Robert Frank, Harry Lunn, Paul Katz, and collector Arthur Penn
February 24, 2020A personal research into the story of the photographer Robert Frank and the dealer Harry Lunn brought me to a few pages from R.J. Smith’s biography American Witness: The Art and Life of Robert Frank. There I read of how Frank soured on the deal he had made with Harry Lunn, facilitated by Paul Katz of Marlborough Gallery and Arthur Penn, a New York lawyer and photography collector. I not competent to characterize this deal except in its broadest outlines, as I know only what I have gleaned from Smith’s book via Amazon’s handy “Look Inside” feature. (Those interested in the details I refer to Smith, and to another book, Wolfgang Beilenhoff’s Hold Still, Keep Going of 2001.)
What I wish to address regards something that Frank said - or rather wrote - to Katz and Penn that I found absolutely shocking and unfair on Frank’s part. So I have to provide some context, paraphrasing Smith. In 1977 or so, Katz and Penn formed a partnership and purchased the rights to some 3100 of Frank’s images, including vintage prints from The Americans. Frank signed each print, and Arthur Penn paid him $300,000 - $30,000 a year for the next ten years, if I understand correctly. Katz and Penn then approached Harry Lunn, the important photography dealer, offering to sell Frank’s work. They made a deal, by which they sold Lunn tranches of 150 prints each year, for $40,000 the first year, $50,000 for the next, and so on. Lunn was to sell “a limited number of signed complete editions of all 83 photographs in The Americans”. It seemed that Frank as well was content with the arrangement. For Frank the steady money was surely a relief; his son Pablo was very ill and there were expenses to be met.
But soon enough, it seems, Frank was chafing at the bit - in fact he probably felt like a sort of draft horse for Harry Lunn, whose wheeler-dealer style was antithetical to Frank’s bohemian character. (He had trusted Paul Katz, Marlborough’s curator of photography, who was another kind of person entirely, but he hardly knew Lunn.) Now Frank was no longer in control of his work. He could not sell a print independently of Lunn (although it’s not clear whether this regarded images committed to Lunn - which would be an unsurprising restriction - or images which were not the object of his contract). In addition, his work was being contextualized in a way that went against Frank’s intentions. It seems also that Lunn began to sell individual prints outside the context of The Americans, marketing them as individual works instead of complete editions.
So Frank grew very dissatisfied. In a letter he wrote to Katz and Penn in 1985, as cited by Smith, “Frank mockingly notes that when he had given them a photo some time back, he had neglected to inscribe it for them. Here he belatedly offered his inscription: you are greedy and soulless and immoral.” A postscript quoted the Bible passage in which Jesus asks, “For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”
This astonished me, as I knew Paul Katz at that time, and I simply could not believe he would deal anybody in such a way as to deserve such an insult. Paul Katz was my teacher in 1976 and 1977, a professor of photography at Lehman College, N.Y., where I was pursuing my M.F.A. degree. He had also begun to collaborate with Marlborough Gallery. He arranged my assignment as an intern with Marlborough Graphics dusting my final semester. While working with Paul at Marlborough, I met Berenice Abbott, Irving Penn, Louis Faurer, and briefly Robert Frank himself. (I also “met” Harry Lunn numerous times, although the word is too strong for what I - a lowly intern - was able to share with Lunn. Better to say I was present for some of Lunn’s business visits to the gallery, always red-faced and bon vivant.) Paul also set me up to work as an assistant to Irving Penn, which I did for the next two years. This experience was a great privilege, and I owe Paul a lot. (I have not been in touch with Paul since those days, I regret to say. I generally feel overwhelmed by the present, so I’m not very good about keeping up with old friends.)
I always found Paul to be sensitive, patient, attentive, and fair in his dealing with me and everyone else at Marlborough. He had an artistic sensibility and a sincere love for art that went well beyond what you usually find in the world of art galleries. (This sort of tendency can disqualify you for such work.) I can well understand how Paul was able to win the trust and confidence of the notoriously difficult Frank. (The one time I met Frank at Marlborough must have been in the spring of 1977, when the deal between Frank, Katz, and Penn was perhaps beginning to take shape - although of course I heard nothing about it then or later. Paul introduced me to Frank, and I made a very sincere compliment about his photography. Frank thanked me graciously, but had nothing else to say to me, and I stayed discreetly in the background. He seemed preoccupied, out of his preferred element - not at ease in a major art gallery consultation room where he might be swallowed up like Jonah. Now that I look back, I suppose he was simply anxious about the prospect of this arrangement.
Paul’s admiration for Frank and for his work was clearly genuine, and I can only think that, besides acting on behalf of Marlborough, he would have done whatever possible to help Frank. To cheat him would have been inconceivable. So Frank’s gesture towards Katz and Penn seems only an example of Frank’s cantankerousness, his stubborn personality. Perhaps his anger would have been better directed at Harry Lunn, the only party to the deal that truly had the instincts of a shark. (This was the opinion of numerous others who were a part of that world.) Although Lunn’s love of photography (or was it passion?) was sincere, he was a real operator, a macher, and his ways grated against many. He was boastful, smarmy, and full of himself. I personally found him repellent - like a Donald Trump, but with some genuine brains and culture. Lunn undoubtedly did a lot to raise the status (and going prices) of photography and photographic artists, and he brought to prominence some photographers who had been for years unjustly neglected, such as Louis Faurer. But perhaps he was too cavalier in how he dealt with Robert Frank. In any case, by the early 1980s, Frank was able to get out of his contract with Lunn, Penn, and Katz. (Smith doesn’t say much about how this was accomplished.) He won back his copyright and ownership, and began a new relationship with Peter MacGill’s gallery, Pace/MacGill. I have yet to read about how this went.
In a brief discussion of Frank’s very personal 1979 film Life Dances On, Smith mentions some of the problems Frank had with his son Pablo, who had a very hard time of it. In the film, Frank tries to communicate with his son, who was becoming extremely withdrawn. Pablo offers his father only a series of strange comments, which seem to “express his rejection of his father’s control” (as Smith puts it). Robert asks, “Why can’t you…?” “Why won’t you…?” and finally “Why do you have to carry the whole world on your shoulders?” Pablo answers “Because I don’t like earth’s gravity. I want to see what gravity’s like on other planets. I want to investigate Mars.” Aside from Pablo’s pitiable condition and Robert’s inability to help his son, try as he might, Robert’s question seems a projection of his own feelings - that it is not just Pablo, but also he, Robert, who feels he must carry the weight of the world on his shoulders. I wonder if Frank found his new-found success oppressive - that with it he was somehow selling out, compromising his integrity. (As Lucy Van Pelt’s sign says, “Psychiatric Help, 5 cents.”)
(My first reading of these brief passages from Smith was a double shock: I had never heard of this collector-lawyer Arthur Penn, and when I read of “Katz and Penn”, I took for granted that it meant Irving Penn. My association of Katz with Irving Penn is very strong, because he was Penn’s contact with Marlborough, and I presumed that it was he who put up the money - or some of it - for the deal with Frank. Although a quite different personality and a radically different kind of photographic artist (and commercially far more successful), Penn most likely thought of Frank with admiration and might well have been willing (and financially able) to help with Frank’s elevation as a justly-recognized artist. My estimation of Penn’s integrity is equal to that I have of Paul Katz’s, and I could not believe Penn would be a party to any kind of squalid rip-off of Frank. So I was relieved, when I returned to Amazon “Look Inside”, this time searching for “Penn”, I discovered the existence of Arthur Penn, now with full name, about whom I still know little. Most remarkable is that he and his wife (a photographer herself) started a photography collection, amassing in a short time a large number of images, mostly at very low prices. (He’s not easy to research because he is easily confused with Irving Penn’s brother Arthur, the celebrated film director.)
Allen Schill
24 February 2020
What is Saint Christopher doing here? He is not among the subjects most often represented in the art of the Renaissance. He is less often seen in churches than on the dashboards of people’s vehicles. All the same, he is widely known as the patron saint of travelers. But the story behind him is not so familiar. The odd thing, when you do find him, is that often he looks at the Christ Child with a distinctly irritated air. According to legend, Christopher, originally named Reprobus, was a giant, some five cubits tall (2.3 meters or 7 1/2 feet), who wanted to serve the greatest king that ever was. A Christian hermit persuaded him to use his size to ferry people across a dangerous river, saying that it would be pleasing to Christ. One day a small child appeared, and asked to be carried across the river. Christopher agreed, but during the crossing it seemed the child had become as heavy as lead, putting the powerful giant in great difficulty. When they reached the other side, he complained to the child, saying, “I do not think the whole world could have been as heavy on my shoulders as you were.” The child answered, only then revealing himself to be Christ, and said “You had on your shoulders not only the whole world but also Him who made it.” The child then named him Kristoforos, Greek for “he who carrles Christ”. He then vanished.
Saint Christopher is here for Robert Frank and Pablo and all the rest who feel that life is almost too much to bear.
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