Micky Wolfson's Cabinet of Wonders: From Private Passion to Public Purpose

Abstract

Micky Wolfson is one of those larger than life characters who would probably have been more at home in the late 19th century than in our current age of dematerialization and electronic communication. He is a man who likes material things and has traveled far and wide to collect them. In 1984, the stocks he inherited from his father, a prominent real estate developer in the Miami area, were sold to an investment firm and Wolfson realized $84.5 million in cash, a sum which he used to accumulate more than 70,000 objects and 40,000 books and periodicals that now comprise the collection of the Wolfsonian Foundation in Miami Beach, Florida.' Wolfson began to cultivate the collector's instinct as a child when he amassed thousands of keys from hotels and ships' staterooms while traveling with his parents. At Princeton, he studied economics and European civilization and then, after graduate studies at Johns Hopkins, he entered the U.S. diplomatic corps. He was the American vice-consul in Genoa, Italy for five years, resigning in 1971 to begin his life as a full-time collector and man about the world. To better understand the nature of Wolfson's collecting instinct, we might consider the three categories of collecting devised by museologist Susan Pearce: systematics, fetishism, and souvenir collecting.2 Systematics, according to her, is an attempt to represent an ideology. As an example, she cites the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford, England, which portrays the natural history of evolution. Fetishism, she says, is the removal of the object from its original historical and cultural context, and its recontextualization in terms of the collector's own interests. good example would be William Randolph Hearst's accumulation of European decorative arts at San Simeon, his estate in southern California. Souvenir collecting is simply the gathering of objects on which the collector confers the mnemonic power to evoke personal memories of a place or time. 1 For additional information on Wolfson's life, the history of his collecting passion, and the founding of the Wolfsonian, see John Malcom Brinnin, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr.: The Man and His Mission, The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts (Fall 1988): 80-93; Tom Sustin, A Gentleman and Scholar, New Times (December 30, 1992-January 5, 1993): 1 1-12, 14, 18, 21-22; and John Dorschner, What Hath Micky Bought? The Herald Tropic (October 29, 1995): 6-16. 2 Pearce's categories are mentioned in John Windsor, Identity Parades, in The Culture of Collecting, John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, eds. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 50.