The Frick's Henry Koerner show offers a glimpse into how an art show is developed

Sunday, September 21, 2003

By Caroline Abels, Post-Gazette Cultural Arts Writer

Hearing Ruth Grossman talk, you'd think she was an apprehensive mother seeing her teenagers off to college.

"It's going to be strange not having them here," she said, sitting in her East End home last summer. "It's a little spooky. It'll be interesting to see how I can live without them. "

Months of preparation must take place before a museum can open an exhibition. Earlier this month, Sarah Hall, registrar of the Frick Art & Historical Center in Point Breeze, performed a condition report on a Henry Koerner painting before it was hung for the Frick's current exhibition. (Matt Freed, Post-Gazette) Click photo for larger image.

But the 79-year-old Grossman was referring to paintings, not children -- specifically, to the handful of works by Pittsburgh artist Henry Koerner that have hung in her living room for years.

It would be a little more than a month before the Frick Art & Historical Center in Point Breeze would borrow Grossman's paintings for "The Early Work of Henry Koerner," an exhibition that opened Sept. 13. But that July day, she became unusually subdued as she considered being separated from the art in her living room.

"Do you have anything like that on your walls?" she asked plaintively.

Exhibitions in museums everywhere depend on the willingness of private collectors to part with their treasures temporarily, and Grossman did willingly. But to mount the show, the Frick staff needed more than Grossman's blessing. They had to make hundreds of decisions, engage in two years of intricate logistical planning and deploy the skills of dozens of people, from art historians to custom framers to van drivers to guards.

Tom Smart, the Frick's director of museum programs, says putting together an art exhibition "is like putting together a long freight train and making sure the engine is at one end and the caboose is at the other."

The Koerner show is not only a tribute to a Pittsburgh artist who grappled with heart-wrenching themes of loss, death and the Holocaust but also an example of what museums go through to bring art to the public.

It began with a phone call.

Edith Balas was surprised that a gallery and a museum that she declines to name were not interested in developing an exhibition of Koerner's early work.

A professor of art history at Carnegie Mellon University for the past 26 years, Balas wanted the public to see what Koerner, who died in 1991, painted after World War II to express his despair about the Holocaust. She wanted to curate the show herself and include some work of Valentin Lustig, a living Romanian artist whose work complements Koerner's.

After unsuccessful attempts at garnering interest in her idea, Balas called the Frick in fall 2001 at the suggestion of Linda Benedict-Jones, now executive director of Silver Eye Center for Photography, South Side. Although Balas is a soft-spoken woman, she was not shy about calling Smart, even though ideas for exhibitions usually come from people within museums.

"I knew almost immediately that it was the right project for the Frick at the right time," Smart recalls.

Ruth Grossman watches as art handlers Paul Bowden and Briget Shields remove a Koerner painting from her East End home in August. It was taken to the Frick for the exhibition "The Early Work of Henry Koerner," which opened last weekend. (Andy Starnes, Post-Gazette) Click photo for larger image.

The Frick had recently begun enlivening its schedule with more contemporary exhibitions, so Koerner's and Lustig's 20th-century work fit the bill. And Balas, whose specialty is 20th-century and Italian Renaissance art, knew she could work with Smart because in 2001 he had brought in a traveling exhibition of works by Elie Nadelman, an early 20th-century sculptor Balas admires.

"Plus, we were able to talk Neoplatonism," Balas recalls. "How often can you do that with someone?!"

Balas has a warm smile and a thoughtful demeanor, but she turns melancholy when she talks about an experience she and Koerner have in common -- the Holocaust. Koerner, who was Jewish, escaped Austria after the Nazis invaded that country, but his parents remained in Vienna and died in a concentration camp. The paintings on view at the Frick depict surreal, distorted scenes that evoke Nazi horrors, and Balas, the author of six art books, believes that painting them was an act of therapy for Koerner.

A Jewish native of the Transylvania region of Romania, Balas spent a year in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen when she was 15. In 1945, she was liberated, and one of the soldiers who entered the camp was Canadian war artist Alex Colville, now a famous painter. To Balas' delight, Smart was in the midst of writing a book about Colville when she first spoke to him on the phone.

Smart was intrigued when he saw Koerner's paintings in catalogs, but he had never seen any in person. So Balas took him to Ruth Grossman's home on a late fall day. Balas and Grossman met in the late 1960s, became tennis partners and socialized with Koerner often.

"She is a tremendously giving person," Balas says of Grossman. "I never needed a psychiatrist because I had her."

Grossman and her husband met Koerner during an exhibition of his at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts in 1965. They were so entranced that they bought two paintings on the spot. Struck by the artist's expansive personality, they also developed a friendship.

"He had a reputation of being very, very brash, almost rude," Grossman says. "But it wasn't that at all. He was a showman, an actor. ... Once when I asked him why he always went back to Vienna, he said, 'Oh, you don't understand! You don't understand!'"

Gathering and cataloging

After Smart visited Grossman's house, he knew immediately that Koerner deserved a show, and he thought Lustig's series of seven paintings about his aunt entitled "Hoka-Neni" would make a nice concurrent exhibition. He gathered some preliminary information for the collections committee of the Frick board, which must be kept informed of all exhibitions. By February 2002 the show was officially accepted.

William Bodine, the Frick's director, was not at the museum at the time. But when he arrived a few months later, Smart took him to Grossman's house, and he, too, was entranced.

"I walked into her house and I said, 'Oh, this is the work of Paul Cadmus and George Tooker,'" Bodine says, referring to two magic realist painters of Koerner's time. "I thought, 'Who's been hiding Henry Koerner?'"

Koerner's 1945-46 painting "The Prophet," examined here by Richard Stoner as he prepares to photograph it for the Frick's catalog, is an example of the magic realist style of painting. (Darrell Sapp, Post-Gazette) Click photo for larger image.

By this time, Grossman had already told Balas she would lend some works. But Balas had to locate other paintings that she wanted in the show, and to do so she pored over catalogs of previous Koerner exhibitions, including a 1983 Carnegie Museum of Art retrospective.

In some cases, it is Sarah Hall, the Frick's registrar, along with curatorial assistant Jennifer Roche, who track down paintings for a show. Hall says there can be many reasons why an owner may not want to lend a painting.

"Usually what's problematic is family conflict in a lender's family," she says. "For instance, the elder in the family wants to lend the painting, but the younger family members don't."

Museums often pay for restoration work on pieces they borrow, which makes lending attractive to an owner who needs a new frame or wants a canvas tear repaired. Lending also increases the value of a work because it becomes more widely known in the art world.

In March 2002, Smart wrote letters to people outside the Koerner family who owned paintings the Frick needed. Every individual, museum and company that was asked to lend their Koerners agreed, bringing the total number of paintings in the show to 31. And Lustig agreed to lend the seven paintings in his "Hoka-Neni" series.

Smart also asked Julie Scriver, art director of Goose Lane Design in Fredericton, New Brunswick, to design the Koerner exhibition catalog. She came to Pittsburgh to see the Grossman collection and found them so dark and unsettling that she did not immediately agree to the assignment. But Smart eventually persuaded her.

Catalogs are expensive for museums to produce -- $20,000 for the Koerner catalog -- but they provide a record of who owns a painting at a given time, and provide visual documentation of an entire exhibition.

"The catalog is something that can stand by itself after the pictures are packed up in boxes and shipped away," Scriver says.

Education and events

While the curatorial staff worked on the paintings, the education staff began thinking about Koerner-related lectures, film screenings, guided tours and children's activities. Most museums establish education departments to deepen the experience of visitors.

"People have to learn how to go to a museum, because so often they're not comfortable in one," says Pam St. John, the Frick's curator of education. "Our job is to teach them how to read a painting."

The Koerner show presented challenges to the education staff: how to explain magic realism, how to bring up the sensitive issue of the Holocaust when Koerner dealt with it obliquely, and how to capitalize on Koerner's status as a Pittsburgher and local art icon.

The staff began with a February 2003 visit to Linda Hurwitz, director of the Holocaust Center of the United Jewish Federation of Pittsburgh, which is located in the Jewish Community Center in Squirrel Hill, to invite the Jewish community to participate in the exhibition in some way.

"This is a really different exhibit for you guys," Hurwitz remarked to Smart during the meeting.

"Yes," Smart replied, "it's a different Frick."

At her home in March, Joan Koerner showed the Frick's director of programs Tom Smart some of her late husband's drawings. The two discussed which drawings should be included in the current Koerner exhibition. (Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette) Click photo for larger image.

The next meeting of the education staff took place in their offices in March. One programmatic theme that arose was that of magic realism, Koerner's style of painting in the late 1940s and early '50s.

For the "Art at Noon" lecture, someone suggested Mark Cole, an assistant curator at the Columbus Museum of Art. A writing workshop for adults centered around time and memory -- prominent Koerner themes -- was also planned. And students during their school visits would create their own collages, since a few of the paintings in the show resemble a collage.

Susan Bails, education program coordinator, asked Hall whether paintings with nudity could be hung in less prominent areas of the gallery so that elementary students wouldn't be distracted by them.

"Yeah, we don't want to show them a painting that's hanging between two nudes!" Flick said.

Around this time, Smart needed to talk with Koerner's widow, Joan, about which of Koerner's drawings to exhibit alongside the 31 paintings. They met in March 2003 at the Koerners' home, a brick townhouse in Squirrel Hill that was built for the couple in 1966.

A lively 71-year-old who is the executor of her late husband's affairs, Joan met Henry when she was a 22-year-old violin student at Chatham College in 1952. Henry, having already made a name for himself in New York, had come to Pittsburgh to be the artist-in-residence at Chatham.

Joan says that when she first saw him painting outside that year, "I thought, 'That's the man I want. I want him!'" They soon began dating, to the consternation of the administration at the all-women's school.

"I remember being called into the office -- little old innocent me -- and they said, 'You know Joan, he's a man of the world, and he's much older than you.' Older than me ... poor guy, he was 36!"

They later married, had two children and decided to stay in Pittsburgh, which Koerner came to love even though it was far from the New York art circles that some scholars say would have brought him wider fame. Joan recalls a kind husband who grappled with insecurity but insisted on painting the way he wanted to, regardless of trends in the art world.

"I believe he'll come into his own one day," Joan said at the dining room table of their bright and airy house. "He always hoped it would be in his lifetime. But a year before he died, he told me he'd come to the conclusion that he wouldn't reach the level of fame he had from '45 to '50 in New York."

When Smart visited Joan, she laid some of her husband's unframed drawings and sketches on the floor of what used to be his studio. Smart became nervous that someone would step on them, but Joan insisted that Henry always laid his drawings on the floor.

She also asked Smart to include some uplifting drawings.

"People are always saying Henry's work is so depressing," she said. "Sure, it was a depressing time, right after the war, but he painted happy things, too."

Money and membership

Tom Smart is a low-key Canadian with a dry sense of humor who is usually quite subdued. But when the 46-year-old talks about art, he can get as excited as a child at an ice cream truck.

A native of London, Ontario, he specialized in Italian Renaissance and Baroque art in graduate school, but takes a great interest in Canadian art as well. He arrived at the Frick in 1999, after serving as chief curator, deputy director and acting director of the Winnipeg Art Gallery and, prior to that, as curator of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in New Brunswick.

"There aren't many curators like Tom," Joan says. "Museum people can be so stiff and arrogant, but not him."

In the summer, the bulk of Smart's work on the Koerner show was over, and he turned more attention to the other exhibitions he'd been juggling as he worked on Koerner. But that's when the department of external affairs shifted into gear. Far from glamorous, the department is a maze of gray file cabinets and stacks of paper, a place where money is raised, press releases are written and parties are planned.

Henry Koerner, in a 1964 photo, was often seen on the streets of Pittsburgh, painting scenes of the city he adored. (Post-Gazette archives) Click photo for larger image.

"As soon as an exhibit ends, we all go 'Whew,' but then after two weeks of tying up loose ends, we have to turn our attention to another show," says Dede Acer, director of external affairs.

Acer, a polished fund-raiser with an easygoing personality, set out to raise $30,000 for the exhibition, which was expected to cost about $100,000. Usually she begins her fund-raising by looking at a local foundation directory and seeing where similar exhibitions have found funding. And sometimes she looks through donor files.

Most museums keep a file on everyone who has contributed to the museum, be it $20 or $20,000. Usually, the files hold just a person's membership form, but the files of more significant donors include past correspondence between the donor and the museum, as well as details about meetings between the donor and museum employees.

"I can know that certain people had a conversation about something, maybe something I didn't know, like what kind of art they like," she said.

A Greensburg-based foundation, the Millstein Charitable Foundation, ended up giving a substantial gift for the Koerner show, but the fund-raising goal of $30,000 was not reached. Bodine attributes that to the challenge of finding donors who respond to the kind of dark imagery featured in the show.

But he insists that exhibitions are not planned for their ability to make money.

"I don't want to say Koerner has to raise 'X' dollars or else it's not worth doing," Bodine says. "Income can influence our programming, but it doesn't direct it -- mission directs programming."

As Acer dealt with fund-raising over the summer, Greg Langel, the Frick's public relations and publications manager, wrote up news releases, the member newsletter, even the script for the voice-mail message people hear when they call the Frick. In early August, invitations to the opening party were sent to the museum's 3,328 members and press kits were sent to 350 media outlets -- including a few national publications, such as The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Art in America.

The image on all the invitations, press kits and posters was Koerner's 1946 painting "My Parents no. 2." In rich orange and gold hues, it shows an elderly man and woman walking through a forest with their backs turned. There was much discussion within the Frick about which painting should represent the show. The other contender, a disturbing painting called "The Prophet," was deemed too disheartening.

Also over the summer, the opening party -- important for cultivating donor relations -- was planned by Kirsten Liddicoat, the Frick's manager of special events and advertising. She chose Rania's to cater it.

Parting and placement

On Aug. 19, Ruth Grossman bid farewell to her familiar Koerners. Two art handlers, Paul Bowden and Briget Shields, donned white gloves and placed the paintings between boards, wrapped them in bubble wrap and carried them out of her home into a U-Haul. Before that, Hall inspected the works for canvas scratches, chipped frames or other problems, so that the Frick would have a record of their conditions.

Once the Koerners arrived at the Frick, they were turned over to Emilie Cohen, a local frame conservator. Cohen assessed the structural stability of the frames and repaired some damage. For example, she spent a few days dealing with "The Barker Booth," applying a synthetic resin on the frame's puffs and peaks of paint so she could push them flat without flaking off the paint. Daulton attended to areas on the canvases where paint had cracked or risen.

Other Koerner paintings came in from Minnesota, New York City, London and the Carnegie Museum of Art, while Lustig's seven paintings came in from Switzerland, where the artist lives. The paintings that came from within the United States were driven to the Frick by a company that specializes in art transportation, while the foreign works were shipped by cargo on airplanes.

Nine days before the show, the paintings were hung, their placement chosen by Smart with the help of Hall and Roche. The three took pains to make sure a visitor moving from one room to the other would see paintings of a similar style. They also wrote the labels and wall texts -- not that Koerner would have required wall texts.

"It doesn't bother me that my work is not always understood," he told the Post-Gazette in 1989. "In fact, when a person says, 'What does it mean?' I say, 'That's it! That's the title.' 'No, no,' the person says, 'I mean what does it mean?' and I say 'Yes, that's it! 'What Does It Mean?'"

Joseph Koerner, a professor of art history at the University of London and the Koerners' son, says his father would have looked with amazement at this exhibition of his early work.

"These works probably seemed very far in the past for him," Joseph said. "He changed his style so often and so radically in the '50s that he probably would have viewed the show like all of us: as a spectator."

Joseph Koerner was one of 400 guests at the Sept. 12 opening party. As waiters from Rania's Catering passed grilled figs with goat cheese, tequila shrimp skewers and lobster stuffed eggs, and as the guards made sure drinks weren't brought near the paintings, guests mingled inside the galleries and on the steps outside the Frick, sharing stories about Koerner's legendary personality.

Lustig was in attendance, as were Balas and Joan Koerner, who beamed as they greeted their friends.

The next morning, the public was finally allowed into the galleries, where they saw only the names of Henry Koerner and Valentin Lustig, not the names of Tom Smart, Sarah Hall, Ruth Grossman, Edith Balas, Emilie Cohen, or any of the other people who chipped in to make the show happen.

And on Monday, Smart came into his office and spent the morning working on the Frick's next exhibition, "Empire of the Sultans," a large survey of Islamic art set to open in November.

The exhibition will require the entire permanent collection of the Frick to go into temporary storage, and Smart -- with the Koerner show now behind him -- spent the morning figuring out how that would happen.

Correction/Clarification (Published Sept. 26, 2003): This story on the Henry Koerner exhibition at the Frick Art & Historical Center, as published on Sept. 21,2003, misstated Linda Hurwitz's work title. She is director of the Holocaust Center of the United Jewish Federation of Pittsburgh, which is located in the Jewish Community Center in Squirrel Hill.

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