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. 

Art: What Martin Roth's obits shockingly left out

When I heard that Martin Roth died, I read all the obituaries I could find.  It was as if I felt that by reading accounts of his life his early death would be less shocking. He would have loved them. From the Guardian to the Independent and Telegraph and across the Atlantic, too, in the New York Times all was praise for his short reign as Director of the Victoria & Albert Museum. Nice, I guess, but for me disturbing. Not a single obituary mentioned the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum. You know, the art and objects. It was as they do not exist. Why then would there be any discussion of Martin Roth’s role in preserving, studying, displaying and/or expanding them. The conclusion was as terrible as it was obvious: Art and objects of art don’t much matter.  A look at what they tell us does matter will follow but first:

As what is in the V&A; the reason for its creation and existence, was not thought worth a mention, there was no point in mentioning Martin Roth's relationship with those employed to maintain, study and increase it. As one does not wish to speak ill of the dead, that may have been just as well; many curators were not Martin Roth fans.  

Maybe the fact that I liked Martin Roth (see previous post) and respected what he achieved in Dresden led me to feel that the anger of V&A’s curators was off target. I reckoned that it ought to have been aimed at the Trustees. Martin did what they hired him to do; he was expected to replicate his success in Dresden. Evidently, when the Trustees were kids they all cut class on the morning their teachers explained about how you can't compare apples and pears.

At Dresden's State Art Collections, Martin Roth was an Admiral overseeing a fleet of 12 (now 15) ships. His job was not to run the State's Armory, Green Vaults;  Old Master, Modern Art, Porcelain or Folk Art collections. Each of these museums has its own Captain responsible for its contents and a staff that reports to him or her. Martin was responsible for strategy, conquests, publicity, raising money. . He revelled in it. Also, he was very good at it.  During his 10 years there he became a figure on the international culture stage; Dresden was reborn as a great culture capital. The splendor of its collections was a revelation and joy.  

When Martin came to London he worried that people might have trouble accepting him as the first German to head an important British museum.  He did not appear to have any doubts about his job description. He arrived an Admiral and that is what he remained. The result was that the V&A became a ship without a Captain; some would say it was minus an anchor, too. I had no idea until I read the obituaries that for a lot of people in the art world this did not seem to matter. Evidently, there were more important things. Consider, for a representative example, this snippet from a laudatory obit in the FT:

  “Roth’s outward-looking approach was reflected in bold plans for new outposts for the South Kensington-based museum. V&A Dundee, Scotland’s first museum of design, is due to open in 2018, and V&A East is planned for the QueenElizabeth Olympic Park in east London.”  And there was more to praise, much more:

  

 In the Guardian, the current Chairman of the V&A Trustees, Nicolas Coleridge, is quoted saying that Martin Roth raised “the international profile of the museum. Initiatives under his leadership included a presence at the Venice Biennale, the expansion of the museum to China, Dundee and east London, the founding of the V&A research unit, and the opening of restored galleries devoted to European arts and crafts of 1600-1815.”  Hurrah. Hurrah?

Yes, while Martin Roth was Director, the number of visitors rose to 3.8 million. There was such high demand to see exhibitions devoted to David Bowie and AlexanderMcQueen that the museum had to extend its opening hours--even through the night. Also no. The number of curators shrank. Acquisition budgets ditto. More cuts were promised. Talk became more bitter; the voices of staff were not heard; their concerns ignored.

Okay bitching is one of the perks of being on staff. But sometimes it is more than a ventilating system. The New York Times obituary described Martin Roth as “a path breaking curator in Britain.” Where was the editor that day? He was not a curator of any kind in Britain--nor at Dresden’s State Art Collections for that matter. The Big Picture was his department. 

In London, at lunch with Martin one day, I mentioned that V&A curators were discontented; that they felt they could not get their views across. He simply had no idea what I was talking about; what they wanted from him. They knew where he was. It was up to them to make themselves heard. I didn’t think he was being arrogant. He just didn’t get it. 

In the absence of a focus on their contents, museums become brands. The V&A, a magnificent museum is marketed; opens branches, sells franchises. Its success is measured by counting the number of feet through the door; the amount of media coverage, celebrities coming to its parties and awards of course. A successful museum director is someone who grows the brand. What's so dreadful is that this is not happening in small pockets here and there; that it is what's called trending. What so awful is that is now normal to think more about the packaging and selling of museums than what is in them.

I don't like it. I wish it would stop.

Remembering Martin Roth--and Dresden

It was only last Autumn that Martin Roth, then a vigorous 61- year old, left London after five years as Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum and returned to Germany. There cancer, reportedly diagnosed soon after he arrived, felled him fast. He died on August 6.  When I heard the announcement on the BBC news I was shocked and also sad. I’d known and liked Martin for 15 years. 

I last saw Martin Roth last Autumn at a V&A party. Once it was decided that he would no longer be its Director he decided to leave before the very end of his contract..He and his wife were about to head for Berlin.

  “What are you going to do next?” I asked.

   “One thing for sure, I will spend more time in British Columbia,” he said.

     Although he loved it there this seemed improbable.  Martin was too ambitious; his need to scoot around the world to museums and conferences; to hang out with the rich, famous and//or beautiful was much too great for him to relax swaying in a hammock tied to the rough bark of a couple of sky- skimming trees. 

   

Tall and dark when we first met and later a distinguished gray, Martin Roth would have been handsome if there weren’t something sheepish about him. It was as if he were playing the lead in the story of his life without fully connecting with the character.. The plot involved driving fast cars, wearing beautifully cut suits, enjoying fancy company and maybe above all being seen to be a figure on the international culture scene. He relished it yet seemed a little embarrassed by the hot shot, glamorous character he played. . This sheepishness undercut the slickness and vanity. It made him approachable; likable.  Soon I came to admired him, too--not for his performance at the V&A (about which more in the next post), but for his brilliant achievements during the decade before.

Detail from the large jewelled tableau "Throne of the Great Moghul Aureng Zeb " in the Green Vault 

In 2001 Martin Roth became Director General of the Dresden State Art Collections. He was to oversee the reconstruction, restoration and re-display of its 12 museums (there are now 15).  Together they house the greatest surviving Western Princely treasure in the world. There is magnificent armour for men and horses, Old Master and Modern masterworks, important sculpture, the best early Meissen and Chinese porcelain,  an abundance of splendid jewels and objets d’art. There is folk art, too, and much else.  Also there are the palaces in which all this was housed. (Above a small part of the opulent and fabulous "Throne of the Great Mogul" with its bejewelled camels and elephants, diplomats and slaves all passing before Aureng-Zeb seated on a throne at the back of the tableau. It was created in the 18th century by Johann Melchior Dinglinger for Saxony's Elector August the Strong. "Over the top" would have had no meaning for him.  In fact, at first glance it seemed just the right description for this ostentatious piece. After a very few minutes it became a dream come true, a dream I didn't know I;'d had. It made the the far more famous works by Faberge seem derivative. Very well done of course but less imaginative; less brilliant; not thrilling..

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Martin Roth was also charged with making the world aware of Dresden’s splendor. I write for publications with a global reach. That is why I was invited to Dresden in 2002 and the reopening of the first of its exceptional museums: The Porcelain Gallery. From the start he and I had the usual mutually beneficial (exploitative) relationship of museum director and arts journalist. It was richer than that only because Dresden is..

About all I knew before I went was that the  RAF firebombing of the city near the end of the war destroyed it, tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of people. It became an empty shell. End of story. The firebombing was a tragedy but it was not the end of Dresden.               

Dresden soon after the firebombing

During the war its princely treasures had been removed and hidden in the hills to the east of the city. Almost all of it survived. Quite a few of its Renaissance and Baroque buildings were flattened but many more survived like a congregation of ghoulish, blackened, stone stalagmites. 

   Dresden was cut off from most of us from the start of the Second World War through the decades of the Communist German Democratic Republic. It might as well have been flattened; its treasures destroyed. The government of a reunited Germany was determined to bring it back to life.

I accepted the invitation to go to Dresden because I am keen about old jewels. I'd been told by people who themselves had not yet managed to see it, that there in its  Green Vault was the best collection to see them in abundance. First of course,t I visited the Porcelain Gallery, which after all was the official reason for the trip.  Quickly and to my surprise I fell in love with early Meissen porcelain especially the magical menagerie of animals from a rhino to a turkey.  I visited the store rooms, too,  and the temporary installations.  Finally I managed to get into the Green Vault which was not on the itinerary. From August the Strong's suites of matching jewels (all diamonds or emeralds, coral or carnelian to Dinglinger's tableau.  Until then if I imagined Paradise it was Arcadian. Ever since it has become populated with wonders made by men. I left Dresden  awed,  excited and inspired.  I went back more than half a dozen times.

There were not so many other foreign journalists as besotted by the State Art Collections as I was. Naturally Martin Roth noticed. And naturally I grasped that it is handy to be friendly with the man who had keys to all that glorious stuff. But there was something else too: Dresden meant a lot to us both if in very different ways and we both knew it.  It was there that Martin became a player; an art star. .It was there that I was given an aesthetic jolt that expanded my consciousness which for all the hype LSD never did.    

I am glad that Martin Roth and I had Dresden to share; sorry not to have him to share it with any more. Sorry, too, if that word can express it, that his adventure in life ended so soon.

Who knew?: Alberto Giacometti at Tate Modern

"The Dog" 1951

 "I haven't been yet,"I mumbled if someone mentioned "Alberto Giacometti" at Tate Modern. I was lying. I had no intention of going. I suffer from blockbuster fatigue; the thought of going to one of these huge, crowd drawing extravaganzas makes me sleepy.  A show with some 250 drawings, paintings, sculptures and objects; selections from a half century of work by Giacometti did not lure me. And I like Giacometti once he stopped being a Surrealist. The artist who died in 1966 at the age of 65 was famous in his lifetime. He is more famous now.  Add to this the multimillions for which his sculptures sell, and Tate Modern could expect many thousands of feet through its doors. My feet, however, were not going to the party.  Or so I thought.

  One sunny day last week when the weather was perfect for a cycle ride and I had no particular plans, I got on my bike and headed for Tate Modern. I have no idea why. I am pretty sure, however, that if it had been raining, I still would not have seen the exhibition. That would have been a big loss. 

  Sine my teens, I've been drawn to Giacometti's all-profile busts and skinny and all stretched out as if he'd been working with pizza dough. I have seen plenty of his work since. And yet this show was a revelation. 

  The organizers managed to raise the needed money to have many of his fragile plaster sculptures conserved and therefore fit to travel. The eight "Women of Venice," have not been on view since their initial display at the Venice Biennale in 1956, Many other plaster pieces have never been on public view, ever. 

  Room 5 in the exhibition is the first in which all the works are plaster. Most were done during or just after the WWII,  I looked around me. It was as if I were meeting Giacometti for the first time--more than that, I felt that for the first I "got him," or anyway was beginning to. 

White. The tall smooth walls are white. The 18 plaster statues in Room 5 are white or painted in very pale pinky/gold/ beige. In some, Giacometti went on to draw with paint on the surfaces. Usually, smooth they are not.  Along one wall stands a single statue: "Woman on a Chariot" a female nude. Its base of wood is supported by four small wooden wheels. The other three walls are lined with illuminated built-in vitrines--the sort of display not uncommon when presenting jewels. That makes sense; everything on view behind the flat, glass panes is small or smaller--at least one full length figure is the height of the nail on my little finger.  All this is both accurate and misleading. Measurements of this kind are of uniquely limited value when talking about the perception and impact of Giacometti's sculpture. Whatever the tape measure says, these works are monumental. 

The painted plaster "Head of a Man" (above and below) measures "55 x 13 x 16 cm (21 x 5.14  x 6.2") including the base has more impact than "Standing Woman," for instance.. The giant bronze, in a gallery further along, at 272 cm high (just under 9 feet) would be eye to eye with any giraffe that wandered into the Tate. Impressive yes. Even memorable. Many dealers would not hesitate to call her iconic. For all that she doesn't lure the viewer into a journey enticed by where they have been, what they know and the desire to learn more. 

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Head of a Man 1948-50

Head of Diego c.1949

"Head of  Diego" 1946  measures 11.8 x 6 x 8.3

(topping out at 4.6 inches).  Like "Head of a Man" or more so it seems like a map of the world or--what the hell--even the cosmos.  Maybe to calm down a little, it is better to say that each of these busts and full figure plaster statues, whatever the ruler has to say about them, seems to tell us so much--more than it is possible to take in on one meeting--about living and who knows maybe about the artist himself.

About the latter Giacometti would not agree. He acknowledged only one self-portrait. That bronze made in 1951 has so much appeal the Tate has reproduced the image on carrier bags, mugs and tee shirts in a choice of background colours available in its shops .

Half-a-dozen years after he created it, Alberto Giacometti told Jean Genet "One day I saw myself like that."  That is "The Dog." The emaciated creature, lopes along, nose to the ground exhausted and charismatic. (See opening image.)

The show closes on September 10. I will keep going back wanting to see more of what he sniffed out.