FREDERICK DRAPER KALLEY:
PRINCE OF THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE
F.D.Kalley
This effort, my first “invented history,” started as a parody of the traditional art history slide lecture, and only later did I organize the material into the book form shown here. F.D.K. has been presented dozens of times, either full blown or fragmented and slipped into otherwise serious presentations. The gist of the thing is fairly well described through the following “Abstract” from a College Art Association Meeting presentation in 1993. How time flies.
Frederick Draper Kalley, the Prince of the American Renaissance, was the archetypical wealthy American art collector at the turn of the century. A man of business, he founded the Artistic Novelty Company with his brother Horace (The Pharaoh of Fifth Ave.) and made a fortune selling Aesthetic Movement gimmicks such as the “Venetian Viewer” and “Peto Repeto” to the newly prosperous middle class. He saw little distinction between elite and popular culture or fine art and finance, and was, consequently, a prophet. His sponsorship of the “Mr. Peanut, Into the Light” series of 1908 (a clever if somewhat mercantile appropriation of Edward Steichen’s images of Rodin’s “Balzac”) is proof of that. An even more exotic example is “Ki-Mona Li-Sa,” a bamboo framed doo-dad which combined Leonardo and the Japanesque in a mélange that was extreme even for an age used to random and guiltless cultural appropriation.
The old boy adored the art world and his relationship with it was straightforward: he provided the money, and the art world provided the pizzazz. Of course, his collecting habits were a bit erratic, and his collection uneven. “The Little Dancer with Three Legs” is probably not authentic, and the “Mustache Series” of bronze reliefs is hopelessly derivative of the contemporary study of human form by Matisse, which Kalley claimed never to have seen. Many also have had doubts about both “Tennis, Anyone,” the charmingly tasteful version of Picasso’s “Still Life with Chair Caning” and the “Reitveld Highboy,” generally ridiculed for the same reason.
Yet Kalley was an art world star. His circle included dealers looking to unload their own unwise purchases at a healthy profit; artists espousing revolution while lunching at his club; critics and curators looking to trade flattery and academic theories for reciprocal flattery and cold hard cash; and fellow collectors seeking to join the hunting party of mindless accumulation and instant cultural status.
Little did they all know that Kalley never took himself or the contradictions and vanities of the art world all that seriously. That was the “theory” he found most useful and the lesson he hoped would be his enduring legacy.