Behind the Scenes Minis: Birth Year and Buildings

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class A production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. We talked about Mickelina Watier or Mikaelino Watier. Hopefully I didn't make anyone really furious about which pronunciation we went with. If I did, I'm sorry that birth year. Okay, these episodes did not come out in this order because we had the whole series of other episodes in between them. But I recorded this episode, or I researched this episode and the Merry Dire episode back to back, So if you've heard the Merry Dire episode in the behind the scenes, you know I went down a whole, huge rabbit hole about where the place of execution was in Boston at that time. Right in this episode, I went down a giant rabbit hole about what her birth year was supposed to be. And I spent so much time searching various permutations trying to figure out, like, did someone discover a new like a new document, was there something that clarified her birth year to sixteen fourteen instead of sixteen oh four And I did not find a good answer, and I was like, if I had made that discovery, I'd be telling everybody, and so like then I was like, I'm going to have to for the second episode in a row, contact a random person and ask them for help. And in this case it was like the contact address for the center for a netherlandish art. I wish I knew the details of like what new documentation suggest that in sixteen fourteen is the right year rather than sixteen oh four. But if you go looking for any information about about her, of which there's just not a ton, you will see a lot of places have one year, and a lot of places have the other, and some places have both years in different places. It was a lot. I'm very curious about, uh about where that correction came from. One thing I found a brief mention of that I did not put in the episode just because it didn't seem totally Jermaine and also seemed like something that could strike people oddly, is that Mickelina and her brother Charles lived together for their whole their whole adult life's lives or both artists. It seems like they probably shared a home for their whole adult lives. They did own their property. There's there's a little fuzziness there. There are a couple of places that are like formal official documents about like property they bought or whatever that like mistakenly identifies them as husband and wife, and then like somebody crosses that out and is like brother, which like makes sense that that like two adult people living together forever, that people would just assume that they were a married people, but really they were siblings. And you know, those were among the very few currently known documents about their whole lives. Man, I wish we knew so much more about her. I wish we knew a lot more about her personality than what we can imagine based on her placing herself as a self portrait right in the black and hole. Right. Yeah, I mean it's interesting, right because we can guess and it seems like that must mean she was kind of a firecracker. M But we could be wrong, you know what I mean, Like we could be We don't know. Maybe one day we will discover something else hers, perhaps a little diary. Yeah, that would be cool there. I've also in various lectures that I watched people give about her. People also seem pretty confident that there are other, as yet undiscovered paintings because like, because she was so not well known at all. Apparently the twenty eighteen exhibition LAS is often the case when there's a big art exhibition somewhere, you know, there are posters of it all over town, and the bus shelters are decorated, like suddenly, this person's name is everywhere, and that really seems to have prompted a lot of the people realizing that they had a work in their own collections or private collectors realizing whose work they had. I read an article that was about this exhibition at the MFA that was about Rosemrie and ivon Auto Load getting this call or email or something like that from an art dealer who was like, Hey, this is this is going to be coming up for sale, and how delighted and astonished they were that like number one it was it was mckleeena Walt Watti's worked, and then number two that it was specifically the Five Senses because that was, you know, work that people had been trying to find, and that was just at this point three years ago, so I know every time it came up in the telling of this like, oh, that was not figured out until nineteen sixty five, eighty seven. This is like history unfolding before our eyes. Yeah, yeah, which is cool. I don't really know what the story is behind when Garland with Butterfly was rediscovered. All I know is that I was trying to find more information about it, and then I was like, this museum says have it on loan right now, so it's been found. Great. There was as as folks may know, I'm continually looking at in bookmarking links to talk about on Unearthed, and there was one that just within the last few days was like three previously unknown paintings by seventeenth century masters, and I was like, are any of them Mclanawati? None of them were, But like my very first thought was is it a new Mcleanawatier painting? I really just I was not even there to look at that at the MFA when I stumbled onto these. Not only was I not there, I was not there to look at European art at all. The MFA is having another Hokusai exhibition, which is we have done a Hokusai episode before after previously the MFA had done a different Hokasi exhibition, and so uh Patrick and I had gone to see that and then he had other plans for the day he left, and I was like, I'm staying at the Art Museum, and then I'm going to walk all the way from the MFA to North Station, which I did. And my plan had been to go into the like the Japanese h and other Asian art area. All of that is currently being redone, I think, so a lot of the things that I was gonna go look at were not like that whole area was closed off, and so I was just kind of wandering around the museum and then I was like, what is who is this beautiful self portrait? What is this five? What is who? I've never heard? What's the Center for Netherlandish Art? Like? It was a a whole discovery process that day at the MFA and then a very long walk on a very windy day. This is a little bit of a jump. But I keep meaning to mention it to you in forgetting. But you mentioned Hokusi. Did you see the Doc Martins that they were doing with Hokusi Art, No bought a pair of those boots so fast. That sounds you. Doctor Martins does a lot of collaborations with big museums and they pick out kind of iconic pieces of art, and they put them on shoes and I have a few of them. Those those great wave boots are real good. Yeah, they still have them in quite a few sizes, So you might get lucky if you go to Nice. Nice. This particular hocus I exhibition is about like hokus I, Hokusi's students, the continuing influence of hokus I's work, and so there's a lot more uh like modern work as part of the exhibition. There was a lot of stuff in it that I thought was really cool. We really enjoyed it. And so if you are into Hoasai or other Japanese art or other art influenced by Japanese art, well that's the thing happening right now. I don't I'm not clear on whether this Miquelina Woitier exhibition how long it's going on, or if it is just a permanent part of collection now, but I was very glad that I stumbled over it while not even there to be looking at European art. Magical accidents. Yeah, we talked about Louis Sullivan this week. We did. And Chicago architecture, yes, yes, which I love that city so much. So it's also a joy to get to talk about it a little bit. Louis Sullivan's autobiography is amazing. Yeah, And it was one of those things where I had it ready. I had purchased a kindle version of modern reprinting, and I had like written out the bones of the episode already, you know, because sometimes that's easier than like pouring through someone's memoir, which is often a little a little yeah, flourishy. It's a little harder to follow the timeline because then usually I'll go back through and then I'll go back to the autobiography and be reading it, and I can be like, oh, there's the touch point of dissce. Yes. It was one of those things where this very rarely happens. But when I then opened his autobiography and started reading, I was like, Brian, this is delightful. It's like his turn of phrase. He was a very good writer. I mean that first thing that you read early in the episode where you were like, that is delightful. The entire book is like that. He I love that is very very good as a writer and conveying things. A lot of it like a full I mean, it felt like a third of it is about his use, even though he is writing this in you know, at the end of his life, when he was in his sixties. What's interesting, though, is that he ends his memoir after the Columbian Exposition, like that's the end of it, okay, him being angry, Like it's literally like the denu mal of that book is they have ruined everything, and it's pages and pages of how angry he is. And then that's the end of the book. And it's like, wait, you were living almost thirty years longer after that, what are you now? So I have not read this book obviously, but I'm like, is that what motivated him to write an autobiography? That it really was going to be a treatise about how the White City ruined architecture? I mean part of it, yes, I mean he was he was commissioned to do it. But I think in terms of his layout of it was like, fine, I'm going to tell you why you're all wrong, why you're bad, and your opinions are bad and you're tasting bad. Everyone was all wrong. I mean, it's really interesting. We only talked briefly about his assistant, Elleslie, who was seems like he must have been very good natured because he didn't he didn't have like a rose colored glasses version of Sullivan. He wrote about him in very honest terms and was like, oh, he's really really arrogant, Like he is exactly the guy I won't I didn't write it down, so this won't be a word for a word. But he literally talks about like he gives everyone advice whether they want it or not, Like he will walk up and tell you everything that's wrong with your design, even if you're not, you know, and he would tell off clients, you know, like he would be like, no, your taste is bad, and I'm you hired me because I know what I'm doing. You don't know what you're doing, which may be true, yeah, but it's not a good way to run a business now. So it's not surprising that he was like, this will be my manifesto, ab how you ruined architecture in the United States. There were two things that are very, very extra interesting in this autobiography to me. One is a little tiny weird note about his dad. His dad, Patrick Sullivan, was as we said, irish and from pretty humble beginnings. Because the story that Louis said he was always told was that his father, when he was still just a kid, was on his own because he had lost his father in a crowd at a county fair and never found him again. And I'm like, did he get dumped off in a fair? And like, because I mean, you would think if a parent wanted to find their kid, they would I don't know. This is a weird little detail that I was like. Wood Ah. The other thing that is really really interesting to me about his autobiography are the omissions. Okay, because three people do not show up in it at all. Three important people his wife, Okay, Frank Lloyd. Right, I was gonna say, is Frank Lloyd write one of them? Because and his brother Albert never appear in that book at all, even though he was apparently close with all of these people and had falling out fallings out with them. Yeah, I think he was real good at grudges and not real good at like the reflection necessary to be able to talk about those things. Like I have known people, and I've certainly had times in my life where there was like an unpleasant thing and I never wanted to talk about it again. Hmm. But eventually ideally you grow and like talk through it, and that's how you don't get plagued by things like that. This is why therapy is great. Yeah. I don't think he ever got to that point. He just was like, the book is closed. Margaret is dead to me, Albert is dead to me. I am so intrigued by this mystery wife, right. I only I found one article about her, and it really was like, there's we don't have a ton of information, and it does seem like she was not always truthful about her self, Like there are a lot of times, like there's a very good documentary about Louis Sullivan that talks about her, and it, like many other things, tells the stories. Though here's a man of forty four and he married a much younger woman of twenty seven. But then this one article I read was like, we think she was actually in her forties, oh yeah, and that she had just been fibbing the whole time, that she was much younger. So it becomes extra hard to track her down because it's like, well, if you don't have a birth record, like then what, yeah, how do you even know who the parents saw are? Would she know a lot of people in the nineteenth century were you know, fabricating their own backstories for whatever benefit. I'm not gonna judge about him. Makes it really hard to document you for the future. Uh yeah, we don't. She really just pops up out of nowhere. It doesn't. There's no like there was a courtship and they fell in love. We knew he was dating her, and then they got it's like suddenly he had a wife. Oh wait, that didn't work out. Like yeah, mysteries, mysteries. And I will say again, I think based solely on their recognition of his incredible skill and his achievements. His peers, I don't know that they were forgiving of him, but they were very magnanimous with him. Like when he reached those rough times in his later life, people that he had talked a lot of trash about were like, dude, I will help you. What do you need, Like, I will give you money, We will set you up in a room somewhere, which is like, for as crabby as he seemed to be with people, I think that speaks very highly of how he was regarded. But that's when he reconciled with FRANKLYD. Wright. Was when he needed help. Oh, dear and FRANKLYD. Wright was like, all right, I mean, you did teach me a lot. I feel like just the fact that he had to write in his autobiography that he was not an all fault terrible It's like, dude, nobody accused you of that, So this kind of seems like you must have been telling on yourself a little bit here. But I also do like the idea that he was like the kid who wanted to cut class, not to go cut up, but to go watch a blade of grass grow. Yeah, I mean, as a kid who kept getting in trouble for reading during class but not reading what we were supposed to be reading. I feel a little a little empathy there. Yeah, here's what's really interesting to me about his story because he was I think, smarter than the average bear and was probably thinking circles around a lot of people that he encountered. He dropped out of one program after another and yet kept getting snapped up for jobs, So he had to have been really good at it, just naturally, because I can you imagine if you went to a job interview and you're like, uh no, I went to that program, but it was boring. I left after eight months, and then I went to Paris but I kind of messed around in Europe and I don't know. I hung out in Italy, I went to this is teen chapel that was cool, and then I came back here and I don't know. I mean, I want to work in this field, I think, I just it's also boring, Like would you be like, yes, you should absolutely be part of our firm. I know a number of people you uh, have extremely successful careers in a field and also either like dropped out of college or failed out out of college, but they did it one time, right, Yes. The chronic nature of his like abandonment of education is what got me. Yeah, I mean it worked out sort of. M hmm. It does make me sad. I mean, I have to confess because, as you know, like, I mean, I love all of the styles of architecture he got real crabby about. But I also really love change and people experimenting, and so I can see why he would be like, why do you want to build the same stuff with way? Why do we want to have more neoclassical architecture everywhere forever? Wouldn't it be cool to do something new? I'm like, yeah, so I understand that. How fussy that would make a person, especially because people were like, Wow, this is amazing. I mean when the auditorium opened, like the pre hasn't it visited the opening because people were like, what is this amazing building? You know, it was like a big, big deal. And so for a moment he was like the Golden Child. And then suddenly people were like, Eh, we're gonna go back to all of the marble stuff that we used to do. We're gonna do it. We're gonna do it like they did it in Paris in the eight seventeen hundreds. Wait what why? Why? I could see where that would you know, kind of form a kernel of resentment that you then write a manifesto about in your memento, in your memoirs, you have set architecture back fifty years, which I think I mean, in reading a lot and in watching a number of documentaries about him, I think most architectural historians do agree or they're like, yeah it did. Yep, Yeah, we could be in a whole different place style wise in the US in terms of our our buildings and the culture around them if we had not done that one thing at that one expo, which is a fascinating turning point for an entire you know, cultural style to hinge on anyway, Louis Sullivan, I hope, I hope, if there is an afterlife, that it's all beautiful and experimental for you. Yeah, he and GOUDI could have been buddies. I think if you have time off this weekend, maybe maybe go look at some of his stuff. Next time I'm in Chicago, I'm gonna hunt down a couple more of his buildings. I have seen several, but I want to see more. And I have never been inside the auditorium and I want to reel back because it's still open. They still have shows there. It has had a lot of pretty significant work done to restore it to original design spec which is pretty amazing. And every photograph I see Birthdacake, I would almost not as if I were a performer, not want to play there because I think everybody would be gawking at the architecture, which is pretty great. So if you have time off this weekend, we hope you'd look at something beautiful, whether that is a blade of growing grass or a beautiful building or painting or whatever delights you. If you don't have time off, I still hope you get to look at something pretty and at least take some deep breaths and find some relaxation for yourself. We will be right back here tomorrow with a classic episode, and then on Monday there will be another brand new one to kick off the week. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. 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