by Gary Vikan
Chapter Three
Saving a Gold Key From the Toilet
From 1975 to 1984 I was a scholar, pure and simple, at that most luxurious enclave for Byzantine studies, Harvard’s Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, at the top of Georgetown in Washington, DC. In 1940 founders Robert and Mildred Bliss, whose family fortune came from the patent laxative, Fletchers Castoria, had turned over their historic DC estate, Dumbarton Oaks, with their art collections and expansive gardens and a large endowment to Harvard University. Their vision was that it would become a research center supporting scholarship and publications in the areas of their three passions: Byzantine, Pre-Columbian, and landscape architecture studies. Initially a welcoming home for many World War II émigré scholars, Dumbarton Oaks has since blossomed into an international leader in all three research areas, with several generations of Fellows having now passed through its doors.
My path to DO (as we insiders call it) had been neither typical nor smooth. I had applied for a Junior Fellowship there in 1973 as I was completing the Illuminated Greek Manuscripts catalogue. I was convinced that with that publication in the works, my Princeton background, and the support of my all-but-omnipotent professor, Kurt Weitzmann, it was a sure thing. But I was turned down, and that really disappointed and angered me. Sure, I ended up in DC the next year, but not where I belonged. Instead, I was four miles away at the National Gallery as a Kress Fellow.
Still, I often used the DO library and photo collection. And then one day, I got a call at my little cubicle at the National Gallery from Joan Southcote-Ashton, who ran the photo collection, and who seemed be the keeper of protocol and general good conduct for all of Dumbarton Oaks. She told me in her precise English accent that my bellbottom jeans were simply inappropriate. So not only did I not get the fellowship, but I was being hounded in my little National Gallery nest for having violated the DO dress code. This was not a good start.
Then, on Valentine’s Day in 1975, things turned around when I received a telegram at the American embassy in Bucharest from the Director of Byzantine Studies at DO, Bill Loerke. He was offering me a two-year contract to write a catalogue of the sculpture in the collection—about fifty pieces, ranging from Hellenistic Egypt to Renaissance Germany. The idea, according to Loerke, was that I would help build a bridge between the DO scholarly community and those on the staff who focused on the collection.
Of course I jumped at the opportunity (my only one at the time), though with some trepidation, owing not only to my 1973 fellowship rejection and the subsequent shellacking for my dress code violation, but because I had few good feelings about Dumbarton Oaks to begin with. And to be clear, I knew full well that to be a Byzantinist you eventually had to pass though those splendid wooden doors at 1703, 32nd Street NW. There was no secondary version of DO, and if you didn’t make the cut, you would be nobody, and your career would go nowhere.
But I understood Dumbarton Oaks, from my first awareness of it, to be a place of secrets and favoritisms. After my general exams at Princeton, I was honored at a celebratory dinner that included a former DO Fellow who loved to spin dark and sinister yarns about people Mildred Bliss favored and those she did not, and whom she invited to afternoon tea and whom she invited to the annual Spring Symposium and whom she did not. So I wondered why I would want to go there but knew that I must. And thanks to that Valentine’s Day telegram, with its offer of a third cataloging project, I was on my way.
And as it turned out, I soon grew to love DO. What a privilege it was to be surrounded by the leading Byzantinists in the world, who, much to my surprise, were welcoming, open, and supportive. I especially enjoyed lunchtime conversation in the Fellows Building. Topics might include the etymology of the Romanian word for “orange,” portocală, and its counterpart in Turkish and Greek; the population of 6th-century Constantinople; the availability of stand-up cataract surgery in the Forum of Constantine; and the origin of the vik in Vikan. I guess when you’re the best of the best (it was a room full of Weitzmanns), you can leave competition and intimidation behind. I don’t know how, but they certainly did. And I felt very special.
BUT THERE WAS ANOTHER KIND OF SPECIAL PRIVILEGE I gained access to at DO that would change my life, and it began in the third week in March, 1977, with the death of my friend Marvin Ross. I had gotten to know this legendary curator and Monuments Man because he occupied a small office opposite mine over the entrance to Dumbarton Oaks. It was Marvin Ross who had discovered the famous Isenheim Altarpiece by the German Renaissance master Matthias Grünewald hidden in a castle in Alsace in 1944. For some reason known only to him, Marvin wore a camouflage hunting cap to work each day. Since he preferred telling stories to doing research, he had lots of visitors to his little space. And because he had made it clear to everyone that he suffered from numerous afflictions and diseases, including cancer, it came as no surprise when Marvin died that spring at the age of 72.
More surprising was my summons shortly afterwards to the office of the Honorable William R. Tyler, former US Ambassador to the Netherlands and now Director of Dumbarton Oaks. Hercule Poirot of the English television series reminds me of Bill Tyler; he had those rosy cheeks that French farmers often have—appropriately enough, as he owned a chateau in Burgundy. But people at my level at DO almost never saw Tyler, and I don’t recall that he had ever acknowledged me (he didn’t go to lunch with the Fellows). I was then nearing the end of my two-year contract to catalogue DO’s sculpture. Two other staff members, both Byzantine Junior Fellows, were summoned with me. We were all in our early 30s, each of us a bit nervous and eager to know why we were standing in Director Tyler’s office.
We soon had the answer. A local lawyer representing a wealthy Texas woman named Dominique de Menil had called Dumbarton Oaks with an odd problem. In a vault in the bedroom closet of Marvin’s apartment in Northwest DC was a stash of more than 800 small Byzantine artifacts, mostly bronzes—crosses, rings, stamps, coin weights, and such. The Texas woman claimed that they belonged to her. It seems that her deceased husband had bought them fifteen years earlier from a well-known antiquities dealer named John Klejman, and that Marvin Ross had been on retainer to Mrs. de Menil pretty much ever since, researching the collection for publication. What Mrs. de Menil’s lawyer offered as evidence for taking them away (I don’t recall seeing a bill of sale or title) was a set of research photos commissioned by Marvin in the ’60s. Apparently the objects had never made it to Texas.
So our job, as defined by Director Tyler on Mrs. de Menil’s behalf, was to go over to Marvin’s apartment and match up those little Byzantine doodads in his bedroom vault with the photographs. Which is what we did, while sitting on the deceased curator’s bed. Sure enough, all 800 or so items matched up with their pictures, and soon made their way to the Menil Foundation in Houston.
We three Byzantinists-in-the-making were not alone that day in Marvin Ross’ apartment. There was the lawyer, of course, but there were also two gray-haired ladies who were identified to me as Marvin’s sisters. They were sitting in his study and were clearly very angry with the lawyer as well as with our little crew from Dumbarton Oaks. The basis of their grievance seemed obvious: the rich lady’s lawyer was eyeing not only the objects in Marvin’s bedroom vault, but also the books and papers he’d assembled over many decades. Dominique de Menil had paid Marvin Ross for years to write a book he never wrote. Now, as compensation, she was claiming his personal library. Or at least, that was what I assumed.
DOMINIQUE DE MENIL REENTERED MY LIFE a year later. My two-year catalogue-writing contract at Dumbarton Oaks turned into three, as happens at places as wealthy, slow moving, and indulgent as DO. But there I was again, in the spring of 1978 (the catalogue still unfinished), soon to be without a job and with no fellowship prospects. This time my salvation came in the form of a phone call from KW with the joyous news that he had recommended me to Dominique de Menil as just the right person to carry on Marvin Ross’s research and publish that collection of little bro
nzes I had seen in his bedroom a year earlier.
I was hoping for this, but hardly expecting it. Kurt Weitzmann had been all over the newspapers in those months for having organized The Age of Spirituality exhibition at the Met, the largest show ever devoted to the art of the Late Ancient world. I imagined this had gotten Dominique de Menil’s attention. I eventually became aware that she always went to the top, whether in the world of art or scholarship or spirituality, including consultations with the Dalai Lama. Only recently did I learn from Dominique’s biographer, William Middleton, what Kurt Weitzmann said about me when she called him about who might take over Marvin’s work. According to Dominique’s notes: “Weitzmann says Gary Vikan is his most gifted pupil—he is in touch with everything he does.”
KW recommended me for this job because I could do really good catalogues. My editing of the catalogue for Illuminated Greek Manuscripts from American Collections that was produced in time to honor his retirement from the art department in 1973 got the attention of the committee giving out Kress Fellowships at the National Gallery for the 1973–1974 academic year. I then applied for and received the privilege as a Kress Fellow of editing Medieval & Renaissance Miniatures from the National Gallery of Art, which came out in 1975. These two catalogues apparently impressed Bill Loerke at DO, and so he hired me in 1975 to write the Catalogue of the Sculpture in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection.
Now, as a matter of principle, as you tackle one catalogue after another, there is a tendency to make each successive publication more ambitious than the one before—which means that the process will take longer and longer unless there is a public exhibition planned, with the real deadline of an opening injecting some discipline. Vikan catalogues one and two were both driven by exhibitions, and both came out on time. The Dumbarton Oaks catalogue, though, was not, and while I was hired to write it in two years, which would have it coming out around 1978, it did not appear until 1995. But no matter, before KW figured out how good I was at procrastination, he steered me to Dominique de Menil. Her collection totaled more than eight hundred individual works from which I generated seven hundred pages of catalogue over fifteen years. That catalogue, perhaps 85 percent complete, still sits on my desk, nearly forty years after I started it. This is how academic life works.
I HAD NO IDEA WHAT TO EXPECT on my first trip to Houston in the summer of 1978, but I was excited and optimistic. I imagined that something magical awaited me, and I recall rereading Dickens’ Great Expectations: little Pip, off to see Miss Havisham. What did I know of Dominique de Menil in those days before the Internet? Only that she was immensely wealthy, French, a widow, and an art collector of works mostly modern and contemporary. I knew that her fortune somehow came from oil, but only much later did I learn that she was, when still in her 20s, a script assistant on the Josef von Sternberg production of The Blue Angel. This alone, had I known it, would have dazzled me.
I arrived at the Menil compound in the fancy River Oaks section of Houston in the murderous heat of July. Dominique herself drove me from the airport in her black Mercedes to her Philip Johnson mansion. She sat me down in her living room, put on a Bessie Smith record, and produced a glass of whiskey from her not-so-secret “secret” Surrealist liquor cabinet. (It was filled with tiny Max Ernsts and Alexander Calders, and micro-sized maquettes of works in her collection.) I assumed that after more than three decades in Texas, this elegant oil heiress took it for granted that all Americans wanted a whiskey after a long plane flight. As for Bessie Smith, this was revealing of Dominique’s deep affection for American Black culture, which took the form, academically, of her enormous “Image of the Black in Western Art” project, now housed at Harvard.
I was then shown to the nearby guesthouse by Dominique’s Indian house man, Mani. I remember a Max Ernst over the bed and a Picasso nearby. But mostly, I remember a long cord with a red button. Mani told me that I was to press the little button in the event of a break-in, and the Houston police would appear all but instantly. Somehow, I doubted that. Mani made us breakfast in the main house the next morning, just Dominique and me. And I recall that he burned the toast. Dominique, who dressed and looked like a wispy nun and ate almost nothing, carefully scraped off the burned part of the toast before she passed it to me.
My first task was to make some sense of the lifetime of Marvin’s personal notes that filled a row of file cabinets beneath a de Chirico in the guesthouse study. I tossed papers away freely, which made sense given Marvin’s habit of recording in his illegible handwriting every random thought on a scrap of paper. But in the process, during that first day of housecleaning, I came across something interesting—in fact, two interesting things. One was a 35mm color slide of a small gold key whose end loop had apparently once been hinged to a handle of some sort, but had been broken open. And the other was a canceled check for $200 dated 1967, made out to George Zacos and signed by John de Menil. The subject line on the check, at the lower left, bore two words: “gold key.” So where was that gold key and what was its story?
There were lots of Byzantine keys in the cache in Marvin’s vault, but they were all bronze. And while many were hinged to a flat handle of some sort, or a ring, apparently so that they could be conveniently folded into the palm of the hand, none among them had been ruptured like the gold key. And I had never seen a Byzantine gold key before. It was clear as well that the ward, that is, the working “flap” of this gold key, was much more sophisticated than those of the bronze keys. It almost certainly was intended for a lock that, by Byzantine standards, was very complex. So what was missing was certainly exotic if not, when purchased, very expensive. And not only that, it presupposed a second piece to which it was once attached, presumably a gold ring. I was intrigued. And thus began my quest to find that all-but-magical gold key.
By then I knew that George Zacos had supplied Dumbarton Oaks with most of its exquisite Byzantine gold jewelry, beginning in the early ’50s. Marvin Ross, I had been told, was the connection between Zacos and Dumbarton Oaks, which made sense given that DO had commissioned Marvin to research and publish this gold jewelry in a catalogue that came out in 1965—shortly after the de Menil purchase when, I supposed, Marvin was free to take on another major project. I also knew that George Zacos, an Istanbul-born Greek, had been brought up in the Grand Bazaar, and that most of the interesting Byzantine objects he had to sell were brought to him by aradjis (Turkish for “beachcombers”), who scoured the beaches on the Sea of Marmara side of the city during the winter months as the waves sifted through the excavation dirt dumped there by trucks.
I also eventually learned that John Klejman, who had a shop on the Upper East Side in Manhattan, was one of several dealers of that time who fronted sales for George Zacos, or, in this case, bought items from him. This meant that the gold jewelry at Dumbarton Oaks and the bronzes from Marvin’s closet almost certainly came from George Zacos. I envisioned Zacos in his shop in the Grand Bazaar, putting aside the occasional gold piece that came in and saving it for Dumbarton Oaks. Over the years, he probably tossed the small bronzes into shoe boxes with keys in one, crosses in another, stamps in another, and so on.
Back in Washington, DC, a few weeks later, while thumbing through Marvin’s catalogue of the DO jewelry, I came across something at once startling and wonderful. It was a 9th-century gold monogram seal ring with an ornamental groove at the base of its hoop. It made perfect sense to me as the fitting for the now-lost Menil key. With a little investigation, I learned that this gold ring had come to Dumbarton Oaks in 1958 by way of George Zacos. But more amazing still, I found a note in the object folder in Marvin’s inimitable scrawl recording that he, too, had made that connection to the Menil key in early 1977 during the last months of his life. Everything seemed to fit. Even the ring’s monogram seal, which identified the owner of the Menil-DO key ring as “Panaretos.” A lead correspondence seal of the 9th century in the DO collection (likely from Zacos as well) carried the name of Panaretos kurator, that is, “curator” or “keep
er.” In Byzantine society of the time that meant someone very special who was in charge of something very special.
From the beginning I never believed that George Zacos had ruptured the key ring himself. After all, the key sold separately was just $200, while the key and ring united made for a compelling and unique piece of functional Byzantine jewelry. That the two pieces ended up in two different collections nine years apart suggested to me that Zacos’ runners had found the key and ring separately, perhaps some months or even a few years apart, but likely on the same beach, and that the ensemble was purposely ruptured centuries ago, though kept together.
Through a little research, I learned that there was an imperial workshop in Constantinople specifically for making gold keys, and that it was customary during the Middle Ages in general (as with the Pope, to this day) to destroy the seal rings of important people at the point of death, in order that the rings could not be appropriated and misused. So in just a few weeks, that chance discovery in the guesthouse in Houston had taken on great significance. But I had no clue where the Menil gold key in that 35mm slide had gone, nor did anyone at the Menil Foundation. For months, nothing further was discovered.
IN THE MEANTIME, I WAS getting to know Dominique de Menil. I felt that I had entered an elite inner circle of wealth and sensibility that I found enormously seductive. Here anything was possible and my prospects were limitless. When did I know I had “arrived”? It was in June 1979 in Basel during lunch in the apartment of George Zacos.
A friend at Dumbarton Oaks had told me that Zacos had some things I should see. I knew that he was aware of my cataloguing project of those bronzes he had sold to John Klejman nearly twenty years earlier. As it turned out, Zacos had continued to fill those shoeboxes of his during his self-imposed Swiss exile from the Grand Bazaar. It was obvious I should have a look, and Dominique decided she would come along.