<Death Anniversary> Max Klein (May 20th 1993)
Bill Schenley
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FROM: The New York Times (April 5th 2001) ~
By William Hamilton
Photo: http://www.paintbynumberz.com/dedication.html
Some distant day, anthropologists may discover what was surely the tribal
art of 20th-century American suburbia: paint-by-number paintings.
As quickly as you could become a writer by corresponding with the Famous
Writers School, lose weight without exercising, own sea horses or a monkey
the size of a teacup, you could be a successful artist by completing a
blue-printed numbered canvas, color-coded to tiny pots of paint.
The clowns, kittens, ballerinas, cowboys, New England landscapes, Pacific
seascapes and Parisian cityscapes rendered by the ubiquitous hobbyists of
the 1950's coincided with the dawn of tract-home civilization. Fifty years
later, they already seem as remarkable as Lascaux. You just have to stumble
across a cave of them.
''O.K.,'' said Trey Speegle, sounding the roll call. ''Jesuses, Sacred
Hearts, Marys.'' Mr. Speegle, like a Vatican guide with a group behind him,
marched down the stairs on the last leg of a tour of his four-story
19th-century town house in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn. The
stairway holds the bulk of Mr. Speegle's collection of roughly 500
paint-by-number paintings, hung according to subject or genre. The
masterpieces -- Mona Lisa, which he paid 165 big bucks for; the
Gainsboroughs, Blue Boy and Lady Innes (a k a Pinky in paint-by-number
circles); Ingres's odalisque -- are the cream at the top of the stairs.
''I know; it's ridiculous,'' said Mr. Speegle, the creative director of YM
magazine, grabbing the offense. Not on the premises are 20 large works Mr.
Speegle lent to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History for
''Paint by Number: Accounting for Taste in the 1950's,'' an exhibition
opening tomorrow in Washington. The show, on view through Dec. 31, is the
first full accounting of the popular pastime since 1992, when the
Bridgewater Lustberg Gallery in New York put on display the collection of
the late Michael O'Donoghue, a writer for ''Saturday Night Live.''
''I can remember them as the decorative condition of the neighborhood I grew
up in,'' said William L. Bird Jr., the Smithsonian exhibition's curator, who
grew up in suburban Washington. ''They were a perfect match with people who
aspired to own their own home -- the ultimate achievement of
do-it-yourself.''
Mr. Bird, whose parents took him at age 12 to see the ''Mona Lisa'' behind
bulletproof glass at the National Gallery of Art in 1963, recalled returning
to his house and seeing the framed Utrillos in the basement recreation room
with new appreciation.
The paint-by-number concept was the work of two men: Dan Robbins, an artist
who worked for the auto industry, and Max Klein, who manufactured paint.
''It's fitting it happened in Detroit,'' Mr. Bird said. ''If General Motors
had made art, this would have been it.''
Mr. Robbins remembered that Leonardo da Vinci had left numbered sections of
paintings for assistants to fill in. In 1952, he brought the idea to Mr.
Klein, the owner of the Palmer Show Card Paint Company, his new employer.
Mr. Klein saw potential in marketing fail-safe artists' kits, in part
because of the celebrity of Sunday painters like President Eisenhower and
Winston Churchill.
But he disliked Mr. Robbins's first proposed painting, ''Abstract No. 1,'' a
still-life that was ''part Picasso, part Braque and a lot of Robbins,'' said
Mr. Robbins, 76, now an artist living in Oakbrook, Ill. His latest
commission is an outdoor banner for the Smithsonian exhibition -- an
18-by-28-foot paint-by-number lighthouse painted by number this week by two
museum employees in a cherry picker.
Mr. Klein placed his bets instead on the postcard scenes and calendar art of
barns in Maine, and fair-faced collies, pigtailed Indian princesses and
coolies in China -- the pictures that America saw and smiled at when it
closed its eyes to the realities of a nuclear age, urban sprawl and a
growing multiculturalism. And masterpieces: though 90 percent of the art was
original, reproductions like da Vinci's ''Last Supper'' were best-sellers.
''Once we'd launched, we were besieged with requests from customers,'' Mr.
Robbins said. ''We took our lead from the letters from customers. We were
getting our research right from the horse's mouth.''
By 1953, 30 companies were manufacturing paint-by-number sets, which
typically sold for $2.50, with palettes that included up to 90 colors. Art
departments modeled on cartoon animation units at studios like Disney
specialized in subjects like pets or religious studies, generating thousands
of images. Sales for the industry that year topped $80 million.
''Actors act in plays written by somebody else,'' Mr. Robbins said.
''Singers cover songs.
This is just an artistic version of singalong.''
What made paint-by-number painting so popular?
''You didn't have to make any decisions, about what the colors should be or
what to paint,'' said Mr. Speegle, who, despite his impressive holdings, has
never tried his hand at one. ''It was relaxing. Then you could frame it and
hang it on your wall and look at it.'' Mr. Speegle was standing next to an
''out of control kitty,'' as he described a small animal portrait,
expressionistically executed by someone who clearly had trouble relaxing.
The prevailing wisdom of the postwar period was that art enhanced the
quality of life.
''An artistic home means more enjoyable living,'' wrote Janet K. Smith in
1949 in the Journal of Home Economics.
Even the White House, during Eisenhower's administration, installed a
gallery of paint-by-number paintings in the West Wing, in 1954.
It included pictures completed by Nelson Rockefeller, Ethel Merman and J.
Edgar Hoover (a prim Swiss village, blocked in with a marksman's precision).
Paint-by-number paintings betrayed America's belief that the production of
art could be domesticated like anything else -- from a paper-trained puppy
to the perfect lawn.
The paintings, entered in local art contests, took prizes, which sent
critics into full howl.
''Why were they so afraid of a housewife who picked up a paintbrush for the
first time?'' Mr. Bird asked. ''One thing you have to know about it -- it's
not art.''
June Mersky, a Boston collector, who also lent pieces to the Smithsonian
show, would disagree.
'
'They're folk art,'' said Ms. Mersky, who is down to 650 paintings (she just
sold 50). ''They're not cookie-cutter. People did artistically what they
wanted with them. It was tedious, done by hand, not machine.''
Unlike Mr. Speegle, who was bequeathed his first big batch by another
collector, and who appears to have adopted the attitude that the rest
slipped into the house one day when he forgot to lock the door, Ms. Mersky
loves her paint-by-number paintings.
''They're my gems; I adore them,'' she said, though she added, ''My
husband's ready to sell the house just to get rid of them.'' Her favorite is
a self-portrait by Madame Vigée-Lebrun. The ''other one'' hangs in the
Louvre. She also has two Maillols that ''would hold up in a mansion as the
real thing,'' she said -- an interesting thought.
Ms. Mersky has painted by number herself.
''A little cabin in the woods,'' she recalled. ''I think I did a good job on
it. I was 10.''
The hobby and its by-products, in fact, bring out a generation of memories
for those who grew up in the 1950's, which lends a powerful appeal to them
as collectibles.
Dr. Larry Rubin, a psychologist in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., decorated the
waiting room of his office with his collection. Dr. Rubin owns 250.
''I'm a small-time collector,'' he said.
For Dr. Rubin's patients, the paintings are picture windows into the past.
''People started offering fascinating tidbits about themselves, or their
families,'' he recalled, ''insights that I don't think I could have gotten
so easily in therapy -- tearful reminiscences about watching their fathers
doing these, or the family at Christmastime.''
Though the kits are still produced, by the late 1950's the bloom was off the
rose -- all 10 carefully parceled colors of it.
''Television displaced paint-by-number as the visual experience in the
home,'' Mr. Bird said.
Mr. Speegle, standing by a wall of ''Oriental'' themes at the foot of his
Brooklyn stairway, said he thought that people were fond of paint-by-number
paintings as faded emblems of a pre-ironic America.
What was naïve art is now deadpan collecting. Mr. Speegle's curios include a
bounced check written by Courtney Love; a pair of unworn, monogrammed
pajamas tailored for Ray Bolger; a stuffed cat curled on a pillow by a
fireplace; and a tennis shoe signed by Andy Warhol. The artist -- deadpan's
patron saint -- also did a series of paint-by-number paintings in the
1960's: the numbers were placed over the paint.
Mr. Speegle, a recovering pack rat, who says he no longer buys, still checks
in with eBay online for paintings. The heydays of thrift-shop shopping and
flea-marketing are largely over. It is a field still finding its criteria --
some pay for precision, others for painterly license -- but prices, which
vary wildly, usually stay below $100.
There are rarities, too, like unpainted canvases or unused boxed sets, and
there are paintings that remain rumors.
Mr. Speegle has a grail -- the queen of England, Elizabeth II, produced by
Palmer in 1953 as an export for Canada.
''I've only ever seen it in pictures,'' he said.
How high would he go? Five hundred?
''Oh good God no,'' Mr. Speegle exclaimed nervously. ''That's a lot of
money. I'm not that interested in them.'' The vista up the stairs was
painted by number as far as the eye could see.
''Maybe 200 -- at the most,'' he said.
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About collecting Paint By Numbers:
http://www.go-star.com/framer/pbn.htm