| The Evolution of Matt's Passion for Art |
| Early Beginnings Given that both my parents were artists, the beginning of my interest in art is difficult to pinpoint in time. Somehow, if you live in an environment like that, art is just part of your every-day existence, like food and sleep, and play. My earliest intentional recollections are associated with the German National Gallery, which during the post war years was housed in a complex directly opposite my grade school. I don't know who first took me there, but I became so fascinated with the paintings, that I started going on my own on a regular basis, and soon became known to the guards as 'the young kid who comes to visit the paintings.' In fact, the director must have been so intrigued by this young boy that he told the cashier that I did not need to pay an entrance fee anymore--what a way to kill a budding interest! I believe it was soon after that I stopped going. However, for the period of time that I went, I remember distinctly sitting in front of the Masters (particularly Rembrandt) and drawing furiously away. As I remember, the museum also had marvellous Indonesian puppets that were regularly used to perform plays. But I only went to one or two of those, not only because it cost money but because I had puppets at home, and it was these puppets that provided the subject matter for some of my own childish paintings such as the watercolor below. Beyond that, most of my paintings were of the princes and princesses of my imagination. While I continued to paint and draw even after our emigration to the US, I think that this interest began to wane once my father joined us and my parents set up shop together. Instead I turned more to reading and becoming socially involved, volunteering for the NAACP in Milwaukee, and working as a counsellor in summer camps for inner city youth. To my great regret, my parents never let me march or get involved in the more public social activism of the early sixties. But then, maybe that also saved my skin. Taking the Next Step |
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| Watercolor of my Puppets 1956 |
| The first thing I did upon returning to Berlin, was to rummage through our attic to see what I could find to decorate my walls. It was a veritable treasure trove of sketches and lithos that my parents had left behind when we emigrated to the US. With these I made my study-bedroom into what was virtually a small gallery. Sad to say, when I moved to England I put those pieces into storage and they became lost. It was at during my student years in Germany that I seriously began going to museums again and, upon the advice of a family friend, started acquiring catalogs of the exhibits. According to him, this option was an extremely inexpensive way to start a collection art books, since the catalogs tended to be heavily subsidised. I have some of those catalogs to this day, including exhibits of the erotic art of Picasso put on at the New Art Gallery in Berlin and an exhibit of the works of Matisse that I saw in Paris back in the sixties. Sadly the glue on these books tended to be of pretty poor quality and through many moves, the bindings have become rather damaged. It was at this time that I also started visiting commercial galleries, if for no other reason that several of them happended to be in the same street as my favorite bar. I can still kick myself now that I never thought of buying any of the at that time still extremely affordable lithographs and sketches by David Hockney, on exhibit sometime during the early 70s. The only thing I did get was a small poster from that exhibit. It hung over my bed for many years. Not having any money to buy art, I quite regularly borrowed items from an art library that was associated with one of the local galleries and where the public could borrow paintings a month at a time. I actually think this is an excellent way for people to try out different styles. The first piece of my own that I actually acquired was a rather abstract, meditative lithograph (La Vie) by the German artist, Jorg Neitzert, a piece I received in exchange for the dog that I had to leave behind when I left for England. I own that piece to this day, and it never ceases to intrigue me, with it's geometric compositon of a circle intersected by an undulating triangle. Although I had very little money indeed while I was Lector at Cambridge University, it was there that I bought my first pieces, one by Gunther Grass and one by the brother of Peter Shaffer, the author of the play Equus. While I did not have the gumption to buy the more erotic of the Grass pieces (he was writing The Flounder at that time), the piece I bought is a rather striking dyptich (Scenic Madrigal), with a poem on one side and the head of a man and a fish on the other. Sadly, Grass did not use acid free paper, and the piece is now starting to show stains. Brian Shaffer's piece was quite different, a Logograph called Winter Quarters, in which he had taken a piece of blue paper, folded into it diagonally into four quadrants and painted four different views of the fraction 1/4th in the four horizontal/vertical quadrants into which he graphically divided the sheet. I find the piece particularly evocative when I'm sitting in my warm living room with the snow blowing outside--though there's not much of that here in DC. Probably my biggest find during this period was a lithograph of a seated male nude by Hans Abbing, my first slightly homoerotic piece. At the time I bought it, Abbing was still selling his work on the streets of Amsterdam for no more than a few guilders. When I returned a few years later, he had opened a gallery and his prices had exponentially increased. Besides these occasional acquisitions, I started integrating my interest in art into my teaching, particularly when I joined the Department of German at Harvard, where I was responsible for teaching a course on German literature and culture. For each period, I made sure to discuss not only the literature of the time, but also the art and the music. It was an extremely enriching experience for me and, I hope, for my students. And Now... During my years teaching, I'm afraid I spent all my money on books and travel, so that I could do the requisite research; and other than the odd gift, I did not increase my collection at all. It was only once I settled in Washington that I started to pursue that activity again, spurned on by a silent auction at the Touchstone Gallery, where I bid on a small male nude. Sadly, I did not go back to check on the bidding and was outbid by five dollars. However, that event started my relationship with this artists cooperative, and it has endured to this day. I regularly attend their openings and thoroughly enjoy the variety of the work they represent. In addition to the Touchstone Gallery, I've found that over the years Eastern Market, with it's Gallery 5 and the artists who simply set up on the sidewalk, has been a virtual gold mine for interesting work. Finally, whenever I travel, I make it a point to see what the locals are doing. Just like exploring restaurants, it adds a whole dimension to the experience of visiting distant places. If I were to describe my interest in contemporary art, I would have to say that it is truly ecclectic, since I do not specialize in one type of work or another, preferring to choose pieces simply because I like them. However, it is inevitable that my selections should reflect my interest in Afro-American and Gay culture. In general, I've restricted myself to two dimensional art, since I find that my horizontal spaces tend to be rather crowded as it is, and I firmly believe you need to give each piece it's own breathing space to do it justice. The result of my ecclecticism has been a veritable challenge for me, as I need to rethink my space and how pieces fit together each time I introduce a new member to the family. In addition to this little essay, I plan to write a series of essays on selected pieces from my collection and the artists with whom I've developed a particular relationship or whose work I think deserves more recognition. |
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