Forty years ago, I was standing in a small auction gallery in New Jersey with a paddle in my hand. I was there to bid on a painting of children by a lake by the American Impressionist, Edward Dufner (1872-1957). Born in Buffalo, Dufner enrolled in art classes at the Buffalo Art Students League at age 19. Two years later he won a scholarship to the Arts Students League in New York. At age 25, like many young American artists, Dufner traveled to Paris, where he lived for five years and studied at the Academie Julian. (Someday I’m going to curate an exhibition of late 19th century American painters in Paris who didn’t study at the Academie Julian. You could probably hang the entire show in a broom closet.)
Dufner won an honorable mention at the Paris Salon and, though still in Paris, won a medal at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition back in Buffalo. He returned to his hometown in 1903 and became an instructor at his old school, but New York beckoned, and he moved there in 1908 to begin nine years of teaching at the Art Students League. He did not live in New York City, however; he and his wife made their home in Caldwell, New Jersey, and the willow-lined lakes in the area soon became his favorite subject. For the rest of his life, he painted scenes of lakes with children and ducks, which were what his collectors wanted. For my taste, however, his 10 x 8-inch paintings of women or children in interior scenes are his finest achievement. They’re unsentimental, absolutely terrific, and I wish I had a whole wall of them today.
I can’t remember if I was the successful bidder on that day long ago, but I remember what happened afterwards. A man came up and introduced himself as Wally Churgin. He told me he had a whole collection of Dufner works and invited me to visit his home (in Short Hills, I think it was) to see them. Soon after, Roberta and I visited him and met his charming wife, Shirley. We were much taken with their Dufners, and five of those paintings formed the core of a Dufner exhibition I mounted later at the Madison Avenue gallery for which I then worked.
Edward Dufner, Age of Innocence, oil on canvas, 40 x 50 inches.
Formerly in collection of Walter and Shirley Churgin
I stayed in touch with the Churgins after they retired to California. Wally died in 2005, but I heard from Shirley now and again, and Roberta and I visited her when we were in California a few years back. The paintings were as lovely as I had remembered.
Unfortunately, the Churgin home was in Pacific Palisades. When I saw the news this month of the devastating wildfire there, I tried to contact Shirley by phone, text, and email without success. I was finally able to reach her daughter, who told me that Shirley had managed to evacuate but that the house and all its contents were gone.
I can’t imagine what it must be like to be in your 90s and to lose all the things you have assembled over a lifetime. Many of them have sentimental value only to you and your family – photographs, tchotchkes acquired on vacation, potholders made by great-grandchildren, and the like. The destruction of works of art, however, is a financial loss as well as a sentimental one. (I am currently working with the family on a loss appraisal for their insurance company.)
In a larger sense, though, the loss of those artworks is something greater, something that extends to us all. Now there are five fewer Dufner paintings in the world. A small bit of the beauty around us has been lost.
Musing about all the terrible losses from the Southern California fires, I thought of William Butler Yeats’s poem “Lapis Lazuli,” in which the poet speaks of the transitory nature of works of art. We know of the ancient Greek sculptor Callimachus only through accounts of his work by his astonished contemporaries, Yeats says; no handiwork of his remains.
But the world goes on. And the artistic impulse to give visual delight goes on. As Yeats says in his poem:
All things fall and are built again
And those that build them again are gay.
