On a warm Gallery Night in October, lots of people are out meandering. Michael Lord Gallery on Milwaukee Street acts like a beacon, with its large front windows reflecting emanations of the enticing, brightly lit white interior.
On this night, the main space downstairs is devoted to mid-career local artists, all seasoned art faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee: John Balsley’s wood and metal sculptures, Lisa Moline and Lane Hall’s books and Leslie Bellavance’s photographs. The pristine formality of the gallery space itself makes their work look important and expensive.
There may not be another gallery in town that quite compares to offering this kind of professional context for local artists’ work. Even the fact that Lord privileged this local work by putting it in the main room downstairs and relegated last month’s Dennis Oppenheim sculptures to the upstairs is a comment on the dealer’s democratic approach.
There is something about Michael Lord faintly reminiscent of a classical Greek sculpture. His boyish good looks, wavy hair and perfect posture combine with a warm, gracious charm to produce the consummate host. He looks just right in the uptown space, dressed in Armani, smiling, happy to see the gallery full. He’s not an extrovert or “personality,” really, but a presence, understated and seamlessly erected, an irresistible blend of hometown Midwestern humility scented with urban savoir-faire.
This compares to Dean Jensen a few blocks away, who also hangs his shingle on a beautifully renovated two-level gallery in a historic building. But the ambience is decidedly different here. Jensen’s narrow space keeps people moving vertically down the wall of artwork rather than standing in the middle of the room socializing. Dean is often seated in the middle of the gallery behind a desk, personable enough, but shielded, as if the socializing part of the job is a little painful for him. The type of art shown here is generally edgier than at Michael Lord’s. Folk art, flash art, local and national painters and, more than any other gallery, photography. Both Jensen and his assistant, John Sobczak, seem like perfect dark foils to the wholesome exuberance of Lord – Igor and Lurch to Lord Fauntleroy. While Jensen might opt for photographs of teenagers with heroin needles dangling from their arms, Lord likes the dance of high modernism: art corralled within a certain formal language that speaks of color, line and objecthood more than social ills or psychological penetration.
The gallery business is not for weaklings. Jensen, among others, complains regularly about how Milwaukeeans have elevated frugality to an art form.
Michael Lord would never be so candid. But indeed he has faced formidable challenges of his own in the past several years: pressing debt, legal battles and public humiliation. Yet in that classical Greek fashion, he manages to shun the vestiges of worry and still look the golden boy, even at age 49. As his troubles continue to mount, the only hint of strain is a slight weariness in his face and some deepening lines on his forehead.
That’s pretty good for a person facing a criminal charge of theft and at least five civil lawsuits filed by some of his good friends and two of the most prestigious art galleries in the country. In all, legal claims against Lord total $722,000.
“It’s been a strange year in a lot of ways,” he says, shaking his head in dismay at how this could happen.
Lord’s legal missteps first became public two years ago when local newspapers reported his questionable involvement in brokering the sale of two Helen Frankenthaler paintings for Firstar Bank (now U.S. Bancorp). The paintings, originally commissioned in 1973, had hung in the bank lobby at 777 E. Wisconsin Ave. In 1999, Lord said he had sold the paintings for $100,000 to a New York dealer, well below their assessed value of $375,000 each. In time, the bank discovered that Lord had sold the paintings for $200,000 to his old mentor, Irving Luntz, in Palm Beach, Florida. In a 2001 civil lawsuit, U.S. Bancorp called Lord’s action a “scam” and was awarded a judgment of $92,000.
In November of that same year, the family of Charles Peckarsky, a friend and business adviser to Lord, filed a suit to recover the $292,989 Peckarsky had lent Lord. Faced with closing the gallery to pay the debt, three of Lord’s friends lent him the money to pay Peckarsky’s family.
Then, in December 2003, criminal charges were filed against Lord by family members, accusing him of stealing $175,000 from the estate of his great-aunt, Edna Geske, of Wauwatosa.
Today, it seems as if everyone is lining up to sue Michael Lord. The list of lawsuits – all of which are pending, some of which have never been made public – brings up names of both nationally esteemed artists and galleries and locally important individuals. His friend, a Milwaukee cardiologist, is suing to reclaim the money he paid for a Henri Matisse drawing that then disappeared. Another friend, Jeffrey Kasch, former president of the now-defunct toy distributor, M.W. Kasch Co., is suing for a missing Frank Stella painting Lord had been entrusted to sell. Milwaukee art consultant Sally Stevens is suing for a disputed commission regarding the purchase of Firstar’s Frankenthaler paintings, sold by Lord after Stevens initiated the sale with the bank.
From New York, Marlborough Gallery is suing for funds never received on works by Magdalena Abakanowicz. And Lehmann Maupin Gallery is suing for works consigned to Lord by the renowned contemporary American painter David Salle.
As Lord approaches his 50th birthday in November, he may be faced with re-inventing his professional life from the ground up, not to mention possibly spending time in jail.
The question could be posed: Who is the real Michael Lord and how did he teeter from his position as this city’s most prominent and well-liked art dealer? But when a person’s life is spent dealing art, which is both a solid commodity and an illusive immaterial idea – a representation of something, not the thing itself – he becomes enmeshed in a world of illusion. In some ways, Lord seems to be living in that in-between space that art so eloquently attests to: the place where reality is truly a concept dependent on perspective.
An art dealer is essentially a salesman. Image is important. While dealers attract clients by their knowledge of art and ability to communicate their convictions, they maintain clients with tools of social sophistication and élan. This may require socializing, schmoozing and all sorts of ongoing caring and tending. Dealers often get quite involved with clients’ lives. Lord, for example, currently is helping an elderly client who recently had a stroke.
“If you’re going to sell expensive stuff to rich people,” says Sobczak, who used to work for Lord, “you have to be or look rich yourself. And to do it, you spend, spend, spend.”
Lord puts it this way: “It’s important how you present yourself. People size you up by what you wear, and you are always trying to sell yourself. I can’t walk into a New York gallery with a cheese hat on.”
Lord owns a condominium on the upper East Side of New York City, where he travels frequently for business. In the 1990s, he would fly four or five times a year to Europe or Asia. In Milwaukee, he now resides in a second-floor apartment above his gallery, which he bought for $385,000 on a land contract two years ago after selling his condo on East Kane Place.
Four days a week, Lord begins his mornings at the Milwaukee Athletic Club in the exercise room. His favorite restaurant is Izumi’s, where he keeps a private bottle of vodka and nourishes his love of sushi. (One local artist remembered eating sushi for the first time in the early 1980s at one of his openings.) For recreation, he water-skis. It’s his only hobby, and he says he never takes vacations. “Travel is always for business,” he says. “I can only relax for a couple of days. What I like doing is going to New York and going to museums and eating out.” Lord adds that much of his spare time has gone to civic causes such as Bastille Days, Jazz in the Park, Gallery Night, the Milwaukee Art Commission and a project to restore Milwaukee’s aging public sculptures.
Over the years, he has developed important friends and contacts – people like Bud Selig, Rembert Weakland, Ray Allen and Bo Black. All of this is in marked contrast to his humble upbringing on Milwaukee’s near West Side. The son of a Milwaukee beat cop, Lord attended Mother of Perpetual Help Catholic school with his two sisters. He says he was close to both of his parents, who were loving and supportive. “As a kid, I looked up to my dad and admired him in his uniform,” he says. “I would walk with Dad on the beat, and he knew everyone.” Until his mother died suddenly at age 59 of a heart attack, she worked every Saturday in the gallery doing the accounting.
Even in Lord’s early years in the art business, he set the bar high. “For God’s sake,” expounds Carri Skoczek, a Milwaukee artist who now lives in New York, “Mapplethorpe was at an opening in his old space.” Lord brought controversial photographer Robert Mapplethorpe to town in 1983 for a solo show of his work. The now deceased photographer’s catalogue raisonné lists his solo shows of that year as: “New York, Paris, London, Tokyo, Toronto, Milwaukee, Munich, Dusseldorf and Venice,” showing the kind of league Lord had already joined. If you were smart enough to buy a $1,000 print from the show, it’s worth between $20,000 and $60,000 today.
Lord was one of only a few galleries in the country to show some of Warhol’s last works. He introduced the Milwaukee art community to celebrated young painters like Donald Baechler, Gary Stephen and Susan Rothenberg. He exhibited photography before there was a local market for it, with shows of Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Bill Brandt, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Brassai. He put on shows of Robert Kushner and Frank Stella, Gilbert and George, and Nicholas Africano.
“For Wisconsin,” says sculptor Jill Sebastian, “he’s one of the venues that thinks big.”
Standing in the middle of a high-end gallery like Lord’s, all notions of economy become skewed. Suddenly a $1,600 photograph by Janet Groover seems like a steal compared to a $60,000 David Salle painting across the wall. And that is precisely how some dealers, especially those like Lord, who show big-name, national artists, fall into huge debt. Bringing in high-end art requires risk. Most New York galleries, for example, that lend the work of name-brand artists to regional galleries, require a minimum “guarantee” of net sales. If the show doesn’t sell, the local dealer still owes the promissory amount to the gallery. Big losses can result from one bad gamble. Shipping and insurance alone are expensive. Because Michael Lord is ardent about high-end contemporary art, he tends to gamble more radically than other local dealers.
“Michael operates in a more rarefied strata,” says Jensen. “But at any level, it’s white knuckles, a total gamble whether the work will sell. We’ve always met our guarantee, but we haven’t always made money beyond it.”
Jensen’s range of sales averages between $3,000 per piece at the low end to $8,000 at the high end. The dealer gets anywhere between 20 to 50 percent of the sale. If it’s consigned from another gallery, he gets 20 percent, but he often has to negotiate a “buyer’s discount” to secure the sale and gives away part of that profit. If he’s reselling a work of art for a client, the dealer usually gets a 10 percent commission. Recently, Jensen sold a Bill Traylor painting to a German collector for $65,000, an exceptional coup for him. He says a Milwaukee gallery cannot survive on local clientele but must search out buyers nationally and internationally, primarily through the costly and time-consuming practice of attending large international art expositions such as Art Chicago at Navy Pier each May or the annual Outsider Art Fair in New York City.
Jensen “hangs in there by my fingernails,” he says, not taking huge risks and conservatively selling lower-end works (less than $10,000) to a small and fairly loyal base of local and national collectors, as well as attending several art expos annually.
But that’s not the way Michael Lord does business.
Lord learned the business of art from former Milwaukee dealer Irving Luntz, who now has an influential gallery in Palm Beach, Florida. Lord began working for Luntz when he was 12 years old, first sweeping floors, then learning how to frame and hang art. When Lord turned 16, Luntz told him to learn to drive a stick shift and sent him out alone in a rental truck to pick up artwork in New York City. Lord got lost, ended up in Harlem and finally found his way to Broadway. In front of Lincoln Center, a cab cut him off and he was stuck in traffic. Frustrated and angry, Lord looked up and saw Andy Warhol get out of the cab. “That was my first trip to New York City,” he recalls.
Besides honing his eye from an early age as he saw Miros, Picassos and Lautrecs emerge from Irving Galleries’ shipping crates, Lord absorbed people skills from Luntz.
“He was an interesting man,” says Lord, “an incredible salesman… a true art dealer, not a picture seller. And he had an incredible eye. I knew by the time I was in high school that this is what I wanted to do.”
The essential lesson Luntz taught him, though, was to go for the big deal, “to sell high-end art, significant, important art,” repeats Luntz today. “You can’t sell ditzy local art and pay your expenses. Go for the big deal. Go for only major things. That’s what I taught Michael to do.” And that’s what Lord did, quite successfully much of the time.
His first “big deal” was in 1986 while still located in his initial fifth-floor space on Milwaukee Street, where the elevator was so small that during art openings, people had to line up for their chance to squeeze in, four at a time. Lord found an Alexander Calder mobile on the market through Pace Gallery, New York, that had previously hung in a Texas airport and thought it would look fabulous in the Milwaukee airport, which was under renovation. Based on his conviction and without a buyer, Lord, with assistance from Barry Bateman, director of the airport, paid the enormous shipping and insurance expenses to bring it here and had it temporarily installed in the airport’s maintenance garage. Philanthropist Jane Pettit read about it in the newspaper and called Lord. She saw it at the airport, fell in love with it and purchased it for the community for $1.5 million. The 35-foot mobile of red, blue and black circles never looked good in the airport. The busy industrial ceiling obscured the delicate piece, and for years Lord and others agonized over its positioning. Finally, in 2001, it was moved to the Calatrava addition of the Milwaukee Art Museum, where it now hangs to its full advantage.
Flush with this large commission, Lord had his first taste of Luntz’s dictum: “Go for the big deal.” Later that year, the building that housed his gallery, which Luntz had owned, was sold, and Lord decided to move to an available ground-floor space in the Pfister Hotel, with more visibility and quadruple the rent. Lord was 32 years old and now had huge expenses to meet.
Once he moved to the Pfister, the need to establish and maintain a cosmopolitan image through large sales increased substantially. Fortunately, after the Calder sale came a series of impressive transactions, one of which seemed to fall from the sky and is indicative of Lord’s refined social skills.
The singer Mitch Miller was in town performing and happened to meet Lord’s gallery assistant, Karen Kane, in a nightclub after his show. “He had a crush on her,” says Lord. At a 9 a.m. meeting the next day, the gallery’s elevator door opened and out of a cloud of cigar smoke stepped Mitch Miller, most likely looking for Kane. Miller, it turns out, was a collector of Picasso prints. Later that evening, Lord ran into Miller sitting alone at a table at Elsa’s and went over to chat with him. When he found out that Miller shares his love of sushi, they headed to Lord’s friend Seigo Hidaka’s restaurant for Japanese food. A friendship blossomed. When Miller decided to sell his portfolio of more than 200 Picasso prints, many of them erotic and difficult to market, Lord eventually found a buyer in Japan with Hidaka’s assistance and sold the collection for $1.2 million, earning a flat commission of $100,000. It took a year of negotiations and numerous trips to Japan.
Before the booming art market of the 1980s would collapse, Lord also sold a collection of five major paintings by such modern masters as Motherwell, Stella and Wesselman for $1.8 million for a Milwaukee collector and sold a single painting by Georgia O’Keeffe to Ruth West of the Rahr West Museum in Manitowoc for more than a million dollars.
The O’Keeffe sale resulted directly from Lord’s sense of timing and sensitivity to a client’s interests. West had once mentioned to Lord that she’d someday love to have an O’Keeffe. On a gamble, Lord flew to the artist’s home in New Mexico shortly after she died. After hanging out on the ranch with Juan (John Bruce Hamilton), O’Keeffe’s longtime companion, Lord brought back “Birch and Pine Tree No. 2, 1925.” It was a scene painted at Lake George, New York, where, coincidentally, Ruth West had grown up. She loved it and bought it.
But not all of Lord’s gambles paid off. In the late ’80s, in a similar situation to the O’Keeffe and Calder, Lord had found on the market a large Henry Moore bronze sculpture of a reclining mother and child and “felt very passionate” that Milwaukee needed an important piece of public art by a renowned artist. He speculated that if he brought it here and installed it in the small park in front of the Northwestern Mutual Life complex, both the corporation and the city would recognize its beauty and significance and purchase it. But this time, Lord’s timing was off. NML had just announced a building project and wasn’t going to invest $700,000 in the sculpture.
“It would have been a great piece for the city,” he still says, noting that he saw it on the market recently for $3 million. “I thought it would be a wonderful balance to the nearby di Suvero,” the brash orange metal sculpture at the end of Wisconsin Avenue. With shipping, insurance and a repair to cover, Lord estimates he lost $30,000-$35,000.
A much larger loss occurred in 1991, when Lord decided to purchase a fine-art printing press in Minneapolis. His friends, including Luntz, advised against it. “You are destined to lose your ass” is what Luntz remembers telling him. The art market had already gone bust, but Lord bought Vermillion Press anyway, with Lynde Uihlein (daughter of Jane Pettit) and the printer, Steve Anderson, as partners. His idea was that he could get national artists to make lithographs and monotypes there, which he would sell. He even secured a spot at the very competitive and prestigious Basel Art Fair in Switzerland as a print dealer. But while he was in Japan doing business, he received a call that his mother had died of a heart attack.
He was devastated. At the same time, he says, Uihlein had a falling out with the master printer at Vermillion and the entire enterprise fell apart, with Lord suffering a personal loss of about $1 million, which he is still paying off.
“A career in art is a labor of love,” says Sobczak. “But it’s a career that will shorten your life span faster than smoking.”
Former independent art dealer Meryl Goldfarb, a longtime friend of Lord’s who now lives in Chicago, puts it like this: “Art dealing is a profession that seduces you into thinking you can extend yourself and somebody’s going to walk in the next day and you’re going to have a big sale and you’re going to get out of trouble financially. An art dealer can live on four great sales a year, but you don’t know when they’re coming. It’s the most unstable business I can imagine.”
Lord did not weather these stresses alone. Charlie Peckarsky, a genial old man, accom-panied Lord on his odyssey. Peckarsky was a veritable fixture at both of Lord’s gallery spaces. Sympathetic, kind, full of advice and always nearby to answer the phone or greet gallery visitors, Peckarsky was a paternal mentor and friend to Lord. They first met at a conference at Wingspread in Racine and became friends. Every morning for 18 years, they began their day over breakfast at Heinemann’s or, later, the Pfister Cafe.
When Lord ran into debt with Vermillion Press, Peckarsky loaned him money. Additional small loans from Peckarsky helped him “get through the bad economy of the ’90s,” says Lord, and in 1998, his friend and father figure issued him a promissory note for $200,000. But even more than financial assistance, Lord says Peckarsky was a partner who offered continuous moral support and guidance with big decisions.
But after Peckarsky’s health deteriorated (he is now in a Cedarburg nursing home), his children in December 2001 decided to file a lawsuit against Lord to recoup the loaned money. With the family threatening to reclaim collateral of all of the gallery’s artwork, as well as his condominiums in Milwaukee and New York, Lord eventually paid the nearly $293,000 he owed.
According to court records, Lord’s tax problems began around 1996, with the state filing warrants for back taxes. Lord faced a number of delinquent tax liens owed to the Department of Revenue – $37,848 in 1996, $99,715 in 1997, $44,072 in 1999. He says he hired a full-time bookkeeper to “keep things from piling up” and paid off the $181,635 that was due. But his tax woes continued, and as recently as last year, he owed more than $12,000 to the state.
In 1998, Lord was asked to sell a Frank Stella painting titled “Bonin Night Heron” for his friend, Jeffrey Kasch. But Lord neither paid him the $128,748 nor returned the art. Kasch waited five years before filing a suit in August 2003.
“Lord… has failed, refused and neglected to return the painting to… Kasch or to pay him for the sale of the painting, which has been requested on numerous occasions,” states the complaint.
“It will get resolved,” says Lord. “The painting was sent to Japan as part of an exhibit. I have to get it back from Japan. [Lord’s friend, the restaurateur] Seigo died, and I’m having trouble locating things.” Hidaka had moved from Milwaukee back to Japan, where he and Lord briefly held a partnership in a gallery, Lord says.
In 1999, another deal went awry. Lord sold a Matisse drawing to a longtime friend, a River Hills cardiologist, for $165,000. The doctor, who asked not to be named, then gave it back to Lord for resale, hoping to make a quick profit. But again, Lord never paid the doctor for the drawing and never returned it.
The cardiologist, a friend of Lord’s for 20 years, tells the story this way: “I invested a substantial amount of money in a drawing by Matisse. A beautiful piece. I paid $165,000, and Michael bought it through a London auction house. Michael said if we bought it, we could probably sell it and make a fair profit. Well, in short, the piece was never sold and it essentially disappeared from my view. I don’t know where it is. Michael says he’s in negotiations to sell it and it’s in the hands of another potential buyer. For several years, I trusted Michael that these reports were valid, but I got tired of waiting, and Michael’s responses were simply not getting us any closer to a resolution. I decided to take legal action.”
The only auction record at Sotheby’s and Christie’s London for the drawing the doctor identified as his “Femme allongée,” 1927, is from a sale in 1995 where the buyer paid $36,536, raising the possibility that Lord bought it for considerably less than he had told the doctor.
Lord says he did not buy the Matisse from auction but four years later from a private dealer in London and paid more than $100,000 for it. “That’s not the piece,” he claims. “I never buy anything at auction.”
So where is the Matisse? At one point, Lord told the doctor it was in an exhibition at Pacific Asian Museum in Pasadena, California. The gallery says it has no knowledge of the work. About two years ago, after hounding Lord to return the drawing, Lord got it back and showed it to the doctor. “But he said he had somebody who wanted it and that I should leave it [at the gallery],” says the doctor. It’s been missing ever since.
I asked the doctor if he had considered having the drawing appraised before making such a large investment. “No, I just trusted Michael,” he says. “He’s a very decent person who has made some very bad business judgments. But he’s quite resilient, and I think if he has his choice, he will pay everyone back to whom he owes money. I have faith that he will try to do the right thing.”
In his 25 years in the business, Lord has earned widespread respect and support in the art community. Even those who have financial issues with him generally bracket their comments with “he’s a nice guy.”
“He’s exceptionally generous with his time,” says Bill Budelman, another former gallery assistant. “He is charming and charismatic, and I think he’s as good as anyone can be at his work.”
Mark Lawson, co-president of the Milwaukee Art Dealers Association, describes him this way: “He’s a hometown guy. A high-profile, high-style art dealer who brings high-quality international art to Milwaukee, and he does it with flair.”
Former employee Sobczak reflects on Lord’s legal problems and says, “He spent more money than he makes. He’s not pathologically criminal. He has cash flow problems, and he pushed it to wishful and delusional thinking.”
Local real estate developer Barry Mandel recently worked with Lord to purchase a sculpture for a small park at Farwell and Prospect avenues. Mandel originally budgeted $35,000 for the purchase but with Lord’s enthusiastic coaching was persuaded to invest in something more substantial. Mandel says they looked at 100 to 200 works, including a 25-foot-tall Claes Oldenburg safety pin and a Jonathan Borofsky “walking man” before selecting a more classic work by well-known artist Beverly Pepper at a cost of $225,000. Mandel contributed a substantial amount and raised the rest through donations.
“Michael worked tireless hours for this, and I’m sure whatever he got in commission was small compared to the time he spent,” says Mandel.
But some of Lord’s dealings in recent years have left others questioning his intentions and integrity. “Michael is a charming man but dangerous and deceitful,” says one individual involved in a lawsuit against Lord. “This is very emotional for me. I’ve lost a lot of money.”
Says another prominent local individual who’s had business dealings with Lord: “My take on it is that Michael seems to lack a moral compass. When things are going well, he does fine. When setbacks occur, he can’t understand there’s an ethical dilemma. It’s kind of tragic because he’s so good at what he does.”
Meryl Goldfarb, Lord’s longtime friend and a former art dealer, sees it this way: “When the ship starts sinking, you lose a sense of perspective and you start throwing anything in after it to keep it afloat. That’s when poor judgment comes in.”
Mentor Luntz has not seen Lord for years. “I can’t be at his side because I can’t approve of his behavior,” says Luntz. “It’s a big disappointment to me. I’m hoping he can get himself out of the mire, because that’s what it is, mire. He’s mired in now up to his knees.”
Like many of Lord’s friends, Luntz says he admires Lord. But it was a “character flaw” in Lord that put him at odds with his friends and eventually pushed them away.
“People everywhere say, ‘Oh, poor Michael. Oh, poor Michael.’ But he’s done them wrong,” says Luntz. “I don’t know how he can get untangled. I don’t think he will.”
The Beverly Pepper sculpture was acquired through Marlborough Gallery in New York – the same gallery suing Lord for back payment for three Magdalena Abakanowicz works he sold. One of the works, a sculpture titled “Two Figures on a Beam, 1992,” was purchased for $160,000 through Lord in 2001 as a gift to the Milwaukee Art Museum in honor of departing director Russell Bowman. Marlborough is demanding the nearly $80,000 remaining payment from Lord for the “Two Figures” sculpture and two smaller works by Abakanowicz valued at $5,000 apiece.
On a Friday morning in early March, Lord appeared alone and unrepresented at a scheduling conference in Milwaukee County Circuit Court regarding the Marlborough suit. Looking nervous and tired, Lord said the Marlborough matter would eventually be settled. Nevertheless, a pre-trial hearing was set for mid-September.
Lord claims he intentionally withheld final payment to Marlborough because the New York gallery owes him a commission of close to $90,000 from a previous sale. “It’s their loss,” he says. “In slow times, galleries like ours in the wilderness, as they say, are important to them, and they rely on us and our connections.”
Lord says he has worked with Marlborough on and off for many years and has never had a problem before this. “Since 9/11,” he says, “there’s really been a change. Instead of being nice, people go to lawyers.”
But the gallery’s attorney, Hanno D. Mott, says legal dealings such as these with galleries are uncommon. “It’s very rare with other dealers,” says Mott. “You make a choice of whom you do business with.”
Overall, Lord’s legal issues did not seem to hurt his business. Although collectors, foundations and friends of Lord’s undoubtedly were familiar with his legal problems at the time, a who’s who of Milwaukee Art Museum patrons backed the Abakanowicz purchase, as did Russell Bowman himself.
“The museum relationship with Michael had been very positive,” says Bowman, “and when I responded to the Abakanowicz, I was basically responding to the art and the fact it was appropriate for the museum. I always tried to purchase locally if I could.”
Also in 2002, Lord received two other major commissions from public figures who were close friends: then Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist and Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig at Miller Park.
Lord had befriended Selig years ago after the two met on an airplane. Selig paid $250,000 for two bronze sculptures of Hank Aaron and Robin Yount for Miller Park. The Cathedral commission came through Weakland, who had been friends with Lord since his early days in the business.
“We were neighbors,” says Lord, who had been a lapsed Catholic but returned to church one Sunday in the late 1970s and was impressed enough with Weakland’s sermon to begin attending regularly.
As part of the $10.5 million cathedral renovation, a committee, including Lord, selected the Italian artist Arnaldo Pomodoro to create a site-specific “corona” for the cathedral. Pomodoro was a reasonable choice because Irving Luntz had a business relationship with him and Pomodoro had also done a major work for the Vatican in Rome.
Some say the $475,000 they paid was way too much for the Pomodoro. The highest auction price paid for a Pomodoro between 2000 and 2004 was $221,000, according to Artnet.com records. Yet the cathedral’s sculpture was a site-specific commission, which runs higher, notes Lord, adding that he did not take a commission on the deal but orchestrated the sale in service to the cathedral.
Regardless of whether the price was too high or not, the cathedral sculpture, without Lord’s involvement, would most likely have been an inconsequential piece of ecclesiastic art. Now Milwaukee has a world-class sculpture in a Downtown cathedral.
Beyond the devastating consequences of all of this for Lord, there may be some unfortunate fallout to everyone in the local art community. For 25 years, Michael Lord offered our provincial city a pipeline to the New York art world and allowed us to believe that however remote our geography might be, we were still connected to a larger intelligentsia.
Lord’s legal issues and financial crisis bring up an uncomfortable truth about our city: The pride we take in our cultural offerings is justified but very thinly secured. We barely have a handful of “upper-level” professional galleries, and to lose one, for whatever reason, is to come uncomfortably close to a sensitive self-esteem issue in the city. Ironically, the controversy over Dennis Oppenheim’s “Blue Shirt” commission for the airport parking garage brought it to the forefront. Milwaukee doesn’t want to consider itself a working-class city, yet at the same time, it doesn’t quite rise to the level of sophistication and support of the arts to overcome that image. Michael Lord overcame the image with aplomb, and the art community as a whole benefited. In a city almost devoid of celebrities, Michael Lord came as close as one could get.
One has to wonder, though, if it was all an illusion.
“If a dealer makes the news,” writes Peter Schjeldahl in a recent issue of The New Yorker, “it’s usually for being accused of tax evasion, money laundering, estate tampering or some other offense that, in an arcane cash business, may be temptingly easy to commit.”
What makes art dealing such a unique business is that the “product” being sold has no intrinsic value. The “value” is determined by the market and a chain of fortuitous exchanges between artist, dealer and public – all of it dependent on reputation and artistic merit, which is determined by academics, critics, dealers and artistic peers. It’s an intricately woven system that is so intellectual and specialized that the buyer needs assistance through the morass. The trusted dealer must act like a shepherd guide to the blind Homer. Reputation is everything.
Clearly, Lord’s reputation hangs in the balance. This past December, yet another suit was filed against him, this one by the Lehmann Maupin Gallery in New York. In 2002, the gallery shipped two large paintings by David Salle to Lord for an exhibition. They now sit in Lord’s storage room with gaping holes in both canvases. The gallery is demanding $144,120 for the works.
“These were damaged in shipping,” says Lord. “The gallery sent the paintings before I had a chance to insure them.”
Lord says it was always difficult to convince New York galleries to loan work to the “provinces.” Now, with two of New York’s most prominent galleries taking him to court, it seems doubtful that they will jump into any consignment situations with other Milwaukee galleries.
Of all of this, it’s the lawsuits from friends and family that are the most troubling, says Lord. In December, one day before the Lehmann Maupin gallery filed suit, his own family members filed criminal charges after they became impatient over the repayment of $175,000 Lord took from his great-aunt’s estate. That hurt him deeply, he says. He had been close to his great-aunt and had cared for her during her last four and one-half years of life. After she died, he was named representative of her estate.
“We hate to see Michael in this problem, but it hurts us financially,” says Dennis Martin, one of the beneficiaries who decided to press charges. “Michael’s a nice guy, very personable, and we all like him. There’s no vindictiveness here – we just want our money. After Uncle George died, Michael took her [Aunt Edna] shopping and helped her out. He helped her move to a nursing home. None of us want to see him go to jail, but my kids are starting college, as are two of the other heirs. Mom is 91 and my sister is 66 and would like to retire to care for her. We could all use the money.” A trial date was set for May 3 in Milwaukee County.
On the day I interviewed Lord for this article, he was seated at his office desk (a gift from Irving Luntz), with floor-to-ceiling shelves of art books to one side and Lichtenstein and Miro prints on the walls. His large, hairy dog was tied to a chair. Peri-odically, Chester lifted his head and let out a resounding, incredibly loud “woof.”
Lord says Chester is the best thing that has happened to him in recent years. He rescued the husky/collie mix from an elderly client who had entered the hospital. The dog had been locked in a small room for two years. Lord, who had never owned a dog before, takes him on long walks three times a day.
“I get more pleasure out of walking the dog than going to a social event,” says Lord, who describes himself as basically shy, a person who likes the behind-the-scenes work far more than the limelight.
As Lord approaches his 50th birthday, he says he can’t predict the future. His intense commitment to the gallery business has interfered with his personal life, and although he’s had several long-term relationships, he never married. He says he’d still like to marry and have children. Many of his clients have aged and moved to secondary homes in Arizona or California, and he says he has considered opening galleries there.
“I’ve never been so buried, but you pick your head up and go forward,” says Lord. “I’m not closing up and I’m not running. Everything will get resolved.”
Debra Brehmer is a local art historian, artist and freelance writer. Her last feature for Milwaukee Magazine was an October profile of industrial designer Brooke Stevens.
