Behind the Scenes Minis: Birth Year and Buildings

Tracy talks through the many paths she went down trying to track down Wautier's birth year. The hosts also discuss Louis Sullivan's incredibly quotable autobiography.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class A production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy B. Wilson
and I'm Holly Frye. We talked about Mickelina Watier or
Mikaelino Watier. Hopefully I didn't make anyone really furious about

(00:22):
which pronunciation we went with. If I did, I'm sorry
that birth year. Okay, these episodes did not come out
in this order because we had the whole series of
other episodes in between them. But I recorded this episode,
or I researched this episode and the Merry Dire episode
back to back, So if you've heard the Merry Dire

(00:45):
episode in the behind the scenes, you know I went
down a whole, huge rabbit hole about where the place
of execution was in Boston at that time. Right in
this episode, I went down a giant rabbit hole about
what her birth year was supposed to be. And I
spent so much time searching various permutations trying to figure out, like,

(01:07):
did someone discover a new like a new document, was
there something that clarified her birth year to sixteen fourteen
instead of sixteen oh four And I did not find
a good answer, and I was like, if I had
made that discovery, I'd be telling everybody, and so like

(01:30):
then I was like, I'm going to have to for
the second episode in a row, contact a random person
and ask them for help. And in this case it
was like the contact address for the center for a
netherlandish art. I wish I knew the details of like
what new documentation suggest that in sixteen fourteen is the
right year rather than sixteen oh four. But if you

(01:51):
go looking for any information about about her, of which
there's just not a ton, you will see a lot
of places have one year, and a lot of places
have the other, and some places have both years in
different places. It was a lot. I'm very curious about,

(02:12):
uh about where that correction came from. One thing I
found a brief mention of that I did not put
in the episode just because it didn't seem totally Jermaine
and also seemed like something that could strike people oddly,
is that Mickelina and her brother Charles lived together for
their whole their whole adult life's lives or both artists.

(02:34):
It seems like they probably shared a home for their
whole adult lives. They did own their property. There's there's
a little fuzziness there. There are a couple of places
that are like formal official documents about like property they
bought or whatever that like mistakenly identifies them as husband

(02:54):
and wife, and then like somebody crosses that out and
is like brother, which like makes sense that that like
two adult people living together forever, that people would just
assume that they were a married people, but really they
were siblings. And you know, those were among the very

(03:15):
few currently known documents about their whole lives. Man, I
wish we knew so much more about her. I wish
we knew a lot more about her personality than what
we can imagine based on her placing herself as a
self portrait right in the black and hole. Right. Yeah,

(03:39):
I mean it's interesting, right because we can guess and
it seems like that must mean she was kind of
a firecracker. M But we could be wrong, you know
what I mean, Like we could be We don't know.
Maybe one day we will discover something else hers, perhaps

(04:01):
a little diary. Yeah, that would be cool there. I've
also in various lectures that I watched people give about her.
People also seem pretty confident that there are other, as
yet undiscovered paintings because like, because she was so not

(04:24):
well known at all. Apparently the twenty eighteen exhibition LAS
is often the case when there's a big art exhibition somewhere,
you know, there are posters of it all over town,
and the bus shelters are decorated, like suddenly, this person's
name is everywhere, and that really seems to have prompted
a lot of the people realizing that they had a

(04:47):
work in their own collections or private collectors realizing whose
work they had. I read an article that was about
this exhibition at the MFA that was about Rosemrie and
ivon Auto Load getting this call or email or something

(05:08):
like that from an art dealer who was like, Hey,
this is this is going to be coming up for sale,
and how delighted and astonished they were that like number
one it was it was mckleeena Walt Watti's worked, and
then number two that it was specifically the Five Senses
because that was, you know, work that people had been
trying to find, and that was just at this point

(05:30):
three years ago, so I know every time it came
up in the telling of this like, oh, that was
not figured out until nineteen sixty five, eighty seven. This
is like history unfolding before our eyes. Yeah, yeah, which
is cool. I don't really know what the story is

(05:52):
behind when Garland with Butterfly was rediscovered. All I know
is that I was trying to find more information about it,
and then I was like, this museum says have it
on loan right now, so it's been found. Great. There
was as as folks may know, I'm continually looking at
in bookmarking links to talk about on Unearthed, and there

(06:15):
was one that just within the last few days was
like three previously unknown paintings by seventeenth century masters, and
I was like, are any of them Mclanawati? None of
them were, But like my very first thought was is
it a new Mcleanawatier painting? I really just I was
not even there to look at that at the MFA

(06:36):
when I stumbled onto these. Not only was I not there,
I was not there to look at European art at all.
The MFA is having another Hokusai exhibition, which is we
have done a Hokusai episode before after previously the MFA
had done a different Hokasi exhibition, and so uh Patrick
and I had gone to see that and then he

(06:58):
had other plans for the day he left, and I
was like, I'm staying at the Art Museum, and then
I'm going to walk all the way from the MFA
to North Station, which I did. And my plan had
been to go into the like the Japanese h and
other Asian art area. All of that is currently being redone,

(07:24):
I think, so a lot of the things that I
was gonna go look at were not like that whole
area was closed off, and so I was just kind
of wandering around the museum and then I was like,
what is who is this beautiful self portrait? What is
this five? What is who? I've never heard? What's the
Center for Netherlandish Art? Like? It was a a whole

(07:47):
discovery process that day at the MFA and then a
very long walk on a very windy day. This is
a little bit of a jump. But I keep meaning
to mention it to you in forgetting. But you mentioned Hokusi.
Did you see the Doc Martins that they were doing

(08:08):
with Hokusi Art, No bought a pair of those boots
so fast. That sounds you. Doctor Martins does a lot
of collaborations with big museums and they pick out kind
of iconic pieces of art, and they put them on
shoes and I have a few of them. Those those

(08:29):
great wave boots are real good. Yeah, they still have
them in quite a few sizes, So you might get
lucky if you go to Nice. Nice. This particular hocus
I exhibition is about like hokus I, Hokusi's students, the
continuing influence of hokus I's work, and so there's a

(08:52):
lot more uh like modern work as part of the exhibition.
There was a lot of stuff in it that I
thought was really cool. We really enjoyed it. And so
if you are into Hoasai or other Japanese art or
other art influenced by Japanese art, well that's the thing
happening right now. I don't I'm not clear on whether

(09:14):
this Miquelina Woitier exhibition how long it's going on, or
if it is just a permanent part of collection now,
but I was very glad that I stumbled over it
while not even there to be looking at European art.
Magical accidents. Yeah, we talked about Louis Sullivan this week.

(09:49):
We did. And Chicago architecture, yes, yes, which I love
that city so much. So it's also a joy to
get to talk about it a little bit. Louis Sullivan's
autobiography is amazing. Yeah, And it was one of those
things where I had it ready. I had purchased a

(10:10):
kindle version of modern reprinting, and I had like written
out the bones of the episode already, you know, because
sometimes that's easier than like pouring through someone's memoir, which
is often a little a little yeah, flourishy. It's a
little harder to follow the timeline because then usually I'll
go back through and then I'll go back to the

(10:30):
autobiography and be reading it, and I can be like, oh,
there's the touch point of dissce. Yes. It was one
of those things where this very rarely happens. But when
I then opened his autobiography and started reading, I was like, Brian,
this is delightful. It's like his turn of phrase. He
was a very good writer. I mean that first thing
that you read early in the episode where you were like,

(10:51):
that is delightful. The entire book is like that. He
I love that is very very good as a writer
and conveying things. A lot of it like a full
I mean, it felt like a third of it is
about his use, even though he is writing this in
you know, at the end of his life, when he
was in his sixties. What's interesting, though, is that he

(11:16):
ends his memoir after the Columbian Exposition, like that's the
end of it, okay, him being angry, Like it's literally
like the denu mal of that book is they have
ruined everything, and it's pages and pages of how angry
he is. And then that's the end of the book.

(11:37):
And it's like, wait, you were living almost thirty years
longer after that, what are you now? So I have
not read this book obviously, but I'm like, is that
what motivated him to write an autobiography? That it really
was going to be a treatise about how the White
City ruined architecture? I mean part of it, yes, I

(11:58):
mean he was he was commissioned to do it. But
I think in terms of his layout of it was like, fine,
I'm going to tell you why you're all wrong, why
you're bad, and your opinions are bad and you're tasting bad.
Everyone was all wrong. I mean, it's really interesting. We
only talked briefly about his assistant, Elleslie, who was seems

(12:20):
like he must have been very good natured because he
didn't he didn't have like a rose colored glasses version
of Sullivan. He wrote about him in very honest terms
and was like, oh, he's really really arrogant, Like he
is exactly the guy I won't I didn't write it down,
so this won't be a word for a word. But
he literally talks about like he gives everyone advice whether

(12:42):
they want it or not, Like he will walk up
and tell you everything that's wrong with your design, even
if you're not, you know, and he would tell off clients,
you know, like he would be like, no, your taste
is bad, and I'm you hired me because I know
what I'm doing. You don't know what you're doing, which
may be true, yeah, but it's not a good way

(13:02):
to run a business now. So it's not surprising that
he was like, this will be my manifesto, ab how
you ruined architecture in the United States. There were two
things that are very, very extra interesting in this autobiography
to me. One is a little tiny weird note about
his dad. His dad, Patrick Sullivan, was as we said,

(13:24):
irish and from pretty humble beginnings. Because the story that
Louis said he was always told was that his father,
when he was still just a kid, was on his
own because he had lost his father in a crowd
at a county fair and never found him again. And

(13:45):
I'm like, did he get dumped off in a fair?
And like, because I mean, you would think if a
parent wanted to find their kid, they would I don't know.
This is a weird little detail that I was like.
Wood Ah. The other thing that is really really interesting

(14:05):
to me about his autobiography are the omissions. Okay, because
three people do not show up in it at all.
Three important people his wife, Okay, Frank Lloyd. Right, I
was gonna say, is Frank Lloyd write one of them?
Because and his brother Albert never appear in that book
at all, even though he was apparently close with all

(14:27):
of these people and had falling out fallings out with them. Yeah,
I think he was real good at grudges and not
real good at like the reflection necessary to be able
to talk about those things. Like I have known people,
and I've certainly had times in my life where there
was like an unpleasant thing and I never wanted to
talk about it again. Hmm. But eventually ideally you grow

(14:48):
and like talk through it, and that's how you don't
get plagued by things like that. This is why therapy
is great. Yeah. I don't think he ever got to
that point. He just was like, the book is closed.
Margaret is dead to me, Albert is dead to me.
I am so intrigued by this mystery wife, right. I

(15:09):
only I found one article about her, and it really
was like, there's we don't have a ton of information,
and it does seem like she was not always truthful
about her self, Like there are a lot of times,
like there's a very good documentary about Louis Sullivan that

(15:33):
talks about her, and it, like many other things, tells
the stories. Though here's a man of forty four and
he married a much younger woman of twenty seven. But
then this one article I read was like, we think
she was actually in her forties, oh yeah, and that
she had just been fibbing the whole time, that she
was much younger. So it becomes extra hard to track

(15:54):
her down because it's like, well, if you don't have
a birth record, like then what, yeah, how do you
even know who the parents saw are? Would she know
a lot of people in the nineteenth century were you know,
fabricating their own backstories for whatever benefit. I'm not gonna
judge about him. Makes it really hard to document you

(16:16):
for the future. Uh yeah, we don't. She really just
pops up out of nowhere. It doesn't. There's no like
there was a courtship and they fell in love. We
knew he was dating her, and then they got it's
like suddenly he had a wife. Oh wait, that didn't
work out. Like yeah, mysteries, mysteries. And I will say again,

(16:48):
I think based solely on their recognition of his incredible
skill and his achievements. His peers, I don't know that
they were forgiving of him, but they were very magnanimous
with him. Like when he reached those rough times in
his later life, people that he had talked a lot

(17:11):
of trash about were like, dude, I will help you.
What do you need, Like, I will give you money,
We will set you up in a room somewhere, which
is like, for as crabby as he seemed to be
with people, I think that speaks very highly of how
he was regarded. But that's when he reconciled with FRANKLYD. Wright.
Was when he needed help. Oh, dear and FRANKLYD. Wright

(17:32):
was like, all right, I mean, you did teach me
a lot. I feel like just the fact that he
had to write in his autobiography that he was not
an all fault terrible It's like, dude, nobody accused you
of that, So this kind of seems like you must
have been telling on yourself a little bit here. But
I also do like the idea that he was like
the kid who wanted to cut class, not to go

(17:54):
cut up, but to go watch a blade of grass grow. Yeah,
I mean, as a kid who kept getting in trouble
for reading during class but not reading what we were
supposed to be reading. I feel a little a little
empathy there. Yeah, here's what's really interesting to me about
his story because he was I think, smarter than the

(18:17):
average bear and was probably thinking circles around a lot
of people that he encountered. He dropped out of one
program after another and yet kept getting snapped up for jobs,
So he had to have been really good at it,
just naturally, because I can you imagine if you went
to a job interview and you're like, uh no, I

(18:38):
went to that program, but it was boring. I left
after eight months, and then I went to Paris but
I kind of messed around in Europe and I don't know.
I hung out in Italy, I went to this is
teen chapel that was cool, and then I came back
here and I don't know. I mean, I want to
work in this field, I think, I just it's also boring,
Like would you be like, yes, you should absolutely be
part of our firm. I know a number of people

(19:00):
you uh, have extremely successful careers in a field and
also either like dropped out of college or failed out
out of college, but they did it one time, right, Yes.
The chronic nature of his like abandonment of education is
what got me. Yeah, I mean it worked out sort of.

(19:22):
M hmm. It does make me sad. I mean, I
have to confess because, as you know, like, I mean,
I love all of the styles of architecture he got
real crabby about. But I also really love change and
people experimenting, and so I can see why he would
be like, why do you want to build the same

(19:42):
stuff with way? Why do we want to have more
neoclassical architecture everywhere forever? Wouldn't it be cool to do
something new? I'm like, yeah, so I understand that. How
fussy that would make a person, especially because people were like, Wow,
this is amazing. I mean when the auditorium opened, like
the pre hasn't it visited the opening because people were like,
what is this amazing building? You know, it was like

(20:05):
a big, big deal. And so for a moment he
was like the Golden Child. And then suddenly people were like, Eh,
we're gonna go back to all of the marble stuff
that we used to do. We're gonna do it. We're
gonna do it like they did it in Paris in
the eight seventeen hundreds. Wait what why? Why? I could
see where that would you know, kind of form a

(20:27):
kernel of resentment that you then write a manifesto about
in your memento, in your memoirs, you have set architecture
back fifty years, which I think I mean, in reading
a lot and in watching a number of documentaries about him,
I think most architectural historians do agree or they're like,

(20:48):
yeah it did. Yep, Yeah, we could be in a
whole different place style wise in the US in terms
of our our buildings and the culture around them if
we had not done that one thing at that one expo,
which is a fascinating turning point for an entire you know,

(21:09):
cultural style to hinge on anyway, Louis Sullivan, I hope,
I hope, if there is an afterlife, that it's all
beautiful and experimental for you. Yeah, he and GOUDI could
have been buddies. I think if you have time off

(21:31):
this weekend, maybe maybe go look at some of his stuff.
Next time I'm in Chicago, I'm gonna hunt down a
couple more of his buildings. I have seen several, but
I want to see more. And I have never been
inside the auditorium and I want to reel back because
it's still open. They still have shows there. It has
had a lot of pretty significant work done to restore

(21:53):
it to original design spec which is pretty amazing. And
every photograph I see Birthdacake, I would almost not as
if I were a performer, not want to play there
because I think everybody would be gawking at the architecture,
which is pretty great. So if you have time off

(22:14):
this weekend, we hope you'd look at something beautiful, whether
that is a blade of growing grass or a beautiful
building or painting or whatever delights you. If you don't
have time off, I still hope you get to look
at something pretty and at least take some deep breaths
and find some relaxation for yourself. We will be right
back here tomorrow with a classic episode, and then on

(22:35):
Monday there will be another brand new one to kick
off the week. Stuff you Missed in History Class is
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.