Sacred and Stolen

by Gary Vikan

  My aim was to make clear that in this space, in this exhibition, Christ is in charge. And what’s more, he knows what you’re thinking. Michael Brenson, who characterized Holy Image, Holy Space as “a good and perhaps a great show” in his Times review, got it. His first four paragraphs, which flanked the large reproduction of the Christ the Wisdom of God icon, were devoted to how that icon worked in the show. He assumed that the congregation of the church for which it was created around 1400 “must have had absolute faith that this image in the front of the apse was a door or window to Christ.” And he went on to complete the thought with precisely the affective, emotive outcome I was after: “Six hundred years later, on another continent, in a museum, the icon still seems like a medium, a passageway to another realm.” Just what I had hoped for.

  But what the reviewer criticized—what made this a good but not a great show in his view—was the tension between my academic labels and my theatrical installation. I felt (and feel) that the art history of a work must be told, and told accurately. So for Michel Brenson, and I’m certain for many visitors to Holy Image, Holy Space, there was a constant back and forth between a sense of transcendental rapture and lessons to instruct the viewer about the iconography and history of icons. I never could resolve that.

  I PRESENTED THREE ICON EXHIBITIONS between 1988 and 1993, from Greece, Russia, and Ethiopia. Each was the first of its kind in America and, in all, they toured to eighteen cities from coast to coast and were seen by about half a million people. And in each, my aim was to create a sense of the divine for our visitors. The Met’s great Glory of Byzantium exhibition of 1998 was far bigger than my three shows combined, and was seen by about half a million people in its single venue. It was a magnificent exhibition.

  But I like to think that our efforts were complementary and that I somehow paved the way. In the end, over a ten-year period, the United States became well acquainted with the icon. This was long overdue for reasons I think have something to do with the spiritual power of icons and America’s discomfort, both in academic circles and in daily life, with embracing an art form over which we simply cannot maintain critical disinterest. Despite its stylistic austerity, the icon is a hot medium and, to get it, you have to get hot with it. You have to take the icon on its own terms. So, bravo for us.

  Celebratory reviews in The New York Times and lots of visitors are good signs. And all three of my icon shows got both. But Jeff Koons with his balloon dogs and David Hockney with his watercolors of Cornwall get that. And neither is in the business of working the numinous. How can you tell if you’ve captured the holy—the sense of profound affect that the object, the icon, can impart, but only when the viewer completes it?

  I remember well a scrawny guy I took to be maybe 35, who had the thickest glasses I had ever seen. Truly like the bottoms of Coke bottles. And pretty soon, I was seeing this person in Holy Image, Holy Space every Wednesday, which was our free day. He had one of those collapsible chairs with three legs and a very small canvas seat that he brought with him. He behaved like a monk, but he was dressed in street clothes. I never spoke to him. He parked himself in the same spot each time, in front of a two-sided icon showing an anxious-looking Virgin Mary with Christ Child on one side and the dead Christ, chest up, on the other. For me, and I guess for him, it is the greatest icon ever created. Powerful, beautiful, puzzling in its meaning, and, like all icons, anonymous. It is from Kastoria, in northern Greece, and dates around 1200. See this icon and you shall never forget it.

  The show traveled to Miami and I went to give the opening lecture in an anonymous darkened hall downtown that was packed. As my eyes adjusted to the low light, I saw someone I sort of knew at the far right of the first row: Mr. Bottle-Glasses. I realized then that there is such a thing as an icon groupie.

  Another person I know from the show is Frederica Mathewes-Green. Actually I learned about her because of it and met her later. Nowadays, she leads an Orthodox parish just south of Baltimore with her husband. Frederica started her life as a Catholic and later, through marriage, became an Episcopalian. And then she went to Holy Image, Holy Space. I still occasionally see her, and she tells me the same story each time.

  It’s the story of the impact on her of that very same Kastoria two-sided icon that Mr. Bottle-Glasses parked himself in front of each week. She, too, was profoundly moved. But in her case it took the form of precipitating her conversion to Orthodoxy, which she wrote about in a book called Facing East: A Pilgrim’s Journey into the Mysteries of Orthodoxy. Those two people give anecdotal evidence that the divine was in the air for that show.

  Holy Image, Holy Space opened on Sunday, August 21, 1988, and I knew immediately that I had found the numinous. First, there were the kisses on the Plexiglas of the cases. There were many kisses, and they had to be cleaned off constantly. But what really showed the power of this show was the report I got from the security staff on the first day that by mid-afternoon our visitors were kissing the painted hand of Saint Francis. Now, to be clear, we ended the show with a few panels reputed to have been painted by Domenikos Theotokopoulos, El Greco, while he was a young icon painter on the island of Crete. They were not great works, and not with all certainty by him, but they were very interesting and provocative. However, Henry Walters had bought a magnificent El Greco of his own, a canvas showing The Stigmata of Saint Francis. It is one of the stars of the museum’s Renaissance gallery.

  I decided to bring this painting down and include it in the show to remind our visitors what this Cretan icon painter turned out to be in later life. It was the only work in the exhibition not covered by Plexiglas. And to my knowledge, in the half century that the Walters had been open to the public before Holy Image, Holy Space, no one had ever kissed this painting. But that day, it seems a lot of people were kissing this painting, which made no sense, given that Saint Francis is among the most nearly Catholic of Catholic saints and has no relationship whatsoever to Byzantium or Orthodoxy. But such is the power of the numinous. And I had nailed it.

  There was poetry in the outcome of my quest to capture and work the numinous in the fact that Gates of Mystery: The Art of Holy Russia, which remains the finest Russian icon show ever to come to the US, found its home at the Princeton University Art Museum exactly twenty years after my 1973 Princeton exhibition of Illuminated Greek Manuscripts from American Collections. (Gates of Mystery began its national tour in Baltimore in August 1992.) While this 1993 show was very large and prominently displayed upstairs, my earlier show was very small and hidden away downstairs. Almost no one came to that manuscript exhibition; this icon show, by contrast, was the highest attended up to that point in the history of the museum. There was no review in 1973, but a “must-see exhibition,” said Michael Kimmelman in The New York Times in 1993, under the banner headline: “Opening the Gates of a Russian Mystery.” Much of the difference in impact had to do with the difference between illuminated manuscripts, which are small, often badly damaged, and may not even have figural decoration—and icons, which typically are big, powerful, compelling, and focus on sacred faces.

  But there is more nuance to what separated the dud from the blockbuster. In Illuminated Greek Manuscripts I was conveying information that was mostly the label’s answer to the question: “When was this manuscript made?” I didn’t even have much to say about the “where,” other than that if the manuscript was beautiful, it must be Constantinople, and if it was ugly, it must be “provincial”—whatever that was supposed to mean. I almost never asked or attempted to answer questions about context of use, ritual, or belief. Instead, I offered information about the thing, the book, which was on the whole pretty accurate. But no one seemed to want that information. By contrast, in Gates of Mystery I was offering an experience of the thing, which put the emphasis on the visitor and on the impact of the icon encounter.

  It was the kind of art that was on display and the experiential focus on the visitor that had changed. But as important as these was how the display was orchestrate
d. For Gates of Mystery, the numinous installation involved deep green walls, dramatic lighting, piped-in Russian chant, and as the star individual work we presented the great plashchanitsa (“burial shroud”) of Jesus from Moscow, dated to the year 1592. At nine by six feet, it is an enormous damask, embroidered with silk, silver, and gilt threads, showing the dead Christ lying on the Slab of the Anointment with Saint John cradling his feet and a diminutive Virgin Mary cradling her dead son’s enormous head. Angels with altar fans and mourning women are behind. And all the figures, in neutral tones, are set against a powerful Russian-red field.

  We put the plashchanitsa in context, both for how physically it would have been encountered in a Russian church and for how, emotionally, it would have been received by its congregation. For the faithful, this is not simply a representation of the dead Christ; it is the dead Christ. And that collapse of art and the sacred, image and divine reality, is what I was trying to achieve for the visitors to the exhibition. Again, a reconstructed context (the sanctuary) and dramatic presentation enhanced with color, light, and sacred music were my tools. Michael Kimmelman, in the caption beneath the large reproduction of this work in his review, spoke of “a strangeness and melancholic silence.” This, for me and for the exhibition’s visitors, was the numinous. I had brought the icon into art museums on its own, numinous terms, and it was embraced by my audiences. It was embraced as well by the academic community, which now made icons a topic of critical research and scholarly conversation as never before.

  When Byzantine icons are presented in traditionally antiseptic museum settings they lack that spiritual potency, at least for most people. I can say this from having watched visitors to Heaven and Earth: Art of Byzantium from Greek Collections in the National Gallery of Art in the spring and summer of 2014. The great icon of Christ the Wisdom of God and the magnificent two-sided icon with the dead Christ from Kastoria, the two stars of Holy Image, Holy Space, had paid a return visit to the United States after a quarter century. But this 2014 National Gallery installation was completely different from their showing at the Walters in 1988. Dry and lifeless, it was essentially a match for the installation of the Ashcan School paintings in the gallery opposite the exhibition’s entrance. There was no drama, no spiritual rapture—and no kisses on the Plexiglas.

  Chapter Eight

  “I Loved to Fondle It”

  Tuesday, August 16, 1988, was a day of high drama at the Walters. The following Saturday would be the festive members preview for my exhibition, Holy Image, Holy Space: Icons and Frescoes from Greece. Icons are extremely fragile, so their display cases must be specially constructed with silica gel hidden inside to mitigate fluctuations in relative humidity in order that the panel will not warp and the paint pop off. The cases have to be perfect. Forget that the Greek Air Force plane carrying those fragile icons out of Greece for the first time had arrived at Baltimore-Washington International Airport in the dead of the night after a day when the temperature reached 104 degrees and sat for hours on the tarmac without air conditioning.

  Forget that the Greek conservators who accompanied those icons to America would smoke cigarettes as they worked over the icons and set their cups of coffee down on the paint surfaces—right on the faces of saints. Forget all of that brutal treatment; our display cases had to be perfect. Obviously this wasn’t easy, which was why we were far behind with our installation schedule leading up to the members preview, just four days away. We were in over our heads, trying to do an exhibition that would be normal for the National Gallery or the Philadelphia Museum of Art, but for the little Walters Art Gallery, it was on a scale that was new and daunting. Nerves were on edge and our installation crew of four were all straight-out angry, I assumed at me, since I was the one who inflicted Holy Image, Holy Space on them. So when they suddenly disappeared from the temporary exhibition space at about 4:00 p.m. that Tuesday, I concluded that they had just walked off the job.

  But out of the corner of my eye I saw one of them disappear up the little winding stairway that led up from the armor gallery, about thirty feet from the entrance to the temporary exhibition space. I followed him and found that he was trailing the other three. The group was silent and serious, which convinced me I was right—they were really pissed off. I followed them up to the sculpture court of the palazzo, then up to the third floor medieval galleries, past the 19th-century and Asian galleries on the fourth floor, to the curatorial offices and library on the fifth floor. And finally, into to a conference room on that floor that we rarely used. Our director, Bob Bergman, was already there with the chief of security. They were sitting in silence at a long table with our chief registrar and our Curator of Asian Art, Hiram “Woody” Woodward, Jr.

  All were ashen and the registrar looked as though she was about to cry. Someone had died, I thought. But this was not the tragedy that dismayed them. Apparently there had been a theft. A very big theft. At least three dozen pieces of Asian art could not be found, and among them, the famous Peach Bloom Vase, an astonishingly beautiful, slender copper-glaze Qing Dynasty porcelain vessel—famous and an iconic Walters’ piece, ever since it was purchased by William T. Walters in 1886 for the spectacular sum of $18,000. (That would be about $450,000 today.) The auction catalogue noted that this vase had a “world-wide reputation of being the finest specimen of its class in existence.”

  There are only four places that a work of art can be in the Walters or, for that matter, in any museum at any given moment: on display in the public galleries, in storage, in the conservation lab, or in the photo studio. Things do move around, and in the days before computers, the paperwork was clumsy, so it was not unusual that a little bit of searching was necessary before a specific object could be tracked down.

  It seems that Woody Woodward had arrived back at work after a three-week vacation in Maine and was giving a tour of the Asian galleries to a conservator from the Met. He went to the large display case where the Peach Bloom Vase had been shown for years, but there was no vase. Nor, strangely, was there any hint that anything was missing from the case. Everything seemed perfect, and all the little paper labels were in place, but no Peach Bloom Vase. The case seemed “lean”—with fewer works of art in it than normal, yet they were all perfectly and elegantly arranged.

  A quick trip to the conservation lab revealed that the Peach Bloom Vase was not there. Then a run down to the newly renovated storage space at the street level of the palazzo: no trace of the Peach Bloom Vase. By this time it was late morning. The chief registrar was called, the Asian galleries were searched, the card file with those objects on public display was checked, and then checked again. By the later afternoon the AWOL Peach Bloom Vase was now in the company of three dozen other missing works of art, all Asian and all from the same fourth-floor galleries. Bob Bergman and the chief of security were now part of the frantic search, and soon Bob called in the installation team, whom, he once told me, he trusted most among all the Walters staff. And there I was, trailing after them.

  The heist was very sophisticated, for sure. And I’m certain that I was not the only one who thought of The Pink Panther and someone playing the part of the white-gloved Phantom, David Niven. We could imagine the clever thief coming across the Peabody Mews alley behind the Walters from the roof of the Engineering Society building just opposite on a taut steel wire secured with a huge hook. He would have entered the museum through one of its fifth-floor windows (how did he get the window open from the outside?) or maybe by way of the fourth-floor skylights (was a pane missing?). This must be the work of a real professional, and certainly someone working for a rich, discreet, and discerning client far away, which in those days meant Japan. Was this the end of the Peach Bloom Vase for the Walters and for Baltimore? Had it already gone underground? How long had it been gone? Our best guess was that it was still in its case on July 22nd, when Woody went off to Maine. But how much longer? We had no idea.

  Clearly, this was a job for the FBI. And it turned out that they would have a lot
of other art to track down. Within the next 48 hours the tally had reached more than 130 works, including some jewelry from the ancient galleries on the second floor, a pair of dueling pistols, a fancy dagger, and a few early American rifles from the armor gallery. How did the thief get them out of the museum? How long did it take?

  But at that moment, waiting for the FBI, we all wondered what was to be done. We were pumped up with adrenaline and we were all profoundly fearful, and we just needed to do something positive. So, we said, let’s have a look at the scene of the crime, the Asian galleries, one floor below the conference room. We went down the fire stairs in silence.

  What followed was both astounding and comical, for being absurd—absurd at our expense. The display case that was missing the Peach Bloom Vase was designed and built in the early ’70s by a local Baltimore fabricator with a national museum clientele named Helmut Guenschel. Made to be abutted against a wall, this particular Guenschel case was low and rectangular, with a large glass front panel and glass side panels, shiny brass fittings, and a rich walnut-veneer base. It was much more sophisticated and vastly more expensive than the simple plywood and Plexiglas cases we made in-house. A set of such cases had been commissioned for the installation of the brutalist-style wing added to the Walters in 1974. These Guenschel cases had little locks built into the brass fittings that secured the large glass front panel in place, and the only way that a glass panel could come off was if two strong people, working together and using big rubber suction cups affixed to the glass itself, unlocked the two locks and slowly drew the sheet of glass forward and then lowered it to the floor.

  The comically absurd part of this unfolding drama was what we now discovered, and should have known, about the case’s design: from above, it had virtually no security. There was a hinged ¼-inch plywood top held down with wing nuts, and below that, the guts of the case: a plywood platform with a rack of florescent lights and below that a plastic waffle grid to diffuse the light. The panel with the lights could be easily lifted, and the waffle grid was secured only with screws. So what did we see? It didn’t appear as though the waffle grid had been unscrewed and lifted, but there was a 8 × 10-inch section of that grid that had been cut out, obviously to give access to the art below, and then glued to a piece of Plexiglas so that it could be set back in place, undetected. And that was UV Plexiglas, I noticed. Odd.