by Gary Vikan
But the van? Howard, where is that goddamn van? Run! It finally appeared, and they made their ceremonial exit from the Walters house. I stood in the door of the double parlor as they walked passed me, down the narrow hall to the door, down the steps, and into the van. This happened very, very slowly. And each one, including the brother, stopped in front of me as they departed and gave me a hug. Each one, and that made for eight hugs. Did I take that to mean that I was their “brother in Christ”? That we had bonded through this ordeal? Or, that I had given them what they wanted, an “international incident” with symbolic martyrdom? I have no idea.
The van pulled away from the curb, went the half block down Monument Street, then took a left down Cathedral, all very slowly, and I walked alongside the van up to the light at the intersection of Cathedral and Centre Streets. The TV cameras, the protesters, and the rejected members were all caught up in a flurry of activity at the museum’s entrance, no more than twenty yards away from the van. So no one noticed as it quietly slipped away and went south back to Washington, DC. I was finally free. So I strolled over to the TV cameras and did some interviews. Happily, the protesters joined in; they weren’t angry at me, it was the Abune they hated, and the Ethiopian president who appointed him.
“DEAD CAT BOUNCE.” I KNOW it’s A Wall Street term, applicable to a brief upturn in the market that typically follows a huge sell-off. The idea being that even a dead cat, if he falls far enough, will bounce. But I like it and use it for my own purposes. African Zion had a version of the dead cat bounce the next morning, Sunday, October 17th. I was there at 11:00 a.m. when those glass doors opened and people started pouring in. It seemed wonderful. It was as if last night, last week, were a bad dream and now I’m awake.
But not so fast. I was sitting behind the entry desk with the folks selling tickets, and in comes this scruffy looking guy in military fatigues with a fist full of Xeroxed flyers. I could see that his hands were covered with that white paste that we had in grade school that some kids were fond of eating. And his eyes looked totally crazed. He gave me one of those flyers of his, said nothing, and was out the door. I’m then looking at a virulently anti-Semitic statement from the “German-American Voice,” signed by its chairman, Duncan Edmister, whom I take to be the guy with the paste on his hands. I get it, he has no idea what this show African Zion is about, but it must involve Blacks and Jews.
At that instant, I was looking out the glass doors of the museum toward where all the action was the previous evening. There was a cop car, and I ran out the door to flag it down. But it was gone. But then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mr. Neo-Nazi gluing one of his flyers to the light pole at the corner of Charles and Centre Streets. So I ran that way. (What, after all, could he do to me?). And when I got to the corner, I saw him turn into the Peabody Mews alley that bisects the Walters’ block. I ran again. And then, at the far end of the alley, I saw him disappear around the corner of Cathedral Street. So I ran that way. But that’s the last I saw of him. I felt good about myself, and that little cat and mouse game added a bit of unexpected luster to my performance the previous evening and, in fact, the whole week. I was taking charge of things. I was being the boss. And I liked it.
I took the flyers down and returned to my spot with the Walters ticket sellers. In just a few minutes I looked up and one of our docents was beckoning me to step over near the entrance to the show. I obliged, of course. It was getting crowded, and it was not even noon. “What’s up?” I asked. Well, she said, that gentleman over there, the tall one, is looking for you. His name is Abdul. I froze. And he was coming my way and reaching out! It was big hug #9, and I had never even met the guy. He said he wanted so much to thank me, in person, for bringing the art of his native country to America. And he made the point of telling me he was Muslim.
AFTER THOSE BIRTHING PAINS, African Zion blossomed into an enormous success. It was critically praised in The New York Times, was celebrated far and wide in the media, and it drew wonderfully large and diverse crowds in Baltimore and throughout its national tour. Not only did this exhibition introduce a rich, sophisticated, and profoundly spiritual artistic tradition that virtually no one in America had previously encountered, it brought before us all the provocative truth that Jesus, a Semite like the Ethiopians, was “a man of color.” I loved all of this, and I was eager to buy some Ethiopian art for the Walters, some icons and illuminated manuscripts, and a few of the elaborate bronze processional crosses. The trouble was, no Ethiopian art was then for sale.
It was the middle of May 1995, and I got a call from a wonderfully generous and good-spirited art dealer in Soho named Bill Wright. He was about to offer items for sale from the collection of Joseph and Margaret Knopfelmacher. There were a large number of Ethiopian icons, manuscripts, and crosses, some of which had been in African Zion—and he was giving the Walters first pick. I immediately went to see Bill at his gallery on Houston Street in what appeared to be abandoned warehouse with an open garage on its ground floor. I gathered up my courage and went up to the 4th floor on a rickety freight elevator activated by a bent coat hanger dangling from the ceiling and entered a cramped but sparkling new white exhibition space with a shiny pine wood floor. I found it filled with the most wonderful Ethiopian art I could imagine. Bill said I had my pick and offered me a box of those little sticky red dots to put on the icons and what else I wanted.
They were magnificent, and at just $10,000 or $15,000 each, they were so inexpensive that I thought I should get out my credit card. I was there for less than an hour and it took only two passes to find fifteen pieces I wanted for the Walters. Among them was a huge, spectacular, and extremely rare painted liturgical fan. At $60,000, it was by far the most expensive item. We were just then beginning to plan the reinstallation our Centre Street Building, and my heart was set on giving special emphasis at the center of the new medieval galleries to those Ethiopian works that I had just blessed with the little red dot. But I had a problem: Our acquisition budget, the Jones Fund, had a very small balance in it. How was I going to come up with the $200,000 I needed to redeem those works now marked in red?
Time went by and I waited. Bill Wright called me, and then called me again, and again. It seems that the Minneapolis Institute of Art wanted some of the works I had marked; they had the money and were ready to pay. I needed to come up with the cash or Joe Knopfelmacher’s wonderful pieces from Ethiopia would go to Minneapolis. Wait, I told him; Bill, please wait. By then it was the middle of December, and Bill Wright finally said time’s up. He had to sell. He had given me all the time he could, and now my option is up. I asked for just three weeks, until the end of the first week in January.
My hope was for a year-end market rally. I was hoping against hope that the Jones Fund would surge through the ceiling of the Dow and that by year’s end I would have the cash to pay for what my red dots had reserved. Thankfully 1995 was not 2008. The market did its good work, the Dow was up that year by more than 30 percent, and our Jones Fund went up with it. It was just enough, in the end, to pay my friend Bill Wright and to bring to Baltimore what was, and remains, the finest collection of Ethiopian art outside of Ethiopia.
Eighteen months later, in August 1997, we had a joyous opening celebration to welcome our new collection of Ethiopian art to the Walters. Mayor Kurt Schmoke, Governor Parris Glendenning, and Congressman Elijah Cummings were there, along with state legislators and local VIPS. And the Ethiopian ambassador was there, too. It was a high point of my life. There I was, standing next to Ambassador so and so, and I asked him, “Were you the ambassador in 1993?” He said yes, and smiled. I smiled back, thinking oh, yes, the dead cat bounced.
Chapter Twelve
My Father’s Obit
A second, smaller, and certainly quieter opening party for African Zion was scheduled for Saturday, November 6th. Much had changed at the Walters and in my life during those three intervening weeks since the cancelled members preview of October 16th. What I learned in that crazy week lea
ding up to the 16th was that I enjoyed taking charge. There was an eminently competent acting director always near at hand, Kate Sellers, and the director designate, Michael Mezzatesta, appeared every now and then, but I was the one who took the leadership role. I found I liked it, and was good at it. This was one important change, but I could hardly have expected that it would converge with two other watershed events in my life, both of which unfolded between 5:00 and 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, October 21, 1993—totally by coincidence. What was the first clue that something was different? If someone were very attentive, they might have noticed that on that Saturday evening of the rescheduled members preview, when I was on stage at the podium, I was wearing a new suit. It was the first in years. But it was much more than a new suit; it was the bearer of its own meaning.
Carol Vogel of the Times called what had happened the “Battle of Baltimore,” and Paul Richards of the Post called it the “affaire Mezzatesta.” The story had broken in The Baltimore Sun on November 11, 1993: “Walters axes choice for director.” The previous day, the Board of Trustees of the Walters had formally withdrawn the offer it had extended to Michael Mezzatesta to be the museum’s new director to replace Bob Bergman, who in May had gone off to be Director of the Cleveland Museum of Art. This was done despite the fact that the Baltimore mayor and the governor of Maryland had both enthusiastically and very publicly applauded the new appointment when it was announced at the end of June with multiple public appearances and a celebratory press release. Although the effective date of Mezzatesta’s appointment was, on the day he was officially fired, still three weeks away, he was already in the possession of the director’s credit card, had moved into and begun redecorating the director’s office, and for more than three months had been meeting with staff to plan projects and exhibitions.
Technically, though, Michael Mezzatesta had not yet signed a contract with the museum, nor had he formally resigned from his previous job, which was Director of the Duke University Museum of Art. A few weeks earlier, on October 21st, the Walters board leadership had asked Mezzatesta to go away quietly but he had refused; legal counsel was retained, various threats made, and a financial settlement eventually reached.
The Walters had not gotten that much bad national press since the summer of 1988 and the debacle of the art theft by the head of night security. The official version of the back story, as presented by the out-going Board President, Jay Wilson, was that there were “irreconcilable differences . . . of vision and values,” and a disagreement on compensation. What apparently had been an adequate salary in June was inadequate by October; moreover, Mezzatesta reportedly wanted a significant increase in the director’s contingency fund. It was also clear that his commitment to contemporary art was more aggressive than the board had initially imagined, and there were already signs of friction with the staff.
A more nuanced and in-depth investigative piece by Kathleen Renda appeared in the January 1994 issue of Baltimore Magazine. In it the events of the affaire Mezzatesta are made to unfold in real time, with quoted dialogue, through the eyes and sensibility of Jay Wilson. The moment of high drama comes in the later afternoon of Thursday, October 21st when Jay and incoming Board President Adena Testa ask for a private meeting with Michael Mezzatesta in the director’s office. According to the Renda article, Jay Wilson’s first words were: “I’ve got some bad news for you.” At that moment I was in my office on the fifth floor of the Walters 1974 Wing; soon I would go down to the auditorium to introduce America’s leading authority on Ethiopian art, Marilyn Heldman, who was going to speak on illustrated Ethiopian manuscripts. My phone rang, and it was my sister Linda. She said she had some bad news for me. Our father Franklin had developed severe jaundice and had been taken to the hospital. It wasn’t another episode in his struggle with diabetes; they thought it was cancer.
MICHAEL MEZZATESTA HAD COME TO see me in Baltimore in May to ask if I thought he should apply for the Walters directorship. I said yes, and I would say nice things about him to the search committee. I had met Michael and his wife Nancy Kitterman a year earlier, in line at a “pork pull” at the Ackland Museum of Art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was there in his capacity as Director of the nearby Duke University Museum of Art and as co-host of the annual spring meeting of the Association of Art Museum Directors. I was there at the invitation of my director, who was on the program committee for that meeting and wanted me to be part of a group of curatorial presentations on new ways of approaching art exhibits. The title of my paper was “Working the Numinous.” Michael Mezzatesta and I are nearly the same age, which means younger than most everyone else at the pork pull, and I think he, too, was a bit in awe of the crowd. So we sat together and bonded.
To me, this meant that in May 1993 when he came to Baltimore to discuss the Walters directorship with me, he and I were all-but-best-friends. I was not surprised that he turned to me for advice and support when he decided, eight months into the Walters search, to apply to be the museum’s next director. Michael’s timing was perfect. The search committee (I was on it) had by that time seen everyone out there; the job had been offered to Max Anderson of the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University, and he turned it down. Committee members were exhausted and dispirited, summer was approaching, and Bob Bergman had just left for Cleveland.
After Michael Mezzatesta’s appointment was made public, our relationship went south so fast and with such a thud that I could only conclude that his congenial behavior in May, just a few weeks before, was Mezzatesta theatre. I recall a specific meeting, just Michael and me, in early August. It was about future exhibitions, and he started talking about a Pre-Columbian show he had organized at Duke called Painting the Mayan Universe. It was centered on an impressive collection of Mayan pots that Michael had secured for Duke from a private collector in New York. Michael got on to the fact that his grant application for that show to the National Endowment for Humanities had been turned down, and how he was prepared to sue them. Someone on the peer-review panel had torpedoed it, he said, because the Mayan pots did not have traceable provenance before the mid-80s. He lingered on this “person” on the panel, on the provenance question, and how he was going to sue the NEH, which seemed to me all but impossible and, in any event, not a very healthy way of thinking about the past. By his tone, though, I was pretty certain that he knew that I was on that panel, and that he thought that person was me.
I was convinced at that moment that I had no future at the Walters. And yes, I did recall then, and often, what Bob Bergman had said to me over the phone the night in September, 1992, ten or so months earlier, when he called to tell me he was going to Cleveland. He said that they had “a lot of dough.” The reason I remember that is not because his choice of words seemed odd; what struck me at that moment was that I felt I was doing pretty well at the Walters already with not a lot of dough. I knew that Bob wanted me to join him in Cleveland, but I was not at all sure I wanted to do that, dough or no dough.
So that’s where I was in late summer of 1993: I had been at the Walters for nearly nine years and by that time had organized three major exhibitions that had been reviewed in The New York Times, something that had never happened at the Walters before. And we had just closed a Sisley exhibition, in collaboration with the Royal Academy and the Musée d’Orsay, that broke attendance records. So I was doing great, and yet not so great at all. Sure, Jay Wilson had taken me out for drinks before the search committee had their first meeting to ask me whether I wanted to apply to become the next director. I immediately said no, without equivocation, mostly because I liked what I was doing already and I didn’t think I would like Bob Bergman’s job. But also, because I understood that Jay’s real agenda was to get us both past that question. I knew he didn’t think I was right for the job and, then, neither did I.
I thought of myself as a curator; it was the right fit for me, I enjoyed it, and I imagined that was to be my career. To me, it was the difference between being the lead singer i
n a band and playing backup. I simply didn’t want that much of the spotlight, and I certainly didn’t want it all to depend on me. And that aside, I thought of myself as I thought of my father, as an introvert of the Scandinavian sort and very much a product of our quiet little farming town of Fosston. I could not then imagine wanting to—or being able to—play the public role that I knew the Walters directorship required. I’d have to dress up every day; I’d have to give up swearing; I’d have to go to lunches with rich people I didn’t know and probably wouldn’t like; and I’d have to ask for money. None of that sounded like Gary Vikan. But I also knew that Jay Wilson, and I assumed the entire Board of Trustees, wanted me to stay at the Walters.
THE LAST TIME I SAW MICHAEL MEZZATESTA was at a staff meeting on Friday, October 22nd, the morning after that fateful Thursday “bad news” evening. He was sitting opposite me, clearly agitated, and all of a sudden he just got up and disappeared. That Friday evening was the last time I spoke with my father. I called around 7:00 p.m., and it was clear from his tone and frail voice that there was not much time left. I said I would come out the next day, but he was going to St. Luke’s Hospital in Fargo, about one hundred miles west of Fosston, to get a definitive diagnosis and a treatment plan. So he wanted to let that unfold, and I then could come, and yes, he said, we’ll go for a drive out by Cross Lake. This was my father’s favorite thing to do on a Sunday afternoon. This would be okay, I thought, since I was scheduled to lecture on Russian icons at Bates College on Monday; that could go forward as scheduled, and then I’d be off to Fosston. But when I hung up the phone, I suspected I would never hear my father’s voice again.
