California wildfires claim MFAH cache
As officials braced for mudslides from the scorched earth above Malibu Wednesday, officials 1,400 miles away at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston joined the list of people coping with losses from the deadly California wildfires.
About 24,000 books the museum acquired in 2012 from the uber-collector Manfred Heiting were lost in the Woolsey fire. The books and other objects — including about 160 photographs and 200 ceramics that were destined for the museum — were insured. But MFAH director Gary Tinterow and photography curator Malcolm Daniel weren’t focused on the financial hit.
“It’s just a tremendous loss for the history of photography and artist books,” Tinterow said.
Heiting was out of the country when the fire raced through, and his wife Hanna is safe. But all that’s left of their home above Pepperdine University and the Pacific Coast Highway is a foundation and ashes.
Houston’s association with Heiting began in the early 2000s, when the MFAH bought his collection of about 4,000 photographs dating from the 19th to the mid-20th century. (Those prints have resided safely in Houston since 2004.) Heiting used the purchase funds to start a related collection of photography and artist books that
had grown to include about 30,000 objects, all of it promised to the MFAH.
Heiting had sent about 6,000 of the books to the museum in batches, after meticulously cataloging them — but he was still deep into the project, which filled his home.
Heiting was also still collecting, continually upgrading and refining his holdings as he ferreted out the best examples of rare editions to build a photography scholar’s dream library, when the wildfirehit.
“He brings extraordinary dedication and energy to anything he takes up,” Tinterow said. “It was an archive that was unique in its focus and breadth.” The museum had planned to dedicate a room to the books in the Beck Building.
“The quantity mattered, because it allowed you to learn about a range of material,” Daniel said.
“For example, he didn’t just have a first edition of Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans.’ He had every edition, in all 20 languages, in mint condition, so you could see the differences.”
Daniel and the MFAH’s head librarian, John Evans, had visited Heiting’s home several times and planned to be there in December. “It was an extraordinary place, filled with great books and much other art,” Daniel said. “Much of what was lost I never saw.”
But he’s painfully aware of much of it, including one of only seven known copies of John Thomson’s 19th century “Foochow and The River Min,” a book by a British photographer who traveled through China in 1870 and 1871.
Heiting also had a complete set of Camera Work, a quarterly journal of photography published by Alfred Stieglitz from 1903 to 1917. Twelve of the issues had already been sent to Houston, but 38 were lost.
“Some things are replaceable, maybe, and some things aren’t,” Daniel said. But the likelihood of finding photobooks of equal quality and quantity isn’t good, because Heiting had scoured the market for about two decades.
A writer, designer and curator who was an executive for Polaroid earlier in his career, Heiting has produced several important scholarly volumes from his archives about the history of photography in Germany, Czechoslovakia, Russia and Japan, all of it impeccably recorded and researched.
“That’s what I mourn besides the books — whatever Manfred would have done in the next five years,” Daniel said, “and what scholars would have done here in the future as they mined the resources.”