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March 25, 2005/Adar II 14 5765, Volume 57, No. 30
Collecting conscience: Mikki and Stanley Weithorn
DEBORAH SUSSMAN SUSSER
Associate Editor
"Most of the time," the critic Robert Hughes writes of art collectors, "they buy what other people buy. They move in great schools, like bluefish, all identical. There is safety in numbers. If one wants Schnabel, they all want Schnabel, if one buys a Keith Haring, two hundred Keith Harings will be sold."
And then there are collectors like Scottsdale's own Stanley and Mikki Weithorn. Unike bluefish, or lemmings, or people (most of the time), the Weithorns buy art based on their gut reactions.
"We never ask people do you like this or don't you like this," Mikki says, "because very honestly this is our art. The fact that it turned out to be a collection, quote unquote, is intriguing, but that's not the direction we were headed."
A tour through "The Other Mainstream: Selections from the Mikki and Stanley Weithorn Collection," currently on view at the Arizona State Art Museum, is a powerful look at the kind of art that matters to the couple, who have been collecting work together since 1988, when they first met. Both had lost spouses the year before, and both had resisted the efforts of a mutual friend to set them up on a date, according to Stanley.
"(Mikki and I) lived in adjoining towns," he says. "It took about four months of (the friend) nagging to get us together - and it worked."
Both Stanley and Mikki had been interested in art before meeting each other, but neither to the extent that the two are now. Stanley, who is at the age of 80 mostly retired, worked as a tax attorney and devoted much of his time to small charities with an emphasis on social justice. Mikki worked for 40 years as a speech pathologist.
"When my late wife and I could squeeze in the time," Stanley says, "we would rush to see an exhibition at MOMA or the Met or the Whitney or the Guggenheim and so on, but neither of us had the knowledge or confidence to jump into the fray ... It was one of those things where we appreciated and enjoyed art, but from a distance."
As for Mikki, she'd fallen in love with art in college, when she took a general art course. "I always went and really extensively looked at art," she says now, "but I didn't buy very much."
Stanley says that when he and Mikki began collecting, "I operated initially on the courage of her convictions." Both Weithorns are, in Stanley's words, "very strongly committed, very involved humanists - that sort of sits in front of every aspect of our being and our functioning," and gradually the couple began to build a collection that reflected their shared principles.
"It's what I wanted to do when I grew up," Mikki says of collecting art, "I just didn't know it."
Today their collection, which fills their homes in Scottsdale and New York City and continues to grow, contains an impressive and provocative mix of works by both well-known and lesser-known artists. From Kara Walker's linoleum blockprints exploring racial identity in the United States to Tempe artist Jon Haddock's small, powerful sculpture of a bound and blindfolded John Walker Lindh, the Weithorns embrace work that pushes boundaries and explores controversial issues.
"When it came to art," Stanley explains, "it had to be something that we looked into that had special meaning. We've never bought an abstract painting, we don't buy landscapes, we don't buy portraits. We buy things that speak to us."
Stanley's advice to anyone looking to start a collection begins with a question: "What is it in your heart and soul, Miss or Mister or Mrs. X Who-is-thinking-about-starting-to-collect," he asks, "that really inspires you, that really makes you look at something and say, 'Oh my goodness, I can think about that, I can almost taste what the artist was thinking and doing?'
"If I had 50 million dollars," he explains, "I would not go around buying 10, 20, 30 million dollar pieces of art. I think people who buy that kind of art are buying it mostly because it's an ego thing, it's a power thing."
Collecting for the Weithorns is "a different kind of thing," Stanley says. "It's a part of living your life from within as opposed to keeping up with the Joneses."
Stanley attributes his approach, both to life and to collecting, to an epiphany he had as a young infantryman in World War II.
"We came into a labor camp, right outside of Hanover," he remembers. His unit had been directed to the labor camp in the hope that they might be able to save some of the prisoners "before the guards could do anymore damage." They were almost too late.
"What was left were carcasses of humans that had been killed," Stanley recalls, "and 19 people that were still sort of halfway on their feet.
"I was brought up an Orthodox Jew," he says. "When we came into this condition of these helpless, abused and murdered people who had done nothing more than being Jewish - I could not stomach it. I did not go to sleep that night. I came up that morning with an absolute feeling that there is no possibility, any way, shape or form, that there is a supreme being. Because there could not be a supreme being that could allow this to happen. ...
"I said to myself, not then, but as I reflect back what really I was saying to myself in a subliminal fashion was, Well, if there is no supreme being, then we - at least those of us who are willing and committed - we have to do things to assist those who are less able in our society."
Stanley's epiphany gave him "a sense of commitment in the society in which I live," a commitment that has stayed with him to this day.
"Basically I'm a tax lawyer," he says, but, he admits, not just any tax lawyer: "I invented, in effect, a segment of tax law which had been totally ignored for years and years on the theory that it wasn't economically a viable thing for a law firm to get involved in which is now called charitable tax law." In addition to writing a seven-volume treatise in the field and representing more than 250 charities, some of them pro bono, Stanley also set up the first set of conferences on the subject for tax lawyers.
"I left an element of where good tax lawyers normally end up, which is business tax, which I had been doing in my early years," he says. "I turned that away and gave those clients to my partner. It's been an exciting, a dramatic, a fulfilling career. And when Mikki led me into the area of collecting art, it had to be on the same track. So it was sort of a natural."
"I'm a mover and a shaker," Stanley concludes, "and it has nothing to do with money. It has to do with trying to make this world a better place, which isn't easy to do."
Details
- What: The Other Mainstream: Selections from the Collection of Mikki and Stanley Weithorn
- When: Through Saturday, April 23
- Where: ASU Art Museum Nelson Fine Arts Center, southeast corner of 10th St. and Mill Ave., Tempe
- Cost: Admission is free.
- Call: 480-965-2787
- Online: http://asuartmuseum.asu.edu/theothermainstream
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