Not Just Ladies Who Lunch: Margaret Schmitz
Getting to know some fabulous ladies who work in the arts!
Welcome to the Monday series Not Just Ladies Who Lunch. This will be an ongoing addition to the blog, meant to introduce you to some arts professionals. Their jobs will vary from freelance graphic designers to music composers, auction house specialists to cake decorators. Be sure to check back every Monday for a new profile. If you would like to be featured, please do send me a note! I am opened to suggestions as this piece evolves. Here goes week eleven:
Meet Margaret!
MJ and I met in London three summers ago when she became my intern at the auction house. We spent many a day singing Robin’s Call Your Girlfriend while high on silver polish, dealing with crabby clients (I do believe she accidentally hung up on a VIP once) and drinking away our stresses at the pub. She’s since moved to New York City, but in the fall she’ll be returning to the UK to work on her PhD at the University of Kent. She’s not only my most stylish friend, she’s a smarty pants; having completed her Masters of Fine and Decorative Art at the Sotheby’s Institute and she has a BFA from Aquinas College. You might remember seeing her name here, as she recently wrote a piece for Home James on the Kara Walker exhibition and you can follow her on twitter here. MJ, don’t forget to CYGF!
I work for The Haven Art Group. We are a fine art insurance adjusting/advising firm and collections management group. We have extensive experience in fine arts risk management and advise a number of private collections throughout the United States, along with large insurance companies who cover a broad range of clientele from museums to homeowners with smaller collections.
Basically, as a fine art claims specialist, when an oil on canvas is punctured by an airport forklift during transit while on loan to a museum, or if an insurer has a pipe burst on their 19th Century Steinway piano, I get called in to help! An average loss usually involves arranging for conservation, appraisals, shipping, investigating the direct cause and finding the liable party (if there is one), and ultimately negotiating to a fair settlement with the insured.
1. What did you want to be when you were growing up?
I wanted to be a dog. No joke. When I realized that this was physically impossible I decided on becoming an artist. That hasn’t exactly worked out either.
2. What is the best piece of advice you were ever given?
“Stop telling me what it isn’t and instead tell me what it is.” –a wise drawing professor once told me this, and I have never forgotten it. I realized it wasn’t just relevant to my artwork and it has become a mantra of mine.
3. Can you name your biggest success and/or failure in your career so far?
I was denied entry to 5 top MFA programs directly after I completed my undergraduate degree. I felt absolutely retched and really beat myself up about it. After a long while I realized that creating work is always something that I will do, I just needed to come to grips with the fact that those programs didn’t want me right now. I wasn’t ready. That in the long run, mistakes and failures are the best tools for learning. At the time I had only applied to one art history program (Sotheby’s) and happened to get in. I had always been on the fence about whether or not I would be a fulltime artist vs. an art historian/academic and in either case I always knew I wanted to teach at the University level. I felt that Sotheby’s would be a great experience because I would be able to explore a side of the art world that I knew little about, and it also had that academic aspect to it. I thought, if I really wanted to be an artist I could still do that too, my education would just be different. Sotheby’s turned out to be a great experience and I discovered my lost love in British Modernism and had a slew of amazing work and internship opportunities in London. I was able to recognize that intensive research and writing came with the same investigative mood that I felt when creating visual art. While at Sotheby’s I was introduced to my now overseer at the University of Kent where I will be starting my PhD this autumn with funding as a teaching assistant. I still find time to create art, and I still think “what if”, and of course my situation has its cons, but at heart I wouldn’t give it up for anything.
4. Name a tool you can’t live without.
Sadly…the worldwide web, my iPhone, my macbook pro…
5. Do you have a mentor/Who would your dream mentor be?
I have a few mentors right now. Professionally, Claire Marmion, my boss and the CEO of Haven, is definitely one of them. In academia, Professor Martin Hammer for several reasons first of which my research interests greatly reflect his. My mother for the usual, and great, reasons. And in my dream life: Sophia Coppola.
Walter Richard Sickert, Il Barone Aliosi, circa 1936
6. Tell us about your favourite picture.
This is a beautiful picture [above].
Source for Sickert’s Il Barone Aliosi, published in the Daily Express, 19 August 1935.
Image courtesy of Rebecca Daniels’ ‘Press Art: The late oeuvre of Walter Richard Sickert’, Apollo, 2002, page 32
To me, what makes a painting beautiful (without getting into a philosophical discussion of “beauty”) is the breadth of its historical context and the multifaceted discussions based on that context that can occur around it.
