Letter on the headed stationery of the Graduate Program in Art History, the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, One East 78th Street, New York City, from Miss Sara M. Halpern to Professor Adele Rosenwald, her thesis adviser. Posted from a mailbox on Fifth Avenue the evening of 12 March 1968. Two sheets, typed on Miss Halpern's portable Royal, with three inserted hand-corrections in blue ballpoint.
March 12, 1968.
Dear Professor Rosenwald,
I am writing rather than calling because I think I will need to take the matter back out and look at it on paper before I can talk about it without sounding agitated. Please read this and then call me when you have a free quarter-hour. The number at my apartment is BUtterfield 8-0941, evenings.
I mentioned to you in February that my Uncle Sol had died and that I was going to inherit his apartment in Brooklyn and (more pressingly to me) his basement of antiquities. I went out to Carroll Street last Monday with the appraiser. We spent two days going through the cabinet behind his workbench, which is what he called "the cabinet" with the definite article that suggested there were no others. There weren't. Most of what is in it is what you would expect from a dealer of his generation — devotional objects, a coin collection, six small icons, a few liturgical things from the South. The appraisal totals come to a little over twelve thousand dollars, which my Aunt Miriam will be glad to hear.
The object I cannot stop looking at, Professor, is a small silver-and-niello bird-pendant on the top shelf. I am bringing it to your office on Thursday so you can see it. I would not be writing now if I had not, last evening, opened the green ledger Uncle Sol kept for the cabinet's contents and read his entries against this one item, and found inside it a folded clipping I am also bringing.
The clipping is from the Bulletin of the Athens Archaeological Museum for 1937. The Museum announces, on pages 188–189, the anonymous donation of a silver-and-niello bird-pendant whose every published particular matches the pendant on the top shelf — the form, the chevron, the inscription Ω ΧΡΕ Ε, the bend in the lower left wing, the chain of later Continental workmanship. The Bulletin assigned it the reference A.B.-1937-44 and published it with a photograph at plate XIV-3, which I have studied for three hours under the desk-lamp and which shows what is unmistakably the same object.
The pendant is also in Uncle Sol's basement in Brooklyn.
Professor, what I cannot work out — and what I am writing this letter to ask you about — is whether the Athens piece is a high-quality replica that Uncle Sol or some predecessor of his had made for reasons not yet clear to me, or whether the piece in the cabinet is the replica, or whether some third explanation is the explanation. Uncle Sol's marginal annotation on the clipping reads, in his hand: The bend is correct. The chevron is correct. The lettering is correct. The chain is correct. The weight is wrong. By 0.3 g. — S.A.H., 12 Sept 1937. The Bulletin gives the donated piece's weight as 7.4 g. The appraiser weighed Uncle Sol's piece at 7.7 g. Uncle Sol, who was a careful man with a balance and a careful man with a museum-bulletin, knew this in September 1937 and chose not to write to the Bulletin about it.
I think — I would like you to disagree with me, Professor — that this means Uncle Sol believed in 1937 that his pendant was the original and the Athens piece was the copy, and that he chose to leave the matter alone for reasons that I have not yet found in the ledger.
I am planning to be in Athens in May, after the term ends. I have a small grant from the program and a small grant from my late mother that I have been saving for exactly the kind of thing I did not realize would surface. If I am right about which way around the original and the copy are, the Museum will not be pleased to see me; but I think I would rather walk into the Δελτίον's offices with the ledger and the clipping and the pendant in a velvet box, and ask the curators to look, than I would do nothing.
If I am wrong about which way around — if Uncle Sol's piece is the copy — then I would like to know that too, and the trip to Athens will still have been worth taking.
Will you call me?
With respect, and a little adrenaline,
Sara Halpern
P.S. The other thing I should tell you, and you will laugh, is that the ledger entries for the pendant are dated 1879, 1937, and 1953 — three generations, three decisions to not address it. I am, by my arithmetic, the fourth. — S.