Barton Kestle is not dead. He has never been dead. He has no plans to be dead in the near future. At almost 88, he looks terrific: thick mop of white hair, stylish round glasses, all of his own teeth. He does not look like someone who was all but buried in 1954.
Oops.
Barton Kestle’s former office at Mia, as it looked when Mia discovered it in 2013, hidden behind a wall.
Back then, Barton was a young curator at Mia, an expert in Soviet avant-garde printmaking and photography. That spring, he took a train to Washington, D.C., to testify on Communist influences in American art. And then, somewhere between here and there, he vanished.
Poof.
Never called, never wrote, never returned to work.
His office, boarded up in a moment of indecision and hope, was soon forgotten. Eventually, so was he. By the time that Mia discovered the office a few years ago—a sort of Mad Men time capsule complete with cigarette butts and drinks cart—his existence had become a mystery.
Barton pruning a tree in the Linden Hills neighborhood of Minneapolis in 1955, shortly after disappearing from Mia.
What happened was no mystery to Barton, however. In those days before the internet, before digital fingerprints, you really could disappear. You could bail out, land in a new life. You could hide in plain sight. Which is more or less what Barton did.
Well, it’s his story to tell. But we couldn’t be happier that he chose this moment to re-emerge. Here, in a letter to Mia’s board of directors, he explains what drove him into the shadows, and how Hollywood filmmaker Guillermo del Toro—the star of Mia’s special exhibition “Guillermo del Toro: At Home with Monsters”—returned him to the light.
10 March, 2017
It’s been a while. Sixty-two years, if I’m not mistaken. It happens. You start a family, you buy a fondue pot, you get busy. Next thing you know, you’re a ghost to everyone you know. Boo.
I suppose this is an apology. You were kind to keep my office intact. (Those are Cuban cigars—how did you not smoke them??) Perhaps I should have collected my things. But I’ve been a coward, hiding under the covers.
The short version is this: I met a guy on a train. He told me about Ernst Bloch, the utopian philosopher, who had just come out with The Principle of Hope, about preparing for a perfect future. Here I was, rattling to Washington to condemn artists I’d never met before a bunch of politicians who wanted to drag us back to the past. And then what: I go out and have a Manhattan and congratulate myself on having saved my own skin? Bloch says that’s literally insane.
I wanted to puke. And as I was spewing my guts in the swaying clutch of the commode, I knew I never wanted to judge anything again.
So, I went into landscaping. They used to call me “Clara” Barton in Wayzata and Long Lake and Mound, because I kept everything alive. To dig in the dirt is to feel rooted to something, and I needed that. Sometimes I would loosen the earth with a pitchfork and sink my arms in up to my shoulders, as though I were being swallowed. I suppose I was looking for a way out—or in.
After a while, I started to visit the Institute again, but I rarely saw anything on the walls that compared to nature.
Until now.
I had never heard of Guillermo del Toro. I hadn’t seen a monster movie since I was in knickers. But in this show I found something I didn’t even know I was looking for. Here is a mind attuned to the human spirit, the ancient animal frequency that rumbles beneath the rabble of politics and greed. Here is a vision that celebrates imperfection, and to hell with judgement.
We are all monsters in someone’s eyes. Communists, gays, immigrants. Del Toro shows us what kind of small ball we’ve been playing. The game is bigger than us. It’s bigger than Washington. It’s bigger than every cruelty we’ve ever devised to keep the “monsters” at bay.
In the galleries last week, full of ordinary people in thrall to the monsters of del Toro, I wept. Wept for all the years I wasted, asleep in my cocoon. Wept for everyone else who believes they are alone.
Del Toro reminds us: We are all warped. We are all twisted by the forces of a selfish world. But there is beauty in tragedy and heroism in vulnerability. Our damage is our strength; our scars are all the armor we need.
I won’t be a stranger, to you or myself, anymore. And, if you don’t mind, I’d love to have those cigars back.
Top photo: (left) Barton Kestle as a young curator at Mia in the early 1950s, (right) the entrance to Mia’s Guillermo del Toro exhibition.