August 1990
Ed Deming wants big changes, and he wants them fast.
August 1, 1990... He has always looked younger than he is, but even with that he is clearly old. He moves slowly through the hotel lobby, preceded by his ample stomach, leaning forward slightly and looking straight ahead through his glasses. From a distance, he...
The unexpected private passion of Sigmund Freud. (traveling exhibition of antiquities, originating at the Freud Museum, London)
August 1, 1990... No matter how many times you have seen photographs, the room at first sight-and second and thirdjostles and jolts the eye. Here, on a peaceful suburban London street, in his last home, is Sigmund Freud's study, the place where he spent his...
Ed Deming wants big changes, and he wants them fast.
He has always looked younger than he is,
but even with that he is clearly old. He moves slowly through the hotel
lobby, preceded by his ample stomach, leaning forward slightly and
looking straight ahead through his glasses. From a distance, he appears
to be completely bald, but as he gets closer, you see that his hair is
white and cropped close to his skull. There are hearing aids in both
ears. He is, as always, dressed in a custom-made suit. All of his
jacket pockets are stuffedclippings, a calculator, scraps of paper, a
little magnifier, file cards, a small notebook, a pocket diary and
whatever else he's picked up-and the pocket of his white shirt holds no
fewer than a half-dozen pens and markers. On the lapel of his jacket
there is a round, thick, gray pin about the size of a dime. The only
thing about him other than his age that attracts anyone's attention
this morning is that his assistant, an intern and doctoral candidate in
business management, is an attractive, well-dressed woman young enough
to be his daughter's daughter, and they are walking through the lobby
holding hands. You get a sense that for him, it's partly for support
and partly for the hell of it.
His business card reads "W. Edwards Deming, Ph.D., Consultant in Statistical Studies." It would be more accurate if it added, "and Capitalist Revolutionary." He wants changes, and not little ones, in everything-business, industry, education, how we live, how we teach our children and how we deal with one another. Deming wants something better for us all, and for most of his 89 years he's been fighting to get it. He knows from experience that what Machiavelli wrote is true: "There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things."
He initiated a new order of things in japan. It was a 49-year-old Ed Deming, tall and crew-cut, who in 1950 started teaching japanese managers, engineers and scientists how to manufacture quality. An important step was to teach them to use statistics to find out what any system would do, then design improvements to make that system yield the best results. That idea sounds so logically simple that the tendency is to say, "Everyone knows that." No, everyone doesn't. Americans have a penchant for solutions that are easy to understand, easy to do, aimed at a specific goal and fasten nonthreatening steps to nirvana in 30 days. When it comes to improving what we do, there seems almost to be a flavor-of-the-month approach with each new, highily touted technique stepping on the heels of the one that went before-management by objective, management by results, management by problem report and resolution. Those are the cookbook methods, where you blend the worker and the machine, stir in a pinch of raw material, add a promise of a bonus (or a threat of dismissal), half-bake for 30 minutes and declare a dividend. It's easy to explain, easy to understand, and it doesn't work. Deming teaches that the more quality you build into anything, the less it costs. That, too, sounds self evident, but it's not. Maryann N. Keller, an automotive industry analyst and managing director of a brokerage firm, believes that the most profound change in the American auto industry in the past ten years was the realization that quality can cost less because you design it in rather than inspect it in." The traditional American idea of quality is, as Keller says, to inspect it in; that is, you build a whole lot of widgets, inspect them and separate the good from the bad. The bad can't be sold, but they cost a lot. Not only must all those inspectors be paid, but a bad widget takes the same amount of raw material, machinery, work time and attention as does a good widget. That explains why, typically, about 25 percent of any manufacturing plant's budget goes for repair and rework. That's why so many manufacturers think quality costs more, but what actually costs is a lack of quality. Vernay Laboratories in Yellow Springs, Ohio, makes small, precision-molded rubber parts for the automotive, home appliance, pharmaceutical and medical industries. Before the company heard of Deming in 1983, there was one inspector for each employee molding parts, and to insure quality, those inspectors checked everything that was produced. Think of that: nearly half of the production workers were paid to check what the other half did. In five years, doing what Deming taught it, Vernay cut its ratio of inspectors to molders by 75 percent. In the same five years, the plant's scrap and returned-product rates were cut by three-quarters, and productivity in the plant was up 30 percent. Quality was up, costs were down and the savings could be given to the customers. "One of the great pleasures I've had over the last five years," says Dale Piper, national sales manager, "was walking into the purchasing office of one of our larger customers and telling them that we were going to be giving them a price reduction, a completely unsolicited price reduction."
The basics of Deming's method are contained in a list of objectives he calls "the 14 points." These managerial imperatives are more philosophical than mechanical. The first of them is to "create constancy of purpose." You have to decide what business you're in and how you can stay in that business. It sounds deceptively simple, until you try it. Buggy whip makers undoubtedly believed they were in the business of making buggy whips, which explains why they are no longer in business at all. They, were actually in the business of vehicle acceleration; just making buggy whips, even the world's finest-quality buggy whips, wasn't enough. Part of constancy of purpose is staying ahead of the customer, not only meeting present needs, but planning for future needs, as well.
The Ford Motor Company began consulting with Deming in 1981, and one of the first questions he asked was about constancy of purpose. Top management began to think about it. Eighteen months later Ford had a 350-word statement of its missions, values and guiding principles. By now, there can't be a Ford employee, supplier or dealer anywhere in the world who does not know that Quality is job l." Donald Petersen, Ford's recently retired chairman and chief executive officer, says, "I am a Deming disciple." And he adds, "Those enterprises that don't adopt a quality culture simply are not going to succeed."
The issue is even broader than that. Improving quality, Deming says, automatically increases productivity, one of the measures economists use to judge how
I the economy is doing. Ours is improving, but not at a pace with japan's. At current rates, the United States' productivity will double in 120 years, japan's in a generation, meaning its children's standard of living will double while our children's will stay about the same.
When he first went to japan, Deming was certain he could teach the japanese how to join the leading industrial nations by improving quality. "I think that I was the only man in 1950," he says, "who believed that the japanese could invade the markets of the world and would within five years." The lapel pin that few in this country could recognize represents japan's Second Order Medal of the Sacred Treasure, awarded to him by the late Emperor Hirohito. The citation says the japanese people attribute the rebirth of japanese industry and its worldwide success to Ed Deming.
As famous as Deming is in japan, he was comparatively unknown in the United States until june 1980, when he appeared in a network television documentary titled, If Japan Can, Why Can't We? It compared industrial productivity in japan and the United States. I was the writer and narrator. Cecelia S. Kilian, Deming's secretary since 1954, and known almost universally as Ceil, said that starting the next morning, "Our phones rang off the hook.... Dr. Deming's mail quadrupled, and beyond." Petersen at Ford was one of the eventual callers. By late 1987 he told an interviewer, "We are running well over 50-percent-better levels of quality in our products today, and I dare say that I would not have predicted that much improvement in this short time." That same year, 1987, General Motors called Deming. The word was spreading in the industry: building quality drives costs down and profits up. At an age that most American men will never reach, Deming continues trying to transform (his word) the United States, to make it possible for us to join what he calls "the new economic age." To teach corporate managers how that can be done, he works six days a week and is booked into 1991. Ceil is his whole staff.
Deming is never quite satisfied, so any attempt to chisel what he says into stone is frustrated by his insistence on constantly trying to improve or clarify his thoughts. But that continual improvement is at the heart of his teaching. It is one of his 14 points: Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs." To get to that point, Deming says, you not only need constancy of purpose, you also have to recognize that we're in a new economic age with a single global market, that mass inspection does not produce quality, and that buying from the lowest bidder is costly. To get good supplies, Deming says, you work with a single supplier to improve his quality and lower his costs, cultivating a long-term relationship in which both of you will profit. Cheaper is not always better That last one leaves people in purchasing departments almost in shock, since it is a basic tenet of American industry that you play one supplier against another, demanding and getting lower prices, and if one supplier won't cut his price, another one will. That's the way you cut costs and improve profits, and everyone in business knows that. And like a great many other things that everyone knows, it's wrong. Deming tells the story of a shoe manufacturing company where productivity dropped like a rock in a well, and a consultant was called in. The first thing the consultant did was what the typical American manager would rather die than do: the consultant went on the factory floor and asked the workers what went wrong. Shoes are sewn together, and it takes an enormous quantity of thread. Sewing machine operators said the thread kept breaking, so they spent half their day rethreading the machines. You know the end of this story. Some time earlier, some genius in purchasing found a company that would sell thread a penny a bobbin cheaper than their regular supplier, and to save a penny a bobbin, the company's productivity was cut in half.
The rest of Deming's 14 points basically deal with management and labor and their relationship. He says quality is made in the boardroom, but everyone must have a part in changing the company. Management must learn about the responsibility for quality, must learn how to lead, instead of giving orders, and must make it possible for everyone to work together for the good of the company.
Everyone already knows that-, If, in the typical American firm, everyone is working for the good of the company, then why are different divisions within that company competing? Why is it necessary to give employees annual ratings or performance appraisals? What's more important to you, getting a good rating for yourself, or helping another person improve so that the whole company will prosper? Why are there numerical goals or work standards? Are we trying to make quality, or are we satisfied to make dally quotas?
If you want to make quality, management leads in the design of product and service, but everyone has to understand where they're going. If you tell someone to wash a table, the order doesn't mean anything unless the worker knows why. Is it being washed to serve lunch? Simple enough and quickly done. Is it being washed as an emergency operating table? Not easy, but it can be done. Is it being washed to go into a computer "clean room"? Can't be done.
Job training alone, Deming says, is not enough; the company has to help with employee education in a more general way, too. At Ford there are joint company-union education programs, everything from helping you brush up on your high school math to studying for your college degree. College courses are taught at no cost to employees in learning centers at Ford facilities or at the local union hall. The idea is this simple: the smarter everyone gets, the more everyone will be able to help the company.
W Edwards Deming is an unlikely capitalist revolutionary. Had he become a Marxist, it would be more understandable. If he ever saw a silver spoon as a kid, it belonged to someone else. He was born in Sioux City, Iowa, on October 14, 1900. With his mother and father, he and younger brother Robert went to Wyoming seven years later. Wyoming was the frontier, and his father had staked a land claim there. Sister Elizabeth was born in a four-room tar-paper shack in Powell. In winter, snow blew through cracks in the walls and around the windows. Deming remembers kneeling in the shack with his mother and brother and praying for enough to eat. "I think I had a ob when I was 8 years old or 9," Deming says. "Worked in a hotel, night and morning, before and after school, a job that wouldn't exist today." He carried in kindling and coal, emptied washbasins, tended the boiler. "A dollar and a quarter a week, but those were gold dollars."
In the fall of 1917, his saved money in his pocket, Deming took a train to the University of Wyoming at Laramie. "I studied engineering," he says, "but I really didn't know what engineers did. The course appealed to me-mathematics, thermodynamics, electrical circuits." To stay in college, he worked at anything that paid; after four years, he left Laramie with about the same amount of money he'd arrived with.
Deming taught and finished work on his PhD in mathematical physics at Yale in 1927, then went to work for a research laboratory affiliated with the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. He had other offers, good ones in private industry, he recalls, but he decided on this one and, he says now, "That was no mistake.... There were great men there." (And at least one great woman, Lola E. Shupe, his assistant and coauthor of several papers, whom he married in 1932. She died in 1986.)
Deming had learned to use statistical theory while studying physics. At the Fixed Nitrogen Lab, he devised statistical methods to replace some experiments, saving time and money. Impressed, one of his bosses introduced him to Walter Shewhart, then at the firm now known as AT&T Bell Laboratories, who was working to improve the quality of telephone equipment. Shewhart wanted the expression "as alike as two peas in a pod" to be replaced by "as alike as two telephones." He believed that could be accomplished with statistical analysis.
During World War 11, it was largely through Deming's efforts that 35,000 American engineers and technicians were taught to use statistics to improve the quality of war materiel. That work brought him to the attention of the Union of japanese Scientists and Engineers (JUSE). When the war was over, japan was little more than a pile of rubble and its industrial capacity was severely crippled. JUSE asked Deming to help its members increase productivity. In july 1950 he met with the top management of japan's leading companies, and he gave eight daylong lectures titled Elementary Principles of the Statistical Control of Quality" to 230 japanese managers. It was, essentially, the same course he had taught Americans during the war.
Why did his teachings catch on in japan but not here? Because, Deming says, the japanese knew they were in an economic and industrial crisis and we don't. Yet here we are in 1990, the world's most indebted nation, borrowing heavily from, of all people, the newly wealthy japanese. Deming tells students at a four-day seminar in Texas that we can recover. Then he adds, "Nobody's sitting here predicting that we'll survive. We may not. There's no regulation saying we must survive. Purely voluntary." And he tells a group in Ohio, "We can rise from the ashes like a phoenix, but it will take a transformation to do it."
By transformation, he means adoption of his quality philosophy. It is not so much a recipe of dos and don'ts, although there are some, as it is a method of continual improvement that involves reducing variation. American manufacturers say that they are already doing that, that they have strict specifications for every part. A quick story. An American car company was having trouble with transmissions made at one of its plants here, and warranty costs were enormous, a drain on profits. The same transmission, built to the same specifications at a plant in japan, was not causing problems. Engineers carefully examined 12 American transmissions; variations existed, but all were well within specifications. A quality-control inspector would have been delighted with every one. When the 12 japanese transmissions were tested, an engineer reported that the measuring equipment had broken. It hadn't; in those transmissions, there simply was too little variation to measure. They didn't just satisfy the specs; for any practical purpose, they were identical. Staying close to what is best That story's true; this one's made up. Assume that we all work in a room together, and we know by statistical analysis that we produce our best work when the temperature is 68 degrees E But if it's 67 or 69, the loss in terms of the quality of our work is so imperceptible that it simply doesn't matter. Now, should the temperature fall to 58 or rise to 78, the loss will be enormous. Take that same idea and apply it to specifications. Everything inside a given set of specifications is not the same. Some are worse than others, and the farther away you get from what is best, the worse it is and the greater the loss in quality will be.
Statistics alone cannot assure reduced variation, Deming says; it takes everyone, management and labor, working together. To get that kind of cooperation you have to throw out much of what is currently accepted as good management practice. Not only do you have to do away with bonuses and incentive pay because they create competition; once you adopt the Deming method little else stays the same. Ben Carlson, executive vice president at Vernay and chairman of its Deming Steering Committee, says the Deming method "changes the relationship with your customers; it changes the relationship with your suppliers; it changes the relationship you have with your employees." Customers become the most important people in your business. Unless the customer is so delighted that he's not only willing to come back but eager to bring his friends, you can close the door now and save time. Suppliers can no longer be played off one another for lower prices. They become your partners, and you have to help them improve so they can give you continually improving supplies for lower prices. And if you and your employees don't work together in mutual respect toward the same goal, how good the supplies are won't matter. Corny as it sounds, Deming wishes work could be nicer, more satisfying.
In teaching people to be nicer, he himself can be abrasive. Polite to the point of courtliness in social situations, he can be short-tempered and intolerant at work. He always tells people at his seminars that the object is "to have fun," but when one person he is raking over the coals complains, "Dr. Deming, I'm not having fun," he leans back in his chair, smiles broadly and says, "I am."
Deming works as a consultant to private companies, but more people probably know him through his public seminars, most of which are run by Nancy Mann, who has a PhD in biostatistics. People are standing in line to get in. Deming mentions one seminar-500 vacancies, 3,000 applicants. There are 14 of these seminars a year in this country and England with 500 to 600 students each, and a waiting list of about 100 for each seminar. "Students" is perhaps misleading. At a seminar I attended in Dallas, the people were mostly in their 30s and 40s-managers, engineers and technicians from major corporations in all types of business, defense contractors, officers of the Armed Forces, health-care insurers. Deming lectures morning and afternoon for the four days, sometimes from notes, sometimes from memory, but with a good teacher's sense of when the lecture is becoming too intense, as it did at one seminar when he tried to make the class understand that there is no true value of anything, that whatever number you get depends on how you count, and if you change the way you count, the number will change. People think the speed of light is a true value, Deming says, but it isn't; there were ten different published figures for the speed of light between 1874 and 1932. Then in his best professorial voice, which is deep and impressive, Deming quotes Galileo as saying, is not infinity, then it's awfully damned fast." The class roars. The point is unforgettably made. Deming wants American business and industry to prosper. "All I have to offer is to improve profit," he says, but his method is not easy to understand. The standard American corporate questions about quality improvement are, "What do we do? (But keep it simple)" and "How long will it take? (But keep it short)." With Deming what you do is continually improve, not in great leaps forward, but a little here, a little there, and it never gets any easier. You change the way you think, unlearn everything about management you've been taught, and develop an understanding of statistics and psychology, an understanding of how people learn and what makes them change, and an understanding of people's need to take pride and joy in their work. How many steps are there-, No one knows. How long will it take? The rest of your life, but-here's the good news-you should start to see results in three to five years. Why should you do that@ Because the people who have tried it say that it works. And not much does these days. At the hotel, it's early evening, and his lecture is over. Deming is going to his room to rest before dinner, a rare concession to his age. He comes down the hallway, the same attractive, well-dressed young woman holding one hand, and a tall, striking woman, a seminar coordinator, holding his other hand, and they are skipping. Skipping! Three kids home from school. W Edwards Deming, PhD, Consultant in Statistical Studies and Capitalist Revolutionary, wears a smile of the most childlike pleasure and delight.
His business card reads "W. Edwards Deming, Ph.D., Consultant in Statistical Studies." It would be more accurate if it added, "and Capitalist Revolutionary." He wants changes, and not little ones, in everything-business, industry, education, how we live, how we teach our children and how we deal with one another. Deming wants something better for us all, and for most of his 89 years he's been fighting to get it. He knows from experience that what Machiavelli wrote is true: "There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things."
He initiated a new order of things in japan. It was a 49-year-old Ed Deming, tall and crew-cut, who in 1950 started teaching japanese managers, engineers and scientists how to manufacture quality. An important step was to teach them to use statistics to find out what any system would do, then design improvements to make that system yield the best results. That idea sounds so logically simple that the tendency is to say, "Everyone knows that." No, everyone doesn't. Americans have a penchant for solutions that are easy to understand, easy to do, aimed at a specific goal and fasten nonthreatening steps to nirvana in 30 days. When it comes to improving what we do, there seems almost to be a flavor-of-the-month approach with each new, highily touted technique stepping on the heels of the one that went before-management by objective, management by results, management by problem report and resolution. Those are the cookbook methods, where you blend the worker and the machine, stir in a pinch of raw material, add a promise of a bonus (or a threat of dismissal), half-bake for 30 minutes and declare a dividend. It's easy to explain, easy to understand, and it doesn't work. Deming teaches that the more quality you build into anything, the less it costs. That, too, sounds self evident, but it's not. Maryann N. Keller, an automotive industry analyst and managing director of a brokerage firm, believes that the most profound change in the American auto industry in the past ten years was the realization that quality can cost less because you design it in rather than inspect it in." The traditional American idea of quality is, as Keller says, to inspect it in; that is, you build a whole lot of widgets, inspect them and separate the good from the bad. The bad can't be sold, but they cost a lot. Not only must all those inspectors be paid, but a bad widget takes the same amount of raw material, machinery, work time and attention as does a good widget. That explains why, typically, about 25 percent of any manufacturing plant's budget goes for repair and rework. That's why so many manufacturers think quality costs more, but what actually costs is a lack of quality. Vernay Laboratories in Yellow Springs, Ohio, makes small, precision-molded rubber parts for the automotive, home appliance, pharmaceutical and medical industries. Before the company heard of Deming in 1983, there was one inspector for each employee molding parts, and to insure quality, those inspectors checked everything that was produced. Think of that: nearly half of the production workers were paid to check what the other half did. In five years, doing what Deming taught it, Vernay cut its ratio of inspectors to molders by 75 percent. In the same five years, the plant's scrap and returned-product rates were cut by three-quarters, and productivity in the plant was up 30 percent. Quality was up, costs were down and the savings could be given to the customers. "One of the great pleasures I've had over the last five years," says Dale Piper, national sales manager, "was walking into the purchasing office of one of our larger customers and telling them that we were going to be giving them a price reduction, a completely unsolicited price reduction."
The basics of Deming's method are contained in a list of objectives he calls "the 14 points." These managerial imperatives are more philosophical than mechanical. The first of them is to "create constancy of purpose." You have to decide what business you're in and how you can stay in that business. It sounds deceptively simple, until you try it. Buggy whip makers undoubtedly believed they were in the business of making buggy whips, which explains why they are no longer in business at all. They, were actually in the business of vehicle acceleration; just making buggy whips, even the world's finest-quality buggy whips, wasn't enough. Part of constancy of purpose is staying ahead of the customer, not only meeting present needs, but planning for future needs, as well.
The Ford Motor Company began consulting with Deming in 1981, and one of the first questions he asked was about constancy of purpose. Top management began to think about it. Eighteen months later Ford had a 350-word statement of its missions, values and guiding principles. By now, there can't be a Ford employee, supplier or dealer anywhere in the world who does not know that Quality is job l." Donald Petersen, Ford's recently retired chairman and chief executive officer, says, "I am a Deming disciple." And he adds, "Those enterprises that don't adopt a quality culture simply are not going to succeed."
The issue is even broader than that. Improving quality, Deming says, automatically increases productivity, one of the measures economists use to judge how
I the economy is doing. Ours is improving, but not at a pace with japan's. At current rates, the United States' productivity will double in 120 years, japan's in a generation, meaning its children's standard of living will double while our children's will stay about the same.
When he first went to japan, Deming was certain he could teach the japanese how to join the leading industrial nations by improving quality. "I think that I was the only man in 1950," he says, "who believed that the japanese could invade the markets of the world and would within five years." The lapel pin that few in this country could recognize represents japan's Second Order Medal of the Sacred Treasure, awarded to him by the late Emperor Hirohito. The citation says the japanese people attribute the rebirth of japanese industry and its worldwide success to Ed Deming.
As famous as Deming is in japan, he was comparatively unknown in the United States until june 1980, when he appeared in a network television documentary titled, If Japan Can, Why Can't We? It compared industrial productivity in japan and the United States. I was the writer and narrator. Cecelia S. Kilian, Deming's secretary since 1954, and known almost universally as Ceil, said that starting the next morning, "Our phones rang off the hook.... Dr. Deming's mail quadrupled, and beyond." Petersen at Ford was one of the eventual callers. By late 1987 he told an interviewer, "We are running well over 50-percent-better levels of quality in our products today, and I dare say that I would not have predicted that much improvement in this short time." That same year, 1987, General Motors called Deming. The word was spreading in the industry: building quality drives costs down and profits up. At an age that most American men will never reach, Deming continues trying to transform (his word) the United States, to make it possible for us to join what he calls "the new economic age." To teach corporate managers how that can be done, he works six days a week and is booked into 1991. Ceil is his whole staff.
Deming is never quite satisfied, so any attempt to chisel what he says into stone is frustrated by his insistence on constantly trying to improve or clarify his thoughts. But that continual improvement is at the heart of his teaching. It is one of his 14 points: Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs." To get to that point, Deming says, you not only need constancy of purpose, you also have to recognize that we're in a new economic age with a single global market, that mass inspection does not produce quality, and that buying from the lowest bidder is costly. To get good supplies, Deming says, you work with a single supplier to improve his quality and lower his costs, cultivating a long-term relationship in which both of you will profit. Cheaper is not always better That last one leaves people in purchasing departments almost in shock, since it is a basic tenet of American industry that you play one supplier against another, demanding and getting lower prices, and if one supplier won't cut his price, another one will. That's the way you cut costs and improve profits, and everyone in business knows that. And like a great many other things that everyone knows, it's wrong. Deming tells the story of a shoe manufacturing company where productivity dropped like a rock in a well, and a consultant was called in. The first thing the consultant did was what the typical American manager would rather die than do: the consultant went on the factory floor and asked the workers what went wrong. Shoes are sewn together, and it takes an enormous quantity of thread. Sewing machine operators said the thread kept breaking, so they spent half their day rethreading the machines. You know the end of this story. Some time earlier, some genius in purchasing found a company that would sell thread a penny a bobbin cheaper than their regular supplier, and to save a penny a bobbin, the company's productivity was cut in half.
The rest of Deming's 14 points basically deal with management and labor and their relationship. He says quality is made in the boardroom, but everyone must have a part in changing the company. Management must learn about the responsibility for quality, must learn how to lead, instead of giving orders, and must make it possible for everyone to work together for the good of the company.
Everyone already knows that-, If, in the typical American firm, everyone is working for the good of the company, then why are different divisions within that company competing? Why is it necessary to give employees annual ratings or performance appraisals? What's more important to you, getting a good rating for yourself, or helping another person improve so that the whole company will prosper? Why are there numerical goals or work standards? Are we trying to make quality, or are we satisfied to make dally quotas?
If you want to make quality, management leads in the design of product and service, but everyone has to understand where they're going. If you tell someone to wash a table, the order doesn't mean anything unless the worker knows why. Is it being washed to serve lunch? Simple enough and quickly done. Is it being washed as an emergency operating table? Not easy, but it can be done. Is it being washed to go into a computer "clean room"? Can't be done.
Job training alone, Deming says, is not enough; the company has to help with employee education in a more general way, too. At Ford there are joint company-union education programs, everything from helping you brush up on your high school math to studying for your college degree. College courses are taught at no cost to employees in learning centers at Ford facilities or at the local union hall. The idea is this simple: the smarter everyone gets, the more everyone will be able to help the company.
W Edwards Deming is an unlikely capitalist revolutionary. Had he become a Marxist, it would be more understandable. If he ever saw a silver spoon as a kid, it belonged to someone else. He was born in Sioux City, Iowa, on October 14, 1900. With his mother and father, he and younger brother Robert went to Wyoming seven years later. Wyoming was the frontier, and his father had staked a land claim there. Sister Elizabeth was born in a four-room tar-paper shack in Powell. In winter, snow blew through cracks in the walls and around the windows. Deming remembers kneeling in the shack with his mother and brother and praying for enough to eat. "I think I had a ob when I was 8 years old or 9," Deming says. "Worked in a hotel, night and morning, before and after school, a job that wouldn't exist today." He carried in kindling and coal, emptied washbasins, tended the boiler. "A dollar and a quarter a week, but those were gold dollars."
In the fall of 1917, his saved money in his pocket, Deming took a train to the University of Wyoming at Laramie. "I studied engineering," he says, "but I really didn't know what engineers did. The course appealed to me-mathematics, thermodynamics, electrical circuits." To stay in college, he worked at anything that paid; after four years, he left Laramie with about the same amount of money he'd arrived with.
Deming taught and finished work on his PhD in mathematical physics at Yale in 1927, then went to work for a research laboratory affiliated with the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. He had other offers, good ones in private industry, he recalls, but he decided on this one and, he says now, "That was no mistake.... There were great men there." (And at least one great woman, Lola E. Shupe, his assistant and coauthor of several papers, whom he married in 1932. She died in 1986.)
Deming had learned to use statistical theory while studying physics. At the Fixed Nitrogen Lab, he devised statistical methods to replace some experiments, saving time and money. Impressed, one of his bosses introduced him to Walter Shewhart, then at the firm now known as AT&T Bell Laboratories, who was working to improve the quality of telephone equipment. Shewhart wanted the expression "as alike as two peas in a pod" to be replaced by "as alike as two telephones." He believed that could be accomplished with statistical analysis.
During World War 11, it was largely through Deming's efforts that 35,000 American engineers and technicians were taught to use statistics to improve the quality of war materiel. That work brought him to the attention of the Union of japanese Scientists and Engineers (JUSE). When the war was over, japan was little more than a pile of rubble and its industrial capacity was severely crippled. JUSE asked Deming to help its members increase productivity. In july 1950 he met with the top management of japan's leading companies, and he gave eight daylong lectures titled Elementary Principles of the Statistical Control of Quality" to 230 japanese managers. It was, essentially, the same course he had taught Americans during the war.
Why did his teachings catch on in japan but not here? Because, Deming says, the japanese knew they were in an economic and industrial crisis and we don't. Yet here we are in 1990, the world's most indebted nation, borrowing heavily from, of all people, the newly wealthy japanese. Deming tells students at a four-day seminar in Texas that we can recover. Then he adds, "Nobody's sitting here predicting that we'll survive. We may not. There's no regulation saying we must survive. Purely voluntary." And he tells a group in Ohio, "We can rise from the ashes like a phoenix, but it will take a transformation to do it."
By transformation, he means adoption of his quality philosophy. It is not so much a recipe of dos and don'ts, although there are some, as it is a method of continual improvement that involves reducing variation. American manufacturers say that they are already doing that, that they have strict specifications for every part. A quick story. An American car company was having trouble with transmissions made at one of its plants here, and warranty costs were enormous, a drain on profits. The same transmission, built to the same specifications at a plant in japan, was not causing problems. Engineers carefully examined 12 American transmissions; variations existed, but all were well within specifications. A quality-control inspector would have been delighted with every one. When the 12 japanese transmissions were tested, an engineer reported that the measuring equipment had broken. It hadn't; in those transmissions, there simply was too little variation to measure. They didn't just satisfy the specs; for any practical purpose, they were identical. Staying close to what is best That story's true; this one's made up. Assume that we all work in a room together, and we know by statistical analysis that we produce our best work when the temperature is 68 degrees E But if it's 67 or 69, the loss in terms of the quality of our work is so imperceptible that it simply doesn't matter. Now, should the temperature fall to 58 or rise to 78, the loss will be enormous. Take that same idea and apply it to specifications. Everything inside a given set of specifications is not the same. Some are worse than others, and the farther away you get from what is best, the worse it is and the greater the loss in quality will be.
Statistics alone cannot assure reduced variation, Deming says; it takes everyone, management and labor, working together. To get that kind of cooperation you have to throw out much of what is currently accepted as good management practice. Not only do you have to do away with bonuses and incentive pay because they create competition; once you adopt the Deming method little else stays the same. Ben Carlson, executive vice president at Vernay and chairman of its Deming Steering Committee, says the Deming method "changes the relationship with your customers; it changes the relationship with your suppliers; it changes the relationship you have with your employees." Customers become the most important people in your business. Unless the customer is so delighted that he's not only willing to come back but eager to bring his friends, you can close the door now and save time. Suppliers can no longer be played off one another for lower prices. They become your partners, and you have to help them improve so they can give you continually improving supplies for lower prices. And if you and your employees don't work together in mutual respect toward the same goal, how good the supplies are won't matter. Corny as it sounds, Deming wishes work could be nicer, more satisfying.
In teaching people to be nicer, he himself can be abrasive. Polite to the point of courtliness in social situations, he can be short-tempered and intolerant at work. He always tells people at his seminars that the object is "to have fun," but when one person he is raking over the coals complains, "Dr. Deming, I'm not having fun," he leans back in his chair, smiles broadly and says, "I am."
Deming works as a consultant to private companies, but more people probably know him through his public seminars, most of which are run by Nancy Mann, who has a PhD in biostatistics. People are standing in line to get in. Deming mentions one seminar-500 vacancies, 3,000 applicants. There are 14 of these seminars a year in this country and England with 500 to 600 students each, and a waiting list of about 100 for each seminar. "Students" is perhaps misleading. At a seminar I attended in Dallas, the people were mostly in their 30s and 40s-managers, engineers and technicians from major corporations in all types of business, defense contractors, officers of the Armed Forces, health-care insurers. Deming lectures morning and afternoon for the four days, sometimes from notes, sometimes from memory, but with a good teacher's sense of when the lecture is becoming too intense, as it did at one seminar when he tried to make the class understand that there is no true value of anything, that whatever number you get depends on how you count, and if you change the way you count, the number will change. People think the speed of light is a true value, Deming says, but it isn't; there were ten different published figures for the speed of light between 1874 and 1932. Then in his best professorial voice, which is deep and impressive, Deming quotes Galileo as saying, is not infinity, then it's awfully damned fast." The class roars. The point is unforgettably made. Deming wants American business and industry to prosper. "All I have to offer is to improve profit," he says, but his method is not easy to understand. The standard American corporate questions about quality improvement are, "What do we do? (But keep it simple)" and "How long will it take? (But keep it short)." With Deming what you do is continually improve, not in great leaps forward, but a little here, a little there, and it never gets any easier. You change the way you think, unlearn everything about management you've been taught, and develop an understanding of statistics and psychology, an understanding of how people learn and what makes them change, and an understanding of people's need to take pride and joy in their work. How many steps are there-, No one knows. How long will it take? The rest of your life, but-here's the good news-you should start to see results in three to five years. Why should you do that@ Because the people who have tried it say that it works. And not much does these days. At the hotel, it's early evening, and his lecture is over. Deming is going to his room to rest before dinner, a rare concession to his age. He comes down the hallway, the same attractive, well-dressed young woman holding one hand, and a tall, striking woman, a seminar coordinator, holding his other hand, and they are skipping. Skipping! Three kids home from school. W Edwards Deming, PhD, Consultant in Statistical Studies and Capitalist Revolutionary, wears a smile of the most childlike pleasure and delight.
Smithsonian archives from August 1990
Smithsonian horizons. (public support for science, and public support for art) (column)
August 1, 1990... Public support for science is now generally accepted; why has it become so controversial for art? Bitterly engaging Congress during this spring and summer has been a polarized debate over reauthorization of the National Endowment for the Arts...
August 1, 1990... Public support for science is now generally accepted; why has it become so controversial for art? Bitterly engaging Congress during this spring and summer has been a polarized debate over reauthorization of the National Endowment for the Arts...
The object at hand. (Auguste Rodin's Burghers of Calais) (column)
August 1, 1990... In the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden, Rodin's famous figures stand witness to an ancient act of civic courage When England's King Henry V, whose Shakespearean exploits have lately stirred such enthusiasm among filmgoers, sailed for France in...
August 1, 1990... In the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden, Rodin's famous figures stand witness to an ancient act of civic courage When England's King Henry V, whose Shakespearean exploits have lately stirred such enthusiasm among filmgoers, sailed for France in...
Phenomena, comment and notes. (students from Memphis College of Art study for a week on Horn Island) (column)
August 1, 1990... Following in the footsteps of artist Walter A nderson, students learn how to see nature on a Gulf Island It was a typical weekday morning. Stingrays were sunning themselves in the shallows. Bottle-nose dolphins dawdled 50 feet off the beach,...
August 1, 1990... Following in the footsteps of artist Walter A nderson, students learn how to see nature on a Gulf Island It was a typical weekday morning. Stingrays were sunning themselves in the shallows. Bottle-nose dolphins dawdled 50 feet off the beach,...
In Anatolia, a massive dam project drowns traces of an ancient past.
August 1, 1990... On the western edge of the brown, rolling steppe of southeastern Turkey, the blue-green waters of the Euphrates surge into a giant reservoir behind one of the world's largest dams. It is named for the father of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal...
August 1, 1990... On the western edge of the brown, rolling steppe of southeastern Turkey, the blue-green waters of the Euphrates surge into a giant reservoir behind one of the world's largest dams. It is named for the father of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal...
A dreamer who made us fall in love with the future. (Hugo Gernsback)
August 1, 1990... In 1910, when my grandmother was 7 years old, Hugo Gernsback would come to the house and make alarming predictions about that newfangled device, the telephone. My grandmother was then living on Central Avenue in Cleveland, and Gernsback, a...
August 1, 1990... In 1910, when my grandmother was 7 years old, Hugo Gernsback would come to the house and make alarming predictions about that newfangled device, the telephone. My grandmother was then living on Central Avenue in Cleveland, and Gernsback, a...
Letting us down gently: the art of the parachute.
August 1, 1990... I fell, and tumbled through death. On the other side it was a sunny afternoon, bright and breezy, and shortly i tried out my wings and fell in love. Others had been there before. I had read the reports of combat-hardened pilots and...
August 1, 1990... I fell, and tumbled through death. On the other side it was a sunny afternoon, bright and breezy, and shortly i tried out my wings and fell in love. Others had been there before. I had read the reports of combat-hardened pilots and...
Ed Deming wants big changes, and he wants them fast.
August 1, 1990... He has always looked younger than he is, but even with that he is clearly old. He moves slowly through the hotel lobby, preceded by his ample stomach, leaning forward slightly and looking straight ahead through his glasses. From a distance, he...
August 1, 1990... He has always looked younger than he is, but even with that he is clearly old. He moves slowly through the hotel lobby, preceded by his ample stomach, leaning forward slightly and looking straight ahead through his glasses. From a distance, he...
For happy campers, nothing beats the old rites of passage.
August 1, 1990... At 7:45 in the morning, 8- and 9-year-old members of Camp Airy's Unit A dash up the hill from their cabins. Fog blankets a valley far below, but the 450-acre summer camp in the foothills of Maryland's Catoctin Mountain perches above the...
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2009年6月號的 《講義 西洋講義》(p.32)："....沒想到我竟然能和曾祖父 (S. Freud)心靈相通，對雕塑同樣熱愛。佛洛依德 (S. Freud)本身就是個收藏家.....珍花了20個月，將這個意外驚喜拍成《死或生》影片，把自己的作品和佛洛依德的收藏品，做了淡入、淡出的疊合效果。....."是否對自己的創作失去原創性感到失望？"....."我認為這就是挑戰。"
August 1, 1990... At 7:45 in the morning, 8- and 9-year-old members of Camp Airy's Unit A dash up the hill from their cabins. Fog blankets a valley far below, but the 450-acre summer camp in the foothills of Maryland's Catoctin Mountain perches above the...
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2009年6月號的 《講義 西洋講義》(p.32)："....沒想到我竟然能和曾祖父 (S. Freud)心靈相通，對雕塑同樣熱愛。佛洛依德 (S. Freud)本身就是個收藏家.....珍花了20個月，將這個意外驚喜拍成《死或生》影片，把自己的作品和佛洛依德的收藏品，做了淡入、淡出的疊合效果。....."是否對自己的創作失去原創性感到失望？"....."我認為這就是挑戰。"
"Dead or Alive" by Jane McAdam Freud (2007)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C72HZlYiRZwMcAdam Freud's short film 'Dead or Alive' refers to Freud’s concept of Condensation. The pairings morph into each other through the merging back and forth of Freud’s antiquities with her sculpture, from past to present ‘virtually’ closing the gap of time. Great similarities can be found in the forms and motifs of the pairs. At a midway point the two objects merge and form a third image of a ‘virtual’ object. Her preference for this work was to locate it within reach of a psychoanalytically aware audience. Dead or Alive was however shown internationally at museums, institutes and galleries including Philoctetes Centre for the Imagination, NY, New York USA in 2008, Lung Yingtai Cultural Foundation, (Media Tek Lectures) Taipei, Taiwan and the Kosciuszko Foundation, NYC, USA in 2009. Also the Sundaram Tagore Gallery, LA, USA in 2010 and Whitelabs Gallery, Milan in 2012.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_McAdam_Freud
The unexpected private passion of Sigmund Freud. (traveling exhibition of antiquities, originating at the Freud Museum, London) /Smithsonian 月刊1990年8月號
August 1, 1990... No matter how many times you have seen photographs, the room at first sight-and second and thirdjostles and jolts the eye. Here, on a peaceful suburban London street, in his last home, is Sigmund Freud's study, the place where he spent his...
August 1, 1990... No matter how many times you have seen photographs, the room at first sight-and second and thirdjostles and jolts the eye. Here, on a peaceful suburban London street, in his last home, is Sigmund Freud's study, the place where he spent his...
http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-5465707_ITM
The unexpected private passion of Sigmund Freud. (traveling exhibition of antiquities, originating at the Freud Museum, London)
No matter how many times you have seen
photographs, the room at first sight-and second and thirdjostles and
jolts the eye. Here, on a peaceful suburban London street, in his last
home, is Sigmund Freud's study, the place where he spent his last year
and where he completed his last book and where, on a September day in
1939, he died. In the warm domestic surround that summons up
turn-of-the-century Vienna, here is the couch covered with a good
Persian rug, and just behind it, the green armchair where Freud
famously positioned himself to escape the patient's direct gaze. Here
are photographs of friends and colleagues. Here are the well-used books
of a man who read widely, deeply and ferociously-full sets of Goethe,
Shakespeare, Balzac and Anatole France, a wall of volumes on
archaeology.
And everywhere the astonished gaze wanders, here are emblems of the vanished past. Terra-cotta and bronze figures and fragments of figures throng the shelves. Mummy masks hang from a bookcase and lie under glass. Ancient Greek pots, Egyptian scarabs, Roman oil lamps, Sumerian seals that have survived for more than four millennia-forests of these things repose in serried ranks in vitrines. The cherished pieces crowd the edge of Freud's desk, an attentive, questioning audience. Squirreled away in drawers are still more objects, odds and ends too small or too difficult to display. Infinite riches in a little room you could say-these are Freud's antiquities, 2,300 of them by the best estimate. In the felicitous phrase of one of his biographers, "the archaeologist of the mind" had an unappeasable appetite for the entombed treasures of other times. The sturdy brick house at 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead, in northwest London, became the Freud Museum in 1986. Last fall, a sampling from the collection began a 30-month tour of the United States, crisscrossing the country to settle for weeks at each of 13 galleries. (The exhibition schedule for this year includes the University of Colorado, Boulder, july 6-August 18; the University of Miami, Coral Gables, August 30-September 30; and the University of California, Irvine, November 11-December 16. In 1991, the show will be at Stanford University, Stanford, California, january 15-March 17; the New Orleans Museum of Art, April 21-june 3; the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, june 28-August 16; the University of Houston, September 7-October 13; the jewish Museum, New York, November 7-February 18, 1992. In 1992, the show will be at Boston University, February 26-April 6. The exhibition is sponsored by CIBAGEIGY Pharmaceuticals and the National Endowment for the Arts.)
It is an elegant little show designed for the intimate spaces of smallish museums, a digestible portion of the art that absorbed this great man's attention and spare funds for more than 40 years. Entitled "The Sigmund Freud Antiquities: Fragments from a Buried Past," the exhibition was formally intended to mark the 50th anniversary of the death of the founder of modern psychiatry. More aptly, it celebrates his work and evokes his ideas and passions.
"The Freud Antiquities" consists of 65 pieces, embracing a range of ancient times and places that held Freud's interest. Not surprisingly, many of them represent humans or animals-gods and sages and magical figures that embodied the mythology of ancient religions. Aptly enough, the show usually begins with Eros and ends with Thanatos-visual examples of Freud's conclusion that civilizations evolved through the drive to live, struggling eternally against the urge to die. It offers a sphinx, whose mystery was fatally unriddled by Oedipus; the Theban king would, in turn, bestow his name on what Freud decreed was a universal force of infantile sexuality, the Oedipus complex. It displays a balsamarium, an Etruscan container for perfumed oil, a favored piece that sat on his desk. One side wears a female face, the other a male visage, a double image for this master of dichotomies who found dualities everywhere he looked, and who saw bisexuality as basic to human nature.
The show has surprises. It was to be expected that Freud would be drawn to Egyptian, Greek and Roman imagery mirroring Freudian ideas and theories. On the other hand, he also found his way to the less-familiar, less-fathomable art of the Orient. And if the symbolism of ancient human and animal forms compelled his interest, he could also allow himself to own beautiful old jars and bottles that reflect nothing more than the master glassmaker's art.
And he could be fooled. The exhibition cases house a few forgeries; two are the kind of pieces that the modern museum world labels airport art"-massmarketed souvenirs produced for tourists. Scattering a few fakes among the authentic works was a calculated gesture, an essential ingredient of this homage to the whole, complex persona-scientist, thinker, explorer of the human psyche, medical practitioner, humanist, family man and, rather touchingly, obsessive collector who, like collectors almost everywhere, would sometimes succumb to a longing for a questionable object simply because he loved it and had to have it.
The exhibition is the joint effort of Lynn Gamwell, director of the University Art Museum of the State University of New York at Binghamton, and Richard Wells, director of the Freud Museum in London. Modestly scaled though it is, "The Freud Antiquities" was meant to represent the full range of the collection, including trivia. As Gamwell explains, "We did not want it to be simply honorific; we wanted to reflect the fact that he made mistakes." Actually, the low end of the selection stops short of her co-curator's assessment; with charming candor, Wells is apt to tell a visitor to the museum that while Freud's esthetic sense was a good deal more refined than friends and family gave him credit for, he did wind up with "a certain amount of junk and tat."
It should hardly come as a surprise that Freud understood better than many collectors what his buying meant on the simplest level and in the most personal terms. It was "an addiction," he once told his personal physician, Dr. Max Schur, and it was rivaled in intensity only by his need for nicotine. Plainly, at least one of those habits was necessary to his sense of well-being. Cigar smoking afflicted him with cancer of the palate and, beginning with his first surgery in 1923, would ever after be a relentless cause of suffering. Collecting was, at least, a benign addiction. It offered the good doctor the kind of comfort known to everyone who has ever succumbed to the desire to buy something-as a reward, as an antidote to a spell of low spirits, as a remedy for boredom, as an amulet against anxiety.
Freud's attraction to objects of antiquity was layered with meanings, but there is a touching simplicity to his report on a purchase he made just after an especially unhappy medical episode. He had been fitted with a new artificial palate after yet another encounter with oral surgery. The prosthesis impaired his speech and put an end to his public lecturing; just inserting and removing it was a harsh effort. Reporting his medical news to his colleague and friend Max Eitingon, he wrote, "I got myself an expensive present today, a lovely little dipylon vase-a real gem-to fight my ill humor. Spending money is indicated not only for states of fear.)"
Freud bought his first art in 1896, about the time his ailing elderly father was not far from death, or possibly just after jacob Freud had died. No one is quite sure. If you share the Freudian view that there are no accidents or coincidences n human affairs, then explanations are in order. It has been suggested that buying copies of art he admired was both a way to console himself in a time of mourning and the representation of a kind of relief universally felt by a survivor.
The earliest purchases were replicas of sculpture of the Florentine Renaissance. Very soon after, Freud began to buy originals of classical sculptures. Like any serious collector, he was finicky about authenticity. Most of his purchases were checked out at the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum. If an authority concluded that a piece was a forgery, it was given away. But the experts were not always certain and not always correct.
Not surprisingly, Freud's partiality for remnants of the distant past was linked with powerful memories. Before his medical schooling had begun, he had absorbed and enjoyed a classical education; the old Greek and Roman civilizations and even-older cultures they drew from were familiar territories for him. It is hard to imagine the adult Freud coveting another man's triumph, but the contemporary figure he envied was Heinrich Schliemann who, in Freud's youth, found and began to dig up the lost city of Troy.
The objects Freud collected came from sunny lands that he loved or longed to visit, and they held a mysterious grip on his imagination. To a colleague, he once wrote of "strange secret yearnings" that rose up in him when he studied the art he owned. Perhaps, he said, these feelings stemmed "from my ancestral heritage for the East and the Mediterranean and for a life of quite another kind: wishes from childhood never to be fulfilled and not adapted to reality."
For the professional brethren, on the other hand, the significance and weight of Freud's collecting dwells in what the psychoanalytic literature calls "the archaeological metaphor." Freud began collecting his antiquities during the last decade of the past century, while he was in the process of self-analysis, the painful and meticulous exploration of his own unconscious. The effort would lead to a new method of dealing with emotional distress, to the science or art of psychoanalysis, to what has been more lightly described as "the talking cure." He would write and he would tell some of his patients that the search for suppressed memories they had launched, the effort to rummage through buried experiences "layer by layer," was not unlike the technique of excavating a buried city." The message to the patient was: dig. New York writer Helen Dudar, a frequent contributor to these pages, wrote on the drawings of Jasper Johns in the june 1990 SMITHSONIAN. Like the dualities in Freud's own ideas of human experience, the metaphor is at once relevant and beside the point. After all, what sensible man would assemble more than 2,000 objects for the sake of supporting analogy when a dozen would have made the point? Moreover, the Freud collection includes 100 fine pieces of antique glass; as the museum's Richard Wells points out, "there's no intellectual mileage in ancient glass." Freud bought steadily the way collectors often buy: for the joy of buying, for the pleasure and for the childlike, almost primitive sense of power that ownership of valuables evokes. Sometimes he bought in a way that fed another artery into his fantasy life. Searching the Hampstead study for material to be used in the exhibition, Lynn Gamwell pulled open a drawer and found it crammed with etchings and engravings, more than 50, many of them of archaeological sites, including an 18th-century Piranesi. There was little wall space left in Freud's study, but clearly he could not resist prints of digs that appealed to him. Treasure smuggled by a princess Colleagues and friends learned to look to Freud's interests. When a Roman cemetery was discovered buried under farmlands in central Hungary in 1910, Sandor Ferenczi, a fellow collector who practiced psychoanalysis in Budapest, shared the booty. Lamps and beads from the site were bought for Freud's collection. In later years, Princess Marie Bonaparte, who had been his analysas and and became an important friend and benefactor, seldom arrived from Paris without a prime piece. She was also willing to break the law on his behalf. When it looked as if he might have to leave the collection in Vienna, the princess smuggled out a treasured piece, the fine little figure of Athena that is in the show. In our time, the last knowledgeable witness of Sigmund Freud's buying habits was Robert Lustig, a small, round, rosy man who died last February at the age of 83. In Vienna, Freud was the first and, 13 years later, the final customer for his antiquities. As a boy, Lustig had haunted the galleries of ancient art at the Vienna museum. In 1925, at the age of 19, he somewhat reluctantly went to work in the family watchmaking shop. Still, he prowled the auction rooms and one day triumphantly came back with a bargain, a dozen Egyptian alabaster urns, miniatures no more than three inches tall. To his father's angry dismay, he pushed aside some watches in the window to make room for his find. There they were spotted by a passer-by, a small bearded man who walked into the shop to ask about them. He liked the price.
"Bring them to my house, and I will pay you there," he told the young man, fishing a card out of his pocket. The card announced he was Professor Freud, a name Lustig vaguely knew was famous. When Lustig arrived at the apartment at Berggasse 19 with the little urns, he was overwhelmed by the study: "I had never seen so many things in a private collection." He left with his money and the professor's instructions, "Whenever you find something, bring it up to me."
In a few years, Lustig had his own shop on Wieblinger Strasse. Although it was Freud's habit to route his dally walk through the commercial districts where he knew he would pass antique stores, Lustig usually brought his merchandise to Berggasse 19, sometimes waiting with patients in an outer room until Freud could see him. He came at least once a week and sold something nearly every time. In keeping with local custom, Freud always bargained; the price always came down a trifle. But he was not practiced at pretending indifference.
"When I saw on his face that he liked something very much," Lustig confided, "I charged him a little more. But he took me down anyhow."
Far from rich, Freud was usually a cautious buyer. Some of the money he used for antiquities was unexpected cash-fees paid by patients who knew that for an hour every afternoon Freud could be consulted without an appointment. But in Vienna in those days, collecting classical pieces was not an expensive hobby; the high-priced objects in the shops were from the Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque periods.
At least once, when he was short of cash and wanted something that Lustig was offering-"I have to have it!" Lustig recalled him exclaiming-a trade was arranged. The piece Freud longed for was an Egyptian coffin mask. He proposed that he pay half the price in cash and the remainder with pieces that were duplicates in his collection. "He opened a drawer, and it was full of Greek and Etruscan mirrors," Lustig recalled. The young dealer went off with three or four mirrors and a small prehistoric Greek terra-cotta figure, a seated monkey, which he took to the museum. The curator of the Grecian department gave him an Etruscan bronze in exchange for the piece and put the monkey on display in a glass cabinet of its own. Owning a piece of sculpture that warrants museum display of that kind would suggest that the owner had a better-than-fair eye for quality. Of course, Freud occasionally bought a fake; even museums wind up with fakes. To Lynn Gamwell, co-curator of the show, the quality of much of the collection is impressive. Still, friends and strangers tended to be patronizing about Freud's art interests. One of his major biographers, his colleague Ernest jones, was advised by Ernst Kris, an art historian who became an analyst, and by Freud's son, Ernst, an architect, to avoid the subject entirely. Since Freud had little esthetic appreciation, they argued, there could be nothing worthwhile to say. As a theoretician, Freud certainly was more interested in the role of an artist's fantasy life in the creation of art than he was in esthetics. Still, in the end, the explorer of the human unconscious seems to have thrown up his hands at the prospect of divining the secrets of creativity. "We have to admit," he wrote in his book on Leonardo da Vinci ". . . that also the nature of artistic achievement is inaccessible to us psychoanalytically."
Freud's written views on art nevertheless angered and disturbed a good many people, among them, famously, the distinguished British art critic Roger Fry. His supposition was that Freud did not understand the basic elements of esthetic pleasure-ideas of mass and line, light and shade, space and color. The pursuit of simple beauty In Freud's defense, Ernest jones wrote that there was evidence to show that he had "a keen sense of simple beauty, notably in the sphere of nature, and also that he had some capacity for esthetic appreciation." After all, jones argued, no one would have spent year after vacation year wandering through the art galleries of Italy without some feeling for the art and architecture he was encountering.
Freud's days were crowded. There were patients to be seen, books and papers to be written, professional meetings to be organized, defections of the once faithful to be dealt with, and hundreds of letters to be composed-in his final year in England, 880 reached friends and family and admirers. But there was always time for the collection.
Freud kept a journal, his Chronik," in which he briefly noted some daily events. The last Chronik, the only one to survive the move from Vienna, consists of 20 unbound foolscap sheets covering ten years-an odd document that museum scholar Michael Molnar is trying to explicate. There are perfectly clear, and chilling, comments. The final entry, on August 25, 1939, rePorts "War panic." And there are lines tinged with disappointment: "October 31, 1929, Passed over for the Nobel Prize." And there are tantalizing notes like John D. Rockefeller jr." Did he visit? Did he write? Molnar is still hunting for a clue. New pleasures every few months Freud seems never to have failed to note the acquisition of an important piece. Every few months, the Chronik reports a new pleasure. "Painted Chinese lady," says the entry for March 17, 1933. Ivory Buddha," he reports on May 7, 1934; coming as it did a day after his birthday, it could even have been a gift to himself. Isis with Horus" is recorded on August 2, 1935; the piece, bought from Robert Lustig, is in the exhibition. Traveling from Paris to see him on October 29, 1938, Princess Marie Bonaparte and her daughter, Eugbnie, did not come empty-handed. The visit is reported in Freud's usual laconic style with the note "bronze Venus"-another piece in the show.
Considering how much the collection meant to him, one of the surprises at the museum is the discovery that his antiquities were kept totally separate from the family's living quarters. Freud would sometimes carry a new object to the dinner table to examine and enjoy, but all of his treasures dwelt in the study.
Perhaps Martha Freud, a sturdy, conventional wife and mother who ran the house, disliked his alien stones. Possibly Freud persuaded himself that his antiquities belonged exclusively to his work. No one has quite addressed the question, although Richard Wells, whose career includes both the practice of psychoanalytical group therapy and the management of museums, is willing to guess that the arrangement may have represented Freud's careful division between work and family life: on the one hand, we have the radical thinker who suffered isolation, ridicule and want of advancement for his revolutionary views; on the other, there is the bourgeois paterfamilias who sired six sons and daughters, who loved children and dogs, who always came to the dinner table on time and who believed in mountain walks for the sake of health.
When Freud sat down at his handsome Art Nouveau desk each morning, the first thing he did was reach over and affectionately pat one of his stone "friends." They keep odd company in the museum. Amid these elegances stands a small souvenir figure of a porcupine, an undisguised piece of kitsch that some visitors are shocked to see, but one that represents a sweet moment in early psychoanalytic history. It was given to Freud in 1909 during his only visit to the United States. He had been invited to Clark University to receive an honorary degree and deliver a series of lectures. Before he sailed, whenever anyone asked about the purpose of his trip to Worcester, Massachusetts, Freud would announce that he was going to look for porcupines-to Europeans, exotic American beasts. For years afterward in psychoanalytic circles, the standard expression of anxiety about a looming event was to announce that you were going to look for porcupines. Freud had surely never reckoned that the porcupine, the desk, the figures, the books, the rugs, would make one final trip with him when he was too old and too ill to be traveling. In 1938 Hitler's forces moved into Austria; soon a swastika was draped over the door of Berggasse 19, and jews were set to work cleaning the streets with toothbrushes. The man reviled as a dangerous jew and as the inventor of an insidious set of theories was in peril. Freud finally caved in to the urgings of his friends and family to leave the city. It took some pressure from friends of international stature to get him out, and also payment of a ransom to allow his valuables to leave. When Freud moved into 20 Maresfield Gardens, his son Ernst and the family maid, Paula Fichtl, had already arranged the objects in his study as closely as possible to the way they'd been in the Vienna room. His greatly loved daughter Anna, a distinguished analyst in her own right, who lived in the house until her death in 1982, left the place largely as it had been when her father died.
Somewhere in that room, stuffed into curio cabinets or crammed into drawers, are the last items Freud ever bought from Robert Lustig. One day in March 1938, warned by a policeman friend that the Nazis were taking all the jews to concentration camps," the dealer filled his pockets with a few small items from his showcase, closed his shop and headed for the Czech border on his way to America. But first he made a stop at Berggasse 19. He needed money, a small sum to help him get out of Austria. There was never a doubt in his mind that Freud would help, and so he did. Lustig left behind his pocketful of old pieces and went off with a little cash and the professor's good wishes ringing in his ears. "Lots of luck to you," he remembered Freud saying. "I have to go, too."
And everywhere the astonished gaze wanders, here are emblems of the vanished past. Terra-cotta and bronze figures and fragments of figures throng the shelves. Mummy masks hang from a bookcase and lie under glass. Ancient Greek pots, Egyptian scarabs, Roman oil lamps, Sumerian seals that have survived for more than four millennia-forests of these things repose in serried ranks in vitrines. The cherished pieces crowd the edge of Freud's desk, an attentive, questioning audience. Squirreled away in drawers are still more objects, odds and ends too small or too difficult to display. Infinite riches in a little room you could say-these are Freud's antiquities, 2,300 of them by the best estimate. In the felicitous phrase of one of his biographers, "the archaeologist of the mind" had an unappeasable appetite for the entombed treasures of other times. The sturdy brick house at 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead, in northwest London, became the Freud Museum in 1986. Last fall, a sampling from the collection began a 30-month tour of the United States, crisscrossing the country to settle for weeks at each of 13 galleries. (The exhibition schedule for this year includes the University of Colorado, Boulder, july 6-August 18; the University of Miami, Coral Gables, August 30-September 30; and the University of California, Irvine, November 11-December 16. In 1991, the show will be at Stanford University, Stanford, California, january 15-March 17; the New Orleans Museum of Art, April 21-june 3; the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, june 28-August 16; the University of Houston, September 7-October 13; the jewish Museum, New York, November 7-February 18, 1992. In 1992, the show will be at Boston University, February 26-April 6. The exhibition is sponsored by CIBAGEIGY Pharmaceuticals and the National Endowment for the Arts.)
It is an elegant little show designed for the intimate spaces of smallish museums, a digestible portion of the art that absorbed this great man's attention and spare funds for more than 40 years. Entitled "The Sigmund Freud Antiquities: Fragments from a Buried Past," the exhibition was formally intended to mark the 50th anniversary of the death of the founder of modern psychiatry. More aptly, it celebrates his work and evokes his ideas and passions.
"The Freud Antiquities" consists of 65 pieces, embracing a range of ancient times and places that held Freud's interest. Not surprisingly, many of them represent humans or animals-gods and sages and magical figures that embodied the mythology of ancient religions. Aptly enough, the show usually begins with Eros and ends with Thanatos-visual examples of Freud's conclusion that civilizations evolved through the drive to live, struggling eternally against the urge to die. It offers a sphinx, whose mystery was fatally unriddled by Oedipus; the Theban king would, in turn, bestow his name on what Freud decreed was a universal force of infantile sexuality, the Oedipus complex. It displays a balsamarium, an Etruscan container for perfumed oil, a favored piece that sat on his desk. One side wears a female face, the other a male visage, a double image for this master of dichotomies who found dualities everywhere he looked, and who saw bisexuality as basic to human nature.
The show has surprises. It was to be expected that Freud would be drawn to Egyptian, Greek and Roman imagery mirroring Freudian ideas and theories. On the other hand, he also found his way to the less-familiar, less-fathomable art of the Orient. And if the symbolism of ancient human and animal forms compelled his interest, he could also allow himself to own beautiful old jars and bottles that reflect nothing more than the master glassmaker's art.
And he could be fooled. The exhibition cases house a few forgeries; two are the kind of pieces that the modern museum world labels airport art"-massmarketed souvenirs produced for tourists. Scattering a few fakes among the authentic works was a calculated gesture, an essential ingredient of this homage to the whole, complex persona-scientist, thinker, explorer of the human psyche, medical practitioner, humanist, family man and, rather touchingly, obsessive collector who, like collectors almost everywhere, would sometimes succumb to a longing for a questionable object simply because he loved it and had to have it.
The exhibition is the joint effort of Lynn Gamwell, director of the University Art Museum of the State University of New York at Binghamton, and Richard Wells, director of the Freud Museum in London. Modestly scaled though it is, "The Freud Antiquities" was meant to represent the full range of the collection, including trivia. As Gamwell explains, "We did not want it to be simply honorific; we wanted to reflect the fact that he made mistakes." Actually, the low end of the selection stops short of her co-curator's assessment; with charming candor, Wells is apt to tell a visitor to the museum that while Freud's esthetic sense was a good deal more refined than friends and family gave him credit for, he did wind up with "a certain amount of junk and tat."
It should hardly come as a surprise that Freud understood better than many collectors what his buying meant on the simplest level and in the most personal terms. It was "an addiction," he once told his personal physician, Dr. Max Schur, and it was rivaled in intensity only by his need for nicotine. Plainly, at least one of those habits was necessary to his sense of well-being. Cigar smoking afflicted him with cancer of the palate and, beginning with his first surgery in 1923, would ever after be a relentless cause of suffering. Collecting was, at least, a benign addiction. It offered the good doctor the kind of comfort known to everyone who has ever succumbed to the desire to buy something-as a reward, as an antidote to a spell of low spirits, as a remedy for boredom, as an amulet against anxiety.
Freud's attraction to objects of antiquity was layered with meanings, but there is a touching simplicity to his report on a purchase he made just after an especially unhappy medical episode. He had been fitted with a new artificial palate after yet another encounter with oral surgery. The prosthesis impaired his speech and put an end to his public lecturing; just inserting and removing it was a harsh effort. Reporting his medical news to his colleague and friend Max Eitingon, he wrote, "I got myself an expensive present today, a lovely little dipylon vase-a real gem-to fight my ill humor. Spending money is indicated not only for states of fear.)"
Freud bought his first art in 1896, about the time his ailing elderly father was not far from death, or possibly just after jacob Freud had died. No one is quite sure. If you share the Freudian view that there are no accidents or coincidences n human affairs, then explanations are in order. It has been suggested that buying copies of art he admired was both a way to console himself in a time of mourning and the representation of a kind of relief universally felt by a survivor.
The earliest purchases were replicas of sculpture of the Florentine Renaissance. Very soon after, Freud began to buy originals of classical sculptures. Like any serious collector, he was finicky about authenticity. Most of his purchases were checked out at the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum. If an authority concluded that a piece was a forgery, it was given away. But the experts were not always certain and not always correct.
Not surprisingly, Freud's partiality for remnants of the distant past was linked with powerful memories. Before his medical schooling had begun, he had absorbed and enjoyed a classical education; the old Greek and Roman civilizations and even-older cultures they drew from were familiar territories for him. It is hard to imagine the adult Freud coveting another man's triumph, but the contemporary figure he envied was Heinrich Schliemann who, in Freud's youth, found and began to dig up the lost city of Troy.
The objects Freud collected came from sunny lands that he loved or longed to visit, and they held a mysterious grip on his imagination. To a colleague, he once wrote of "strange secret yearnings" that rose up in him when he studied the art he owned. Perhaps, he said, these feelings stemmed "from my ancestral heritage for the East and the Mediterranean and for a life of quite another kind: wishes from childhood never to be fulfilled and not adapted to reality."
For the professional brethren, on the other hand, the significance and weight of Freud's collecting dwells in what the psychoanalytic literature calls "the archaeological metaphor." Freud began collecting his antiquities during the last decade of the past century, while he was in the process of self-analysis, the painful and meticulous exploration of his own unconscious. The effort would lead to a new method of dealing with emotional distress, to the science or art of psychoanalysis, to what has been more lightly described as "the talking cure." He would write and he would tell some of his patients that the search for suppressed memories they had launched, the effort to rummage through buried experiences "layer by layer," was not unlike the technique of excavating a buried city." The message to the patient was: dig. New York writer Helen Dudar, a frequent contributor to these pages, wrote on the drawings of Jasper Johns in the june 1990 SMITHSONIAN. Like the dualities in Freud's own ideas of human experience, the metaphor is at once relevant and beside the point. After all, what sensible man would assemble more than 2,000 objects for the sake of supporting analogy when a dozen would have made the point? Moreover, the Freud collection includes 100 fine pieces of antique glass; as the museum's Richard Wells points out, "there's no intellectual mileage in ancient glass." Freud bought steadily the way collectors often buy: for the joy of buying, for the pleasure and for the childlike, almost primitive sense of power that ownership of valuables evokes. Sometimes he bought in a way that fed another artery into his fantasy life. Searching the Hampstead study for material to be used in the exhibition, Lynn Gamwell pulled open a drawer and found it crammed with etchings and engravings, more than 50, many of them of archaeological sites, including an 18th-century Piranesi. There was little wall space left in Freud's study, but clearly he could not resist prints of digs that appealed to him. Treasure smuggled by a princess Colleagues and friends learned to look to Freud's interests. When a Roman cemetery was discovered buried under farmlands in central Hungary in 1910, Sandor Ferenczi, a fellow collector who practiced psychoanalysis in Budapest, shared the booty. Lamps and beads from the site were bought for Freud's collection. In later years, Princess Marie Bonaparte, who had been his analysas and and became an important friend and benefactor, seldom arrived from Paris without a prime piece. She was also willing to break the law on his behalf. When it looked as if he might have to leave the collection in Vienna, the princess smuggled out a treasured piece, the fine little figure of Athena that is in the show. In our time, the last knowledgeable witness of Sigmund Freud's buying habits was Robert Lustig, a small, round, rosy man who died last February at the age of 83. In Vienna, Freud was the first and, 13 years later, the final customer for his antiquities. As a boy, Lustig had haunted the galleries of ancient art at the Vienna museum. In 1925, at the age of 19, he somewhat reluctantly went to work in the family watchmaking shop. Still, he prowled the auction rooms and one day triumphantly came back with a bargain, a dozen Egyptian alabaster urns, miniatures no more than three inches tall. To his father's angry dismay, he pushed aside some watches in the window to make room for his find. There they were spotted by a passer-by, a small bearded man who walked into the shop to ask about them. He liked the price.
"Bring them to my house, and I will pay you there," he told the young man, fishing a card out of his pocket. The card announced he was Professor Freud, a name Lustig vaguely knew was famous. When Lustig arrived at the apartment at Berggasse 19 with the little urns, he was overwhelmed by the study: "I had never seen so many things in a private collection." He left with his money and the professor's instructions, "Whenever you find something, bring it up to me."
In a few years, Lustig had his own shop on Wieblinger Strasse. Although it was Freud's habit to route his dally walk through the commercial districts where he knew he would pass antique stores, Lustig usually brought his merchandise to Berggasse 19, sometimes waiting with patients in an outer room until Freud could see him. He came at least once a week and sold something nearly every time. In keeping with local custom, Freud always bargained; the price always came down a trifle. But he was not practiced at pretending indifference.
"When I saw on his face that he liked something very much," Lustig confided, "I charged him a little more. But he took me down anyhow."
Far from rich, Freud was usually a cautious buyer. Some of the money he used for antiquities was unexpected cash-fees paid by patients who knew that for an hour every afternoon Freud could be consulted without an appointment. But in Vienna in those days, collecting classical pieces was not an expensive hobby; the high-priced objects in the shops were from the Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque periods.
At least once, when he was short of cash and wanted something that Lustig was offering-"I have to have it!" Lustig recalled him exclaiming-a trade was arranged. The piece Freud longed for was an Egyptian coffin mask. He proposed that he pay half the price in cash and the remainder with pieces that were duplicates in his collection. "He opened a drawer, and it was full of Greek and Etruscan mirrors," Lustig recalled. The young dealer went off with three or four mirrors and a small prehistoric Greek terra-cotta figure, a seated monkey, which he took to the museum. The curator of the Grecian department gave him an Etruscan bronze in exchange for the piece and put the monkey on display in a glass cabinet of its own. Owning a piece of sculpture that warrants museum display of that kind would suggest that the owner had a better-than-fair eye for quality. Of course, Freud occasionally bought a fake; even museums wind up with fakes. To Lynn Gamwell, co-curator of the show, the quality of much of the collection is impressive. Still, friends and strangers tended to be patronizing about Freud's art interests. One of his major biographers, his colleague Ernest jones, was advised by Ernst Kris, an art historian who became an analyst, and by Freud's son, Ernst, an architect, to avoid the subject entirely. Since Freud had little esthetic appreciation, they argued, there could be nothing worthwhile to say. As a theoretician, Freud certainly was more interested in the role of an artist's fantasy life in the creation of art than he was in esthetics. Still, in the end, the explorer of the human unconscious seems to have thrown up his hands at the prospect of divining the secrets of creativity. "We have to admit," he wrote in his book on Leonardo da Vinci ". . . that also the nature of artistic achievement is inaccessible to us psychoanalytically."
Freud's written views on art nevertheless angered and disturbed a good many people, among them, famously, the distinguished British art critic Roger Fry. His supposition was that Freud did not understand the basic elements of esthetic pleasure-ideas of mass and line, light and shade, space and color. The pursuit of simple beauty In Freud's defense, Ernest jones wrote that there was evidence to show that he had "a keen sense of simple beauty, notably in the sphere of nature, and also that he had some capacity for esthetic appreciation." After all, jones argued, no one would have spent year after vacation year wandering through the art galleries of Italy without some feeling for the art and architecture he was encountering.
Freud's days were crowded. There were patients to be seen, books and papers to be written, professional meetings to be organized, defections of the once faithful to be dealt with, and hundreds of letters to be composed-in his final year in England, 880 reached friends and family and admirers. But there was always time for the collection.
Freud kept a journal, his Chronik," in which he briefly noted some daily events. The last Chronik, the only one to survive the move from Vienna, consists of 20 unbound foolscap sheets covering ten years-an odd document that museum scholar Michael Molnar is trying to explicate. There are perfectly clear, and chilling, comments. The final entry, on August 25, 1939, rePorts "War panic." And there are lines tinged with disappointment: "October 31, 1929, Passed over for the Nobel Prize." And there are tantalizing notes like John D. Rockefeller jr." Did he visit? Did he write? Molnar is still hunting for a clue. New pleasures every few months Freud seems never to have failed to note the acquisition of an important piece. Every few months, the Chronik reports a new pleasure. "Painted Chinese lady," says the entry for March 17, 1933. Ivory Buddha," he reports on May 7, 1934; coming as it did a day after his birthday, it could even have been a gift to himself. Isis with Horus" is recorded on August 2, 1935; the piece, bought from Robert Lustig, is in the exhibition. Traveling from Paris to see him on October 29, 1938, Princess Marie Bonaparte and her daughter, Eugbnie, did not come empty-handed. The visit is reported in Freud's usual laconic style with the note "bronze Venus"-another piece in the show.
Considering how much the collection meant to him, one of the surprises at the museum is the discovery that his antiquities were kept totally separate from the family's living quarters. Freud would sometimes carry a new object to the dinner table to examine and enjoy, but all of his treasures dwelt in the study.
Perhaps Martha Freud, a sturdy, conventional wife and mother who ran the house, disliked his alien stones. Possibly Freud persuaded himself that his antiquities belonged exclusively to his work. No one has quite addressed the question, although Richard Wells, whose career includes both the practice of psychoanalytical group therapy and the management of museums, is willing to guess that the arrangement may have represented Freud's careful division between work and family life: on the one hand, we have the radical thinker who suffered isolation, ridicule and want of advancement for his revolutionary views; on the other, there is the bourgeois paterfamilias who sired six sons and daughters, who loved children and dogs, who always came to the dinner table on time and who believed in mountain walks for the sake of health.
When Freud sat down at his handsome Art Nouveau desk each morning, the first thing he did was reach over and affectionately pat one of his stone "friends." They keep odd company in the museum. Amid these elegances stands a small souvenir figure of a porcupine, an undisguised piece of kitsch that some visitors are shocked to see, but one that represents a sweet moment in early psychoanalytic history. It was given to Freud in 1909 during his only visit to the United States. He had been invited to Clark University to receive an honorary degree and deliver a series of lectures. Before he sailed, whenever anyone asked about the purpose of his trip to Worcester, Massachusetts, Freud would announce that he was going to look for porcupines-to Europeans, exotic American beasts. For years afterward in psychoanalytic circles, the standard expression of anxiety about a looming event was to announce that you were going to look for porcupines. Freud had surely never reckoned that the porcupine, the desk, the figures, the books, the rugs, would make one final trip with him when he was too old and too ill to be traveling. In 1938 Hitler's forces moved into Austria; soon a swastika was draped over the door of Berggasse 19, and jews were set to work cleaning the streets with toothbrushes. The man reviled as a dangerous jew and as the inventor of an insidious set of theories was in peril. Freud finally caved in to the urgings of his friends and family to leave the city. It took some pressure from friends of international stature to get him out, and also payment of a ransom to allow his valuables to leave. When Freud moved into 20 Maresfield Gardens, his son Ernst and the family maid, Paula Fichtl, had already arranged the objects in his study as closely as possible to the way they'd been in the Vienna room. His greatly loved daughter Anna, a distinguished analyst in her own right, who lived in the house until her death in 1982, left the place largely as it had been when her father died.
Somewhere in that room, stuffed into curio cabinets or crammed into drawers, are the last items Freud ever bought from Robert Lustig. One day in March 1938, warned by a policeman friend that the Nazis were taking all the jews to concentration camps," the dealer filled his pockets with a few small items from his showcase, closed his shop and headed for the Czech border on his way to America. But first he made a stop at Berggasse 19. He needed money, a small sum to help him get out of Austria. There was never a doubt in his mind that Freud would help, and so he did. Lustig left behind his pocketful of old pieces and went off with a little cash and the professor's good wishes ringing in his ears. "Lots of luck to you," he remembered Freud saying. "I have to go, too."
How the lowly 'love apple' rose in the world. (tomatoes)
August 1, 1990... "Tell me what you eat, and I'll tell you what you are." Such was the fourth on the list of aphorisms published in 1825 by Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the celebrated French lawyer-gourmet. Well, we Americans eat Lycopersicon esculentum-which, in...
August 1, 1990... "Tell me what you eat, and I'll tell you what you are." Such was the fourth on the list of aphorisms published in 1825 by Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the celebrated French lawyer-gourmet. Well, we Americans eat Lycopersicon esculentum-which, in...
Two missionaries' ordeal by faith in a distant clime. (Ferdinand and Jane Ward)
August 1, 1990... on the morning of April 21, 1837, the American merchant ship Saracen stood off Madras, on India's southeastern coast, at the end of a 120-day voyage from Boston. On deck, seven American missionaries and their wives watched silently as two...
August 1, 1990... on the morning of April 21, 1837, the American merchant ship Saracen stood off Madras, on India's southeastern coast, at the end of a 120-day voyage from Boston. On deck, seven American missionaries and their wives watched silently as two...
The Magnificent Mountain Women: Adventures in the Colorado Rockies.
August 1, 1990... The Magnificent Mountain Women: Adventures in the Colorado Rockies janet Robertson University of Nebraska Press, $21.95 if you were asked to name a bona fide mountain woman, who would she be? Baby Doe Tabor? Senora Kit Carson? Mrs. jim...
August 1, 1990... The Magnificent Mountain Women: Adventures in the Colorado Rockies janet Robertson University of Nebraska Press, $21.95 if you were asked to name a bona fide mountain woman, who would she be? Baby Doe Tabor? Senora Kit Carson? Mrs. jim...
The American Circus: an Illustrated History.
August 1, 1990... The American Circus: An Illustrated History john Culhane Henry Holt, $39.95 Like the subject itself, The American Circus is an extravaganza: a one-volume 500-page chronicle, an encyclopedia, a lavishly illustrated pageant of American history...
August 1, 1990... The American Circus: An Illustrated History john Culhane Henry Holt, $39.95 Like the subject itself, The American Circus is an extravaganza: a one-volume 500-page chronicle, an encyclopedia, a lavishly illustrated pageant of American history...
Buddy, Jean and me, going great guns. (playing with toy guns in the 1930s)
August 1, 1990... Three little citizens are looking at you from a lost March afternoon in the 1930s on a farm in upstate New York. Those are pistols pointing at you. That's me on the right, age about 10, and my sister jean, a year younger but for the moment...
August 1, 1990... Three little citizens are looking at you from a lost March afternoon in the 1930s on a farm in upstate New York. Those are pistols pointing at you. That's me on the right, age about 10, and my sister jean, a year younger but for the moment...
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