Oral History Interview with Clifford Schorer, 2018, June 6-7
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Oral history interview with Clifford Schorer, 2018, June 6-7 Funding for this interview was provided by Barbara Fleischman. Contact Information Reference Department Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution Washington. D.C. 20560 www.aaa.si.edu/askus Transcript Preface The following oral history transcript is the result of a recorded interview with Clifford Schorer on June 6 and 7, 2018. The interview was conducted by Judith Olch Richards for the Archives of American Art and the Center for the History of Collecting in America at the Frick Art Reference Library of The Frick Collection, and took place at the offices of the Archives of American Art in New York, NY. Clifford Schorer and Judith Olch Richards have reviewed this transcript. Their corrections and emendations appear below in brackets with initials. Researchers should note the timecode in this transcript is approximate. This transcript has been lightly edited for readability by the Archives of American Art. The reader should bear in mind that they are reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose. Interview JUDITH RICHARDS: This is Judith Olch Richards interviewing Clifford J. Schorer III, on June 6, 2018, at the Archives of American Art offices in New York City. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Hello. JUDITH RICHARDS: Hello. Good afternoon. I wanted to start by asking you to say when and where you were born, and to talk about your immediate family, their names, and anyone else who was important to you in your family. CLIFFORD SCHORER: So there are those who were present that were important to me, and there's one figure who was not present who was very important to me. So I was born in 1966 in Rockville Centre, New York. I lived —my youth was split between Brooklyn Heights, Massapequa, Long Island, and Martha's Vineyard, with probably more time on Martha's Vineyard than anywhere else, where my aunt lived—my great-aunt, actually. JUDITH RICHARDS: What was her name? CLIFFORD SCHORER: Dorothy Fitzgerald. And that's the absent member of the family that had a great influence. That was my—Dorothy Fitzgerald's father was my great-grandfather, who was a haberdasher in Fall River, Massachusetts, who actually was quite prominent and made quite a bit of money with a millinery and factory that made hats. And he was an art collector. And by the time I was born, he was deceased and the family was bankrupt. So all of the art that he did have was gone. But we have some legacy of where certain pieces went, and I was able to track some pieces down later in life. JUDITH RICHARDS: Mm-hmm. [Affirmative.] CLIFFORD SCHORER: And actually go to the apartments where they were. JUDITH RICHARDS: Wow. Let's get— CLIFFORD SCHORER: Yeah, in one case they were actually in the same apartment where the family had sold them from years before. JUDITH RICHARDS: Well, let's remember to get back to that. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Sure. JUDITH RICHARDS: So coming back to your— CLIFFORD SCHORER: —family. So my mother and father divorced when I was very young. The divorce began when I was four. I think it ended when I was 11. It was a very protracted process. [00:02:00] JUDITH RICHARDS: And their names? CLIFFORD SCHORER: Gatia. Gatia Schorer. JUDITH RICHARDS: Can you spell that? CLIFFORD SCHORER: G-A-T-I-A. It's the Dutch, rather than the Japanese. And Cliff, my father, is the same name as myself, as is my grandfather. And my maternal grandmother, Ruth, was still living. My maternal grandfather was dead by the time I was born. JUDITH RICHARDS: And what was Ruth's last name? CLIFFORD SCHORER: Ruth Payntar, P-A-Y-N-T-A-R. And on my father's side, both parents were living. My father— my grandfather was Clifford Schorer Sr., and his wife was Mildred. And her maiden name was Mildred Wolfgang. And her father was Wilhelm Wolfgang. And we'll get back to him, too. He was also a collector of some very important merit, but not in the fine art world. He was a very important stamp collector. So he was—and I knew him when he was superannuated to the extreme. I remember he was 90 when he bowled a 300. JUDITH RICHARDS: [Laughs.] CLIFFORD SCHORER: And he lived quite a bit after that. I don't know exactly how long, but he lived a long time. He lived until I was 13 years old. And he started me on collecting, actually. Just collecting as a general habit. JUDITH RICHARDS: You mentioned—did you grow up—how long did you live in the city where you were born? CLIFFORD SCHORER: Well, I moved around quite a bit. I lived between New York and Martha's Vineyard. I lived in Massapequa, Long Island, for probably an extended period; I would say from about age seven until about— actually, from about age eight until about 13. Then I went away to boarding schools. And pretty much after 13, I never went back home again. JUDITH RICHARDS: Mm-hmm. [Affirmative.] CLIFFORD SCHORER: So I went to a boarding school, and then I went to live with my grandparents, who had moved by that point to Virginia. And then I moved to Boston directly. And I've been in Boston ever since. JUDITH RICHARDS: Do you have siblings? CLIFFORD SCHORER: I have a brother, a younger brother. JUDITH RICHARDS: Who's named? CLIFFORD SCHORER: Daniel Schorer. I'm very proud of Daniel. He was a television actor, and now he's an attorney in the U.K., so. [00:04:00] JUDITH RICHARDS: So, in those—you mentioned your great-grandfather and his collection—when you were in grade school, and even in high school, what were your main interests? And did art play any role in that? CLIFFORD SCHORER: I was interested in history primarily, if I had my druthers. I think I got out of fourth grade by writing the brief military history of World War II for the entire year, because the teacher couldn't stand me [laughs], so she let me have the year off to write my military history, which I was obsessed with. So, yes, I spent a lot of time with history in general, not art history, and was always interested in history. And then I would say when I was around—and this tied well into the art world. And the segue to art was clearly— and I see it very clearly now. My great-grandfather, when I was around eight or nine years old, gave me a Hefty trash bag with 80,000 postage stamps in it and said, "Sort these out." My grandfather's collection—my great- grandfather's collection—was in the millions of stamps. And he had, you know, many, many, many layers of very valueless stamps, but didn't have the time to bother with them. You know, bags full of them. JUDITH RICHARDS: Did you ever buy them in the mail, like kids did? Where you— CLIFFORD SCHORER: No, no. JUDITH RICHARDS: —spent five dollars and you get a thousand stamps? CLIFFORD SCHORER: I had access to, you know, a virtual warehouse full of them. A little house in Levittown that was literally bursting with stamps. I mean, it had—I know there were three million sorted stamps. I don't know how many there were that were unsorted. And so he gave me this Hefty bag and he told me to sort it. And I came back in a year, diligently, with the little glassine pouches that he gave me and all sorted. And all, you know, Hungarian and German—it was mostly—his world was primarily German, Austro-Hungarian, and all the occupied territories from the First and Second World War. And then he had a very complete American collection. I mean, very—you know, the Inverted Jennys, the Zeppelin sheet. You know, everything. I remember it was very celebrated. People came and visited to see the collection. [00:06:02] JUDITH RICHARDS: Did you talk to him about collecting at all? Like, get a sense of what it meant to him? CLIFFORD SCHORER: No. We're German people. We just put our heads down into the envelopes, and start looking at them and sorting them out. And I mean, he didn't speak—I don't think there were too many words spoken about much. And again, I knew him, you know, to be fair, I knew him from age 80 to age 99-something. So I didn't know him—I didn't know him as a young man. So, I mean, he was—by the latter point of that, his eyesight was failing, and you know, the collecting was something he sat and pretended to do. But I think it was just muscle memory at that point, so. JUDITH RICHARDS: Did you get a sense of how he—how he spent his time collecting versus what he did professionally to earn income and how he balanced that? CLIFFORD SCHORER: Yeah. And actually, it was very similar to my grandfather, which was not his son but his son-in-law. My grandfather, who was a very technical man—very poorly educated, but a very technical man—he could take apart any machine and put it back together. And my great-grandfather, the folklore is—whether true or not, and I tend to believe it—is that he jumped a ship in New York Harbor and swam into Brooklyn, went to a church and got a birth certificate, and became an American.