About

I first met Herta Galton in the late 1960s

Her vibrant, colorful paintings captured my imagination and I became a collector... and friend

I met Herta in the late 1960s, when her daughter, Elizabeth, and I were in medical school together. Elizabeth and I were part of a group of friends who studied together and went places together on the weekends. We would go out dancing, or visit classmates' families. Herta lived only about 35 miles from our medical school in Kansas City, Kansas. She lived in Lawrence, Kansas.

One of the first things I noticed about Herta was how petite she was, but strong. Her hair was closely cropped, and was a rich dark red. She was slender and often wore the tight, short skirts popular at that time. At times her skirts were leather. She seemed so young to have been born in 1914.

Her paintings attracted me from the start. They were so powerful; how could they come from this gentle person. She never talked to me about her past experiences. I didn’t know that she escaped from Vienna in 1938, when Hitler was taking over Austria. It wasn’t until much later that I learned that she had fled from Austria to England, where she worked as a maid before meeting and marrying her husband, and that her daughter, Elizabeth, had been born in an air raid shelter.

Herta never talked about all that.

Even in the 1970’s, people in the midwest United States who had numbers tattooed on their arms or legs didn’t like to talk about the Holocaust. Once I began to practice medicine, I saw a number of patients who had experienced that time in Europe and even had numbers on their arms or legs. But, they did not want to talk about it.

Herta did tell me that Vienna had some public buildings with paintings by Gustav Klimt which impressed her. She felt that those paintings had an influence on her art.

Herta didn’t like to talk much about the meaning behind her art. I do remember her saying that she didn’t like the process of having prints made of her pictures. She felt that it took away too much of her control over the process and the outcome of the product.

I never met Herta’s husband, Herbert Galton, but I was aware that he was an honored teacher of Slavic languages at the University of Kansas. I remember Herta and Elizabeth saying that he demanded quiet when he was doing his work at home. This was difficult for Elizabeth, who played the violin and loved classical music. I also remember them saying that he didn’t like the mess of Herta’s paints.

There was one painting by Herta that clearly showed a man putting a ring on a woman's finger.

This was about the same time that her son, Bernard Galton, was getting married to his fiance Yvette, and I thought the painting must be related to that. But, Herta never mentioned a connection.

In 1967, I took a trip to DC with Elizabeth to look for an internship after medical school, and that trip was my introduction to a more cosmopolitan life than what I’d experienced growing up in Kansas.

I ended up doing my internship in Richmond, at the Medical College of Virginia, and over the course of that year, I took many weekend trips to DC. I always went up by bus. I had made friends with some older women from Atlanta, probably in their eighties at that time, who had a lot of money from the Coca Cola company and liked to spend it on young men, mostly taking them out to eat in the evenings. I visited art museums, the West Wing and the East Wing of the Smithsonian, the Natural History Museum, the History of the United States Museum, and the National Portrait Gallery. I developed an appreciation for art and became familiar with abstract expressionism.

Elizabeth did her internship and residency in Los Angeles, leaving Herta alone in the house in Lawrence, Kansas.

Elizabeth was interested in Psychiatry, and took that as her chosen field. She was interested in Sigmund Freud, and I remember Herta saying that she gave Elizabeth a collection of all of the writings of Freud.

In 1971, I spent a year in South America after finishing my neurology residency. When I came back and started working in Kansas City, I finally had money to buy paintings from Herta. I probably bought my first one in 1971. It was the one that has an orange background and some figures in the front. I bought it for about 500 dollars in 1971 or so. It was early in my career, so I made payments on it. Adjusted for inflation that would be about $3600 or so.

In the mid 1970's I shared a Neurology office with another doctor, Dr. Yu. We were located in the fashionable Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, Missouri. We hired an office decorator to guide us in furnishing the office, to give it "taste". She liked blue and orange, so we went with that. I had 3 small paintings by Herta that I wanted to hang on the walls. The decorator suggested orange for the matting around the paintings. The office looked great for a while, until one day when Dr. Yu asked me to step out for a talk. He asked me whether I thought it was appropriate for a doctor's office to display pictures of people with green faces. Now, I have never seen a Neurology patient with a green face, but, to please my colleague, I sadly agreed to take the paintings down.

Around 1972, I would occasionally take a drive from Kansas City to Lawrence, to see Herta.

On one occasion, I took a friend, Bill Carr. He immediately saw a painting that he liked and bought it. I was later jealous that he had bought it, and wished that it was mine. It was all dark blues and blacks. There were 3 shadowy figures coming out of a dark background. I last saw that painting 20 years ago in Tucson, AZ. In 1977, I bought a large house in Kansas City, and held an exhibit of Herta's work in my new home.

Another friend of mine, Bill Wright, was also an artist. He and I visited Herta in Lawrence often, and the three of us even took a trip to San Francisco together, sometime around 1978. The main thing that I remember from that trip was having dinner at the rotating restaurant on top of the Hyatt Regency Hotel in San Francisco, where we discussed the astonishing breadth of human accomplishments, particularly in the west coast.

I think Bill and Herta both saw California as a place filled with possibility and promise. Soon after that, San Francisco became Bill’s permanent home, and the Van Nuys area of Los Angeles became Herta’s.

I only visited Herta once in Van Nuys.

We attended a party at Elizabeth’s home. Herta’s paintings changed after she moved: her colors and subject matter became noticeably lighter and more playful. She started to put in palm trees. I felt that Herta must be happier in her new home. Over the years, I continued to purchase her art whenever I could.

After I had sold my big house in Kansas City and didn’t have as much space for art, I continued to buy paintings for my sister, Nola, to hang in her home in Washington, DC.

I will always remember Herta’s pleasing laughter. She always welcomed people into her home and loved showing her art to them.