. . . on Albert Bender
ALBERT WHO? THAT was my first thought when I got the e-mail asking me to launch a book about the art collector and philanthropist Albert Bender. Then I wondered whether launching a book about someone I’d never heard of was pushing it even for me, an awful chancer with Olympic-standard bluffing abilities.
And then there was the tiny matter of the book launch taking place in the National Museum of Ireland. My reply should have been polite but firm, consisting mainly of the words “no, you’re grand, thanks”.
I felt like Linda Martin circa 1992. “Why me?” I wondered. But after thinking about it for about 30 seconds on the basis that it was probably the first and last time Dr Patrick Wallace would ask me to launch so much as a paper aeroplane, I said yes.
Then I got talking to the lovely Dr Audrey Whitty, curator of ceramics, glass and Asian collections at the museum, who wrote the book The Albert Bender Collection of Asian Art in the National Museum of Ireland and did her doctorate on the man. She is a walking encyclopaedia on Albert Bender. Her enthusiasm for the man is catching.
Perhaps some of you are reading this and thinking, “Imagine not knowing who Albert Bender is. Pshaw! For shame! Such ignorance!” It’s probably best not to read on if you are one of those people. For the rest of you philistines, here’s a bit of background. (Thanks to Dr Whitty I am now a walking pocket-sized pamphlet on Bender, so I can fill you in off the top of my head without recourse to books or even Wikipedia. At least not much.) He was born in Dublin, the son of a German rabbi, Philip Bender, and went to primary school in Lower Mount Street. At 11 little Albert and his family moved to Hastings, England, when his Dad got a job as a principal over there.
For some reason, at 13, he was packed off to San Francisco, where his uncle was a big noise in the insurance trade. After studying business, Albert became his uncle’s apprentice, and by the age of 20 had set up as an independent insurance agent. He went on to make a fortune.
Bender had a cousin and close friend called Anne Bremer, an artist, who inspired his appreciation of the visual arts. When she died in 1923, he started collecting contemporary and Asian art for donation to public institutions.
His contemporary art collection formed the basis of the fledgling San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His collections can be found in Mills College California, Stanford University and beyond.
Between 1931 and 1936 he donated around 260 artefacts of East Asian origin to the National Museum. These included massive and rare Tibetan-Buddhist thangkas – “big pictures”, as his pen-pal WB Yeats used to call them. The Louvre in Paris was desperate to acquire the thangkas, but Bender told them he wanted to give the land of his birth first refusal. The National Museum wasn’t exactly snapping up Asian art, being mostly inclined towards Irish artefacts. Still, in his quietly persistent and patriotic way, through a series of letters with the then-director Adolf Mahr, aka Dublin Nazi No 1, Bender, a Jew, succeeded in having an Asian art wing in memory of his mother Augusta opened by then-taoiseach Éamon de Valera in 1934.
The collection was dismantled in the early 1970s to make way for newly discovered Viking material and kept in storage until 2001, when Dr Whitty reinstalled the collection. The permanent exhibition of Bender’s artefacts was opened in Collins Barracks three years ago. It’s well worth a visit. The snuff boxes alone are extraordinary, not to mention the 17th-century Daoist priest’s robe.
Albert Bender died 71 years ago tomorrow in San Francisco. The obituaries printed at the time tell a tale of a much-loved Irish-American. They wrote of him buying the art of students, even if it wasn’t brilliant, and storing it under his bed.
It was said that around 90 per cent of his income was given away to charity. He had an almost permanent salon in his home on California Street for both celebrated and unheard-of creative types. Every March 17th his friends gathered to put on a show in his honour, having invented the fiction that St Patrick’s Day was his birthday. He sent kimonos as gifts to Frida Kahlo, donated rare books to Trinity College Dublin, kept up correspondence with the likes of Jack B Yeats, George Russell and Oliver St John Gogarty. The obituaries tell of the thousands at his funeral mourning the man known locally as Mickey Bender.
The best obituary in Dr Whitty’s book is from the San Francisco News, which said that Bender was more than just a patron – he was a “saint” in the arts community. “Bender didn’t care what you represented, whether you were Catholic, Protestant, Jewish or Mohammedan, whether you were white, black or yellow, whether you had plenty of money or no money. As a fellow being you’d appeal to his sympathy.”
His donation paved the way for future gifts of Asian origin to Ireland, such as those by Chester Beatty, whose name is much more easily recognisable. Dr Whitty, who has lots more to write about Bender, hopes one day her art hero’s name will be just as easily recognised and appreciated.
Albert who? Pshaw! For shame! Such ignorance! Only one of the kindest, cultured and most gracious Dubliners who ever lived, that’s who.
In other news
If you’re Belfast-bound, Home, the pop-up restaurant on Callender Street, is worth a detour. Great food, friendly service and everything in the place, from the upcycled chairs to the pretty placemats, is for sale. Tel: 0044-79-36292502 homepopup.com