clifford schorer winslow homer
If you come of age at a certain point in the collecting dynamic, and you are presented with the last 12 years of catalogues, and you go through them all, and from that you draw your conclusions about what the marketplace has been, and then you make the investor's fatal error of projecting the future as the same as the past, the problem there is that you say to yourself, Okay, a painting by, you know, fill in the blank, Molenaer, is worth 20,000 for a minor work. JUDITH RICHARDS: And not buying a lot, but gaining information and confidence, and then, and then it wentthe volume of activity. Yeah. No, no, no. CLIFFORD SCHORER: So it was very, very pleasing to me to have, you know, the Antwerp Museumyou know, the KMSKAbuy, with their own money, what I consider to be a certain van Dyck sketch, you know, from a very importantyou know, one of his pictures in the Prado, one of his preparatory sketches for one of the pictures in the Prado. You know, there are certainly moments in the '60s and '70s when scholarship might have been a little weaker, and they missed something, but in general, right after the war, when everyone else was profiteering, the firm didn't. And how the Chinese merchants were trying to sell you back what you wanted to see. CLIFFORD SCHORER: We packed up everything to go down there. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Porcelain. CLIFFORD SCHORER: I'm trying to think what I'veno, what I've done is, which is interesting, is I've sort of done that kind of thing your psychiatrist advises you to do, which is I'm projecting. CLIFFORD SCHORER: and previously had been unassociated. 
And again, I mean, I don'tbecause it's not a family legacy business for me; I'm not planning on handing this off to a son, so I have to think very carefully about what the next generation of the Agnew's company will be. CLIFFORD SCHORER: I'm sure it was all an interest in history. [00:48:00]. So what I had done was I worked for Gillette for a while. I wanted to have a three-day ceratopsian symposium, which they did a wonderful job of. CLIFFORD SCHORER: For theyou know, luckily, we have the sands of time to wear away the lesser works from the, you know, from the museum-quality question of whether an Old Master belongs in a museum. I like to go back and forth to Paris. WebSotheby's sued over Winslow Homer ownership October 29 2013. So, I mean, he's at a level way above mine in philanthropy, and very chauvinistic about his city of Antwerp, which is wonderful, because, you know, Antwerp has had, you know, off and on, hard centuries and good centuries. So they used to have in their little museumsthey probablyonce, back in the '50s and during communism, they probably had these Thracian pieces, you know, that they found in the ground, and then the National Museum sort of pulled them all into the National Museum. [4] It appeared in the catalogue without any reference to having been found; it was described simply as "private collection, 1987". And I think it's working in a sense that people think of us a little bit differently than they did Agnew's under the old ownership, and I think we've come full circle; I think the five years that we've been operating in business, Anthony has done a wonderful job, you know. And the problem was my upbringing hadn't prepared me to be a child. So those private collectors often didn't have professionalother than dealers and advisers that were outside of their, you know, home, they didn't have in-house curators who made, you know, art historical decisions or collecting decisions. CLIFFORD SCHORER: No. JUDITH RICHARDS: Yes. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Yeah. JUDITH RICHARDS: So there's strategy meetings with Anthony. [Affirmative.] JUDITH RICHARDS: When you bought that first painting, did you very quickly continue buying paintings? Did the mission change at all during the years that you were there? So that's a modern phenomenon, where you have this conflict between, you know, a museum, institutional curator and private collectors who may desire that their collection end up on view and the curator may have opposing views. I think there are 3- or 400,000 photographs in our archive, and if, JUDITH RICHARDS: This is the archive that's been acquired by the National. JUDITH RICHARDS: Because you couldn't be competing. JUDITH RICHARDS: Did you get a sense of how hehow he spent his time collecting versus what he did professionally to earn income and how he balanced that? I mean, there wasthere was a bit of knowledge of something's not right here. You could put together quite an impressive-feeling collection. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Now, again, that's a collecting area that was most popular between 1890 and 1910, 1915. But I think that if there's any way you can filter out the noise of the marketplacebecause the noise of the marketplace is just a cacophony now compared to when Iyou know, when I was first starting. [Laughs.] This growing passion? CLIFFORD SCHORER: And it may get burned, and it may also have little to no attention paid to it, because it may be lost in a sea of other things, and this exciting story we have to tell about your picture will be utterly lost. CLIFFORD SCHORER: I had a lot of walls in this house. JUDITH RICHARDS: late teens. I think they also probably were in New York at that point. JUDITH RICHARDS: Yeah. Generally speaking, the book presentations are in Antwerp. It was a fantasy shop that wasn't going to exist, but it was just an idea of how I would pass my time, because I need something to do. She's always willing to take a phone call from an annoying person like me. And recently, Milwaukeeso I love Tanya Paul; she's the curator at Milwaukee. CLIFFORD SCHORER: No. We've done Paris Tableau, which is obviously now over. [Laughs.] And he moonlighted teaching financial management at Boston University Metropolitan College, which was their evening school. Is this Crespi? Three, four years. So it was very depressing. At some point. I've spoken to Jon a few times. And, you know, from there I was able to turn more of my attention. JUDITH RICHARDS: So you're relying on people in the field, aren't you? Or just the, CLIFFORD SCHORER: So, the Adoration is atis in London at Agnew's Gallery at the moment, and The Taking of Christ is in Worcester, hanging, JUDITH RICHARDS: Is that a long-term loan? [Laughs. And, you know, when the euro was new. Had you been thinking about it? [Laughs.]. And you know, there's no way I'm ever going to get it back. You know, your real moneymakers, frankly, are selling one or two major paintings. I'd write a letter and say, you know, "I think this is by Crespi." CLIFFORD SCHORER: You know, selling a 50,000 work when you have 800,000 in overheadif you're on a commission basis, you have to sell a lot of 50,000 works. They had a [Hans] Hoffmann of a hare, a painting of a hare, which was, you know, a world-class masterpiece, and they had a Sebastiano Ricci, a big Sebastiano Ricci. And actually, it was very similar to my grandfather, which was not his son but his son-in-law. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Yeah, it's a biggerit's a much bigger issue than myself, and that's why I'm very pleased to have Anthony and Anna on board, because they are, you know, seasoned gallerists and auction specialists and, you know, managers and people who can handle those sorts of questions. JUDITH RICHARDS: for the field. JUDITH RICHARDS: Where is the Gropius house? But I wouldin France and Europe, I generallynobody had the money to just go wander around. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Yeah. I think we're right-sized for the moment for the market. [Laughs. CLIFFORD SCHORER: It was a perfect, you know, confluence of interest at the moment. CLIFFORD SCHORER: You know, we were in the marketplace. So in other words . So I did start scaling that down, but I did always imagine every time I scaled it down, I would keep this sort of select group. I think that what people said to me back then, because it was a different kind of marketplace, wasit was all about market strategy. I sold it all. You know, obviously, I feel that way about some of the greatest Renaissance masters, but that's just not going to happen. So, you know, I think that's why I say it's a hobby you can take to your tomb. So I came to that same point, that same impasse, in stamp collecting, where, okay, I have every single U.S. issue, except for these 27. And, JUDITH RICHARDS: So, a library, because it wasthey were liquidating? CLIFFORD SCHORER: Or the auction houses, yeah. JUDITH RICHARDS: Would you say that's one of the most gratifying occasions, and that that kind of experience is a key element for driving you to that kind of scholarship and scholarly discoveries, driving you as a collector? My grandfather's collectionmy great-grandfather's collectionwas in the millions of stamps. CLIFFORD SCHORER: It was a little municipal museum. How did that acquisition come about? I never actually mentioned my age. JUDITH RICHARDS: So you're notit sounds like you're not sure you will go back to collecting for yourself. Again, knowing that that is a skill set that I will never possess, and that as close as I can ever get is to collect something. JUDITH RICHARDS: What's the name of the curator at the Met again who did the Gossart? So, I hadit's an unlined painting, so I said, "Well, it's a little fragile." CLIFFORD SCHORER: I consider to be respectable parameters. WebA household name in the US, Winslow Homer created dramatic images of human resilience, depicting the US Civil War and the aftermath of slavery, writes Diane Cole. . I mean, I'm doing the floors in my new buildings. It's more like I'll find a print after a painting. So that's always. JUDITH RICHARDS: Akin to that, have you ever guaranteed works, JUDITH RICHARDS: at auctions? They'll be in the Pre-Raphaelite show. And we were able to put together a comprehensive Laserstein show. So I got in my car and I drove over there at lunchtime, and I walked through the whole building, and literally, there was nobody there. I was their last call, because they didn'tthey wanted silent investors who did what they were told to do, and I was going to be an active investor who wanted to physically see the painting, who wanted to understand their rationale for purchasing it, and who wanted to understand their pricing strategy. I think I turned 16 right aroundit was in that first year, so that's what I recall. [00:40:05]. It's a very long cycle, so you can't think about it as "I need a salary this year," you know, from the ownership standpoint. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Yeah. I mean, it may at some point, but it's certainlyit's a measured approach, I think. Then you have the everything else, and the everything else is becoming a really sad mess, and it's because Grandma's dying, and Mom and Dad are dying, and the 50-something and youngerthey want nothing to dothey want, you know, clean lines, Mid-Century Modernism [laughs]; they want Abstract Expressionism. It hadeffectively, it had been on the market for 25 or 30 years. New York? JUDITH RICHARDS: Have youdo you imagine in the future acquiring another art business? You know. [4] She rejected this offer and the parties initially agreed to continue the sale and resolve the dispute afterwards. And I was doing independent study, but at the same time, I was offered an incredible programming job at Gillette. JUDITH RICHARDS: Is there any indication onit's a loan. I guessI guess I felt a bit insecure about the fact that I needed their help to learn something. So I went to the director's office. [Laughs.] JUDITH RICHARDS: that you had worked on? You know, sure, there is an accumulation of thinking, but the goalmy goal sort of long-termhas always been to find better and better and better things.
I mean, it's been a lot more fun than I ever would have imagined. CLIFFORD SCHORER: I went to TEFAF. CLIFFORD SCHORER: I remember going there. So all of that was interesting, and there was no need there to say, Okay, you know, from the Nanking Cargo-type of plate, there are 15 different floral varieties. CLIFFORD SCHORER: So I think of storage as storage, but just good climate control. And so the National Gallery has our historic stock books and archive. And we'll get back to him, too. ], And, I mean, I remember spending as much time as possible in front of that painting, and obviously, you know, that. CLIFFORD SCHORER: I think so, yes. CLIFFORD SCHORER: An investor, not a face to an enterprise, but awhich I still am notbut a sort of investor-backer. He had eyelashes; he had glass eyes. JUDITH RICHARDS: Did you read art magazines? And being a sort of mariner and obsessed with the mariners of, you know, the 19th century. Is it an official. Like, the Ladies' Club would go, and she would bring me on the bus. And it wasn't mine. She shifted her little chair over, and I walked by. How can they possibly have a Piero di Cosimo in Worcester? CLIFFORD SCHORER: Right. JUDITH RICHARDS: So you do all the paperwork yourself? CLIFFORD SCHORER: I had a lot of books. JUDITH RICHARDS: Did you talk to him about collecting at all? I mean, I was programming cash registers at that point, so it was very interesting. I think she's working throughin one of the institutions. That's always fun. We maintain the photographic backup to all of that so that we can research individual paintings in the photographic archive. And, you know, you can do that, and if it's done aesthetically well, you can show somebody that, you know, you can still have the quality and think about what a bargain it is. [They laugh. CLIFFORD SCHORER: So I shouldn't say 5,000; 3,500 years. [00:02:03]. JUDITH RICHARDS: And is there official paperwork that goes along with that? You know, it was this incredibly complex. You know, from the slaves of West Africa, to the sugar, to the rum, to the plates, to the spices. CLIFFORD SCHORER: We do. So Iyou know, again, the same thing. You know, et cetera. CLIFFORD SCHORER: and he said, you know, "You need to be involved in this museum; you need to be involved with this museum." We can still do a very large volume in dollars, but a very small volume in picturesyou know, dollars or poundsbut a very small volume in pictures. But I bought it for the frame. [1:02:00], CLIFFORD SCHORER: It's by Antonio de Pereda. I mean [00:02:00], JUDITH RICHARDS: Yeah. [Affirmative.] CLIFFORD SCHORER: He took a much more traditionalwell, traditional, if anything in my house could be traditional. clifford schorer winslow homer. [Affirmative.] I don't know if, CLIFFORD SCHORER: I don't know if I would say collecting books. So, I lost it. Yeah, not so much an engraving. I mean, I wasyou know, I had negative $8,000 to my name. You have to go to the source. So, you know, the local cataloguesI mean, I don't remember whether it was called Skinner in those days, but I think it was Skinner all the way back. JUDITH RICHARDS: It sounds likegone through all the money. Came back to public school in Massapequa, Long Island, because that was the most convenient homestead we could use, and failed every class. Yeah, I haven't doneI didn'tI hadn't done that at that point. So, yes, I've had, over the years, to send things to the art museum or to conservators or to other places to get them out of my house. And [00:14:03]. [Laughs. JUDITH RICHARDS: Mm-hmm. And so, they're walking away from that equation with a very large amount of money, "And your picture is going to be part of a catalogue with 160 pictures in it.". They invited my paleontological heroes, which they also did a wonderful job ofand I sat in the audience quietly, and then at the end of it, we came to an accommodation to create a permanent installation for the specimen, which is the largest specimen in the state. So what I'm trying to do is take a very hands-off approach to the sort ofany cash flow that goes into the business is reinvested in the business, which helps us to be able to buy better stock and do different things, and that might give us a slight edge over some other galleries where their owners need to provide their lifestyle from the income. [00:28:00]. I would have purchased some of the assets; we may have purchased some of the inventory. CLIFFORD SCHORER: And, you know, I would never fault any of those folks for their business acumen. Or whose voice will impact this collection that's sort of held for the public trust? CLIFFORD SCHORER: Who had the photographs, because I would never have believed that was an antiquity. I lasted six months. Suite 2200 So, you know, we may not necessarily be the origin of all the writings, but we're a part of it, so we can contribute to, you know, the fundraising effort to write a catalogue, and we can give the pictures; we can do this; we can do that. So when I finally got a big house in BostonI bought a townhouse and renovated it. JUDITH RICHARDS: Can you talk about any important acquisitions, let's say, around 2005, 2010? I've also had some crazy requests that I won't honor, you know, museums in France that want to do awant to recreate the human digestive system, and they want toyou know, they want to have thisI have a painting by [Pieter] Huys, H-U-Y-S, and it's ait's this screaming woman. He's a good director. To depict something, for him, was not just to provide an opportunity for JUDITH RICHARDS: grinding your own pigments. JUDITH RICHARDS: You said it's atthey're both at the Worcester? I tried to hire someone who came in, and we had some battle royales over everything. I want to talk to them. So thoseyou know, those are the moments where I think about all those table arguments about this picture and that picture and [00:28:00]. [Laughs.] answer in a very finite category of pictures. I'm reasonably good at language, and I tried. WebFriedrich Schorr (September 2, 1888 August 14, 1953), was a renowned Austrian-Hungarian bass-baritone opera singer of Jewish origin. New York,NY10010, Dedicated to collecting and preserving the papers and primary records of the visual arts in America, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 2023 Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Terra Foundation Center for Digital Collections, Guidelines for Processing Collections with Audiovisual Material, Washington D.C. Headquarters and Research Center, Publications Using Material from the Archives of American Art, Oral history interview with Clifford Schorer, 2018, Art Collectors: A Project in Partnership with the Center for the History of Collecting in America at The Frick Collection, Art -- Collectors and collecting -- New York (State) -- New York -- Interviews. JUDITH RICHARDS: Whenas we're getting into the '90s, is that when the involvement with painting started? No, it was a lot of fun. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Yeah. To me, what's happened is, it's a lifestyle that maybe is going away, the lifestyle of the sort of dedicated scholar, in high, euphemistic quotes, collector who would buy one major painting per year, who would study, study, study, study, study until they found that moment, and then it would come and they would buy it, and they put it in their collection, and then they die with a 29-painting collection that's extraordinary. You know, all of those things, and then you just let go, and it's, you knowit is aI think my psychology is well suited for that in a sense, because I don't have this great lust for the object; I have the lust for the moments that, you know, that sort of [00:36:00]. CLIFFORD SCHORER: So it's a simple fact of plentiful quantities, disparity in quality that I could see and discern, and you could have entry-level objects at $50. [00:26:02]. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Now, the difference is if the artist is alive, and the dealer is alive, and you've got, you know, sort of some other motivations. CLIFFORD SCHORER: So their largest triceratopsian specimen is mine. But we won't go too far there.
But my desire to live in the middle of nowherethis was in Meriden, New Hampshire, which was literally the middle of nowherewith 400 other. I had a great time with that and didn't think it would go any further than that, and then the Agnew's thing occurred. JUDITH RICHARDS: under the circumstances. JUDITH RICHARDS: Did your other business interests then also take a step back? JUDITH RICHARDS: Well, that's it. It's oftenit's often not of the period. No, no. CLIFFORD SCHORER: I know that Colnaghi has managed to navigate those waters for the last 60-odd years since the originalyou knowwell, even more than 60 for thesince the original founders were out of the picture. I did put them in boxes and move them to deep storage.
Howwhat was the process of that reattribution officially? Then we did the Lotte Laserstein, the Weimar German show, where we borrowed from the German state institutions for the first time ever, as I understand it, as a private gallery, borrowed from museums, Berlin specifically. But I didn't buy it with much of a focus on the painting itself. So, you know, I did that kind of loop aesthetically, where I went from the filigree to the shadow. You want toyou want to sort ofyou know, you want to have a completely catalogued collection, with every example of, you know, canceled, non-cancelled. So I was in the room, andI think her name is Marietta Corsini? It was very early. So, yes, I mean, you're talking about a razor-thin equation which is, you know, buy, consign, don't buy. CLIFFORD SCHORER: The MFA. And I could seethere was a sense that I had that Noortman was not long for the world. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Well, I like darkness, so that's easy. I needed to think about walls. Then it was scientifically designed fakes made to deceive. I mean, I'm still waiting for the great Quentin Matsys show. JUDITH RICHARDS: Did you acquire any friends?
When the mainland Chinese entered the marketplace, it was all changed. Yeah, to me, and I was excited, so excited. Because, actually, I got rid of the Victorian, and I now live in a Gropius house. And of course, my fear about doing this as just a simple risk-taking exercisemy fear has proven to be well-founded but measured, so it's something I could wrap my arms around. I enjoyed Richmond. It was one of several works that Homer is thought to have created during a mid-1870s visit to Virginia, where he had served for a time as a Union war correspondent during the Civil War. JUDITH RICHARDS: And issues or concerns about it, too. The art questions were Anthony's bailiwick.
JUDITH RICHARDS: Having that photograph at hand to show you gives me the sense that they already knew that it would be mistaken. And I would see the same objects pop up here and there, and I would know exactly where they came from. Traditional age to start college? [5] A preview of the sale appeared in the Daily Telegraph. So, you know. They take advice, and they build wonderful collections, and they're wonderful people, but you talk to them about things other than paintings. CLIFFORD SCHORER: And then we get on our airplanes, and we start flying around, looking for things, yeah. And they said, "You're out of your mind." Like a Boule chandelier. WebThe painting was made by Winslow Homer, one of the most important American artists of the 19th century. A soldier in blue sits high on the branch of a pine tree. So it was more aboutit was more about the business of the trade of these things. Just collecting as a general habit. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Oh, I thought it was great, yes. For an angel, I thought this was [laughs] such an unusual thing, to give them such a worldly attribute, you know, almost a peasant, worldly attribute. We had to get translations and then figure out whether the translations were right, and then write programs for them. In her later years, Olive was described by one of her grandsons as being "a formidable looking woman of whom I was somewhat frightened".[3]. And you eventually, as a young person, you come up against the realization that, you know, there's a handful of things that are up in the stratosphere here that we're never going to touch. I enjoyed my job. I mean, I. The subjects that they were trying to make that were attractive to the audience. [Laughs.]. And the museum is making ambitious purchases. I brought a chandelier back from Vienna. CLIFFORD SCHORER: I believe so, yeah. And heby the time I knew him, he had retired as, I think, the 50- or 60-year chief engineer of Grumman Aerospace, sofor their plants, not for their aircraft manufacturing. So, I have these big buildings filled with storage, and a few years ago it got out of hand, you know, when it topped over a million square feet of storage. I mean, I know it's an exciting moment; you start a business. But the problem is, New England is dry as a bone in the winter, so you have, you know, you have extremes, and I think the differenceif you kept a painting in England for 350 years, if you kept the painting in New England for 35 years, I bet it would have far more wear and tear in New England. Lotte Laserstein was a Weimar German artist, a female artistamazing artistand Agnew's had sort of rediscovered her in the 1960s and then did a show, a monographic show, in the 1980s. So it wasyou know, thatit's not as if you canat the level we're talking about in paleontology, there's not many opportunities. New York , NY 10010, Washington, D.C. Headquarters and Research Center. [00:10:00]. And they didn't have a real understanding. CLIFFORD SCHORER: it's ano, it's a part gift, part sale, and in the end, it hadthe strings that I had, they met them all, which were that they're going to do a focal exhibition on paleontology in thebecause they're doing a re-jigger of many of their exhibitions. [Affirmative.]
[2] They were attending a fancy dress party in Arabian costume. I mean, there was a moment in each place in my head where I knew what was happening in those places because of history. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Yes, so. [Laughs.]. CLIFFORD SCHORER: My understanding is it's around 1911 and '12, yeah. So I've sold off most of my warehouses. Three, four months. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Well, if I fall off a bridge in the next few months, everything goes to the various museums. 