Uncut Gems

THE NEW CRITERION, October 2021

Uncut Gems

On the new Allison and Roberto Mignone Halls of Gems and Minerals at the American Museum of Natural History, New York.

On the evening of October 29, 1964, a trio of beach boys sidled their white Cadillac up to the American Museum of Natural History. By the next morning, they had pulled off the biggest jewelry heist in U.S. history. Allan Kuhn, Roger Clark, and Jack Roland Murphy—a champion wave-rider known as “Murph the Surf”—had that rare combination of talents. By the time they targeted the museum, they were accomplished swimmers, aerialists, and burglars. Living in Miami, Murphy had helped popularize California surf culture on the East Coast. He had also used his aquatic skills to swim away from the many mansions he looted along the Intracoastal Waterway. Flush from these capers, the gang lived large in New York. They took up an expensive penthouse suite at an Upper West Side hotel as they patronized jazz clubs and passed around a copy of The Story of the Gems by Her­bert P. Whitlock (who had been the curator of mineralogy at the museum from 1918 to 1941), all the while searching for targets. The museum’s J. P. Morgan Hall of Gems and Minerals, at the time an antiquated fourth-floor room of open windows and unalarmed cases, was an easy mark.

James A. Oliver, director of the Museum of Natural History, inspecting the case that held jewels stolen from the museum, 1964. Photo: Arthur Brower/The New York Times.

Scaling a fence at West Eighty-first Street, then an exterior staircase, then sidestepping along a hundred-foot-high ledge, at around 9 p.m. Kuhn and Murphy entered the fifth-floor office window of Colin Turnbull, a curator of African ethnology, who kept a harpsichord by his desk to play at lunchtime. As Clark stayed behind in the getaway car and communicated by walkie-talkie, Kuhn and Murphy timed the rounds of the museum guards. They then descended by rope through an open window into the Hall of Gems a floor below.

Through the gifts of J. P. Morgan and other Gilded Age benefactors, the collection of the American Museum of Natural History included some of the rarest gems in the world. Using a glass cutter, duct tape, and a hammer, the thieves took two dozen of the most valuable of them. Their haul included the 100-carat star ruby donated by Edith Haggin De­Long and the 116-carat Midnight Sapphire. They also carted away two en­graved emeralds, two aquamarines, a number of uncut diamonds, and several bracelets, brooches, and rings. Their biggest prize was the Star of India, a 563-carat sapphire, the largest gem-quality star sapphire ever discovered, which had been do­nated by Morgan himself. After the two made their late-night escape, they brought their loot along in a bag to the Metropole Cafe in Midtown as they went to listen to Gene Krupa’s band.

Thanks to their high-flying lifestyle, the three were soon tracked down and apprehended, but not before fencing the jewels in Miami. A New York prosecutor named Maurice Nadjari made a deal with the thieves and escorted Kuhn from his New York jail cell as they tracked down the jewels in Florida. While the uncut Eagle Diamond was never found, the prosecutor remarkably recovered over half the goods. A friend of the museum paid a hefty ransom for the De­Long ruby. The Star of India eventually returned as the jewel in the crown of the museum’s collection. A 1975 film called Murph the Surf was made about the caper.

The Star of India (left), the DeLong Star Ruby (center), and the Midnight Sapphire (lower right), on view at the Allison and Roberto Mignone Halls of Gems and Minerals, The American Museum of Natural History. Photo: James Panero.

“These gems have life in them: their colors speak, say what words fail of,” George Eliot famously wrote of the power of jewels and the minerals that compose them. A decade after the robbery, in 1976, the museum sought to embed this jeweled allure in the new Harry Frank Guggenheim Hall of Minerals and Morgan Memorial Hall of Gems. Designed by Fred B. Bookhardt, Jr., of William F. Pedersen & Associates, this new combined exhibition hall filled a windowless cul-de-sac on the first floor of the museum. Replete with ramps, enclosed passages, and amphitheater seats, all covered in dark wall-to-wall carpeting, the design was praised at the time as “one of the largest and most ambitious exhibition halls the museum has yet attempted.” “I’ve been on many a mineralogical exploration,” said Vincent Manson, the curator of the hall, “and the atmosphere one feels in here is very much like that of going down into the earth to explore for minerals.”

“God sleeps in the minerals, awakens in plants, walks in animals, and thinks in man,” observed the nineteenth-century agriculturalist Arthur Young. Like some space-age mine dappled in prismatic light, the 1976 hall inspired more than a generation of museumgoers with its mysterious appeal. Its sensory approach epitomized a style of museum design that saw specimens elevated out of their cases into theatrical, immersive displays—a method pioneered by Carl Akeley fifty years before through his animal dioramas.

For this critic, first as a child and then adult, the 1976 hall was a favorite piece of museum culture. It was also a dated specimen that revealed more about the crystalline obsessions of the 1970s than the crystals themselves. For the latest generation of earth scientists who just want to tell the story of rocks, however, the hall had become a ridiculed romper room for the museum’s underage visitors. George E. Harlow, the museum’s curator for the physical sciences, says his staff called it “Nanny Hall.”

Amethyst geode on view at the Allison and Roberto Mignone Halls of Gems and Minerals, The American Museum of Natural History, New York. Photo: © AMNH.

Shuttered in October 2017, the Guggenheim and Morgan halls have been gutted and replaced, after some delays this past June, with the Allison and Roberto Mignone Halls of Gems and Minerals. Museum practices often swing like a pendulum. Curated by Harlow and designed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates along with Lauri Halderman of the museum’s exhibition department, the new hall blasts out any remnants of that indoor-outdoor carpeting. In its place it presents an open, 11,000-square-foot room of labels and display cases that more resembles the gem hall of 1964 than 1976. What the presentation loses in immersive appeal it makes up for in the miraculous forms it displays and the often interesting stories they tell.

The completion of the Allison and Roberto Mignone Halls of Gems and Minerals is but the first stage of a larger project to turn the unfinished western side of the museum facing Columbus Avenue into the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation, a new wing designed by Jeanne Gang with exhibition spaces again by Ralph Appelbaum Associates. No longer a cul-de-sac, the Mignone Halls will eventually connect into this new space.

Rocks “are books,” claimed John McPhee, who wrote more than a few clunkers about them himself. “They have a different vocabulary, a different alphabet, but you learn how to read them.” While it is true that every rock tells a story, you don’t necessarily need to hear the story of every rock. The new halls of gems and minerals now tell many stories, certainly too many for a single viewing. A theory of evolution concerning not just animals and vegetables but also minerals has lately gained currency among geologists and now takes up much of the storytelling. “The diversity of minerals on our dynamic planet is directly connected to the evolution of life,” says Harlow—turning the “diversity” key even in the cylinder of this hard science. Fortunately, the presentation of these minerals and gems, aided by artful lighting and unobtrusive stands, nevertheless keeps the natural world mostly front and center. The information provided, about both their evolution and their discovery, also largely adds to their interest and appeal.

The new halls open with two amethyst geodes that, at nine- and twelve-feet tall, are among the largest on public display. New to the museum, these “giant geodes” from the Bolsa Mine in Artigas, Uruguay, began forming 135 million years ago. Gas escaping between the separating South American and African continental plates opened up cavities in the hardening magma like rising bread. Groundwater then flowed through the spaces, depositing silica that crystallized into quartz. Over millions of years, high energy radiation from the surrounding rocks turned the colorless quartz a deep purple. Out of the ground and no longer exposed to this radiant energy, the amethyst will slowly lose its purple hue.

It seems quite a fanciful story—Middle Earth stuff—but the crystals are there to prove otherwise. Interspersed among display cases are similarly captivating crystals in what the museum calls its new “crystal garden”: stibnite from China; a double-ended dravite from Australia; fluorite from Spain; beryls from the American Northeast; elbaite and fluorapophyllite from Brazil; rhodonite from New Jersey; labradorite from Madagascar; petrified redwood from Oregon; grape agate from Indonesia; and calcite, aragonite, and a massive block of blue azurite and green malachite known as the “Singing Stone” from Arizona. From rounded to prismatic, textured to smooth, red to green and creamy to black, the variety of colors and textures here reveal the great sculptural powers of the natural world.

While the display cases are now abundant, their dark appearance and the metallic armatures within (crafted in the same way as the supports for dinosaur bones three floors up) largely allow the stones to stay in the foreground. The smaller specimens are then grouped in ways that illustrate the stories of their creation and discovery. Some examples: the difference between simple and complex pegmatites; “the many colors of fluorite”; the hydrothermal environments of mineral development; “the fabulous tourmaline family”; how light affects the perception of minerals; “the Tin Islands and the Bronze Age in Europe”; the zinc deposits of New Jersey; the minerals employed in the modern world; “How Do We Use Different Salts?”; and the extensively excavated mineralogy of New York City. A wide-ranging selection of minerals from the “Copper Hills of Arizona,” all from mines around the town of Bisbee, reveals the remarkable forms of copper, gold, and silver buried below the Mule Mountains.

Elbaite on view at the Allison and Roberto Mignone Halls of Gems and Minerals, The American Museum of Natural History, New York. Photo: James Panero.

As a display for both minerals and gems (which are simply polished minerals), the new Mignone halls divide up the two in much the same way as the old Guggenheim–Morgan footprint. Alcoves along the right wall serve as specialty galleries. One small space reveals the fluorescence and phosphorescence of a stone slab from the Sterling Hill Mining Museum in Ogdensburg, New Jersey, that glows in ultraviolet light. Another serves as a temporary gallery, now used for an exhibition on “Beautiful Creatures: Jewelry Inspired by the Animal Kingdom.” The most sought-after space in the hall, this new gallery is just a half-step away from a Cartier showroom. Marion Fasel, the guest curator, is otherwise a commercial consultant with a “passion of telling jewelry and watch adventure stories,” according to her biography. This opening show’s connection to the specimens of flora and fauna elsewhere in the museum barely saves it from commercial oblivion as naturalistic pieces are divided in cases dedicated to mammal, insect, and aquatic forms. The stand-out examples are the pieces that bring out the concurrences of nature: in particular, Paula Crevoshay’s 2014 brooch of a Portuguese man o’ war, inspired by the resemblance of the 33-carat Mexican water opal at its center to the pneumatophore, or “float,” of that dreaded hydrozoan.

Between these two alcoves is the central, permanent showcase of gems, one that is surprisingly reserved in its display. One suspects that the designers of this gallery, unlike the special exhibition with its illuminated Fifth Avenue-like stands, wanted to undercut the sparkle of the spectacular. In deadpan fashion, wall-mounted displays present the museum’s rich collection of opal, topaz, garnet, quartz, ruby, emerald, sapphire, diamond, tourmaline, and other precious gems. Located in a standalone case in front of this alcove are those collection highlights that spent some unwanted time away from the museum back in 1964. For all of the stories told in this new hall, the tale of Murph the Surf is notably, but understandably, absent.

Cuomo by Design

THE SPECTATOR, WORLD EDITION

Cuomo by Design: The governor’s aesthetic abuse of New York

‘Please. I beg you. It’s not worth seeing. Avert your eyes. It’s all laptop screensaver crack smoke. Just please don’t make me write about Hunter Biden’s artworks.’

Such were this critic’s fevered thoughts as the news of New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s resignation came across the Twitter-tape. And so we turn to another artist manqué. This time, he is a builder, a builder of works on the order of the Romans of the 1930s. And now, these works will remain unappreciated (such is the fate of true artists). So, let’s appreciate.

‘Excelsior’, this governor scrawled across the edifices and tunnels and apps of his numinous creation. ‘Ever Upward’, he helpfully provided just beside it in translation. ‘It’s Latin!’ he undoubtedly screamed into the phone at his subordinates, those designers and contractors who made the mistake of bidding on a New York State RFP. And so, ‘Excelsior’ we now inscribe on the epitaph of Cuomo’s political career.

As allegations of sexual abuse have occupied the headlines, far less has been said of the ex-governor’s aesthetic abuse of New York. And Cuomo was a serial abuser, wantonly so and without remorse. From Albany, he dreamed of the glories of Rome. Regrettably, he was only looking as far as the City of Rome in Oneida County, just over a hundred miles from Troy, New York. And yet, from his state house by Empire State Plaza, Andrew was our latter day Aeneas. If only Mario, his Anchises, had lived to see those Hesperian shores.

Just consider Dandy Andy’s many design ambitions: in 2018, the New York Post reported that Cuomo wasted $30 million on a change order to replace the tiles of the Midtown Tunnel. Why? Because he wanted his stripes, that’s why. Cuomo drew his particular blue-and-gold color scheme on everything. In doing so, he ensured that his state, from Buffalo to Plattsburgh to Montauk, would one day look like the same office of the DMV.

Speaking of the DMV, Cuomo took his strong hand to the design of the state’s license plates. It should be noted that since 2010 (the year before Cuomo took office), New York drivers had enjoyed one of the more distinguished plate designs in the country. It was a reserved abstract design, one resembling a distant curving horizon, known as ‘Empire Gold’. In 2019, Cuomo unveiled an online competition for a new (yes) ‘Excelsior’ plate. The final designs were all terrible. It so happened that four of these finalists depicted the Statue of Liberty. Meanwhile, just one of the five featured an illustration of the (yes!) new Mario Cuomo Bridge.

On Twitter, Nate Silver wrote, ‘LOL yeah this indeed seems kind of rigged in favor of the Mario Cuomo (née Tappan Zee) Bridge license plate. A bunch of near-identical Statue of Liberty designs will split the SoL vote.’ In the end, it was a bridge too far — a tepid depiction of Niagara Falls and Lady Liberty took the lead — but it was an A for Effort on the part of Team Cuomo.

Plans for Penn Station have been another debacle. The 1960s destruction of McKim, Mead & White’s Pennsylvania Station is the festering wound that never heals in Midtown New York. A design based on the Baths of Diocletian was replaced with the Cloaca Maxima of railroad hubs. ‘One entered the city like a god,’ the architectural historian Vincent Scully famously observed of the old station. ‘One scuttles in now like a rat.’

With the expiration of Madison Square Garden’s lease — which sits atop our transit pipes like a toilet bowl — the governor had a chance to right a historic wrong by rebuilding Old Penn. To do so would have followed a widely popular and feasible plan that has been independently studied (that’s because the old tracks are all still in the same place).

But why fix a broken neighborhood when you can break even more? Instead, Cuomo threatened to level the existing historic buildings that still surround the station in a master-builder plan he called the ‘Empire Station Complex’. This complex might even — you know, I don’t know — contain a ‘Cuomo Station’. The governor already did much to scrub the name of Daniel Patrick Moynihan from the new station that the late senator ingeniously envisioned carving out of the old Central Post Office building across the street.

In the end, through his daily COVID press briefings, it was America that got the double dose of our ex-governor’s aesthetic. For many, the shot started out fine enough. We barely felt it. It was just a pin prick. Then we got worse and worse. This was no standard inoculation. We were all feeling the effects of an experimental hit of Cuomo RNA. Strange messages started appearing in those increasingly incoherent PowerPoint slides. ‘I am going there,’ one read. ‘MISTAKE’ blared another.

It was all nearly too late. By the time he released his poster called ‘New York Tough’, an art-brut collage of every flatten-the-curve cliché, our collective immunity to the Cuomo-esque was at its lowest point.

And yet, here we are, looking ever upward. Excelsior!

Meet the Medici at the Met

The Spectator, June 2021

Meet the Medici at the Met

Bad politics often make good art. That’s especially true when the art is tasked with making sense of political senselessness. A preview of The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512–1570 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Someone turned up the lights on portraiture in 16th-century Florence. Lyrical poetry went hard rock. Colors became high key. Posers now scowled at the oil-on-canvas flashbulbs, giving attitude, hands on hips, codpieces a-thrusting. Not that they even cared about looking as good as they do. Sure, they got dressed for the occasion, but notice the sprezzatura, the indifference in their eyes to the whole affair.

That was the maniera moderna, the new mannerism in art, and no one captured it better than Agnolo Bronzino. Whether it’s the ‘Portrait of a Young Man with a Book’ (mid-1530s), his haughty painting in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or ‘Lodovico Capponi’ (1550-55), his side-eye romancer at the Frick Collection, these figures are boys interrupted. One has a finger in his book. The other fingers a medallion of a woman as he looks up, in adolescent annoyance, from the Snapchat of the day.

In The Renaissance in Italy (1875-86), John Addington Symonds called such faces ‘hard and cold as steel’. Somerset Maugham said Bronzino’s paintings showed a ‘supreme and disdainful indifference to the passion of others’. In the Florence of the Medici, this was just the point. The boys were back in town.

Bad politics often make good art. That’s especially true when the art is tasked with making sense of political senselessness, such as the fraught alliances of cinquecento Florence. Intrigues, assassinations, depositions, shifting enemies, family feuds, pandemic plagues and big money: 16th-century Florence had it all. The wonder and power of Florentine art came out of the scramble to clarify a present that was anything but clear. In Florence and beyond, there were Reformations and counter-Reformations. There was holy Rome and the Holy Roman Empire. Henry VIII wanted his annulment. Meanwhile the second of two successive Medici popes, Clement VII, had to take refuge in Castel Sant’Angelo after the mutinous troops of Charles V sacked Rome in 1527. That period around the League of Cognac and the Diet of Worms must have been hard to swallow. Even the Pope couldn’t figure it out.

Art worked on the front lines to give form to the new formulations. You had to see it to believe it. It helps when you have some of the greatest artists of the period, and arguably any period, available for hire. It also helps when you have florins to burn and the keys to the most famous bank in history. Medici money could not always buy Florentine love. But Medici millions went far in buying Florence’s greatest artists and establishing the look and feel of the Medici’s dynastic power as the family returned to the city as ducal rulers.

Bronzino, Portrait of Lodovico Capponi, 1550-55, on view at “The Medici: Portraits and Politics”

A major loan exhibition opening in June at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art looks to make sense of this artistic sense- making. The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512–1570 brings together over 90 works by artists from Raphael, Jacopo Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino to Benvenuto Cellini, Francesco Salviati and Bronzino. Such an exhibition at any time would be an achievement. To organize one now amid continuing pandemic closures is a triumph. At a moment when much of the Met’s staff cannot even return to work in person and must face the world remotely, these challenges must be near insurmountable. Fortunately, considering many of these paintings originally came out of a period of bubonic plague, a little coronavirus should be nothing for these portraits to shake. Art cannot live by Zoom alone, even if many of our museum executives still do.

The Medici: Portraits and Politics follows up on the Met’s 2011 exhibition The Renaissance Portrait: From Donatello to Bellini. It also serves as a final tribute to Keith Christiansen, the John Pope-Hennessy chairman of the Met’s Department of European Paintings. The great curator is retiring after over 40 years at the Met, and after facing a not insignificant amount of hardship following statements he made during the riots of summer 2020.

Christiansen first conceived of this show in better times, as a small conversation between a portrait of Carlo Rimbotti from 1548, acquired by the Met in 2017, and the Met’s ‘Portrait of a Young Man with a Book’. As the scope of the exhibition grew to its current size, Christiansen brought in Carlo Falciani, a professor at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, as guest curator. Falciani contributes many of the words to the exhibition’s weighty and not altogether sprightly catalogue.

The 1500s saw Florence devastated and divided, switching back and forth between republican rule and Medici leadership. The city’s most powerful banking family was sent packing more than once. After the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent in 1492, France invaded Italy, the Medici lost standing in Florence under Lorenzo’s son Piero the Unfortunate and the family went into exile for the first time. In 1497, the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola ignited the ‘bonfire of the vanities’. In a conflagration in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria art, books and musical instruments were burned in a censorious conclusion to the high life of the quattrocento.

Yet those Medici good times were not only a memory. The family, the money and the art would all eventually return to what should have always been a Medici town — and if you had any doubts, the art is there to prove it. Under its republican ruler, Piero Soderini, Florence continued with the austere aesthetics of Savonarola through the first decade of the 1500s, but it was about to get a shot of color and light.

The Medici’s exile lasted until 1512, when the family returned to Florence under Lorenzo’s second son, Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, who in 1513 became Pope Leo X. The Medici set about reestablishing dominion over Florence’s other oligarchic families through a renewed cultural campaign that sought to promote the words and look of Florence to Italy and beyond. Florence, after all, was the birthplace of Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch along with Giotto and Brunelleschi. The native son Michelangelo received Medici honors in death, even though he had had little to do with the family in life.

After an anti-Medici faction again took control of Florence in 1527, the family returned in 1530, this time as a ducal dynasty for keeps. Alessandro de’ Medici clocked in as the first Duke of Florence until his assassination by a distant cousin, Lorenzaccio (‘bad Lorenzo’), in 1537. Then young Cosimo I stepped in to consolidate Medici power in a reign that continued over three decades.

For our Instagram age, the Medici’s portraits of power seem right up to date. Details are filtered, tweaked up, smoothed over and glamorized. Bringing his more Roman style to the canvas, Salviati left some crumbs of naturalistic imperfections. His remarkable ‘Portrait of a Young Man with a Dog’ (c. 1543-45), from a private collection, could have been painted yesterday. Bronzino, Pontormo’s favorite student, meanwhile licked his plate clean. His stunning ‘Young Woman and Her Little Boy’ (c. 1540-45), on loan from Washington’s National Gallery, looks like it was painted tomorrow.

The Italian art historian Giulio Carlo Argan called Mannerism ‘nothing less than the passage of art from a sphere of theology and knowledge to that of existence’. The sitters here are indifferent because they are of the moment, at once both realized and idealized. Those dynastic upstarts who manage to succeed in history often have a successful artistic program at their back. Look to the Rome of Augustus, when portraiture dispatched with the republican veneration of old age for a new smoothed out idealism of imperial youth. Or consider art under Napoleon, when the School of Paris found a new employer to pay wages and benefits after its artists ran up student debts in the Revolution.

Cosimo I was likewise an ‘authoritarian duke’, writes Christiansen in his catalogue introduction. He managed, despite his youth, to ‘upstage the old oligarchic families that had mistakenly thought they could manipulate to their advantage’ a 17-year-old who had been imposed upon them by Emperor Charles V. Here was a ruler who ‘realized the ways in which he could employ the arts — literary as well as figurative and architectural — to promote his court and elevate the cultural hegemony of Florence in Italy and beyond’. Artists under Cosimo mixed traditions old and new to create the look of the now. As in the art of Bronzino, it’s all there to see, lights on high, so you can’t miss a thing.

The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512-1570 can be seen at the Metropolitan Museum, New York City from June 26. The catalogue is edited by Keith Christiansen and Carlo Falciani (Yale University Press, $65). This article was originally published in The Spectator’s June 2021 World edition.