English professor masters art of interdisciplinary study

An indirect but critical connection exists between Madison’s Spaightwood Gallery and the last cigarettes Andrew and Sonja Weiner ever smoked.

“We had been three-pack-a-day smokers, and even then, six packs came to quite a piece of change. When we decided to quit, we thought we’d put the money we would have spent on cigarettes toward something we really wanted,” says Andrew, a UW–Madison professor of English.

Those somethings turned out to be art. The first pieces they bought were old masters, Rembrandt, Lucas van Leyden, Han Sebald Beham, Hendrik Goltzius and Weiner’s favorite, Albert Dürer.

Weiner knows the period well — literature from the 16th and 17th centuries is his academic specialty. Dealing as he does with the world of the ideas, he has been one of the pioneers in interdisciplinary scholarship at UW–Madison. His work with the gallery has heightened his awareness of how both images and ideas evolve, reinforce and affect each other, between disciplines and across time.

For example, “when Sonja and I were researching Renaissance art, we also saw some 20th century work that appealed to us, and we were struck by the similarities in the two periods that spanned hundreds of years,” he says.

For instance? “Renaissance artists and writers began to one-up each other in a quest for individual style,” he says. “Each wants to be recognized immediately by his own artistic style or voice.”

Sound familiar? Weiner traces the striving for unique voice to our own time, starting with the modernists. “Twentieth century modernists like T.S. Eliot, Yeats and Ezra Pound tried to make everything new again, and in their own image,” he says, as did visual artists working at the same time: Picasso, Matisse, Wasily Kandinsky, all with pieces at Spaightwood. In fact, the Weiners’ treasury numbers more than 7,000 pieces (“We always buy a few more than we sell,” he admits). In addition to the aforementioned artists, Miro; Chagall; Picasso; Robert Motherwell; German expressionists such as Käthe Kollwitz, Lovis Corinth, Max Pechstein and Erich Heckel; and many more are represented in the Spaightwood collection.

At the moment, the Weiners are exploring the way art has been used as an instrument of political expression. At press time, Spaightwood is poised to open mid-month a show dedicated to COBRA — Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam. Weiner says that the end of Nazi occupation in those places was a signal for artists to burst free of previous artistic protocols, a very modernist notion.

Weiner has developed a record of fostering connections on campus as well as in his gallery. For example, when he and UW–Madison Law School colleague Leonard Kaplan founded the Law and Humanities Project in 1996, they resolved to welcome contributions by as many academic disciplines as possible. The project’s journal, “Graven Images,” is a forum for scholars of literature, law, history, art history, history of science, religious studies and other fields.

Weiner says he cannot help but bring his preferred interdisciplinary approach to his classes, this semester two undergraduate courses on Shakespeare and Milton, and a graduate seminar on Renaissance literature. He says making connections is at the very heart of his concept of education.

“It’s precisely by making connections that you learn, and it’s something you have to do for yourself, on your own, by trying things out and seeing what works and what doesn’t,” he says, echoing the sentiments of modernist E.M. Forster.

The Weiners’ Spaightwood Gallery, 1150 Spaight St., is open weekends noon- 6 p.m. For more information on the COBRA exhibition, call (608) 257-4559.