Another narrow escape from the high life.
I once held an original Brancusi marble sculpture worth perhaps several million dollars! It wasn’t my idea, really. The owner, a wealthy Romanian industrialist who had a huge collection of Brancusi’s work (the first truly modern sculptor of the 20th century), wanted to mount a world-wide touring exhibition of the sculpture of Brancusi and Holmes (that’d be me). He was so tickled that I said yes that he forced me to hold this fragile marble sculpture for a picture! (The photo below is of him and another Brancusi narble that he actually dropped and broke! Here he’s putting the pieces together to show me what it looked like. YIKES!)
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He then flew me and my manager to Bucharest for a few days of high living while we drew up the contract for tours of Europe, the U.S. and Japan. I was thrilled to be included with Brancusi, one of my art heros!
But that was the end of it. The contract period came and went with nary a word. He may have been taken down in a corruption scandal in the Romanian government, but I never heard from him again… Life in the fast lane!
