I was let go from my teaching job. Somehow this Winslow Homer painting called, “Noon Recess,” from 1872, is all I can think about. Outside the scene depicted here of a teacher looking wistfully out the window, longing possibly to be outside her red schoolhouse. We also have a young boy whom we find to be on punishment. While the other kids can be seen vaguely through the window playing a game called, snap the whip, this boy is clearly on punishment of some kind— a reading detention, if you will. This genre painting is not as quintessentially American as Homer’s “Snap the Whip” painting from the same year. It does not extoll American virtues of group play and the individualism of the snapping whip participants. It shows a teacher with latent wanderlust from her detention dominion.
Though, it does successfully take me back to the beginning of my pursuit of the American dream in my first job out of college. A dream in which I peaked too soon as a scholar, and then joined the business of graduate schools as a student for life. My early successes turned out to be a mere research horse shoe in my arsenal, rather than stemming from the sheer power of my intellect. I have always felt it is better to be lucky than good at least when it comes to golf, but my academic business could have used some business instruction to really cultivate “good” at anything, and this may have been the perfect pairing with all my academic luck experienced as a twenty-two-year-old.
To say I had no instruction would be a bald faced lie, and I am not in the business of telling half-truths here under a pseudonym. I call myself Carp South, in order that I can be truthful. I had a team of insightful mentor professors at University of Alabama helping me. I also had a medievalist advisor there tell me to “distinguish myself from the herd by doing undergrad work on artifacts in a museum setting.” The private collection was the only house in town related to American history.
When I was in my early twenties I fell in love with a woman whom was hired to work in the private art collection in Tuscaloosa because she had beautiful legs, but also because she was pursuing an MA in Art History from the University of Alabama. The owner of the collection had a parkway named after him, and his family invented the brown paper bag machine. He was a paper magnate doing his end of life years as a Curator of his own American art collection in North River Yacht Club. He was an intriguing man for how he had dominated Tuscaloosa society over the last 75 years. He was 90 when I knew him, and he had superb taste in realist representational art. He did not mess with that “communist abstract shit,” though. His eye was so good at the auction houses that he was considered to have had the second best private collection of American art in the world for the way he carved out a representational niche, second only to Alice Walton’s collection at Crystal Bridges in Bentonville, Arkansas. Walton ended up cannibalizing the art owned by this collector shortly before he died. You see his son was then the CEO of the paper company, and so to liquidate assets he sold Asher Durand’s 1853 painting “Progress” for upwards of fifty million dollars. The son built a mill for roughly that amount, and in a Tuscaloosa News report the former CEO is chagrined by his son’s action, and mournfully wishes he had held on to the company instead of retiring. He was 94 at the time of this utterance.
His wife used to send him and the butler over to rehang paintings around certain American thematic ideas that only had meaning in the mind of the collector. These reshuffling events occurred daily, and we rarely used gloves on the gilt leaf multi million dollar masterpieces. For the wife of the magnate, it was usually an exercise in getting the late aristocratic industrialist out of the house. I believe he enjoyed me as a flunky who had a research hovel in the museum. It was a great place to do my first boiler room research. I deluded myself into believing I was doing research to add value to the individual paintings, but I would really just sit on the clock doing my own research, and occasionally teaching new docents about the massive collection.
I felt for the collector. He was like a great- grandfather figure to me after he discovered that Hugh W. Agricola Sr. was my great grandfather. He did not know who I was until I wrote an essay on English artist Valentine Bromley’s high art painting, “The Scalping.” Then he saw my unusual name, and somehow I doubt he read the research. He would not be the last to gloss it, but he may have been the first.
It was “Legs” that gave him the essay to keep him occupied. Anything was better than his manic tares at re-organizing the collection which happened on a weekly basis. Then he asked me if I was related to Hugh, as apparently they served on the Alabama Chamber of Commerce together back in the 1950s and 1960s. I learned from a custodian of the museum that my painting, the one that moved me, used to hang in the board room of the paper company, emblematic of people losing their heads, and even their jobs. It was an intimidation painting in the provenance with this particular collector. Now, under my watch, it was gathering dust, hung salon style next to a Thomas Moran painting called “Voyage of Ulysses.” My painting hung above the bar. Too high and Royal Academy large to easily move at the whims of the collector.
There was something special about this painting. I remembered reading a book by scholar Joy Kasson about Buffalo Bill Cody, and I saw all these parallels to “the Scalping” in the designs made by Wild West show promoters. I made a lecture presentation at some wine event that followed on the heels of the lessons learned from the current Director of the Birmingham Museum of Art, Graham Boettcher, after his lecture was delivered a month earlier, but it seemed because I added “The Scalping” few noticed the similarities to our discussions. He did not know about the Cody Wild West program, and he was a PhD from Yale. I felt I really had something special. I was a premature pinhead. Boettcher was in attendance, and he may have even been impressed by my talk because afterwards he and my father discussed ways to get me into the Yale Art History graduate program. I went on to receive a second place undergraduate research award from the entire liberal arts college, and presented my findings at George Mason University at the Southern Association of American Studies.
I found my abstract on an old disk in my safe:
Before Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West, George Catlin’s paintings and tableax vivants were instrumental to the encouragement of recreational travel among those who could afford to do so. Earlier the impulse toward exotic travel had been incited by traditional American literature, such as the James Fenimore Cooper series. This form of high American culture sparked the imaginations of European elites who could afford to engage European artists and illustrators to document their excursions into the frontier of the new world. Aside from the more traditional literary forms, new media evolved to take advantage of popular western interest such as the dime novel, storytelling from frontier participants, as well as theater. Indeed it was these lowbrow American contributions that fostered English artist Valentine Bromley’s imagined reality of what a scalping would be like. By examining various cultural media from the 19th century we begin to understand how English artist Valentine Bromley came to paint, The Scalping. This painting is the European high art reflection of an authentic American experience, and it is used by Cody’s publicists to market the show in the United States. By gauging the European reaction to Bromley’s 1876 exhibit in London, Cody’s marketing team had found their model for advertising the Wild West show’s “First Scalp for Custer.” Considering that our collective memory of the frontier is inextricably linked to Cody’s show, reconciling the appropriation of European art challenges Turnerians clinging to American exceptionalism. Bromley’s seminal painting forces us to consider how the European artist was fundamental to the process of mythologizing a savage frontier.
When the dust settled after “Legs” left the role of Education Curator, I became her replacement with a crummier title— “Education Coordinator.” There was a consultant that fleeced the collector for a time. She masqueraded as a “Director,” but when it came time to receive a tourism award from the Governor, the museum sent me, a 23 year old greenhorn to take it from then Governor Bob Riley. It may have been my crowning achievement, excluding my marriage, and the birth of my son. Strange thing was I had not earned being there with the Governor. They just sent me to Montgomery, because I was slightly more clever than them. Eventually, the collector’s wife used my lack of graduate training against me, and I got it in my head that the work environment was toxic. I went to graduate school in Wyoming in order to begin my wanderlust that still gives me fits today. I cannot help ponder what if I had just weathered the storm at the Private Collection Museum? Maybe if I had stayed longer I wouldn’t have been so divided about whether to work in museums, or whether to teach. Here I am today, scalped by the Gadsden City pink slip machine, and nearing the end of my road. I am hoping the dream of finding fulfilling work is not just a dream, but a destination.