New York Sun, NY
Feb 1 2007
Elizabeth Tashjian, 94, Founded Nut Museum
By STEPHEN MILLER
Staff Reporter of the Sun
February 1, 2007
Elizabeth Tashjian, who died Sunday at 94, was proprietor of the Nut
Museum, a quirky collection of nuts, nutcrackers, and nut art that
she dared visitors to take seriously.
Situated in a couple of rooms of Tashjian’s Old Lyme, Conn., mansion,
the museum garnered the attention of compilers of books on wacky
museums (focusing Lawrence Welk, Tupperware, nuts) as well as
late-night schmoozers from Carson to Letterman. The Nut Museum even
caught the prurient eye of Howard Stern, who thought he was being
shocking when making anatomical comparisons.
But like so many who tried to simplify its message, Mr. Stern missed
the place’s serious whimsy. In the mold of Salvador Dalí, Tashjian
used nuts as the centerpiece of a surreal world in which she was the
star performer.
Opened in 1972, the Nut Museum was a showcase for her nut paintings,
a nut crèche in a coconut shell, and the prize of her collection, a
kind of double coconut weighing 35 pounds from the Maldives, known as
a "coco de mer." Tashjian liked to point out that it resembled a
female pelvis, and used it to illustrate her theory that humans were
descended from nuts. Darwin, she told Mr. Letterman, was "bunk."
An 8-foot nutcracker hung out front of the place. Admission
originally cost one nut, and when this proved financially
impractical, $2 and a nut. The arch-mannered Tashjian, whose naiveté
seemed mainly of the faux variety, claimed never to have heard of
"nut" as a term of disparagement until a visitor offered his wife in
lieu of a nut for admission.
Thereafter, she resolved to remove any stigma from nuttiness. "I’m
releasing 20 million people who are called `nuts,’" she told the
Boston Globe in 2003. "It isn’t a joke, too."
It was a sad irony, then, that she ended up being declared
incompetent and having her Nut Museum shuttered and sold off in lieu
of back taxes. "How cruel, how merciless to have the state kidnap the
Nut Lady," she wailed to the Hartford Courant in 2003.
Tashjian grew up in New York, the cosseted daughter of Armenian
immigrants. Her father, a carpet dealer, supported the family in a
lush Riverside Drive apartment complete with a chauffeur, but her
parents were divorced when Tashjian was young.
She claimed that she and her mother were poor after that, though took
violin lessons, attended private schools, and went on to study art.
She exhibited at galleries in the 1930s and won a prize from the Art
Students League. One of Tashjian’s early paintings, "Cracker Chase,"
was of an eagle-headed nutcracker preying on hazelnuts.
Following her mother, she became a devout Christian Scientist,
serving for a time as a healer. A sense of faith and an awareness of
the numinous suffused much of her art, and nuts, in her hands, became
tokens of a higher reality.
In 1950, Tashjian and her mother left the city and moved to the
13-room home in Old Lyme. Her mother died in 1959. Tashjian never
married, and seems to have become progressively more interested in
nuts. By 1972, a small item in the Courant about the opening of the
Nut Museum described her as having "spent much of her life amassing a
collection of art works based on the theme nuts."
Tashjian told the Courant she wanted to build a walnut-shaped
outbuilding for the collection. The outbuilding was never to be, but
more than 30 years later, her ambition still burned. "I am trying to
do for nuts what Cezanne did for apples," she told a new generation
of Courant interviewers in 2005.
Alas, her last years were spent in bitter decline. After decades of
maintaining the Nut Museum on a shoestring, she began to falter and
her home fell into disrepair. The bicycle that was her only transport
to the grocery story broke down and was not repaired. Squirrels came
down the chimney and began nibbling at the collections.
In 2002, after she refused entry to a social worker, she was declared
incompetent and later fell into a coma. She miraculously recovered,
but her home was sold for back taxes.
A 2005 documentary, "In a Nutshell," brought attention to her plight,
and a Connecticut College professor of art history, Christopher
Steiner, saved her collections. In 2004, he mounted an exhibition of
her collection at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, Conn. To
emphasize that she, as much as the nuts, was a part of the show, Mr.
Steiner included a mannequin of Tashjian. He is writing a book about
her, to be called "Performing the Nut Museum."