Robert Flynn Johnson: Make People Dream Your Dreams
Robert Flynn Johnson was Curator Emeritus of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. His interest in art was sparked while studying at McGill University, followed by an early curatorial post at the Worcester Art Museum and then a role as Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Recruited to San Francisco, he led the Achenbach for 32 years, retiring in 2007 after helping expand the holdings to roughly 90,000 works on paper.
Alongside his museum career, Johnson built a private, Impressionist-leaning collection, especially works on paper by Edgar Degas and his circle, valued for their intimacy and sense of process. The traveling exhibition Edgar Degas: The Private Impressionist draws entirely from his private collection and reflects his stated belief that curiosity, more than “taste,” is the collector’s essential attribute.
Curator Robert Flynn Johnson interview by Hugh Leeman — Part Two
20,000 Artworks
Hugh Leeman: I'm Hugh Leeman, managing editor of Roborant Review. Today we're with Robert Flynn Johnson, the former curator for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, who acquired some twenty thousand artworks over thirty-two years for the de Young Museum and the Legion of Honor. This is Part Two of a series with Robert; you can see Part One at roborantreview.com. As in Part One, we'll look at the stories behind a handful of standout artworks he acquired for those collections. Robert, start us off with the work on the screen now — tell me the story of how it became part of the collection.
Artist Day and Expertizing Day
Robert Flynn Johnson: When I was curator at the Achenbach, I considered us the city's museum, with a responsibility to have an interface with the public. So once a month I'd hold an Artist Day, where any artist could bring in a portfolio by appointment — prints, drawings, watercolors, whatever — and I'd give them feedback. Not necessarily buying anything or offering an exhibition, just feedback, so that artists in the community couldn't say the curator was inaccessible. I'd see three or four artists every month.
I also had an Expertizing Day — another day of the month where anybody with a work of art they couldn't identify could bring it in. A little like Antiques Roadshow, but for works on paper: prints, drawings, watercolors, etchings. The one condition was that I would help research whatever they brought, but I would not give it a financial valuation. It was not an appraisal, only an expertizing. If somebody brought in what they thought was a Whistler lithograph, I could research it and say, "Yes, this really is a Whistler," or "No, this is a reproduction." Since we're so far west, far from other research institutions that could help the public, I always felt that was a responsibility — to help people understand what they had, without giving them a financial appraisal.
In 1986 our museum had a wonderful exhibition called Venice: The American View — works on the subject of Venice by important American artists like John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, and Maurice Prendergast, who went to Venice and made beautiful works there. Prendergast, whom you see on the screen, was a Canadian-born American artist, a wonderful painter and watercolorist who also specialized in monotypes. A monotype is a unique print: you put ink onto a copper plate and run it through the press once — you don't engrave or affix the surface in any way, you just print that single impression. This is a beautiful Maurice Brazile Prendergast monotype called After the Review.
While that show was on, a woman called to make an appointment for Expertizing Day, and she brought this exquisite Prendergast monotype into the Achenbach. I nearly fainted, it was so beautiful. She'd inherited it from her mother and had it hanging in her bathroom over in Marin, and she wanted to know what it was. I told her exactly: an absolutely exquisite monotype by Maurice Brazile Prendergast, really, really beautiful. And I said — using the word "if" — if you ever think of selling it, our museum would be interested. She said, "I really like it, but I have four or five grandchildren, and I need to provide for them." I said, well, if you give the monotype to one of them, you'll have to compensate the other four, because it's worth money — but if you sold it to the museum, you could divide the money equally among them. And if you sold it to us at a slightly better price, we could attach your family's name to the work as a purchase and partial gift, so your name would always be with it.
She went away, and about two weeks later called back: "Are you really interested in buying it?" We figured out a fair price, and we acquired it — paying her ninety percent of its value, with the other ten percent as a gift to the museum, and her family's name attached forever. We'd never have acquired it except for that exhibition on American artists in Venice, which prompted her to bring it in. So Expertizing Day really paid off.
Hugh Leeman: Was that idea — bringing the community in — something you'd wanted to do? How did those conversations go with the museum to make it happen?
Robert Flynn Johnson: Artist Day and Expertizing Day were both my own initiative. I don't believe the museum does either anymore, but we did them when I was curator, simply because we were a city museum with a responsibility to the public and to artists — to let three or four artists a month bring in work I might not otherwise see, since they weren't being shown by galleries in town, and to help people understand what they had.
I remember an older woman who called and said, "I'm not sure if I should bring this in — I'm not sure it's a real Degas drawing." I asked if it was framed. She said yes. I asked if there was anything on the back of the frame. She said, "There's a label from the Art Institute of Chicago, where it was in an exhibition in the 1940s." I said, I'd love for you to bring it in, but I can almost guarantee you one hundred percent you've got a real Degas — because it has a label from the Chicago Art Institute on the back. And of course she brought it, and it was a real Degas. She never sold or gave it to us, so we never got that drawing, but I was delighted to confirm it. Over the years, many people brought in reproductions of Van Gogh thinking they'd buy a house with the proceeds — which they wouldn't — but I've also helped people confirm that what they had really was what they thought. Always without a financial valuation. We're not auctioneers; we just help people figure out what they have.
A Degas Masterpiece at a Morning Auction
Hugh Leeman: You mentioned a Degas — and part of the collection you acquired was this Degas. How did it come to the Achenbach?
Robert Flynn Johnson: When I was an assistant curator at the Baltimore Museum in the early '70s, I was introduced to a very important New York collector named David Daniels. He specialized in Degas but owned many other beautiful drawings, did exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum, and took me under his wing — an older man, a mentor who gave me a greater sense of connoisseurship about drawings. I knew him for years, even before I came to San Francisco.
Around 1995, David decided to sell his Degas collection — fifteen or sixteen Degas in an auction catalogue at Christie's, including drawings, pastels, and this one great bathing scene, the most important work in the sale. A donor and friend of mine named Dora Donner Ide, who'd given works to the Achenbach, got a copy of the catalogue. She called me, excited, first about a modest figure drawing; a few days later, about a landscape pastel that was more expensive; and finally, five or six days before the auction, she said, "I think what I'm really interested in is the woman bathing" — the pastel you see here, by far the most expensive work in the sale. She asked what I thought it would bring. I said probably a million and a half dollars. "Why so expensive?" Because it's a masterpiece — and since Christie's has an office in California, you'll have to pay California sales tax. She asked how to avoid the tax. I said you could move to Oregon or New Hampshire, which have no sales tax. She wasn't going to do that. She pondered, then called back: "What if I give the museum the money to buy it directly — do I pay the sales tax then?" No, you don't. "And can I have it hanging in my apartment in San Francisco for a month?"
I called Harry Parker, explained the situation, and he said of course, we'll arrange the insurance. So I went to auction with instructions to bid up to a million and a half, and we got it for about $975,000. She was thrilled, then asked, "What's wrong with it? We got it at such a good price." Nothing — the work had been placed in a morning auction, and morning auctions don't have the big hitters bidding. Had the seller put it in the evening auction, it would probably have brought a higher price. Regardless, we got a dead-bang masterpiece at a really good price. It took two weeks of persuading her, from a figure drawing to a landscape to a masterpiece, and she was very pleased in the end — as are we.
Hugh Leeman: Did this piece end up hanging in her bathroom for a time before the museum?
Robert Flynn Johnson: No, her living room. You're mixing it up with the other woman, whose Prendergast hung in her bathroom. This hung in her living room for a month, and then she let us retrieve it for the permanent collection.
Hugh Leeman: There's a Cassatt that's at least visually somewhat similar, from the late nineteenth century. How does this indirect view of the woman's face shape our relationship to it? It's a very private act — and in neither work can we actually see the person's face.
Intolerable That a Woman Could Draw So Well
Robert Flynn Johnson: They're both intimate scenes of la toilette. Someone once referred to Degas's pictures as "keyhole pictures." Earlier in the nineteenth century you'd have a woman lying on a settee, displaying her body, à la Manet or Courbet. Here, Degas and Cassatt show women at their toilet, seemingly unseen by the artist — as if he's looking through a keyhole.
Mary Cassatt came from a very wealthy Pennsylvania family; her brother ran the Pennsylvania Railroad, and she had enough financial independence to come to Paris and become an artist. She was very talented — a painter, pastelist, and printmaker — and she was mentored by Edgar Degas, who taught her printmaking. One thing she did that Degas never did: in the 1890s she experimented with color printing, which meant making a print from multiple aquatint plates and overprinting them — a very complicated, difficult procedure. She did a series of about ten or twelve of these color etchings, exquisite things. Degas, when he saw them, joked to her, "It's intolerable that a woman could draw so well."
My first job was at the Worcester Art Museum, outside Boston, which owned a complete set of the ten color prints by Cassatt, acquired from a collector at the turn of the century. Boston has many, the Met has some, Chicago too. But when I came to San Francisco, we had no color prints by Mary Cassatt at all. In 1980, five years after I arrived, there was a major sale of Mary Cassatt prints from a French private collection — a man who had inherited his stock from the great dealer Ambroise Vollard. This print was on the cover of the catalogue. I went to our director, Ian White, told him this was by far the most important of all Cassatt's color prints and a beautiful impression, and that we should go after it. We had the money, and he agreed.
I didn't go to the auction — I sent one of my assistants, whom nobody knew, so that when she bid, they wouldn't know it was our museum. We were lucky enough to acquire it. The next day, the Wall Street Journal ran an article: it was the most expensive American print ever sold at auction. We paid $80,000, and it was worth it. One of my East Coast curator friends chided me — "Why did you need another one of those color prints?" I said, that's typical of you: your collection acquired these things a hundred years earlier, as a matter of course. I had to go out and buy this. It's the only one we have, and if we hadn't bought it, we wouldn't have one. Later I got the great poster artist and printer David Lance Goines, at Saint Hieronymus Press in Berkeley, to make a beautiful facsimile poster of it — twenty-six color runs to get it just right. We made it slightly larger than the original and put a blind stamp in the corner of each, because it was so good you could otherwise pass it off under glass as the real thing.
Hugh Leeman: Something really interesting there — it was the highest-selling American print at the time, $80,000, yet you sent someone else to bid, because if they'd seen Robert Johnson bidding, it would likely have pushed the price higher. Is that a common tactic in museum acquisitions?
Robert Flynn Johnson: Absolutely. To this day, if I can help it, I never leave a bid. At a French auction, if something is estimated at five to seven thousand euros and you leave a bid for seven thousand, there's a very good chance it'll sell for exactly seven thousand — the house might run it up to your limit, because they know you'll pay it, rather than sell it to you cheaper. I'm always suspicious of auction houses, so it's best to bid by telephone or send someone surreptitiously, rather than put your hand up publicly.
Why I'm Suspicious of Auction Houses
Hugh Leeman: For people less familiar with auction houses — what do you mean by "suspicious"?
Robert Flynn Johnson: An auction house tells the person consigning a work that it will get them the highest price. And it tells potential bidders to come in because they might get the work at the lowest price. They're telling two different audiences two different things. It's the old story that victory has a thousand fathers and defeat is an orphan. If a work estimated at eight to ten thousand dollars gets no bids and is bought in, the house will have an excuse — too large, too small, too faded. But if it sells for forty thousand, they'll pride themselves on being so smart. They're positioned to defend themselves either way. I've got nothing against auctions by and large; I'm only saying that people who think they'll always get a bargain at auction, as opposed to buying from a dealer, are misguided.
Hugh Leeman: We looked at an Edgar Degas, and established Cassatt's relationship to him. I want to go to yet another piece — a ballet scene.
Robert Flynn Johnson: This is not by Degas — this is by John Singer Sargent.
Hugh Leeman: Oh, wow — thank you for the correction. Tell me about it.
The Only Sargent Monotype in Existence
Robert Flynn Johnson: This is one of the greatest surprises of my career. I was out to lunch one day, and a volunteer handling the phone told me when I got back, "Boy, did I have a phone call — a very old lady says she has a John Singer Sargent monotype." I said, "John Singer Sargent didn't do monotypes." She said, "Here's the number, call her."
So I called this woman, who sounded very old, up in Reno, Nevada. She said, "I have this monotype by John Singer Sargent. I called the Metropolitan Museum and the National Gallery in Washington, and they weren't interested — they told me to call you, being on the West Coast." I said, well, okay — since she sounded too old to manage it herself, I asked, is there any chance someone could package it up and send it to San Francisco so I could look at it? She said yes, I gave her my address, and then I proceeded to forget about it.
About two and a half weeks later, I came in one morning to find a large package in my office, about thirty inches by twenty-five, and I didn't know what it was. I opened it — and it wasn't just a John Singer Sargent monotype. It was a masterpiece of one. As I said, a monotype exists in a single impression. This was an amazing sepia-colored opera scene, with the bass fiddles of the orchestra in the foreground, fully signed "John Singer Sargent, 1890." I got on the phone and said, thank you for sending it — it really is by Sargent. What's the story behind it?
She said, "My grandfather was Joseph Jefferson." Joseph Jefferson was one of the most famous American actors of the latter third of the nineteenth century, known for playing Rip Van Winkle in a famous play, the way Yul Brynner played the King in The King and I. He was wealthy, friends with Sargent, and had a summer place on Cape Cod. He invited Sargent down, and Jefferson was himself an amateur artist who made monotypes. He showed Sargent his copper plates and asked if he'd like to make one. So Sargent made this single monotype, signed it, and gave it to Jefferson when he left. It stayed in the Jefferson family collection. Years later there was a show at the Metropolitan Museum on the history of the monotype, and this was in it — alongside Degas, Picasso, Prendergast, and Gauguin — as the only monotype in existence by John Singer Sargent. So if you want to see a Sargent monotype exhibition, ours is the only one you need, because it's the only one.
Hugh Leeman: What a story — one of the great surprises of your career. Of the roughly twenty thousand works you acquired, does this one count among your personal favorites, because of the surprise? How do you feel about having favorites?
Robert Flynn Johnson: Yes — and with all due respect to my colleagues at the National Gallery and the Met, this could have been in their collection, but both institutions blew this woman off. It's like the publishers who turned down The Catcher in the Rye from J.D. Salinger, and then someone said, "We'll publish this." All she wanted was some attention for it; she was an old lady who wanted to place it somehow, and they weren't interested. This was 1981, before the internet, so she couldn't have emailed a photo. Quite frankly, if I'd known how good it was, I'd have driven up to Reno to see it. I didn't know what it was — but I at least asked if she could send it down, and she did. The rest is history.
Hugh Leeman: You mentioned this was before the smartphone, so she couldn't send a digital photo. You had a decades-long career before and after the proliferation of smartphones — how did they impact your job and your connection with collectors and auction houses?
The Smartphone, and the Extra Set of Eyes
Robert Flynn Johnson: It makes things easier, and also more complicated, because now you have access to hundreds of auctions and dealers who put catalogues online. Before, the only way to know about a European auction was a hardbound catalogue, or a dealer's catalogue — and some dealers sent them, some didn't, and if they didn't, you'd never know what was in their show. So it's sped everything up and brought the world closer — someone in San Francisco closer to the art markets in Paris, London, Berlin. But it also means spending far more time going through far more material.
I should mention one thing from before the internet: sometimes I'd have a friend, like the artist and collector Joseph Goldyne, and if he was in New York, London, or Paris, I'd ask him to keep an eye open — not for me personally, but for the Achenbach. He knew the collection well, and he'd say, "There's a beautiful Dutch drawing at a gallery in New York, good price, you should check it out." I'd call the dealer and say, our mutual friend Joseph Goldyne told me about this drawing — can you put it on hold and send a photograph? A number of works in our collection came to us because I had an extra set of intelligent eyes out there, in places I couldn't be. It's good to have a good eye, but it's also good to have friends.
Hugh Leeman: Let's go to this next piece — Toulouse-Lautrec, 1899. There's a circus horse and, seemingly, a fallen trainer. How did this come into your hands?
A Ticket Out of the Sanitarium: Toulouse-Lautrec
Robert Flynn Johnson: It's a great story. At the end of the nineteenth century, Toulouse-Lautrec was in bad shape — a serious alcoholic, starting to have delusions. After a period of blackouts, he woke up in an asylum; he'd been taken drunk from some bar and placed there under a doctor's care, under lock and key. His family — he was a count, with money — had put him away in this locked sanitarium, and he couldn't get out. After a couple of days he sobered up and realized he needed to get out of there, but he had to show the doctors he had his faculties about him so they'd let him leave. A friend of his, Théodore Duret, helped devise a plan: Lautrec proposed doing a series of drawings from memory of the circus he used to go to as a boy.
Most of Lautrec's drawings were soft, light, spontaneous sketches, not particularly finished. But the thirty-nine circus drawings are all meticulous and exquisite — and done from memory. He didn't go to the circus to watch the horses perform; he had to remind himself, from memory, what a horse would do rearing up on its legs, which is extraordinary. The beauty of the drawings was such that they let him out of the sanitarium. Sadly, within a year and a half he'd died of alcoholism — he didn't stay on the wagon — but he did these drawings to win his release. It's a very famous story.
This drawing was in a private collection in San Francisco — given to a couple as a wedding present from a member of one of the families, who were very wealthy. The couple was divorcing, and the drawing was being sold; a member of the family called me to come look at it. The day before I was to go, our curator of paintings told me he knew a man named Jack Tanzer, a dealer at the Knoedler Gallery in New York, who'd come to San Francisco to buy a Toulouse-Lautrec drawing — obviously this one. So the next day, when I arrived at the appointed hour, just as I came in the front door, Tanzer was leaving — but he didn't have the drawing under his arm. I went into the living room, saw the drawing, and — it's a masterpiece. One of the greatest Lautrec drawings of all time. Just jaw-dropping.
Hugh Leeman: Fascinating to consider the context — that for him, drawing this was very much a ticket to his freedom from the sanitarium.
Robert Flynn Johnson: Yes. All thirty-nine drawings are very good; this is one of the two or three best. The person selling it said, "That was Mr. Tanzer from Knoedler Gallery" — I played dumb — "he's offered me fifteen thousand dollars. But I just assumed it'd stay in San Francisco. So if you're interested, I'll let you have it for the museum for fifteen thousand, and because you're a museum, I'll give you ten percent off — thirteen thousand five hundred." I walked out the door with it under my arm. About four years later — this was 1977 — we lent it to the Art Institute of Chicago for a big Toulouse-Lautrec show, and insured it for almost a million dollars.
It's a rather poignant, bittersweet story, because he eventually couldn't help himself and fell back into alcoholism. And there are all these connections: Toulouse-Lautrec loved Edgar Degas, though Degas wasn't entirely fond of him. Degas used to say, "Lautrec is painting with his hand in my pocket," because Lautrec painted those beautiful scenes of prostitutes that Degas did too. When I did a show in 1985 of the greatest drawings in the Achenbach collection, we put this Toulouse-Lautrec on the cover of the catalogue.
Hugh Leeman: I want to turn from the Lautrec to a piece by Munch. It really turns the corner on the aesthetics here — how dramatic it is. Tell me the backstory.
Munch, and the Michaels Bequest
Robert Flynn Johnson: First, a bit about Edvard Munch. Munch did everything "wrong," as opposed to Vincent van Gogh's family, who did everything right. When Van Gogh died, he'd sold only about one work in his lifetime, and his brother Theo died shortly after, so both brothers were gone. But Theo's wife controlled Vincent's collection, and she did two things: she kept half, which is now in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, one of the great museums in the world; and she sold the other half over the years, so there are Van Goghs in Tokyo, Stockholm, Paris, London, New York, San Francisco — all over the world. That's part of why he's so famous: there are Van Goghs in many museums.
Edvard Munch was a great Scandinavian artist, one of the great post-Impressionists. He painted many masterpieces, but after a nervous breakdown in the early twentieth century he withdrew from life, became reclusive, and when he died he left his whole studio to a museum in Oslo. So many of the Munch paintings that might have been in museums around the world are in Oslo instead. If you really want to see Munch as a painter, you have to go to Oslo — there are only two or three good Munch paintings in American collections. The way to see Munch in depth in the United States is through his prints, and luckily he was an absolute master printmaker in etching and woodcut. This is a unique color proof called Moonlight, done in 1896 — a haunting picture, the visual equivalent of an Ingmar Bergman film: mysterious, sad, beautifully expressive.
When I got to San Francisco, we had a couple of etchings and one lithograph by Munch, but none of his color woodcuts — considered his greatest works, and also the most expensive. Here's what happened. The Achenbach has a support group called the Graphic Arts Council, which raises money and also educates people about connoisseurship. There was a couple in Marin, Vera and Herman Michaels, who were the lowest-category members — they paid a hundred dollars a year, which was fine; I knew them, they were nice. One of them died, and the second about a year later. Then I was informed that the Michaels, who had no children, had left five percent of their estate to Meals on Wheels, five percent to guide dogs for the blind, five percent to a boys' school in Marin, and eighty-five percent to the Achenbach — in a fund to purchase works of art, on one condition: the works had to be made before 1900.
That was several hundred thousand dollars, exactly what I needed. When this Munch print came up at around $185,000 or $190,000, I was able to use the Vera and Herman Michaels Fund to buy it. Some people bequeath funds as a lump sum you can spend entirely; others give an endowment where you can spend only the interest. In this case they gave a lump sum, which mattered — an endowment would have kicked out only five or seven thousand a year, and we'd never have been able to buy a nearly $200,000 print. It was the right work at the right time with the right funds, and luckily it was made in 1896 — under their 1900 line by four years.
Hugh Leeman: An incredible story — a unique act of generosity. They paid a hundred dollars a year to be part of this, then left such a massive gift that it let you acquire this Munch.
Robert Flynn Johnson: Yes. And I should say the Achenbach isn't like the Getty, with one extremely wealthy benefactor; these things come and go. Without the Michaels, we wouldn't own the Munch. One of the beautiful things about America is that our museums, operas, and dance companies are built on individual private philanthropy — unlike Europe, where everyone waits for Berlin or London or Paris to send money. Our institutions are funded by people who love art, music, and dance, and support their own communities. So it takes many people to build a collection like the Achenbach — not just the curator, but the people who give the funds to acquire work that will be in the collection for centuries.
Hugh Leeman: The works so far have focused on people. I want to turn to our first work with no person in it — a piece by Cyril Edward Power from the early twentieth century. Of all the works you wanted to share, what is it about this one that calls to you?
Below the Radar: Cyril Power
Robert Flynn Johnson: This is by an artist of the so-called Vorticist school, the Cubist-influenced school of English art in the 1920s and early '30s. I was very unfamiliar with it. I was visiting a dealer in London to buy a nineteenth-century French print I knew of, and before I left he said, "I've got some English prints I might show you — interested?" He opened a portfolio of prints by Cyril Power and others, and I was fascinated. They weren't expensive, so that one afternoon I bought about ten of them for around a thousand dollars, around 1980.
It's almost amazing: within a couple of years there were exhibitions and publications on these works by Cyril Power, Claude Flight, and others, and the prints became very fashionable. They weren't fashionable when I bought them. I remember — not this print, but another from that day — reading an article five or six years ago in an English trade newspaper. I contacted the Achenbach and asked, didn't we buy a print by a woman artist called Gust of Wind? They looked it up: bought in 1980, along with this one, for a hundred dollars. I said, you've got to change the insurance value — it just sold for 120,000 pounds, about $140,000.
This print, The Tube Staircase by Cyril Power, is one of the most important and largest of them. It's very important to me to say that I bought it not because it had become famous or expensive, but because it was under the radar — this art was very underappreciated and quite affordable then, and I took a chance on it because it was very good. I bought on the question of quality, not rarity or fame. We got a whole group of them, a nice key group, and I'm very happy we did, because it would be very expensive to add to the collection in this area now.
Hugh Leeman: As part of this series — in our previous discussion you mentioned a criticism in your career, that you were frittering away the collection's money on unimportant artists, buying things where people asked, "Who is that? Why would he get this?" Do you think pieces like this put those criticisms to rest?
Robert Flynn Johnson: Yes and no. Some of my more adventurous, under-the-radar acquisitions are only now becoming known as smart moves. I simply stand by them. I bought these in 1980 — about nine of them for a thousand dollars — and said they're good, they're important English works that are undervalued and underrepresented in our collection, and we need them for historical purposes, for no other reason. That they've become very valuable now makes me happy, and also happy because if we didn't have them, we'd have a very hard time acquiring them today. But I didn't spend all my time looking for bargains; sometimes I had to acquire works retrospectively for a lot of money, as with the Cassatt, the Degas, and others.
Hugh Leeman: At the other end of the spectrum — in a much more modern context — there are works like this Diebenkorn. Where did that fall on the spectrum when you purchased it, in terms of how people felt about you bringing it in?
The Crown Point Press Archive: Diebenkorn
Robert Flynn Johnson: This work came from a collection of over a thousand works. Crown Point Press — famous as the greatest intaglio workshop in America, publishing etchings and aquatints — was based in San Francisco, run by Kathan Brown, who'd been making prints for many decades. She moved to new quarters in 1988 and had just finished the space at the time of the Loma Prieta earthquake, which irreparably damaged it. It was condemned, she had to move out, and she needed funds to build a new workshop. She had kept one of every print she'd ever published, in an archive, and decided to make that archive available for sale to raise the money.
So we had an opportunity to buy it, and we had to fend off the National Gallery in Washington, which also wanted it. We didn't want this great San Francisco press's archive to leave the city, so through private donations from many of our trustees and other collectors, we raised over a million dollars to buy the complete Crown Point Press archive — on the condition that we would also receive one of every print the press published in the future, for free, so our collection would stay complete. This Diebenkorn is just one example. We have every etching and aquatint that Richard Diebenkorn did at Crown Point. This print, Green, is his largest and most expensive there. Funnily, this single impression is worth about $600,000 today — more than half of what we paid for the whole thousand works. And we get all the future prints too. It was good for everybody: the city kept the collection, the Achenbach has it, and Kathan Brown was able to rebuild her thriving press. She sadly passed away about a year ago, but she was a great pioneer in the history of American printmaking.
Hugh Leeman: You mentioned something interesting — that part of the deal was that going forward, you'd get one image of everything they produce. Can you talk about the role the curator plays in those negotiations, and how the director and trustees function in them?
The Achenbach Proof: Ed Ruscha
Robert Flynn Johnson: You need to appeal to people's generosity and common sense. If you buy an archive going back to, say, the early '60s, and you're getting one of an edition of twenty-five from fifty years ago, that print could be very valuable. But here's the deal for future work: when an artist makes an etching after you've acquired the archive, he or she only needs to print one extra impression — the "Achenbach proof." If the edition is twenty-five, the artist prints twenty-five to sell, tells everyone there are only twenty-five, but there's also an Achenbach proof, printed only for the museum and never for sale, so it doesn't affect the number on the market. All we're asking the artist to do in the future is pay for press time and one extra sheet of paper. By printing that proof, your collection stays forever up to date. That's how we've kept the Crown Point Press archive complete — and how we did it with Ed Ruscha's graphic archive. We're the only museum in America with a complete archive of all of Ed Ruscha's prints.
Hugh Leeman: Let's go to that to bring things full circle. You mentioned his name — and as a final piece, one of the iconic Standard stations. Tell me about it.
Robert Flynn Johnson: Here's an interesting story. The Walker Art Center did an exhibition and catalogue raisonné of all of Ed Ruscha's prints. They have some Ruscha prints, but they're mostly a painting and sculpture collection, so they weren't interested in acquiring his print archive. The exhibition was going to travel to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Ruscha has been an LA artist for decades, so logically the archive might have been offered to LACMA.
Ed wanted his graphic archive — all his prints, plus his working proofs and color proofs, the unique things, the colors he considered but chose not to use — all placed in a museum where it could be used for study, rather than sold off piecemeal from his estate after he died. He was going to sell it, but he wanted it all in one museum. But when the Walker show traveled to LACMA, the director at the time made a terrible mistake. I don't think she was a great fan of Ed Ruscha, and she said the exhibition didn't need so much space — show only two-thirds of it, cut it by a third, leave a third in the crates. That really upset Ed; he wanted the full show that had been at the Walker. He got ticked off at LACMA and told his dealer, "Do not offer the Ruscha archive to LACMA. Offer it to my friend Bob Johnson in San Francisco." Ed and I were friends, and he offered the collection to us.
The dealer asked if we wanted to buy the archive. I said yes, but we want prints from his future editions as part of the deal. "You want us to give you prints from future editions?" Yes — it only costs Ed a piece of paper and press time for that extra proof. Ed agreed, and the price was $750,000, an unbelievable bargain. I went to a dear art patron named Phyllis Wattis — an elderly woman with wonderful taste, interested in contemporary art — and she provided the $750,000, so we acquired Ruscha's complete archive. The print on the screen is Standard Station, Mocha Standard, a beautiful large silkscreen from 1965. We have six or seven impressions of each of his standard stations, two or three of which would be worth the price of the whole collection today. And we get all of Ed's prints in the future — he's been making prints for us for almost twenty years now, so we get all the Achenbach proofs from everything he's done, in addition to what we acquired back in 2000. Ed is a good friend of mine to this day.
Hugh Leeman: Robert Johnson, thank you so much for sharing these backstories, and giving us context not just on the artworks but on how they came to be part of the collection — the stories that make them personal to you. It's a beautiful context that brings art to life.
Robert Flynn Johnson: Thank you. As I've said this afternoon, a lot of it is knowledge, and being in the right place at the right time — but it's also making connections and friendships. Having people like Phyllis Wattis believe in you and be willing to write a check, or the Michaels, who left us their money to acquire something beautiful. One of the keys to being a good curator is to make people dream your dreams. And with their generosity, the collection grows for the future.
Hugh Leeman: I love that — make people dream your dreams. Robert Johnson, thank you so much. Until the next time.
Robert Flynn Johnson: Very good — thank you.
