Elizabeth Tashjian, 94, Dies
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/04/dining/04tashjian.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries&oref=slogin
Elizabeth Tashjian, 94, an Expert on Nuts, Dies
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: February 4, 2007
Elizabeth Tashjian, who debated whether she was a nut culturist or a
nut artist, but was indisputably, well, nuts enough about nuts to win
fame (but not fortune) as matriarch of the Nut Museum in Old Lyme,
Conn., died last Sunday in Old Saybrook, Conn. She was 94.
Ms. Tashjian hated being called "the Nut Lady" and died without
fulfilling her dream of opening a nut theme park certain to surpass
Disneyland. (Her reasoning: Squirrels are cuter than a certain mouse.)
Her death was confirmed by Christopher B. Steiner, a professor of art
history and museum studies at Connecticut College, who in 2002 rescued
Ms. Tashjian's nuts, nut art, nut jewelry and a Nativity scene made
completely of nuts from being thrown away.
That collection, the Nut Museum, had filled a room of Ms. Tashjian's
17-room Gothic Revival mansion. The objects have since been in museum
and library exhibitions.
"She became a visionary avant-garde artist," said Dr. Steiner, who is
dedicated to preserving, interpreting and communicating Ms. Tashjian's
legacy.
Dr. Steiner said that Ms. Tashjian began as an academic painter who
liked nuts as a subject and started her museum in 1972 as a "cabinet
of curiosity." These "cabinets," which emerged during the Renaissance,
were rooms stuffed with intriguing objects about which people told
stories.
Or sang songs, in the case of Ms. Tashjian. She performed her
composition "Nuts Are Beautiful," the nut anthem, for visitors, to
whom she also gave free cider and coffeecake. She told stories about a
bearded dwarf dwelling within every peanut embryo. (Admission at first
was one nut, later rising to $3 and one nut.)
Her museum fits comfortably within an American tradition of
enthrallment with odd collections, including museums of vacuum
cleaners, toilet seats, mustard, postcards, potted meat, Antarctic
dogs and dirt. But it aspired to be an art museum.
It contained mainly artworks by Ms. Tashjian, including her "Mask of
the Unknown Nut" sculpture. The many varieties of nuts, including the
35-pound Coco de mer, which resembles buttocks, from the Seychelles,
were gifts from patrons. So were many of the artifacts, like toys
derived from nuts.
Ms. Tashjian's second act in life was as a public personality on
television and radio. She appeared on the shows of Johnny Carson,
David Letterman, Jay Leno, Howard Stern and Chevy Chase, who kissed
her hand twice and won her heart. She often took along her huge,
disturbingly suggestive Coco de mer nut.
Mr. Steiner said it was arguable whether she was exploited by the news
media, exploited it or played it to a draw.
His suspicion that she was the joker, not the joke, is reflected in
the title of his forthcoming book, "Performing the Nut Museum:
Elizabeth Tashjian and the Art of the Double Entendre."
In her twilight years as a gaunt, four-foot-tall woman with a sing-
song voice, she became a symbol of defiance, as she vainly fought to
keep her home-cum-museum. A court declared her incompetent, and named
guardians who sold it to pay her bills.
In 2005 the filmmaker Don Bernier made a documentary, "In a Nutshell:
A Portrait of Elizabeth Tashjian." Marian Masone of the Film Society
of Lincoln Center wrote, "Bernier's lovely, touching film asks the
question, was she really nuts?"
Elizabeth Yegsa Tashjian was born in 1912 in Manhattan, the daughter
of Armenian immigrants. Her father was a prosperous rug trader, and
her mother came from an aristocratic family with a castle. They
divorced when she was 7.
She studied at the New York School of Applied Design for Women and the
National Academy of Design, where, The New York Times reported in
1929, she won a prize. She was also a gifted violinist.
"The art and the music galloped together," she said in an interview
with The Hartford Courant in 2005.
As a child, she played with nuts, then painted them. As an art
student, she submitted a painting of a nutcracker chasing Brazil nuts
to a juried art competition.
She and her mother moved to the Old Lyme mansion in 1950, and her
mother died in 1959. Until she fell ill in 2002, Ms. Tashjian lived
there alone. She never married, held a regular job or learned to
drive. She left no immediate survivors.
She claimed not to know the word "nut" meant crazy until a patron
shocked her by offering his wife for the "nut" portion of her
admission fee. She resolved to end this pejorative use of her favorite
word, in the process becoming, she said, a nutty philosopher.
In an interview with The Washington Post in 1999, she shared an
insight: "To reveal its inner self," she said, "the nut needs the
nutcracker."