26 MarEpisode 46 | The Museum of the Dog opens in NYC
Up until last month, one of the world's largest collections of dog-related art resided outside St. Louis inside a museum that most of the locals didn't even know about: The Museum Of The Dog. That changed last month, when the museum officially relocated to midtown Manhattan. Annie interviews the museum's executive directly, Alan Fausel, about the museum's collection, history, and fan favorites.
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Full Transcript:
Annie:
Hey everyone. Thank you, as always, for listening. If you are a dog lover in New York City, or maybe if you’re not in New York City, you may have heard that the Museum of the Dog has just opened, after spending many years in St. Louis it is now located in Manhattan on 41st and Park. And I am actually going to be at the Museum this Saturday, March 30 from 1 to 2 doing a training demonstration. So if you're around please come on by, it is free. Sadly, it is not open to dogs but my dog will be there doing a demo.
And today, I have the pleasure of speaking with the Museum's Executive Director. Alan, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself.
Alan:
My name is Alan Fausel, I’m the Executive Director of the AKC Museum of the Dog which has just been moved from St. Louis to New York.
Annie:
And were you the director also in St. Louis?
Alan:
No, I was not. I had an association with the AKC for years, when I was doing open houses at Doyle and Bonhams in New York and we always had them as one of our charity benefactors for the Humane Fund. So I knew the people in the collection and actually appraised the collection.
Annie:
What did you think of the collection when you first saw it?
Alan:
I have known it for years and there are some really great things here and also I went out to St. Louis twice before I took the job, you know, over the years. There are some fabulous paintings here and also a lot of interesting other teachable things that we have besides paintings and sculptures but there's also collars, trophies, a whole variety of things we call “doggyama.”
Annie:
Doggyama, I loved it. So tell me about how the museum first got stopped.
Alan:
It got started in the early 80s, so a number of people from the AKC and dog lovers formed a foundation because they didn't like the fact that Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge’s collection in the ‘70s had, sort of, been dispersed, they thought they wanted to retain some of this.
Annie:
I don’t know about her collection. What was her collection?
Alan:
It was several thousand pieces. She was a huge- she was behind the Morrison Essex dog show and was the preeminent dog person in the United States.
Annie:
And she was an art collector and a dog lover, I’m guessing.
Alan:
Yep, a dog breeder. She had hundreds of dogs at any one time.
Annie:
She was a Rockefeller?
Alan:
Yes, Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge in New Jersey.
Annie:
And what kind of dogs did she breed.
Alan:
Uh, German Shepherds were the main ones. I also think there were some Bedlingtons in there and Cocker Spaniels. She was instrumental in the development of American Cocker Spaniel, as opposed to the English Cocker Spaniel.
Annie:
So she had amassed this huge collection of art and when she died, it got left to the AKC, is that right?
Alan:
No, this is what’s confusing everyone. It got dispersed and the people at the AKC said, “huh, we don’t want that happening and let’s start a museum.” But I’m talking about, is five years before this was formed, Mrs Dodge’s collection was scattered to the winds and the people said, “wow, we probably don't want to have that, let’s see if we can put a collection together here.
Annie:
Ah, ok.
Alan:
Now, there are a few pieces that have come in to us by various ways that she was once owned and …. but that was there was sort of the inspiration to say, let’s collect some of these things, let’s start a collection. And they started it in the New York Life building where the AKC had their headquarters upstairs, it was in the lobby of the New York Life Building at 51 Madison and was there for five years. And great art dealer, William Secord, one of the major US dog art dealers was the first director.
Annie:
And then it was moved from Manhattan to St. Louis, I understand, because of rent prices, I’m guessing.
Alan:
There were some incentives to go out there and they needed more space than they had in Manhattan and they went out to St. Louis for 32 years.
Annie:
So how have pieces entered this collection?
Alan:
I would say almost 99% of it is donations, there are very few purchases.
Annie:
And tell me about the kind of pieces that are part of this collection that’s now been around for more than 30 years.
Alan:
About ½ of it is three-dimensional art, in the form of ceramics and bronzes-that’s a very big part of the collection of dogs. People collect a lot of ceramic dogs and then, about the other ½, is sort of, flat art: drawings, paintings and prints, watercolors that hang on the wall. And most of it is really geared towards purebred dogs, in the fact most people involved with AKC are, in fact, involved with their own breeds.
Annie:
Are there famous artists who have pieces in this collection or household names, painters or sculptors?
Alan:
I don’t know about household names per se other than we have a William Wegman photograph, he is a famous dog photographer. In dog art world, yes, they’re household names like the Earl Family: George, Maud and, of course, the leading one is Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, who was a great painter, in and of itself, let alone a dog painter.
Annie:
When was he working?
Alan:
He was working in the 19th Century and he was Queen Victoria's favorite. In fact, that sort of ushered in, sort of, the Golden age of dog painters is like 1840 to about 1940 and because of Queen Victoria people wanted to be like her and she had, at any one time, about 75 dogs. She sponsored and commissioned a lot of dog art.
Annie:
That was kind of when breeding got started, at least in America.
Alana:
Even there, in England, the first Britain conformations were like 1851. And the kennel club there starts a little before 1873 or 4 (1874) so it’s all gaining momentum at that point.
Annie:
I've heard, and maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong but a lot of conformation breeding started because people wanting to be like royalty, who had these fancy dogs and if you got your hands on a couple of dog like they had you could create your own population.
Alan:
It is soft of an English thing of categorization and delineating things. So the famous scientist Linneaus, … How you describe each species, each of these breeds. So they want to have some conformity so you know what you are getting so they started to breeds dogs for certain, their purpose-bred. These dogs would be better for hunting, these dogs would be better for going after badgers, these dogs better herding sheep- they all had a job.
Annie:
So tell me about the move of the museum from St. Louis to New York City. I understand it just opened a few weeks ago.
Alan:
We opened officially on February 8th and we started, construction started about a year and half ago and we've now done very, very well, it has paid off. We are going, we doubled St. Louis’ s attendance and revenue in 16 days.
Annie:
You mean the revenue for a year?
Alan:
For a year, we doubled it.
Annie:
Well what brought about the move from St. Louis?
Alan:
That- in a sense. The fact in St Louis, it was a nice building and nice complex and they did a good job but they weren’t getting the people in there. They were outside of St. Louis, 20 miles 25 miles outside St. Louis proper. In a nice suburb but there wasn’t a lot of …
Annie:
foot traffic.
Alan:
..foot traffic or people coming through. Even the local people didn’t know much about it.
Annie:
Now it’s in the same building as the AKC, is that right?
Alan:
Which is where it happened before, bringing it back. There is an advantage to that: one is my first show which we have, For the Love of All Things Dog is highlights of the two collections, that people don’t realize is two separate collections, the AKC collection which is normally housed on the fifth floor and then there is the Museum of Dog collection so I thought for the first show we put our best foot forward and have highlights of both collections. The AKC collection started longer before back in the late 19th century shortly after they were formed, but it is smaller, has about 260 works, is very high quality, mostly paintings. The Museum has about 1,700 works now.
Annie:
And what is the date range? Are there some modern pieces and very old pieces?
Alan:
There are some very modern things. We have the William Wegman photograph, a lovely Spanish painting that was done in the 1990s. We have people who painted things that were donated from the art show for the dog show and that was some over last year 20 years or so giving us contemporary works.
Annie:
What’s the criteria to get into the museum. Do you have people trying to give you their paintings?
Alan:
Everyone does. And since we moved, actually, there were so many ceramics, you know, 300 Bulldogs, we decided to trim the collection down through a process, the accession of the sale of about 900 items out in the St. Louis where we left behind. We decided to sell some of the things work that were duplicates, we have one particular ceramic Collie, we had nine of them. You know I don’t need the same thing over and over again. And it costs money in New York to store and maintain those.
Annie:
You know it seems that there are not usually art museums that are based on a topic rather than a period or a style.
Alan:
You know, hard to think. I’m thinking about, there are other dog museums out there; in Passow, Germany there is a museum for the Dachshund, just one breed.
Annie:
As they deserve.
Alan:
But it’s interesting but there are other different museums. I was listening to public radio the other day and they were offering something where there is a guide to 110 museums in New York.
Annie:
Oh I know that.
Alan:
You don't even know about.
Annie:
Were you included in that?
Alan:
I'm not sure because we probably hadn't, it was probably before we got out there but they did mention when they did they write a piece on us.
Annie:
What kind of people are coming to the museum?
Alan:
It’s a mix. We have had three events with our AKC people and we had a major brunch and so those were more of the donors, people at Dog Fancy who breed and own, really hard-core groups. And what I know is the Museum works very well because it's a great collection but it also has a cutting edge, about seven cutting-edge interactive digital displays and people congregate to different ones and then they go back to the collections. We have “Find a Match” which has been one of the most popular where you don't find your match, this kind of lifestyle but it takes a picture of you and uses visual identification and matches you with what dog you look like.
Annie:
Right. I saw that. Now I have to ask what you got?
Alan:
I actually got a Boston Terrier, sometimes it changes, or a Bulldog, but it’s fairly consistent. And that's the.. the millennial's love it because they can email these things and it goes onto social media and you hear the howls and screams of laughter from that. And we also have the “Meet the Breeds” table which I call the heart and soul operation. We have an interactive flat screen table where you can have four different people working on it and you watch your dog come across, or your breed come across the screen, then pull it down into the doghouse and you are given about six or eight different qualities: what they look like, their parents, their origin, their past, their present, a fun fact and what we have in the gallery. And it’s just chock-full of information which was being here in the AKC is able to rely on their expertise to fill that with content for all 193 AKC – accepted breeds. Then upstairs we have a train your dog, where we took a Labrador Retriever puppy, a six-month old lab and put her in a motion capture suit and had her go through the tricks and it is set up so that the 7 foot screen responds to your other hand gestures and your voice to train the dogs to sit, speak, spin, down, come.
Annie:
Very cute
Alan:
So it's.. little kids love it. You hear them screaming, her name is Molly, so screaming “Molly” all the time. We have a community board and we also have a board, an interactive board about breeders- it tells the story of the breeders of the AKC. And what was really …most proud of and actually happy about was, is our library. We have 4000 volumes of more general books from our 15,000 volume AKC library.
Annie:
It’s an amazing library. I felt like now I know when I can leave my books when I go.. Where did all those books come from?
Alan:
Oh you know, over the years, it's part of the AKC library and we put some rarities out there in the cases from upstairs and then we have the general books for people to use. We have an activity table where people can draw, do puzzles and school groups can come through. And we post that on our community board.
Annie:
Yeah you have some really nice ways to engage people. The library is amazing in the kind of niche books that are there. There is a whole section on just naming your dog and within that I found a book on naming your dog with Gaelic translations of regular names or something.
Alan:
It’s very funny that you mentioned that. We had a reporter in Saturday and was asking about this book about Irish names
Annie:
Oh really?
Alan:
That he knew as a child, he was about 35/40 and there it was. Funny you mentioned that.
Annie:
Do you have any favorite pieces in the museum?
Alan:
I think the crowd favorite is: “Silent Sorrow” by Maud Earl which shows Edward VII’s dog, Caesar, who he was very attached to, Edward VI being the son of Queen Victoria, inherited her love dogs. And it shows that it was so important that whenever the Seventh died -Caesar was included in the funeral cortege. And this shows, Maud Earl’s brilliant stroke, shows Caesar resting his head on his departed master’s armchair and the armchair itself is sort of faintly drawn and as it goes up higher, it blends in the background and fades much like the memory. It is very touching. People love it and it shows Earl’s inventiveness in which we will be featuring this summer- we have about 80 works by Maud Earl, 40 works by Margaret Kersey and other women artists of the early 20th century. So we are doing a show, our next show will be in July of woman and dog art in the early 20th century.
Annie:
You have mentioned her a couple times. Who was Maud Earl?
Alan:
Maud Earl was the daughter of George Earl and the niece of Thomas Earl and the half sister of Percy Earl so she came from a dog painting family. And George and Thomas were very accomplished but she put out a fairly large body of work and we’re mentioned, modestly in my press release, that her career is being reassessed a lot because I am. Since the last year, I have been thinking, “oh my gosh, what’s this woman doing? Oh she’s doing this.” and how she differs from other artists of the time, male artists like …
Annie:
When was she painting? Was she British?
Alan:
Yeah, she was British, she was from 1864 to 1943.
Annie:
1864..
Alan:
Yeah and in 1915, she moved to America actually, painted a lot of dogs here.
Annie:
Are you in touch with what’s going in the modern world of dog painting- is there a modern world of dog painting? Or are there big collectors
Alan:
Yeah the modern world is, same with anything in the art world, it's hard to distinguish quality except by time, time sort of reveals truth and so we see enough to see that from a distance but we do have other people, some very good artists. As I said, we have a Wegman, we have a couple Christine Merrill paintings, she's a great dog portraitist. We have her portrait of Millie, the Bush dog. And there’s others we just sort of, we try to be selective and see where the trends are. We will probably have some shows up in the future with contemporary artists and photographers.
Annie:
What’s the highest valued piece of work you have in the museum?
Alan:
We try and we are not really supposed to talk about value with my attorneys there. But it’s not that expensive but most expensive works- I came from the auction world which sell from between $200 and $400,000 you know in today’s auction world, so it’s not a huge amount of money.
Annie:
But you can’t tell me which painting? *laughing*
Alan:
Probably not.
Annie:
I liked the porcelain Great Dane. It seems like if you were going to have a Great Dane a porcelain one might be the way to go
Alan:
Well we have a bunch of those. We will probably have some for sale at 23rd and St Louis in April.
Annie:
Was that kind of a trend to get large porcelain lifetime versions of different breeds, ‘cause it seemed like you had a few of them.
Alan:
What it depended on was the donors. You will see a lot of Mastiffs because Marie Morgan was 300 Mastiff paintings and Cohen gave us over 300 Bulldogs and Nancy Carol Draper gave us at least 150 Great Danes so that's where that collection is heavy and so in moving this year, I said well much this is kind of top heavy- like a dog show you wouldn’t want 800 labs and you know just a just a few curious pointers.
Annie:
So when is the St. Louis auction, I am curious about this.
Alan:
So it’s really the redundancies and the things that aren’t the quality of things we would want here. Thing, like, I have two dog sleds. And one is in storage and I am going to hang it someplace here but the other one I don't need, one dog sled is enough. As I said, the Collies, the Astead Applause by Royal Doulton, the collector was gave us a really a good collection of porcelains was a Collie person had 15 of them so we are selling 9 of them. It’s the same thing over and over again. So there is no reason, I worked it out in storage fees and handling it would be $50 a year for each one piece of porcelain.
Annie:
And this sale is happening in St. Louis in April or March?
Alan:
April 23.
Annie:
April 23. Well we’ll have to information about that in case anyone wants to go to St Louis
Alan:
Or they can do it online, it's Leslie Hindman, it's an auction house I have known for years.
Annie:
Oh interesting. Tell me about the skeleton you have.
Alan:
Bellgrave Joe is the mascot of a library, he has always lived there, he has always moved down here from upstairs. He belongs to the AKC. But Bellgrave was a very important Fox Terrier. They said before Joe there were terriers that chased foxes and then after him were Fox Terriers. He was sort of fundamental, seminal producer in the breed who helped steer the direction of the breed. He lived or 20 years, had a lot of offspring and, they said his blood ran through, you know, almost half the Fox Terriers, smooth and wire for dozens of years. In fact, we have a painting downstairs of Nori Sattler, who’s a 25th generation removed Fox Terrier, won something like 71 shows back in the late 30s.
Annie:
Interesting.
Alan:
What's interesting about him is we’re are using him as a teaching tool. We discovered the photograph and going through 3D animation, we’re going to have him 3D credit printed for a teaching tool.
Annie:
You are going to have the skeleton 3D printed?
Alan:
Yep.
Annie:
Wow. Do you have any other future interesting show that we should know about?
Alan:
There is always a lot of interest in service and war dogs. We have two war dogs already, Always Faithful and Smoky who were World War II dogs, cast in bronze, here. And this Memorial Day ,we are going to be honoring them as well as Fleet Week, a lot of sea dog here. But also another sculpture from Susan Bihari of Stubby. He was a World War I dog, so we will have to have them all here and give a salute to them during open Memorial Day weekend.
Annie:
Cool. Well I am going to be there on March 30 doing a little training demo, dog training 101. And if you are open to it, I have a couple suggestions for shows that I think you guys could host in the future.
Alan:
We have a list but we will talk about it, sure.
Annie:
I think you could do one of illustrations, great illustrations of dogs. My father was an illustrator which is why I am interested in that. But I saw that you did have some beautiful old posters, some movie posters.
Alan:
I don’t have enough for that but I have something, somewhat, along that line, but its different. I have a collection of vernacular photography which is becoming very popular these days in collecting world of just everyday pictures. There is a woman who collected from the back, since the 70s, she would just go to estate sales and buy the old photo albums or get the dog paintings- pictures, out of people's photos going back to the late 19th century. And I wanted to do it because it is how people see their dogs and how they were seen in those days and what you would record of photographs. And now it is so different from what we have today because you’ll just snap billions of images. Then, the reason I call it “Photos: please do not bend” because if you talk to anyone over 70, they write that on their- if they are sending photographs, they write that on their envelope, because when I grew up photographs took a long time to get back, you had to go to a lab, the present generation doesn’t understand 1 hour photos, let alone two week photos and they’re thought of as precious objects, to make sure they didn’t get bent in the mail. So taking a little different look at how people interacted, lived with their dogs and what they chose to record.
Annie:
I love that, that sounds really exciting, I would love to see that. My other idea for you is to do a show of art by dog.
Alan:
Yeah, hard to say. I don’t know if that would be an entire show but I think before that I might do a show with dog artists, who are contemporary ones, I think we want to keep the art going. And people will have demonstrations, drawing classes. So as one of my colleagues says, “we will actually have live nude models.”
Annie:
*laughing* Sounds like a good note to end on.
**music**
Fun dog fact of the day: Millie Bush, the English Springer Spaniel, who belonged to Barbara Bush and President George H.W. Bush, her painting is the museum, but my fact is: she appeared, or I should say, was portrayed, in 4 different sitcoms in the ‘90s. Murphy Brown, Wings, Who’s the Boss and the Simpsons.
And our Woof Shout Out Today goes to: my dog, Amos, who turns 14 next month. This Saturday, March 30 from 1-2, he and I will be at the museum doing a training demonstration, so please come on by. And later this week we will also be doing a walk through of the museum on Instragram, so please make sure you follow us at School for the Dogs.
Links:
Museum of the Dog: Find your Match
