‘Mining Gems’ a Treasure Hunt at the Grohmann Museum

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Photo courtesy Grohmann Museum

'Barcelona Glavanizing Shop'

'Barcelona Glavanizing Shop', Francesc Pausas Coll, 1941

Brooklyn Galvanizing Shop has greeted visitors to the Grohmann Museum since opening day in 2007. A 1925 painting of men and women toiling inside a steamy workshop, Brooklyn Galvanizing Shop was deemed exemplary of the Museum’s mission to display art representing all industries in every historical period. But the painting was wrongly identified and wrongly dated. It’s really Barcelona Galvanizing Shop, painted in 1941. The Museum learned of the mistake when contacted by the daughter-in-law of a young woman prominent in the painting’s composition who saw it on the Grohmann’s online catalog.

The discovery was one of the inspirations behind the Grohmann’s current exhibition, “Mining Gems: Stories from the Collection.” A letter from the daughter-in-law of Carmen Martinez, the painting’s prominently featured woman, “started the idea that the collection is a living, growing thing,” not a static assemblage, explains Museum director James Kieselburg.

The story behind Barcelona Galvanizing Shop, by Spanish painter Francesc Pausas Coll, is especially colorful and involves the refusal by Martinez’s father to allow his daughter to sit for a portrait. To get around parental disapproval, Coll visited her workplace and painted her bent over work but facing the viewer. Martinez is still alive today, age 92.

Kieselburg collected other stories for “Mining Gems” about the artists whose work is housed at the Grohmann, often from children or even great grandchildren of the painters. Some of the works chosen for “Mining Gems” are enlightened by appropriate references to literature, a project carried out by the Grohmann’s curator, Marina Bernovich. For Jehan Georges Vibert’s Polishing Day (c. 1880), depicting a monk polishing his monastery’s silver bowls, Bernovich prepared a text panel with relevant quotations from Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. Her panel for the magnificent Forge of Vulcan (c. 1580), by an unknown student of Francesco Bassano the Younger, relates the mythological workshop to a passage from Homer’s Odyssey.

One of the exhibit’s underlying themes is that the meaning, names and attributions of other admired artworks in museums across the world might also be subject, like Barcelona Galvanizing Shop, to revision and new insights. “The book is never closed,” Kieselburg says. “Mining Gems” features two dozen paintings from across the Museum’s three floors, identified by gem-shaped panels. It’s a treasure hunt, indeed.

“Mining Gems: Stories from the Collection” runs through Dec. 17.