I gazed contemplatively at "Lucretia" by Rembrandt...
...I admired the vivid colors of "Olive Trees" by Van Gogh...
...I marveled at the stunning detail of "Dream Castle in the Sky" by Maxfield Parrish...
...and I discovered an intriguing "Period Room" that I'd never noticed before....the "Curator's Office". It's a fun little room full of artifacts from the office of the first curator of modern art for the MIA, Barton Kestle.
To be honest, I would have skipped reading the placard describing the room again, had it not been for two ladies who stopped to read it, commenting on how bizarre the information was. I circled back after they were finished and read it...wow!
"Barton Kestle was the first curator of modern art at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, which before 1948 had not deemed the position necessary. In the autumn of 1950, Kestle assumed his post after moving to Minneapolis from his former home in New York City. Although erudite and urbane with a cosmopolitan grace, Kestle was quiet and shy. Respected for both his scholarly rigor and informal conviviality, he fit well into the museum's professional culture, which was particularly proud of its democratic intelligence. Although liked by many, the retiring young man seemed to have no true close friends at the museum, and would politely rebuff staff invitations to after work gatherings.
Kestle was of medium height and build and considered by many to be handsome. Those who were concerned about awarding the position of curator to one so young- he was 32 at the time he accepted the job- were won over by his Ivy League credentials. He had done his undergraduate work at Yale and earned his PhD at Columbia. He never spoke of his upbringing, childhood, or family; if pressed eh would mention only having moved about New England while growing up. He neither mentioned nor detailed previous military service, although is was widely assumed he had served.
Kestle was kind and respectful to the entire staff. Like modern art itself, he seemed an odd mix of aloof elitism and egalitarianism in equal parts. He had a reputation for extraordinary diligence and focus. Often Kestle worked late into the night, being the only person in the vast museum other than the night guard, who could often hear Kestle's typewriter snapping well past midnight. Kestle's nocturnal habit forced him to move his office from the museum's administration zone to the unconventional location off the main entrance: from there he could exit through the guard post without tripping alarms.
His work was sparsely published in academic journals and art magazines and he seemed exceedingly knowledgeable about the art movements of the Soviet Avant Garde, Dada, and Surrealism. Indeed, his first exhibition project for the museum was a modest selection of paintings by Max Ernst, for which there is a slim and austere catalogue. He was also keenly interested in photography and lobbied the Minneapolis Institute of Arts' Director Richard Davis to add a department of photography to the museum's areas of concern (the photography collection would not be established until 1973). Kestle himself seemed to have been an avid amateur photographer, although no examples of his work have ever been uncovered.
Kestle was a disciple of Alfred H. Barr, the brilliant first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Indeed, it seemed Kestle found in Barr a mentor, and was known to display a photostat of Barr's 1935 diagram from the Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition on the wall of his office. Kestle's own interest turned to a young group of American artists working in New York in the early 1950's, and after a research trip in early 1954 he seemed to throw himself with astounding vigor into organizing an exhibition of the works of these self-conscious vanguardists. He believed this exhibition would propel the Minneapolis Institute of Arts to the forefront of contemporary experiments in modern art.
In March of 1954 a number of discreet inquiries about Kestle were made by unidentified agents. The museum's chief administrators were questioned behind closed doors, and within days Kestle received a summons from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in Washington, D.C. Throughout the offices there was talk of a refusal to sign the Employee Loyalty Program document, and other rumors proliferated. What is known for certain is that on March 27, 1954, Barton Kestle boarded a train for Washington, D.C., and was never seen again.
Over the years the museum staff would wildly speculate about what had happened to Kestle. Although there had been much concern in the days before he left, it was two weeks before anyone thought anything unusual might have occurred. His office was untouched and neither his research assistant nor anyone else had heard from him. A missing person report was filed but the police reported nothing suspicious at Kestle's abandoned home. Without close friends or known family, the search for Kestle soon languished. While organizing a museum exhibition in great haste, the door to Barton Kestle's office was sealed and painted over and it remained entombed until 2011 when it was rediscovered by the museum's technical staff and curator Elizabeth Armstrong, who advocated the room remain untouched and join the popular period room collections in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts."
Wow! Soooooo many questions...
- What happened to Barton Kestle? Was he gay? Did the government do something to him...like the British government did to Alan Turing in England? Was he a spy? A double agent? His interest in the Soviet Avant Garde movement certainly raises a flag...especially in the uber paranoid 50's.
- Did the authorities find ANYTHING at his abandoned house? What does it mean by "abandoned"? Empty? Tidy, but still full of stuff? What happened to his property and belongings?
- How could a room be sealed up and forgotten...especially with such a mystery hanging over the disappearance? It just seems too "convenient" that the office of this guy who mysteriously disappeared wasn't searched...or even remembered for six decades.
- How could it take two weeks for people to notice that anything usual had occurred? Even if he was somewhat reclusive, wouldn't people have wondered what was going on, and then asked questions when he didn't return?
Here's hoping YOU found something intriguing recently to pursue as well!!!
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POST SCRIPT:
This is why I DESPISE "Contemporary Art". I wrote this post BEFORE pursuing any research on what I THOUGHT was a great mystery. Turns out it was part of an exhibit called "More Real?" in 2013, assembled by Mark Dion, a New York-based artist.
I'm leaving the post, because I TOTALLY believed it, and...it was pretty cool!
1 comment:
Hey don't feel bad. I went to the MIA today and this totally captured my imagination! Omg - now I find out its fake! Loved the experience of it.
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