Bill Arnett had spent two decades collecting and dealing antiquities from around the world — African art was his passion — when, in 1986, he had an epiphany in Birmingham, Ala.
There, the artist Lonnie Holley assembled sculptures from salvaged junk, and on his first visit, Mr. Arnett bought one — a statement about racism made from a mannequin and chains. It inspired him more than anything he had seen in Europe, Africa or Asia ever had.
“Nothing has been the same since,” Mr. Arnett told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1993. “I had to go out and tell the world that there’s this forgotten civilization doing this great work.”
To Mr. Arnett, Mr. Holley’s work — and that of other Black painters, sculptors and quilters he would soon encounter, most of them poor — was as distinguished as that of acclaimed white artists like Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.
He became their fan, promoter and patron, paid at least 20 of them stipends of $200 to $500 a week and brought their art, invisible to the traditional art world, to the attention of museums.
“He was to these folk artists what Alan Lomax was to folk music,” said Andrew Dietz, author of “The Last Folk Hero: A True Story of Race and Art, Power and Profit” (2006), about Mr. Arnett and some of the artists. Mr. Lomax was a pioneering folk music collector and archivist.
In the process Mr. Arnett found critics, who detected a whiff of paternalism in his relationship as a white art collector and dealer to impoverished Black artists.
Mr. Arnett died on Aug. 12 at his home in Atlanta. He was 81. His son Paul did not specify a cause but said his father had had a history of diabetes and heart attacks.
In addition to Mr. Holley, Mr. Arnett sought to elevate the work of artists like Thornton Dial Sr., a welder who told the story of Black struggles in paintings and assemblages from scavenged materials; Mose Tolliver, who painted on wood from old tree stumps and roots; and Bessie Harvey, who used branches, roots and found objects for her sculptures.
And there were the quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend, Ala., Black women whose hand-stitched creations honored traditions that could be traced to the mid-19th century. Over four years, Mr. Arnett paid $1.3 million for more than 500 quilts.
When 70 of the quilts from Mr. Arnett’s collection were exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York beginning in 2002, Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times described them as “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced.”
He added, “Imagine Matisse and Klee (if you think I’m wildly exaggerating, see the show) arising not from rarefied Europe, but from the caramel soil of the rural South in the form of women, descendants of slaves when Gee’s Bend was a plantation.”
Mr. Arnett was born William Arenowitch on May 10, 1939, in segregated Columbus, Ga., to Hilliard and Minna (Moses) Arenowitch. His father was a dry goods wholesaler, his mother a homemaker.
He graduated from the University of Georgia in 1963 with a bachelor’s degree in English. A course he took in ancient civilizations stoked his desire to explore their art.
He got that chance after college while working for a beverage bottling company in London, a job that left him with time to start collecting art. He began taking trips throughout Europe and to the Middle East, South America and Asia. It was around this time that he and his brother, Robert, who sometimes accompanied him on these trips, changed their Jewish surname to Arnett.
It was only after health problems slowed his international travel that he began his rambles in the Southeast in his van from his base in Atlanta.
For much of the next 30 years he built his collection into a behemoth that needed a warehouse to hold what he boldly told The New Yorker magazine in 2013 was “the most important cultural phenomenon that ever took place in the United States of America.”
Mr. Arnett, loquacious and passionate about what he called the vernacular art of African-Americans, rankled some people in the art world. One issue was his giving stipends to Black artists; these outlays gave him the right of first refusal to buy their works.
“I was trying to give the artists some financial security and confidence; I was buying enormous amounts of work to get the pieces I did want,” he told The Journal-Constitution.
His link to Mr. Dial in particular came under scrutiny. Ned Rifkin, the former director of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, for one, questioned Mr. Arnett’s role as Mr. Dial’s exclusive representative.
“He couldn’t help himself from playing God,” Mr. Rifkin said in “The Last Folk Hero.” “He had his own pantheon of hierarchical dimension about this art. He would say, ‘Dial is Picasso, this one is Matisse, that one is Chagall.’”
In 1993, Mr. Arnett was a subject of a “60 Minutes” segment with Morley Safer in which one artist said on camera that Mr. Arnett had underpaid him for some works; another, Ms. Harvey, said he had not returned three works he had borrowed (an accusation she later dropped). The segment suggested that Mr. Arnett controlled Mr. Dial by owning the house the artist lived in.
Mr. Arnett defended himself by saying Mr. Dial had needed to move from a dangerous neighborhood but had been subjected to racism when he tried to get a mortgage. So Mr. Arnett bought the house, he said, and put it in his name.
“His good intentions led to this cul-de-sac where my father had to figure out how to get the house given over to Dial without Dial owing taxes,” Paul Arnett said in a phone interview.
Mr. Arnett said that the notoriety the “60 Minutes” broadcast had brought him had hurt his business, but he recovered somewhat in 1996 when “Souls Grown Deep,” his exhibition of 500 works by 30 Black artists, was shown in Atlanta during the Summer Olympics.
Christopher Knight of The Los Angeles Times wrote that the show demonstrated “the potential power in a highly personal art commonly made from castoff materials, by artists who have themselves been castoffs from American society.”
Over the years, Mr. Arnett said, he sold off parts of his collection of antiquities and his two houses to support the artists and pay off his debts from helping them. In 2010, he donated 1,300 pieces of the artists’ works to the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, which he founded. The foundation, in turn, has made gifts to museums, including one, in 2014, of 57 paintings, drawings, sculptures, quilts and mixed media works to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
When the Met exhibited some of the works in 2018, Roberta Smith of The New York Times wrote, “The show seems nearly perfect in art installation and irrefutability of greatness.” In addition to his son Paul, Mr. Arnett is survived by his brother, Robert; three other sons, Matt, Harry and Tom; and eight grandchildren. His wife, Judy (Mitchell) Arnett, died in 2011.
Two of Mr. Arnett’s grandchildren, including Viva Vadim, are the children of Matt Arnett and Vanessa Vadim, a daughter of Jane Fonda and the director Roger Vadim. Ms. Fonda was a partner with Bill Arnett in a publishing firm that produced books about the Black artists and is on the foundation’s board. Ms. Vadim and Matt Arnett produced a short film about the Gee’s Bend quilters in 2002.
Mr. Arnett was working with his son Matt in the late 1990s on a book about African-American quilters when a photo of a woman with a quilt from Alabama riveted them. They set out to find her — which they did, in Gee’s Bend — and were welcomed by her fellow quilters.
“We went to meet one quilter and after a few days, we’d met 15,” Matt Arnett said by phone. “Word got around that there were two crazy white men buying ‘ugly, raggly’ quilts. They weren’t ugly, but they were not the prevailing aesthetic. And once it was clear there was something extraordinary there, we went as often as we could.”
August 27, 2020 at 06:39PM
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/arts/bill-arnett-collector-and-promoter-of-little-known-black-art-dies-at-81.html
Bill Arnett, Collector and Promoter of Little-Known Black Art, Dies at 81 - The New York Times
https://news.google.com/search?q=little&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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