Ether Music and Espionage. a History of Art Dealing in the United States

LANDSCAPE WITH FIGURES: place. European dealers such as Alfred A History of Art Dealing in Knoedler and the Scotch-Irish William the United States. Macbeth recognized the value of the American By Malcolm Goldstein. Oxford Univ. product, and American dealers such as Peggy Press. 370 pp. $30 Guggenheim promoted and supported Euro- In 1937 Peggy Guggenheim, whose Uncle pean modernists. Solomon founded that famously circular The narrative lingers at midcentury, when the museum, opened an art gallery in London. author was a poor student traveling down from Hilla Rebay, the German artist who was help- Columbia University to 57th Street to buy ing Solomon amass his collection, chided the paintings he could ill afford, on installment. The fledgling dealer: “It is extremely distaste- dealers he met then—Grace Borgenicht, ful...when the name Guggenheim stands for Edith Halpert, and Antoinette Kraushaar— an ideal in art, to see it used for commerce. were informed, generous with their time, and Commerce with real art cannot exist. You not unprincipled. By Goldstein’s reckoning, will soon find you are propagating mediocrity; they, and those who followed them (especially if not trash.” By 1940, Peggy had closed her Betty Parsons, Sidney Janis, and Leo Castelli), London gallery—not because she took Rebay’s genuinely advanced the cause of serious art. point, but because she hadn’t turned a profit. While Goldstein gives scant attention to art She went to Paris, checkbook in hand, buying dealings’ last few confused decades, no one a picture a day on the cheap for her own little could yet call them historic, and perhaps no one museum. Only Picasso rebuffed the bulb- ever will. nosed American. “Now, what can I do for you, —A. J. Hewat madame?” he asked when she arrived at his stu- dio. “Are you sure that you are in the right department? Lingerie is on the next floor.” THEREMIN: Though necessarily episodic, this history of Ether Music and Espionage. American art dealing is pleasingly written, By Albert Glinsky. Univ. of Illinois attentive to nuance, respectful without being Press. 403 pp. $34.95 sycophantic, and rife with tales of the titans In 1920, Russian engineer Leon Theremin and oddballs who made art their business. The arranged a demonstration for colleagues at his economy and grace of the metaphoric title Petrograd research institute. He stood in the apply to the admirable book as a whole. The publisher is touting it as “the first history of art dealing in America,” but Goldstein, a professor emeritus of English at the City University of New York, makes a far more modest claim. As in Saul Steinberg’s cartoon, the states beyond New York scarcely exist here, and only the most influential dealers in American and European art get much play. “Surely that is enough for one book,” the author writes courageously. And it is. American art dealing scarcely existed before the latter part of the 19th century, when European dealers played to Gilded Age mil- lionaires’ sense of cultural inferiority by selling them Old Masters. While the dealers showed European paintings, among them Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crosses the Delaware, American artists struggled: Thomas Cole’s paintings hung in a frame shop, available for $25, and Frederic Church advertised his landscape-painting services in a magazine. An Leon Theremin demonstrating his eponymous important cultural exchange eventually took device in Paris in 1927. Winter 2001 133 Current Books front of the room, “his arms outstretched, his two in the mid-1960s, around the time the Beach Boys hands hovering, fluttering, and diving in air” used a theremin in “Good Vibrations.” During around two antennas attached to a high-fre- the remainder of his long life, he was honored quency oscillator, according to Glinsky. From a as the father of electronic music. rudimentary loudspeaker came the melody of Glinsky, a composer who teaches at Camille Saint-Saëns’s “Swan.” Theremin Mercyhurst College in Pennsylvania, faced (1896–1993) had developed a musical instrument many obstacles in writing Theremin’s life that could be played without physical contact. story. “Theremin routinely supplied different Theremin and his “etherphone” (soon called versions of the same incident to different inter- the “theremin”) won worldwide acclaim. He viewers at different times,” he writes. “And played concerts in the Soviet Union, Europe, and when he was finally politically free enough to the United States, for audiences that included tell his own story he could no longer be count- V. I. Lenin, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Arturo ed on to tell it reliably.” In addition, Theremin’s Toscanini, and George Bernard Shaw. Some contemporaries were mostly dead, and many reviewers likened the ethereal music to “celes- of the materials were incomplete or infected tial voices,” though Shaw remarked that he had with historical revisionism. heard pleasanter sounds from a tissue-covered Through indefatigable research, Glinsky has comb. Theremin believed that his instrument, nonetheless managed to provide a nuanced, inexpensively mass-produced, would replace comprehensive portrait. Though he is no word- the parlor piano. Without any training, people smith—paragraphs lack transitions, characters are could “wave their hands and express their own introduced out of place, the chronology mean- musical personality,” he said, “providing they ders—his biography is a triumph. The tale is so possess a musical feeling.” He moved to New York bizarrely dramatic that the book is nearly impos- City and tried to market the instrument while sible to put down. working as a musician, teacher, inventor, and per- Glinsky skillfully uses the inventor’s life to haps spy. contrast communism and capitalism. After In 1938, Theremin returned to the Soviet Theremin designed a television during the Union—and disappeared. Caught up in Stalin’s 1920s, for example, the Soviet government purges, he was imprisoned for eight years and then confiscated it, stamped it classified, and trans- assigned to a secret research facility. (One of his formed it into a surveillance device for border Cold War inventions came to light in 1952 guards. During his decade in the United when a British radio operator in Moscow heard States, by contrast, the Radio Corporation of U.S. ambassador George F. Kennan dictating let- America hired Theremin as part of its effort to ters. Technicians searched the ambassador’s place a television in every living room. “The house and found a listening device hidden divergence of Soviet and American culture inside a bas-relief Great Seal of the United can be almost unfathomable,” Glinsky States, a hand-carved goodwill gift from Soviet observes. “And it would be laughable, had it not boy scouts seven years earlier.) Invisible and pre- been so tragic and so typical.” sumed dead for 25 years, Theremin reappeared —Steve Weinberg Science & Technology THE UNDERGROWTH understandable. Others, such as making up OF SCIENCE: facts altogether, are unforgivable. Delusion, Self-Deception, and One way of going bad, however, is harder Human Frailty. to judge. A reputable, even eminent scientist By Walter Gratzer. Oxford Univ. Press. discovers something unexpected and nearly 328 pp. $27.50 undetectable. The scientist is intrigued, A scientist can go bad in any number of then enthralled, then obdurately convinced. ways. Some of them, such as trimming facts A few fellow scientists concur, but others, to fit theories, are lamentable but almost unable to repeat the discovery, attack. War 134 Wilson Quarterly.

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