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The Journal of Antiques & Collectibles Feature Article January 2002 |
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Two school diploma’s and a university degree were my reward for serving to seventeen years in the trenches of formal education. Names, dates, facts, philosophies, had been retained dutifully in my mind, but at the age of twenty-two I remained out of focus about myself and a career. My solution was to step off the whirring carousel, walk away from the familiar, and gain new perspectives. And for two years I lived and taught school in Athens. Coming from New York, city of energy and modernity, I needed the contrast of Greece with her ancient culture that had provided the foundations of Western art and governance. If America was the apex of current civilization, then Greece contained its primitive and uninhibited beginnings. During my weekend travels away from the Byzantine cities and towns, pockets of the Grecian landscape seemed absolutely unchanged from ancient times. On two occasions, in the Peloponnesus and along the Mani coast, I remember walking alone – not a scrap of paper or rusty beer can, no jet stream painting the sky, not even the sputtering motor of a caique. There wasn’t one reminder of the twentieth century. I was walking on rocky terrain – broken only by the occasional olive tree – whose worn patina bore witness to life in antiquity. Across the water, silhouetted against a timeless twilight backdrop, the wavy coastline appeared trampled and beaten down by centuries of human activity. Soldiers, sailors, farmers, and shepherds, plying land and sea millenniums ago, passed before me on the stark stage. Isolated in this ancient landscape, I was indeed a New York Yankee in Homer’s Hellas, but this was no sleep, this was no dream. Call it an awakening, at once very spiritual and physical. A new set of muscles was born and stretched, totally independent of my academic intellect, which had labored for so long in classrooms to appreciate history. Being on location with sights and sounds gave a vital life force to what the mind had learned long ago. The image of the land, that earth so essential to the beginnings of Western civilization, had touched me and reached my core. During my stay in Athens I collected shards and pieces of ancient pottery as away of marking those special moments in the Greek countryside. Baked earth, shaped and decorated by human hands, underlined the basic working relationship between nature and man. NEW YORK, 1964 For fear of becoming an expatriate, I returned to America in the summer of 1964. As it always has, the visual impact of the city skyline stunned me as I crossed the Triborough Bridge on my way home to New York. The thrust of the gateway city’s creativity and energy, so neatly packaged in buildings and the grid, underline the unique standing America has in human history. where the worn and crusty earth of a Greek landscape had served me as a marker for the beginnings of our civilization, so the towering skyscrapers symbolized a country that has created opportunity and government for a vast population as no previous society has been able to do. Having lived and worked overseas for two years, I had gained a different perspective on Ametica. It was the center of the world, a cultural and material force to be envied and hated, to be loved and pursued as an earthly paradise for humanity. In such a short, histotical time-two hundred and fifty years-this community had grown from immigrant seeds to become a national entity that reached out to the world and spread its culture. History books had taught me the names of heroes and the principles of independence and representation. But the day-to-day work and settlement of this land had been in the hands of unknown soldiers and fami-lies, farmers and tradespeople. I had never been told their story. Tools, tableware, bedcovers, birth certificates – what survives today from those pioneers who laid the foundations for the society in which I live, for the civilization that is so special in human history? This article is reprinted from American Radiance by permission of Abrams Publishing and The American Folk Art Museum. Photos courtesy of Abrams and AFAM.
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My immediate need on that humid July day was to find a good present; an article in the newspaper directed me to anew folk art gallery on Fifty-seventh Street. I spotted a colorful coverlet and bought it. Awaiting my change and the gift-wrapped package, I looked around: there on a battered tavern table was a small slipware dish ( see bottom right). “Pennsylvania German,” said the dealer, noticing my fascination. I turned it over, and once again, there was the earth, the rough underside providing such a contrast to the smooth slip surface. No mistaking this piece for my antique shards. Time had barely touched the veneer of this plate compared to the millenniums Greek pottery had survived. Fired over a century ago, the neon glitter of the Pennsylvania slip seemed positively modern compared to its ancient counterpart. Yet, it too was an artifact, a survivor of a great culture. In the end, I walked out with two purchases: a bulky birthday gift to be carried and a piece of Pennsylvania earth slipped into my pocket. My American journey had begun. Ralph Esmerian
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