by Gary Vikan
The next Monday, as I was driving up the New Jersey Turnpike on my way to Lewiston, Maine, I imagined that my father was being driven to the hospital in Fargo. Somewhere near the Tappan Zee Bridge I stopped to eat, and it occurred to me, out of nowhere, that I could be Director of the Walters, that I could do the job. It was not so much that I felt more empowered myself, but I did a rundown in my head of all the candidates that had been interviewed by the search committee, and I knew many of them. If they thought they could do it, I certainly could do it. So I let that thought hover. What I did not know was that at about that same time, my father had decided on no treatment and no more diagnostics; he had turned back to Fosston to die, on his terms.
My mother did not share that plan with me, and so I settled on Thursday as my departure day for Minnesota. I know I understood this to be the end, since I took my old suit, my single white dress shirt, and my formal silver and black striped tie. My father’s intestinal cancer was tentatively diagnosed six days before he died; we all understood this to be the final chapter in a lifetime of Norwegian stoicism. I flew to Minneapolis, a trip of a bit over three hours, and then it was more than five hours by car to Fosston. The weather was typically gray and unusually cold, and snow was in the air, which is a possibility any time after mid-October. Fosston Hospital is just off Highway 2 as you enter town from the east. These were the days before cell phones, and I had not called in and did not know if my father was still living. I drove through the small parking lot of the hospital looking for my sister Linda’s car, since I knew she was already in Fosston. It was not there, so I knew he was dead.
My mother was sitting at the kitchen table when I arrived, with Linda. On some level I assumed that Dean’s balsa wood planes and my stacks of National Geographic magazines had disappeared decades earlier from the room upstairs we shared in the ’50s, which was now our mother’s room. But our family kitchen was pretty much the same as it was in 1955 when I was eight. So we just sat there, receiving family friends who came bearing hot dish, as is the custom in Minnesota when someone dies. Elana and our two children, and Gail, Dean, and Bonnie, and their spouses and children, appeared at intervals over the next twenty-four hours, and we drank vast amounts of cheap wine, which was mostly the white zinfandel my mother liked.
Pastor Paul Magelssen of Hope Lutheran Church came by for prayers and to discuss the service, as did the funeral director, Gary Carlin, whom we all knew from high school. And then the editor of The Thirteen Towns called to ask about Frank’s obituary. My mother told us to look in the black tackle box in the cabinet to the left of the desk in the den. We assumed she had been directed to this by our father shortly before he died. I was aware of that black box because it was there that my father kept the collection of Indian Head pennies he gave to me some years earlier. And there also he kept the letter he received in the late ’30s from J. Edgar Hoover in response to his application to become a fingerprint expert with the FBI—an offer he declined. But that tackle box contained other important papers as well. Franklin Vikan, like all good newspapermen, had already written his own obituary, and that is where he kept it. This was welcome news, but when we looked, it was clear that he had not updated his obit since the mid-’70s, though he had kept a clippings file and a list of all the civic positions he had held in Fosston over the years.
I volunteered to update Frank’s obituary, and as I wrote it I discovered a side of my father that I didn’t know. As Treasurer of the Fosston Volunteer Fire Department, President of Fosston’s Community Club and Rotary Club, President of Hope Lutheran Church, and, most of all, as Editor and Publisher of The Thirteen Towns from the late ’30s to the late ’80s, my father was truly a civic player who had a major hand in shaping much of what our hometown was all about for half a century. Of course I knew all of that to be true on some level, although for all of my adult life I had packaged these civic parts of my father within his Scandinavian demeanor and self-effacing manner, and his predisposition toward gloom and drunken benders.
But as I was writing his obituary, I had the realization that my father’s life was a life above all of public service. It was, perhaps, the most basic ingredient in who he was. And I recognized through him that public service might be in me as well. The “could” part of my thinking about the Walters director position now had a “should” part—maybe this is something that I should do.
Back in Baltimore on Saturday afternoon, November 6th, I joined Elana on her excursion to Nordstrom at the Towson Town Center, which was very unusual for me. On some level of my thinking I may have had a plan; I don’t recall. I wandered into the men’s department and the display of suits. The one suit I owned and wore to my father’s funeral the previous Saturday was now too small, as was my dress shirt. This made the tie look odd and made me feel very uncomfortable. I took a Joseph Abboud suit jacket off the rack and tried it on; it was dark blue with pointed lapels, double-breasted, two over. It looked great, it felt great, and it was really expensive. But I wanted it. So I said to the salesperson that I wanted to try on the full suit. By good luck, the jacket fit perfectly; the trousers, though, needed to be cuffed. I was gripped with an idea, which I’m now certain must have been bubbling in my head for at least a few days. I said, “If you can cuff these by 6:00 tonight I’ll buy the suit.” It’s Nordstrom, after all, and of course the answer was yes. So there I was on stage at the Walters at 8:00 p.m. for the members preview, talking about the arts of Ethiopia. I was saying pretty much what I would have said the first time around, on October 16th, but now in my new suit. Did anyone other than Elana notice, and figure out what I was up to? I doubt it, but from my point of view, I was beginning to act “presidential,” and this new suit of mine was saying two words: could and should.
THE STORY BROKE IN The Baltimore Evening Sun on April 13, 1994 with the headline “Walters Art Gallery picks new director—a curator from its own staff.” Adena Testa, the board’s President Elect, said the board had asked Vikan to apply the first time around—which was news to me. And that it “approached him again” in December. That I was approached then was true. Around that same time, I had gone out to Cleveland to meet the staff and tour the museum; Bob Bergman wanted me to be his chief curator. But after my look around, I decided that the Cleveland Museum of Art was not the place for me. The most interesting passage in the Sun article, though, was unattributed. According to art critic John Dorsey: “In recent months, Dr. Vikan has been taking on a more visible leadership role.” Had he noticed my new suit?
On my trip to Cleveland, I had two items of business: first, to meet the staff and then decide on the possible move; and second, to inform my friend and former boss, Bob Bergman, what I was going to do. I told Bob and his wife, Marcie, that evening over dinner in their home; it was December 23rd. I told them I would say no to the Cleveland chief curatorship and would say yes, I hoped, to the Walters directorship. Bob, who was a wise, instinctive, and thoroughly honest man, said immediately that this would be a big mistake. Why? I remember his exact words: “Because you can’t just say ‘fuck it.’”
What did I imagine lay ahead? I’m not too sure, though I recall that the day I was appointed director was the opening party of Art Blooms, which was then turning into the Women’s Committee annual spring fundraiser—flower arrangements responding to works of art in the galleries. I shook lots of hands that evening, and liked it. But more generally, I was keen on a metaphor for what I imagined I was going to do: I was going to “turn up the heat.”
Chapter Thirteen
Ready to Explode
That’s how I looked and felt, and Raoul Middleman captured it. According to the review in The Baltimore Sun, the “movers and shakers” of the Baltimore art world—fourteen of us—were all there, both at the opening in early February 1996 and for eight weeks thereafter on the walls of the Steven Scott Gallery, just south of the Walters. Steven had asked the well-known and much-loved Baltimore artist Raoul Middleman to paint portraits of the major players in the local art scene, and among them
, I was the new arrival. I had sat for Raoul in his cavernous warehouse and studio the previous October. It was unusually hot that day and I didn’t want to be there. Raoul gave a quick tour of his racks and racks of canvases. He is both fast and prolific, he loves to talk about philosophy, his undergraduate major, and he paints with the honest gooeyness of Rembrandt, his favorite Old Master. Raoul’s style is gritty, on the ugly side of realism.
That day I couldn’t sit still. I didn’t want to sit still. Just minutes before I left my office one of my favorite Walters staff members, a talented designer and a friend, had come in to tell me she was leaving. She loved working at the place that was “the little engine that could” she said, but now things were changing at the Walters and, for her, not in a good way. I was confused, agitated, and hot, as I watched Raoul wield his dripping brushes in broad and aggressive strokes. I was tense, and a little afraid. Raoul smoked a pipe, and he seemed continuously to be lighting and relighting it, as he mixed turpentine and wiped whatever extra paint was flying around, which was plenty, on his baggy trousers. I imagined not simply a fire, but an explosion—the whole goddamn warehouse going up, with us in it. But then, I thought, he must have been doing this for years, and he’s still around. Gradually, in the course of that sitting, a strange peacefulness came over me, a peacefulness that I otherwise only knew in the presence of monks or in a medieval church. It was very odd, but that was the power of Raoul’s intense charisma and the discipline of holding a pose for more than an hour with my arms crossed.
I know I examined my portrait before I left, I know I was wearing my new double-breasted blue suit, and I think I was generally pleased with what I saw, though my head seemed overly large. But I was hardly prepared for my revisit with Raoul’s version of Gary Vikan in swirling oils at the Steven Scott Gallery four months later. The Sun reviewer loved my portrait in particular and spoke of the sense of “coiled energy” of a guy who “seems anxious to get back to his own work,” which was true. But what I saw in that portrait was a man about to explode. And I knew why: because the Walters itself was about to explode.
I had certainly jacked up the heat. By the fall of 1995, eighteen months after becoming director, I had tried one of just about everything a director can try and taken much of the museum apart in the meantime. There was no idea for an exhibition that I didn’t like, and the more shows the better, even if that meant turning the stately Walters into a three-ring circus. Dodge Thompson, Chief of Exhibitions at the National Gallery, called to offer me an exhibition of the Genoese Baroque master Bernardo Strozzi for the fall of 1995, a show they could not manage to squeeze into their schedule. But somehow, I could make it work at the Walters. We have a great Adoration of the Magi by Strozzi, Genoa is Baltimore’s Sister City, and I had long wanted to do a Strozzi show. So of course, I immediately said yes, pretty much ignoring the fact that I had already committed to two exhibitions for that fall 1995 time slot, and each in its own way was more ambitious than any show that the Walters had ever done before.
The first, the “tradition buster” in the words of The Baltimore Sun, was Going for Baroque, a collaboration between the Walters and Baltimore’s Contemporary Museum that would, for the first time, bring the works of eighteen contemporary artists into our galleries, including Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, Frank Stella, and Andres Serrano. The organizing criterion was that these artists were in some way fascinated with Baroque and Rococo art, and each work was installed next to the type of art that had inspired it.
This meant that the show was spread out on both floors of the museum’s palazzo building. A chrome Louis XIV by Koons was set near its marble 18th-century ancestor in the sculpture court, a seeming French Rococo tureen in the gallery behind the Koons bore a sly self-portrait of Cindy Sherman as Madame de Pompadour, and a huge abstract bronze by Bryan Hunt, called Cloak of Lorenzo, was installed in the center of the floor above in the Old Masters gallery near the Walters’ diminutive bronze of The Risen Christ by Bernini. The Hunt was so heavy that it made the floor sag. And worse than that, throughout these recently reinstalled galleries I was doing the almost unforgivable, namely, forcing pins through and putting sticky tape on the pristine Scalamandré fabric that covered the walls. Contemporary art was bad enough in the eyes of Walters traditionalists (one of my older trustees refused to enter those galleries while the show was up); tampering with those beautiful spaces that my predecessor, Bob Bergman, had created just a few years earlier was tantamount to a sin.
The planning of Going for Baroque was fraught with peril. My collaborators at the Contemporary were insistent that we include Serrano’s famously controversial 60″ × 40″ Piss Christ photograph (which shows a crucifix in a glass of the artist’s urine) beside our Murillo Virgin of the Immaculate Conception. While this made perfect sense to me both visually and conceptually, I told them that I might as well resign right on the spot if we decided to include that work in the show. Just a few years earlier, in 1989, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, had cancelled an exhibition of homoerotic and sadomasochistic photographs by Robert Mappelthorpre for fear of the firestorm of protest that would ensue. This act of self-censorship was widely and universally condemned in the art world. The director left, and some believe that this was the beginning of the end for the Corcoran. So I couldn’t win. If I showed Piss Christ I was convinced that my board would send me packing. But if I chose not to show it, which is what I did, would I have a Corcoran problem? Well, in theory, no, provided that the conversation and decision stayed in my office and remained confined to the four of us then in the room. Only years later did I learn that one of my Contemporary collaborators marched off to the local art critic for the Sun, John Dorsey, and told him that I had capitulated to self-censorship in the manner of the Corcoran director. John chose to ignore her.
And then there was the mini firestorm surrounding the small companion show organized with students from the Maryland Institute College of Art, who had also “gone for Baroque.” As it turned out (and to no one’s great surprise), one among the students had gone blue, by devising a computer-based installation wherein Baroque art was somehow linked to contemporary pornography. This, too, had to go, and in this case the reason I thought was obvious: The students’ work was to be installed on a public path through the museum and we could not restrict access by children. It was simple; that work is out of the show.
Well, not so simple. This all must be explained and worked through with the young artist in question, who had a sense of entitlement to self-expression that was generally shared by her teachers and classmates and everyone else who had an opinion on the matter. So off I went to her studio in a townhouse near the MICA campus. The idea was that she would explain to me what she had created, and I would explain to her why I couldn’t include her work in the exhibition. Well, it was pretty obvious that this artist had another agenda. As she showed me her creation on screen, she began to ask some leading questions. And then I noticed this little red light under some papers on her desk. I poked around a bit and discovered a tape recorder that was turned on but mostly hidden, and unmentioned by her. What she was after was a final addition to her work of art, which would be me, on tape, in my act of censorship. I pulled the plug.
I was getting the feeling that my Contemporary Museum collaborators didn’t have my career interests at top of mind, and, for a while, I felt sort of friendless. But nowadays, whenever Going for Baroque is mentioned, it is celebrated, even by Walters traditionalists, within a warm, hazy afterglow as a great milestone in the museum’s history. And it was.
But what I recall most vividly among the many odd and wonderful moments of that show was the opening in late September 1995. The exhibition was cheap and so was the event: beer, wine, and potato chips in the sculpture court next to that chrome Jeff Koons. All of a sudden this big guy with wavy black hair walks in and straight up to me to shake my hand and congratulate me for bringing the Walters into the 20th century. He wore a brown leather trench coat, no shirt, and around h
is neck, a tattooed necklace in the form of barbed wire. Cool, I thought: my new friend.
THE THIRD EXHIBITION THAT HYPER-INTENSE fall was Pandora: Women in Classical Greece, and it opened on November 5th. With Pandora, the challenge was one of scale, because its curator, Ellen Reeder, always thought big. While it was basically in the spirit of my Silver Treasure exhibition of 1986, with works from the Walters complemented by loans from around the world, Pandora was exponentially larger. With 135 objects from more than four dozen lenders, it could not fit into our temporary exhibition space, which meant that we had to dismantle the entire 19th-century installation on the fourth floor of the 1974 Wing. And the cost, $1.2 million, was four times that of the Byzantine silver show. We were in financial free fall. One day my registrar told me the fee for the loans for packing, transportation, and insurance was on the order of $250,000, and a week later, she said it was closer to $400,000. In fact, it turned out to be almost $600,000, with a single red-figure amphora from a German museum costing us $28,000 for its round-trip to Baltimore (nearly half the total expense line for Going for Baroque).
Finding money and dismantling our 19th-century galleries were not my only Pandora problems. A small but intense firestorm broke out around our ad campaign; what I considered to be a brilliant marketing image, others took to be soft porn. It was Ellen Reeder who had the idea of going to an outside ad agency to promote the show, and I liked it. I especially liked the concept the agency hit on, namely, that young women in classical Greece were likened to wild bears that must be tamed. The firm came up with an image that I thought was truly exciting: A young woman with bear paws where her hands and feet should be is enveloped in a flowing, diaphanous textile as she seemingly tumbles through space and lands before us. Literally, she was being transformed before our eyes from a bear into a young woman. Wonderful!
