I'm certain it was with Mildred, because she was very involved in all of those things. CLIFFORD SCHORER: And he's a very entertaining historian. JUDITH RICHARDS: So this book was based on photographs with 15 layers of varnish. I was in Bulgaria a couple years ago, and I was in Plovdiv, which is a small city. JUDITH RICHARDS: because most of the material was only sold at auction? JUDITH RICHARDS: Thinking about your non-business interests? CLIFFORD SCHORER: I was stillI was still interested in stamps and coins. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Early 20th-century British and Continental. It was about [00:52:00]. He's not a regular "player" in the region, but what Cliff Schorer has accomplished as board president at the Worcester Art Museum over the last two years has helped revive attendance . But my desire to live in the middle of nowherethis was in Meriden, New Hampshire, which was literally the middle of nowherewith 400 other. And Agnew's was one of the firms that simply refused to deal in what they called "refugee art." So I walked across the bridge with the gun towers, and you know. JUDITH RICHARDS: Did you ever think about collecting drawings or prints? And I mean, he didn't speakI don't think there were too many words spoken about much. But it hammered down; I lost it, you know, and thought no more of it. CLIFFORD SCHORER: So, yeah. I lived in Montreal off and on. I mean, this year, there might be two and next year there might be none. So, you know, my grandmother was doting on me like a grandmother. Washington, DC 20001, 300 Park Avenue South Suite 300 CLIFFORD SCHORER: I leave that to Anna and Anthony, and, you know, I come in and I nod my head in approval, because they have such amazing taste. I mean, it's those kinds of crazy, you knowI mean, you think about it. JUDITH RICHARDS: Have you encountered any of those with the works you've acquired? JUDITH RICHARDS: Reading auction catalogues? And eventually we agreed to part friends. And by the time I was born, he was deceased and the family was bankrupt. Is that something that you are thinking about? I think they have seven to 10 loans of mine, so there are some things there that, you know, they would like to have long-term, soand other things that they probably don't need necessarily, but they were interested in having for a particular purpose. CLIFFORD SCHORER: It is difficult for, you know, someone who's used to running a 20,000-employee, for-profit operation to come into a 160-employee museum and understand how this expenditure furthers the mission, rather than, you know, a profit model or efficiency model. CLIFFORD SCHORER: So I did two things at the same time, and you're going to laugh. And they're like, "Come on, please," you know, "it's important people know that, you know, the board is giving." And my maternal grandmother, Ruth, was still living. These are salient works in, you know, in the catalogue, and these are works that the gallery had a historical involvement with in the 19th century. So, yes, I mean, obviously there is this interplay between the marketplace and the art historical importance. And we've obviously done a lot of work on our Pre-Raphaelite exhibition, which was kind of a protractedwe did, basically, a two-year Pre-Raphaelite fiesta, with lots of publications. SUBSCRIBE. And often, they were strange variations on Chinese stories made for an American market or made for a British market or made for a French market. JUDITH RICHARDS: And you were still living in Boston? And pretty much after 13, I never went back home again. So, you know, one major painting today selling for $25 million, even though the gallery may only make a commission on it, is still more than the gallery sold in adjusted dollars in 1900. We know that T Dowell, Tylden B Dowell, and five other persons also lived at this address, perhaps within a different time frame. And he said, "Well, ironically enough, Sotheby's"and I knewI could feel this sort ofwithout even asking the question, I knew that Noortman's days since the death of Robert Noortman were numbered. Schorer. JUDITH RICHARDS: And the Museum of Fine Arts? [00:48:00]. Having old art in New England is not the easiest thing, because of humidity control, which is almost impossible. Maybe five, six. I mean, but I didn't, you know, I wasn't trying to make myself a gadfly in the market, or even a gadfly in the curatorial world. CLIFFORD SCHORER: And I don't mind living in a cardboard box. Lotte Laserstein was a Weimar German artist, a female artistamazing artistand Agnew's had sort of rediscovered her in the 1960s and then did a show, a monographic show, in the 1980s. And, JUDITH RICHARDS: You didn't feel encumbered? Olive subsequently married John (Jack) Arbuthnot who wrote some of the Beachcomber columns. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Bless you. He was a television actor, and now he's an attorney in the U.K., so. A good city to. And I think, in a way, my art world is still centered in London a little bit. And so, those are wonderful. CLIFFORD SCHORER: It's almost ready. [1:02:00], CLIFFORD SCHORER: It's by Antonio de Pereda. They don't knowthey didn't know that the specimen was named after him. Clifford J. Schorer is known for Plutonium Baby (1987). CLIFFORD SCHORER: Absolutely. CLIFFORD SCHORER: I mean, especially lesser objects. He is considered one of the foremost painters in 19th century America and a preeminent figure in American art. And most of our manuals were in Japanese, because the cash register manufacturers in those days were mostly Japanese. I would be 16, turning 17 in that year. [00:04:00], JUDITH RICHARDS: Which, if there's one person. A picture should not reappear three times [laughs] on the market. So, yes, to me, that was the detour, but it waswhich was pure craft, but I esteem the craft as much as the conception, and I know that I'll never have the craft. And I said, you know, This is [00:18:02]. They didn't understand what the crucifixion scene was on some of these plates. CLIFFORD SCHORER: No, not really. So there's thosethere's those kind of, you know, the grime of Naples and the horror that life must've been during the plague of 1650 creates this explosion of these gruesome paintings. CLIFFORD SCHORER: into the gallery's living room, or the prospective buyer's living room if that's something the buyer would consider. I mean, for the price of a multiple by Damien Hirst, you can buy a Reynolds, you know. CLIFFORD SCHORER: I had access to, you know, a virtual warehouse full of them. So, JUDITH RICHARDS: Wow, Lucien Freud is much, JUDITH RICHARDS: further into the decade than, CLIFFORD SCHORER: Yeah, yeah. And then, you know, you may 10 years later find that Molenaer is worth five, or he's worth 500. CLIFFORD SCHORER: No, no. I had developed my eye to the extent that I also realized that all the export wares were crude Kraak wares that they were just, you know, flipping onto the boats to get rid of it. So I'm sure that somewhere they've usedyou know, time goes by, and they use your name. CLIFFORD SCHORER: And I did start to back some. Why is this not Renaissance?" CLIFFORD SCHORER: Yeah. And I saw Daniele Crespi as an artist who is equally competent but died so young that he never really established his name. Occupation: Real Estate/Realtor. JUDITH RICHARDS: And you spent four years there? Before we get to thatso that's 2008, about? JUDITH RICHARDS: So they were very strict with provenance restrictions. My grandfather was also lobbying hard, saying, "Go back to school." [Affirmative.] And the segue to art was clearlyand I see it very clearly now. So I didn't go back. So he came for the opening. CLIFFORD SCHORER: It's been a very long-term loan. I've got some Islamic examples. The shareholders did very well by the real estate, but the business, by that point, was, I think, sort of put on the back burner after 2008, then when they didn't have a premises, they built themselves a new and rather expensive rental premises, and the rent and the costs there were quite high. [00:32:00]. CLIFFORD SCHORER: In Eastern Europe in the old days, almost always I would give a bribe to be taken through a museum where they frankly couldn't be bothered with any visitors. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Give up all my business interests and retire to sort of a conversational job where I sat in a shop, and I played shopkeeper, and people came in and looked at my furniture and told me how overpriced it was. CLIFFORD SCHORER: so, there weren't purpose-specific stamp and coin auctions in Boston, really. And his son, Caleb, is also deceased. [00:16:00], You know, she was waving me away. Literally, very, very inexpensive. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Or the auction houses, yeah. That'sthose are the best. But I wouldn't have purchased the ongoing operation of the business. No, it was a lot of fun. [00:12:00]. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Yeah, we have to pick our battles carefully. Howwhat was the process of that reattribution officially? I mean, they're all Americans, but theythere's at least someI would say a kernel of the character is forged in the German fire. Funding for this interview was provided by Barbara Fleischman. I mean, not, of course, of the quality of Randolph Hearst [laughs], but of a quantity, for sure. And Iand Iyou know, obviously, there's a lot more material. And so, in this case, weyou know, I really got ready for it, and I expected it to be, you know, the same price as the last time, and I was prepared for that. And if the auction house can earncan tell a client, "Well, we're not going to charge you anything; we'll charge the buyer. [Laughs.] JUDITH RICHARDS: Were there collections in other institutions in Boston that you might've, CLIFFORD SCHORER: Eventually I got access to Harvard, and that was great because then I could troll the stacks, which I did for 20 years every night of my life. Their collection was just chock-a-block with things that had nothing to do with museum collections. CLIFFORD SCHORER: it's ano, it's a part gift, part sale, and in the end, it hadthe strings that I had, they met them all, which were that they're going to do a focal exhibition on paleontology in thebecause they're doing a re-jigger of many of their exhibitions. JUDITH RICHARDS: So you're going to thenot stamp and coin auctions, though? [00:10:00]. JUDITH RICHARDS: And is there official paperwork that goes along with that? You know, you'd spend two days there every weekend. Just collecting as a general habit. CLIFFORD SCHORER: And what they kept domestically and what theywhat the scholars and, you know, the courtiers had domestically was of a different level. [00:20:00] Yes, there was, of course, The Massacre of The Innocents by Rubens, which made 45 million, and two days later, for a relative bargain, a van Dyck of that painting, done in the studio at the same time, came on the marketa drawing of that painting. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Well, the big London galleries. I'm always the general on my projects. JUDITH RICHARDS: So that's a huge change? But, yeah, I mean, I'mgenerally speaking, I stop into all the galleries that I've always known, you know. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Corsini. So I go in there, find thisthere's this little Plexiglas box, and inside this Plexiglas box is the most breathtaking bronze I have ever seen. And it came up for bid, and I was bidding on it, and I think it ended up pushing over [$]1.7 [million], and I was out. And knowing, of course, that, you know, in a way, sort of on day one, my business challenge was to take a business that was burning, you know, [] 8 million in losses, and flip it off instantly and reopen it as a business that would basically break even or make money, because I was not in the business of buying a company simply to continue the legacy losses of the previous ownership. But, and I went right toI went right to the paintings. And I remember the Museum of Natural History, which haunted me later as an obsession with paleontology. JUDITH RICHARDS: This sort of opens the whole question of the relationship between collectors and institutions and their collections and how much of a collectionit happens more in contemporary art, but issues arise. And I met wonderful people; I saw them all last night. How have you approached conservation through the years? JUDITH RICHARDS: So you moved on after about three and a half years. I think that what people said to me back then, because it was a different kind of marketplace, wasit was all about market strategy. Again, knowing that that is a skill set that I will never possess, and that as close as I can ever get is to collect something. [1:00:00], And when a gallery approaches the person, and says, "Look, we're going to catalogue it; we're going to do this; we're going to take it to this city; we're going to show it at this fair; we're going to do these things; we're going to pay the insurance on it; we're going to pay the shipping and all of these things, and, you know, we'd like to earn 15 percent." And again, I knew him, you know, to be fair, I knew him from age 80 to age 99-something. So, you know. JUDITH RICHARDS: In all those years when you were collecting in the field of Chinese porcelain, did you think it wasperhaps you should learn a bit of Chinese since you're so good at computer languages? 1. The interview was conducted by Judith Olch Richards forthe 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. So, in other words, the entire world previously had been constructed around those dedicated 80 collectors who came to the market, who came to the oasis once a year to buy a painting, be it Maastricht, be it Sotheby's New York, whatever it is. ", CLIFFORD SCHORER: "We know he dropped out after two and a half years, but you want this guy." The shareholders did very well by the real estate. So you've gotyou can put them side by side. And so I painted one Madonna and Child with pickles and fruit [they laugh], which is the Carlo Crivelli typical. I think that's a big story for Plovdiv. And we'll get back to him, too. His oil paintings were immensely expressive. [00:38:00]. This was the case for one art collector, who stumbled upon a rare drawing on his way to a get-together in 2019, CNN reports. Other people who you could talk to about becomingabout this passion? It wasthank you for doing that." It had been in dealer hands so long, and it had been sort of, shall we say, gussied up so many times by restorersanother layer of varnish, another layer of feeble retouching, another layer of varnish. [Laughs.]. So my father was encouraged by that, and sort of dragged me on a little field trip to Boston and took me around to the colleges. How has it evolved? CLIFFORD SCHORER: And some, you know, lifting, but I usually don't let it get to flaking. Born in 1836, Winslow Homer is regarded by many as one of the greatest American painters of the 19th century. JUDITH RICHARDS: The competitors are in equal situations? In a wayin a way, I thought every mistake told some part of the story. $14. JUDITH RICHARDS: So you can't complain about having to keep your home dark. [00:20:00]. He had that very sort ofhe had an idea about using modern architecture in all his buildings. So I was in the room, andI think her name is Marietta Corsini? So, I think18, 19, 20, in that area, I spent 26 weeks a year outside the United States. And I was just, you know, I was a rebel. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Ruth Payntar, P-A-Y-N-T-A-R. And on my father's side, both parents were living. 3) Example 2: Create New Variable Based On Other Columns Using transform () F Or some of the 300? But I did buy things that were interesting. CLIFFORD SCHORER: It's interesting that, generally speaking, no, because, you know, the works on paper department has a very different policy on showing things. And when Freeport got a little too rough for them, because they were living in a part of town that had gone down quite a bit since they bought in the 1940s. So, I mean, I rememberI remember buying that because I thought it would be a good decoration. JUDITH RICHARDS: So as you got to 2000, 2001, how did your interestyou said you became involved with the Worcester Museum. [Affirmative.] CLIFFORD SCHORER: Yeah. Richard Dauenhauer, poet. JUDITH RICHARDS: And you bought it? We can cover a lot of auctions in a night. W hen Clifford Schorer, an American art dealer who specialises in Old Masters, realised that he had forgotten to buy a present for a colleague, he had no idea that a chain of coincidences was. [Affirmative.] But that wasn't what brought me to it. You're going to findthere are going to be many more. And the focus was much more British 20th century. I especially, of course, remember the Egyptian things. The Allori that was sold at Northeast Auctioneers, which came from the Medici Archives, and I found it in the Medici Archives two hours before the auction. And the. But I wouldin France and Europe, I generallynobody had the money to just go wander around. And I saw my name alone in a category, and I was very shocked, because I had never said, "You may do that." CLIFFORD SCHORER: It's a long, convoluted history, but basically lots of research, lots of phone calls, and everyone knowing that I'm on the hunt for Procaccini. That was myDorothy 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. [Affirmative.] But, yeah, I mean. And commercially, it was a triumph because, of course, the Chinese were not in the market yet. I don't even remember the day. JUDITH RICHARDS: If they were appropriate. He focuses on businesses with unique ideas or technologies that are in need of guidance during their . So I dropped. Winslow Homer Key West, Hauling Anchor, 1903. He was also a collector of some very important merit, but not in the fine art world. Whatever you have to do to get into the museum, because they, CLIFFORD SCHORER: they didn't actually want you in there. But, I mean, I can tell, you know, when yet another picture arises from a certain quarter, what we're dealing with. So, you know, we can fight that territory one collector at a time, and if that means a deep engagement with one person to try to interest them in something that we think will be rewarding for them, JUDITH RICHARDS: I assume participating in art fairs is a way of broadening your audience, JUDITH RICHARDS: Perhaps collaborations within some other [00:46:02], JUDITH RICHARDS: symposium or whatever you can imagine doing, JUDITH RICHARDS: that will bring in people andyeah, and then convert that, JUDITH RICHARDS: current interest in only contemporary and Modern to, CLIFFORD SCHORER: Well, our first TEFAF, for which we received some praise and some criticismwhich is exactly what I wantas the radio personality says, "One star or five stars, and nothing in between." Is worth five, or he 's a very entertaining historian segue to art was clearlyand I it... Back some 20th century again, I was in Plovdiv, which is almost impossible way, grandmother... 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