Day 5
Cold and gray this morning. In a Madison Avenue diner, I try to get warm, but the tea I order is so hot it’s undrinkable. Oh well. I’ll have to have something to drink with Tom Gitterman, who I’m visiting this morning. Perhaps I should call him and invite him for a coffee – boiling hot.
The moment I arrive Tom shows me his current exhibition: One Tree by Machiel Botman. It’s a magnificent black-and-white series of double exposures, and what I like best is that they’re completely nonsensical. Just pictures, one next to the other, not in any series, without no real cohesion save for the style.
I love it.
I even want to take Julia or Water Trees home.
That’s where it happened, exactly at that moment in Tom’s gallery – where I realized that this portrait series was also becoming a quest for my first print to buy. How exciting!
We get to talking and move upstairs to a fabulous room with brick walls and wood; this was his bedroom when he still lived here. He tells me the gallery is moving soon, which is a shame, but he smiles and reminds me that everything changes eventually. The first print he acquired was a Witkin, and like the photographer, Tom believes that nothing is invented, that everything is a reincarnation, reinterpretation – that it is the voice of the artist alone that makes the difference. He adds that each work of art, regardless of the medium, is part of a larger discussion to which each brings his contribution. What he loves is discovering, in this maelstrom, the artists who he thinks will push history forward.
Tom is a teacher. It is obvious. You can feel it, and it’s delicious.
Among the anecdotes he shares with me, one in particular stands out: his discovery of Saul Leiter’s work in a box while he was working at Howard Greenberg. He says the collection seemed infinite, and he spent the entire night discovering everything that was hidden in those closed boxes… It brings back for me a powerful memory of a particular Tuesday in Paris—when, with the help of one of my security guard friends, I slipped into the Musée du Louvre after hours to explore the works in storage…
An hour later I’m back on the sidewalk. My tea must be ice cold, but that doesn’t make a difference anymore.
Thank You Tom.
From his first encounter with photography to the opening of his own gallery space…
Tom tells me about his difficult start – a bad student in middle school, a bad student in high school – and how he barely made it into an art history program in college.
And he goes into detail about his discovery of photography through the pictures he bought during different periods of his life:
The first: Lisa Lyon as Hercules by Joel Peter Witkin – bought at Peter McGill while Tom was just an intern there. It depicts a silhouette without a head or arms – like a classical statue wrapped strangely in a sort of wet fabric.
Then in the early ‘90’s, while working at Zabriskie, Virginia gave him a few pictures as a sort of raise. He still has them, especially Steichen’s portrait of Rodin superimposed on his statue of The Thinker.
Around this time he also bought a picture from the project The Death of Statues, a joint work by Pierre Jahan and Jean Cocteau documenting statues melted during the war to be transformed into cannon balls.
In 1995, he was hired at Howard Greenberg where he would remain for 8 years. He’s kept several pictures from this period, including a Saul Leiter and a Dave Heath.
The events of 9/11 gave him the energy to what he had longed hoped for: go solo.
He opened the Gitterman Gallery in 2003.
A picture that has special importance in his life…
Vengeful Sister by Dave Heath – a picture from a 1962 series included in the book The Dialogue with Solitude.
When he purchased it, he said the image was the most expensive picture he’d ever seen. He confides to me that it was his most difficult purchase, but that he’s never regretted it.
His best memory as a gallerist…
His worst memory as a gallerist…
Tom said the opening night of his first exhibition was his best and worst memory.
After 13 years in the industry, he had no idea who would come to the opening. In two hours, the place was overflowing with people which was – he said – even more terrifying!
On his bedroom wall…
The Vengeful Sister, among other images.
When they first moved in, his wife put it aside, preferring other pictures from Tom’s collection. He had to explain that this picture was an essential part of his life. Now his wife loves the picture, he says.
If he was a renowned photographer…
He has a hard time deciding, but seems to veer towards photographers close to the Barbizon school near Fontainebleau in the mid to late nineteenth century – those that chose nature as a subject and not just a backdrop as Eugène Cuvelier did.
He could imagine following in Watkins’ footsteps and heading out to Yosemite in 1861 – a trip that was certainly artistic but also probably spiritual.
If he had to choose another job…
He’d load up a backpack, leave the city, and go off into the wilderness.
