The Anonymous Rich

Well, it was a different age, but was it any better? Because consider, Pondering Readers, that I have spent two days in two rich men’s houses, which were designed to impress, edify, educate the likes of me: the art / culture seeking public.

The first was J. P. Morgan and his library, which fittingly is in midtown—on 36^th street. He was, after all, the older man, and his instruction to the architect Charles McKim was simple and direct—“build me a gem.” Right, so McKim got down to work and did just that, and the result is a truly grand space, housing a magnificent collection. It also is a space that seems truly personal; on his desk was an ornamented box that I was convinced had held cigars, and perhaps still did. It was the only thing I longed to touch, but the steely eyes of the guard seemed always upon me. But I read in Wikipedia today that in fact he smoked dozens of large Havanas every day. Was any trace of the smoke lingering in the room? Probably not, but the imagination easily supplied it….

And Morgan, of course, died a rich man—as he had been born. Here’s Wikipedia:

At the time of his death, he only held 19% of his own net worth, an estate worth $68.3 million ($1.39 billion in today's dollars based on CPI, or $25.2 billion based on 'relative share of GDP'), of which about $30 million represented his share in the New York and Philadelphia banks. The value of his art collection was estimated at $50 million.

Upon his death, the majority of Morgan’s art collection went either to the Metropolitan Museum of Art—which curiously had just happened to make him president in the years before his death—or was sold to pay estate taxes. OK—so who bought it? Enter the second rich guy….

Henry Clay Frick, unlike Morgan, was born with only a pewter spoon in his mouth. From a Mennonite background growing up near Pittsburgh, he had a good head for numbers. He also had a vision, and managed to team up with a good friend, Andrew W. Mellon, to buy some beehive ovens to turn coal into coke. And that was useful because the country needed coke to power the steel industry, which was booming. And so, on his honeymoon, Frick took a little time off—business is business, after all—to meet a guy named Andrew Carnegie. Yes, that Carnegie. In one of the interesting glimpses of how Wikipedia works or doesn’t work, here’s its description of their relationship:

This meeting resulted in a partnership between H. C. Frick & Company and Carnegie Steel Company, and was the predecessor to United States Steel. This partnership ensured that Carnegie's steel mills had adequate supplies of coke. Frick became chairman of the company. Carnegie made multiple attempts to force Frick out of the company they had created by making it appear that the company had nowhere left to go and that it was time for Frick to retire. Despite the contributions Frick had made towards Andrew Carnegie's fortune, Carnegie disregarded him in many executive decisions including finances.[7] Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Carnegie developed a relationship when working together.

Am I the only one thinking that “Frick and Carnegie developed a relationship when working together” is somewhat at war with the earlier statement “Carnegie made multiple attempts to force Frick out of the company they had created?” At any rate, I was curious enough to run over to the Frick collection history page to hear a more biased / less sanitized chronicle of the affair. And here it is:

Frick grew disenchanted with Carnegie and became honorary chairman of the board in December 1894. Five years later, Carnegie abolished Frick's position as chairman of the H. C. Frick Coke Company and the two went to court over the value of Frick's interest. In March 1900 a settlement was reached in which Frick received $30 million in securities. In 1901, having moved from Pittsburgh to New York, Frick became one of the directors of J. P. Morgan's newly incorporated United States Steel Corporation; his official biographer noted that he was the largest individual railway stockholder in the world.

OK; here’s the time to say it. Henry Clay Frick was a true son of a bitch. Nor am I the only one to say it: portfolio.com ranked him as number 11 of the worst CEOs in American history. And what did he do that was so objectionable?

Well, we can start out with the Johnstown Flood of 1889. Johnstown, Pennsylvania, sits at the bottom of a wedge of mountains, which at one time had a river run through it. So sometime in the early part of the 19^th century, The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania had built a dam above the city; the resulting reservoir, the land around it, and the dam itself was then sold to a group of rich guys—some connected to Carnegie Steel—who made a lovely little resort up there, overlooking the town. What didn’t they do? Well, the engineer of the steel mill in the town kept telling them—do some work on that dam. But things got a little busy, and there was heavy rain and a big snow melt off, and guess what happened? Right—one of the largest natural disasters in US history: here’s you-know-who on the subject:

The total death toll was 2,209, making the disaster the largest loss of civilian life in the United States at the time. It was later surpassed by fatalities in the 1900 Galveston hurricane and the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Some historians believe the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane and 1906 San Francisco earthquake killed more people in the U.S. than did the Johnstown Flood, but the official death toll was lower.

Right, and an earlier sentence from the same Wikipedia article has the chilling information:

Henry Clay Frick led a group of speculators, including Benjamin Ruff, from Pittsburgh to purchase the abandoned reservoir, modify it, and convert it into a private resort lake for their wealthy associates.

OK—so what to do? Frick and his friends organized a little group to throw some money at the victims. Here’s Wikipedia again:

When word of the dam's failure was telegraphed to Pittsburgh, Frick and other members of the club gathered to form the Pittsburgh Relief Committee for assistance to the flood victims, as well as determining never to speak publicly about the club or the flood. This strategy was a success, and Knox and Reed were able to fend off all lawsuits that would have placed blame upon the club’s members.

Oh yes, and Carnegie built the town a library….

Things were even uglier in the Homestead Strike of 1892, when Frick sent 300 Pinkerton agents up the river to crash through the pickets and stop the strike. What happened? At least nine people were killed, a riot ensued, and the state militia had to send 8000 guys to break up the affair. Understandably, people felt that this was all a bit excessive, and Frick became known as the most hated man in America. No surprise that Emma Goldman’s lover tried unsuccessfully to kill the guy in July of that year. And so it’s not for nothing has “frick you” become a substitute for a harder, though one-letter-shorter, epithet.

And one feels it, walking into the museum. There’s a chilliness that no heat can burn off—the granite or limestone or whatever-it-is seems to exude cold. But what is there, in that museum, is meant to impress.

Well, it’s Art History 101—so anyone who wants to skip the Met but still see the great Masters in a couple of hours now has that alternative. True, some rooms make me want to run screaming out of them—why is it that Fragonard always stimulates the gag reflex. And there is an especially large and gauzy Renoir that has to live in a hallway (along with a Degas and assorted other masters). But consider—I went to visit a show that had one Vermeer: The Girl with the Pearl Earring. But the museum? It has three Vermeers, and if memory serves, there are only about 70 works of the master left on the planet.

For all his bastardry, I can’t help thinking that Frick had an edge over the modern equivalent, the hedge fund mogul. Because what greeted me this morning, over the print edition of The New York Times? Here it is:

Grisly Warhol Painting Fetches $104.5 Million, Auction High for Artist

It is, Astonished Reader, a silkscreen diptych of a car crash. And also this week, a Francis Bacon triptych Three Studies of Lucian Freud sold for over 140 million bucks. And to whom? Here’s what Roberta Smith, in another article in The Times, had to say:

Auctions have become the leading indicator of ultra-conspicuous consumption, pieces of public, male-dominated theater in which collectors, art dealers and auction houses flex their monetary clout, mostly for one another. The spectacle of watching these privileged few (mostly hedge fund managers and investment-hungry consortiums, it seems) tossing around huge amounts of money has become a rarefied spectator sport. These events are painful to watch yet impossible to ignore and deeply alienating if you actually love art for its own sake. 

Emblematic, isn’t it? Frick was at least a real life, fire-breathing, sulfurous-stenching bastard. But a hedge fund manager?

Please….

Forget the Gutemberg….

It was a thing to see, and somehow I had missed it. So I circled back, after reading somewhere on one of the walls of the J. P. Morgan Library that an edition of the Gutenberg Bible was always on display in the East Room of the original library. And yes—there it was, and why had I missed it? Not because of its size, which is as large as you would imagine (think coffee table book). No, a docent had been in front of it, along with 20 other people. And so blown away was I by the room itself, that I had somehow missed the Gutenberg. Here’s what I was standing in….

Not bad, hunh? And by the way, the little display case by the door holds the Gutenberg Bible.

Which was a bit…well, ordinary. Which come to think of it may be the point—it was the first book printed in moveable type. And that means that it was designed to be mass-produced, it was meant to be available to many more people than the rich patrons who commissioned hand-copied books. And so there are decorative elements, yes, but nowhere near the elaborate ornamentation of illuminated manuscripts. Here’s a juicy manuscript:

And here’s the more sober Gutenberg….

Right—and that’s the first page—the rest is much simpler.

Well, Pierpont—as he liked to be called, so happy to oblige!—had the dough to do what he wanted, and what he wanted was to collect. He had been left 12 million plus by Pop, named Junius—very classy name, though the computer is red-squiggling it—in 1890, when Pierpont was in his early fifties. And from then on, Pierpont combined finance with collecting on a major scale. Actually, two major scales—since among other things J. P. Morgan was the only man in the country that could step in, in the financial Panic of 1907, and save the American economy from collapsing. How did he do it? He got all the big boys together, knocked their heads together, and put together a deal for how to save the day. Then he went back to collecting.

And Pierpont, educated with a degree in Art History from a German university, certainly knew what he was doing. Here, from the Morgan’s website, is a description of his habit:

During the last two decades of his life—from the 1890s until 1913—Morgan spent some $60 million on art (about $900 million today). From the beginning, it was clear that Morgan's collecting tastes could only be described as encyclopedic—what he amassed in such a short period encompassed virtually the full range of artistic and human achievement in Western civilization, from antiquity to modern times. 

He acquired art objects numbering in the thousands, in a wide range of media—from bronzes, porcelains, watches, ivories, and paintings to furniture, tapestries, armor, and ancient Egyptian artifacts as well as the rare books, manuscripts, drawings, prints, and ancient artifacts that are the core of the Morgan.

For years, the bulk of Morgan’s collection was in London, and to accommodate it all, he had to buy the house next door to the one he inherited and knock through the walls. Why? Because at the time, there was a 20% import fee for art coming in to the United States. So he and Isabella Stewart Gardner and some others got together and scotched, and then he began to move it all over to the States. (One ship he had intended to use was the Titanic—fortunately, the collection couldn’t be appraised in time to make the voyage….)

And the bulk of his art went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, of which he was the trustee and then president from 1904 until his death in 1913. But the manuscripts? They stayed in the library—which his son Jack opened to the public in 1924.

And so, today I saw a document signed by Elizabeth I, a Mozart manuscript, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with marginalia in the composer’s hand, and a ravishing drawing of da Vinci. But what fascinated me the most?

This:

Cuneiform—from a couple millennia before Christ. It was the world’s first written language, and was etched by reeds into clay and then hardened. And it is, as you can see, exquisitely small, and virtually illegible. And how had anyone possibly deciphered it, given that the language had died out some centuries after Christ?

As it turns out—the same way that someone deciphered the Rosetta Stone. Here’s Wikipedia on the subject:

Meanwhile, in 1835 Henry Rawlinson, a British East India Company army officer, visited the Behistun Inscriptions in Persia. Carved in the reign of King Darius of Persia (522–486 BC), they consisted of identical texts in the three official languages of the empire: Old Persian, Mesopotamian Aramaic, and Elamite. The Behistun inscription was to the decipherment of cuneiform what the Rosetta Stone was to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

I stared for some ten minutes, went away, and came back again. And though the exhibit stated that the language had been invented for mercantile purposes, none of the texts quoted had anything to do with commerce. Instead, they were of love, birth, eagles, fertility. A whisper of immortality chiseled in a lump of clay, hurled through millennia….