Howard Greenberg: Life lit up
Because my father loved art, and because he had the courage of his convictions and didn’t wait for the approval of cultural savants before buying it, the home I grew up in was overflowing with paintings, drawings and sculptures. Since he was a high school teacher, his budget was limited. Yet he trusted his eye and bought Joseph Stella, Abraham Walkowitz, George Grosz, Louis Eilshemius, Chaim Grosz, Yasuo Kuniyoshi and William Gropper, at a time when most of these artists were not well-known. There was art everywhere in our home, including in my third-floor bedroom. I remember protesting when one of the images, a Kathe Kollwitz lithograph of a father and his children sitting beside the bed of their dying wife and mother, was hung in the hallway to my room. “C’mon, Dad, it’s so depressing.” His terse response: “That’s life, too, Peter.” The print stayed there.
As discerningly, my father collected photographs, which assumed pride of place next to the Stella oils and Kuniyoshi prints. There was no hierarchy. The process of producing images by radiant energy and light on a sensitive surface, was, for my father, as much of an achievement as mixing color on a palette and composing, either representatively or abstractly, a work on canvas. In the late-‘60s, shortly before he died, I remember my father’s excitement at finding and buying three gelatin silver prints from Margaret Bourke-White’s series of images on the construction of Fort Peck Dam, near Billings, Montana. My father, in great detail, explained that one of the images, that of massive buttresses of what appeared to be battlements (actually elevated highway supports), had, on Nov. 23, 1936, been the cover of the first issue of Life Magazine. And he told me about Bourke-White’s remarkable life.