Maxim Karolik folk art

Magazine Antiques, April, 2001 by Carol Troyen

Maxim Karolik (Fig. 1) had no particular passion for folk art. In fact, he rejected it as a category, writing: "one wonders whether, from the artistic point of view, the question of Folk Art versus Academic Art has any meaning." [1] Yet within the three extraordinary collections of American art he and his wife gave to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston beginning in 1937 arc masterpieces by such known artists as Erastus Salisbury Field, Wilhelm Schimmel, Joseph H. Davis, Harriet Powers, and many others whose names have yet to be discovered. Karolik's championing of their works has made the museum one of the premier repositories of folk art in the country. Many of these objects will be featured in the museum's exhibition American Folk, which opens on April 8.

Karolik, a Russian immigrant, was blessed with a pleasing tenor voice, a Boston Brahmin wife with deep pockets, and an unswerving belief in the civilizing power of art. He met his future wife and collecting partner, Martha Codman (1858-1948), while performing at one of her "evening entertainments." Their marriage in 1928 shocked Beacon Hill, for Karolik was a Jew whose heavily accented English was peppered with irreverent puns, while Martha Codman was the ultimate proper Bostonian, descended from the Amory, Pickman, Rogers, and Derby families. She was also thirty-five years Karolik's senior. Many of the celebrated objects from the first Karolik collection (colonial and Federal furniture, silver, textiles, and paintings) were Codman family heirlooms. Almost all were antithetical to the commonly held understanding of folk art, being high style and produced for the elite by leading makers and shops in major urban centers. Whereas the first collection did include several schoolgirl needlework pictures that are f requently considered to be folk art, it is in the second and third collections--of paintings, and then of drawings, watercolors, and sculpture made between about 1800 and 1875--that folk art plays a prominent role.

If Karolik did not view folk art as a separate entity he nonetheless was quick to recognize folk paintings of quality and was willing to pay good money for them. One of the very first nineteenth-century paintings he acquired--academic or folk--was Meditation by the Sea (Pl. III), a haunting image of a somberly dressed figure standing in a landscape that seems more lunar than earthly He paid $650 for it in 1943--a hefty sum for a tiny picture by an unidentified artist. But his immediate recognition of the extraordinary quality of this picture more than justified the expenditure. [2] It appeared in the exhibition Romantic Painting in America at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1943, one of only three folk paintings in that historic show and in 1946 it was shown at the Tate Gallery in one of the first exhibitions of American paintings to be mounted in London. [3] In 1945 he gave it to the Museum of Fine Arts to inaugurate the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Art, 1815--1865. It has appeared in many subsequent exhibitions, to the envy of more than one connoisseur. Some forty-five years after the collector Jean Lipman (1909-1998) first saw the picture, she ruefully confessed to having passed it up because it had recently been cleaned. "Maxim Karolik, who promptly bought it, wasn't that stupid; he profited from a number of our mistakes," she wrote. [4]

Meditation by the Sea was produced during what Karolik later referred to sarcastically as a "barren period." He attributed this phrase to the scholars who believed that little art of consequence was produced between the death of Gilbert Stuart and the ascendancy of Winslow Homer. [5] The paintings Karolik encountered from this "barren period," illustrating native scenery and smalltown life, excited his curiosity and patriotism. Even before he began to buy paintings in earnest he resolved to build a collection of such images for the Museum of Fine Arts. The brilliance of his eighteenth-century collection (and the size of the Codman pocketbook) were sufficient guarantees, for in 1945 the museum's leadership endorsed his project. W. G. Constable (1887-1976), the museum's British-born curator of paintings, as unlikely a champion of middlebrow American art as his Russian patron, was deputized to work with Karolik, and together they began amassing paintings from Karolik's neglected half century.

Once the project was known, dealers were quick to oblige, and paintings came pouring in. With Constable as arbiter and himself as contact and financier, Karolik bought sixty-eight paintings in 1943 and some eighty-eight the next year. Many of these were by artists such as Fitz Hugh Lane (1804-1965), Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904), and Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), who were then little known but are now admired as the most accomplished American painters of their era. Also among Karolik's purchases were major works of folk art. In his first two years of collecting, he acquired John Brewster's ethereal Child with a Peach (Pl. II); Black Cat on a Chair, perhaps the sole surviving work by Andrew L. von Wittkamp, an otherwise unknown physician from the Philadelphia region; a James Bard (1815-1887); and an Asahel L. Powers (1813-1843). Some of the most celebrated paintings in the group--Running Before the Storm and Meditation by the Sea--were by unidentified artists, and remain unattributed today. Karolik was fam ously indifferent to signatures or guaranteed attributions for his paintings. "We discarded the motto of the fashionable connoisseur. 'Tell me who the painter is and I will tell you whether the painting is good'," he announced on more than one occasion. "Our motto was: 'Tell me whether the painting is good and I will not care who the painter is'." [6]