Can you collect all of human history, past and future, and enfold it into a book? At the end of the 15th century, only fifty years after the invention of printing using movable metal type, in what may have been the most ambitious publishing project to date, a printer in Nuremberg by the name of Anton Koberger attempted this very task.

It’s this book that comes to mind when I think about an object epitomizing the human impulse to collect. It embodies both the acquisitive ambition of compiling sources and knowledge and also—maybe more significantly—the desperate will toward survival that often accompanies the collecting impulse: contrasting, say, the motivations of a contemporary art collector with those of a man pushing a grocery cart full of aluminum cans and plastic bottles. Just as I might see both of these figures walking the same Chelsea block today, I see their 15th-century equivalents in the pages of this book.

, now commonly referred to in the English-speaking world as 

, was published in 1493 and remains an iconic work (even something of a cliché) of the so-called incunable period—the term for the early, somewhat experimental phase of book printing from Gutenberg’s invention before 1450 to the year 1500. For a 500-year-old book, it isn’t especially rare, with more than 800 copies of the first Latin edition now held in research libraries, museums, and academic collections, more than half of the estimated original print run still extant, documented, and largely accessible.

A second edition was published soon after, translated into German. So popular and prized, the book was also soon pirated by a printer in Augsburg, less than 150 kilometers from Nuremberg.

The book’s author or, perhaps more accurately, editor, Hartmann Schedel, was a medical doctor and himself one of Nuremberg’s greatest book collectors. Most of the text was simply collaged from a mix of Christian and classical sources in his personal library, with his original contributions binding this material together within the structure of the book. It’s divided into the “seven ages of the world,” spanning from the Biblical story of God creating the orders of angels and heavens (a scene that borders a geocentric model of the universe, rimmed with astrological signs), followed by the creation of birds and animals, and ultimately to the genesis of humankind, with Eve shown emerging from Adam’s rib. To modern readers, the woodblock printed cells illustrating these scenes might recall a graphic novel, with God alternating in form between a disembodied hand emerging from a cloud (a representation of the power of creation) and a bearded fatherly figure. The book ends in the Biblical tale of revelation and apocalypse: a promised end of the world (and last judgment), with various Biblical and classical accounts interspersed within.

As an intellectual and technological achievement, it is one of the first works to synthesize a design that incorporated both text and image, helping to establish the visual character of the printed book as its own form, freed from and no longer seeking to mimic the tradition of handwritten medieval manuscripts, which could also take on highly synthetic text-image formats, as in the Books of Hours, popular prayer books from the same century designed and marketed for the laity, which were both written and painted or illuminated with the inclusion of gold leaf. Gutenberg’s Bible had to look like and essentially pass as a manuscript. Koberger’s 

 helped codify how a printed book could look, presenting information both textually and graphically as its own proven technological form.

was also one of the most incidental: The young son of a Hungarian goldsmith by the name of Albrecht Dürer, who likely had a hand in the design of the more than 600 woodcut illustrations featured in the book, many of them used more than once. The design was commissioned from and executed by the workshops of the artists Michael Wohlgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff. Dürer apprenticed with Wolgemut from 1486 to 1489, so it was likely that he worked on the project in its earliest days. Wolgemut ran an atelier where he oversaw and sometimes partly subcontracted work to churn out paintings, sculptures, altarpieces, and woodcut illustrations for the then-nascent technology of the printed book. The great printer Koberger, who himself had first trained as a goldsmith before turning to developing what was likely the largest printing and publishing operation in the world at that time, also happened to be Dürer’s godfather.

As a work of learning or scholarship, the 

 gathers a hodge-podge view of retrospective late-Medieval thinking. Despite Columbus’s voyage in the year before the book’s publication, the world map reflects a classical worldview, centering Europe, bordered by Africa and Asia, recording a rather primitive Ptolemaic geography presented beside a series of monstrous portraits of characters sourced mainly from Herodotus: a six-armed man, a woman whose body is covered in hair, a centaur, an androgyne, a cyclops, and a Blemmyes, a headless figure thought to be found in Libya, with facial features inset in his chest. As if a mix of fear and fantasy populated the regions beyond the familiar order.

 is taken up by city views of major European capitals and centers of trade, of cities and towns. Some woodcuts are repeated, thus representing two different cities with the same image—the logic being that this city is also on a river and so on. The most elaborate image is of Nuremberg itself, which was, at the time of publication, enjoying its waning days as a wealthy cosmopolitan center. It takes up the entirety of the opening pages of the book, from verso to facing recto.

Here is where I find the most interesting detail related to collecting, which in some way has transformed how I see every early-printed book: in the bottom right of the frame, outside of the walled city limits of Nuremberg and set apart, sits Ulman Stromer’s paper mill. This was the first European paper mill established north of the Alps; it began production a century earlier, converted from a flour mill in 1390, breaking what was essentially an Italian monopoly.

When looking at this city view of Nuremberg, the print comes alive to me. Not with the workings of the mill itself but with the ragpickers the mill required to source the raw material needed for its work. They are like the canners with their overstuffed bags and shopping carts, recycling for cash. Each can is equal to a coin. So, too, were the spent rags redeemed by the ragpickers—a sort of currency collected from trash heaps or door-to-door inquiries, the ragpickers visible, even conspicuous, yet in the margins of society. A scavenger underclass. In my imagination, this woodcut in 

 teems with these ragpickers. Each of the dozens of copies I have looked at in various university and research libraries and museums still consists of their labor, as do many of the great works of literature from the last 500 years, all produced and printed upon the labor of the ragpickers.

Incunabula (plural), incunabulum (singular) in Latin, or Anglicized as incunable, means precisely, in the rare book librarian or bibliophile’s jargon, “a book print in or before the year 1500.” In Latin, the term means “from the cradle,” suggesting swaddling cloth, the simple textile used to wrap a child, one of the first human sensory experiences after the skin of the mother. Swaddling clothes, after their use was complete, were precisely the kind of quality rags sought after by the ragpickers to be turned into fine, handmade laid paper.

The rags would be collected, then sorted by quality, then cleaned, then retted—a process of fermentation that broke down the fibers chemically before they were beaten mechanically into a fibrous slurry. Into this slurry, a rectangular screen made of woven wires would be placed and given a methodical shake, evenly spreading the fibers onto its surface and producing a single large sheet of paper, which would then be pressed and dried between two sheets of felt. The completed sheet wouldn’t be much larger than the full folio spread showing that map of Nuremberg, with its mill. This page, too, was made from the scavenged wares of the ragpickers.

John Vincler

The ragpickers were visible, even conspicuous, yet in the margins of society. A scavenger underclass.

The Ragpickers

On a sweltering summer afternoon, Cultural Counsel’s Senior Vice President Hunter Braithwaite hopped on a Zoom call with Laura Doyle, CEO of DOYLE Auction House. Founded by her father, William Doyle, in 1962, Laura spent her childhood accompanying him to various auction houses and exhibitions and rifling through the knick-knacks he kept in his office cabinets. DOYLE specializes in jewelry, fine art, and distinguished collections, but for Laura, “collecting has always been about the stories.” 



Laura, what was it like growing up in the auction business, and what were your earliest encounters with collectors or with collecting?

 It was magical to grow up and run around this building that we’re still in on 87th Street, going to different auctions that we did on premises outside of the city and auctions here in our existing space, and then clients’ homes. I accompanied my dad, and during the exhibitions, I hung out and was in his office. He always had a lot of things in a cabinet in his office. He was a fan of the instant collection. He would buy a collection from a client, and then we would suddenly have that collection, like Tartanware, for example. Or he bought a collection of dolls for me once.


 If collecting is a journey, what, from your perspective, constitutes that first step?



 You buy your first piece, whatever it is, and it’s the second piece that makes it a collection. Is there a thread between them? do they have something in common? Do you find that you’re drawn to the same artist or the same type of object? How do they speak to each other? For collectors who really get excited about collecting, it's never finished. And there are some collectors who are very disciplined, which is always shocking to me. They’ll be like, “I’ve completed this collection of this certain type of prints from this period of time, and I have exactly what I want. Now, I will sell this collection, and I'm going to start collecting something new.” That's interesting as a collecting style. Mine is much more eclectic. It's much more random, and it’s not intentional. I think of myself more as a shopper than a collector.



 What are some objects you've collected that you've seen yourself in over the stages of your life?



 I grew up with traditional paintings and furniture in our home. So the first pieces that I bought weren't traditional. Those, to me, felt like a big step because it's easy to buy more of what you know or is familiar to you. It's harder to take a risk. Some of those things would be like the 

painting that I have. It was graffiti, and it also referred to Franz Kline, who I thought was interesting and used less traditional materials like spray paint and house paint. I bought it at auction. 

It's become even more interesting to me as our company has developed a relationship with 

. He's done two murals for us and an eighties New York piece for our ‘80s New York sale last fall. I also thought the Tristan Eaton ‘Botched Operation’ I bought from Opera Gallery was very cool.



 Are there any types of collectors or types of collections specific or archetypically that you're jealous of or that you envy? Like, “Oh man, I really wish I had this collection of tiny pewter pigs.”



 I love jewelry. My eye is probably best suited for jewelry. So often, the things that I love in a sale are the ones that go much higher. I do think that kind of eye for value is a key part of what we do in our business. My dad had an incredible eye for value. He could see it even if he didn't know what it was. I do have fantasy collections of art. For a while, it was like a Cecily Brown with a [Willem] de Kooning, and now, Flora Yukhnovich. She's very contemporary. There is a Renoir kind of fleshiness to those that exist on a continuum.



 I love the intergenerational play here. I feel like any considered collection of art, jewelry, furniture, or anything does that and allows you to almost play God historically or chronologically. Putting everyone in the same room is putting them in the same moment.



 It's not that it’s so much about each individual one; it’s just how they relate to each other. 

 What about that eye for value? From your perspective, both personally and at the helm of DOYLE, how have you seen the market change?

About ten years ago, I remember saying it felt like the market was on a candy binge and that they were coming to us for a home-cooked meal. And I feel that again. I feel like it’s been on a candy binge, and I think that people are being more thoughtful about what they're buying. There’s a price point where people still feel very comfortable. That’s in the seven figures and below, which is sort of our sweet spot. We see when there’s volatility that there’s interest in prints because people feel safe. We see people feeling comfortable with things that have an inherent value, like jewelry, coins, or silver.

We always see people looking to us for discovery—artists who have been overlooked or undervalued or whose work has gained new meaning in today's context that might not have resonated in the same way previously. The last several years, women artists or a more diverse group of artists have seen a lot of interest from buyers. People are also looking regionally in the U.S., looking to southern artists if they’re from the South, and it brings them a connection to where they come from.


 How do changes in the market affect your customers?


 I think the market is cyclical. People get really excited and speculative, thinking that everything should go up continually. It’s the same with private equity projections of hockey sticks or whatever that people expect the art market to be as predictable as other financial markets. There’s been a lot of cycles around that in terms of how people are investing in art. Our message has always been: buy what you love. Regardless of market and fluctuations and value, if you buy something that you love, that you want to have in your home, that you want to wear and enjoy and use, you’re immune to those fluctuations because you have a connection to the piece. The other piece of it is that people come to us with an expectation of value. So they're looking for things that they feel... That’s why auction is so important in these markets: because of the variable pricing and the power of the underbidder.
Collecting has this bittersweet quality to it where it’s positive, it’s additive, it’s bringing something into your life, and into your living room. But it’s also attesting to the fact that this thing doesn’t exist in its original context.
My dad always said: “We just borrow these things,” and I think that’s true. We're caretakers. One of the categories that’s the most exciting for people is single-owner collections because they help teach people how to collect. That was a big thing about [Stephen] Sondheim’s collection, seeing how this genius, whom we all know and that we all can immediately make a connection to through his music and his musicals, how he collected and which objects inspired him.



 How do you think about auctioning heirlooms?


 We get to experience people who are selling for all different reasons. You see something someone’s inherited, like a painting collection or a piece of jewelry, and then that piece in their life becomes a graduate school education, a new home, or the start of another type of collection. If you leave these items of value to your family, they can become seeds for the future. Transferring a collection into something else is kind of magical.


 Too often, we focus on death, divorce, and debt. But these objects can transform into something else.


 I think of it as freedom. That’s the other piece, particularly women and jewelry and seeing so many women buying for themselves. I love that as a mom of four daughters.


 How would you recommend people get started with vintage jewelry?


 Look at a lot of different things. Your eye definitely develops over time. It’s like art. You develop an instinct for it, a sense of stones, a sense of things, where the value and the piece don’t jive. Talk to our specialists. They look at so much stuff that they can also be huge resources. It isn’t as easy to find and learn about the marks on jewelry. You really have to see the different shades of stones to develop that instinct. But the other thing that the jewelry market has is labs; so, if you're buying a stone, there are things that are knowable. There are things that are gradable. You’re not going to get a grade on a Rothko. The value is different in that way. There is an intrinsic value. There is a weight to the gold. There are measurements to the stones, and there are makers that have more value than others. There’s always a lot of opportunity in things that are unsigned. Sometimes, I buy things that I like the look of, and they’re unsigned, so they’re affordable.


 Something like a diamond or maybe something like gold has been pretty much a constant in human history. What about other types of stones?


 We’ve seen a huge rise in colored stones. It’s particularly sapphires and rubies, but also stones like aquamarine are really popular. They’re much better value than some of the other stones. That 1950s and 1960s kind of aquamarine jewelry is very popular right now. People are also consistently interested in natural pearls. That totally changed throughout my career. When I first started, nobody had any interest in natural pearls. But as the market has become much more global, and particularly as the Middle East and India has become more active, that has reignited interest.


 Tell me about pricing strategy—the Patek Phillipe I saw in the catalog will surely go for five times the estimate.


 Maybe, maybe not. That’s the appeal of auctions, and we put the prices to draw the widest audience. That's what people expect from us: attractive estimates. When we are too tight on the reserve and the market price of something, it doesn’t sing. It doesn’t have the energy. We’re creating desire, and we want to create desire amongst as many people as possible because that’s what makes an auction work.


 Creating desire. It’s a bit of theater, right?


 The worst thing that happens in an auction is you get one bid because nobody feels good about that. The power of the underbidder is the best thing about auctions. The people who feel the least happy with their purchase are the ones bidding against the reserve. It doesn’t mean that that’s not worth that price. It just doesn’t have the same energy. So, for an auctioneer, having a lot of bidders participating and feeling engaged is good for everybody actually. It is good for the bidders, and it is good for the sellers and it is good for the auction house.



 I want to ask you about that box in your collection.



The box was the first thing that my dad bought at auction when he was nine. He went to his first auction with his great aunt, and he was bidding on this box, and then there was a bidding war, and everyone started shouting. “Let the kid have it, let the kid have it!” Then he gave it to me when I was nine.

I keep coming back to that box and re-curating some of the things that go in it. It came with my dad’s baby spoon in it when he gave it to me. Then, a matchbox from my wedding and other little special ephemera. A box is such an interesting idea: a vessel of its own collection within a collection.



 It could have been any object, a geode or a Ty Cobb rookie card. But he got a box, and you got a box. I love it.  Anything else to leave the readers with? Things that you’re excited about the future of collecting?



 I’m excited about Gen Z. They are interested in objects, in sustainability, and in history. They have the potential to be the next great collecting generation. It feels very authentic. We’re seeing some really junior collectors. Someone showed up with all his Bar Mitzvah money, and he wanted to buy a rare book. Someone else was saving his money to start a coin collection. It’s super exciting to know that in such a digital age, people are interested in objects and things. With all that's being talked about with the great wealth transfer, this is going to be an engaged audience. It’s not just digital; it’s not just the metaverse. They’re interested in real things.


Laura Doyle

Hunter Braithwaite

An interview with Laura Doyle on growing up at the auctions, the different ways in which people collect, and having an eye for value. 

Creating Desire

The air in the church hung heavy with incense and wax, pressing down upon the congregants as fatigue does upon an eyelid. Through this fog, the disparate small flames of the candles, stuck into pedestaled candle holders filled with sand, united in a diffuse glow that warmed the gold leaf of the altar, the robes of the priests, the deacons, and the altar boys, the hands of the choirmaster, and the faces of the babushkas, framed by the cloth of their headscarves, as they fulfilled the duties of praying or fussing about.

Many Wednesday and Friday evenings and every Sunday of my adolescence were spent standing there for two hours at a time, next to my mother, collecting myself into something that resembled introspection, concealing the profound boredom that would take over me. In this boredom, I would look at the images surrounding me: the frescoes of saints Vera, Nadezhda, Lyubov—Faith, Hope, and Love—on one wall, the seven deadly sins on another, angels and biblical motifs on the domed ceilings. The church, built on the bank of the Moskva in 1769 by Count Alexey Grigorievich Razumovsky, a cossack who slept his way to the top, ascending through the ranks as the lover of Empress Elizaveta Petrovna, is named after its central icon, 

, depicting the Annunciation at the moment of Christ’s conception. The Virgin’s hands raised are to the heavens, the child in an aureole upon her chest. What I remember best about this icon was the time I was reprimanded by one of the fussing babushkas who had seen me find my reflection in the glass of its frame and fix my own headscarf. Vanity.

The prayers I had known by heart have long disintegrated into incidental shards of Old Slavonic. Instead, I remember the stories of the relics I have encountered in my years of coerced piety: the icon, also of the Virgin Mary, that churchgoers at the Vvedensky Monastery in Kyiv discovered had embossed itself on the glass before it one morning; years prior the icon had cried, real, salty tears supposedly streaming down the cheeks of the image, a fairly common type of miracle. Shortly after the embossing was discovered, it was said to have cured a pregnant woman from hepatitis.

Or an older example, one of which I had only seen derivative versions—the 

, held on Mount Athos since 999 A.D., where she is the only representative of the female sex; the icon was said to have been stabbed and dropped in the sea by Byzantine iconoclasts and recovered on the island by Gabriel the Iberian, a monk on the island, who had received the instructions for its retrieval from the Virgin herself when she came to him in a dream, he was to walk over water until he found it. The icon was placed in the main church of the monastery, only to go missing again the next morning. It appeared atop the entry gate, where it had “chosen” to protect the cloister and its men. There it has stayed, albeit now enclosed in a chapel.

, which, since being brought from Constantinople to the Russes in the fifteenth century, had a habit of going missing for a century at a time, appearing in dreams, being recovered from ashes, and later, through police investigations. Its habitual disappearances came to be interpreted in the Orthodox church as a sign of historic cataclysms to come. It is unclear if the original icon still exists.

Convoluted as they are, these narratives imbue their subjects and the sites that house them with greater value on the market of religious veneration—they become the end-point of pilgrimages; believers in their wonders leave behind jewelry and photographs of loved ones, notes, and other keepsakes. It was always in religion’s favor that when it comes to these objects, provenance is most often a matter of faith. 

In a period of itinerancy that has brought upon me a state of clattering lonesomeness, in every city I find myself drawn to its museums to find some sort of center, or balance, or God, or myself, or peace, or whatever it is that the spiritually-inclined look for in the places they designate for worship. I mostly think of it as silence, a reprieve from the clatter. The itinerancy, a result of world-historical events beyond the confines of my life, feels counteracted in being surrounded by objects that function as conduits of time, its concentration mounting until it overwhelms my lifespan and those of everyone else in the galleries with me. But what isn’t the product of historical events beyond itself?

The fact that the paintings I was looking at were on these walls and the paths they had taken to end up there were in themselves confirmation of this.

. And so, at the Musée d’Orsay, in a gallery near the end of an enfilade, where people move like schools of fish around a coral reef, I stand before the parquet planers—

completed by Gustave Caillebotte in 1875. It is a painting of a room, illuminated with a cool light through its window, guarded with decorative wrought iron. Three men kneel, their bare torsos bent towards the floor, doing what they are announced to be doing in the painting’s title. Two of them with their heads turned slightly towards each other, as if mid-conversation, the kind that is inconclusive, constructed of remarks, quickly absorbed by the activity that kindled it. The wood shavings lay on the floor in delicate curls, which one can imagine dancing from under the workers’ tools. The rest of the floor possesses a dull gleam, like tarnished gold. In the corner, there is a bottle of red wine, a tumbler, half-full, next to it.

Like most of Caillebotte’s work, the painting possesses a photographic dynamism, reveling in the continuous present that it transmits; the composition slightly askew, the lines of the room pulling into its corner, the cropped frame in which the room is contained, offering voyeuristic intimacy. The painting’s theme was novel at the time—while depictions of those laboring in pastoral settings had long become common, the urban proletariat was new to the canvas. As these things went with the Impressionists when it was presented at the 1875 Paris Salon, the jury was shocked by the painting’s “crude realism,” the critics made accusations of torture, perspective its alleged victim, the artist grew ever more resistant to the orthodoxies of the academy. The painting was shown again the following year at the Second Impressionist Exhibition.

It went on to a rather sheltered journey through time, from one state institution to the next: in 1877, it was part of an auction at the Hôtel Drouot organized by Renoir, his own works among the 45 paintings, as well as those of Caillebotte, Pissarro, and Sisley. The paintings at the auction did poorly, fetching an average of 169 Francs; it appears the Caillebotte had bought back his floor planers, who had been offered at 655 Francs. It remained in the artist’s personal collection until his death in 1894, upon which it was bequeathed to the French Government, along with the rest of Caillebotte’s collection of 68 paintings, including the work of his friends—Pissarro, Renoir, Monet, Manet, Sisley, Degas, Cézanne, and, of course, his own. The bequest stipulated that the works should be displayed at the Musée du Luxembourg, and it took Renoir, who was the executor of the will, some negotiating for the collection to enter that of the museum. This was the first presentation of the Impressionists in an official venue. It remained there until it was moved to the Louvre in 1929. In 1947, it was moved to the Jeu de Paume, with a brief detour to the Élysée Palace between 1977 and 1978, where it was called in by President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who was undoing the modernist redecoration of his predecessor, Georges Pompidou; Giscard d’Estaing’s tastes skewed in the direction of what, by then, was considered more traditional. In 1986, the

made their way to the Museé d’Orsay, where now listless viewers like myself can admire it for idiosyncratic amounts of time.

The list of hands and institutions through which the painting has passed can be read as a linear accounting for the origins of a museum item; it exists as such on the museum’s website and betrays little of what it carries with it. For one, it is the story of how Impressionism went from being an outcast art movement to an establishment darling—about the friendships and alliances that were at the movements basis, about the fact that, by the time the painting was moved from the Musée du Luxembourg, which then showed only the work of living artists, those who were represented in the donated collection were no longer such; it is the story of the strategic foresight Caillebotte exercised not only as an artist but also as a collector, having known, that the works in his possession he regarded to be future art-historical treasures would otherwise languish in attics and on unwitting living room walls, would he, as a dead man, not insist that the French state not only accept them but display them; it is the story of the institutions themselves. It poses the question of what constitutes a movement, the painting discussed by far not the most representative of Impressionism and, if anything, more occupied with furthering the realist tradition. Does it add value? In simple market terms, probably. Though what does that matter when a painting is not for sale? It certainly adds heft to the painting’s presence on the museum’s walls, and even if all who come to look at it, with purpose or by happenstance, might not be aware of it, on some intuitive level, it makes itself known; 

being, most likely, what Walter Benjamin meant by 

Though of course, if you really want to talk about provenance and how arresting it can be, you just need to travel a few floors down and step into one of the side galleries, where museumgoers never pass by Courbet’s 

At the Albertina in Vienna, I stood, once again, before a painting, barely able to keep in laughter. It was Paul Klee’s 1927

in which, against a stormy brown background, a pink-faced man in a flared jester’s robe is mid-dance. The position of his legs encased in stockings suggests a wiggling lightness; his arms are splayed outwards, fingers fanned in jazz-hands fashion. Flying about this figure are the bells attached to its robe, which are oversized and look eerily like a swarm of flat-mouthed emoji, unamused, which was doubtfully the intent in 1927. Yet the meme-infested mind can not quiet itself. Stifling juvenile giggles, I thought, "What if THIS was the Angel of History?” It was hung in a hallway-like space between galleries; nobody else seemed to share my response, they just walked by. I shall spare us all the spoof version of the ninth thesis in 

 that began its vague dance in my mind; if I were to resort back to the language of religion, this was certainly a case of being befallen by temptation. I took a picture, which I would later post to my Instagram stories with a goofy caption, and moved on too.

Nobody comes to look at art with a pure mind, not with the reference libraries most carry in their heads, even if they are of varying sizes, even if the junk that intermixes with the masterworks is different in each one. Perhaps the marker of a good education is the ability to unpack this library, but what is left for the rest of us? For our perception to be interrupted by involuntary eruptions of humor that function like a memetic jack-in-the-box, falling limp as soon as it jumps out, that is what appears to be left. And so, Walter Benjamin sits next to emoji and basic meme formats—

signaling that I hold a university degree in liberal arts or something like it and am part of a particular generational cohort that has spent a lot of time online, my own thinking characterizing me in the most facile terms possible. What it also does is reduce Benjamin’s 

 to empty form, husk-like, along with my own personhood. Just like the memes. Sacrilege.

Even when pushed further, this has its obvious limitations: I did, in earnest, start working on a spoof version of the most famous of Benjamin’s theses, only to understand that much of the text’s magic is its baggage—the provenance of its subject, Paul Klee’s, 

(1920). Benjamin bought the painting from the artist, a friend, in 1921, setting off the chain that would become the work’s fate. Like the collector he had once described,

the fragment sees him, its narrator, turning into the earnest “physiognomist of the world of objects,” ascribing the image its meaning, telling us that the angel’s face is turned towards the past, that all of history, to him, is a single catastrophe, that a storm from Paradise gets caught in his wings, and propels him, violently, into the future; “this storm is what we call progress,” he concludes.

Where has the catastrophe or progress—the two sometimes swirling together into a tornado of circumstance—taken the Angel? In the ’30s, it led an itinerant life along with its owner, roaming Europe, their final resting stop together at a disused furniture factory in Vernuche, France, that functioned as an internment camp for German Jews. Before departing on his final, fatal journey to Spain, Benjamin left the Angel, along with his papers, to Georges Bataille; after the war, the Angel, along with the philosopher’s other possessions, traveled to New York, into the custody of Theodor Adorno. From Adorno’s hands, the Angel wandered to Jerusalem, into those of Walter Benjamin’s close friend, the man who became the custodian of his legacy, Gershom Scholem, whose widow later gave the painting to the Israel Museum in 1987. Its paper now fragile, the painting is rarely exhibited, but it seems bitterly providential that the Angel now observes the catastrophe of history from what was, during Benjamin’s life, Palestine.

There is little I can say about the fate of 

, other than that it was lent to the Albertina for the long term by the son of a German TV baron, who followed in his father's footsteps, or that Klee had painted it during his Bauhaus days. But I cannot look at it without thinking about the emoji or 

, though, if anything, it is perhaps affirmative of the disjunction between the lyrical thrust of Benjamin’s thesis and Klee’s naive, silly manner of figuration of Benjamin’s peculiar sense of humor.

“The only exact knowledge there is,” said Anatole France, as quoted by Benjamin in the essay 

, “is the knowledge of the date of publication and the format of the books.” And so, perhaps, it is too with anything else. Everything else is the fantasies and historiographical projections we read into it, the physiognomies we, as unwitting collectors of images, interpret.

A fifteen-minute walk away, past the Staatsoper and the Burggarten, into the hallway of the Museumsquartier’s courtyards, at the Leopold Museum, I wandered through an exhibition dedicated to German New Objectivity. Titled 

, the exhibition was curated to capture the interwar period and the strange transitional state of its licentious decadence as it sobers up and sees the harsh light cast upon the world. Things as they are.

The centerpiece of this exhibition, as the museum identified it in their ads across the city, was Christian Schad’s 

Made in Vienna in 1927, the picture depicts the artist glancing sideways from the painting, a probing furrow in his brows, his lips pressed together firmly, hair slicked back. He wears a diaphanous absinthe-green shirt, his torso still bare under this futile veil of fabric, which gathers like a shadow in the folds of his body, the patch of hair on his chest flattened by the tasseled strings binding the shirt’s neckline. Behind him is a woman, the model from the painting’s title, sitting in profile, her hair in a sharp black bob that echoes her aquiline nose, her face made up according to the fashion of the time, lips parted slightly, and a scar on her cheek like the ones the artist had seen on the faces of women in Naples—marks left by men on their lovers, an assertion of ownership. She is nude, besides a black ribbon tied in a bow on her wrist and a sliver of a red stocking that the viewer is otherwise left to imagine. A white narcissus protrudes from behind her shoulder. In the window, a transparent curtain reveals the rooftops of what looks like Paris in the twilight. A symbolic (as stated by the artist himself) exploration of narcissism and identity (as determined by art historians), the painting possesses a piercing coldness; there’s a seductive cruelty in the artist’s indictment of himself and his contemporaries, whether it is out of judgment or nihilistic embrace of its soul-sickness. The liminal quality of the painting—the clothed nakedness, the not-quite-night state of the sky, the composite character that is the model—captures the suspension of the historical moment; post-war is pre-war. Its details are excruciating.

While avoiding conscription during WWI, waiting it out in Switzerland, Schad was a participant witness to the founding of Cabaret Voltaire and the emergence of Dada, beginning his artistic career during this time. In the 1920s, carting through Naples, then Vienna, then settling in Berlin, he went on to become one of the prominent Post-Expressionists. In the 1930s, he was said to have withdrawn from art due to financial issues; he returned to painting in the 1940s, working obscurely but comfortably in the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg until his death in 1982. Many of his contemporaries, friends, those in the company of whose works his self-portrait will hang in Vienna until the end of this month—Otto Dix, George Grosz, Max Beckmann, Käthe Kollwitz, Karl Hofer—were decried by the Nazis as “insulting German feeling,” their work and featured in the 1937 

and their career prospects slashed. Schad, however, had been spared this fate; in fact, his work was featured in 

exhibition of the same year, whether it was because his symbolism hid behind a style more palatable to the nazis, even if it did sometimes depict men kissing or women masturbating, or the fact that he had been a member of the NSDAP between 1933 and 1943—unclear. Likely, both.

The bare facts of the painting’s comings and goings, beyond it being loaned to the Leopold Museum by the Tate, where it has been on a long-term loan from a private collection since 1994, are likely to be found among the Tate's documents. I don't have access to them now, and that doesn't really matter. 

The list of dates, places, and names that constitute the painting’s provenance would probably not yield much in the way of narrative offerings. We are accustomed to looking for stories of artistic abandon at heroic scales, perseverance in the face of challenging circumstances, spectacular eccentricity, tragedy, and, if nothing else, evil genius; often, however, the art we admire carries with it the unremarkable. Perhaps it is a man who makes a moral compromise to continue doing the work he loves. Perhaps, it is not much of a moral compromise that he has made—when questioned under the denazification program of the Allied Forces, Schad would say that he was entirely disinterested in politics and point out his collection of occult books as proof of his misalignment with nazi ideology. Should this diminish the “value” of the work, the impact it has on the viewer? “The chronicler, who recounts events without distinguishing between the great and small, thereby accounts for the truth, that nothing which has ever happened is to be given as lost to history.” Benjamin, once again.

During a two-day layover in Zürich last summer, I went to the Kunsthaus. It was near perfect: I bought my ticket as the museum opened and, with two hours before I had to get to my computer to start working, I made my way through its galleries, mostly empty of other visitors, starting from its 1976 annexe by Erwin Müller to the original 1925 corpus by Karl Moser, through the 1958 extension by the Pfister brothers, into its latest, Chipperfield-designed, addition, each space exemplary of its time. I gave in easily to the delight and wonder of discovering works with which I had not been familiar prior, becoming infatuated with them; I was particularly overcome by this feeling in the small gallery of works by Félix Vallotton. At the risk of sounding overly sincere, I’ll admit to having found life-affirming comfort in the fact that there is so much of which I am not aware, to which only circumstance will lead me—an easy kind of luck.

This feeling filled the gallery spaces, clashing with the neutral grandiosity with which they were designed. But by the time I got to the Chipperfield building, this feeling was punctured. It may have been the newness of these walls, the abundance of brass that evoked a recent-datedness, or the Cathedral-like proportions of the windows, which offer an amount of light unnecessary for a museum, or it may have been the plaque near one of the 28 replicas of Degas’ 

, who stood there freely, not encased in glass, with her cotton tutu and a ribbon tying her bronze braid. The plaque informed visitors that the works in this part of the museum belong to the collection of the German-born Swiss arms manufacturer Emil Bührle, which was being investigated on account of provenance issues—much of Bührle’s collection was acquired in Nazi-occupied Paris—and that the museum was in the process of finding “just and fair solutions” to these issues with the heirs of the works’ former owners.

Not much time was left, and I felt saturated, so I headed out to walk around in the old town of Zürich. Having spent much of my childhood in the neighboring canton of Zug, I had once known this tangle of cobbled streets well. I walked them every Sunday after service; one of Switzerland’s few Orthodox churches was nearby. It was strange to be a tourist in a place that was once so familiar.

It was a breezy day for August, and the streets were mostly empty. I observed the tableaux of prosperity that the shop windows formed: at the luthier’s, the violins hung lined up by size, their lacquered spruce and rosewood bodies catching the light in their curves; the pharmacy displayed vitamins and fancy sunscreen, insoles for every kind of shoe and a large selection of elegant hair clips with tortoiseshell and malachite patterns; at the stationary store the Caran d'Ache pens and pencils and leather-bound notebooks beckoned suggestively with diligence and productivity. For a while, I stopped in front of an antique store. It was closed, but in the display’s lights gleamed a neoclassical mantel clock, with the bronze figure of a woman in luxuriant recline on a base of white stone; before it, the shop window bore the signs of attempted theft. Webs of cracked glass obstructed my view of the clock. The scene felt apt for a place designed to enchant, concealing the sinister in its neat, gold-threaded seams. I was not immune to its charms.

To observe it is one thing; to live with it is another. Most major museums across Europe and the United States disclaim one thing or another, acknowledging the injustice, inequality, or violence from which it has benefitted. Provenance is often at the center of these reckonings, as things of narrative potency are bound to be—it is where the mysteries to be solved and the controversies to be inflamed live. The Leopold Museum has had its fair share of Nazi loot and restitution controversies, and so has the Albertina. At the Musée d’Orsay, Courbet’s 

had long been the subject of speculation, until 2018, when every riddle to do with the work, from who had commissioned it to, centrally, the identity of its sitter, was resolved by the historian Claude Schopp. The Kunsthaus in Zürich continues to account for the French art that it houses, returning paintings now and then. Just this summer, five paintings were removed from its collection, and a settlement was reached on the subject of another—and renewing its provenance research commitments and strategies.

A few months after my visit, in November, an exhibition titled 

 opened at the museum, which contextualizes the Bührle collection, bringing in the biographies of the former owners of individual works, “whose sale took place under questionable circumstances,” stating elsewhere in the materials for the exhibition that “the Kunsthaus wants to talk about these issues.” It is not the only museum that does: in recent years, museums across the west, from Brussels to Chicago, have put on exhibitions addressing the question of how the artifacts before the public’s eyes have ended up there. Museums are expanding and fortifying their provenance research departments, and new hires in this area make headlines, providing museums with opportunities to publicize these efforts in restitution and redemption. Provenance has become a useful tool in these attempts to redraw their legacies, entrenched in the histories of power in the nations that bore them, be they of the imperial, colonial, or financial sort. What else is an institution to do in the age of transparency?

In more abstract terms, I’d like to return to the collection, where provenance forms and turns into the fate of a work. Will it be moved unlawfully? Will it be moved because of a war? Will it be sold? What is the estimate and what is its realized prize? Will it end up on the walls of a sprawling private property? Of a corporate lobby? Of a museum? Or will it while away decades in a freeport? Another distillation: the owners of the world collecting its fate. It will inevitably outlive them, absorbing their collectors into history—and such, perhaps, is their purpose. Sometimes it is harder to account for where you have come from and where you have been than it is to let objects speak for you. 

Stacey Streshinsky

Time courses through the world of objects. 

Long Term

We asked our favorite collectors about the item or work that started it all. Eileen Harris Norton highlighted a 1990 David Hammons found art piece, 

; NADA Executive Director Heather Hubbs told us about her childhood Crinoid collection, which grows every time she visits home; Pamela and David Hornik told us about their first collector's intuitions; Elizabeth Leach expounded on the graduation present that never came to be; National Black Theatre CEO Sade Lythcott explained what her collection of Hermès scarves means to her; Jordan Schnitzer recounted his precocious first acquisitions; Co-founders of the interdisciplinary creative studio Zoo as Zoo Ami Sueki and My Nguyen talked about the jacket that started the Zoo archive closet. We all start somewhere.

(1990) is one of the pieces that I bought early on with my former husband. It’s not the first piece we bought together, and it's not the first artwork I bought, but I have several David Hammons in my collection. I’ve always been a fan of David's. He started his career in Los Angeles as an artist, but later moved to New York. I was born and raised here [in LA] and naturally gravitated to his work. Many of the pieces I bought are more of his edgier pieces; I’ll say push the boundaries of art, and that's what I enjoy about collecting them.

David is uniquely himself. When he walks the street, he sees something, and creates something fabulous from the thing that we usually would just walk by. Of course, in the case of this artwork, it’s a rock, but the hair on it is actually from a barbershop that he went to. So he added the hair to it. And then, of course, the pedestal, he just found on the streets of Harlem, walking down as he does. Many of his pieces are just pieces he found just walking along the streets, things that people have thrown out, but he transformed them.

Seeing black artists create art has been a thread throughout my life… I first encountered Ruth Waddy, and then years later, I met David. I've encountered many other Black artists, such as Lorna Simpson, Glenn Ligon, Gary Simmons, and many others. These artists have shaped my collecting history and challenged my notions of what art can be. I admire these artists and their craft.

We have always been drawn to painterly paintings. We loved impasto before we knew what impasto was. So when we saw Ray Turner’s gorgeous, thick, expressive paint on glass, we lost our minds. We still do. As parents of four small children at the time, the fact that the painting was of Ray Turner’s son, George, was a bonus.

Growing up in Northwest Indiana on Lake Michigan, I went swimming all the time. There, these fossils wash up on the shore with all the other rocks, called crinoids (aka Sea Lillies). They come in all different sizes and colors, but they are always round. Sometimes they have a star-shape in the middle, sometimes it’s a round hole, and the texture can vary. They were stacked when they were whole and intact, and then over time, they break apart into single discs and wash ashore. I’ve amassed a collection of about 800 over the years. It resulted in a particular appreciation for objects and wanting to take care of them, to keep them; I went on to collect other things including a crazy collection of ceramic Hello Kitty coin banks.

Working at Sotheby’s after graduating from college, I would go on collection visits with different experts. They weren't always art collections; once, I went to a factory building, now the Mana building in Chicago, which used to be owned by an automotive parts company. The gentleman who owned the company loved Tiffany lamps, and he bought a Tiffany lamp for every office in the building, which was a lot because it was big. The company was closing, and they were auctioning off the Tiffany lamp collection; I went there to assist in tagging all of the Tiffany lamps, and I had an expansive moment where I realized what it looked like to authentically collect something you love, and realized that is what I had done with the crinoids, it’s just that the crinoids are free.

But even then, I never really thought about being able to buy art on my own. It wasn't until I started working for Art Chicago (the fair was called Art Chicago before it became Expo) that I made the leap. We were in the selection committee meeting for the fair, and I had seen a work at Anthony Meier Fine Art that I liked. I remember talking to him about how much I liked the painting, and he said, "Well, you should buy it." And I was like, "I can't afford it." And he's like, 'You can pay it in installments. Just pay whatever you can pay now and then pay later." And I was like, "Oh, I can do that?" And so, I bought it, and that was the start. That was where it began. It was a Jeremy Dickinson painting called Autotank III and I still own that painting.

I was very fortunate to study Art History in high school. It was my passion, and we had an incredible teacher. For my High School graduation, my father generously offered to buy me an artwork. When we were in San Francisco, we went to the John Berggruen Gallery, where I looked way up on the wall. The art was salon style—almost two stories high, it seemed—and I asked, "What is that piece?” It was a Sam Francis, which was beyond the budget provided.

So, I waited for the right piece. In college, I became involved with the Light & Space artists in L.A. That is when I found this incredible drawing by Hap Tivey from the year he spent in a monastery in Japan. I love this piece - the simplicity of the line drawing and the narrative. It is somewhat mysterious.

Collecting rare Hermès scarves that showcase people of color in all their power and majesty is a profound act of reclaiming visibility and celebration. Each piece, meticulously crafted, becomes more than just an accessory; it is a vibrant tapestry that reflects a rich, often overlooked narrative. In these scarves, the magnificence of people of color is captured with elegance and reverence, challenging historical invisibility and redefining notions of beauty and status. For me, this collection is not merely about luxury but about honoring and elevating our stories, weaving them into the fabric of fashion and history with grace and significance.

My first acquisition, by which I mean that I was given the piece, was when my mother, the late Arlene Schnitzer, decided to open the Fountain Gallery of Art. Her mother, Helen Director, found the cheapest space in town for $50 a month in the New Market Theater, built in 1872 in Portland. We don't have that many buildings that old, like they do on the East Coast.

One day, I went down to the gallery, and I saw some artists helping to sheetrock the walls and paint the walls. I also saw an odd cabinet over the side with these little drawers. And I thought to myself, "That's funny. How do you put sweaters or clothes in there?" So I go over—I'm now in the third grade—and I pull out a drawer, and it's a print cabinet. And I'm looking at a beautiful work by Stanley Hayter, a famous British artist who spent most of his time in Paris. I'm looking at this gorgeous, fuchsia-colored work. My mother comes over and says to me, looking over my shoulder: "Do you like that?" And I said, "Yes." She says, "Well, you can have it."

Some years later, in addition to being fortunate that my parents would give me art for my birthday, Hanukkah, and other events, when I actually bought my first piece, I was 14. One of the most important artists in the Pacific Northwest was a man named Louis Bunce. While he was not a very tall man, probably 5'8", he was one of those bigger-than-life characters wearing these tweed jackets and scarves around his neck. He had this savoir-faire and smoked like a fiend. Just like David Hockney, there was a cigarette flopping on his lips all the time and ashes falling all over. But he certainly wooed all the students in school with his character and personality. I was lucky he always paid attention to me. I loved his work. There was a small work called 

. It cost $75. I saw it, went to my mother, and said, "I want to buy it." There was a 20% family discount, so I paid $60 for it—$5 a month out of my allowance. I've always said my mother knew where to foreclose if I missed a payment since my bedroom was down the hall. I've kept that work with me; it's on the fireplace in the master bedroom.

This jacket by Clarissa Arocena of HIPS Studio is part of the very first collection that started Zoo’s archive closet. The year is 2016: we had just established ourselves as a studio. We’re in the process of inviting emerging fashion designers to join our StylePark program, designed to collect thesis collections and find placements for them within our works to extend the collections' life cycle. We were particularly drawn to Clarissa’s curiosity, experimental process, and use of unconventional materials.

Clarissa and Ami have been friends since freshman year in college. Through a decade-long collaboration and friendship, the two studios have seen their fundamental alignment in work ethics and philosophy. This garment serves as a gentle reminder of their origins—where they started and where they’re going.

Eileen Harris Norton

Heather Hubbs

Pamela and David Hornik

Elizabeth Leach

Sade Lythcott

Jordan Schnitzer

Ami Sueki and My Nguyen

We asked collectors we admire about the first items they admired enough to acquire.

First Things First

Issue 6

For all its complexities, the engine of the art world is surprisingly simple. Its power is derived from two related human conditions: the drive to create and the drive to collect. When you realize this basic truth, every issue of every publication is a collecting issue. Every stop on the art world circuit is a collection junction. And so we could have done this anytime.

Fair week paraded by with Armory, Independent, and the new arrival COLLECTIBLE Design. The galleries are back from break, their summer group shows rehung with works that will set the tone of the season. And then, of course, the auctions. September, exceptional in the density of objects and velocity of wire transfers, exclaims a year-round truth. We like collecting.

Accumulation makes us human. Most people would say their objects (or network of friends or mental slideshow of experiences) define who they are. But collecting, the thought and strategy required to do it right, is key to another echelon. Digital wallets, hoarded closets, climate-controlled galleries—all exist in the collecting continuum.

Here’s a sampling:


Understanding the collecting impulse as a lifelong affliction (“a disease,” Marc Glimcher put it), Jane Drinkard goes scouting for childhood symptoms, interviewing seven collectors we admire 

For Laura Doyle of Doyle Auctions, a gift from her father acquired at auction when he was a boy set the course for generations of the family-run auction house. In a 

 with Hunter Braithwaite, Doyle talks market froth, the power of the underbidder, and the alchemy of auctioning one collection so that one might create another.

A similar metamorphosis occurred deeper in history, discovers John Vincler in his essay 

 when refuse gathered by Nuremberg's scavenging underclass became the material for some of the finest books in history. Rags to riches, indeed.

, Stacey Streshinsky wanders the halls of European museums, piecing together the provenance that connects all great works of art—and all of us.

Letter from the Editor