Welcome to Spaightwood Galleries

From the Madison (WI) Capital Times, 31 December, 2003

Andrew D. Weiner did his undergraduate work at the City College of the City University from 1961 to 1966 and his PhD at Princeton University from 1966 to 1969. He joined the University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty in 1969 and taught there until his retirement in May 2004. He was also an Affiliated Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Weiner is the author of Sir Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Protestantism (U. Minnesota Press, 1978) and over twenty articles on Erasmus, More, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Fulke Greville, Giordano Bruno, and Milton. He was one of the founding editors (with Leonard V. Kaplan, UW Law School) of the monograph series, Graven Images: Studies in Culture, Law, and the Sacred and co-editor of five volumes in that series,
Graven Images 1 (October 1994). 242 pages. Co-Editor (with Leonard V. Kaplan) and contributor
Graven Images 2: The Body (October 1995). 272 pages.Co-Editor (with Leonard V. Kaplan) and contributor.
Madness, Melancholy and the Limits of the Self: Studies in Culture, Law, and the Sacred (Graven Images 3). Madison: University of Wisconsin Law School, 1996. 283 pp. Co-editor (with Leonard V. Kaplan) and contributor.
Transgression, Punishment, Responsibility, Forgiveness: Studies in Culture, Law, and the Sacred (Graven Images 4). Madison: University of Wisconsin Law School, 1998. 284 pp. Co-editor (with Leonard V. Kaplan) and contributor.
On Interpretation: Studies in Culture, Law, and the Sacred (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002). 289 pages. Co-editor (with Leonard V. Kaplan) and contributor.
He is currently working on books on Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare; he is also planning a book tentatively titled, "Chick Flicks and Prick Flicks: You are what you see," an exploration of the sources of romantic comedies in Shakespeare's romantic comedy, action flicks in Senecan Theatre of Blood, and the Gender Gap in Politics. His thesis is that artistic works embody ethical, moral, political, cultural, and religious values and that at least to some extent we embody what we consume.

Sonja Hansard-Weiner received her BA from the University of St. Thomas in Houston, her MA at the University of Texas-El Paso, and her MFA in Poetry from the University of New Orleans. She was a Teaching Assistant at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for four years, completing all of the coursework for a PhD in Renaissance Studies. She taught at Madison Area Technical College for 26 years, ending her stint as Lead Teacher (Chair) of the English Department. She inaugurated a course in Women in the Arts and received a Lifetime Award for her contributions to the Creative Writing Program at M.A.T.C. She has been Associate Editor of Graven Images since 1994 and has published articles on Lucrece and Shakespearean theatre as well as several poems.

This story is not just about a local art gallery moving away.

I have looked at and admired most of the art galleries in the city and surrounding area, and have bought works from many of them. But Spaightwood Galleries holds a special place in my affection because it was the first Madison gallery to really educate me about art. Not by chance are the owners Andy and Sonja Weiner both award-winning teachers. Andy retired last year as a professor of Renaissance English literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Sonja retired from teaching writing, literature and women's studies at Madison Area Technical College.

Much of what has made the Weiners successful dealers and friends to many over the past 24 years, since they opened their gallery in their historic near east side home at 1150 Spaight St., is their willingness - indeed, their eagerness - to educate and be educated. They are patient and generous people who are eager to please and illuminate. To frequent their gallery - it carries Old Masters and American Pop-Op but specializes in modern and contemporary European art - is to come to understand the difference between Cubism and Surrealism, between French Impressionism and German Expressionism. As they get ready to leave, they are also offering 25 percent off works by Claude Garache, bought from a Paris gallery that went out of business, and 10 percent off their colorful and folkloric 1956 Bible etchings and lithographs by Marc Chagall as a thank you to Madison.

After numerous construction delays in converting a former Unitarian church into an art gallery, the Weiners expect to leave by early November and move to the new gallery in Upton, Mass. It will bring them closer to family and mark a transition to being full-time art dealers with a business thriving on the Web.
I visited them recently with the idea of taking some last looks at what they are calling "The Last Picture Show" (sort of a changing "best hits" anthology with about 150 works on the walls) of their favorite works and favorite artists. I wanted to glean a few last lessons about collecting and appreciating art, and I was not disappointed. Here is some of what I found:

You started in 1980 with an inventory of about 100 pieces and now have about 9,000, which suggests a certain success. What would you like people to know about art?
ANDY: We've tried to show that art is much more affordable than most people think. Anybody can buy a Chagall or a Miro or a Picasso.
For you, what is the role of art?
SONJA: It enriches our lives and the world. It offers us something outside ourselves to respond to with our imagination and our thoughts.
A sense of aesthetics is undervalued in today's culture and is so often replaced with a sense of entertainment. But entertainment dulls the senses while aesthetic pleasure enhances them. And that is absolutely essential to living as a full human being.
People think art is hard, but it isn't. It's just that people's exposure is just so limited.
ANDY: It's also that a lot of art books are incomprehensible in the way they're written. People have this sense that great art is caused by a sick soul or imagination. Art sweetens our imagination, but bad art can be a bad thing and there's a lot of bad art out there.
Can people make up their own minds about what is good art?
ANDY: Not really, except that you can say that a carrot is a celery stalk. But the more you learn, the more you understand. That's how you learn what good art is.
SONJA: It's like the way children respond to art. You have to begin with your own responses, but then you have to go on to challenge those responses, whether you do that on your own or it's done by people around you.
For me, because I'm a teacher, it always starts from the question rather than the statement. That's how you grow in your appreciation of art. So often art museums take the approach that "This is what you're supposed to see" and then people don't see it and go away feeling dumb.
You've raised four children on art. How would you help people choose which art to look at?
ANDY: C.S. Lewis once said that a book worth reading only once isn't worth reading at all. I would say that a piece of art you can see on the first viewing isn't worth seeing.
I think the most important thing is to look at a lot of art. Everything you look at will change the way you've ever seen art. You see a piece of art, you focus on it and keep coming back to it because there is something about it that you don't understand or that makes you feel you're not sure about the way you feel. And soon it becomes a part of you.
Is there a secret to appreciating art?
SONJA: I think the current political culture depends on advertising and repeating the same thing until you begin to believe it. With art, you have to open up yourself and your imagination to what is different.
ANDY: Some people get it in their head that they like figurative art or landscapes and that's it - they just won't look at anything else.
What advice do you have about buying art?
ANDY: Never buy art for investment. Buy it because you love something. A lot of people fall so in love with their art they never want to sell it. It's more important to buy art for a fair price.
Do artists themselves play a role in how the public accepts or rejects art?
ANDY: An artist who is great or who can make a living from his or her art is an artist who is at peace with themselves. An artist who can't is a person who is constantly being attacked by self-doubt and is at war with themselves and their community.
Any final pieces of advice?
SONJA: Art is relational. Just as when you get to know people and have a deeper sense of that person and then know whether they will get along with another dinner guest, you have a conversation with individual pieces of art that also converse among each other.
Being a part of that environment - and recognizing old or new or different conversations - is what is exciting and enriching about participating in art and having people come into your gallery.
ANDY: Don't be afraid. Don't let bad art drive out the good. Look, look, look.

Joan Gardy Artigas (b. 1938), Homage to Brancusi. Ceramic sculpture, 1983. Size: 280x100x110cm. This work was included in Artigas shows at the Meadows Museum in Dallas (1984) and the Hispanic Institute in NYC (1985). This beautiful sculpture, nearly 10 feet high, is now adjusting to its new home at 120 Main street in Upton MA.

For a visual introduction to our new gallery space, click here and here.

2008 was notable for us as Spaightwood increasingly became regarded as one of the most accurate and detailed sources on the web for information about not just the art that we sell but the context for the works; we are also becoming a major source for museums, book editors, and authors to get photographs of art works for exhibition catalogs and books. Last year we provided photographs for a large important catalogue published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Cezanne's influence (Bonnard’s Bather, a tribute to Cezanne commissioned for an homage to Cezanne published after his death containing works by other artists after works by Cezanne), two photographs of works by Rouault for the Seton Hall University Art Gallery, who also borrowed the works themselves for an exhibition on Georges Rouault to celebrate the 150^th anniversary of his birth; six photographs for the Museum of Biblical Art in NY for a Chagall exhibition, and we lent an etching by Guido Reni to the Chelsea Museum of Art. We also sold works to the St. Joseph's College Museum of Art in W. Hartford CT (an important 1896 pointillist color lithograph by Henri-Edmund Cross) and the Gonzaga University Museum of Art (a Frank Stella mixed media work). A textbook publisher used our photograph of one of our Kathe Kollwitz etchings (The Outbreak from The Peasants’ War Series) for a high school text book ("A Community Connection: Explorations in Art") and a Chagall color lithograph depicting Jeremiah was used in a 2008 book on Jewish biblical sages (Rabbi Berel Wein, The Oral Law of Sinai: An Illustrated History of the Mishnah). Following up on the University of Richmond’s purchase of two of our Goya etchings from the first edition of The Disasters of War, a French Journal, Savoirs et clinique: Revue de psychanalyse, used two of our photographs of works from the sixth edition of Goya’s Caprichos, Sopla (Blow)and El Sueno de la Razon (The sleep of reason produces monsters), in an issue devoted to Le corps à la mode ou les images du corps dans la psychananlyse (plates III and V, following page 56, n. 10, March 2009). Our show on Images of Women in Old Master Prints and Drawings / Images by Women in Old Master Prints was the subject of a review article in Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Volume 3 (2008), pages 309-318, sponsored by the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park and the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. The article, by Professor Jodi Cranston at Boston University, included photographs of three of the works in the show (2 drawings and an engraving) and discussed the philosophy of our exhibition and the different ways in which such a show might be organized. 

As many of you who have looked extensively at our website have told us, Spaightwood Galleries, Inc. is different from most galleries: my wife and I are both retired academics and expert researchers, we own the building in which we live and in which we show our art, and we have an inventory of over 10,000 works of art. We don't show works because we can get them on consignment; we show works because we loved them enough to buy them and because we want to share them in the gallery and on our website with people interested in art with varying backgrounds and at various stages in familiarity with art from the late 15th century to the present. During my thirty-five years at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, I not only directed PhD dissertations in the English Renaissance and served as a reader on dissertation committees of students working with my colleagues, I also served as an outside reader on dissertations in Renaissance history and in Art History. My own work has always been interdisciplinary and approaches literature through the political, intellectual, theological, and social contexts of the writers and their intended audiences. In pursuit of these interests I also helped revive the Renaissance Studies Group at the UW and chaired it for several years in the early 1970s. In the 1990s, I was part of a group involved in creating a monograph series published by the UW Law School (first 4 issues) and the UW Press (final issue) devoted to Studies in Culture, Law, and the Sacred, and I was one of the founding co-editors of the monograph series (Sonja served as the Associate Editor of the series). Before assuming her role as President of Spaightwood Galleries, Inc., Sonja taught in the English Department at Madison Area Technical College, including classes in Women in the Arts (with a special interest in the art of Kathe Kollwitz and in works by Women Surrealists, especially Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, and Leonora Fini). She also taught advanced classes in Creative Writing, especially poetry, many of which used poems about art and artists as examples for exercises and critical studies. She also initiated a series of "Womanshows" at Spaightwood, focusing on the works of women artists and, on two occasions, representations of women in the art of male artists.