Sacred and Stolen

by Gary Vikan

  But not for everyone. Before the ad appeared in print I had a visitor. It was the only time that I recall, since my secret encounter with Yanni Petsopoulos at Dumbarton Oaks in 1983, that someone came into my office and asked to close the door. In this case, my visitor was one of the most sterling and universally admired among the small band of stalwart Walters lifetime supporters. A member of the Women’s Committee, a docent, a donor—and the mother of a girl about the age of the girl in the ad. And that was her message. This image of a teenager more or less interchangeable with her daughter, who may have gone to the same private school, radiated a sexuality that was inappropriate for the Walters. She went on to invoke Calvin Klein, Times Square, and ads for underwear; these were okay for New York City, but their counterpart was not okay for Baltimore. She came because she liked me, and she was worried. Her soft-porn drumbeat spread, and grew ever louder, so I finally killed the ad. But in the process, thanks to those rumblings, I had used up a big hunk of the goodwill that every new director gets. And I didn’t have a whole lot to begin with in some circles, thanks to my devotion to Elvis Presley.

  What does Elvis Presley have to do with the Walters? Not much, except that a profile head on the lid of one of the museum’s Roman sarcophagi looks just like Elvis, and I have long been fascinated with Graceland. My fascination began in the summer of 1987 with a call from Emory University, inviting me to present the keynote speech at a symposium called Medieval Mania. The idea was that I should reveal how things medieval live on in modern times. The honorarium was $1,500, so of course I accepted, though with no idea of what I was going to talk about—that is, not until August 17th, when I opened The Washington Post to discover the banner headline “Saint Elvis.” The dateline was Memphis and the reporter was describing what was then unfolding as 50,000 devoted Elvis fans (Presleyterians) were converging on Graceland to mourn the 10th anniversary of the King’s passing.

  I had written extensively about the art and rituals of early Christian saints, and now in the Post, I was reading about a huge figure in popular secular cultural associated with pilgrimage, relics, veneration rituals, and iconic portraiture remarkably like that of the early saints. Medieval mania for sure. So that December I went to Emory and gave my first Elvis talk, in which I interwove his story with, among other things, the statue of Paul Bunyan with Babe the Blue Ox in Bemidji, Minnesota, that I admired so much growing up in nearby Fosston, and the Shroud of Turin. All, I tried to show, were “eternal images” with “eternal power.”

  Somebody at the Walters had the idea that I should give my Elvis talk at our 1989 black-tie donor dinner, which I did. I thought I would finish my presentation with the notion, then very popular, that Elvis had not actually died and that he might at any moment reappear anywhere. And then, the tricky part, which lives on as myth and legend in the minds of the four hundred or so in attendance that night. When I got to the point in my talk when I brought up the idea that Elvis was still alive and among us, suddenly the lights in the auditorium were turned off. A pause, in total darkness and in total silence.

  Then suddenly, from a little office at the back of our auditorium, came the driving rhythms of a small band. A bright spotlight fell on the door of that office, it burst open, and then, to the grinding beat of a Presley hit of days gone by, appeared an Elvis impersonator of the first order. He weighed the requisite 250 pounds and covered his totally bald head with a huge, wavy wig that looked like black whipped cream. He wore a silver jumpsuit that was at least two sizes too small, and it was opened down the front to his waist. I think his chest hair was pasted on. Singing a deep-throated imitation of Elvis’ (“a hunk, a hunk a”) Burning Love at full sonorous pitch, he leapt onto the stage beside me, sang a few bars, then worked his way up the side steps of the auditorium toward the exit at the top.

  Singing all the way, he paused at every third row of seats or so to take a sweaty Elvis scarf from around his sweaty neck and place it around the neck of one of his adoring female fans. A kiss on the cheek and in a flash he was gone. The lights were off again, for just a moment, and then on. Had it really happened? Had the King of Rock ’n’ Roll really appeared at the Walters? I think most of the audience, which had been primed with several glasses of wine, took this as good fun.

  That was not the case, though, some months earlier when I gave the same talk, sans the imitator, for the first annual John Hopkins Masters in the Liberal Arts Alumni Lecture. The problem may have been the context, which was serious and scholarly, and the title, which was “Looking Behind the Shroud of Turin”—with no mention of Elvis. The audience wanted a serious talk on the Shroud with serious evidence that it might be genuine. And I totally dismissed it, within the context of Elvis and Paul Bunyan, as an obvious fake and bet anyone in the audience 20:1 that it was a fake and would be shown to be a fake by the carbon-14 tests then underway. (The results, dating the linen of the Shroud between 1260 and 1390, were published the following November.)

  When I finished, the audience of around two hundred was mostly silent. There was a chill in the air, and all I wanted to do was go home. Then a man near the front leaped to his feet, identified himself as a Jew, and angrily took on the bet (yes, he paid off in November). I retreated to the punch bowl and thought I had found some relief when a large man came up, very close, to ask me where I had gone to school. Princeton, I said, thinking he had gone there and remembered me. His angry response, which captured the feeling that night, was: “What a waste.”

  The worst, though, was yet to come, in a letter that arrived two days later from a Walters trustee who felt I had insulted his intelligence. He began the third paragraph of his angry two-page diagnostic of the evening with this: “you spent an embarrassing twenty minutes of my time leveling your heavy guns at the Elvis cult unfortunates and National Enquirer curious as a demeaning paradigm for the Christian faithful.” Yikes. No wonder I felt a little paranoid as the drum beat began to build about that bear-turned-girl.

  Pandora: Women in Classical Greece turned out to be a smashing success. I managed to raise just enough money to break even as attendance far exceeded my expectations. Ellen Reeder’s enormous catalogue published by Princeton University Press quickly became a college textbook, and the closing day of the show, Sunday, January 7, 1996, was nothing short of spectacular. A snowstorm was predicted to hit late in the day and, in Baltimore, that means a trip to the grocery store for toilet paper, milk, and bread. But on that Sunday, it also meant a feeding frenzy for Pandora. I knew there was something wonderfully strange going on when, on my drive in to work, I encountered a traffic jam several blocks from the museum. Once inside, I saw a continuous line from the exhibition entrance back to the ticket desk, and from there, out the front door, down the block to Cathedral Street, and up Cathedral Street to the alley. That had never happened before and has not happened since. This was a Baltimore blockbuster, but one with an unmistakably Walters scholarly flavor. For a museum director, it gets no better than that.

  So yes, I had the feeling during that intense fall of 1995 when Raoul Middelman painted my explosive portrait that I was a submarine captain and that I had taken the Walters too deep too fast. The museum was creaking in very threatening ways, and springing leaks. But in fact, the museum more than survived, it prospered. And, looking back, those were the most exciting and productive months of my entire museum career.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Getting Beat Up with Shevardnadze

  Many exhibition ideas are never realized. Sometimes it’s money: The show is too expensive or there’s no backer available at any price. Other times it’s the impossibility of getting the loans, perhaps because there are overriding conservation risks. Often, though, it’s simply the realization on the part of those who make the decision, usually the director along with senior staff, that the public just won’t care even if the critical press does, or vice versa. You often get to “no” pretty quickly, and at little expense, so I don’t count these as failures, just as explorations that got now
here. And as long as this doesn’t happen too often, no harm is done. What makes for a failure is the combination of two things: By the time you cancel, you have already gone public; and in canceling, you will have lost a significant amount of money. These failures, true failures, are very rare, and their symptom is some ugly press. You have made a dumb mistake, and the only people who take pleasure in such failures are other museum directors.

  Fifteen years into my career organizing exhibitions and five years into my Walters directorship, I had just such a public failure. The loss was in the $120,000 range and the embarrassment was significant, because it involved a head of state, and a prominent one: Eduard Shevardnadze, President of the Democratic Republic of Georgia who, in a previous career as Mikhail Gorbachev’s Secretary of Foreign Affairs, had helped disassemble the Soviet Union. In truth, if I were destined to fail, this is how I would want to do it; there was something exhilarating about failing in that kind of company.

  I first set eyes on the “Silver Fox” on April 24, 1999, in the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC. He had met with President Clinton earlier in the day, and my partner and guide in this particular venture, Greg Guroff, had arranged for me to attend a dinner in his honor that evening. To my surprise, the gathering was tiny, in a private dining room with only a few tables. Daniel Shorr, then Senior Analyst for NPR, orchestrated the conversation over dessert, and I recall that it involved, among others, Bud McFarlane, National Security Advisor under Reagan, and Edward Nixon, the former president’s youngest brother and look-alike. Greg had told me that Eduard Shevardnadze was charismatic and I had wondered how that would be apparent. Now I found out. From the moment he entered the room (he came in last) it was clear to me why they called him the Silver Fox. And the Shevardnadze charisma? Was it his piercing eyes, his flowing white hair, his hulking build and movements—or was it the reputation that preceded him, the three assassination attempts, and his role in the peaceful dissolution of an empire? I don’t know, but I was certain that he was looking just at me and talking just to me.

  And then, the following afternoon, Eduard Shevardnadze was talking about me. In the same hotel, the Silver Fox, standing next to Arthur Hartman, former US Ambassador to the Soviet Union and now Board Chairman of the Foundation for International Arts and Education (FIAE), announced what he described as a great artistic event. The show, the Georgian National Exhibition, as he called it, would open at the Walters in Baltimore in a mere six months, and he was going to invite President Clinton. Shevardnadze explained to all assembled—and to cameras recording for posterity and his home audience nearly 6,000 miles away—how the art of Georgia was for the first time coming to America. And this was thanks to that visionary museum director there in the front row, Gary Vikan. If announcements guaranteed realities, I was fast nearing the acme of my career.

  The show was called The Land of Myth and Fire: Art of Ancient and Medieval Georgia, and it was scheduled to open at the Walters on October 14, 1999. The idea had been brought to me by Greg Guroff, a wonderfully gentle bear-like man who invariably wore a blue Oxford-cloth shirt with an ivy league tie that was always askew. You could not help but like Greg, who was of that Sputnik-era generation of young Americans drawn to Russian studies and from there into the Cold War. After he received his PhD at Princeton in 1970, all things Russian and Eastern Bloc became Greg’s life. For twenty years he had been part of the United States Information Agency, rising to the rank of Cultural Attaché in the US embassy in Moscow in the ’80s. Now, in post-Soviet times, he was founder and President of the FIAE, a Bethesda-based nonprofit whose mission is to facilitate academic and cultural exchanges between the United States and nations of the former Eastern Bloc.

  The Ambassador of Georgia to the United States, Tedo Japaridze, suggested to Greg in the fall of 1997 that the FIAE organize an exhibition of Georgian art to tour the United States, and he said it would have Shevardnadze’s support. With that in his pocket, Greg went to New York and presented the idea to Helen Evans, Curator of Medieval Art at the Met, who had organized the enormously successful Glory of Byzantium exhibition the previous spring. Helen, I later learned, told Greg that the Georgians had been particularly difficult to work with in securing the few loans she could manage for her show. And then she steered him my way. That was fine with me since I had been committed for some time to exploring the art of the exotic corners of medieval Orthodoxy, and the art of Georgia seemed to be a perfect sequel to my successful Russian and Ethiopian exhibitions.

  I partnered with Greg to organize an exhibition of art treasures from Georgia, a mythical land at the eastern edge of the Black Sea, where only a very few Americans ever go, and few Georgians ever leave. Since no such exhibition had ever come to the US, and we had a willing collaborator in the Director of the State Museum of Georgia, we ambitiously set our sights on a broad survey. The Land of Myth and Fire was to include one hundred fifty items covering more than three millennia, from an exquisite gold lion just one inch high dating to around 2000 BC, to an icon of Christ the Savior of 1550, set in a gold frame liberally sprinkled with rubies, garnets, amethysts, and pearls.

  The Myth and Fire in the exhibition’s title were related to the Greek myths of Jason and the Argonauts and of Prometheus. Prometheus was bound by Zeus to a rock on a mountain in the Caucasus (northern Georgia) for having stolen fire from Mount Olympus, and he was condemned to have his liver pecked out daily by an eagle. And as for the legend of Jason and the Argonauts, its connection to Georgia was the Argonauts’ pursuit to the Colchis region on the east coast of the Black Sea of the winged ram with the Golden Fleece. The idea of “golden fleece” probably derives from the ancient practice of affixing fleece to wooden frames and then suspending these frames in the rivers that descend from the Caucasus in order to capture some of the abundant gold particles being carried toward the Black Sea.

  To this day, and through the five millennia or so of their cultural identity, the Georgians have been addicted both to precious metal and to jewels, and they are fabulously gifted at crafting them into exquisite works of art. This is what The Land of Myth and Fire was mostly about. In 1981, at the International Byzantine Congress in Vienna, I had seen an exhibition of medieval Georgian art. I was amazed at the distinctive play of gems and metalwork. Stylistically spare and crafted in relief, the icons looked like Romanesque sculpture, but in silver. I had never seen anything like that in the sacred art of any other Orthodox people, and I was captivated.

  Part of the signed protocol for the 1999 exhibition was to assure that this splendor would be preserved. The Georgians knew that their collections needed a level of professional conservation attention that they were not trained or equipped to provide, especially for the medieval metalwork and the manuscripts on the loan list. And they knew, because they came to Baltimore to see at first hand, that the Walters had a superb conservation lab and staff—specifically Terry Weisser for metalwork and Abigail Quandt for manuscripts. This was a critical part of the coming exhibition’s quid pro quo: not only that specific important works of Georgian art would receive much-needed conservation treatment, but also that Georgian conservators and scientists would be brought in as partners to acquire expertise and form working relationships that would carry forward well beyond the exhibition. The idea of making an ongoing contribution to the treasure’s upkeep made me almost as proud as the prospect of the exhibition itself.

  THE LEAD UP TO MY encounter in the Mayflower Hotel with the Silver Fox had been smooth. A year earlier, Greg and I signed a protocol with the president’s representatives that detailed our plans and our mutual obligations. It’s not that I assumed everything would run smoothly from then until the opening. After all, when this art had last left the country in the early ‘80s, Georgia was under an authoritarian regime, and Shevardnadze, as First Secretary of its Communist Party, could do pretty much whatever he wanted to. But what I could not have guessed was that now, at the end of the ’90s, a repeat of the earlier show would turn out to be impossible.
r />   My earlier visit to Georgia was built around a tour of the museums of our collaborators, each of which had its own peculiarities. The history museum, the State Museum of Georgia, is on the main street of town, the beautiful Rustaveli Avenue, but for some reason we entered from the small street behind, through a surreal courtyard. We looked up to the second floor of the museum and saw that the windows had been shot out. We were told this happened during the violent coup d’état of December 1991 that deposed President Zviad Gamsakhurdia. We also learned as we inspected this damage that Levan, the museum’s director standing next to us, had come in as the street battles were raging just outside and put the fires out. We assumed that had he not, the museum and everything in it would have been lost. To our right in that courtyard was an old Soviet-era bus whose tires had gone flat, and to our left was a huge glass box—really huge—with thick glass that was cracked in places and broken. And in this glass box was a complete mastodon skeleton.

  We then proceeded down a dark, low passageway into the lower level of the museum past a soldier with a machine gun to the threshold of a large vault door that was opened to reveal the Treasury. That is where all the gold was kept. (The bronzes and arrowheads and such were up one floor.) I can visually reconstruct that tour in my head, from the tiny, three-millennia-old gold lion at the near left, all the way around the room, clockwise, to an enormous Roman-period jet bracelet adorned with gold and garnets. The various styles in successive cases—Greek, Persian, Sasanian, Roman, and Islamic—reveal a profound truth about Georgia. This is a land isolated and seemingly protected by the Caucasus and the Black Sea, but at the same time, a land that has historically been a crossroads for every conqueror and occupier imaginable over thousands of years. Most recently, since around 1800, it has been Imperial Russia, first, and then the Soviets. In that dark, vault-like Treasury, there was only Levan and our little Baltimore group; this was a powerful experience.