Coromo In New York, parts 1711 - 1714

1711. Tallulah was described as an art dealer but that was not really accurate. She had an antique store in New York on Madison Avenue, up in the Seventies, it was a small establishment selling only French gilded furniture, gilded mirrors, gilded frames with old etchings of monuments, and the odd sentimental figure painting without any history, purchased from auctions.

1712. Nothing in her shop was newer that 1890, although she did occasionally include a dusty Ash Can school painting, or a German Expressionist etching since she was partial to Kathe Kollwitz. But like all dealers of art and antiques she wanted it understood that even though she showed only the dead, as the saying goes, she was well aware of all the interesting things going on in the world of the living.

1713. It was this desire to be seen as a person who read art journals and attended bi-annuals that motivated her to purchase the works of Coromo mistaking then for the Folk Art they resembled. She put them up in her shop in an dark corner in the back where they went unnoticed for a few weeks, and then one of her best clients noticed them and remarked about them saying, “What have you got here, a few fake Grandma Moses pieces.”

1714. Say what you want to about Outsider out, it can’t include any works by Grandma Moses. First of all she was clearly not psychotic, that is easy to see. Secondly she never spent any time in prison or mental institutions. Mentioning Grandma Moses in the same sentence with Adolph Wolfli is just like talking about Norman Rockwell in remarks about Goya. There are portraits in the works of both, but there the similarity ends.

Richard Britell