AILSA CHANG, HOST:
A longtime ALL THINGS CONSIDERED host, one of NPR's founding mothers, died today. Susan Stamberg was 87. And while we're celebrating Susan's life, we're also remembering how she championed visual art, even on the radio. Critic Bob Mondello looks back.
BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: Paintings, sculpture, silk, ceramics, golden chalices - all are gorgeous, but none of them makes even the slightest sound. Radio and music are natural partners. Radio and visual art, not so much. Susan knew she needed to somehow give art a voice, create a scene.
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SUSAN STAMBERG: One way to get into the new East Building of Washington's National Gallery of Art is to start in the old building, go down some stairs and get on a people mover - a conveyor belt that takes you there underground.
J CARTER BROWN: I've always been intrigued by...
MONDELLO: Joining her on the conveyor belt in 1978 was gallery director J. Carter Brown, who talked, as they were transported a few hundred feet, about how this compressed space leading to the grand, new atrium would make it feel as if they were emerging from a cave. Susan heard the space as much as saw it.
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STAMBERG: The new is going to absolutely explode on us when we get to it. And at the moment, what would you say we were - 10 feet away, on this squeaky people mover?
BROWN: That's right.
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STAMBERG: Anything to say about the squeaks, Mr. Brown?
BROWN: They're about to be taken out.
STAMBERG: (Laughter).
MONDELLO: As she sees the atrium, you hear her voice change.
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STAMBERG: Off of the people mover and we are coming into the new building.
MONDELLO: And now she's describing...
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STAMBERG: A central courtyard flooded with sun from a glass skylight 80 feet above your head.
MONDELLO: Above your head because she's taking you with her, and you can almost feel her tug at your sleeve when she notices something worth mentioning.
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STAMBERG: Do you know, this marble is really pink. You read that it's going to be Tennessee pink marble, and you think, sure. But in fact, we're not just looking at this museum through rose-colored glasses. This marble has a lovely rosy glow to it.
MONDELLO: And all of this is before they've even installed the art. Give her an exhibit to talk about and she'd find dozens of ways to help you see that on the radio. Susan made it a point to wear hard heels in galleries, so that while she was talking with a curator about, say, architect Frank Lloyd Wright...
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STAMBERG: He even had to design the napkins that people used...
MONDELLO: ...You'd hear her footsteps...
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UNIDENTIFIED CURATOR #1: Yes, the napkins, the ceramics when possible.
MONDELLO: ...And picture them walking around the exhibit.
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UNIDENTIFIED CURATOR #1: There was no detail he felt was too insignificant.
MONDELLO: There was no detail that Susan felt was too insignificant either, whether she was talking about Michelangelo's brushstrokes or Jackson Pollock's dribbles, a traveling exhibit from the Hermitage or an unexpected visitor at a press event.
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STAMBERG: Squirt, the vice president's cat - a fluffy white creature with tan spots - leaves his seat next to the huge Joan Mitchell abstract "Place For Puppies" and rubs his neck against an acrylic cube containing Ernest Trova's "Study" from "Falling Man" series - a shining chromium sculpture of a man in a vintage car. The photographer crouching on the floor raises his camera and snaps a picture.
JOAN MONDALE: Now look at Harry (ph).
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Yeah.
STAMBERG: Joan Mondale is having the press in for art.
MONDALE: As you look around the house...
MONDELLO: Susan did all this while cohosting ALL THINGS CONSIDERED for 14 years and then getting NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday off the ground for three more. At which point, she made the decision to step back from everything except the arts, as she told an interviewer for the Jewish Women's Archive in 2011.
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STAMBERG: Part of my job description is, as an anchor, be curious about everything. You know, that name, ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, we took it quite seriously. And I - it's something I did naturally anyway, and so I found a perfect place to exercise it. And I continue that way. I - look, I'm getting older. I'm not curious about everything anymore.
MONDELLO: But that made her listen even more carefully, she said, to the things she was curious about when she became NPR's special correspondent focusing on cultural issues and the arts. It was a job she would hold for more than three decades, and that led her down byways she'd long avoided - into work by French artist Paul Gauguin, who painted nudes in Tahiti, for instance.
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STAMBERG: And I thought, oh, Gauguin. You know, I've seen a lot of Gauguin. I'm not a big fan, but I've never done a story about him. And I started reading and see that the curator here's take on it is a biographical one about his life. And all of these exotic visions of Eden that he created there were completely manufactured by him because what he found was a colonialized - by the French - missionary-ized (ph) - no more bare-breasted ladies. They were forced by the missionaries to cover up with very unattractive gowns. So he just made it up. He didn't find it. He made it up.
MONDELLO: Interesting take - something she could sink her investigative teeth into with a curator, but kind of esoteric and cerebral. So to coax an audience into listening...
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UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST #1: (Singing) Were I in Gauguin's shoes...
MONDELLO: ...She began her report by playing a song...
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UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST #1: (Singing) ...What would I have to lose?
MONDELLO: From an unproduced musical called "Gallery."
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UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST #1: (Singing) I would embrace the muse and even thank her.
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STAMBERG: Edward Kleban, the lyricist of "A Chorus Line," wrote this song about Gauguin.
MONDELLO: She knew that because she'd known Kleban since they were pals at New York's High School of Music & Art in the 1950s. And for a piece that was going to take a biographical approach to Gauguin, it gave her a springboard.
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UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST #1: (Singing) He was a banker.
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STAMBERG: Actually, a stockbroker in Paris in the 1870s.
MONDELLO: By the time they got to tales of Gauguin making up the naked ladies he didn't find in Tahiti, Susan had you wrapped up in his story, which is what she always did, by getting wrapped up herself and letting you hear her process. She invited you to explore things with her, making even the most abstract modern pieces tactile and as visual as radio gets.
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STAMBERG: He wrote it in chalk. It looks like chalk on a blackboard...
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: It is.
STAMBERG: ...And he's smushed his hand over it so it - the letters do move.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Yes, they do.
MONDELLO: And always, even when she's in mid-conversation with someone as famous as English painter, photographer and printmaker David Hockney...
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DAVID HOCKNEY: The more, in a sense, you make a journey around things.
MONDELLO: ...Letting you see what she sees as soon as she sees it.
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STAMBERG: This photo collage consists of 13 separate Polaroid photographs across and - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 - 11 up. And these...
MONDELLO: She is always describing, analyzing, communicating her fascination with artists and their work, and never making what are generally called the fine arts sound stuffy or pretentious. In fact, she loved a good art joke. Years after that first visit to the National Gallery, she played along as a curator there, started spinning a tale of a research project that sounded increasingly unlikely - one that explored how some of the collection's most famous artists had once turned their talents to baking bread and had briefly run a cafeteria together. Susan kept rolling, even as she pretty much lost it.
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STAMBERG: The cafeteria was called The Sandwiches of the Earth?
UNIDENTIFIED CURATOR #2: The Sandwiches of the Earth, yes.
STAMBERG: And what sorts of things were featured there other than bread?
UNIDENTIFIED CURATOR #2: Well, each artist made sandwiches in his own style. This is what was remarkable about this cafeteria.
STAMBERG: Could you describe the Jackson Pollock sandwich?
UNIDENTIFIED CURATOR #2: Well, Pollock was famous in his paintings for pouring paint onto canvas, and he...
STAMBERG: Drooping and looping and blobbing.
UNIDENTIFIED CURATOR #2: And looping and pouring, yes. And he transferred this when he worked at the cafeteria into pouring pasta...
STAMBERG: (Laughter).
UNIDENTIFIED CURATOR #2: ...Onto bread so that it...
STAMBERG: (Laughter).
UNIDENTIFIED CURATOR #2: ...Achieved the same rich intermixture...
STAMBERG: (Laughter).
UNIDENTIFIED CURATOR #2: ...Of skeins of spaghetti...
STAMBERG: That you'd get on the canvas.
MONDELLO: Susan Stamberg - ever an enthusiast, a connoisseur, a wise interpreter and a champion of the arts, who knew how to make them come alive for listeners.
I'm Bob Mondello.
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UNIDENTIFIED CURATOR #2: We're working on a sequel, I might add (ph).
STAMBERG: Oh, good Lord. What's it going to be - desserts of the artists?
UNIDENTIFIED CURATOR #2: No, no. This - as you remember, last year there was another project we did at the gallery, which was to work on a very large pizza prepared in 1905 by Picasso. It's from his rose period.
STAMBERG: (Laughter).
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UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST #2: (Singing) Bit by bit.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Gorgeous. We love you, Susan. It's NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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