He was a quiet gentle giant of a man, engrossed in his painting, in love with his wife, and, in his off time, busy maintaining his one hundred upstate NY acres, and the beautiful house/pond at their center. A lover of the night sky (like UD), he built himself an observatory. He and Magda drove around most weekends finding the quirky Americana that filled the house. They often had guests (not in the winter!), many of them famous Polish artists, and Magda cooked everyone spectacular meals, topped off with dusky strolls through the woods.
Then we’d all sit on the big front porch and gaze at the pond Fangor made until we started falling asleep.
An old friend of the Soltan family, he was a significant but not immensely significant artist until his last decade, when Les UDs began to panic as their six Fangor paintings became so valuable we had to make a decision: Handle and secure them properly or sell most of them. We kept this one
For complex reasons, this July 4 Les UDs were gifted with a home delivery of filets mignons and hamburger steaks. Their neighbors, the Trockis (Tammy, an excellent photographer, took pictures of our Fangors), will cook the meat, and we’ll all gather at their place for a holiday blowout.
UD’s father in law spent four years in Corbu’s atelier just after WW2 – and I mean just after, as in he pretty much traveled directly from Murnau POW camp (where he spent the whole war, having been captured by the Germans early in the conflict) to the Paris studio. UD worked with Jerzy, who wrote the original manuscript in English, on his written English (English was his third or fourth language) in the main essay, which you can find here. (You can find a mistake-free version of the essay in this book.)
One of my happiest memories is sitting on the porch overlooking a pond at Wojciech Fangor’s house one summer, going back and forth with Jerzy, paragraph by paragraph. He had a big broad excitable style with major use of dashes, dot-dot-dots, and exclamation marks; he took all of my editing suggestions in good humor.
Here’s Jerzy’s acknowledgement of our work together.
And here’s his just-released writing about Corbu, translated into Polish:
Morning, Ledge House, Harpers Ferry West Virginia.
Worked. Like a charm. The 6:03 from Union Station stopped and took me from Garrett Park to Harpers Ferry, just as it said it would.
The tricky part was finding Ledge House. UD, on foot and alone, with night approaching, and in a mountain town where most streets are steep inclines, made every mistake possible and then some. She chatted with half the town in her effort to find the place.
Everyone – including the man who took me to a steep crumbly poison ivy ridden path he swore would get me there (I didn’t take the path) – was very friendly. And of course GPS was trying to help me too. Every wrong route I tried opened up onto gobsmacking views of rushing rivers, bridges, rock cliffs, green hills, and clear evening skies with an almost full moon.
Eventually, her ancient heart pounding, UD got to Henry Clay Street, where the GPS lady assured her she had reached her destination.
The house – way the hell up some cruddy steps – looked wrong. UD had no choice but to trudge the cruddy steps.
While resting halfway, she checked her email, which included congratulations from Amy at Bonhams – at yesterday’s New York auction, our latest Fangor sold for over a hundred thousand dollars.
Naturally this news gave me a second wind and I finished the course like a Marine recruit.
Where was I? This was a private house, with a big For Sale sign in front of it. GPS had stopped me too soon and sent me up the wrong street. Now – eyeing the cemetery that was the only other game in town – I had to go all the way back down to Henry Clay.
Where, glowing with charm and a Southern garden in dusky shadows, stood Ledge House.
She’s got a little house in nowheresville upstate New York, no lights anywhere, a true dark sky, and she has sat in its front meadow many a chilly August night over the years, looking up at the enormous firmament. (Actually, news flash: UD‘s country house has suddenly gone from a nowheresville location to a destination location! Look what’s moved down the lane. That pond you see if you check out the photos on the website was the work of UD‘s old friend, Wojciech Fangor and… well, you can put Fangor in my search engine if you want that story…) But for all her effort, she’s never experienced a true meteor shower – just occasional shooting stars in the course of a few hours.
This year, Les UDs are going to Shenandoah National Park – two hours from ‘thesda – because it’s apparently the best place for hundreds of miles around to see the perseid meteor shower.
There will be a Night Sky Festival at the park while we’re there. So even if UD is again disappointed this year, she will at least be surrounded by experts telling her precisely what’s up there and why.
Obviously, she will extensively blog this experience.
