by Gary Vikan
Sacred and Stolen is also the story of a Minnesota kid who started out as a printer’s devil in his father’s small-town newspaper and ended up as the director of a gem of a museum in Baltimore, with stops along the way at Carleton, Princeton, Harvard’s Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Georgetown, and the Menil Foundation in Houston. And it tells of his struggle to reconcile his passion for acquiring and displaying sacred works with his knowledge that many of them were stolen.
I left the Walters in 2013 after twenty-eight years; in the words of the Baltimore Sun editorial, I was the “happy warrior” of the art world. It’s true, I was. And I like to think that what Rod Grierson said about me in the acknowledgments in the Gates of Mystery catalogue years earlier also captured the truth—that I was able “to see with the eyes of the art historian, the theologian, and the man in the street.” I was lucky to have lived my life in art museums as I wanted to live it, with a taste for adventure, an attraction to the new and unknown, an eagerness to fan the flames of excitement, and a bemused comfort with the chaos that often ensued. The truth is I loved it. Most of the time.
THESE ARE MY BEST RECOLLECTIONS of important events in my life, some of which took place decades ago. More than three dozen people have read and commented on parts of Sacred and Stolen in advance of publication; many figure in the narrative. Any errors or omissions, though, are my own.
GARY VIKAN
Baltimore, Maryland
May 2016
Chapter One
Finding My Religion
I was born in 1946 in the small farming town of Fosston in the far northwestern region of Minnesota where, as they still say, “the prairie meets the pines.” I was the youngest of five children of first-generation Scandinavian-American parents, Wilma and Franklin Vikan.
The National Geographic Magazine was my first exposure to the fine arts, if I discount the two sepia reproductions of engravings of Gothic cathedrals—Amiens and Reims—in our living room and Warner Sallman’s ever-popular Head of Christ in the basement of the nearby Hope Lutheran Church. And so it happened that the first great painting in my life, the first one I fell in love with and felt I somehow owned, was the luscious Venus with a Mirror by Titian that I met in a National Geographic in my bedroom.
One evening in the fall of 1955 I discovered I could not stand to have the wonderful image of Venus with a Mirror absent from my life. The possibility of this loss came about because I had made a terrible mistake.
As far back as my memory stretched, I shared my bedroom with my brother Dean. Since he was eight years older than me, it was really his room. Dean was an honor student, co-captain of the football team, and the best cornet player in the school band. With his engineer’s boots, ducktail, and green ’39 DeSoto coupe, he was straight out of Rebel Without a Cause, and although he was rarely rebellious, he cut a fine, defiant-looking figure.
He loved to hunt and fish, but his real passion was airplanes. In the fall of 1955, he was only a few months away from learning that he had been accepted into the second class of the United States Air Force Academy. Dean loved to assemble bombers and fighter planes out of balsa wood, putty, paint, and decals, and this décor dominated the room.
But there was one part of the room I owned: the long shelf below the double window where my mother stacked the issues of National Geographic. Since no one else seemed as taken with them, I considered them mine. I didn’t read the articles, but I remember examining over and over all the illustrations with great care. For a while I was set on going to college in Mexico City because I was enraptured by the photos of the new university library with its huge, gorgeous murals. I loved even more the colorful photo spreads on life in tribal Africa with fascinating images of naked people. After studying these, I then decided I wanted to be an anthropologist in the field.
But best of all was an article on the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. I can see clearly, as if I had just gazed at it yesterday, the illustration of Venus with a Mirror, a painting of people who looked real to me but who were involved in behavior that was anything but realistic. Possibly I even recognized it as great art—and was not only drawn to it because a blonde woman with exposed breasts is captured in a private and intimate moment as she gazes into a mirror held up by a naked little boy with tiny bird wings on his back. Or perhaps my initial attraction was based on feeling that things like this were especially unlikely to happen to little Lutheran boys where I lived.
Whatever the reasons, I was smitten. Needing a page marker for quick access to the illustration of Titian’s marvelous painting, I tore off a bit of the magazine’s back that displayed a large Hormel canned ham and did this frequently whenever I lost my bookmark.
I did not think about my fondness for this painting or the oddness, if that is what it was, of my fervent and frequent viewing of it until the incident in 1955. That evening all the other Vikans had gone out. Dean had a date, probably with the farm girl he would later marry. Since I had a great interest in the aerodrome he had constructed, I was glad to have a chance to further explore his favorite possessions.
Dean had cleverly covered our ceiling with little reflective stars and suspended some airplanes with string to create the effect that they were buzzing overhead in the starlight as we slept. He arranged the rest of them hangar-like, with great care and no doubt some military logic, on shelves in the corner just beyond his bed. Since Dean was meticulous and known for a hot temper, I was always very careful with his airplanes.
But that evening as I reached toward the top shelf in our bedroom to pull down Dean’s huge B29 Superfortress, the object of my wonder slipped from my hands. It whacked a lower shelf, and I looked in horror at its broken wing that revealed raw balsa wood and putty where there used to be smooth fuselage and silver paint. I quickly put my brother’s wounded B29 back where it belonged and tried to prop it up to make it appear as if the wing were still intact.
Later that night I stood in misery in front of the damaged plane with my mother and shouting brother. Dean was really angry at me, and this required consequences. Suddenly I was permanently banished from our bedroom and sent to my sister Bonnie’s room.
I soon found I didn’t care which sibling I roomed with, but I cared a great deal about the issues of National Geographic—especially, of course, the one with the Titian painting—that were now imperiled. I think it was the first time I was fully aware that images could have a special hold on me, and the first time I felt I must find a way to keep an image I loved safe and available.
Although my hometown was a five-hour drive from the Twin Cities and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, which has its own share of Renaissance paintings and plenty of naked women, I had never heard of the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Even if I had, I can’t imagine myself or any other family member at that time in 1955 going to the museum. In the meantime, I realized I still effectively owned the shelf of magazines, and since my brother was often out I still had access to them from my new address down the hall.
IN FOSSTON WINTER LASTS FROM late October well into April, and in those days, forty below zero was not unusual in January and February. When it got that cold, my hair, lathered up with Wildroot and plenty of water into my own version of a ducktail, would freeze solid during the two blocks from our home to school.
The Vikans lived in a grand Victorian house with an abundance of oak paneling on the corner of 2nd Street and Eaton Avenue. Then, as now, there were only about ten streets in the whole town, because even at its population peak in the ’60s, there were no more than 1,700 Fosstonites. They were all white (except for a handful of Ojibwa) and mostly of Norwegian or Swedish extraction with a smattering of Finns and Germans. Our house was previously owned by Dr. Abraham Shedlov, likely the only Jew in town and the one who delivered little baby Gary on November 30, 1946. (Well, not so little: At 11½ pounds I set a Fosston record.)
Everyone in Fosston was “we,” and everyone else, whether in the Twin Cities, Washington, DC, or at the Uni
ted Nations in New York City, was “they”—and it was the “they” of the world who actually directed events. We kept track of those directed events mostly by way of our new Sylvania television set. With the aid of a very tall rotating antenna it pulled in one snowy channel, WDAY Fargo, some 110 miles to the west.
My father, Franklin, was the youngest of eleven children of a Norwegian immigrant named Knut Knutson Vikan. After a few years as an itinerant “grubber” (a digger of tree stumps), Knut homesteaded in the 1890s with his wife Betsey in the Turtle Mountains of North Dakota.
In contrast to Franklin’s modest beginnings, my mother Wilma’s family lived in a comfortable style that was both urban and urbane. She was next-to-the oldest of seven musically gifted daughters of an immigrant Swedish butcher named Ernest C. Johnson and his wife, Christina, in the region’s largest town, Grand Forks.
But for reasons not understood, in 1923, when my mother was 13, Ernest in rapid succession borrowed on his life insurance policy, bought a Cadillac, and “blew his brains out” with a pistol. The Johnson children were kept together by their diligent mother, who became a baker, and her entrepreneurial girls who delivered Mom’s baked goods and also performed as “The Johnson Sisters” at hotels and supper clubs around Grand Forks. I think we Vikan children all assumed that our drive to achieve in school and at music was bound to our mother’s difficult victory.
While my mother was by nature cheery and comforting, my father was often gloomy and distant. For fifty years “Frank” was the Editor and Publisher of our local weekly newspaper, The Thirteen Towns, named after the thirteen townships that originally made up East Polk County, Minnesota. For some, working on a newspaper with its deadlines is exciting, but for my father it mostly brought tension. He was constantly “over the barrel” or “under the gun” as Thursday, our weekly publication deadline, approached. The reasons for this were many. Perhaps it was because the relative humidity that week was unusually low and “static in the air” would cause the sheets of newsprint to stick together and not feed into the huge flatbed printing press in the basement. Or maybe it was because the one person on staff who knew how to set linotype got the flu. Or perhaps I had left a hammer on the bed of that big press and when I started it up, it jammed and bent the steel guide-rails for the rollers all to hell. This meant a full day of unusually intense anxiety as our local blacksmith struggled to hammer them straight again.
The chronic strain over a litany of possible catastrophes, and the fact that my father trusted no one (“if you want a job done right, do it yourself”), made him look for escape, and he became a quiet and earnest drinker. Sometimes he would disappear into the countryside around Fosston on a “bender.” He went on these extended drinking excursions with his bachelor farmer friends we somehow never met.
All the Vikan children at one time or another worked at what we called “The Towns”; I started at fifteen as a printer’s devil for forty cents an hour. I’m certain my father thought that was too much. Journalism, if that is what the Thirteen Towns was really about, did not stick with any of us. But it was at The Towns that I became enamored with the excitement of the deadlines that are so defining of art exhibitions.
Fosston High School, on the other hand, was our shared passion, and Dean’s achievement profile became the profile for our entire family. All five children were either a salutatorian or valedictorian. Gail, the oldest, graduated in 1954 and I graduated in 1964. Between us were Dean, Linda, and Bonnie. We were all named FHS honor students, and that meant each of us gave a short salve or vale speech on the night of our graduation.
All the Vikan children except me were very good at music, too. I started on Bonnie’s saxophone in the fourth grade and somehow moved up though some oversight to the oboe three years later. I was simply terrible at all aspects of playing the oboe except making the reeds, which added nothing whatsoever to the quality of my performance. Our band director eventually stopped choosing music that included oboe solos and made me drum major, and finally made me the student director to keep me away from the oboe.
But the truth was that I loved music. I bought many 45s of Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard at the Rexall drugstore just around the corner from The Towns, and found Tchaikovsky, Schubert, and Sibelius LPs at Schmitt Music during our occasional visits to Minneapolis.
The other major focus in our lives besides The Thirteen Towns, the band, and our studies, was church. Given Fosston’s population makeup, it’s probably not surprising that four of our seven churches were variations on Lutheranism. Our family’s place of worship, Hope Lutheran Church, was the largest and very close to our house. I felt that we more or less owned it. After all, my mother played the church piano, my sister Bonnie played the organ, Gail sometimes played the flute, and my father sang bass in the Hope choir. My contribution was that I was coerced into service as an altar boy, a job I detested. Not only did I have to wear a white smock with a huge red bow, but it was nearly impossible to light those damn candles under the gaze of the assembled congregation when the wicks had been snuffed down flat by that jerk of an altar boy who had preceded me.
By the time I was thirteen, the belief in the unseen that came with Hope Church seemed to me comical and absurd. But I still loved Bible stories and that selfless hero Jesus who was ready to take you back no matter what you’d done. One result of my fall from faith was that I now found my Bible classes very funny. This, along with my congenital restlessness, meant that I soon became a nuisance around church. Eventually this earned me the distinction of being the only Hope kid ever to be expelled from summer Bible camp.
Oddly enough, while belief in God exited my life early and forever, the Bible and religion stayed close to my heart. Together they shaped much of my career as their package of spirituality was transferred first to classical music and then to medieval art.
I suppose I needed some kind of religion. I was an anxious kid even before I started to work for my anxious father and periodically had his gloomy sense of doom and imminent disaster. From as far back as I can remember, music, and classical music in particular, offered both the inspiration and the comfort that I had first associated with church. In high school I would set my AM radio dial to WBBM in Chicago, a 50,000-watt clear channel station. The station had an all-night classical music show hosted by the mellow-voiced Jay Andre called Music ‘til Dawn. Jay’s “quiet hours in the Windy City” became a spiritual home for me. At the same time, they were a window to an attractive world “out there” that was very different from the one around me. In a more prophetic way, so was Venus with a Mirror, although I could not have said why until much later.
MY FIRST REAL SENSE OF the role art would play in my life came about a decade later when I met Titian again, by way of a tall, skinny kid from Panama named Mario Small. With a few casual comments, Mario extracted me from an academic dead end and launched me on my career.
From a very early age I could do numbers in my head, and in high school I loved to fiddle around with my chemistry set. I easily got top grades in math and science, and I won the Bausch and Lomb Science Prize for our region of Minnesota when I was a senior. Because I had this set of talents, I chose to attend Carleton College in Northfield, the same small town near Minneapolis where my sister Gail had gone to college. While she picked St. Olaf, the school for Lutherans with musical talent, I chose the college across town for scientists in the making. I pretty much took it for granted that I’d one day end up a research scientist or mathematician—that I’d wear a tweed jacket with elbow patches and maybe drive a sports car and smoke a pipe.
I quickly gave up on that career path, though, shortly after arriving on campus and meeting all of those really bright kids from Minneapolis and Chicago and places like that who had gotten 800 on their SATs. Since I loved music, I thought it better to sign up for a course on the sonata-allegro form. I suspect that the class was pretty easy for anyone with any musical talent, but it was not easy for me. I just could not remember melodies. Strike two.
About that time I met Mario Small who had remarkably come all the way from Central America to Carleton not to become a scientist but to learn how to paint. To me that was odd. Mario said he was taking a class in art history, and in the class he sat in a darkened hall and looked at slides of paintings and famous buildings and tried to memorize them. Now that seemed truly strange. Apparently, I learned, there was a history of art taught at Carleton just as there was a history of music offered. This class was very difficult for him, Mario said, “probably because I’m from Panama,” whatever that meant.
But since it sounded like fun, I signed up for Art 101: Ancient to Medieval in the fall of my sophomore year. And I discovered almost immediately, to my amazement and relief, not only that I really liked to look at slides of the Parthenon, Chartres Cathedral, and Giotto’s Arena Chapel, but I was very good at remembering what I had seen and even good at writing about it. Was that, I mused, because of all those hours looking at issues of National Geographic? Or was this some sort of brain-wiring payback for my failure at music? In any event, I was saved.
I still have my first term paper: “Chartres, the Jeweled City, and the Heart of a 13th Century Peasant” from the fall of 1965. Not only did I get an A+, everything I have ever believed about medieval art and art in general, I laid out in that essay at the age of eighteen. I was totally captivated by Henry Adam’s Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, both for its detailed evocation of a great cathedral I had not yet visited and, more importantly, for its interpretation of that cathedral in terms at once poetic and spiritual. At that time, I did not have the word “numinous” to describe how Chartres made me feel. I had only general notions of awe and mystery, of ineffable spirituality—all somehow engendered through the black and white photographs available to me then. I was transfixed by the audacity of this great building as I imagined it towering above its medieval village. I was certain that if God did exist, this is where he would be.