Jonathan Demme: Lights, camera, auction
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
An Oscar-winning director lets go of his massive collection of self-taught art, and it's all for us.
ALL-CONSUMING ART: This Jamaican oil piece, Byron Johnson's The Beast (2000), is one of the hundreds available at auction from Jonathan Demme's collection.
Material Culture
Material Culture
In his essay in the catalog for the Philadelphia-based auction, “Direct From the Eye: The Jonathan Demme Collection of Self-Taught Art,” the Oscar-winning director talks about his experiences with Haitian art — first near his Manhattan apartment at the Haitian Corner, then on a 1986 trip to Port-au-Prince — as a transforming process.
“I got gobbled up, literally consumed,” writes Demme of Haitian art, calling his experience with it “a love affair that will be with me forever.” Demme talks of his life of collecting self-taught art made in Haiti, America, Jamaica and Brazil, as an addiction.
Now, after gathering 900-plus pieces over 30 years, he’s ready to let go. To that end, he chose Material Culture to find new homes for art that he’s lovingly collected but “hoarded away in storerooms where nobody got to see them.”
Demme, who directed The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia and The Manchurian Candidate, will appear at Material Culture’s pre-auction party on Friday.
That Demme came to Philly’s Material Culture is a testament to owner George Jevremovic’s expertise.
Since 1980, Jevremovic has gathered crafts from around the globe, such as traditional, naturally dyed carpets, rare artisan-made sculptures and paintings.
“I was trying to create a stage for pursuing and presenting … the categories that caught my eye and imagination,” says Jevremovic.
He lived in Turkey in the late 1970s, where he says he was bitten by the “rug bug” and began collecting and dealing antique tribal and Oriental rugs before blossoming into all manner of artifacts from Asia, the Middle East, Africa and beyond.
It was Material Culture’s spirit and knowledge that caught Demme’s curiosity when it became known that the director was looking to thin his collection.
“Demme followed our auctions, particularly those with top-flight outsider art. From there, our curators (Jose Velaya and Wael Qattan) worked with him on the idea of a sale,” Jevremovic says.
It’s to be an affordably priced auction with a large portion of its monies going to rebuilding Port-au-Prince’s Centre d’Art Cooperative, which was destroyed in a 2010 earthquake.
“I think his eye is really his eye,” Jevremovic says, “Not the eye of someone taking instruction from an art or investment adviser.”
Thu.-Sat., March 27-29, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. exhibition; Fri., March 28, 7 p.m. reception, free with RSVP; Sat.-Sun., March 29-30, 11 a.m. auction; Material Culture, 4700 Wissahickon Ave., 215-438-4700, materialculture.com.
