Last Friday was supposed to be a revolution for the Portland
Art Museum, its first major exhibition curated locally in
the sixth year of the Age of the Buchanans.
John Buchanan, PAM's executive director, had pulled off
an art-world coup and landed an exhibition of a noble
Russian family that had turned the sweat of serfs into
rooms choked with Old Masters and icons. Anything the
French approved of, at any rate.
The $250-a-plate opening of the Stroganoff exhibition
was a glittery attempt by PAM to establish international
museum cred. The Baroness Hélène de Ludinghausen,
last of the Stroganoffs, and sundry members of the New
York smart set were in the house; out-of-town journalists,
too. Attention was being paid.
But I couldn't walk away without the feeling that had
this exhibition been in New York or Los Angeles, no one
would have dropped everything and driven in from Greenwich
or Newport Beach, much less Red Bank or Torrance.
Strolling among the tuxedoed and the sequined in PAM's
upstairs grand ballroom, I heard none of the 800 guests
talking about the exhibition.
Sad to say, it's an interesting but underwhelming hodgepodge
of what St. Petersburg's smart set thought was smart for
the 500 years before the Bolsheviks put an end to their
party. The Stroganoffs were your basic trader barons--timber,
salt, fur and iron ore. They must have been real power
brokers, too: Ivan the Terrible deeded them Siberia. In
return, they gave the world beef stew.
Yet for a family that was Imperial Russia's private bank,
the Stroganoffs acquired surprisingly timid art: They
went for the technically well-executed, preferably on
a pious theme, not the powerful. Maybe they didn't want
to show up the Romanoffs.
Sure, there are a couple of nice surprises: Jean-Antoine
Watteau's The Flirt and Portrait of Rubens and
His Son, Albert, turned out by a Rubens student with
that typically unembarrassed Dutch flair.
But only the Malachite Coupe, a huge basin carved
of a luminous green stone and mounted on a five-foot gilt
pedestal, rates as a masterpiece. Van Dyck's Portrait
of Nicolaas Rockox and Luca Giordano's The Battle
of Lapiths and Centaurs are masterful, but not their
creators' best works. And PAM's galleries are so small
that it's impossible to gain a visual hold on many of
the paintings and icons; the Stroganoffs had towering
palace rooms that they surely didn't open to crowds large
enough to fill Terminal C at PDX.
In the entire exhibition, there is not a single work
that leaves you in a puddle. Which is sort of the point
of these big-name, attendance-boosting exhibitions: There's
always got to be that pay-off piece, that Starry Night,
that Guernica, any Vermeer. (WW's
art critic weighs in on the exhibit.)
Far more interesting than the Stroganoffs' self-congratulatory
art was Portland's moneyed class.
Job one among the law partners senior and junior and
their wives matron and trophy was to perform a social
scratch-and-sniff test, the way royalty used to run things
before commoners took matters into their own hands. Upstairs
in the ballroom: A List (the Schnitzers, the Pamplins,
Vanity Fair scribe Dominick Dunne, a table of Grand
Ronde Indians and other heavy donors). Downstairs: B List.
Implicit message to B Listers: Donate more of your disposable
income to PAM.
I was on the F List: neither summoned to sup on the Baroness'
signature beef stroganoff recipe (gristly and dry, by
all reports) nor invited to drink from PAM's bars. So
I invited myself. I became a barfly in a rented tux, a
glass of too-young merlot in my hand.
Portland money is well-tanned in February. It speaks
of Porsches and summer vacation spots (Seaside, no; Gearhart,
yes) and drinks gin-and-tonics. Money, new and old, does
not need to kiss up to royalty; the Baroness and her chums
went virtually unmolested. Neither does money act out;
only a few overgrown frat boys did what all frat boys
do: smash vodka glasses. Da! We are all Russians
now!
The big tremors of the night were left to Madame Svetlana
Ushakova, the wife of the Russian Federation's ambassador
to the United States. Her husband was detained at the
United Nations over negotiations concerning Chechnya,
Russia's latest pogrom. She simply had to fly back East
in the morning. But the Midwest was snowed under. Madame
had no time for such excuses, and she turned PAM staffers'
evening upside down.
Still, the evening's real faux pas was much more public.
Whoever approved the entertainment must have forgotten
that a century ago some of the Stroganoffs' royal pals
let the Cossacks slaughter thousands of Jews, one of the
bloodier chapters in the history of the tribe. It wasn't
the Holocaust, but its philosophical tenets were just
as cheering. Yet there were Cossack dancers performing
right in front of a sizable number of Portland's Jews.
I wasn't in position to check the reaction of the Schnitzers,
but my Jewish companion turned to me and wondered aloud
who, if anyone, handles PAM's protocol.
I wondered about that, too, as the evening melted into
the morning, and the Baroness and Portland money made
their way to shuttle vans and Lincoln Town Cars. There,
at the front of the ballroom, John and Lucy Buchanan danced
to synthesizer disco. John wore tails with a white vest,
white tie and white gloves. He looked for all the world
like a man who'd just pulled a rabbit from a hat.
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Willamette Week | originally
published February 23,
2000
