Moving into a neighborhood usually involves reaching out to new people, so I invited a couple of neighbors over for an afternoon respite of coffee and sweets. I had learned that they were both artists, and thought the conversation might be interesting. He was very tall and lean, and she was as big as a minute. After a pleasant visit, as they were leaving, the wife said, “ We so enjoyed meeting you. Unfortunately, we can’t reciprocate, because there is no place in our home for you to sit.”
Twenty years later, I recently ran into this tiny energizer bunny in the grocery store. Her husband had died, and she invited me to visit her. I didn’t ask if she had purchased a chair, but being naturally curious, I accepted her invitation.
As I arrived, I noticed that both of the heavy gates were unlocked, and she greeted me at the door saying, “Welcome. Would you like a tour of the gallery?” As I entered the house I felt as if I had fallen into the rabbit hole along with Alice. Without warning, I had walked into an ancient dusty world where hundreds of masks stared at me from the walls. My hostess explained that she and her husband were lifetime collectors of pre-Columbian art. Huge urns blocked my path, ceremonial headpieces hung from the ceiling, and pre-Columbian ear spools reminded me not to stick Q-tips into my ears. This was the chair-less living room.
On our way to the dining room, I squeezed around a wooden canoe that was actually a very old drum. I noticed a long wooden beast blocking the fireplace. I thought, “Good thing about collecting antiquities is that you don’t have to deal with the artist.” Scattered about the dining room were animal forms and human forms and human-animal forms and pagan deities stored in glass cases.
We then entered the bedroom where her husband had died. His bed was surrounded with gruesome masks staring down at the bed. “I think maybe they scared him right before he died,” she said. They scared me, and I wasn’t even sick. Her bedroom was a repository for her paintings and many, many clay pots representing several of her pottery periods. I learned about wheels and hand thrown and kilned and un-kilned until I glazed over more than any pot in that room.
The kitchen was blocked off so her howling dog couldn’t get out. She explained that he was “stone deaf”, so he howled, but she suggested we could sit in the kitchen. I told her I was expecting a telephone call and would have to leave soon. Actually, the kitchen looked pretty much like a kitchen fit for a howling dog.
“You can’t leave,” she cried. “You haven’t seen the studio that we added to the house.” At that, she threw open a door and led me into a cavernous grotto that would have comfortably parked three or four huge moving vans. This was the place where she and her husband created their art. Hundreds of huge paintings were stacked everywhere. Plexiglas cabinets protected his gigantic contemporary sculptures that resembled enormous entwined licorice sticks. The bathrooms had been turned into storage units and her pottery seemed to have multiplied faster than rabbits. But, the tour was not over yet-----
The next room was a repository for the most dramatic of the pre-Columbian collection. Standing on a long table was a collection of huge 10-foot warriors. My tour guide told me that before her husband died, they had stood as sentinels in their living room. There was also a head of a man with a facial deformity. I guess that’s what you call the loss of a nose. The tour ended with a walk through a backyard of dirt (“because it’s natural”) and broken pottery (“because I couldn’t bring myself to throw it out ”).
Art buyers are now purchasing works from this home museum. My mother-in-law said, “Live long enough and you will see everything.” Now I know what she meant.
Esther Blumenfeld (Is art supposed to give you nightmares?)