Sidney Hollis Radner, 1919-2011 – A personal remembrance

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 11:06:38 -0400

This article first appeared in The Mandala Magazine, Volume 2, Issue 1 (July/August 2011), pp. 26-27.

Magnificent Obsession

It seems as if I’ve always known his name. No, not Houdini’s—Sid Radner’s.

That Tony Curtis movie is what first sparked my interest in the monarch of manacles. An obscure 1971 BBC documentary is what really kindled the flame. The Truth About Houdini was televised in the greater Los Angeles area around Halloween of 1976, and I vividly recall a photo in that week’s TV Guide of the real Houdini with his striped shirt, his heart-shaped hair, and his ball and chain. It was a photographic still from The Grim Game, and at the time it was one of the few photos of Houdini that I had ever seen. I carefully extracted it from the magazine and packed it away in an Antonio y Cleopatra Cigars box with my other childhood treasures. Now and again, I studied it with care.

From that moment and for many years, I sought out books and information about Houdini. Because I’m the sort who mulls over footnotes, it seemed to me that Sid Radner was popping up everywhere. Randi and Sugar cited him. Henning and Reynolds thanked him. Christopher too, and eventually Brandon and Silverman, Kalush and Sloman, Koval and Culliton. And from the very beginning, the coincidental convergence of Wilhelmina Beatrice Rahner and Gilda Radner in my 1970s TV-saturated mind made Sid’s name unforgettable. I was Radner-aware.

Flash forward a couple of decades. Sometime in the middle 1990s, I was on the phone with Bill Brehm concerning the Houdini Historical Center in Appleton, and he realized I was in New England. “You should go visit Sid Radner!” he declared. “I should? I mean yes, yes. I should!” A little while later, the phone rang and Sid was inviting me and my wife to his home in Holyoke. From his perspective, I was a random stranger who happened to share his magnificent obsession. From my perspective, he was one of the last living connections to the Man Behind the Myth. Here was a chance to savor his unique perspective, and to see some of his collection.

I couldn’t wait.

Creighton Gilbert (1924-2011)

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 05:30:22 -0400

Creighton Gilbert, the author of many fascinating works of art history, has died.

I entered Yale’s graduate program in art history with the idea of studying under Creighton. Although my evolving interests eventually drew me toward a specialization in Northern Renaissance and Baroque, I enjoyed several seminars and many illuminating conversations with him. I’ll leave it to the obituaries to provide a proper overview of his life and works. This is a personal remembrance.

On the heels of his rich and controversial work Caravaggio and His Two Cardinals, Creighton offered a seminar on the origins of Caravaggio’s art. Northern Italian painting before Caravaggio had long held Creighton’s attention; his 1955 dissertation under Friedlaender (who was then working on Caravaggio Studies) was a monograph on Girolamo Savoldo. Being somewhat taken with Caravaggio and his followers, and being so accustomed to thinking of him as revolutionary, I was quite eager to do the reverse engineering that Prof. Gilbert proposed. So Creighton guided me into a study of il Moretto da Brescia and helped me to see what was, and what was not, a good argument in relation to questions of influence.

During this time, I went often to Creighton’s office hours and pelted him with questions, these often pertaining to the history of art history. I asked him about his favorite instructors and educational experiences, for example, and with a gleam in his eye he recalled, as if he had felt it that very morning, the excitement and hunger with which he and his fellow students used to travel across town (to a competing institution) to hear Meyer Schapiro.

Obituaries on Baroque Potion

Sidney Hollis Radner, 1919-2011 – A personal remembrance

Creighton Gilbert (1924-2011)