The Ugly Lamp - restoring a family heirloom, part 1

My grandfather, Harry Levine,was a Jewish Russian-born immigrant.  In his hometown of Vilna (then Russia, now Lithuania), he was trained as a woodcarver/furniture maker.  He came to NYC in his late teens, somewhere around 1912, plus or minus a couple of years.  (I've not yet been able to find him or my grandmother on any ship manifesto.)  In NYC, my grandfather studied at the Educational Arts Alliance, where his woodcarving skills became transformed into the talent of a sculptor.  I'm very proud that the wonderful Brooklyn Museum owns two pieces of his work.  They can be seen on permanent display in the Luce Center for Visible Storage in the museum.  I've written about him several times before on the blog, in particular here and here. 

Sadly, my grandfather died young, and my brothers and I never met him.  The legacy he left behind includes etchings, watercolors, carved busts, an intricately carved fiddle, and many wonderful pieces of furniture.  We each have pieces. For example, I have a beautiful hutch-cabinet, and a library-size table that I use as my dining room table, with carved lion heads on the ends.  One brother has the violin, another has a bust and an end table, and so on.  And then, there's the piece that nobody wanted, the ugly lamp...

The lamp has been the family joke for years.  We have no idea who spray-painted it gold, but it didn't help make it look better.  When our parents had both passed away, and we sorted out the remnants of their home, it was the one thing that nobody claimed.  One brother finally agreed to take it, and the lamp has been stored in his basement collecting dust for many years now. 

He and his wife recently bought a retirement home in Cape Cod, and have been cleaning out their former home and getting rid of stuff.  Periodically, a package will arrive in the mail.  Recently, the package included a lovely needlepoint that my mom had made.  It was rolled up, smelled like wood smoke, and was dirty.  I had it dry-cleaned, matted, and framed with glass, and this weekend we hung it on the wall at our Loon Lake cottage.  I remember my mom making this, and I know she'd be glad to know I have it safely now. 

Also in the package was... yup, you guessed it; the ugly lamp.  I agreed to take the lamp with the agreement that nobody would get upset with me for giving it some sort of funky renovation.  My plan is to make it whimsical and multicolored, possibly with colors like turquoise, yellow, and magenta, though that is just my current idea; I could change my mind tomorrow.  But I will not change what my grandfather carved.  In the base of the lamp there are three panels with engraved insignia.  The first panel has an intertwined H and an R, my grandmother Rae and grandfather Harry's first initials.

 The other panels have a Star of David (often called a Jewish Star) and a menorah.  Compared to my grandfather's usual intricate, detailed, sculptural carving, these crude engravings are rather odd.

The lamp, when I received it, was filthy from years of living in storage.    So I figured I'd start by scrubbing it off with some soapy water and a stiff brush.  And suddenly, I discovered there was other paint under the gold. 

 The more I scrubbed, and rinsed, the more of the gold paint came off, and the more red and black I discovered.  I think the red was painted over the black, though I'm not sure.

And then, as I continued scrubbing, the red and black paint (and some white that I presume is a primer) all started to come off too, exposing the bare wood underneath. 

 When I finally stopped scrubbing and rinsing today, this is how the lamp looked. 

 The paint almost completely came off the top of the  lamp, but not around the curves. 

Now that it's drying out, I'm trying to decide how to next proceed.  Can I just spray a coat of primer on the whole thing once it is dry?  Or now that so much paint  has come off, do I have to get off every stitch of the paint, that I wasn't originally planning to remove at all?  (I absolutely HATE doing paint removal.)  I have no idea what kind of paint is on the lamp.  If you, my readers, have done any  similar renovation/restoration projects, I'd love your advice on techniques and materials.  In the meantime, this is how the lamp looks as it is drying out. I'll be posting 'part 2' when the project is complete!

Harry Levine

These drawings were all done by my grandfather, Harry Levine. He was trained (in Vilna) in the art of woodcarving to become a cabinet builder/furniture maker. Once arriving in Brooklyn as ayoung adult, he spent time at the Educational Alliance Art School, where his peers were other Eastern European immigrants such as Chaim Gross and Louise Nevelson. He took art classes at the Alliance and I believe it was a central part of his short life.

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Grandpa's drawings and etchings are as "sculptural" as his busts and other carvings. He also did a few paintings, but color was never really his thing. I believe these drawings were mostly used for etchings. Many of them have what looks like a conte rubbed on the back, which I assume had something to do with a process he used to transfer his drawings onto the etching plates. There's even a backward signature on the woman in the center above, which I believe is another hint that the drawing was used for an etching.

The central photo above is of him, and the photo to the right is a violin (or "fiddle") that he made, carved with a tree of life of its back. One of my brothers has the fiddle.

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Back to the Brooklyn Museum -The Educational Alliance donated two of his sculptures to the Brooklyn Museum. They are now housed in the Luce Center for American Art (Visible Storage - Study Center) on the 5th floor of the museum. This is the Luce Center:

It is very difficult to photo Grandpa's artwork, because the sculptures are displayed in floor to ceiling glass cases. One piece is on a top shelf (left, below) and one is on a bottom shelf (center, below).

Here they are on the Luce Center's computer:

If this interests you at all, I previously blogged about my grandfather and our search for a missing totem pole he carved in Croton-on-Hudson. Those posts, and images of the carvings he did in Croton can be found here:

http://plbrown.blogspot.com/2010/10/my-grandfather-wood-carver.html

and here:

http://plbrown.blogspot.com/2010/10/my-grandfathers-carvings-part-2.html

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Anyone who can offer any info to help with our search, please let me know! The totem pole has not yet been found.

drawing by Harry Levine

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And by the way... we started the morning with a 2 hour delay (ice, ice, baby!!) and I decided to go in early. Halfway there, I got a call telling me school had been canceled. Argghh!! I came home and wrote this post, but am aggravated that I didn't keep going and have the day to get stuff done in my room. I'm setting up a show in the public library on Thursday, and since we've been on vacation all week I haven't even started name-tagging. Oh dear...

My Grandfather's carvings, part 2

My Grandfather, Harry Levine, when he came to the United States from Vilna, Russia (or actually Lithuania, but it depends on the "when") had been trained as a woodcarver, a furniture maker. In the US he found himself in Brooklyn, and his life included sculpture classes at the Educational Alliance Art School in NYC. A cool aside here: I spent some time in NYC at the Center for Jewish History, researching Grandpa's time at the Educational Alliance. My big "find" was minutes from a faculty meeting where Grandpa Harry was in attendance (he must have taught a class) as they all discussed a grievance. The faculty at the meeting included Chaim Gross, Abbo Ostrowsky, and more, including Louise Nevelson!! How cool is THAT!?

Anyhow, going through old papers at home I found, in an Educational Alliance Art School exhibition booklet a writeup about Grandpa that said he had been commissioned to carve a series of satyric faces on fenceposts at an estate in Croton. EUREKA! Confirmation!!

Around the same time, my brother was back in Croton, showing around the photos. In the public library, someone recognized the lintels over the garage doors and windows, and the next thing I knew, I had a phone call from my brother who was standing in front of the garage doors looking at our grandfather's carvings (photo below). Except the carved panels in the doors had been removed, and all that was left was the lintels. No sign of a totem pole anywhere, no fenceposts.

Note: I've been separating paragraphs in this post with some photos of the lintels as they can be seen now.

He was taken inside the Jewish Center, where upstairs there is a preschool. Staring down from the ends of ceiling beams were more carved faces! Nobody in the Jewish Center knew anything about the history of the carvings, and surprisingly little about the history of the building. Amazingly, the little pre-schoolers didn't seem to notice the scary-ish faces. And as you can tell by the condition of them, they have not been given much (or any) TLC over the years. The wood is cracked, and they are dusty. :-(

Here they are, plus the one at the top of this post. My husband is looking directly at one:

I arranged to meet my brother at the location (currently the Croton Jewish Center) in late Autumn (last year) when the leaves were off the trees, so we could more thoroughly scout the woodsy grounds. After a couple of hours, about to give up, my husband spotted a pile of stones, right near the entry road. On closer examination, we realized they had been cemented together, and there is a nice hole in the center. It matches the stones in our photos; it's the base for the totem pole! Proof it had been there!!

And further exploration found a little log building on the site, which appears in the background of some of the fencepost photos. But there is now a condo development where the fence/bridge/stream would have been. So our photos are probably all that is left of the carved posts. But where is the totem, and where are the carved garage door panels?

We found other carvings that we didn't know about, in particular these two little gargoyle-like men by the front door. My husband (left) and brother (right) are doing their best imitations.

So why am I spending so much time posting this stuff? Two reasons, really. First of all, simply to share, because of my artistic family heritage. I'm (understandably) proud. But also, you never know when somebody might see something or read something that sparks some memory, that might establish for us a new place to look.

Our trips to Croton have led us on wild goose chases - from a call about totem pole in Croton that turned out to be a Boy Scout project, to a claim that someone so liked the garage door panels that they "copied" them for their bathroom vanity. Hmmmm.... We've learned that the Croton Jewish Center isn't really in Croton, it is in Cortlandt, and we've been sent back and forth and all over the place talking to assessors and historians. We've learned that Croton-on-Hudson's history is rich in the arts, and also that there was a lively community of anarchists around the time Grandpa Harry was taking the train north from NYC to do these carvings. We've put stories in the local newspaper, placed ads asking for information, and tried to make it clear we are trying to establish a historic family record. There was even a story in the Westchester version of the New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/nyregion/westchester/28carvingswe.html

We want to find these items to photograph them, not to take them away from anyone who has given them a home. It's been an interesting ride, but I'm out of ideas. Let me know if you can suggest where we might look next!