Sacred and Stolen

by Gary Vikan

  What made the Walters of 1983 different from the Walters of my first visit in 1972 was Bob Bergman, who was beginning to breathe new life into the museum and had boundless ambition for what he and I could do together. Only when I arrived and settled in, though, did I discover that the curatorial staff was in total disarray, the exhibition program all but non-existent, and the installations outdated and impenetrable, except to scholars. There was lots of work to do and not much money, but there was endless blue sky, and I was eager to get going. Plus, for the first time I had a staff—a good staff, but not yet a great staff. Things were different. My exhibition budgets at Dumbarton Oaks were typically around $5,000, and all I had to do was ask. By contrast, my first major Walters show cost $250,000, and I raised the money myself, which I much preferred. As it turned out, the change suited me.

  DUMBARTON OAKS OR THE WALTERS, it made no difference: I could not shed those goddamn Lysi frescoes. It was near the end of March, 1984, and I was eagerly awaiting the feature story on my Walters appointment in The Baltimore Sun. In that same week, though, two more important things happened. First, the beloved Colts abandoned Baltimore by surprise in the dark of night to move to Indianapolis, thus co-opting all local news coverage for days. And second, I was visited at Dumbarton Oaks by a mystery woman who had a letter for me. The courier was a very attractive blonde who identified herself as the wife of Yanni Petsopoulos. She held out a sealed envelope with my name and address on it, and the words “By Hand” underlined twice. Great, a letter from that “Greek dealer in Byzantine art working out London” whose secret identity I had divulged to Bill Stanley and the Cypriot ambassador, among others, just weeks earlier. This was a letter so secret and, I assumed, so laden with ugly and incriminating invectives against me that it could not be trusted to the Royal Mail.

  Yanni’s handwritten message, under his AXIA letterhead, was both to the point and elegantly obscure—in fact, so obscure that should this letter have fallen into unfriendly hands its meaning would likely not be understood. What a relief. This was not a diatribe but rather a good old-fashioned thank you note, with words at once vague and poetic:

  Life is a series of accidents, some of which bring about remarkable results. Our meeting and discussion last spring was one such accident which brought about the most elegant and happy outcome, all around, to a very thorny problem.

  The “thorny problem” was of course the endangered frescoes, and the “happy outcome,” I assumed, was some consummated version of a long-term loan and repatriation deal. As for “all around,” I took that to mean that all parties benefitted from the deal, including Yanni and the Munich Turk, and in their case it involved money. And then suddenly, the remaining piece fell into place. I knew what that “accident” was. It was a she, and her name is Mary Jane Victor, Curator of Collections at the Menil Foundation. And I knew why Walter Hoops was so angry at me over the phone that night in June, 1983. But I kept this to myself until the next time I saw Walter, which was almost five years later.

  “I’LL RIP HER TONGUE OUT!” That was Walter talking—actually shouting—in reaction to what I had just told him during our first conversation since my midnight phone call to Paris in 1983. I was in Houston at the inaugural social gathering of the Byzantine Studies Conference, which had come to town to celebrate and explore the collection of Byzantine art that Dominique de Menil had recently put together. But mostly they came to see for the first time the restored frescoes, looted from the Church of Saint Euphemianos near Lysi.

  Yanni Petsopoulos and the London icon crowd were in attendance, along with virtually all American Byzantinists. It was November 11, 1988, three months after the press release and the celebratory article on the fresco rescue by Souren Melikian. The group and the festive mood reminded me of the opening of my icon show at Dumbarton Oaks in 1983. But in the intervening years, I had lost all naivety in matters relating to the movement of Byzantine icons and frescoes across borders. Among those at the cocktail party was Larry Morocco, the conservator who headed the team that restored the frescoes over a period of almost four years in a specially built London studio. Delivered to Houston the previous spring, the thirty-eight fresco fragments that had been stored in crates in Munich were now, thanks to Morocco, assembled into an intact apse and an intact dome. Both were leaning against the wall in the gallery adjacent to Walter and me as we spoke.

  What had set Walter Hopps off was my little narrative about the Lysi frescoes “accident.” I told him that shortly after my secret April 1983 meeting with Yanni Petsopoulos, I received a catch-up-on-news phone call from Mary Jane Victor. In the course of the conversation I mentioned a magnificent 14th-century icon of John the Baptist belonging to Yanni that I had seen in the New York penthouse of a major, though very discrete, collector of Byzantine art. Other icons in that penthouse were lent to the Dumbarton Oaks exhibition, but for some reason, Yanni would not lend this John the Baptist, which was the best of the lot. I told Mary Jane to tell Bertrand Davezac, Dominique’s curator, to ask Yanni about this wonderful icon the next time he saw him, thinking that he just might be willing to sell it.

  As it turned out, Bertrand stopped by to see Yanni in London a few weeks later, in early June, on his way to Paris to rendezvous with Walter and Dominique. His visit was motivated by what Mary Jane had passed on to him from me. Bertrand offered his recollections of that London encounter in a talk he delivered at the Menil Collection in November 1990. He spoke on that occasion about a “rumor” that he heard from Mary Jane involving a Byzantine work of art of “great significance” that had just emerged on the art market, and the person who knew about it was Yanni Petsopoulos.

  Bertrand did not mention me as the origin of that information, but I’m certain Mary Jane named her source, which means that this hot tip came to Bertrand from me, with my endorsement. Did Bertrand muddle the details when he met with Yanni in London and forget that the important artwork in question was an icon? Or, more likely, did Mary Jane speak to Bertrand only in general terms, not mentioning the John the Baptist icon specifically? According to Bertrand, when he “inquired of Mr. Petsopoulos” about the mysterious masterpiece, Yanni’s reacted this way:

  He looked at me inquisitively, unsure of what I was asking, and then suddenly realizing what it might be that I had heard of, searched for two photographs that he passed on to me.

  The photographs presented by Yanni Petsopoulos to Bertrand Davezac that June day were not of the John the Baptist icon, but rather of the frescoes in Munich. Whether the “accident” was a mutual misunderstanding shared by Yanni and Bertrand, or whether Bertrand’s general (confused?) inquiry allowed Yanni to substitute pictures of the frescoes when he must have guessed that it was the John the Baptist icon that I had endorsed, I do not know for sure. I suspect, though, that the latter was true, for why else would Yanni have characterized the chain of events as an “accident”? In any case, I am absolutely certain that Bertrand, though he chose not to mention it in his 1990 speech, knew that this tip about Yanni Petsopoulos having access to a masterpiece had come from Gary Vikan. And, of course, he had shared that information with his boss, Walter Hopps, who from that moment until our cocktail party conversation more than five years later was pissed off at me. And then, suddenly, his rage was redirected toward Mary Jane Victor, whom I then imagined I could see over his right shoulder, in the next room.

  So that was the accident, or rather the misunderstanding, that led to the fateful meeting in Munich a few weeks later. Dominique must have been intrigued from the start, I’m certain both with the prospect of saving these frescoes from being dispersed and with bringing the art of Byzantine Orthodoxy to America. Walter knew that they represented trouble for his museum-in-the-making and for him as its director, but it was too late; Dominique had fallen in love. A thorny problem had been created by accident; Vikan had inadvertently engineered it, and so he was to blame. But in the end, this accident set off a chain of unanticipated events over which none among us was in full control—and that
led to a most elegant and happy outcome.

  a In 2000 we changed the name of the Walters from “Gallery” to “Museum,” in order to more accurately reflect the wide range of its collections.

  Chapter Seven

  Working the Numinous

  With that hand-delivered note from Yanni Petsopoulos in March 1984, I figured that the Lysi frescoes problem had been solved or, at least, that I was out of the picture for good. The Lysi episode made me uncomfortable even to recall, so I forced it out of my head. But I always suspected that there was lingering, unpleasant chatter at Dumbarton Oaks, and among Byzantinists generally, that I had been involved with the Menil Foundation in something sinister and perhaps illegal.

  In January 1985, I began my new life at the Walters Art Gallery as Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Medieval Art, a position I held until I became the museum’s director in the spring of 1994. For me, being a curator meant scholarly exhibitions with hefty catalogues. That is what I wanted to do, and I hired curators who wanted to do the same thing. I guess I had inherited that scholarly bias from Princeton and Kurt Weitzmann. But my year at the National Gallery in 1973–1974 had introduced me to the blockbuster exhibition showmanship of Carter Brown and his brilliant installation designer, Gil Ravenel. Each day for the last three months of my fellowship I had walked through African Art and Motion on the way to my green enamel cubicle in the mezzanine above the Widener Room. I marveled at the way Ravenel brought individual works in the show to life with piped-in tribal music and videos showing dance rituals involving works like those on display. The powerful sense of place and intense visitor engagement he had created amazed me. The galleries were packed. And yes, the catalogue was hefty.

  That was the kind of exhibition I wanted to do, but at Dumbarton Oaks it was impossible, mainly because my “gallery” consisted of three small wall cases in a hallway bathed in daylight. Videos, piped-in music, evocative wall colors, dramatic lighting, and stage sets—all those ingredients that defined the National Gallery blockbuster—were out of the question. The result was that my first exhibitions at DO were comically dense and insanely didactic. In those tiny wall cases I tried to tell enormously complex stories of Byzantine art and culture using little bitty objects that were mostly inherently ugly and all but impossible for normal people to see clearly, much less understand.

  The scale and setting were very different in my first exhibition at the Walters, Silver Treasure from Early Byzantium, that opened in the spring of 1986. I borrowed from Gil Ravenel by building a miniature church in the gallery with an altar, columns, and arches, and I also created a video, shot on-site in Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, to introduce our visitors to Byzantium and its liturgical silver. The video’s background music (Byzantine chant) spilled over into the galleries and created a wonderful effect. My little stage set was intended to evoke the church for which the silver treasure that was the subject of the show would have been created in the 6th century. Visitors seemed to like it, and it was celebrated by John Russell in an enthusiastic review in the Times. This was mostly an intellectual exercise, though, and I had no great hope that our plywood and Styrofoam church would achieve the magical aura of the sacred that Chartres had for Henry Adams and for me—much less, the intensity of audience engagement in African Art and Motion.

  I did have some hope, though, for the power potential of the star of the show, the famous Antioch Chalice from the Met. A scholarly consultant had concluded that it was neither from Antioch nor a chalice; rather, it was very likely a lamp. While accepting this as true, I was also aware that since the ’20s the Antioch Chalice has been believed by millions to be the outer casing of the Holy Grail, the cup from which Christ and his Disciples drank on the night of the Last Supper. It was also thought by some that the twelve little seated figures dispersed among its openwork vine decoration are accurate portraits of Christ and the Apostles. So I assumed there was a predisposition on the part of at least a segment of our potential audience to cling to this fantastic theory, and in doing so to inform a 6th-century lamp from northern Syria with the numinous potency of Jerusalem and Jesus.

  Our description of the object made clear what I thought the object really was and when and where I believed it to have been made. But the text also told the tale of the Holy Grail. In addition, I placed this one work all by itself in the first large gallery, with sepia photo murals on the walls evoking the exotic feel of the Holy Land and ancient times, and took advantage of the spill-over of the Byzantine chant from the nearby video theater. I put the Antioch Chalice in a case that was taller than all the others in the show, which meant our visitors had to look up to see it. By doing all of this, I allowed for an ambiguity that let a sense of the divine creep in and, for some, flourish. I know it worked, because I recall the staff in silent awe as we installed the piece and how reluctant our art handlers were to touch it.

  But my goal was to present the Byzantine icon, Byzantium’s “theology in color.” I felt its power potential in that small show I did at DO in 1983; I was certain that if I could somehow bring dozens of icons together and present them as Gil Ravenel would, I could create for our visitors a sense of being in the presence of the divine—a sense of the numinous.

  My opportunity came with a call from Carter Brown of the National Gallery in September 1986. It seems that Melina Mercouri, who was then Greek Minister of Culture, was eager to send exhibitions abroad celebrating Hellenic culture. And she had offered two to Carter: one devoted to Byzantine icons and frescoes and the other to the human form in classical Greece. Carter chose the latter, and he was kind enough to think of me for the former. And as it turned out, the show on icons and frescoes would soon be in Florence at the Palazzo Strozzi, so I could go see it. There was an uneven mix of icons by quality and date in the Greek show, and some interesting frescoes, including parts of the interior of a real church, which could be reassembled to give the effect of a Byzantine church interior.

  I concluded that this could be a wonderful exhibition for the Walters. Especially once I dressed it up by adding the DO Saint Peter and the other icons I had shown five years earlier, which were better than most of the panels that Greece had to offer. I partnered with a Washington, DC, exhibition circulating agency, wrote a successful National Endowment for the Humanities grant, and organized a national tour from Miami to San Francisco. With Holy Image, Holy Space: Icons and Frescoes from Greece, I was going to introduce the history, meaning, and power of the Byzantine icon to America. Of course, this meant a deep dive into the theology and ritual of the icon, with special emphasis on its role in the Byzantine church. My tools were primary sources of the Byzantine period and a seventeen-minute video I created called The Icon, which transported museum visitors back in time, into the Byzantine churches at Daphni and Hosios Loukas.

  But beyond this didactic aim, and pretty much independent of it, I was going to load the show up with the numinous. I had come to the conclusion that a Byzantine icon, unlike a Byzantine silver chalice, could not be realized for what it was without the numinous. To put it back in its church by reconstructing an icon screen comparable to the Silver Treasure church was fine, and I did that. However, the real story of the Byzantine icon is not how and where it is situated in a Byzantine church, but rather how it is understood as a vehicle for gaining access to the holy by the supplicants for whom it was created. It was, and is, an agent for engaging the divine—a door or window to heaven.

  The critical ingredients for creating a sense of the divine in the galleries for Holy Image, Holy Space were wall color (a deep blue), ambient darkness, dramatic lighting, Byzantine chant (which again spilled over into the galleries from the video theater), and the positioning of the best of the individual icons in such a way that they would dominate and control the visitors’ field of vision and thus command their emotions. (I was lucky to be working with a gifted contract designer who had trained at the National Gallery with Ravenel.)

  What set the tone for the whole exhibition
was my choice and placement of the very first work the visitors would encounter—an enormous, five-feet-tall icon titled Christ the Wisdom of God of the later 14th century. It is a big, powerful, and commanding version of the familiar image of Christ that traditionally appears in the central dome of Orthodox churches. It shows a bust-length Christ with an open Gospel book (“God’s Wisdom”) in one hand and the other hand raised in blessing. I wanted this icon to bring to life, to make real, for each visitor a compelling text from around the year 1200 that describes how a single icon of Christ, much like this one, could inspire very powerful but different emotions, depending on the psychological state of the viewer:

  His eyes are joyful and welcoming to those who are not reproached by their conscience . . . but to those who are condemned by their own judgment, they are wrathful and hostile.

  To make certain that this icon would do its numinous work, I put it alone at the end of the long, dark entrance hall to the show. It was right in the middle of hall, positioned in such a way that it seemed there was no way to get around it and into the exhibition proper. Each visitor was forced to come straight at this great icon and stare back into Christ’s enormous eyes. Only once arriving directly in front of it could they skirt it, at the last moment, and enter the first gallery.