Myron Kunin was the Twin Cities businessman who founded the Regis Corporation. From the Star Tribune obit, published on Saturday, November 2, 2013:
Kunin, Myron "Mike" of Minneapolis, age 85, died peacefully on Wednesday morning. . . . Myron, a lifetime Minneapolis resident, grew up near Lake of the Isles, and lived for the last 30 years in a house less than six blocks away from his childhood home (where his mother, Florence, lived until her death, at 102, in 2007). His father, Paul, was a Russian immigrant, a barber and beautician, who owned a beauty salon in Minneapolis, and met Florence when he styled her hair. Myron was born in 1928. He attended Kenwood elementary, West High School, and then the University of Minnesota. Mike married Anita Hochfeld, of Portland Oregon, whom he met when she was visiting her cousins in Minneapolis. They recently celebrated their 62nd wedding anniversary. Mike had several different jobs after college, but he eventually purchased his father's salon business in 1958, renamed it Regis Corporation, and over time he transformed it entirely. Throughout the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s, Regis grew rapidly and continuously, as Myron foresaw the changing American marketplace and adapted Regis accordingly. When he stepped down from the Board of Directors, after 50 years at the helm, the Regis corporate group had more than 13,500 salons and more than 65,000 employees.
I quote the parts of the obit concerning his business career as it was to me something of a revelation—not that he was a successful businessman, I knew that, but the scope and specific endeavor were to me unknown, for I knew him mainly as an art collector. I had no understanding of how much money he spent to acquire his collection, which was in two main areas: African statuary art, and contemporary American painting, especially portraiture, "contemporary" in the sense that Kunin was alive when most of it was created. The year after he died, Sotheby's auctioned his collection of African art for over $40 million. Part of the American collection is on loan to the Minneapolis Institute of Art. It's not hard, from the Kunin collection at the MIA, to come toward some conclusions about what interested him, and it's not what I anyway would expect from a beauty salon magnate. He put it this way in a 2005 interview:
I try to buy things that are an extension of the Renaissance, the Old Master artists, and that have some kick to them. I like a painting that reaches in and grabs your heart and stomps on it. . . .
To get a taste of what he meant, you can go here, the blog post of a recent visitor to Minneapolis who feels as I do about the Kunin collection at the MIA—it's the best thing in the museum. She has a lot of pictures of the portraits in the "portrait room," which is just one of the rooms holding the collection. Here's a picture I took of a painting in another room:
It's by John Wilde, a Wisconsin artist who died, age 86, in 2006. I could be wrong, but I think Wilde had in mind the famous painting by the Renaissance master Pieter Breughel the Elder, "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," which is the subject of possibly Auden's most famous poem. If Kunin had the same thought, it might explain part of what he liked about this picture, since he was attracted to works that seemed "an extension of the Renaissance, the Old Masters." Here, female Icarus comes to the rural Midwest and jumps out the top of a barn. As in Breughel's painting, every detail is carefully wrought and adds to the total effect. The birds flit about the nude falling figure who, though her hands are spread like wings, will soon land on the concrete below. The fence visible at the lower right is of barbed wire. Through the window at the far left the head of a man with a clown face is visible. The abandoned wagon is in the role of what Auden, in the closing lines of his poem about the Breughel picture, described as
the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
In my photo, it's almost as hard to see as clown man, but the abandoned wagon holds an abandoned doll lying prone and splayed, like the main exhibit is about to be.
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