Geoff Wisner

The Ransom of Russian Art

by John McPhee. Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994. 181 pages, illustrated, $20.00

When I was sixteen, I spent most of the summer on a sprawling estate on the Patuxent River in Maryland, taking part in a summer-study program on environmental issues. The place was called Cremona Farm and was rumored to have been a plantation complete with slaves. Early in the morning you could go to the river's edge and startle a great blue heron, or walk out the long, long dock, haul up a submerged wire-mesh trap, and see if there would be soft-shelled crabs for lunch. Sometimes we noticed the owner of the property, a portly man with a nearsighted look and a mustache of Flaubertian proportions. He paid little attention to us, and we decided he must have base motives for letting us stay on his property -- an IRS deduction, most likely. His name was Norton T. Dodge, and we rudely joked that the T stood for Tax.

John McPhee's new book The Ransom of Russian Art gave me a fresh reminder of how important it is not to assume too much about people. At the very time, in the mid-'70s, that I was observing Norton Dodge lolling around his outdoor swimming pool with a much younger female companion, McPhee reveals that he was well on his way to amassing the greatest collection of underground art ever to be smuggled out of the Soviet Union.

How did he do it? McPhee's description vividly confirms my memory of a man who didn't seem cut out for cloak-and-dagger work.

Dodge had a great deal more hair on his upper lip than elsewhere on his head. With his grand odobene mustache, he had everything but the tusks. He dressed professor, in tie, jacket -- used clothing. Various friends have likened him to an unmade bed. He is absent-minded to a level that no competing professor may yet have reached. He has called a locksmith to come and get him out of a situation that could have been alleviated by a key he later found in his pocket. But he got around Leningrad. He got around Kharkov. He got around Kiev, Odessa, Tbilisi, Baku, Yerevan.

In the early years, Dodge's pretext for traveling around the Soviet Union was research for a book on the role of women in Soviet society. Later he would sign up for cultural tours, then slip away to meet "unofficial" artists in cramped apartments where canvases were stacked under the beds. When the tour bus was ready to leave, Dodge would be "persona non present."

Dodge collected many fine paintings not so much by being a discerning connoisseur but by buying everything. "What Dodge had evidently assembled," McPhee writes, "was not so much of an era as the era itself. It was the whole tree -- the growing cambium with the dead wood. If his motive was higher than money, it was also higher than the aesthetic level of any given work. He had released into the general light a creativity whose products had been all the more concealed because they were untranslatable and difficult to move. With it, he had released the creators."

The artist who captured Dodge's imagination more than any other was Evgeny Rukhin. Rukhin's story runs through the course of this short but rich book, which includes color plates of a small sample of his prolific output: brooding squarish paintings on canvas or burlap, heavily textured, sometimes imprinted with a face from an icon, or collaged with a ragged bundle of broom bristles. Like many of the unofficial artists, Rukhin was supported by his wife, Galina Popova, an officially sanctioned artist who supplied him with materials. Before this, he had sometimes locked himself in public toilets so he could paint on the towels. She also put up with Rukhin's many affairs, although an American professor who was one of Rukhin's lovers describes an encounter that began when Popova attacked her with a knife, and ended when she threw the American woman's handbag, containing her money and passport, into the lions' den of the Leningrad zoo.

McPhee himself -- unusually for a writer who has revealed very little of himself in nearly two dozen books -- is among the most interesting characters in this one, and one of its pleasures is the glimpse it affords of McPhee's patient, stubborn technique as an interviewer. The conversation in which McPhee presses the aptly named Dodge to explain where he got the money to buy 9,000 works of art is both funny and revealing.

The Ransom of Russian Art pushes the envelope of McPhee's prose style, which has always been workmanlike in the best sense -- clean, solid, and well-crafted. Edward Hoagland, like McPhee an accomplished essayist and nature writer, once described him, with a touch of acid, as "long bent to the traces of The New Yorker." McPhee continues to write for The New Yorker, having weathered the Tina Brown tornado, and he has taken advantage of the freedoms of the new regime to use language that William Shawn or Robert Gottlieb would have red-penciled. In this case, when the subject is the unruly lives and works of the unofficial artists, a little raw language seems not only acceptable but necessary.

Published in the Harvard Post, February 3, 1995.



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Geoff Wisner The Ransom of Russian Art by John McPhee. Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994. 181 pages, illustrated, $20.00 When I was sixteen, I spent most of the summer on a sprawling estate on the Patuxent River in Maryland, taking part in a summer-study program on environmental issues. The place was called Cremona Farm and was rumored to have been a plantation complete with slaves. Early in the morning you could go to the river's edge and startle a great blue heron, or walk out the long, long dock, haul up a submerged wire-mesh trap, and see if there would be soft-shelled crabs for lunch. Sometimes we noticed the owner of the property, a portly man with a nearsighted look and a mustache of Flaubertian proportions. He paid little attention to us, and we decided he must have base motives for letting us stay on his property -- an IRS deduction, most likely. His name was Norton T. Dodge, and we rudely joked that the T stood for Tax. John McPhee's new book The Ransom of Russian Art gave me a fresh reminder of how important it is not to assume too much about people. At the very time, in the mid-'70s, that I was observing Norton Dodge lolling around his outdoor swimming pool with a much younger female companion, McPhee reveals that he was well on his way to amassing the greatest collection of underground art ever to be smuggled out of the Soviet Union. How did he do it? McPhee's description vividly confirms my memory of a man who didn't seem cut out for cloak-and-dagger work. Dodge had a great deal more hair on his upper lip than elsewhere on his head. With his grand odobene mustache, he had everything but the tusks. He dressed professor, in tie, jacket -- used clothing. Various friends have likened him to an unmade bed. He is absent-minded to a level that no competing professor may yet have reached. He has called a locksmith to come and get him out of a situation that could have been alleviated by a key he later found in his pocket. But he got around Leningrad. He got around Kharkov. He got around Kiev, Odessa, Tbilisi, Baku, Yerevan. In the early years, Dodge's pretext for traveling around the Soviet Union was research for a book on the role of women in Soviet society. Later he would sign up for cultural tours, then slip away to meet "unofficial" artists in cramped apartments where canvases were stacked under the beds. When the tour bus was ready to leave, Dodge would be "persona non present." Dodge collected many fine paintings not so much by being a discerning connoisseur but by buying everything. "What Dodge had evidently assembled," McPhee writes, "was not so much of an era as the era itself. It was the whole tree -- the growing cambium with the dead wood. If his motive was higher than money, it was also higher than the aesthetic level of any given work. He had released into the general light a creativity whose products had been all the more concealed because they were untranslatable and difficult to move. With it, he had released the creators." The artist who captured Dodge's imagination more than any other was Evgeny Rukhin. Rukhin's story runs through the course of this short but rich book, which includes color plates of a small sample of his prolific output: brooding squarish paintings on canvas or burlap, heavily textured, sometimes imprinted with a face from an icon, or collaged with a ragged bundle of broom bristles. Like many of the unofficial artists, Rukhin was supported by his wife, Galina Popova, an officially sanctioned artist who supplied him with materials. Before this, he had sometimes locked himself in public toilets so he could paint on the towels. She also put up with Rukhin's many affairs, although an American professor who was one of Rukhin's lovers describes an encounter that began when Popova attacked her with a knife, and ended when she threw the American woman's handbag, containing her money and passport, into the lions' den of the Leningrad zoo. McPhee himself -- unusually for a writer who has revealed very little of himself in nearly two dozen books -- is among the most interesting characters in this one, and one of its pleasures is the glimpse it affords of McPhee's patient, stubborn technique as an interviewer. The conversation in which McPhee presses the aptly named Dodge to explain where he got the money to buy 9,000 works of art is both funny and revealing. The Ransom of Russian Art pushes the envelope of McPhee's prose style, which has always been workmanlike in the best sense -- clean, solid, and well-crafted. Edward Hoagland, like McPhee an accomplished essayist and nature writer, once described him, with a touch of acid, as "long bent to the traces of The New Yorker." McPhee continues to write for The New Yorker, having weathered the Tina Brown tornado, and he has taken advantage of the freedoms of the new regime to use language that William Shawn or Robert Gottlieb would have red-penciled. In this case, when the subject is the unruly lives and works of the unofficial artists, a little raw language seems not only acceptable but necessary. Published in the Harvard Post, February 3, 1995.