Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007 - (Page 60)

One, if he thought it was as well written as I thought it was, and two, how I could take this and proceed to have a career as an art historian. He gave me his view of the thesis without mentioning either topic, so finally I kind of fished for the compliment about my prose, and he said, “well let me put it this way, never try to make a living at it.” And I said, well maybe can I make a living as an art historian? And he said, “I don’t think that’s going to happen either.” Actually he said, “That’s not really a reflection of your thesis, it’s a reflection of the market for art historians. It’s pointless to go out and try; you don’t want to do this. There will be no jobs and you’ll spend the next 20 years miserable.” So it left me without anything to go to or hope for. It left me in a very antiquated position, I was a young man who had been trained for everything and nothing. Through the art history department traipsed a man in his 70s who had gone to Princeton in the late 1920s, who ran the Wildenstein Art Gallery in New York. Wildenstein is a French dealership that smuggled all of its pictures out in dubious circumstances during the Civil War and so New York has become its base. But it is by far the world’s largest privately held collection of old master paintings and sculpture. When I got there this old man hired me to be the stock boy, because he told me I was a presentable young man, and the first thing they did was they dropped the inventory on my lap. At the time it was probably undervalued—this was 1982—on the books. They had $3 billion worth of art. They had dozens of Cezannes. Dozens of J. Blanc Monroe, attorney and former board member of the Monets. Sixty-four Fragonards. They had priceless things they Whitney Bank, maternal great-grandfather of Michael Lewis. forgot they owned, thousands of objects. I’m digressing here, but I just treat the undergraduate remember so many odd stories The Lewis family motto was, “Do as education as a liberal arts that happened there. Daniel little as possible and that unwillingly, education, the economics Wildenstein, who owned the department serves as a kind of place, walked in one day and for it is better to receive a slight proxy for business school. The turned to me as the stock boy reprimand than to perform an way you prove to Wall Street and said, “Bring me the arduous task.” If it does not describe that you’re willing to sacrifice Houdon.” Houdon was the your intellectual curiosity and the Lewis family, it certainly describes great 18th-century sculptor who passion for the sake of your did all the enlightenment the city, and especially now. So yes, financial career is you major in figures, a wonderful sculptor, New Orleans is in my blood. economics. I had an economics very lifelike work. Nobody class that I would guess a third of my classmates went into – yet, what 19-year-old is interested in the gross national product? You had a really discouraging phenomenon of the university being used as a kind of resume builder as opposed to a place to cultivate one’s interests. I had been passionate about art history. It was for me a subject you could get to a lot of other subjects through and it came complete with mnemonic devices: the pictures and the sculptures. It was a thrilling field for me. I wrote my thesis on the way (at Princeton the thesis is a really big deal, it’s a book basically) Donatello used classical sources. It was an exploration of what the Renaissance thought the Renaissance was. I was so fired about this that I was sure that this is what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to pursue a career as an art historian. I can remember sitting down with my thesis advisor—he was until very recently the chair of the Princeton Art History Department—a man named William Childs. We were sitting down to discuss my thesis and I J. Blanc Monroe was among the civic leaders who ordered remember I wanted to know two things from him. levees dynamited in 1927 in St. Bernard Parish to allay fears 60 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Winter 2007-08 PORT OF NEW ORLEANS ARCHIVES LEWIS FAMILY COLLECTION of a Mississippi River flood inundating New Orleans.

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007 Contents Friends Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Katrina: Days of Terror, Months of Anguish Paintings by Rolland Golden The Historic New Orleans Collection The Great Ouachita River Flood of 1932 Jazz Notes Louisiana Architecture Louisiana: Where Land Meets Water Louisiana State Museum Through A Lens Sharply: An Interview with Michael Lewis MR-GO: A “miracle” mired in controversy Louisiana Foodways Louisiana Association of Museums New Orleans: An Autopsy Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007

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