Corcoran Art Available

ART & GALLERIES

Death of Corcoran Gallery leaves

 big task of redistributing art

WASHINGTON — In the six months since a court allowed the Corcoran Gallery of Art here to dissolve, a victim of financial struggles, about 17,000 works in the museum’s overall collection — by masters like Degas, Sargent, Albert Bierstadt and Cy Twombly — have been in a highly unusual institutional limbo.

Their fate is being adjudicated by a group of veteran curators from the National Gallery of Art, which agreed last February to bring as many Corcoran pieces under the museum’s own roof as appropriate and to help find homes for others in Washington-area public collections.

On Thursday, the National Gallery announced that almost 6,500 works had been taken into the overall collection so far. The museum’s holdings of 1,215 American paintings alone will grow by 226, including beloved works like Frederic Edwin Church’s 1857 “Niagara,” a 7½-foot-wide blockbuster that Nancy Kay Anderson, the curator of American and British paintings at the National Gallery, refers to as “our 'Niagara’ problem” because it is so important and so large that paintings at her museum will almost certainly have to move or go into storage to accommodate it.

The process that has been under way behind closed doors at the National Gallery — one large museum essentially digesting another of considerable size — is, in its scope and particulars, unlike anything an American museum has undertaken before.

While some curators are still months away from making final decisions, the sheer number of works chosen by the National Gallery so far is staggering. The additions will be transformative, particularly enhancing the museum’s reputation for American art, and they will fill in historical gaps elsewhere.

Among the firsts for the National Gallery collection are two bronzes by Frederic Remington, an important work by the sculptor Hiram Powers and work by Betye Saar, the Los Angeles artist. But there are also works being turned away, like a George Peter Alexander Healy portrait of President James Buchanan, which curators said would be better served at the National Portrait Gallery.

“There’s really no model for this,” said Judith Brodie, the National Gallery’s curator of modern prints and drawings, whose task of sorting and deciding is numerically the biggest because of the size of the Corcoran’s collection of works on paper. She called her list “the Bible” — a weighty compendium of some 9,000 prints and drawings amassed over more than a century before the museum closed its doors last year.

Determining contents

From July through December 2014, Brodie and other staff members spent every day of the workweek, from morning to evening, inside a cramped Corcoran storeroom trying to determine what precisely was in the collection and where to find it in drawers and boxes that had not been extensively cataloged in years.

The National Gallery’s job is made more difficult because, unlike other American museums, it has a general policy against deaccessioning works that it brings into its collection, for any reason, meaning that — as Anderson said — “it’s a forever decision” that curators are making on a vast scale. (None of the rejected works will be sold but will be given to neighboring institutions.)

“This is two collections coming together, but with no new walls to hang them on,” Anderson said. As she admired “Niagara” one recent afternoon, she was holding a photoshopped image she had created depicting two other Corcoran paintings, one by John Singleton Copley and one by Joseph Blackburn, inserted on a wall among three paintings from the National Gallery’s collection. She wanted to get a sense of whether the grouping functioned as a party or more like a crowd.

Through the absorption, the museum — oddly, for a federally funded institution that many Washington visitors think of first as a repository of American art — will get its first Remington bronzes (two striking, important early casts), only its second Edward Hopper painting and its first substantial piece by Bruce Nauman, one of the most influential contemporary artists of the past few decades.

The additions to the museum’s collection, some of which will begin to appear in the permanent galleries by the summer, will also greatly bolster the National Gallery’s modern and contemporary holdings, its photography collection and its representation of female and African American artists. For example, the museum will take intact the Evans-Tibbs Collection, a major trove of African American art donated to the Corcoran in the 1990s by the Washington collector Thurlow Evans Tibbs Jr.

“The Corcoran was, I would say, ahead of the game for many years in collecting work by women and African Americans,” said Brodie, standing one recent afternoon in front of a lively 1981 collage by Saar.

Sadness, distrust

Longtime patrons and defenders of the Corcoran Gallery, which was one of the nation’s oldest privately supported museums, have viewed the National Gallery’s winnowing with sadness and also with distrust, partly because no information has been released about the process until now.

National Gallery officials said that was because they did not want the selection of works to turn into an emotional public referendum, but also because they wanted to give the museum’s curators — working with former Corcoran Gallery curators, hired temporarily during the transition — the time and latitude they needed.

In interviews with a half-dozen curators, information about which works were coming into the collection was plentiful, while definitive decisions about rejections remained vague, partly because the job is still far from done. But much of the Corcoran’s collection of antiquities will be sent elsewhere, officials said, because the National Gallery does not collect antiquities.

Jayme McLellan, a leader of Save the Corcoran, an advocacy group that filed an unsuccessful suit to block the dissolution, said: “The National Gallery has paid a lot of lip service to the notion of preserving the Corcoran’s legacy, but in the end all that’s going to be left of a legacy is a few works and wall labels. The National Gallery is just cherry-picking the best works. Someone’s going to look at the wall labels someday soon and say, 'What was the Corcoran?’”

Earl A. Powell III, the National Gallery’s director, said the museum was disheartened at being portrayed over the last several months as a vanquisher of the Corcoran instead of as the savior of thousands of its works.

“We weren’t part of the dialogue of takeover,” Powell said. “We really came in after the situation became fundamentally untenable.”

The cost to the National Gallery so far in absorbing the collection has been between $3.5 million and $4 million, he said, generated mostly through private donations; it will also pay to renovate galleries in the Corcoran’s Beaux-Arts building on 17th Street to exhibit modern and contemporary art and to create a Corcoran legacy gallery, though it remains unclear how that gallery will function.

'Monster jigsaw puzzle’

Of the process of what he called “digesting the collection,” Powell added: “This is like putting together a monster jigsaw puzzle. I don’t know of anything I can compare it to. But it’s really, in a way, an old-fashioned connoisseurship project, and one of the good things is that we haven’t had to do it quickly.”

Sarah Cash, a former curator of American art at the Corcoran who has been helping Anderson in the vetting process, said that after spending 16 years coming to know many paintings in the Corcoran’s collection thoroughly, deciding among them has been hard. “It’s a little bittersweet, but we’re all talking about moving forward and working together,” she said. “It is exciting to see some of them in a new context here.”

Even for the National Gallery curators, the responsibility of dismantling and assessing a 145-year collecting history — the banker William Wilson Corcoran often bought pieces directly from the studios of now-canonical American artists — has been wrenching at times.

“What we accept here is always of the highest standard,” said Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., the National Gallery’s curator of Northern Baroque paintings. “We want to maintain that. That’s who we are. But there’s a balance you want to strike of doing honor to the Corcoran while upholding your standards. And that means there are gray areas around the edges and we’re all still figuring out how to deal with them.”

For work by artists who are no longer among the living, the gray areas will be hard enough to navigate. But because the Corcoran collected contemporary art almost up to the end, the process will also affect living artists, who will be in the unpleasant position of seeing a work that was once accepted by a museum be rejected by another.

“I think there are some names that are very young and they probably need to have a longer track record and be more seasoned,” said Harry Cooper, the National Gallery’s curator of modern art, declining to name examples. “It will not be easy for anybody.”

Superheroes at the Museum

With today’s multiplexes muscle-bound from too many superheroes, and TV frantic with the antic shuffle of tiny zombie feet, S.H.I.E.L.D. spymasters and more, it’s easy to forget there was a time when mainstream comic books were in genuine conversation with the broader culture, instead of being meekly strip-mined for profit by other media.

From its birth in the 1930s, the comic book, that bastard child of lurid pulps and newspaper strips, has become a kinetic and crowd-pleasing part of the give and take in a cultural stew that includes film and TV, pop music and bubble gum cards, radio and the news of the day. On the cover of Captain America No. 1, for example, which thumped onto newsstands in December 1940, Jack Kirby’s dynamic, star-spangled Cap is shown clocking a cartoonish Hitler — one full year before the United States entered World War II.

Those conversations are apparent in a new, generously illustrated book from Taschen, “75 Years of Marvel: From the Golden Age to the Silver Screen,” written by Roy Thomas, a former Marvel editor and writer, and edited by Josh Baker.

Mr. Thomas, who also edits the comics history magazine Alter Ego, misses the days when funny books were more than livestock on the Hollywood farm. “There is a sense of loss because the tail is now wagging the dog,” he said in a recent telephone interview.

Still, he added: “Comic book characters were always franchises. But nobody cared about them.”

Here are a few multimedia yarns from the days when comic books were more than just fodder.

OPEN THE FLOODGATES Marvel’s founding publisher, Martin Goodman, never met a genre he couldn’t imitate and then inundate. In the 1950s, when Marvel was called Atlas, westerns and war sagas were Hollywood staples. So out on the dusty plains, his herd of titles included Kid Colt Outlaw and Two-Gun Kid, Ringo Kid and Rawhide Kid — and, oh, Black Rider and Gunsmoke Western. On the war front there was Navy Action, Navy Tales and Navy Combat, Combat, Battlefield and Battle Action, and on the all-alliteration squadron Combat Casey and Devil-Dog Dugan.

OOOH, SURFER BOY Comics have always been open to youth trends, and surf culture was one of the most popular of the 1960s — in music, in movies, and as a sports lifestyle. So it was no big shock when the Silver Surfer zipped and zoomed out of the pages of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s “Fantastic Four” in 1965. But instead of catching a wave, Marvel’s Surfer mastered the breakers and swells of the cosmos.

SUBMITTED FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION, STEVE DITKO He’s best known as the co-creator, with Mr. Lee, of the Amazing Spider-Man and Dr. Strange, but Steve Ditko’s deepest gift may have been as an artist of horror and fantasy. Mr. Lee thought enough of his work that in 1961 and ’62 he gave Mr. Ditko free rein in Amazing Adult Fantasy — “The Magazine That Respects Your Intelligence!” — in a sense going toe to toe with Rod Serling’s popular TV show, “The Twilight Zone.” Mr. Ditko filled Amazing Nos. 7 to 14 with claustrophobic fables like “Why Won’t They Believe Me?” and “The Man Who Captured Death,” twist-ending tales of menace and Cold War paranoia. The all-Ditko experiment ended — sales were abysmal — at issue No. 15, with the comic renamed Amazing Fantasy and featuring the debut of Spider-Man. How’s that for an O. Henry ending?

EVEN LICHTENSTEIN RIPPED HIM OFF One of the best-known paintings by the Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein is “Image Duplicator” (circa 1963), a reworking of a Kirby drawing (uncredited) of the X-Men archvillain Magneto. The cartoonist Art Spiegelman once said, “Lichtenstein did no more or less for comics than Andy Warhol did for soup.” Marvel, however, did exact a smidgen of revenge. For a few months in 1965, it called its comics Marvel Pop Art Productions.

SHELLEY TO KARLOFF TO KIRBY You have to knock around the byways of popular culture for nearly 150 years to get from Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, “Frankenstein,” to the debut of Lee and Kirby’s The Incredible Hulk in 1962. Shelley provided the raw material for the 1931 movie and its Boris Karloff monster, which, as made up by Jack Pierce, heavily influenced the Hulk’s look: same broad, brutish forehead; same proto-Beatles haircut.

PRESENTING THE AMAZING ... GORGO?!? Fifty years ago, licensing a Hollywood project to a comics company was the height of multiplatform marketing savvy. So the producers of “Gorgo” (1961) were thrilled to let Charlton Comics in on their reptilian bonanza. “Gorgo” was a poor man’s “Godzilla,” but what interests us here is that Mr. Ditko, ever the hustling freelancer, sometimes drew Gorgo for Charlton — even as he worked on Spider-Man and Dr. Strange for Marvel. (All of Mr. Ditko’s work on Gorgo can be seen in “Ditko Monsters: Gorgo!,” published last year by Yoe Books.) And it can be argued that Mr. Ditko brought at least a scrap of Gorgo’s Grade B DNA to the early Spider-Man: Issue No. 6 features the Lizard, who looks suspiciously like a scaled-down version of our boy Gorgo.

LIVE FROM NEW YORK! IT’S THE HULK! In another vignette from the antediluvian days of cross-marketing, the cast of “Saturday Night Live” appeared in “Marvel Team-Up” No. 74 in 1978, while an “S.N.L.” sketch in early 1979 about a superhero party included Marvel characters like the Thing and Spider-Man. John Belushi can’t hide his glee in playing the Hulk as a rude and rowdy party animal (certainly my favorite incarnation ever of ol’ Greenskin), and Garrett Morris was a perfectly sheepish Ant-Man. (“Check this guy out! He’s got the strength of a human!”) The moral of that sketch: Never use the bathroom after the Hulk has.

Correction: December 14, 2014 

An article on Nov. 30 about how mainstream comic books were once in genuine conversation with the broader culture referred incorrectly to the special effects animator Ray Harryhausen. Though Mr. Harryhausen worked with the director Eugène Lourié on the 1953 monster movie “The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms,” he did not work with Lourié on his 1961 “Gorgo,” which was licensed to Charlton Comics. Tom Howard provided the special effects for “Gorgo.”

A version of this article appears in print on November 30, 2014, on page AR23 of the New York edition with the headline: Modern Mythology, Yours for a Dime. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

YOKUTS IN SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY

These baskets are traditional Miwok Pine Needle baskets made by Tribal Elder Mildred Burley. PHOTO COURTESY SILVIA BURLEY


OUR DIVERSITY:  YOKUTS THE FIRST




TO LIVE IN OUR AREA

Long before Captain Charles Weber realized the value of a port city to serve foothills-bound prospectors, the area we now call Stockton was home to the Northern Valley Yokuts, a segment of the Native American population that lived in present-day California for thousands of years before Europeans arrived.

The number of Yokuts, whose settlements stretched 250 miles from the juncture of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers to the Tehachapi Mountains, is estimated at 18,000 to 50,000. In addition, Yokuts’ neighbors included Miwok to the north and Costanoans, Salinans and Chumash to the west.

The first people to populate Stockton had their own reason to appreciate the Delta. In addition to providing fresh water, it produced fish, which were a staple of their diet, and attracted waterfowl, which also fed them. They gathered acorns for their food and the endless supply of Tule reeds fed them — they were ground into meal — and were used in basket making and to cover their dwellings, which were built on low mounds to protect against floods.

They were mostly a peaceful people. Their numbers began to dwindle after their first contact with Europeans. The Spanish arrived in 1769 and from 1805 into the 1820s, the Franciscan priests recruited many of them to the mission system, taking them to Santa Clara, San Jose, San Juan Batista and San Antonio.

The Mission system ended in 1834, by which point California had come under Mexican rule. An epidemic in 1833, probably malaria, took as much as 75 percent of the native population, and when gold was discovered in 1848, white settlers flooded into the San Joaquin Valley and carried out a ruthless campaign to drive the Yokuts off their land.

In 1851, the remaining Yokuts groups ceded their lands to the United States, and after resistance by Californians was overcome, a reservation system was established for them in the 1870s.

Today, more than 7,000 Native Americans live in San Joaquin County. In Stockton, the population was recorded as 3,086 in the 2010 census.

Stockton is home to the Central Valley Miwok Tribe, which is working to preserve the Miwok language and shares its traditions and culture with the San Joaquin Historical Society at Micke Grove Park, among others. The federally recognized Tribe is a sovereign nation and conducts government-to-government relations with the United States.

Its leader of 15 years, Silvia Burley, has represented the nation in numerous locations, including the White House, where she shook the hand of President Obama at the Tribal Nations Conference.

November is Native American Heritage Month, and the Central Valley Miwok Tribe celebrated by sharing some of its possessions with the State Indian Museum in Sacramento and meeting and offering gifts to local leaders, including Congressman Jerry McNerny and Stockton Mayor Anthony Silva.

Two annual powwows celebrated the county’s pre-Gold rush history. The Stockton Community Labor Day Powwow is held on the University of the Pacific campus, and Three Rivers Lodge in Manteca, which works to preserve its customs and heritage and promotes health and wellness with programs that address chemical dependence, domestic violence and other issues, holds an annual powwow in July.

Contact reporter Lori Gilbert at (209) 546-8284 or lgilbert@recordnet.com. Follow her on Twitter @lorigrecord.

Genealogy: Recovering Lost Souls

Found footage reveals 3 poignant minutes in prewar Poland

By Jessica Zach    Nov. 14, 2014      from SF Chronicle

When Glenn Kurtz discovered a dusty VHS tape of his grandparents’ 1930s vacation movies tucked away in a closet of his parents’ Florida home six years ago, he thought he had stumbled upon a minor family memento. Maybe the amateur travelogue — labeled “Our Trip to Holland Belgium Poland Switzerland France” — would shed light on Kurtz’s paternal grandfather, a Jewish immigrant from Poland, who had died before Kurtz was born.

“It was just Grandma and Grandpa’s vacation to Europe, and no one considered that it might have real historical value,” says Kurtz.

His engrossing, exhaustively researched new book “Three Minutes in Poland” charts the consuming four-year journey of genealogical sleuthing that Kurtz embarked on, triggered by just a few minutes of that grainy 70-year-old footage (transferred years earlier from 16mm film).

Tucked in between the Kurtzes’ sojourns in Brussels and the Swiss Alps were three minutes, shot in both black-and-white and — surprisingly for its time — color, of their August 1938 visit to Kurtz’s grandfather’s hometown of Nasielsk, Poland.

An everyday small-town street scene comes to life: Children goof for the camera; bearded old men and women in kerchiefs cluster in doorways, keen to glimpse the prosperous American tourists with the newfangled Kodachrome movie camera, “the iPhone of its day.”

“I got shivers the moment these scenes appeared. Everything else faded away,” Kurtz, 52, said by phone from New York where he moved in 2006 after 20 years in the Bay Area.

A classical guitarist turned writing professor, Kurtz is also the author of the well-received 2007 book “Practicing: A Musician’s Return to Music.” He earned his doctorate from Stanford in 1994 in German studies and comparative literature.

“Those shtetl faces broke the frame,” he says. “I realized I wasn’t looking at a family vacation anymore. I suddenly saw this as a unique record of a place that probably had no other extant documentation. It was evidence of a world that would soon cease to exist.”

Neither the American visitors nor the Polish townspeople going about their summer day had any inkling of the catastrophe looming on the horizon in Europe.

Kristallnacht (the “Night of Broken Glass”), the Nazi-coordinated pogrom against the Jews, would take place in Germany and Austria just three months after David and Liza Kurtz sailed back home to Flatbush, Brooklyn, on the Queen Mary.

Germany invaded Poland, beginning World War II, one year later on Sep 1, 1939, and the persecution of Nasielsk’s Jews began immediately. On Dec. 3, the town’s entire Jewish population was deported in boxcars, many bound for Treblinka.

Community lost

Of Nasielsk’s approximately 3,000 Jews when the Kurtzes visited, fewer than 100 survived the war.

“I wanted to reach inside the frame and shake these people, scream to them, 'Get up! Run! Flee!’” Kurtz writes.

Instead, Kurtz did everything in his power to fill in the identities and unknown fates of those nameless faces.

Part memoir and part history lesson as taught by a dogged and emotionally invested researcher, 'Three Minutes” chronicles the chain of coincidences after Kurtz donated the original, and badly deteriorating, film to the Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The museum made it available online.

“Glenn is very lucky he got his film to us when he did because I don’t think it would have been much longer until it was completely disintegrated,” says Leslie Swift, the Holocaust Museum’s chief of film, oral history and recorded sound.

Swift and Kurtz will speak together in San Francisco on Monday, Nov. 17.

After 18 months combing through the JewishGen and Shoah Foundation databases and oral histories, Kurtz thought he had “gone as far as possible” with identifying his grandparents’ film.

Family research

And then he got an e-mail from Marcy Rosen, a lawyer in Detroit, who found the Kurtz family film online when researching her grandfather Maurice Chandler (formerly Moszek Tuchendler), a Holocaust survivor.

Rosen immediately recognized the exuberant, round-faced 13-year-old in the footage as Chandler, still alive and well at 86 in Boca Raton, Fla.

Kurtz calls Chandler “the Rosetta Stone. He made the film legible.”

The day the two men met was “the break in the case.”

Kurtz decided immediately to scrap the novel he had been working on and take leave from teaching at NYU to devote himself full time to identifying people in the Nasielsk footage.

Like many Holocaust survivors, “Mr. Chandler didn’t tell his family much about what he’d endured,” says Kurtz. The sole member of his family to survive the war, “he was a kind of Adam figure to them, seeming as if he had come from nowhere. He had nothing to show, not one photograph. It was such an extraordinary moment when he said to me: 'Now I can show my family that I didn’t come from Mars.’”

Chandler’s flood of memories led Kurtz to “find eight other Nasielsk survivors, all of whom had fled to Soviet-occupied Poland during the war.”

Kurtz eventually identified dozens more people through interviewing descendants on research trips to England, Canada, Poland and Israel.

In October Kurtz led a Kickstarter-funded trip of 50 people to Nasielsk, including numerous people with family roots there. He hopes to turn the trip into a documentary.

Kurtz says he has never felt very religious, but “does feel connected to a Jewish disposition, if there is such a thing culturally. There is a kind of Talmudic quality to the research I did, going over these documents again and again to learn what secrets they might still contain.”

He doesn’t have an easy answer for why this old snippet of film took hold of him with such intensity.

“I felt an urgency because time is running out. I kept thinking it’s still possible that people are alive to whom I can show these images and give something of their lives back to them. That’s a tremendous gift to be able to give someone.”

Individual lives

Swift says the Holocaust Museum “considers collecting this kind of footage of prewar Jewish life in Europe to be of paramount importance. People might think the museum’s archive is just about Hitler, but in fact it is foremost about the victims’ perspective and what happened to various real individuals.”

The film’s ordinariness is in fact “integral to its historical value,” she says. “It’s the same kind of film that today we shoot all the time of our kids. It is just everyday life and nothing special — that is, until you know what happens just afterwards.”

Jessica Zack is a freelance writer.

Rescuing the Evidence: Three Minutes in Poland: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum presents a free presentation with archival film clips by Glenn Kurtz and Leslie Swift. 7 p.m. Monday, Nov. 17. The Jewish Community Library,1835 Ellis St., S.F. (310) 556-3222. western@ushmm.org.

Finding the Bright Eyes on Tours or In the Galleries

By ERIN MEYERSEPT. 13, 2014

Photo

CreditRose Wong

Continue reading the main storyShare This Page

I was born and raised in Minnesota, but as an adult I have mostly lived in Europe and Africa. I teach cross-cultural management at the international business school Insead, near Paris. For the last 15 years, I’ve studied how people in different parts of the world build trust, communicate, make decisions and perceive situations differently, especially in the workplace.

While it would be nice to think that I now know it all, a recent experience reminded me that no matter how much I learn about the world’s various cultures, there will always be more to discover.

While traveling in Tokyo recently with a Japanese colleague, I gave a short talk to a group of 20 managers. At the end, I asked whether there were any questions or comments. No hands went up, so I went to sit down. My colleague whispered to me: “I think there actually were some comments, Erin. Do you mind if I try?” He asked the group again: “Any comments or questions?”

Still, no one raised a hand, but this time he looked very carefully at each person in the silent audience. Gesturing to one of them, he said, “Do you have something to add?” To my amazement, she responded, “Yes, thank you,” and asked me a very interesting question. My colleague repeated this several times, looking directly at the audience members and asking for more questions or comments.

After the session, I asked my colleague: “How did you know that those people had questions?” He hesitated, not sure how to explain it, and then said, “It has to do with how bright their eyes are.”

He continued: “In Japan, we don’t make as much direct eye contact as you do in the West. So when you asked if there were any comments,

 most people were not looking directly at you. But a few people in the group were looking right at you, and their eyes were bright. That indicates that they would be happy to have you call on them.”

I thought to myself, “Now that’s not something I would ever have learned from my upbringing in Minnesota.”

The next day, after a similar presentation, I again asked for questions and comments, and again no one raised a hand. So I decided to follow my colleague’s lead. I looked carefully at all the faces, and I saw that a few people were indeed looking directly at me and that, yes, if I paused to

 notice, their eyes were bright. I stepped gently toward one of them and gestured toward her, to which she responded by giving a slight nod of the head.

“Would you like to share a comment or ask a question?” I asked. She said, “Yes, thank you,” and asked an insightful question.

After the trip I returned to Insead, where the students in my executive courses are managers from all over the world. As I scanned the classroom, I felt both embarrassed and unsettled to see that I had been missing a lot of bright eyes in my classroom.

In Japan, there is an expression popular with young people: “kuuki yomenai.” Often shortened to “K.Y.,” it refers to someone who is unable to read the atmosphere. On my trip to Japan, I learned just how K.Y. I was.

 But I also was reminded that, with a little curiosity and some helpful coaching, even I could improve my ability to read the Japanese atmosphere.

In today’s global economy, you might be an American giving a presentation in Japan, an Italian negotiating a deal in Nigeria or a German managing a team of Brazilians. You can do your business by email or over the telephone, or you can get on a plane. That’s the easy part; the hard part is figuring out how to conduct yourself in another culture. And a particular challenge arises when you are managing a multicultural team.

As an American working in France, I was initially surprised to hear Americans complain that their French teammates were chaotic, disorganized and always late. Some Indian colleagues, on the other hand were frustrated about those very same people being rigid and unadaptable.

And while Americans are continually tripped up by what they see as a hierarchical French system, one Chinese manager told me recently, “Working with the French is amazing because they really believe everyone

 is equal, from the secretary to the chairman.”

If you interact with other cultures, it’s possible to tease out these differences. I map cultures on eight behavioral dimensions: communicating, evaluating, persuading, leading, deciding, trusting, disagreeing and scheduling. For example, the French culture falls between the American and Indian culture on the scheduling dimension — hence the opposite impressions about chaos versus rigidity.

If you find yourself leading a multicultural team, you need to find the flexibility to work up and down these dimensions. This means watching what makes local managers successful. It means explaining your own style often. It may even mean learning to laugh at yourself. Ultimately, it means learning to lead in different ways.

I try to remember that my own cultural biases continually affect my perceptions. That way, I can focus on understanding behavior in other cultures I encounter, and keep finding the bright eyes in the room.

ERIN MEYER is the author of “The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business” (PublicAffairs).