Big Man; Big Heart Gunter Blobel

Big Mind; Big Heart    Gunter Blobel  May 21, 1936—February 18, 2018

A brilliant scientist who won the  Nobel Prize for Physiology in 1999, he gave the million dollar award to the restoration of Dresden. He was not born in the city;  it was never his home yet from the age of eight he lived there in his heart.

 

I first met Gunter Blobel in October, 2003. Everything about him seemed over-sized. He was exuberant, expansive. He was also tall, his white hair thick and wavy.  There was something lyrical about the way he talked; his hands swooped around as if in accompaniment to his song.  He managed to look elegant with it being overly casual or studied. On this day he was wearing a white linen shirt, black trousers and a black cardigan. A beige, heavy knit cashmere scarf was wrapped around his neck. He seemed fit but was no body braggart. (Later, I learned from another early bird around the Central Park Reservoir,  that he was an early morning runner.)

Dr Blobel sat down behind a desk was stacked with papers. I was warned me that he was very busy; that our meeting would have be short.  I did not doubt it. I felt sure his daily commitments exceeded the number of hours in a day.  One reason for this may be that he is a charismatic and prodigious talker. It was two hours later that I stood up to say goodbye. I apologized for having kept him from his work.

“When the subject is Dresden,” he said, “I can go on talking for ever.” 

   

  Dresden was the reason I was there.  I was dug into trying to find out more about a famous collection of 18^th century porcelain that had been born and two centuries later had met its death in Dresden. It was commissioned by Augustus the Strong, the Elector of Saxony, who made the city his capital. In his race to be the first in Europe with the recipe for hard paste porcelain he had set up a factory at nearby Meissen. The early Meissen collection I was learning about was later sold but it had stayed in Dresden until it was hidden in the mountains outside for safekeeping during the Second World War. Against orders, a truck loaded with it,  was parked overnight in the courtyard of the city’s residence palace. That was the first night of the firebombing. 

Surprisingly (some might say miraculously) a decade later a few porcelain survivors of the great collection were dug out of the still unsifted mounds of rubble.  These patched together small figures had become my guides to the collection; to its owners and to the city with which its fate had been intertwined from the first.  Martin Roth, Director of Saxony’s State Museums in Dresden, told me that I must talk with Gunter Blobel. No doubt it was his introduction that made the encounter possible. For all his warmth and generosity of spirit, I suspected that Gunter Blobel would not have patience for people with whom he shared no interests.

   Minutes after we met, we were in the small village in Silesia where he grew up. It was towards the end of the Second World War.  This region, then in Nazi Germany was later in Communist East Germany and now is in Poland. Gunter was one of eight children. The youngest was two; the eldest a teenager and he was eight when his father, a veterinarian, decided that they must leave home where life was “a rural idyll.” The Russians were advancing from the East.

   “People believed the Russian and American armies would meet at the Elbe,” Gunter Blobel told me.  And they were terrified. Russian troops were infamous for rape and robbery.  The family was going to head for the American side of the river and the farm of relatives in western Saxony. The car was packed; off they went.

   Dresden straddles the Elbe.  It was the young boy’s first sight of a big city.  This one packed a particularly potent punch. Since the 18^th century, Dresden had been one of Europe’s culture centers: Bach played the inaugural concert on the organ in the Frauenkirche; Wagner conducted the premiere of his Flying Dutchman at the Semperoper.  The Old Masters, porcelain, arms and armour museums were world famous. For centuries, writers had remarked on the beauty of its Renaissance and baroque architecture.  

“It was a child’s fantasy,” Gunter Blobel recalled, still  bewitched. “Everywhere there were putti, statues, cupids with arrows pointing down at me. I asked my parents couldn’t we stay longer? They said no.”  The family reached their new if temporary home in early February, 1945.  Within days they heard reports on the radio that Dresden was being bombed.  They already knew. “You could see for a hundred miles, the wine-red sky.”

 The war in Europe was over by May. The family headed east again. “There was rubble instead of road,” he said. “We ate what we could scavenge in the fields.”  Sometimes they found apples; sometimes things that they had to boil before they were edible. “Everywhere there were burnt out farms, dead animals—cows, horses.” Whole villages were destroyed.

  Once again they came to the Elbe.   

   “It took us a whole day to cross Dresden,” he remembered. “It smelled of corpses. Broken statues were on the ground.  It was horrendous, horrendous.”

  This ebullient man I had been listening to had tears in his eyes.  He had not buried his “horrible horrible, unimaginably horrible” memories. He allowed them to lay him low and surely this was not the first time. Yet he had new and marvellous images of the city to soothe him; not least of all because of his own heroic efforts.

   The eight year old who saw Dresden in ruins made a promise: If ever in his life he had money, he would  use it to help rebuild what had been a magical city. In 1991 Dr. Gunter Blobel founded the Friends of Dresden.  In 1999, most of his million dollar Nobel award went for the rebuilding of the city’s glorious Frauenkirche and the replacement of a synagogue to replace one that had been destroyed by the Nazis.

”I cannot tell you how hard I worked to raise the money,” he said.  “I couldn’t do it again.” Because of his passion and all that very hard work, that was not and will not be necessary.

Cash Cows. What art is worth and why..

Relative Values at the Met   

 Just as you'd expect,  Relative Values at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with its splendid 16^th century tapestries, jewels, sculpture and works  of art is a beautiful show, even illuminating. The surprise is that its also fun—with no dumbing down along the way it tells the bracing story of the shifting fates of price and value. See it if you can. There’s lots of time—it doesn’t close until June next year.  Congratulations to curator Elizabeth Cleland . With seeming effortlessness—and wit—she has produced a terrific show ; one with a timely and important story to tell.  The success of the exhibition is in part the result of the choice of these  magnificent 62 works most from the Met's collection.  But it is also due to Ms Celeland’s intelligent, cunning and amusing choice of assistants. Bring on the cows. Or if we are talking about the Celestial Globe above, bring on a herd of them.

But before introducing the cast of cows:

They pieces are grouped by theme: Raw Material, Natural World, Virtuosity, Technological Advances, Utility, Recreation and Fame. I try to ignore themes but these at least serve a purpose:. They spotlight the value of different materials in the 16^th century, the admiration for some skills and indifference to others, the time needed to create a piece and the tastes of increasingly competitive rich collectors. This was the recipe for how a work was valued--and its price set. 

The labels are a treat. Instead of the usual record of dimensions and dates plus a description of what you have just seen with your own eyes, these quickly teach the lesson that is the reason for this show: There works were of dramatically different values==absolute and relative-when they were made than they are today. )And that they were along the way--and may well be tomorrow.  The ease with which we are taught this lesson and its staying power is the result of the curator's choice of instructors. Welcome to cows.

In the 16^th century the north of Europe was a crazy quilt of political entities and—crucially here—currencies.  It transpires that such factors as the pay of skilled or unskilled workers and the cost of a loaf of bread,  the price of a milking cow was the fairly consistent equivalent of 175 grams of silver across these many borders. For that reason the original purchase price of each of the treasures on view is  calculated in cows. They do their job well. 

The black silhouette of a cow, facing left, appears on every label. She is followed by the multiplication symbol and a number.  The oil painting on wood panel of “The Rest of the Flight into Egypt” by a follower of Quentin Metsys, for instance,  originally cost COW x 5. The “Celestial Globe” at the start of this blog, is Cow x 59.  “Charity,” a gilded alabaster sculpture: Cow x 40.  The fantastical, enamelled and gem embellished pendants on display cost from Cow x 35 to Cow x 60.

    The first owner of the gilded silver tankard fashioned in Augsburg could have bought 5 cows for the same money. As for the elegant rock crystal bird with silver legs and ruby eyes made in Nuremberg (my favorite in the show), a mighty shake of the money tree was needed. It cost Cow x 275.   

 

This is mooing with a message alright: Neither price nor value are immutable.

When is an artist going to print that on tee shirts and hand them out—or sell them—at Frieze?  (Replacing "immutable" with "fixed" won't make the answer yes any sooner.) How many dealers are going to remind their clients that art is a solid investment only if you happen to be in the right place when the music stops. Go to this show. Enjoy the art and take home the message it tells with such charm and ease. In the face of temptation, it is a good one to remember.