AN ART-WARMING STORY

I never heard of Felrath Hines until this morning. He was born in 1913 in Indianapolis and while working as a dining car waiter, took his first painting lessons in his 20s. He entered the Chicago Institute of Art when he was 31.

Hines ultimately became a conservator at the Museum of Modern Art, then chief conservator at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., and retired as chief conservator of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. He died at 79 in 1993.

For all those years, he continued to paint, seldom exploiting exhibition opportunities that he surely had. When he was invited by the Whitney Museum to exhibit in a show called “Contemporary Black Artists in America” (the exhibit helped catapult his friend Romare Bearden and other black artists to the spotlight), he declined saying “I don't want to be pigeon-holed as a black artist.” Instead, he quietly stacked finished work in the attic of the home he shared with his wife and family.

Last summer the Nasher Museum of Art in Durham, N.C., mounted a retrospective of his “color balance” paintings to good reviews and his widow continues to donate his work to the Ackland Art Museum at the U. of N.C. in Chapel Hill. All this makes a good story. But it’s not the end (at least, for today.)

Lawrence Toppman covers art and culture for the Charlotte “Observer.” He and his schoolteacher wife saw that Durham exhibit and fell head over elbow for Hines’ paintings and began tracing connections to a gallery source in New York City. After various failed tries of contacting the gallery through modern electronics, they climbed aboard a plane for New York City for a weekend search. The SoHo gallery had closed.

This is a news reporter after all; he wasn’t ready to give up. Next he contacted a Nasher Museum employee who put the Toppmans in touch with Hines’ widow. The couple took a week of vacation time, flew to Massachusetts (in February…in the snow…in one of the worst winters that area has had in years!) for a visit and left carrying their very own watercolor original.

To make the purchase even more interesting, they hand-carried the painting aboard the plane but the it didn’t fit under the seat or above in the luggage rack. The idea of checking it and watching it hurled into the hold of the plane was rejected out of hand and so they ended up purchasing a third seat and belted their new baby safely in for the ride back to Charlotte.

Toppmans are a two-income family but together, no one could call a school teacher and local news writer “wealthy.” They must have swallowed hard before taking the plunge (Hines' oil paintings generally sell in the $5 - $10,000 range - watercolors on paper, substantially less. ) Yet, they went to these extremes to own a small bit of paper with some painted triangles that was produced by someone they had never heard of until last summer purely because they connected spiritually with that work.

Just when I’m falling into the abyss of art cynicism, here comes a hook that brings me off the cliff. I’ve never met the Topphams but I love them instinctively and I love their story.

Happy March!