Tampa Museum of Art – Bay Art Files

Joseph Veach Noble: Through the Eye of a Collector

by Dr. Robert Steven Bianchi

In 1986, the Tampa Museum of Art acquired 175 ancient objects from the eminent collection of Joseph Veach Noble, thought to comprise the largest private collection of Athenian vases in North America at the time. This acquisition became the cornerstone of the Museum’s burgeoning permanent collection of antiquities. This article (1) highlights significant events in the life and career of Mr. Noble; (2) presents the significant personalities and events which led to the acquisition of his collection by the Tampa Museum of Art; (3) assesses the importance of that collection; and (4) passes in review some of the more interesting objects in the extraordinary exhibition currently on view at the Museum.

JOSEPH VEACH NOBLE
It’s funny sometimes, isn’t it, when an accidental hobby develops into a life-long pursuit which is successfully integrated into one’s professional life? The trajectory of the life and career of Joseph Veach Noble, whose career and collection are being celebrated by the Tampa Museum of Art, is a case in point. (Figure 1)

Figure 1
Joseph Veach Noble, captured in a pensive moment in this photograph taken in 1965, as he thinks about an Attic, black-figure Pan-Athenaic amphora after consulting the seminal work by John Beazley. Vases such as these were awarded to victors of athletic contests staged at Athens, which feature an image of the goddess Athena, the patron of that city.
(Yousuf Karsh (Armenian-born Canadian, 1908-2002), Portrait of Joseph Veach Noble (black and white photograph). Library and Archives Canada, 1987-054, vol. 197, sitting 12547, no. 35.
Photograph courtesy of the Yousuf Karsh Archive)

THE FORMATIVE YEARS
Mr. Noble was born in Philadelphia in 1920. He honed his collecting interests early in life when as a child, he trudged up and down the planted rows of vegetables on his paternal aunt’s small farm in rural New Jersey in search of native American arrow-heads; later, he also collected fossils. His interest in antiquity was piqued during the Saturday mornings spent at programs for school-aged students hosted by the University of Pennsylvania for which he, as a young, project leader, created models of pharaonic and Roman imperial villas, reinforced by visits to the Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia with its collection of casts of classical sculpture, and his study of Latin in high school. He took art classes, drawing still-lives in charcoal or conte crayon. Noble would while away the evening hours at home learning how to photograph and develop negatives in the family kitchen turned darkroom by his father who had worked his way through dental school from income earned by photographing dentures and restorations

EMPLOYMENT NOT A DEGREE
Mr. Noble enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania as a pre-med student, but never graduated because concurrent with attending classes he was also a member of the non-university affiliated Photographic Club of Philadelphia which enabled him to exhibit at the Philadelphia Art Alliance. Six of his photographs are on view in the present exhibition from which one can gain an impression of the scope of his work. (Figure 2) By his own admission, Mr. Noble explained how he impulsively responded to a random call to that Club for a full-time still photographer from a Philadelphia-based firm specializing in what one now terms film. He put his academic studies on the back-burner by attending night classes. He soon abandoned college altogether to devote himself to his full time post in 1946 which, shortly after his hire, required him to master the art of cinematography. Two years later he produced and directed, Photography in Science, which won the 1948 Venice Film Festival award for scientific documentaries. Thereafter Mr. Noble was hired by Film Counselors, Inc. in New York as their Executive Vice-President. He now had motive and opportunity for pursuing his collecting interests in earnest as his quotidian included repeated visits to dealers in New York City and an ever-increasing awareness of dealers abroad, whose inventory could be perused through catalogues and photographs.

Figure 2
Youth by Joseph Veach Noble Mr. Noble’s interests in photography, nurtured in his youth by his father, eventually led to his career as a cinematographer.

(Joseph Veach Noble (American, 1920-2007), Youth (black and white photograph; undated, ca. 1945-1956). Tampa Museum of Art, Gift of Joseph Veach Noble Collection, 1991.009.002)

A VERY CLOSE ENCOUNTER
Mr. Noble’s eureka moment occurred in 1953 when he acquired a very large vase, 21 inches in height, which was described as an Etruscan vase representing a mounted Amazon. Mr. Noble, justifiably proud of this recent acquisition, showed its photo to a European dealer who chanced to be in New York at that time. The dealer urged Mr. Noble to contact Dr. Dietrich von Bothmer, the assistant curator in the Greek and Roman Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who, it was reported, was in the process of writing a book about the Amazons, those legendary, formidable female warriors of ancient Greek mythology. And so an appointment was arranged for November.

As an art advisor myself, I am often placed in a seemingly awkward situation in which I am obliged to inform a collector of a mistake. As Dr. von Bothmer recalls the meeting, his assessment of that vase was ruthless. The vase was not Etruscan. It was created in Apulia, in South Italy. Furthermore, the subject was not a mounted Amazon, but rather a generic South Italian warrior. I t was the dealer who was to be faulted for the erroneous information, but the collector should have been more circumspect in his blanket acceptance of the data. The critique, admittedly disappointing, made a profound impression upon Mr. Noble, who volunteered that, undaunted, he would still seek out that curator’s opinion in future.

HANDS-ON EXPERIMENTAL ARCHAEOLOGY
On subsequent visits, Dr. von Bothmer introduced Mr. Noble to his colleague, Christine Alexander. She then orchestrated his European trip in 1954, a kind of pub crawl during which the Noble family visited museums and dealers in Rome, London, and Paris. The culmination of that trip was a personal visit with Homer and Dorothy Thompson, stalwarts of the excavations of the Agora, or market place, of ancient Athens, which was the flag ship of the archaeological activities in Greece of the American School of Classical Studies. That meeting reinforced Mr. Noble’s interest in the technical processes by which Greek vases were crafted as he mined Athenian clay for use in his experiments at home involving a kiln in the basement of his home. On view in the current exhibition are examples of the actual objects that Mr. Noble fired in that kiln. (Figure 4)

Figure 4
These four plaques represent some of the examples of experimental archaeology which Mr. Noble conducted using the kiln in the basement of his home. Here he is experimenting with the chemical composition of the black glaze used by potters in ancient Athens.
(Noble’s experiments [ceramic plaques; undated, ca. early 1960s]. Tampa Museum of Art, Joseph Veach Noble Collection)

Every cloud has a silver lining. A few months later, in January, Professor A. D. Trendall, an internationally recognized authority on South Italian vases who was based in Australia, came to the States and was shown photos of the vase. Professor Trendall’s research had enabled him to group those vases into categories. Mr. Noble’s vase was an outstanding exemplar of one of his groups. In keeping with academic practice, since most of the classical vases were neither signed by potter nor painter, vases are assigned a name generally based on their present location. Accordingly Professor Trendall assigned that specific group of Apulian vases to The Maplewood Painter, named after the town in suburban New Jersey in which Mr. and Mrs. Noble were residing. (figure 3)

Figure 3a-b
Dr. Dietrich von Bothmer’s ruthless critique of this vase which revealed that the mounted warrior was not an Amazon but rather a generic depiction of a warrior cemented his friendship and collaboration with Mr. Noble. This vase was then to become known as the eponymous Maplewood Painter vase, the name given to this classification of vessels by Prof. A. D. Trendall, in honor of the Noble’s hometown in New Jersey where Mr. Noble’s collection was housed.
(Eponymous Maplewood Painter vase (ceramic column krater; Apulia, Italy; late Classical period, ca. 360-350 bce). Tampa Museum of Art, Joseph Veach Noble Collection, Museum Purchase in part with funds donated by Mr. and Mrs. William Knight Zewadski, 1986.102)

ULTERIOR MOTIVES
Contact with Dr. von Bothmer continued. He, then, with a hidden agenda of his own, introduced Mr. Noble to Mr. James Joseph Rorimer, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Mr. Noble’s account of that visit, in the director’s Manhattan apartment, is fascinating because it demonstrated how Mr. Rorimer’s very long and drawn out conversation was actually, in hindsight, a camouflaged job interview, which lead to Mr. Noble’s appointment in 1956 as that institution’s Operating Administrator.

SCIENCE IN THE SERVICE OF ART
Now, as a colleague of Dr. von Bothmer, Mr. Noble could spend his time every day before his official duties began and after they had ended in prolonged contact with an enormous collection of Greek vases. He now had added resources at his disposal to continue his research into the technical processes by which Greek vases were manufactured because Mr. Noble, as Dr. Suzanne Murray, remarked,

….not only collected the finer examples, but also was interested in the pots that showed mistakes: misfiring that failed to turn figures from red to black, spalling that showed the clay had not been properly prepped, ancient repairs to broken vessels. These less-than-perfect products helped Mr. Noble with his research.

Many of these “mistakes” are on view in this exhibition. (figure 5 )

Figure 5
Mr. Noble was interested in “mistakes” made by ancient potters. This lump of clay is a fragment of a type of wine cup called a kylix. The potter probably crumpled the cup while it was still malleable because its shape did not come out successfully, as compared to Figure 11. Perhaps it was used as a support in the kiln as it was actually fired in this state. It is among the oldest artefacts in the Noble collection.
(Crumpled wine cup (ceramic kylix fragment; Pylos, Messenia, Greece; Mycenaean period, ca. 1400 bce). Tampa Museum of Art, Joseph Veach Noble Collection, 1986.005)

Mr. Noble was also keenly aware of the fact that Ms. Gisela Marie Augusta Richter, a former curator and predecessor of Dr. von Bothmer, had taken classes in throwing and firing pottery which provided her with the hands-on knowledge from which to draw for her publications about aspects of Greek vases. As instructive as those publications were, and still are, their subject matter was restricted to the physical manipulation of the clay, whereas Mr. Noble’s concerns focused on the chemistry involved, such as the component elements of the glazes used and how those elements were effected by the temperature within the kiln. He summarized the results of his investigations in an article published in 1960, which he expanded into a book published five years later. So significant were his observations that a revised edition, published in 1988, still remains one of the first go-to sources.

FINGERING A FORGERY WITH A PEN KNIFE AND A PRIVATE EYE
In the late 1950’s, during one of his by now routine visits through the museum’s galleries, his attention was drawn to a monumental, Etruscan terracotta statue of a warrior which had been given pride of place by virtue of the way it was exhibited. (Figure 6) It had become in many ways the trade mark for the museum’s classical collections, although some nay-sayers were progressively expressing grave reservations about its authenticity. Aware of the controversy, Mr. Noble’s attention was arrested by the presence of its black glaze. He reasoned that an analysis of the chemical composition of that glaze might help resolve the question of its authenticity. In order to do so, he needed a sample, which he candidly admitted he obtained by surreptitiously taking his pen-knife out of one of his pockets which he used to scrape off a sample of the glaze when the attention of the gallery’s guard was temporarily distracted. In possession of that precious sample, Mr. Noble recognized he faced a conundrum. If the glaze were tested by the museum’s own staff and deemed to be ancient, conspiracy theorists could claim the analysis was rigged so as not to condemn the authenticity of the warrior. He, therefore, resolved to entrust the sample to a disinterested, but highly competent, third party who would analyze the sample in confidence. Within a short period of time, the results of the spectroscopic analysis were received which revealed that the coloring agent for the glaze was manganese, not iron. Magnanese was never employed before the late Medieval period; it was iron on which the potters of ancient vases exclusively relied as their coloring agent.

Figure 6
The monumental “Etruscan warrior” which was exposed as a modern forgery by Mr. Noble because of his analysis of the black glaze found on its surfaces and his orchestration of cloak-and-dagger face-to-face encounters with the forger.

(Colossal Etruscan terracotta warrior (Metropolitan Museum of Art, acc. no. 21.195). Image taken from Gisela M. A. Richter, “Etruscan Terracotta Warriors in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” MMA Papers 6 (1937), pl. 1)

Realizing that corroborating evidence would substantially support his case, Mr. Noble then enlisted Dr. von Bothmer’s assistance. Like every competent curator who meticulously tracks the art market, Dr. von Bothmer had maintained files of dealers, their inventories, their associates, and other data that he deem so necessary to document the provenance, or chain-of-possession, of the classical vases which were the area of his expertise. The two then collated the data from those files with the museum’s own acquisition records which revealed that the warrior had been acquired in pieces over the course of three separate purchases made in 1915, 1916, and 1921.The pieces were then re-assembled by the museum. The vendor’s identify was known, but Dr.von Bothmer’s files revealed that that antiquarian often worked in partnership with another individual who might be able to shed additional light on the purchases. Via a complicated series of cloak-and-dagger operations not unlike those detailed in detective novels, Mr. Noble, via his cinematic connections, secured the services of a private investigator who traveled to Rome and tracked down the partner who was then actively manufacturing fake, bronze Etruscan statuettes for the tourist trade. Maneuvering like a chess master because of the partner’s steadfast reluctance to discuss the matter, Mr. Noble then successfully arranged for Dr. von Bothmer, primed in advance on how to conduct the conversation, to travel to Rome for a face-to-face, during which the partner admitted that he had indeed used bioxide of manganese in his manufacturing of the warrior. Bingo! The museum went public in February 1961 with its announcement on Valentine’s Day that the warrior was indeed counterfeit.

WITH SOME HELP FROM TUTANKHAMUN
Among the objects which were included in the acquisition of the Noble collection is a wooden box, across the lid of which in black ink was scrawled the warning, CAUTION! NATRON. Handle & Unpack with Care. The contents of that box together with other items including linen, pottery vases, and floral wreaths, were part of a find which was excavated by Theodore M. Davis in the Valley of the Kings. The entire find was subsequently associated with the funeral of Tutankhamun, the contents of which were collected by the mortuary priests and purposefully buried in a pit dug expressly for their interment in keeping with religious requirements which prohibited their disposal as trash. In compliance with all existing laws, the Metropolitan Museum of Art was permitted to acquire as acquisitions a selection of objects from that find.

Other hand-written notations on that same lid indicate that the box contained a bag of natron, a naturally occurring mixture of sodium carbonate decahydrate (or soda ash) and sodium bicarbonate (also called baking soda), along with small quantities of sodium chloride and sodium sulfate. (Figure 7) Natron was the primary material employed to desiccate, or dry out, the body, during the mummification process.

Figure 7
The box containing two bags of natron, a naturally occurring mixture of sodium carbonate decahydrate and sodium bicarbonate (also called baking soda), along with small quantities of sodium chloride and sodium sulfate from the so-called Embalmers’ Cache of Tutankhamun. Mr. Noble used that material in his use of experimental archaeology which help him to document the technological processes by which ancient Egyptian faience was manufactures. That box and its contents are on view in this exhibition together with examples of the results of Mr. Noble’s experimentation.

(Bag of natron (linen bag; Valley of the Kings, West Thebes, Egypt; New Kingdom, 18th Dynasty, ca. 1323 bce) and Noble’s experiments (faience figurines and steatite; undated, ca. late 1960s), on view in the exhibition at the Tampa Museum of Art, Joseph Veach Noble Collection. Photography: Paige Bosca)

But Mr. Noble understood that natron was also used as a principal ingredient in the manufacture of ancient Egyptian faience, anciently termed tekhenit, a glazed material, generally turquoise-blue in color, which was used to create a wide variety of shining, glistening objects from beads for jewelry to deluxe vases. (Figure 8) His exploration of the technique by which faience was manufactured went hand-in-glove with his work on the black glaze used in the creation of Greek pottery. In 1969 Mr. Noble published the results of his research about the processes by which ancient Egyptian faience was manufactured.

Figure 8
An original, faience aryballos, or ointment flask, from the collection of Mr. Noble, which he used in conjunction with his experimental archaeology to document the technical processes by which faience, an ancient glazed material, was manufactured. The diamond pattern on the walls of this flask were intentionally created so that the vase would not slip from the grasp of the fingers of its owner while applying its slippery contents.

(Diamond-patterned oil flask (faience aryballos; Rhodes, Greece; Archaic period, ca. 600-550 bce). Tampa Museum of Art, Joseph Veach Noble Collection, 1986.006)

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

Mr. Noble resigned his position at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1970 in order to assume the role of director of the Museum of the City of New York. Despite that change in his employment status, Mr. Noble’s reputation as a scholar and consummate connoisseur and collector of classical vases continued unabated and was universally recognized. And as a collector and museum official, he was accustomed to the common practice of lending objects to institutions for temporary exhibitions. So, it was only a matter of course that he was asked and consented to loan three of his vases to the very first exhibition of antiquities ever mounted by the Tampa Museum of Art. That show, Styles and Lifestyles of the Ancient World, premiered here on March 1, 1983. Ms. Genevieve Linnehan, the Curator of Collections (1979-1992) at the Tampa Museum of Art whose speciality was modern art, organized the exhibition, enlisting the assistance of Mr. William Knight Zewadski (“Bill’) and Dr. Suzanne Murray, who had earned her doctorate in ancient art from the University of Minnesota and was affiliated with the University of South Florida.

THE ART OF NETWORKING

PAUL JENNEWEIN AND JOSEPH NOBLE
Paul Jennewein of Philadelphia was a noted American sculptor whose oeuvre included the massive sculptural pediment adorning the façade of the south east entrance of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (figure 9) Jim Jennewein, his son, and Joseph Noble both fellow Philadelphians, were friends who also shared their mutual service on the board of Brookgreen Gardens. It was Joseph Noble who had suggested to Paul Jennewein that he leave his lifework of sculpture to Tampa. That suggestion turned into a bequest in 1978, when approximately 2,500 sculptures, models, drawings, medals, and related ephemera from his estate were bequeathed to the Tampa Bay Art. Part of that collection is now on exhibition C.Paul Jennewein (April 16, 2023–2025) at the Museum through 2025.

Figure 9
These models for the pediment of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by the Philadelphia-based artist C. Paul Jennewein are part of his estate bequeathed to the Tampa Museum of Art. His friendship with Mr. Noble enabled members of his family to network with the team from Tampa Bay in the initial discussions with Mr. Noble which led to the eventual acquisition of the Noble collection by the Tampa Museum of Art.

(C. Paul Jennewein (German-American, 1890-1978), models for the pediment of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, on view in Sketches and Sculptures: A Study of C. Paul Jennewein at the Tampa Museum of Art, June 13, 2020 – February 28, 2021. Photography: Philip LaDeau)

Jim Jennewein’s wife, Joan, would later recall a conversation in which her father-in-law stated that Mr. Noble was reluctant to donate his collection to a large, established institution where it would get lost. If on the other hand, it was given to a smaller museum it would really be seen. Armed with such a position, Jim Jennewein then suggested to Mr. Noble on May 12, 1984 that he give the collection to the Tampa Museum of Art. Mr. Noble countered by stating that he would be willing to sell the collection to the Tampa Museum of Art for one million dollars.

Mr. Zewadski then picked up the ball and continued to run with it. On November 26, 1984 Mr. Noble sent Mr. Zewadski the card catalogue together with seven volumes of photographs of his collection. Mr. Andy Maass then wrote to Mr. Noble, who incidentally was Mr. Maass’s first employer, on February 13, 1985, explaining that although he was only two months into his tenure as director of the Tampa Museum of Art he would be interested in the loan of the collection for a temporary exhibition which would run from December 1985 through February 1986.

AN UNFORESEEN PROBLEM
The planning for such an exhibition ran into a snag because Ms. Genevieve Linnehan was scheduled to take maternity leave. She was of the opinion, which was widely-shared by others, that any effort to acquire the Noble collection would be enhanced by the presence of an individual with an advanced degree in ancient art. The issue was satisfactorily resolved when Dr. Murray, who had already collaborated with Ms. Genevieve Linnehan and Mr. Zewadski on the first exhibition of antiquities at the museum, agreed to serve as the guest curator for the Noble collection.

THE ON-SITE PERSONAL INSPECTION
Mr. Zewadski mobilized Mr. Maass and Dr. Murray on May 22, 1985, for a road trip that brought them to New York and New Jersey where they visited the offices of Mr. Noble in the city and his home in Maplewood. Dr. Murray recalls that the visit was great fun. She saw the Maplewood Krater (Figure 3) sitting on a TV console and the Neptune statue (Figure 10) standing on the stair landing.

It was such a unique combination of the mundane and modern with the precious and antique. He then produced the gold necklace and earrings to show us—so delicate—which his wife had never seen, and seemed a little \reluctant to include in the deal!

The visit concluded with trip to Drew University where some of Mr. Noble’s vases were featured in a loan exhibition. Days later Mr. Zewadski sent the seven volumes of photographs of the Noble collection together with numerous copies of articles which had been published about that collection to Mr. Maass.

Figure 10
The statue of Poseidon/Neptune, the Graeco-Roman god of the sea, which Dr. Murray described as seeing for the first time on a landing of the staircase in the Maplewood home of the Nobles. This statue was one of the sources of inspiration for the special loan exhibition, Poseidon and the Sea: Myth, Cult, and Daily Life, mounted by former curator, Dr. Seth D. Pevnik, which ran at Tampa from June-November 2014 before moving on to its second venue at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska.

(Neptune with Dolphin (marble sculpture; Rome, Italy; Roman Imperial period, ca. 50-100 ce), on view in the exhibition at the Tampa Museum of Art, Joseph Veach Noble Collection, 1986.135. Photography: Paige Bosca)

A STRATEGY FOR THE FINANCIAL PACKAGE
Moving quickly within a month, Mr. Maass then formally requested the museum’s board to consider the acquisition of the collection which lead to the immediate formation of a subcommittee of the museum’s Acquisitions Committee whose members were so tasked. The City of Tampa then pledged a contribution of $250,000.00, representing 25% of the asking price.

On July 29, 1985 Mr. Maass wrote to Mr. Norman Hickey, the [Hillsborough] County Administrator, seeking a contribution from the county. He pointed out that the one million dollar price tag was a good deal because the collection had been appraised at $1,737,250.00. Furthermore, if the $250,000.00 were to be used as a downpayment, the collection could be on view as early as December. On September 3, after a very convincing presentation by Messrs. Zewadski and Maass, who aggressively advocated for the purchase, the County voted to commit a quarter of a million dollars, payable over four years, to be applied to the purchase price.

There were still some loose ends to tie up, but the acquisition of the Noble collection for the Tampa Museum of Art was now a done deal, which was celebrated on October 26, at Pavillion V, the gala benefit of the Tampa Museum of Art which foregrounded Mr. Noble as the honoree. (Figure 11)

Figure 11
The principles at Pavillion V (October 26, 1985 ) the gala benefit of the Tampa Museum of Art which foregrounded Mr. Noble as the honoree. From left to right, Mr. Willian Knight Zedwadski, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Veach Noble, Dr. Richard E. and Mary Perry, whose endowment funds the Richard E. Perry Curator of Greek and Roman Art, currently held by Dr. Branko van Oppen de Ruiter.

(Courtesy of M.r. William Knight Zewadski)

MORE WORK IS NEEDED
The Noble Collection Committee, whose members initially convened in Mr. Zewadski’s offices at Trenam Law in Tampa, realized that fundraising required persistent dedication by many people. Lead editorial support by the Tampa Tribune promoted the cause. Donations came from many individuals, the community, and every member of the Museum staff. Noble Collection Committee also addressed a host of related issues including the logistics involved in creating an exhibition.

BEHIND THE SCENES
As one who has been personally involved in over thirty international loan exhibitions over the course of my career, I can only concur with Dr. Murray’s recollections

When the collection arrived at TMA, I was able to help unpack the vases, which was an incredible experience. For an art historian to handle these objects was a gift, although some of the vases, like the very wide, shallow kylix with Herakles and the Nemean lion, seemed so impossibly designed that you wondered at their longevity. (Figure 12)

Figure 12
The kylix, a cup for drinking wine, which, as Dr. Murray recalled, as she unpacked it for the exhibition, was so delicately and fragilely designed that she wondered how it survived the millennia still intact. The shape of this vessel recalls the original appearance of the misfired kylix (Figure 4) that Mr. Noble intentionally collected as one of his potter’s “mistakes.” The view taken depicts the Greek hero Heracles wrestling the Nemean lion, the very first of his legendary Twelve Labors and the one that established the lion skin as his trademark attribute.

(Heracles wrestling the Nemean Lion (ceramic kylix; Attica, Greece; Archaic period, ca. 510-500 bce). Tampa Museum of Art, Joseph Veach Noble Collection, 1986.085)

Dr. Murray then collaborated with Mr. Bob Hellier, the long-serving, very talented Chief Preparator of the Tampa Museum of Art, whose responsibilities included the handling of objects and physically placing them in exhibition cases. Both were confronted with the challenges of displaying the antiquities. Dr. Murray discussed the matter with Mr. Hellier. She recommended that the vases be displayed in a way that would maximize their visibility because some were decorated on both sides whereas others were decorated on both their exteriors and interiors. These then had to be arranged into comprehensible groupings with similar themes and subject matter, such as portrayals of myths, sport, warfare, and daily life. Dr. Murray was also responsible for generating copy for labels and other didactic materials such as wall panels which provided the visitor with valuable information about the exhibition. The accompanying, exhibition catalogue was also on her to-do-list. She observed

The catalogue came out beautifully, a joint effort between Bob Hellier and myself. It contained a complete listing of JVN’s collection, as well as a selection of focus pieces for which I wrote individual essays (several of these had color plates).

Visitors to Joseph Veach Noble: Through the Eye of a Collector should also be aware of the fact that the issues which Dr. Murray and Mr. Hellier were obliged to solve were similar to those resolved by Dr. Branko F. van Oppen de Ruiter, Richard E. Perry Curator of Greek and Roman Art, and staff of the Tampa Museum of Art in their collaborative work on this exhibition.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
Over the course of the next three years with a Florida State Legislative fund drive in place, and the continuing efforts of individuals such as Messrs. Frank Harvey, Ben Norbaum, with assistance from Mr. Charles W. (“Jack”) Sahlman and State Senator John Grant, and attractive terms from Barnett Bank, the financial obligation for the acquisition of the Noble collection was discharged, the final payment having been made in late September 1988.

A NEVER ENDING STORY
Dr. Murray recalls that

when I began teaching my Archaeology of Greece course in the History Department at the University of South Florida, the Noble acquisition provided a fantastic teaching collection, as it did for others. Students were amazed that Tampa had such things.

It subsequently generated the specialized position, the Richard E. Perry Curator of Greek and Roman Art with generous contributions from Costas Lemonopoulos and Dr. and Mrs. Richard E. Perry. This position, which is currently held by Branko F. van Oppen de Ruiter, is said to be the most heavily endowed curatorship of any museum in the United States.

The lessons gained from this survey of the life and career of Joseph Veach Noble are simple: Collectors in partnership with museum curators enable collectors to hone their aesthetic judgements, create unlimited opportunities for scientific research, and open pathways for financial support. Such partnerships often result in arrangements by which those private collections enter the public domain where the objects themselves serve as vectors enabling visitors to expand their cultural horizons with an enhanced understanding of a shared past. Such collector-curator partnerships are invariably win-win scenarios.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
This article could not have been written if it were not for the willingness of William Knight Zewadski, a principal mover and shaker of the effort to bring the Noble collection to Tampa, to share unselfishly his vast knowledge, insights, personal experiences, notes, and corporate memory with me.

I also wish to express my indebtedness to Dr. Suzanne Murray for her willingness to share her first-hand experiences with me about her involvement with the events associated with the Noble collection in her capacity as guest curator.

ABOUT THE MUSEUM
For more information about the exhibition, Joseph Veach Noble: Through the Eye of a Collector, on view at the Tampa Museum of Art through February 19, 2026, visit the Museum’s website. The Museum has partnered with the Hillsborough County Public Schools to provide a unique tour experience to students in grades 3-8. In 2024, this program, facilitated by visits, discussions, and art-making projects, will serve nearly 15,000 students from the HCPS Transformation Network.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Robert Steven Bianchi, a critical art historian, is currently chief curator of the Ancient Egyptian Museum Shibuya [Tokyo]. During his career “Dr. Bob” has curated exhibitions of both ancient and contemporary art in the States, France, Germany, Israel, Japan, and Switzerland. He advises collectors and is also a certified, USPAP-compliant member of the Appraisers Association of America. He has previously written about exhibitions in the Tampa Bay area for Bay Art Files

More is More

EMBELLISH ME: Works from the Collection of Norma Canelas Roth and William Roth

by Dr. Robert Steven Bianchi

One of the most significant imperatives of the exhibition philosophy of the Tampa Museum of Art is to present visually stimulating works of art which are not only possessed of superior aesthetic qualities in their own right but whose subject matter is relevant. That relevance is formulated by asking its visitors to view those works of art within the context of current international discourse about pressing social issues. The permanent exhibition, Identity in the Ancient World, explores such issues as ethnicity, gender, and sexuality as lived experiences resonating with similar issues impacting upon our contemporary society.

Embellish Me: Works from the Collection of Norma Canelas Roth and William Roth is its parallel, temporary loan exhibition, showcasing a panorama of stimulating eye candy reveling in glorious patterns and captivating decorative motifs. But like the themes articulated in the Identity exhibition, Embellish Me engages its visitors in an equally compelling art historical discourse, what is art and who decides what is art.

For about a decade from the mid-1970’s to the mid-1980’s a group of artists on the East and West Coast participated in a movement now known as P&D, the Pattern and Decoration Movement. The participating members, mostly women, understood that artistic discourse was dominated by men who, it seemed, arbitrarily and somewhat disparagingly dumped textiles, basketry, and the like into the pejorative “craft” category, effectively divorcing those creations from the supposedly superior category of “fine art.” That hierarchical categorization had an unfortunate misogynist side effect, because, traditionally, from the dawn of civilization women were the dominant weavers of textiles and baskets. The P&D movement’s imperative, therefore, was to set aside such rigid hierarchies and in so doing, intercalate the contributions of women into the ages-old continuum of visual creations. The movers and shakers of P&D also correctly observed that textiles and baskets were themselves often imbued, as a result of the materials used and the patterns employed, with an intrinsic sensuality effected by their retinal-commanding ornament.

The combined oeuvre of the participants of the P&D Movement offered a viable alternative to what some have termed the general manliness of modernism. It demolished the artificial boundaries traditionally separating fine art from craft. Significantly P&D succeeded in elevating the status of women as artists in their own right.

Joanna Robotham, the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Tampa since 2016, collaborated with Dr. Amy Galpin, former Chief Curator at the Frost Art Museum (now Executive Director and Chief Curator at MOAD in Miami) on Embellish Me. Robotham reinforces the added significance of this exhibition for our Tampa Bay community because, as she rightly stresses, the works of view are from the collection of Norma Canelas Roth (1943-2022), and her husband, William. Mrs. Roth was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, is an alumna of the University of South Florida, and lived most of her life right here in the Sunshine State. Early on she recognized the marginalization of women artists because they were often ignored, and hence neglected, by mainstream gallerists and collectors.

Figure 1. Installation view of the exhibition *Embellish Me* at the Tampa Museum of Art.
Photograph by Paige Boscia. Courtesy of the Museum.

The exhibition space is sumptuously designed (Figure 1) with its aubergine-colored accent walls and strategically-placed benches affording visitors various vantage points from which to contemplate the works of art, each one of which occupies its own environment. Every work stands alone and proud, there is no clutter, there is no crowding.

Figure 2. Betty Woodman (1930-2018). Untitled, 1981.

Among the works of art on view are an exuberant vase (Figure 2) potted by ceramist Betty Woodman, one of the mainstays of P&D. The vase is noteworthy for both its size and consummate polychromatic effects.

Figure 3. Joyce Scott (born 1948). *Necklace (Skeletons)*, 1994.

The necklace (Figure 3) by Joyce Scott, created from glass beads and semi-precious stones, is a deceptive masterpiece in miniature because it deserves more than a passing glance. This work, informed by Scott’s Afro-American heritage, alludes to current social issues by virtue of the initially inconspicuous skeletons which are subtly intercalated into its overall, seeming ornamental design.

Figure 4. Jane Kaufman (1938-2021). *Screen*, 1979.

Equally deceptive and likewise worthy of contemplation is the screen (Figure 4) by Jane Kaufman, a leader of P&D. She transformed the skills of embroidery and sewing, taught to her by her Russian-born grandmother, by introducing bugle beads and metallic threads, often glued together, into her compositions. She also foregrounded feathers into her oeuvre, as seen in this exacting, meticulously designed screen in which each pheasant feather appears to be so identical that one’s first impression is that they had been mechanically reproduced rather than being selectively plucked from nature.

Figure 5. Tony Robbin (born 1943). *1978-21*, 1978.

Toby Robbin was a member of an improvisational theater group and a member of a men’s consciousness-raising group before joining the P&D. There his oeuvre concentrated on illusion effective by compositions of polyvalent geometric patterns. The repeated patterns of shape and color in 1978-21 (Figure 5) are a tour de force, oscillating as they do between the linear and the painterly, the static and the kinetic.

Figure 6. Lucas Samaras (1936-2024). *Reconstruction #39*, 1978.

Lucas Samaras participated in P&D, particularly in the 1970’s when he began his Reconstruction series, of which Reconstruction #39 (Figure 6) is representative. He composes his geometric motifs from swatches of fabric which he combines into compositions with a sewing machine. The resulting works of art purposefully resonate with the aesthetic concerns of the Russian Suprematist Art Movement in which the traditional distinction between foreground and background are blurred.

Embellish Me, therefore, engages not only the visitor’s eye with its dazzling array of decorative, polychromatic ornamentation but challenges the visitor to reassess the place of ornament within one’s own environment. That mental engagement may force one to rethink the attraction that we have either for patterned bed sheets or for wallpaper. And that rethinking should awaken everyone to the role that pattern and ornament have played in the visual culture of virtually every civilization since the beginning of time.

Embellish Me: Works from the Collection of Norma Canelas Roth and William Roth is organized by the Patricia & Philip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University, Miami, and presented in collaboration with the Tampa Museum of Art. The exhibition is on view through July 28, 2024.

Dr. Robert Steven Bianchi, a critical art historian, is currently chief curator of the Ancient Egyptian Museum Shibuya in Tokyo. During his career, he has curated exhibitions of contemporary art in New York City, Antibes, and Tokyo. He has previously written about exhibitions in the Tampa Bay area for Bay Art Files.

Fall in Unordinary Love: Salman Toor in Tampa

Fall in Unordinary Love: Salman Toor in Tampa

by Richard Ellis

This spring, visitors of the Tampa Museum of Art (TMA) have the uncommon chance to view a profoundly whimsical exhibition of works by a preeminent contemporary painter. Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love, features more than forty-five paintings and works on paper completed between 2019 and 2022. The exhibition is organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and is on view at the TMA from February 23^rd through June 4^th, 2023.

Born in 1983, in Lahore, Pakistan, Salman Toor resides and works in New York City and exhibits internationally. His oeuvre primarily consists of dreamlike scenes, in which cartoonish figures appear suspended like marionettes, caught in the plotlines of ambiguous narratives. The stories are drawn from moments of the urban lives of imagined queer young men, as well as from the artist’s own lived experience and those of his friends. The emotional atmospheres of his canvases fluctuate between intimacy and isolation, contentment and embarrassment, and tenderness and violence.

This exhibition is important and timely as it draws attention to international human rights issues as well as domestic queer politics. In Pakistan, acts of homosexuality are punishable by life imprisonment, or even death in extreme cases.¹ In America, LGBTQ+ rights, representation and recreation are coming under fire from lawmakers, politicians, and homophobic and transphobic members of the public who are banning or restricting drag shows throughout the country.

On view in the museum’s newly constructed gallery space, the exhibition consists of oil paintings done on panel and canvas, several drawings done in charcoal, ink, and gouache, and two of the artist’s sketchbooks. This body of works offers conceptual, material, and technical variety while also showcasing Toor’s characteristic style. Despite the surreal quality of many of Toor’s paintings and the specificity of his subject matter, the moments that he constructs are deeply sensitive to the human condition. There is a naivete to his figures, but their innocence is occasionally broken by the salacious scenarios in which they appear entangled.

Toor’s paintings reward the visually literate and those well-versed in Western art history. Drawing from the European painting tradition, he invites us to traverse through centuries of time without ever leaving our contemporary moment behind. Toor brings this legacy into our times to confront colonial structures that still confine us. In postcolonial fashion, Toor turns the canon on its head by replacing the typical subjects of Western easel paintings with queer, brown-skinned boys and men. Toor demonstrates his mastery over the Western tradition in a bold act of subversion that begs the question of who owns whose art history.

_{Figure 1: Construction Men, Salman Toor, 2021, oil on canvas, 60 x 48 in. (152.4 x 121.9 cm), photo by author.}

_{Figure 2: Les Raboteurs de Parquet (The Floor Scrapers), Gustave Caillebotte, 1875, oil on canvas, 40.2 x 57.7 in (102 x 146.5 cm), Google Arts and Culture.}

When visitors enter the gallery, they are immediately confronted by Construction Men (Figure 1), a scene that continues the homoerotic celebration of male laborers that can be traced back to Gustave Caillebotte’s The Floor Scrapers (Figure 2), of 1875, though with a campy flare evocative of costumes for The Village People. From there, visitors may circulate the room and explore the three thematic categories that the works are separated into, including desire, tradition, and family. Many of the paintings are neatly spaced along the horizon line of the gallery walls, with carefully adjusted spotlights illuminating each one. His smaller works, though, are clustered together on the south wall, in a way that evokes the salon-style displays of public galleries in the nineteenth century. This strategy slows down the viewing experience and aligns with Toor’s connection to artistic conventions of the past, but it also makes it difficult to see the details in each of them closely, especially for viewers whose vantage point is lower than others.

Not all the works in the catalog make an appearance at this venue. Two notable exclusions include The Latecomer, 2021, and the monumental Fag Puddle with Candle, Shoe and Flag, 2022, which is featured on the cover of the catalog edited by Asma Naeem and available for purchase at the Museum’s store. The painting is a self-referential triumph that blends symbols from Toor’s lexicon, including phalluses, shoes, used condoms, and tombstones. It is perhaps the standout of the show, but it is not on view at the TMA because it was swiftly purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Congratulations are in order for the artist as this painting is the first of his to be acquired by the prestigious institution, but I lament the missed opportunity for a Floridian audience to view this painting.

While the compositions that underly many of Toor’s canvases are taken from monuments of Early Modern European art, these works find themselves quite at home at the TMA, even though such a collection is conspicuously absent. The TMA has historically been known for its collection of classical art from Greece and Southern Italy, but its exhibition programming and the development of its permanent collection have also been centered around outlier art of the modern and postmodern eras. The humor, irony, postcolonial angst, and queer grunge, that we find on the surface of Toor’s paintings bear an uncanny affinity with the irreverent and kitschy contemporary art scene of the greater Tampa Bay area.

_{Figure 3: Cakes, Wayne Thiebaud, 1963, oil on canvas, (152.4 x 182.9 cm), Wikiart.}

Several of the works made for this exhibition pull directly from works in the Baltimore Museum of Art’s collection of European paintings from the 17^th– to the 19^th-centuries. Attention to Toor’s references to early modern art is well-established but has perhaps overshadowed his visual connections to later painters. Toor typically uses oil paints over a surface primed with dark brown acrylic paint. His style is painterly, with thick, visible brushstrokes. The built-up textures of his paintings have been described as frosting on a cake, not unlike Wayne Thiebaud, whose paintings of seemingly mundane desserts and pastries, such as Cakes (Figure 3), 1963, were imbued with a postmodern sensibility and likewise question notions of desire, consumption, class, and privilege.²

_{Figure 4: Night Capture, Salman Toor, 2021, oil on panel, 14 x 18 in. (35.6 x 45.7 cm), photo by author.}

The Western canon is not the only power structure that Toor seeks to upend. Toor also takes issue with the endemic homophobia that plagues his home country of Pakistan, as well as most other Muslim-majority nations. The perils that LGBTQ+ people face within these communities is a topic brought forth by several of Toor’s paintings, such as Stone Throwers, Night Capture (Figure 4), and The Vigil. The threat of violence compels us to hide beneath the protective cover of night and within the fickle safety of wooden areas, where individuals may cruise at their own risk. In Shadow Park, Toor provides us a glimpse into the underworld of queer desire that echoes the sexually charged nightmare-fantasies of Robert Gober’s The Heart is Not a Metaphor.

_{Figure 5: Cemetery with Dog, Salman Toor, 2022, oil on canvas, 43 x 36 in. (109.2 x 91.4 cm), photo by author.}

In some of Toor’s paintings such as Thunderstorm and Back Lawn, we see domestic gardens as a space for freedom and unbridled affection. In Cemetery with Dog (Figure 5), Toor explores a different setting entirely, in which the homoerotic paradise of Sa’di’s garden is now a graveyard.³ The scene has the isometric perspective of Persianate manuscript paintings, through which we peer down at above-ground graves and tombstones. Unlike most of his paintings, this one is conspicuously absent of any visible human figures, though it hardly feels like an empty landscape. By searching for a person, we come to the grim realization that a graveyard is never an empty landscape, as the ground literally contains invisible bodies. In the background, there are trees entwined, an established motif in painting, prose, and poetry from the Islamic world for lovers yearning to embrace one another.⁴ By conflating the garden with the cemetery, and life and death, this painting serves as a dark reminder of the risk of pursuing forbidden love.

Toor is known for his proclivity for green, a color that has, perhaps coincidentally, also enjoyed an emblematic role in Islamic culture. Green is the color of the Prophet Muhammad, who is said to have privileged the color above all others, as well as the color of paradise, which is envisioned as a garden.⁵ For modern artists in the West, such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Pablo Picasso, green indicates a sickness manifests on multiple levels. Toor says that he is aware of the poisonous associations with green, but for him, the color is “velvety, nocturnal, and comforting.”⁶ The conflicting potentialities for the symbolic significance of green in Toor’s paintings, in a way, queer the color itself.

At the heart of his work, Toor celebrates the common love found in causal romances of the sex-positive queer world by elevating it by giving it the treatment of one that is found beyond the realm of the ordinary. He celebrates these because they are valuable, and we take them for granted, forgetting that these small acts of seemingly meaningless affection are a luxury not afforded to all.

Glowing like the green light from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, these gleaming, verdant paintings shine into the night, beckoning us into a world of uninhibited frivolity, misplaced desire, and dangerous trysts. Like Nick Carraway, the narrating protagonist of the hazy tale, Toor seems to find dissatisfaction with the world in which he has entered, where love is free, and therefore made worthless. Lovers are had and then disposed. Forbidden love is no longer forbidden, and therefore has become ordinary. Toor gifts us a fresh perspective by showing the value that remains in public displays of affection and to show us that there is nothing at all ordinary about such love.

Salmon Toor: No Ordinary Love is on view at the Tampa Museum of Art through June 4, 2023. The exhibition is organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art.

About the author

Richard Ellis is an adjunct professor at the University of Tampa, in the Department of Art & Design, and at the University of South Florida, in the School of Art & Art History. He holds a B.A. and M.A., both in art history and from the University of South Florida. His areas of interest include Islamic art and architecture, modern and contemporary art of the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, and the diasporas, as well as Orientalism.

Footnotes

“Pakistan,” Human Dignity Trust, accessed May 8, 2023, https://www.humandignitytrust.org/country-profile/pakistan/.
Asma Naeem, “Salman Toor’s Brown Boys,” in Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love, ed. Asma Naeem (New York and Baltimore: Gregory R. Miller & Co. and the Baltimore Museum of Art), 10.
Mika Natif, “The generative garden: Sensuality, male intimacy, and eternity in Govardhan’s illustration of Sa‘dī’s Gulistān,” in Eros and Sexuality in Islamic Art, ed. Francesca Leoni and Mika Natif (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2013), 3.
Michael Barry, “Illustrating ‘Attār: A Pictorial Meditation by Master Habīballāh of Mashhad in the Tradition of Master Bihzād of Herat,” in ‘Attār and the Persian Sufi Tradition: The Art of Spiritual Flight, ed. Leonard Lewisohn and Christopher Shackle (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 148.
Mohammad Gharipour, Persian Gardens and Pavilions: Reflections in History, Poetry, and the Arts (London and New York, I.B. Taurus, 2013), 24.
Evan Moffitt, “Green as the Night” in Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love, ed. Asma Naeem (New York and Baltimore: Gregory R. Miller & Co. and the Baltimore Museum of Art), 49.

Bibliography

Barry, Michael. “Illustrating ‘Attār: A Pictorial Meditation by Master Habīballāh of Mashhad in the Tradition of Master Bihzād of Herat.” In ‘Attār and the Persian Sufi Tradition: The Art of Spiritual Flight, ed. Leonard Lewisohn and Christopher Shackle, 135-64. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006.

Gharipour, Mohammad. Persian Gardens and Pavilions: Reflections in History, Poetry, and the Arts. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013.

Human Dignity Trust. “Pakistan.” Accessed May 8, 2023. www.humandignitarytrust.org/country-profile/pakistan/.

Naeem, Asma, ed. Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love. ed. New York and Baltimore: Gregory R. Miller & Co. and the Baltimore Museum of Art, 2022.

Natif, Mika. “The generative garden: Sensuality, male intimacy, and eternity in Govardhan’s illustration of Sa‘dī’s Gulistān.” In Eros and Sexuality in Islamic Art, ed. Francesca Leoni and Mika Natif, 43-64. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2013.

Mise-en-Scène: Two Exhibitions of Photography

Two photography exhibitions currently on view, Tableau and Transformation, and Contemporary Performance, at the Tampa Museum of Art and the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts respectively, explore themes of artifice and theatricality in photography since the mid-20th century. Viewed together they harmonize visual trends that came after modernism and that have persisted through the first decades of the 21st century.

Both exhibitions feature photographs that explicitly or implicitly reference cinema, a perfect art-world counterpoint to summer blockbuster movie season. The term “directorial mode,” coined by photo critic A. D. Coleman in 1977, is the relevant visual framework for many of the works in both exhibitions. Photographs in the directorial mode disrupt the tendency to read a photo as an unmediated truth or a slice of life, injecting instead theatricality and obvious created-ness.

Photos in the directorial mode are, quite simply, staged (though I cringe at that term because in photography it seems to carry a pejorative note–again because the expectation is that photographs are supposed to be “natural”). In Coleman’s words, “[Photographers] have simply substituted the credence with which photographs are normally approached for the suspension of disbelief which effective theater wins from its audience.”

Tableau and Transformation is a selection of photographs in the Museum’s permanent collection, with several loans from the collection of Tampa’s Trenam Law throughout. The corporate photography collection of Trenam Law is a sister collection of sorts to the TMA thanks to the cross-institutional efforts of William K. Zewadski at Trenam and Julie Saul of the Julie Saul Gallery in New York throughout the 1980s. It reads like a who’s who of photographic and conceptual artists from the 1960s forward, including important artists like Andres Serrano, William Wegman, John Baldessari, and Sandy Skoglund.

William Wegman (American, b. 1943), Waiting for Dinner, 1988. Dye Diffusion – Polaroid Polacolor II. 34 x 27 ½ inches. Tampa Museum of Art, Bequest of Edward W. Lowman by Exchange, 1989.040. © William Wegman 2019

A staged photograph can take many varied forms, which accounts for the visual diversity in Tableau and Transformation. It may literally reference the proscenium stage as Eileen Cowin’s Untitled (The Bathers) (1987) does, with its freeze-frame dramatically posed figures and deep green velvet curtains at stage right and left. Still lives, composites, and portraits can all be staged. There are narratives and nudes, altered polaroids (Lucas Samaras), and straightforward photos of Weimaraners (William Wegman). Even landscapes that are simply reporting on the scene before the camera, such as the trio of photos by Joel Sternfeld, feel staged, like scouted locations, sets that are awaiting their actors. The sheer diversity of possibility of staged photos, or unstaged photos that feel constructed, leads to an almost infinitely open theme. The TMA has strong holdings in 20th century photography and this is an opportunity to see some of its most important objects in that part of the collection.

Contemporary Performance at FMoPA features works from world-renowned photographers like Cindy Sherman (also represented in Tableau and Transformation) and Deborah Willis as well as emerging artists who matriculated locally, Becky Flanders and Selina Romàn among them. It is a tactile, sensory exhibition. The photographs within share vibrant color palettes and an insistent focus on the human figure. It, too, is comprised of photographs that are created in the directorial mode, though unlike Tableau and Transformation, it is more narrowly focused on narrative suggested by the actions of the people in the frame.

The title, Contemporary Performance, will clue some viewers in to what they may expect in the exhibition, though it is a reference that may resonate only with art-world insiders. Guest curator Kalup Linzy is himself an internationally significant multidisciplinary artist (most notably performance, music, and video) who took his MFA at USF in 2003.

Performance in art is different than performance of a play or of a role in a film. In art, the term is laden with decades of layered, often self-referential context and criticism. “Performance” can mean any and all of: a scripted video work; an ephemeral action designed to be experienced once with no connection to the art market (i.e., without an artifact to be later sold); or the photographic or video documentation of an ephemeral action that is intended to be sold. One-time performances from the 1960s and 70s are now commonly being reenacted by a new generation of artists, adding more layers of signification to the work in a new context. It is not uncommon to hear the term used in the context of performing gender, or to perform other aspects of one’s identity, often to open a space for critique of established social norms. In other words, it is a big term with many potential (and potentially conflicting) interpretations.

The type of performance that the work in the exhibition seems to relate to is the materiality of the human body as a mode of expression or recognizable structure for other variables. Based on the images alone, it seems that the presence of the figure is the connective thread. Locating the site of performance in each image, however, is challenging.

The exhibition provides no contextualization or didactic text beyond the very broad subtitle or description “explores gender, sexuality, class, race, and social identities, and will feature lens based works that convey, elude [sic] to, or concern itself with ideas encompassing performance and role playing.” This has the potential to leave viewers grasping for interpretive threads and possibly not finding them.

Questions I had as an informed art viewer were: How does each photo relate to the theme? What is the contribution of each artist to the curator’s vision? Maybe most importantly, which images show the artist participating in role play? It is not always obvious, especially if one doesn’t know what the artists look like. The professor in me wanted these terms to be defined as they relate to individual photographs within. Which images were dealing with role-playing and which were dealing with social identities? Or more broadly, which, if any, are tongue-in-cheek and which are meant to provoke serious discussion? It is not always easy to locate these important differences with visual information only. This exhibition, including most of the works at an individual level, would benefit from more contextualization for the viewer.

The most striking example of the need for context is in relation to the photograph CREMASTER 3: I Die Daily (2002) by Bjork’s ex-husband, Matthew Barney. When a viewer is confronted with the challenging image, they should have some guidance to help them through the ordeal of looking. Barney is a notorious artist who punishes his body in his performances. He is best known for The Cremaster Cycle, a suite of five big-budget feature-length films (a highly unusual format for video/performance art) in which he performs any number of athletic stunts as metaphors for initiation rites. All students of contemporary art know his name and may recognize some of his iconic imagery, such as the red mouthed Apprentice in his pink kilt and headdress, yet far fewer have ever viewed the Cremaster films because they sell for $100,000 per set, are unreleased individually, and are screened rarely, all by the artist’s decree.

The photograph is disturbing: Barney is in a surgical suite, surrounded by a group of authoritative men wearing aprons that reference those of Freemasons–they all look directly out of the frame at the viewer. His body is partially wrapped in white sheets, his head is covered by a hood with runnels of red coming from the hole cut into the hood, filled by what appears to be a metallic object that must be in his mouth. Barney’s testicles are fitted with an inscrutable white plastic device–is it a surgical tool? The artist’s perineum is at the viewer’s eye-level (possibly referencing the cremaster muscle for which his work is named), and something soft and pink seems to be slithering off the gynecological exam chair and toward the viewer (is it meant to evoke a severed penis, or prolapsed intestines?). I think there are also teeth.

This image is presented without any didactic text to help situate the viewer in relation to what they are seeing. The decision to forego interpretive didactic text is common in commercial art galleries, where viewers are invited to experience the work and bring their own interpretation. Possibly this was a deliberate choice by Linzy to emulate that experience–it is, however, highly unorthodox in museum practice.

Those of us versed in contemporary art are hard to shock, but we would all do well to remember that our familiarity with images like this is rarified and reified, as access to Barney’s videos make clear. To introduce an image like this to an unsuspecting public without any interpretive guidance, in my opinion, has the potential to further alienate viewers who already find contemporary art inscrutable.

Selina Romàn, Drowning in a Desert from the “Please Disturb” series, 2016. Archival Inkjet print. 36 x 24 inches. On loan from the artist.

Barney’s work in the exhibition is exceptional both in its difficulty and its obscurity. The majority of the images, even if the relationship to an aspect of performance is not clearly defined, are engrossing in the narratives they suggest. Selina Romàn’s Drowning in a Desert (2016) feels like a still from a much larger story that leaves the viewer wanting to know more.

Video still from Paula Wilson’s “Salty and Fresh” (2014), Video.

Salty and Fresh (2014) by Paula Wilson is a delightful video that makes the role of artist as performer for her public very clear. In the video Wilson is in a structural dress that elevates her about 10 feet above the sea that she’s standing in. She holds a giant palette and is painting her models’ bodies with a paintbrush several yards long while onlookers picnic on the shore and document the spectacle with their phones. The dress structure renders her unable to move and must continually face the audience and paint her models. If Barney’s Cremaster references the endurance model of being an artist in the public eye, this is a more lighthearted and accessible way to communicate the public persona that artists must perform, tolerate, and embrace.

Bay Art Files contributor Sabrina Hughes holds an M.A. in Art History from the University of South Florida, with a focus on the History of Photography. Hughes has worked at the National Gallery of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg and is an adjunct instructor at USF and is the founder and principal of photoxo, a personal archiving service specializing in helping people preserve their family photos. She also has an ongoing curatorial project, Picurious, which invests abandoned slides with new life. Follow her on Instagram @sabrinahughes for selfies, hiking, and dogs, and @thepicurious for vintage photos.

Tableau and Transformation: Photography from the Permanent Collection is on view at the Tampa Museum of Art through Sunday, October 20, 2019. Julie Saul, of the Julie Saul Gallery in New York, was instrumental in developing the Museum’s interest in collecting contemporary photography and will be speaking at a Tampa Collects evening event at the Museum on Tuesday, October 1st. For information about attending and joining Tampa Collects, please contact Kate Douglass at the Tampa Museum of Art.

Contemporary Performance remains on view at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts through Saturday, August 31, 2019. There will be a special closing reception on Friday, August 23, 2019 starting at 5:00 pm, with a lecture featuring the exhibition’s curator Kalup Linzy following at 6:00 pm. For additional information about attending the public event, please contact the Museum.

Light Through Her Hands: Patricia Cronin at the Tampa Museum of Art

Installation view of the exhibition "Patricia Cronin, Aphrodite, and the Lure of Antiquity: Conversations with the Collection" at the Tampa Museum of Art. Photo: Eleanor Eichenbaum

Artist Patricia Cronin’s “Aphrodite and the Lure of Antiquity” is the inaugural exhibition in the Tampa Museum’s Conversations with the Collection, which puts contemporary art in dialogue with classical antiquities. The exhibit fills two large galleries and the outdoor terrace on the Museum’s second floor. Cronin, a widely recognized Brooklyn-based artist, offers a show that is thoughtful, feminist, materially dazzling, and asks dimensional questions of the fragment and the whole.

The exhibition features three main series of works, all of which engage materially and conceptually. The works feature tactile media; from stone to glass to blue painter’s tarps, to create a densely layered experience. The works echo with female multiplicity— the woman as artist, the woman as symbol, the woman as present, the woman as absent. Cronin interrogates what is missing – in the history of women, of women artists, and in physical reality. Sculptures may be partial, paintings may contain traces, negative space may be charged.

Walking through the exhibition, a viewer threads connections between thoughts and works. Seams – flickering lines of betweenness— are integral to the character of the show. Cronin’s works hinge on the possibility of questions made visible, of touching the ephemeral through noticing the absent.

Installation view of the exhibition "Patricia Cronin, Aphrodite, and the Lure of Antiquity: Conversations with the Collection" at the Tampa Museum of Art. Photo: Bay Art Files.

The gallery closest to the stairs, where the visitor arrives, features works from the Aphrodite Reimagined series. Cronin’s mastery of material choices resonates in this cool bluish room where the sculptural pieces converse with the layered works on the walls. Large paintings with gossamer transparencies depict outlines of individual Aphrodite sculptures from various museum collections. The paintings show the different presences of these particular Aphrodites; the form of the sculptural body is featured in relief, the background rendered as an aqueous field. Viewing these many traces of Aphrodites, a viewer may consider multiplicities in Aphrodite’s symbolic identities and in the histories of these sculptures. Cronin’s paintings are soft and illuminate the ineffable space between line and body. These works conjure what is ghostly, what is fluid— a seam of the permeable that runs through the show.

Of particular interest is Cronin’s Aphrodite (Metropolitan Museum): a two-part sculpture made of deep green cast glass displayed on a pedestal, its two halves set apart by a cushion of space. This piece is Cronin’s first work in cast glass and displays the sculptural body as impression. The seam, a site of joining to create a potential whole, is rendered visible here through the two halves that the viewer may work to visually assemble. In addition to its watery translucence, the apt material choice holds the moment the molten glass stills. This quiet interrogation of the momentary resonates in the exhibition.

Cronin’s moving Memorial to a Marriage and works that focus on the 19th-century American female sculptor Harriet Hosmer share the next large gallery. These works amplify questions of presence and absence. Memorial to a Marriage is functional as an iteration of memorial sculpture in Woodlawn Cemetery for Cronin and her wife, the artist Deborah Kass. They are depicted in marble, asleep and embracing under folds of sheets. The sculpture witnesses the connected lives of two female artists and holds both tenderness and contemplative melancholy. The creamy stone is perhaps the exhibition’s most taut moment of absence, as it materializes questions of mortality. Memorial to a Marriage was initially created in 2002 and predates the legalization of gay marriage by the United States Supreme Court by thirteen years. Another kind of booming absence – one of equality.

Through the project Harriet Hosmer: Lost and Found, A Catalogue Raisonne, Cronin illuminates Hosmer’s work and asks that the viewer see the artist’s works that have been lost to history. Cronin renders these lost works as watery shimmering outlines on paper and as towering abstractions on fabric – revealing each as a glance, a shadow, a ghost. The threads of what was lost are realized in two monumental wall-mounted silk pieces: Queen of Naples and Ghost. The fabric cascades far above the viewer’s height and the air in the gallery animate these pieces with slight billows. The works are both subtle and imposing, like an urgent but hazy memory or like blinking in a dark room trying to find her.


Installation view of the exhibition "Patricia Cronin, Aphrodite, and the Lure of Antiquity: Conversations with the Collection" at the Tampa Museum of Art. Photo: Bay Art Files

.
Installation view of the exhibition "Patricia Cronin, Aphrodite, and the Lure of Antiquity: Conversations with the Collection" at the Tampa Museum of Art. Photo: Bay Art Files.

The her that the viewer ultimately finds is Cronin’s outdoor sculpture, Aphrodite Reimagined. She towers above the viewer and dialogues with light and landscape, her face towards the Hillsborough River. The piece, a whole composite Aphrodite, was inspired by a fragmentary 1st-century AD sculpture in the Museum’s classical antiquities collection. In fact, the viewer may encounter the ancient marble torso on display in the gallery, before proceeding to the terrace. This impression of the fragmentary flashes and is enforced in Cronin’s monumental, Aphrodite Reimagined. Strikingly, her legs, feet, arms, hands, and head are translucent resin, pale green and watery while the draped torso is gray and fixed in stone. Outside, these glassy hands catch light. Light slips through them – a prismatic recasting of stubborn histories. Hands, the means by which we count, gesture, touch, and hold are rendered physically anew from a material that mimics absence and calls attention to what we can now see.

Eleanor Eichenbaum is a writer and educator based in St. Petersburg, Florida. She is also an independent curator of visual arts and has organized exhibits in New York, New Jersey, and California.

Patricia Cronin, Aphrodite, and the Lure of Antiquity: Conversations with the Collection is on view at the Tampa Museum of Art through March 17, 2019.
For more information, visit the museum’s website at tampamuseum.org.

The Tampa Museum of Art’s Educating Collections

Patricia Cronin (American, b. 1963), Aphrodite Reimagined, 2018. Cold-cast marble and resin. Tampa Museum of Art, Commission. Installed on the Bretta B. Sullivan Terrace. Courtesy of Patricia Cronin Studio; Photographer: Selina Roman.

Museums please don’t stay still and keep on moving. So it is with Patricia Cronin, Aphrodite, and the Lure of Antiquity: Conversations with the Collection at the Tampa Museum of Art on view through January 6, 2019. This is the inaugural exhibition of a biennial series of commissioned contemporary art explorations which seeks to examine the synergy that might be wrought from their collections.

In many respects, it is a challenge for museums to avoid the ‘end-of-the-line’ sense of the collections that they hold and display. Broadly speaking, a ‘permanent collection’ for the purposes here, by definition, might be termed as a ‘set’ of related objects and the relationships between the objects define the notion of the collection. Specifically, one of the major curatorial charges is to communicate such a sense of collection…the bonding agent if you will. In particular, the notion that is over and above any individual constituent itself. Consequently, to continually engage a community and to cultivate new appreciations, it is important that museums challenge the stasis of their collections.

There are two roots to the word ‘education’ i) ‘educare’ which means to train or to mold and ii) ‘educere’ which denotes the drawing out of a meaning.

Perhaps, it is with this in mind that the Tampa Museum of Art has embarked on this program of special exhibitions. Specifically, in this case to ‘educere’ and extrude a new sense within which their significant Classical Antiquities collection can be re-seen and (re-)interpreted.

Furthermore, it is interesting to note that this collection is central to the Museum’s remit and as such, every schoolchild in Hillsborough County is invited to see the collection. I dare to say, that distinct from my day, today’s school children’s visits are more ‘educere’ than the ‘educare’ they were for me. I do hope so. It remains to say that, presently, there are interesting and important curatorial developments in ‘cajoling’ the traditional understanding of ‘collections’ into a contemporary practice.

Such a sense of intellectual vigor is very much evident in Patricia Cronin, Aphrodite, and the Lure of Antiquity: Conversations with the Collection. Cronin’s work is informed by her deep interest in the ancient world. Significantly, this exhibition is a strikingly productive crossover in which she combines advocacy, research, and knowledge with (her) considerable creative energy. In taking, as inspiration, the museum’s antiquities collection this exhibition is a very successful dialogue with contemporary art practices. Cronin’s particular methodology is apposite in ‘synergizing’ the idea with which we might previously have viewed the museum’s antiquity collection.

At Bay Art Files we have asked St. Petersburg-based Eleanor Eichenbaum to write about the exhibition and this will be published online soon. In bringing a sense of crafted space and tempo to her impressions and experience, the piece reads poetically and reflective in ways that a traditional review might not read. Just as the Museum’s biennial ‘synergy’ series reconsiders its holdings, so it is hoped that you might see this exhibition anew through Eichenbaum’s writing.