ALL THE WORKS FROM 1997 WERE INCLUDED IN THE EXHBITION, Ken Aptekar: Talking to Pictures, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., October 17, 1997–April 5, 1998. Click HERE for installation views.
30″ x 30″ (76.5cm x 76.5cm)
oil/wood, sandblasted glass, bolts
Text: The curator refers to ghosts in the collection.
She’s smiling, but she’s not happy. I’m puzzled.
“Paintings the museum sold off,” she explains.
60″ x 30″ ((153cm x 76.5cm)
diptych, oil/wood, sandblasted glass, bolts
After Frederick Kaemmerer, The Beach at Scheveningen, Holland, 1874, Private Collection
(de-accessioned from the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1988)
Text: Summers we drive up to East Tawas on Lake Huron. There the sky is much bigger than
over the backyard in Detroit. The sun is hotter, too. Even in the water I have to wear a t-shirt.
Lying on the sand I watch rabbits and mushrooms drift across the sky. I am the baby, and they
love me: Mom, Dad, my sister, my two big brothers. They don’t have to cover up. They’re not
redheads.
24″ x 24″ (61cm x 61cm)
oil/wood, sandblasted glass, bolts
After Adolf Ulrich Wertmuller, Portrait of Robert Rea, 1797, Corcoran Gallery of Art
Text: Bruce Holmes, 14: If he wanted to be feminine, that’s him. I wouldn’t
deprive him of that. For me personally, it’s like, whatever floats your boat.
60″ x 30″ (153cm x 76.5cm)
diptych, oil/wood, sandblasted glass, bolts
After Elizabeth Marie Louise Vigee-Lebrun,Portrait of
Madame DuBarry, 1782, CorcoranGallery of Art
G. P. A. Healy, Portrait ofAbraham Lincoln, 1860,
Corcoran Gallery of Art
Text: Mom was an art teacher before she had the four of us. Dad
taught music. We lived in a house my parents built for us from the
money he made teaching plus moonlighting as a musician.
I have 8 x 10glossies of him when he wastwentysomething where
he looks like a movie star. My mother had the sweet looks of an angel.
60″ x 30″ 153cm x 76.5cm)
diptych, oil/wood, sandblasted glass, bolts
After Mme. Marie Louise Elisabeth Vigee-LeBrun, Lady with wreath
(or Elizabeth de France), 1782, Corcoran Gallery of Art
Text: Her father dragged her from shtetl to shtetl. She sewed clothes for Jews in the back of a horsedrawn cart.
A marriage to an older man was arranged but Mierle Pomerance escaped. Uncle Shmulik secretly arranged passage,
and alone she sailed to America. Stepping off the train in Detroit, she found a job in two days. Two weeks later
Mierle, now Mary, had a boyfriend; and when the relatives she stayed with disapproved, she got herself a room.
They wed in her landlord’s apartment and feasted on corned beef sandwiches. She managed the bicycle shop they
ran; he shmoozed with customers. Still she found the time to make my mother’s clothes: a red and white gingham
outfit, a pink suit with a blue organdy blouse. “A couturière your grandma could’ve been!” my mother says. I
escaped when I became an artist.
30″ x 60″ (76.5cm x 153cm) diptych,
oil/wood, sandblasted glass. bolts
After William Trost Richards, On the Coast of New England,
1894, Corcoran Gallery of Art
George Henry Yewell, Portrait of a Boy, 1867, Corcoran Gallery of Art
Text: “Maybe he’s coming to the new land, like New York,” the museum guard
guesses. “He’s an immigrant, and he has a long way to go.” She looks deep
into the boy’s eyes. “I like that one; it’s very simple.”
24″ x 48″ (61cm x 122cm) diptych,
oil/wood, sandblasted glass, bolts
After Irving Ramsey Wiles, The Artist’s Mother and Father, 1889, Corcoran Gallery of Art
Text: Why couldn’t you be something better than an artist, Liliana Martin-del-Campo thinks they’re
saying. She’s in the sixth grade. “They’re worried their son isn’t making any money,” she tells me,
“and they volunteered to pose for him so he could paint a picture. But they really wanted him to
be something like his father was.” She doesn’t know his father was an artist.
60″ x 60″ (153cm x 153cm) four panels,
oil/wood, sandblasted glass, bolts
After Willem Van de Velde the younger, Before the Storm,
c. 1700, Corcoran Gallery of Art
Text: Dad is showing me how to develop. We’re in the darkroom he built for me
downstairs. He explains the way to place the negative in the enlarger so the
picture won’t come out backwards. It’s all up to me how big to make my pictures.
Often I am all alone in the dark while I’m developing.
Text: I went searching for Jews in the Corcoran. Russian Jews, like me. I found them in the background, huddled, anxious, busy.
After Charles Frederick Ulrich, In the Land of Promise, Castle Garden, 1884, Corcoran Gallery of Art
Text: Strength. Determination. Power. And that’s a little like myself. Carrie Parker, age 15
After Henri Regnault, Head of a Moor, 1870, Corcoran Gallery of Art
Text: She needed help. Her husbandÕs medical bills were more than she could manage. John Fitch, of the Artists Fund Society, wrote to the Corcoran Gallery of Art.
“Mr. Harry Chase, a member of our Society, has been for several years an inmate in an Insane Hospital. . . . I have taken charge of his studio and pictures and am selling all I can to enable his wife to pay all his expenses. Mr. Chase was generally acknowledged as the most promising American marine painter, and all who knew him and his works sincerely mourn that the prospect of his recovery is a very slight one. I would like to offer New York Harbor for exhibition and purchase.” The Corcoran bought the painting for one thousand dollars. Chase died later that year, 1889, at age 36.
After Harry Chase, New York Harbor, 1885, Corcoran Gallery of Art
Text: My parents take us on trips. The four kids pile in the car. Often when we’re driving, I press my forehead to the window. Sometimes birds perch on telephone wires along the road, and I fly up and sit quietly beside them. They’re just there; they have nothing to figure out, no one to escape.
After Meindert Hobbema, Wooded Landscape with Figures, 1663, Corcoran Gallery of Art
![It wasn't my brother who shot the rabbi, 60" x 60" (153cm x 153cm) four panels, oil/wood, sandblasted glass, bolts TEXT IN GLASS: It wasnÕt my brother who shot the rabbi to death before a packed synagogue in a wealthy suburb of Detroit. The killer was some other kidÕs mentally ill older brother. He strode up to the front of the sanctuary on that spring day in 1966, announced over the mike, ÒThis synagogue is an abomination and a travesty,Ó then faced Rabbi Morris Adler and pulled out his gun. The beloved rabbi fell to the floor, his prayer shawl still draped around him. The boy turned the gun on himself, and a family secret became a public tragedy. After Charles Elliott, Portrait of Thomas Loraine McKenney,1856, Corcoran Gallery of Art [Note: The sitter was the US Commissioner of Indian Affairs, and he is wearing an Indian blanket given to him by a Tribal Chief.]](http://kenaptekar.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/TalkingtoPictures13.jpg)
Text: It wasn’t my brother who shot the rabbi to death before a packed synagogue in a wealthy suburb of Detroit. The killer was some other kid’s mentally ill older brother. He strode up to the front of the sanctuary on that spring day in 1966, announced over the mike, “This synagogue is an abomination and a travesty,” then faced Rabbi Morris Adler and pulled out his gun. The beloved rabbi fell to the floor, his prayer shawl still draped around him. The boy turned the gun on himself, and a family secret became a public tragedy.
After Charles Elliott, Portrait of Thomas Loraine McKenney, 1856, Corcoran Gallery of Art [Note: The sitter was the US Commissioner of Indian Affairs, and he is wearing an Indian blanket given to him by a Tribal Chief.]
Text: After his license was suspended, I drove my older brother to bars in Detroit where whites didnÕt go. I tried to be cool, sitting down in a booth with my ginger ale. My brother unzipped his gig bag, raised his trumpet, and sat in with the best of the be-bop bands.
After Henri Regnault, Head of a moor, c.1870, Corcoran Gallery of Art
Text: Is the sky blue? What kind of blue? Would I think twice about the clouds? I can’t tell from a photograph of the painting. Sotheby’s refuses to tell me who bought the beach scene they auctioned for the Corcoran in 1988. They won’t even forward my letter asking if I can take a look. The winning bid was $1.2 million. The $122,500 commission the buyer paid Sotheby’s bought protection from inquiring artists.
After Frederick Hendrick Kaemmerer, Beach at Scheveningen, 1874, Private Collection
Text: “Is that you?” the art student asks. I tell him it’s a self-portrait by Walter Shirlaw from around 1880. The art student tells me to forget about the Shirlaw. “Boring,” he says.
After Walter Shirlaw, Self-portrait, c. 1880, Corcoran Gallery of Art
Text: I’m practicing. Dad’s in the other room, but I know he is listening. He cares about how I play the piano. Later my Russian grandmother is sitting on the couch. I’m playing Oyfin Pripetshik for her. I see her lips moving to the Yiddish lyrics she learned in a village near Minsk sixty years ago. My grandma died in 1982. I don’t play piano much anymore.
After Francois-Hubert Drouais, Portrait of Madame Francois-Hubert Drouais, 1750, Corcoran Gallery of Art
Text: I don’t like anything about the room in the painting. If I were in it, I’d be wondering where am I suppposed to go? I don’t want to sit on the chairs, they’re uncomfortable. I don’t like the colors, they’re bland. And I don’t like the pots, the little sculpture things. I don’t like the picture. You’re just focusing on everything that’s in the picture, not the picutre. Maia Stern, age 11
After Walter Gay, Salon in the Musee Jacquemart-Andre, Corcoran Gallery of Art
Text: When he was twenty, my brother wrote poetry and aspired to playing trumpet like Clifford Brown. Instead he went to medical school on a full scholarship. Five days into the first semester he called for my parents and they brought him home. A few days later two men in white came to the house and took him away. I was twelve at the time. Once I based an entire series of paintings on depictions in art history of severed heads. I find myself drawn now to scenes of harmony.
After Jean Mari Dedeban, Harpsichord (cupid grouping painted on side), 1770, Corcoran Gallery of Art
Text: I’m thirteen years old, and my twenty year old brother is home between stays at the hospital. He doesn’t like the psychiatric ward any more than I like going there to visit him. We’re in the house by ourselves. I’m doing my homework in the kitchen. He decides to go down to the basement. At the far end is Dad’s workbench with the saws and chisels and drills and screwdrivers. Through the floor I hear the pullchains on each ceiling light as he makes his way toward the bench. My heart is racing. What if he does something to himself. To me. He’s standing under the light over the bench. As I approach, I see the three-hole punch, and the sheet music he’s preparing to add to his book of songs.
After Circle of Rembrandt, Man with hat holding a scroll, c. 1650, Corcoran Gallery of Art
Text: “Both of them know something,” the high school girl tells me, “like, say, she had an affair and he knows, but they never talked about it. Each one knows the other is thinking, but they’re not really talking and they’re upset. They’re holding something inside.”
After Irving Ramsey Wiles, The Artist’s Mother and Father, 1889, Corcoran Gallery of Art
Text: Before you died, you said art was your “ticket to immortality.” You gave the Corcoran a million dollars and some Daumier etchings you had promised to the Los Angeles County Museum. You also threw in a big portrait of yourself. It was never exhibited at the Corcoran. Recently, a curator at your museum out in LA showed me a duplicate portrait in a storage room.
After Yao You-Xin (1935-1996), Portrait of Armand Hammer, 1984
Text: I know there’s lots of kids smoking and all, but that’s setting a bad example. And for kids who haven’t started smoking yet, that’s not really sending a good message, you know? But art is art, and all art doesn’t send a positive message. Akosua Tyus, age 14
After John George Brown, Allegro and Penseroso, 1879, Corcoran Gallery of Art
Text: Mollie Zweibel says: “I’d buy a one-way ticket to Spain and send my big sister there forever.”
After Victor Dubreuil, Safe Money, 1896, Corcoran Gallery of Art
Text: From Darnell Hester, a guard in the Corcoran: The gentleman seems like the kind of person I wouldn’t want to know. I wouldn’t trust him any further than I could see him. That’s what I appreciate about the painting, the fact that it does arouse that type of emotion in me.
After Circle of Rembrandt, An Elderly Man in an Armchair, c. 1630, Corcoran Gallery of Art
Text: I call the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Would it be possible, I’m wondering, to arrange the loan of his wife of forty years to sit beside him in Washington for an exhibition? The Metropolitan Museum of Art thinks not, something about “adequate lead time.” To them she hardly matters, they’ve decided she’s not a real Rembrandt. She’s not even on view at the Met. They keep her in a closet.
My parents celebrated their fifty-seventh anniversary this year. I hate separation. Just as I am about to get on my high horse with the Met, I hear, “I’m perfectly happy in New York. Now I have to go sit next to him?”
After Circle of Rembrandt, An Elderly Man in a Chair, c.1630, Corcoran Gallery of Art
Attributed to Jacob Adriaensz. Backer, Old Woman in an Armchair, 1635, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Text: My parents offer to help me buy a computer and scanner to work on my paintings. I get one with a 500 megabyte hard drive, which seems enormous. My studio is in the living room. So is the dining table, my desk, and a sitting area. I don’t have much space to work. For a while, I just move my studio into cyberspace. Now the disk is full, and I really need a bigger room.
After Walter Gay, View of a Salon in the Musée Jacquemart André, 1912, Corcoran Gallery of Art
Walter Gay, View of a Salon in the Musée Jacquemart André, 1912, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Text: I’m out in LA for an opening at a museum, and I go to visit my brther. He hands me a xerox from a book about George Gershwin: “Artists do not need loving or supportive parents in order to succeed.” The author, Joan Peyser, names five famous composers whose fathers “told them they would never succeed if they went into music.” My brother plays trumpet with pick-up bands, works the Chinese funeral circuit, does recording sessions every so often. He rehearses with musicians who meet just to play for their own pleasure. Recently he told me, “I know what I can do and what I can’t. My success is having a love of music.”
After John George Brown, Allegro and Penseroso, 1879, Corcoran Gallery of Art
Text: “I’d just look around and observe,” Fatoumata Parrish, a guard at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, tells me. “I wouldn’t sit in any of the chairs in the painting because they look too pretty to sit in. No, I wouldn’t touch anything,” she says. “I’d just observe.”
After Walter Gay, Salon in the Musee Jacquemart-Andre, Corcoran Gallery of Art
Text: The lights dim in Henry Ford Auditorium. Walter Poole strides out to the podium in his crisp white shirt and tails. At ten years old, I have to sit up in my seat to see the Maestro’s baton. The concert opens with Debussy’s Three Nocturnes, and I fold my hands in my lap as the first, Clouds, begins. Motionless, I follow the musical line. The strings take me away. The timpani rumble, the skies darken. A pleading oboe beckons. My head is in the clouds. Suddenly I detect the questionable intonation of a horn. I shift in my seat. A clarinet entrance is late, the harp and flute are out of sync. I’m being pulled down. Between the first and second nocturne, I am dismayed as listeners applaud. I wish I could just be up in the clouds. Debussy composed it after standing on a bridge over the Seine. He wrote, “I was leaning on the railing. Some clouds slowly pass… a number of clouds, not too heavy, not too light, some clouds. That is all.”
After (all in Corcoran Gallery of Art):
Albert Bierstadt, The Buffalo Trail: The Impending Storm, 1869
Meindert Hobbema, Wooded Landscape with Figures, 1663
Willem Van de Velde the younger, 1623-1707, Before the Storm 1700
Jan Van Goyen, View of Dordrecht (from the North) 165?
Ralph Blakelock, Moonlight, c. 1890
Camille Pissarro, The Louvre, Morning, Rainy Weather, 1900
Charles Daubigny, Landscape, Distant Village, 1870-75