Unexpected Nudes: Scofield Thayer and the Metropolitan Museum

This weekend I went to see the exhibit Obsession: Nudes by Klimt, Schiele, and Picasso from the Scofield Thayer Collection at the Met Breuer in New York. (The show runs until October 7, 2018.) The exhibit contains 50+ pieces from the collection of Scofield Thayer, the co-owner and co-founder of The Dial modernist literary magazine (Thayer’s affiliation lasted from 1919 to 1926).

Apparently, while over in Vienna getting analyzed by none other than Dr. Sigmund Freud in the early 1920s, Thayer began buying works by Klimt, Schiele, Picasso and others. Thayer's collection went on display in New York in 1924, but when the same works were displayed later in Thayer’s hometown, Worcester, Massachusetts, the residents there reacted negatively to the sexually explicit content of many of the pieces. There’s a great write-up in American Art (here) of the Worcester Art Museum’s curators informing Thayer in advance of the 1924 exhibit there that “it seemed best to omit” some of the racier pieces, “[b]ecause we feared that a conservative public might be prejudiced against the exhibition.” The curators appear to have predicted accurately the reaction of Worcester residents.

Even in the 21^st century, the show at the Met Breuer comes with a warning: “Viewers are advised that some images in this exhibition contain explicit erotic content.”

The Met Breuer show opens somewhat coyly with an introductory statement printed on the wall at the entrance to the exhibit (pictured at right):

Offended by intolerant views toward provocative art, Thayer drew up his will in 1925, leaving his collection to The Met before retreating from public life until his death in 1982. An exhibition of the bequest has been planned since its arrival at the Museum in 1984, but its diversity, unevenness, and vast quantity proved a challenge. While a select group of paintings by artists of the School of Paris is always on view, the light-sensitive watercolors, drawings, and prints have rarely been displayed. This exhibition, held on the centenary of the 1918 deaths of Klimt and Schiele, presents these erotic and evocative works together for the first time.

Reading between the lines, it sounded to me like the collection contains material the Met wasn’t especially excited to receive. I also wondered why, if the Met had received the bequest in 1984, there had been a 30+ year delay in exhibiting (much of?) the work.

A little digging turns up quite the saga. Mr. Thayer suffered from mental illness, outlived the individual heirs named in his will (probably lacking the mental capacity to execute a new will after a nervous breakdown in 1926), and he left most of his collection (except for some Aubrey Beardsley drawings which spent some time at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale) to the Metropolitan Museum. The Museum apparently did not know in advance that it was to receive the bequest (see the NY Times story here). So the failure to mount a show therefore began to make a bit more sense (although 30+ years a long time). It also reminded me of one of the lessons I learned in practice: work during the donor’s lifetime with museums that are intended beneficiaries of important art work under a testator’s will. Very often, a museum will prefer a cash gift over an entire collection, especially if the donor puts restrictions on the sale or display of the property (which apparently Thayer did with the Beardsley drawings).

There is a documentary film about Thayer currently in the works -- Stroke of Genius, Scofield Thayer – The Man Who Made America Modern. Its trailer (here) is enticing. But it is the story of Thayer’s will that drew me, as someone who teaches Trusts & Estates, to the linger at exhibit and then read James Dempsey’s biography The Tortured Life of Scofield Thayer (University of Florida Press, 2014).

There’s so more to say…about Thayer’s association with Albert C. Barnes (of Barnes Foundation fame, whose posthumous art-filled legacy has been complicated), his wife’s relationship with e.e. cummings, the way the Klimt, Schiele and Picasso depict women and (in the case of Schiele and Picasso, at least) under-age models in the art work (see Art News’ commentary here). I’ve barely scratched the surface of the many interesting issued inspired by a quick trip to the museum this weekend. I am reminded, yet again, of how macro issues of family, health, life, death, property, control, and money (or Trusts & Estates and Taxation, as I think of them) are all related.

This is an exhibit worth taking in if you happen to be passing through New York before October 7.

Comments

[anon]

I have yet to find a single comment, by Sy, Carswell, Scott, Betsy, Athlete, etc., to be in the least bit funny, clever, insightful or intelligent. Is this unmistakable style of comment supposed to be humorous? The funny thing about it: at least one person apparently thinks so.

That is hilarious.