From the New York Times: Family’s Claim Against MoMA Hinges on Dates
By PATRICIA COHEN
When the Expressionist artist George Grosz, a celebrated painter, fled Nazi Germany in 1933, he left behind two important oil paintings and a watercolor with his Berlin dealer. Next month the United States Supreme Court, in deciding whether to hear the case, will determine whether Grosz’s heirs have any hope that legal action will help them recover the works from their current owner, the Museum of Modern Art.
The lawsuit is an emotional, last-ditch effort by Grosz’s son Martin, and Martin’s sister-in-law, Lilian, to reclaim works they say were lost in the midst of Nazi persecution, only to end up two decades later in one of the world’s most elite art institutions.
Beyond the family, the case has drawn the attention of Jewish groups and experts in international law who argue that the Grosz case, like many others concerning art looted or lost during World War II, have too often been decided not on the merits but on whether claimants filed suit before the legal time limit.
MoMA, for example, has won several lower court decisions in the Grosz case because judges have ruled that the family simply filed its suit too late to be considered under New York State law. The United States has twice signed international agreements that urged nations to decide Holocaust-recovery claims based on their substance, not on legal technicalities. But the agreements do not have the force of law.
“Museums are breaking their own ethics codes and causing the U.S. government to break its international commitments by invoking our courts to resolve Holocaust-era art claims on technical grounds rather than on the merits,” said Jennifer Anglim Kreder, co-chairwoman of the American Society of International Law’s Interest Group on Cultural Heritage & the Arts.
Ms. Kreder is an author of a “friends of the court” brief supporting the Groszes. Several other organizations have also weighed in to argue against the use of statutes of limitations to bar such claims. The organizations include the American Jewish Congress and the nonprofit Commission for Art Recovery.
The museum, which acquired the works in the 1950s, declined to comment because the case is being litigated. But it has maintained in court documents that, regardless of the timing issue, it has diligently researched the artworks’ provenance and has found no evidence that the works were looted by the Nazis or any basis for disputing their legitimate ownership.
Raymond J. Dowd, the Groszes’ lawyer, counters that the lower court considered inadmissible evidence and also failed to take into account a 1998 federal law that was intended to help Holocaust-era victims recover their assets.
Since 2004, the Supreme Court has refused to review several Nazi-era art cases, most recently in June when it decided not to review a case brought against the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif., which ran afoul of a different deadline statute. Lawyers involved in Grosz v. Museum of Modern Art agree that it is unlikely that the high court, given its reluctance to weigh in on matters of state law, will take up this case when it meets on Sept. 26 to review the appeal.
The tangled odyssey of the three disputed works — the portrait “Poet Max Herrmann-Neisse” (1927), “Self-Portrait With Model” (1928) and the watercolor “Republican Automatons” (1920) — begins in 1933. Grosz, a prominent member of the Dada movement best known for his biting caricatures, was a staunch critic of Hitler and emigrated to America just as the Nazi regime was coming to power. Grosz, who was not Jewish, left the three works with Alfred Flechtheim, his dealer, who was Jewish. Under the Nazis, Jewish businesses were boycotted, and within months Flechtheim also left Germany. He died penniless in London four years later.
The Grosz heirs say that Flechtheim was only temporarily caring for the three works and that he was forced to sell or abandon his holdings because of the climate of terror created by Hitler’s regime. The accompanying paper trail that shows bills of sale, liquidation papers and letters, they add, was later fabricated or distorted to mask illicit dealings.
MoMA, which obtained the two oil paintings and the watercolor at different times in the early 1950s, has said it was unaware of any doubts about the chain of ownership. Grosz himself saw the portrait of Herrmann-Neisse hanging on the museum’s walls in 1953, and wrote to his brother-in-law, “Modern Museum exhibits a painting stolen from me (I am powerless against that) they bought it from someone, who stole it.” Grosz, who died in 1959, never contacted the museum about regaining possession, however.
To his heirs the letter is proof that the painting was stolen; to the Modern, it is evidence that Grosz himself passed up opportunities to ask for his art within a reasonable time.
In any case, MoMA has argued, Martin Grosz and Lilian Grosz missed the deadline to file a lawsuit. Under New York law, claimants have three years to sue after their request for the return of their property is rejected.
The first formal request from the Groszes for the works came in November 2003. MoMA says it researched the provenance with scholars from Yale. In July 2005 the museum’s director, Glenn D. Lowry, wrote to the Groszes’ representative that evidence challenging the museum’s ownership was unpersuasive and that the transfers were not forced.
Mr. Lowry’s letter, the museum says, started the clock ticking. The family members, however, argue that Mr. Lowry told them that only the museum trustees could make a final decision, and the Groszes say that they were still negotiating with the museum until April 2006, when the museum board rejected their claim. In their view the board’s vote is what started the clock, and so their lawsuit, filed on April 10, 2009, would have fallen within the allotted three-year period.
Charles A. Goldstein, counsel to the Commission for Art Recovery, said “the museum strung along” the Groszes, holding out the possibility of a settlement while the clock ran out. “The museum was dead wrong,” he said.
During the Nazi regime about 100,000 artworks were looted from public and private collections, including forced sales. To address some of the issues such looting raised, the United States and more than 40 other nations adopted the 1998 Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, and the 2009 Terezin Declaration, which urge nations to decide claims “on the facts and merits” and to take historical circumstances into account when legal hurdles arise. American policymakers have frequently urged other countries to abide by these agreements.
In a keynote address at the Terezin conference, held in the Czech Republic, the leader of the United States delegation, Stuart E. Eizenstat, said he was concerned about the tendency to seek refuge in “technical defenses,” including the statutes of limitations.
Some lawyers who have represented MoMA and other museums in unrelated cases say that laws regarding time limits are not merely technical, but also speak to the question of whether it is possible to reconstruct an accurate historical record after a long lapse. Automatically giving claimants the benefit of the doubt can unfairly penalize honest and rightful owners, said Jo Backer Laird, a lawyer at Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler, a New York firm that represents MoMA and other museums but is not currently involved in any restitution cases.
Mr. Goldstein of the Commission for Art Recovery counters that given stated United States policy on the issue, museums and the courts should respect the 1998 and 2009 agreements. “The statute of limitations was never intended to cover something like wartime mass pillaging of property,” he said.
Monday, August 29, 2011
Guest commentary: Efforts to reclaim Nazi-looted art undermined in court
From the Detroit Free Press: Guest commentary: Efforts to reclaim Nazi-looted art undermined in court
The U.S. Justice Department seems bent on undermining decades of efforts to secure a modicum of justice for Holocaust survivors and their heirs, at least with respect to Nazi-looted art.
Inexplicably, the Justice Department asked the U.S. Supreme Court to deny a rehearing of Von Saher v. Norton Simon Museum of Art at Pasadena, in which the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that California was powerless to extend the statute of limitations for claims involving Nazi-looted art. The Supreme Court in June did as it was asked and declined to take the case.
State laws have been the cornerstone of Holocaust-related restitution claims. J. Christian Kennedy, former State Department special envoy for Holocaust issues, noted four years ago there is "no specific role for the federal government in the art restitution process."
But in Von Saher, the 9th Circuit ruled: "It is beyond dispute that there was no role for individual states to play in the restitution of Nazi-looted assets during and immediately after the war." It reached its conclusion by overlooking traditional federalism and states' rights principles. It also undermined the work of the World War II Army Monuments Men (and Women), who risked their lives to secure Nazi-looted art in the expectation that it would be returned to its owners.
After World War II, Jack B. Tate, U.S. Department of State acting legal adviser, in 1949 expressed to the Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit that it was the "policy of the executive" with respect to Holocaust-era property claims "to relieve American courts from any restraint upon the exercise of their jurisdiction to pass upon the validity of the acts of Nazi officials."
Even during World War II, the State Department issued warnings to those trafficking in Nazi-looted art that a day of reckoning would come. Ardelia Hall proclaimed in the Department of State Bulletin in 1951: "For the first time in history, restitution may be expected to continue for as long as works of art known to have been plundered during a war continue to be rediscovered."
In 2009, the Terezin Declaration, signed by 46 nations, proclaimed that public and private institutions should "ensure that their legal systems or alternative processes ... facilitate just and fair solutions with regard to Nazi-confiscated and looted art, and to make certain that claims to recover such art are resolved expeditiously and based on the facts and merits of the claims."
This was necessary in no small part because some of our most prestigious museums have been duping judges into fearing intrusion upon the executive's foreign affairs domain if they were to proceed in resolving disputes of World War II-related cases dealing with looted art.
The State Department, under the leadership of Stuart Eizenstat, also led the world to adopt the Washington Principles, encouraging re-examination of collections and the restitution of tainted art in 1998. Museums have been defeating claims in court based on technical defenses.
By maintaining that California was powerless to extend its statute of limitations to permit continuations of Nazi-looted art claims, the Justice Department sided with the museums to conjure up a nonexistent looming foreign affairs problem surrounding adjudication of a claim to a painting hanging on a wall in Pasadena.
The government of the Netherlands, the only government that could be directly affected by the case, has even stated that it has no issue with U.S. adjudication. The Supreme Court has rejected almost every claim ever presented to it that federal policy somehow preempts state law.
The U.S. Supreme Court should not have destroyed California's attempt at fundamental fairness for Holocaust survivors by discouraging further claims. Hope is dwindling for the power of state law to act as the cornerstone of restitution in this country.
The U.S. Justice Department seems bent on undermining decades of efforts to secure a modicum of justice for Holocaust survivors and their heirs, at least with respect to Nazi-looted art.
Inexplicably, the Justice Department asked the U.S. Supreme Court to deny a rehearing of Von Saher v. Norton Simon Museum of Art at Pasadena, in which the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that California was powerless to extend the statute of limitations for claims involving Nazi-looted art. The Supreme Court in June did as it was asked and declined to take the case.
State laws have been the cornerstone of Holocaust-related restitution claims. J. Christian Kennedy, former State Department special envoy for Holocaust issues, noted four years ago there is "no specific role for the federal government in the art restitution process."
But in Von Saher, the 9th Circuit ruled: "It is beyond dispute that there was no role for individual states to play in the restitution of Nazi-looted assets during and immediately after the war." It reached its conclusion by overlooking traditional federalism and states' rights principles. It also undermined the work of the World War II Army Monuments Men (and Women), who risked their lives to secure Nazi-looted art in the expectation that it would be returned to its owners.
After World War II, Jack B. Tate, U.S. Department of State acting legal adviser, in 1949 expressed to the Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit that it was the "policy of the executive" with respect to Holocaust-era property claims "to relieve American courts from any restraint upon the exercise of their jurisdiction to pass upon the validity of the acts of Nazi officials."
Even during World War II, the State Department issued warnings to those trafficking in Nazi-looted art that a day of reckoning would come. Ardelia Hall proclaimed in the Department of State Bulletin in 1951: "For the first time in history, restitution may be expected to continue for as long as works of art known to have been plundered during a war continue to be rediscovered."
In 2009, the Terezin Declaration, signed by 46 nations, proclaimed that public and private institutions should "ensure that their legal systems or alternative processes ... facilitate just and fair solutions with regard to Nazi-confiscated and looted art, and to make certain that claims to recover such art are resolved expeditiously and based on the facts and merits of the claims."
This was necessary in no small part because some of our most prestigious museums have been duping judges into fearing intrusion upon the executive's foreign affairs domain if they were to proceed in resolving disputes of World War II-related cases dealing with looted art.
The State Department, under the leadership of Stuart Eizenstat, also led the world to adopt the Washington Principles, encouraging re-examination of collections and the restitution of tainted art in 1998. Museums have been defeating claims in court based on technical defenses.
By maintaining that California was powerless to extend its statute of limitations to permit continuations of Nazi-looted art claims, the Justice Department sided with the museums to conjure up a nonexistent looming foreign affairs problem surrounding adjudication of a claim to a painting hanging on a wall in Pasadena.
The government of the Netherlands, the only government that could be directly affected by the case, has even stated that it has no issue with U.S. adjudication. The Supreme Court has rejected almost every claim ever presented to it that federal policy somehow preempts state law.
The U.S. Supreme Court should not have destroyed California's attempt at fundamental fairness for Holocaust survivors by discouraging further claims. Hope is dwindling for the power of state law to act as the cornerstone of restitution in this country.
Sweet success for Steve Berry
From The Star Online: Sweet success for Steve Berry
Success came slowly but surely for bestselling American author, Steve Berry.
ALTHOUGH every new book of his appears on bestseller lists everywhere from Malaysia to New York, thriller writer Steve Berry likes to say that he does not know much about writing.
“But I’m an expert on rejection,” the 56-year-old adds in his good-humoured drawl, on the phone from his home in St Augustine, Florida.
He explains that he wrote eight manuscripts and had his work dismissed 85 times in total before one story was picked up and published by Ballantine Books in 2002.
That novel was The Amber Room, a tale of art heists and war history. It was followed by nine others, all blending historical fact and heaps of imagination.
Seven of the books star Berry’s popular character, Cotton Malone, a Copenhagen-based rare-book dealer. Berry describes him as an alter ego who gets to do things his creator has not had the chance to try, including firing guns and jumping out of planes. Both collect old books – Berry has more than 1,000 – have a son in his teens, and are “lousy with women”, he jokes.
The latest in the Malone series, The Jefferson Key, is now available in major bookstores in Malaysia. A tale of modern-day piracy and old-school action, the book has had regular spots on The New York Times’ bestseller list since it was published in May.
At first glance, it seems that Berry and his creation have a lot in common with thriller king Dan Brown and his fictional creation Robert Langdon, who is regularly embroiled in historical mystery. Asked about this, Berry responds humbly and happily.
“I’m fine with the comparison. I was a fan long before The Da Vinci Code,” he says, of Brown’s 2003 mega hit. “If it wasn’t for Dan Brown and what he did by publishing The Da Vinci Code, I wouldn’t be here. That book brought the thriller genre back to life.”
In fact, he adds, if he sees a Brown book in a store window, he always pauses to pay his respects. “I stop and I bow. You must pay homage to the Da Vinci!” Like his hero Brown, Berry began writing in the 1990s, but it took him much longer to get published.
After graduating with a law degree from Mercer University in Georgia in the United States, he practised divorce law and, later, criminal law, married and raised a family. But in his 30s, he says, “a little voice in my head started telling me to write books”.
So, every day he would write stories from dawn to breakfast, before either his first wife or three children got up.
“I was 35 years old when I wrote my first book. It was horrible. I wrote a second book – it was horrible. Then I wrote my third book,” he pauses suggestively, “and it was also horrible!”
Finally, he joined a writers’ group in nearby Jacksonville, an hour’s drive away from his then home in Atlanta, Georgia, and the feedback he received over the next six years helped him polish his manuscripts enough for publication.
“I quit three times, but that little voice in your head keeps driving you and nags you and annoys you,” he says.
Now he teaches writing to aspiring authors and the lesson always includes these words: never give up.
Berry spends up to 18 months on every novel and a third of the time is usually research. He reads extensively, consulting perhaps 300 sources for every book and also likes to travel to the locations his characters find themselves in.
He flew to Russia for The Amber Room and France for The Templar Legacy (2006), the first Cotton Malone book. While he failed to find time to head to China for last year’s The Emperor’s Tomb, he had “eyes and ears on the ground” and got regular reports from a friend who visited the country for three weeks.
The next Malone novel is slated for 2013, while Berry is now working on a standalone, which will star a disgraced newspaper reporter.
“Cotton called me on the phone and asked if he could have a year off,” he says in explanation, though clearly it is he who needs the break!
He has no plans to do a John Grisham and write legal thrillers for a change of pace, saying: “I do not adhere to the philosophy that you should write what you know. Write what you love.”
And what he loves is history. His fees from teaching and lecture tours are channelled into History Matters, a non-profit society he founded with his second wife, Elizabeth. They raise funds to preserve historical artefacts, whether art, writing or memorabilia. Most recently, they helped the Bridgeport History Centre raise funds to preserve 19th-century posters.
“History matters,” says Berry. “Without knowing where we’re coming from, we have no clue where we’re going. History is critical in that regard.” – The Straits Times, Singapore/Asia News Network.
Success came slowly but surely for bestselling American author, Steve Berry.
ALTHOUGH every new book of his appears on bestseller lists everywhere from Malaysia to New York, thriller writer Steve Berry likes to say that he does not know much about writing.
“But I’m an expert on rejection,” the 56-year-old adds in his good-humoured drawl, on the phone from his home in St Augustine, Florida.
He explains that he wrote eight manuscripts and had his work dismissed 85 times in total before one story was picked up and published by Ballantine Books in 2002.
That novel was The Amber Room, a tale of art heists and war history. It was followed by nine others, all blending historical fact and heaps of imagination.
Seven of the books star Berry’s popular character, Cotton Malone, a Copenhagen-based rare-book dealer. Berry describes him as an alter ego who gets to do things his creator has not had the chance to try, including firing guns and jumping out of planes. Both collect old books – Berry has more than 1,000 – have a son in his teens, and are “lousy with women”, he jokes.
The latest in the Malone series, The Jefferson Key, is now available in major bookstores in Malaysia. A tale of modern-day piracy and old-school action, the book has had regular spots on The New York Times’ bestseller list since it was published in May.
At first glance, it seems that Berry and his creation have a lot in common with thriller king Dan Brown and his fictional creation Robert Langdon, who is regularly embroiled in historical mystery. Asked about this, Berry responds humbly and happily.
“I’m fine with the comparison. I was a fan long before The Da Vinci Code,” he says, of Brown’s 2003 mega hit. “If it wasn’t for Dan Brown and what he did by publishing The Da Vinci Code, I wouldn’t be here. That book brought the thriller genre back to life.”
In fact, he adds, if he sees a Brown book in a store window, he always pauses to pay his respects. “I stop and I bow. You must pay homage to the Da Vinci!” Like his hero Brown, Berry began writing in the 1990s, but it took him much longer to get published.
After graduating with a law degree from Mercer University in Georgia in the United States, he practised divorce law and, later, criminal law, married and raised a family. But in his 30s, he says, “a little voice in my head started telling me to write books”.
So, every day he would write stories from dawn to breakfast, before either his first wife or three children got up.
“I was 35 years old when I wrote my first book. It was horrible. I wrote a second book – it was horrible. Then I wrote my third book,” he pauses suggestively, “and it was also horrible!”
Finally, he joined a writers’ group in nearby Jacksonville, an hour’s drive away from his then home in Atlanta, Georgia, and the feedback he received over the next six years helped him polish his manuscripts enough for publication.
“I quit three times, but that little voice in your head keeps driving you and nags you and annoys you,” he says.
Now he teaches writing to aspiring authors and the lesson always includes these words: never give up.
Berry spends up to 18 months on every novel and a third of the time is usually research. He reads extensively, consulting perhaps 300 sources for every book and also likes to travel to the locations his characters find themselves in.
He flew to Russia for The Amber Room and France for The Templar Legacy (2006), the first Cotton Malone book. While he failed to find time to head to China for last year’s The Emperor’s Tomb, he had “eyes and ears on the ground” and got regular reports from a friend who visited the country for three weeks.
The next Malone novel is slated for 2013, while Berry is now working on a standalone, which will star a disgraced newspaper reporter.
“Cotton called me on the phone and asked if he could have a year off,” he says in explanation, though clearly it is he who needs the break!
He has no plans to do a John Grisham and write legal thrillers for a change of pace, saying: “I do not adhere to the philosophy that you should write what you know. Write what you love.”
And what he loves is history. His fees from teaching and lecture tours are channelled into History Matters, a non-profit society he founded with his second wife, Elizabeth. They raise funds to preserve historical artefacts, whether art, writing or memorabilia. Most recently, they helped the Bridgeport History Centre raise funds to preserve 19th-century posters.
“History matters,” says Berry. “Without knowing where we’re coming from, we have no clue where we’re going. History is critical in that regard.” – The Straits Times, Singapore/Asia News Network.
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Dutch city settles with Greenwich woman on Nazi-looted Jan Steen painting
From Greenwich Time.com: Dutch city settles with Greenwich woman on Nazi-looted Jan Steen painting
AMSTERDAM -- Lawyers for a Greenwich woman, the U.S. heir of a Jewish art dealer who lost many paintings while fleeing the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, say she has settled with The Hague municipality on a valuable work by Jan Steen.
The lawyers say Marei von Saher will receive €1 million ($1.4 million) and donate her share in the painting "The Marriage of Tobias and Sarah" to a Hague museum.
The piece has an unusual history: it was cut in two before the war and painstakingly restored in the 1990s -- before von Saher's claim to the larger part was established by the Dutch state in 2006. The smaller right side, which depicted the Archangel Raphael, was owned by The Hague. The two fragments were reunited by restorers in 1996.
"Both parties had agreed that they did not want to see the painting divided again," Von Saher's lawyers, Herrick, Feinstein LLP in New York, said in a statement. "The settlement resolves the dispute without separating the painting's two parts."
The painting will be displayed at the Museum Bredius in memory of von Saher's father-in-law, Jacques Goudstikker, the Netherlands' most prominent art dealer in the 1930s.
City spokeswoman Esther Andoetoe confirmed the settlement Monday.
Art historians in The Hague noticed that on the left side of the painting, which belonged to Goudstikker, the tips of the archangel's wings are visible in the top-right corner. This proved that the two fragments belonged to the same painting. The museum says that the pieces that have been reconciled are probably still only the center of a much larger painting.
Though the Dutch government agreed to return its part of "The Wedding Night of Tobias and Sarah" in 2006, the prior joining of the two separated fragments led to a dispute over who should get the complete painting. The two parties began negotiating a settlement more than two years ago.
Marjolein de Jong, deputy mayor in charge of culture in The Hague, wrote in a statement sent by e-mail that the agreed price is lower than Von Saher's initial demands for 1.8 million euros and said the accord "helps preserve the painting for The Hague and future generations."
The Dutch government and Mondriaan Foundation will contribute 400,000 euros toward the settlement, according to Esther Andoetoe, a spokeswoman for The Hague. The Rembrandt Association will pay 200,000 euros, the cultural budget of The Hague will fund 92,000 euros and 308,000 euros comes from insurance money for the loss of two other paintings, she said.
Steen was born in the Dutch city of Leiden in 1625. He painted Bible subjects, landscapes and portraits and left about 800 paintings.
Artworks returned to Von Saher from Dutch museums include pieces by Salomon van Ruysdael, Filippo Lippi and others by Steen. She also has recovered more than 30 works from museums in other countries, including the United States, Germany and Israel.
Goudstikker left about 1,400 artworks in his gallery when he escaped Amsterdam in 1940 on a cargo boat with his wife and baby son. He died during the crossing and his gallery was looted. In 2006, the Dutch government returned 202 works from the national collection to Goudstikker's sole heir, von Saher.
The Bruce Museum in Greenwich displayed more than two dozen of the paintings in the 2008 exhibit, "Reclaimed: Paintings from the Collection of Jacques Goudstikker."
Adolf Hitler's right-hand man in the Nazi party, Hermann Goering, looted the gallery weeks after Goudstikker fled Amsterdam and used the booty to decorate his opulent country estate outside Berlin.
After World War II and the liberation of Nazi-occupied Netherlands, the Allies handed recovered works back to the Dutch government for restitution to the original owners. Those not returned immediately after the war became part of the national collection.
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Nazi looted art: from the Amber Room to Raphael's Portrait of a Young Man
From The Telegraph: Nazi looted art: from the Amber Room to Raphael's Portrait of a Young Man
As Nazi Germany conquered most of continental Europe its forces went on a monumental looting spree, taking an estimated 20 per cent of all European art. Some of the work taken was never seen again.
The Amber Room. Once dubbed the "eighth wonder of the world" the room was a chamber clad entirely with gold-backed amber panels. Dismantled by the Germans from a palace near St Petersburg the priceless amber vanished in the chaos of war. Its possible whereabouts is still the subject of widespread speculation and investigation.
Raphael's Portrait of a Young Man was discovered by German forces found hidden in the Polish city of Kraków for safekeeping. Kept by Hans Frank, the governor-general of Nazi occupied Poland, the painting disappeared in 1945. Art experts say if the work resurfaced today it could fetch over £60 million at auction.
Painter on the Road to Tarascon. A self-portrait by Vincent van Gogh the painting is believed to have been destroyed by allied bombing during the war while stashed in a museum for stolen art although its exact fate was never confirmed.
British POWs 'murdered after being forced to hide Nazi artwork down coal mine'
Documents indicate that in December 1944 under orders from Hans Frank, the infamous governor-general of occupied Poland, POWs from a camp near Auschwitz carried the mysterious crated cargo 300 metres below ground at a mine near the southern town of Bytom, and were then shot.
"We have information and documents which say that at least a thousand prisoners of different nationalities, including British, French, Belgians and others were involved," said Dariusz Psiuch, from the Institute of National Remembrance, the Polish body charged with investigating wartime and communist era crimes.
"They were forced labourers," he added. "We are not dealing with the treasure. We are looking for evidence of a war crime which probably took place."
Researchers believe the bodies were dumped at the bottom of the mine shaft after being killed to ensure they took whatever they knew about the cargo to their graves. They hope any bones, skeletons or clothing fragments found will help identify victims.
But the investigation has been hampered by possibility that the Germans might have rigged booby traps, and by the perilous condition of the mine, which has lain abandoned since the end of the war.
"It's very dangerous because water is pouring down like a waterfall," said local climber Michal Maksalon, who made one decent. "I went down 170 metres, and after that the rock turns to concrete and I can't see any way through."
Exactly what the Germans may have taken such great pains to hide down the mine remains subject to speculation. Historians suggest that with the Red Army grinding Hitler's forces backwards, top Nazis may have constructed a type of safety deposit box underground to stash works of art and gold plundered from museums and private homes across central and eastern Europe.
As Nazi Germany conquered most of continental Europe its forces went on a monumental looting spree, taking an estimated 20 per cent of all European art. Some of the work taken was never seen again.
The Amber Room. Once dubbed the "eighth wonder of the world" the room was a chamber clad entirely with gold-backed amber panels. Dismantled by the Germans from a palace near St Petersburg the priceless amber vanished in the chaos of war. Its possible whereabouts is still the subject of widespread speculation and investigation.
Raphael's Portrait of a Young Man was discovered by German forces found hidden in the Polish city of Kraków for safekeeping. Kept by Hans Frank, the governor-general of Nazi occupied Poland, the painting disappeared in 1945. Art experts say if the work resurfaced today it could fetch over £60 million at auction.
Painter on the Road to Tarascon. A self-portrait by Vincent van Gogh the painting is believed to have been destroyed by allied bombing during the war while stashed in a museum for stolen art although its exact fate was never confirmed.
British POWs 'murdered after being forced to hide Nazi artwork down coal mine'
Documents indicate that in December 1944 under orders from Hans Frank, the infamous governor-general of occupied Poland, POWs from a camp near Auschwitz carried the mysterious crated cargo 300 metres below ground at a mine near the southern town of Bytom, and were then shot.
"We have information and documents which say that at least a thousand prisoners of different nationalities, including British, French, Belgians and others were involved," said Dariusz Psiuch, from the Institute of National Remembrance, the Polish body charged with investigating wartime and communist era crimes.
"They were forced labourers," he added. "We are not dealing with the treasure. We are looking for evidence of a war crime which probably took place."
Researchers believe the bodies were dumped at the bottom of the mine shaft after being killed to ensure they took whatever they knew about the cargo to their graves. They hope any bones, skeletons or clothing fragments found will help identify victims.
But the investigation has been hampered by possibility that the Germans might have rigged booby traps, and by the perilous condition of the mine, which has lain abandoned since the end of the war.
"It's very dangerous because water is pouring down like a waterfall," said local climber Michal Maksalon, who made one decent. "I went down 170 metres, and after that the rock turns to concrete and I can't see any way through."
Exactly what the Germans may have taken such great pains to hide down the mine remains subject to speculation. Historians suggest that with the Red Army grinding Hitler's forces backwards, top Nazis may have constructed a type of safety deposit box underground to stash works of art and gold plundered from museums and private homes across central and eastern Europe.
Friday, August 19, 2011
Collaging Kurt Schwitters
From Bay Area Reporter: Collaging Kurt Schwitters
A tinkerer, a maker, designer, poet, an anthology of art history and a one-man industry: all of these describe German painter/collage artist Kurt Schwitters, whose work seems remarkably familiar if only because he's so often been copied by his inheritors and those he influenced, like Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Ellsworth Kelly and Damien Hirst, to name just a few. Enduring cataclysmic world events that would dampen anyone's avant-garde, utopian idealism, Schwitters emerged from the ruins of WWI, and later, WWII, collecting detritus from the ashes of bombed-out buildings, and signs of life left behind by those who had moved on. He was a scavenger par excellence, a crucial qualification for an oeuvre he made up as he went along.
Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage, now at the Berkeley Art Museum, is the first major overview of the artist's work in the U.S. since 1985. It presents 75 assemblages, sculptures and collages, dating from 1918 to 1947, as well as an intriguing reconstruction of his life's work, an installation destroyed in an Allied bombing raid – but more on that later.
His collages, executed with an astute compositional eye, are an expression of the dissonant collision of information and experience endemic to modern life, a phenomenon that's only accelerated in the digital age. Schwitters' keen ability to balance disparate elements is evident, right from the start, in two of his earliest pieces created in 1918, "Zeichnung, A3" and "Zeichnung A6."
An original thinker with a provocative spirit, Schwitters explored and dabbled in many artistic and intellectual movements, including Russian Constructivism, Dadaism and Expressionism, but, like Picasso, another notorious iconoclast, he neither wholly subscribed to nor obeyed the rules of any of them. It was said he comported himself like a member of the petite-bourgeoisie, but when he opened his mouth, he was "totally Dada."
For his abstract compositions with paper, Schwitters borrowed, interpreted and exercised his stated aim "to erase the boundaries between the arts," by incorporating painting, typography, poetry, phrases, architecture, and words lifted from unfinished sentences. He collected found materials like train tickets, scraps of paper, advertisements, posters, wire mesh and other discarded objects, and applied a loose, fluid paste, then arranged them and let them set. Sometimes he drew or painted on his works like one inscribed and dedicated to Henry Cowell, an avant-garde Berkeley musician and student of John Cage, who toured Europe. That collage, which has an intricate structure worthy of a musical score, is owned by Jasper Johns.
Though works such as "Pink Collage" (1940), a combination of geometric shapes, jagged edges, tissue papers, and muted, washed-out colors, achieve a near-perfect harmony, the appeal of Schwitters' work is primarily cerebral. One senses control rather than contained emotion at play. Beauty is not necessarily the point – evoking associations and making connections is the goal. The collages and even the sleek contours of the pale beech wood sculptures he made in Norway, which reflect a filtered Scandinavian aesthetic, can be like a Rorschach test for viewers, who will be compelled to identify images from the slivers Schwitters supplies, and speculate about their origins.
By the early 1930s, Schwitters gained recognition among collectors and museum curators in both Europe and the U.S., but that exposure, while gratifying, had the unfortunate effect of bringing him to the attention of the Gestapo. He was paid the backhanded compliment of inclusion in the Nazis' notorious hall of shame, the 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition, and fled Germany the same year for the relative safety of Norway. After the Nazis invaded that country, he departed for the Lake District outside London, where his studio was bombed. One step ahead of disaster, war seemed to follow him.
Don't leave the exhibition without going downstairs and visiting a full-sized replica of the artist's lifetime obsession, "Merzbau," a "living" sculptural/architectural installation. The original, which was in Hanover and occupied six rooms of his parents' spacious residence, was destroyed in 1943. Schwitters created four "Merzbau" installations, one in each of the countries he lived; they either didn't survive or were never finished. Once inside the reconstruction by Swiss stage designer Peter Bissegger, you've entered a cross between a white-on-white, Euro-modern studio apartment with color block accents, and a garret with high ceilings that Schwitters dubbed the "Cathedral of Erotic Misery," which contains hidden alcoves called the "Murderers' Cave" or "Goethe Grotto." Portraits, busts and illustrations pop up in surprising places, and there's even a spiral staircase to the "Nest." Schwitters envisioned "Merzbau" as a mutating, evolving space where memories and events could be assembled and transformed into abstract art – a walk-in collage.
Through November 27 at the Berkeley Art Museum.
A tinkerer, a maker, designer, poet, an anthology of art history and a one-man industry: all of these describe German painter/collage artist Kurt Schwitters, whose work seems remarkably familiar if only because he's so often been copied by his inheritors and those he influenced, like Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Ellsworth Kelly and Damien Hirst, to name just a few. Enduring cataclysmic world events that would dampen anyone's avant-garde, utopian idealism, Schwitters emerged from the ruins of WWI, and later, WWII, collecting detritus from the ashes of bombed-out buildings, and signs of life left behind by those who had moved on. He was a scavenger par excellence, a crucial qualification for an oeuvre he made up as he went along.
Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage, now at the Berkeley Art Museum, is the first major overview of the artist's work in the U.S. since 1985. It presents 75 assemblages, sculptures and collages, dating from 1918 to 1947, as well as an intriguing reconstruction of his life's work, an installation destroyed in an Allied bombing raid – but more on that later.
His collages, executed with an astute compositional eye, are an expression of the dissonant collision of information and experience endemic to modern life, a phenomenon that's only accelerated in the digital age. Schwitters' keen ability to balance disparate elements is evident, right from the start, in two of his earliest pieces created in 1918, "Zeichnung, A3" and "Zeichnung A6."
An original thinker with a provocative spirit, Schwitters explored and dabbled in many artistic and intellectual movements, including Russian Constructivism, Dadaism and Expressionism, but, like Picasso, another notorious iconoclast, he neither wholly subscribed to nor obeyed the rules of any of them. It was said he comported himself like a member of the petite-bourgeoisie, but when he opened his mouth, he was "totally Dada."
For his abstract compositions with paper, Schwitters borrowed, interpreted and exercised his stated aim "to erase the boundaries between the arts," by incorporating painting, typography, poetry, phrases, architecture, and words lifted from unfinished sentences. He collected found materials like train tickets, scraps of paper, advertisements, posters, wire mesh and other discarded objects, and applied a loose, fluid paste, then arranged them and let them set. Sometimes he drew or painted on his works like one inscribed and dedicated to Henry Cowell, an avant-garde Berkeley musician and student of John Cage, who toured Europe. That collage, which has an intricate structure worthy of a musical score, is owned by Jasper Johns.
Though works such as "Pink Collage" (1940), a combination of geometric shapes, jagged edges, tissue papers, and muted, washed-out colors, achieve a near-perfect harmony, the appeal of Schwitters' work is primarily cerebral. One senses control rather than contained emotion at play. Beauty is not necessarily the point – evoking associations and making connections is the goal. The collages and even the sleek contours of the pale beech wood sculptures he made in Norway, which reflect a filtered Scandinavian aesthetic, can be like a Rorschach test for viewers, who will be compelled to identify images from the slivers Schwitters supplies, and speculate about their origins.
By the early 1930s, Schwitters gained recognition among collectors and museum curators in both Europe and the U.S., but that exposure, while gratifying, had the unfortunate effect of bringing him to the attention of the Gestapo. He was paid the backhanded compliment of inclusion in the Nazis' notorious hall of shame, the 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition, and fled Germany the same year for the relative safety of Norway. After the Nazis invaded that country, he departed for the Lake District outside London, where his studio was bombed. One step ahead of disaster, war seemed to follow him.
Don't leave the exhibition without going downstairs and visiting a full-sized replica of the artist's lifetime obsession, "Merzbau," a "living" sculptural/architectural installation. The original, which was in Hanover and occupied six rooms of his parents' spacious residence, was destroyed in 1943. Schwitters created four "Merzbau" installations, one in each of the countries he lived; they either didn't survive or were never finished. Once inside the reconstruction by Swiss stage designer Peter Bissegger, you've entered a cross between a white-on-white, Euro-modern studio apartment with color block accents, and a garret with high ceilings that Schwitters dubbed the "Cathedral of Erotic Misery," which contains hidden alcoves called the "Murderers' Cave" or "Goethe Grotto." Portraits, busts and illustrations pop up in surprising places, and there's even a spiral staircase to the "Nest." Schwitters envisioned "Merzbau" as a mutating, evolving space where memories and events could be assembled and transformed into abstract art – a walk-in collage.
Through November 27 at the Berkeley Art Museum.
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Horror and heroics of WW2 star at new exhibition in Chicago
From the Vancouver Sun (July 31, 2011): Horror and heroics of WW2 star at new exhibition in Chicago
The horrors and heroism of World War Two are given a fresh look in an Art Institute of Chicago exhibition of rediscovered Soviet propaganda posters, which depict Hitler as blood-thirsty, anxious and perverse.
One poster in the "Windows on the War" exhibition, opening to the public on Sunday, features a caricature of a worried Hitler hiding a crude hand gesture under his cap while Joseph Goebbels orates nervously.
Another poster produced by Moscow's TASS studios depicts a fearsome, wolf-like Nazi drooling as Allied bombs fall; and another depicts heroic partisans blowing up a Nazi supply train and firing at escaping soldiers.
"Despite the tyranny of Stalin, creativity flourished" in the former Soviet Union as artists felt motivated to contribute to the war effort, said Jill Bugajski of the Art Institute, one of the curators of the exhibition of some 250 posters, paintings and mementos that continues through October 23.
PEN, BRUSH, BAYONET
"I want the pen to be on par with the bayonet," wrote poet and poster contributor Vladimir Mahakovsky, who wrote captions and poems that adorned the posters.
A cache of the now-brittle posters were discovered in 1997 sitting on a shelf in one of the Art Institute's storage closets during a renovation. Two paper rolls and 26 parcels containing the forgotten works were unfolded, restored and some placed behind plexiglass for the exhibition.
Three hundred artists and writers produced some 1,400 poster designs in Moscow's TASS' studios, which was part of the telegraph and news agency.
Using up to 60 stencils for each poster to layer still-bright paint on cheap newsprint, many of the 800,000 TASS posters produced were lost or forgotten.
They were intended to "create a mood of urgency while visually aggrandizing the Soviet solder, defining the Nazi enemy as vile and subhuman, and emphasizing the woeful suffering of the Soviet people," museum exhibitors said.
Inspired by the prewar mocking of "degenerate art" by the Nazis, who also put on an anti-Bolshevik art exhibition, the Soviet artists took liberties with Communist "social realism" to create shocking, sometimes humorous, images.
The hand-painted posters were distributed to newspapers, museums, libraries and "Russian friendship" societies around the world by the Soviet propaganda operation, the USSR Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries.
Frequently placed in the vacant windows of war-time shops and reprinted in newspapers, the posters have been largely forgotten since the war, curators said.
Each illustration had its purpose, which seems distant now in light of the subsequent Cold War and today's up-and-down U.S.-Russia relations: reinforce the Anglo-Soviet alliance against Germany that was signed in September 1941, and lift recruitment and spirits among the beleaguered Allies.
The 157 posters selected for the show offer a diary of the war -- from crushing Soviet losses, to the defense of Stalingrad, to the defeat of Germany in 1945. Among them is a warning to Soviet soldiers that the punishment for retreating was death.
Also on view are haunting photographs of Soviet prisoners of war, and one of eight grimly violent, monumental "The Year of Peril" series of paintings by American artist Thomas Hart Benton.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
National Spirit of '45 Day brings forth a flood of personal stories
From the Philadelphia Inquirer: National Spirit of '45 Day brings forth a flood of personal stories
. . Clayton P. Graybill, Joseph Guizio Jr., Bernard V. Fite . . .
Their names are forever etched into the base of the Angel of the Resurrection at 30th Street Station, a memorial honoring more than 1,300 employees of the Pennsylvania Railroad who died in World War II.
WWII veterans - the country's "Greatest Generation" - were honored Sunday at a ceremony in front of the towering sculpture by Walker K. Hancock, also a veteran.
The observance was one of hundreds across the country, with Philadelphia hosting the official opening ceremony. A two-day tribute was held over the weekend on the Battleship New Jersey in Camden.
Last year, Congress declared the second Sunday of every August the National Spirit of '45 Day. This year it coincided with Aug. 14, 1945, when President Harry S. Truman announced the end of the war.
Warren Logan Sr., 85, remembers that day 66 years ago. The retired Amtrak supervisor was a young Navy gunner's mate aboard a ship passing through the Panama Canal, headed to fight in the Pacific. That's when he heard the war was over.
"There was a lot of relief," Logan said, waiting for Sunday's ceremony at the train station to begin. Men on the ship cheered when they heard the news, he said.
Logan, of Morrisville, was about 16 when he dropped out of high school, fibbed about his age, and followed his three brothers into service. He retired from Amtrak in 1988.
Of the 16 million WWII veterans, the youngest now in their 80s, approximately 1.98 million are still alive, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
As part of the tribute, a 50-foot-long banner decorated with 1,000 images of WWII veterans was on display.
One of the photos was of William Art "Otto" Bilger of Port Richmond, who was sitting in the crowd.
The Port Richmond native, now 90, said he helped ferry troops and supplies during the war. He saw action in Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge, and other big battles.
The baseball hat William Bilger wore was decorated with "bric-a-brac," the ribbons and pins he received for service as a radio operator aboard C-46 and C-47 aircraft during the war. He pointed out his discharge pin, a presidential citation, distinguished unit badge, and good conduct pin.
Bilger was at the ceremony to watch his son, Edward Bilger, deputy executive director of Buglers Across America, conduct the band.
A featured speaker, Deanie Hancock French, 64, of Gloucester, Mass., daughter of sculptor Walker Hancock, spoke about her father's statue and his lifelong love of art. She grew up looking at the plaster casts of the angel holding a fallen soldier that were kept in her father's studio. It was her father's experience in WWII that inspired the sculpture, she said.
"He couldn't have done this, it wouldn't have been so eloquent," she said.
Hancock was one of the Monuments Men, a group charged with retrieving priceless art looted by the Nazis. Their efforts are chronicled in the documentary Rape of Europa.
Near the end of the war, Hancock went to Siegen, Germany, in search of art. He learned the townspeople had been living in a cave with the art treasures. In a tense situation, her father entered the cavern. A young German boy walked over and took his hand, Hancock French said.
"That broke the ice," she said.
After the ceremony, Edward Bilger went up to Hancock French to thank her for telling her father's story.
"Everyone has a big story," she said of the veterans.
. . . Miles Cleland, Frank J. Catania, Paul A. Bennett . . .
. . Clayton P. Graybill, Joseph Guizio Jr., Bernard V. Fite . . .
Their names are forever etched into the base of the Angel of the Resurrection at 30th Street Station, a memorial honoring more than 1,300 employees of the Pennsylvania Railroad who died in World War II.
WWII veterans - the country's "Greatest Generation" - were honored Sunday at a ceremony in front of the towering sculpture by Walker K. Hancock, also a veteran.
The observance was one of hundreds across the country, with Philadelphia hosting the official opening ceremony. A two-day tribute was held over the weekend on the Battleship New Jersey in Camden.
Last year, Congress declared the second Sunday of every August the National Spirit of '45 Day. This year it coincided with Aug. 14, 1945, when President Harry S. Truman announced the end of the war.
Warren Logan Sr., 85, remembers that day 66 years ago. The retired Amtrak supervisor was a young Navy gunner's mate aboard a ship passing through the Panama Canal, headed to fight in the Pacific. That's when he heard the war was over.
"There was a lot of relief," Logan said, waiting for Sunday's ceremony at the train station to begin. Men on the ship cheered when they heard the news, he said.
Logan, of Morrisville, was about 16 when he dropped out of high school, fibbed about his age, and followed his three brothers into service. He retired from Amtrak in 1988.
Of the 16 million WWII veterans, the youngest now in their 80s, approximately 1.98 million are still alive, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
As part of the tribute, a 50-foot-long banner decorated with 1,000 images of WWII veterans was on display.
One of the photos was of William Art "Otto" Bilger of Port Richmond, who was sitting in the crowd.
The Port Richmond native, now 90, said he helped ferry troops and supplies during the war. He saw action in Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge, and other big battles.
The baseball hat William Bilger wore was decorated with "bric-a-brac," the ribbons and pins he received for service as a radio operator aboard C-46 and C-47 aircraft during the war. He pointed out his discharge pin, a presidential citation, distinguished unit badge, and good conduct pin.
Bilger was at the ceremony to watch his son, Edward Bilger, deputy executive director of Buglers Across America, conduct the band.
A featured speaker, Deanie Hancock French, 64, of Gloucester, Mass., daughter of sculptor Walker Hancock, spoke about her father's statue and his lifelong love of art. She grew up looking at the plaster casts of the angel holding a fallen soldier that were kept in her father's studio. It was her father's experience in WWII that inspired the sculpture, she said.
"He couldn't have done this, it wouldn't have been so eloquent," she said.
Hancock was one of the Monuments Men, a group charged with retrieving priceless art looted by the Nazis. Their efforts are chronicled in the documentary Rape of Europa.
Near the end of the war, Hancock went to Siegen, Germany, in search of art. He learned the townspeople had been living in a cave with the art treasures. In a tense situation, her father entered the cavern. A young German boy walked over and took his hand, Hancock French said.
"That broke the ice," she said.
After the ceremony, Edward Bilger went up to Hancock French to thank her for telling her father's story.
"Everyone has a big story," she said of the veterans.
. . . Miles Cleland, Frank J. Catania, Paul A. Bennett . . .
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Heir Awarded $1.43 Million by Hague for Goering-Looted Part of Old Master
From Bloomberg: Heir Awarded $1.43 Million by Hague for Goering-Looted Part of Old Master
The Hague city government agreed to pay 1 million euros ($1.43 million) to the heir of a Jewish art dealer whose gallery was looted by Hermann Goering for part of a Jan Steen painting that was in fragments until 1996.
Jacques Goudstikker left about 1,400 artworks in his gallery when he escaped Amsterdam in 1940 on a cargo boat with his wife and baby son. He died during the crossing and his gallery was looted. In 2006, the Dutch government returned 202 works from the national collection to Goudstikker’s sole heir, his daughter-in-law Marei von Saher.
The Steen painting, “The Wedding Night of Tobias and Sarah,” now hangs in the Bredius Museum in The Hague. Before Goudstikker acquired the left side of the painting, it had been split into segments. The smaller right side, which depicted the Archangel Raphael, was owned by The Hague. The two fragments were reunited by restorers in 1996.
“Both parties had agreed that they did not want to see the painting divided again,” Von Saher’s lawyers, Herrick, Feinstein LLP in New York, said in a statement. “The settlement resolves the dispute without separating the painting’s two parts.”
Goering, Hitler’s right-hand man in the Nazi party, looted the gallery weeks after Goudstikker fled Amsterdam and used the booty to decorate his opulent country estate outside Berlin.
After World War II and the liberation of Nazi-occupied Netherlands, the Allies handed recovered works back to the Dutch government for restitution to the original owners. Those not returned immediately after the war became part of the national collection.
Wing Tips
Art historians in The Hague noticed that on the left side of the painting -- which belonged to Goudstikker -- the tips of the archangel’s wings are visible in the top right corner. This proved that the two fragments belonged to the same painting. The museum says that the pieces that have been reconciled are probably still only the center of a much larger painting.
Though the Dutch government agreed to return its part of “The Wedding Night of Tobias and Sarah” in 2006, the prior joining of the two separated fragments led to a dispute over who should get the complete painting. The two parties began negotiating a settlement more than two years ago.
Marjolein de Jong, deputy mayor in charge of culture in The Hague, wrote in a statement sent by e-mail that the agreed price is lower than Von Saher’s initial demands for 1.8 million euros and said the accord “helps preserve the painting for The Hague and future generations.”
Government Help
The Dutch government and Mondriaan Foundation will contribute 400,000 euros toward the settlement, according to Esther Andoetoe, a spokeswoman for The Hague. The Rembrandt Association will pay 200,000 euros. The cultural budget of The Hague will fund 92,000 euros and 308,000 euros comes from insurance money for the loss of two other paintings, she said.
Steen was born in the Dutch city of Leiden in 1625. He painted Bible subjects, landscapes and portraits and left about 800 paintings.
Artworks returned to Von Saher from Dutch museums include pieces by Salomon van Ruysdael, Filippo Lippi and others by Steen. She also has recovered more than 30 works from museums in other countries, including Germany and Israel.
The Hague city government agreed to pay 1 million euros ($1.43 million) to the heir of a Jewish art dealer whose gallery was looted by Hermann Goering for part of a Jan Steen painting that was in fragments until 1996.
Jacques Goudstikker left about 1,400 artworks in his gallery when he escaped Amsterdam in 1940 on a cargo boat with his wife and baby son. He died during the crossing and his gallery was looted. In 2006, the Dutch government returned 202 works from the national collection to Goudstikker’s sole heir, his daughter-in-law Marei von Saher.
The Steen painting, “The Wedding Night of Tobias and Sarah,” now hangs in the Bredius Museum in The Hague. Before Goudstikker acquired the left side of the painting, it had been split into segments. The smaller right side, which depicted the Archangel Raphael, was owned by The Hague. The two fragments were reunited by restorers in 1996.
“Both parties had agreed that they did not want to see the painting divided again,” Von Saher’s lawyers, Herrick, Feinstein LLP in New York, said in a statement. “The settlement resolves the dispute without separating the painting’s two parts.”
Goering, Hitler’s right-hand man in the Nazi party, looted the gallery weeks after Goudstikker fled Amsterdam and used the booty to decorate his opulent country estate outside Berlin.
After World War II and the liberation of Nazi-occupied Netherlands, the Allies handed recovered works back to the Dutch government for restitution to the original owners. Those not returned immediately after the war became part of the national collection.
Wing Tips
Art historians in The Hague noticed that on the left side of the painting -- which belonged to Goudstikker -- the tips of the archangel’s wings are visible in the top right corner. This proved that the two fragments belonged to the same painting. The museum says that the pieces that have been reconciled are probably still only the center of a much larger painting.
Though the Dutch government agreed to return its part of “The Wedding Night of Tobias and Sarah” in 2006, the prior joining of the two separated fragments led to a dispute over who should get the complete painting. The two parties began negotiating a settlement more than two years ago.
Marjolein de Jong, deputy mayor in charge of culture in The Hague, wrote in a statement sent by e-mail that the agreed price is lower than Von Saher’s initial demands for 1.8 million euros and said the accord “helps preserve the painting for The Hague and future generations.”
Government Help
The Dutch government and Mondriaan Foundation will contribute 400,000 euros toward the settlement, according to Esther Andoetoe, a spokeswoman for The Hague. The Rembrandt Association will pay 200,000 euros. The cultural budget of The Hague will fund 92,000 euros and 308,000 euros comes from insurance money for the loss of two other paintings, she said.
Steen was born in the Dutch city of Leiden in 1625. He painted Bible subjects, landscapes and portraits and left about 800 paintings.
Artworks returned to Von Saher from Dutch museums include pieces by Salomon van Ruysdael, Filippo Lippi and others by Steen. She also has recovered more than 30 works from museums in other countries, including Germany and Israel.
Monday, August 15, 2011
Berlin knockout
Neues Museum: www.neues-museum.de
From StarTribune: Berlin knockout
Article by: CHRISTY DESMITH
An art lover hunts for treasure on Museum Island, a hub of culture and war-ravaged buildings in the heart of the German capital.
I was perusing a gallery of art from ancient Cyprus when I first saw the bomb blasts. Even the lovely stone figure of Aphrodite, an impressive 2,000 years my senior, was no match for this, a room filled with weathered columns, vestiges of decorative plaster and shell-torn holes that once exploded through the room's southwest wall. I could clearly see the damage because it had been plastered over and covered with slightly lighter paint.
I'd never heard of this place -- the remarkable Neues Museum, a World War II ruin brought back to life -- until my boyfriend returned from Berlin with a book detailing its recent 10-year, $300 million restoration. As I flipped the book's pages, oohing and ahhing over its luminous images of crumbling stonework and decaying friezes, I became fascinated by the peculiar past of this history museum.
Built between 1843 and 1855 on orders of a Prussian king, the Neoclassical Neues Museum (named "new" because it followed the nearby Altes Museum, or "old" museum, by about 30 years) was lushly appointed with Greek mythology-themed frescos and hieroglyphic ceiling paintings, designed to complement the king's growing collection of ancient Grecian treasures and classical antiquities.
Years later, the Neues became a casualty of Allied bombing during World War II. In another stroke of bad luck, it was parceled to the government of East Germany. For the much of the next 60 years, its crumbling chambers were left exposed to the elements.
Sturdier sections served as storage facilities for the city's other museums, especially the other four museums on Berlin's Museumsinsel, or Museum Island.
Walking through the exhibit space 12 months after I first saw that book, I witnessed firsthand how the decaying building has been imaginatively restored. Between 2003 and 2009, the British modernist David Chipperfield undertook the task of rebuilding this broken museum. He never endeavored a copy of the original. Rather, he sought to preserve the building's checkered history, the original opulence as well as the wreckage.
The result? Architectural accolades (the building most recently claimed the 2011 European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture/Mies van der Rohe Award in April) -- and a building with better stories than many of the objects it holds.
Nefertiti's domed showroom
The Neues drew me to Berlin, but the city itself has its own fascination. I was struck by the stark character of the western half of Berlin's downtown. There is some interesting contemporary architecture, but the scene is dominated by beige office complexes and generic glass towers. I preferred the east side with the compact, more urban feel of its neighborhoods and the charming patina of its old brick buildings.
From the Brandenburg Gate, I marched eastward along Unter den Linden, the city's most beautiful tree-lined boulevard, to see the sights of the former Soviet sector. I passed the onetime site of the Stadtschloss, a royal palace that was razed by the German Democratic Republic in 1950. A placard there notes the government's plan to rebuild the mammoth edifice (groundbreaking is planned for 2014). Next I crossed the newly restored Schlossbrücke, or palace bridge, and saw the scaffolding that surrounds the famous Berlin State opera house. Finally, I landed at my destination, Museum Island and its cluster of five classical museums, each badly damaged during World War II but none so badly as the Neues.
Though I was somewhat intrigued by the displays of Egyptian works at the Neues, in particular the museum's showpiece, a vibrant bust of Nefertiti that dates to 1334 B.C., I was more intrigued by the renovation. I spent less time admiring Nefertiti than I did her private showroom: a dark, parlor-like vestibule with decayed domed ceiling and reconstructed skylight. I kinked my neck by lingering so long on the cracked frescoes that cling to the coffered walls.
Later, I shuffled through the museum's so-called Greek Courtyard, one of two atria at the heart of the building. I was looking upward toward the wraparound frieze that depicts "The Last Days of Pompeii" when I nearly collided with an exhibition of recent archaeology: 11 pieces of so-called degenerate art, or modernist sculptures confiscated by the Nazis during the 1930s. These were uncovered in January 2010, during excavations for a new Berlin subway station. Among this tattered bunch, the standout is Marg Moll's 1930 "Dancer," now fractured in a few places but curvy and smooth in others--just like the Neues.
In another gallery, I admired the whimsical curlicue pattern of the ceiling. Here, too, the roof was destroyed, so Chipperfield simply rebuilt it using hollow clay pots -- these put less weight on the room's compromised pillars, plus they lend an earthy appeal to the fussy décor. Chipperfield's masterstroke, though, is the museum's elegant main stairway, a geometric study of steps and ramps, where the walls are made of bricks salvaged from old German buildings. I was gaping at the gorgeous thing when a museum guard approached and directed me toward the exit. I hadn't finished combing the building for old bullet markings but, alas, the Neues was closing for the day.
Tour of Museum Island
The next morning, I resolved to see as much of Museum Island as possible. The Neues is one of the greatest buildings I have ever encountered, but with it being my last day in Berlin, its neighbors deserved a look.
I started at another of Berlin's dazzlers, the Pergamon Museum and its jaw-dropping array of archaeological architecture, most famously, the gigantic Pergamon Altar. A reconstruction of a sprawling terrace that once graced an ancient acropolis, the altar features copious columns, a vast staircase and a stone frieze depicting Olympian gods at battle. After World War II, the Red Army famously seized the altar. Soon enough, though, it was returned to the Pergamon, which had been built to house the altar between 1910 and 1930. I spent 2 1/2 hours climbing all over the piece. And I was awed by two of the museum's other city-sized displays: the brilliant blue Processional Way of Babylon and the delicately carved Mshatta Façade.
Of the island's five museums, I was apathetic about just one. In reading about the Bode Museum, I was put off by its collections of Byzantine and early Christian art. So I set out for the Altes Museum, the area's oldest building, a work of Greek-inspired classicism by the iconic German painter and architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel. But I got lost and found myself standing before the Bode and its enormous, heavily ornamented dome. An imposing baroque structure, it was designed to look like it rises from the river Spree. I decided to enter.
Once inside, I found I had the place to myself, whereas the Neues and Pergamon had been packed. I relished the silence while perusing a gallery of Italian Renaissance altars. By the time I reached the German classicism gallery, with its stodgy Madonnas and oak-paneled ceilings, I was ready for a change of scenery.
Soon I was skipping through the colonnades that frame the Alte Nationalgalerie, a temple-like building on a plinth. There, finally, was a collection that hooked my attention: a stash of 19th-century sculpture and painting. It was a lucky thing, too, since the building's 2001 renovation was a straight-up rebuild, the ravages of World War II simply erased. As I entered, I saw all the trappings of a proper old German (or British) art museum: dark marble, white banisters, red carpets.
"Der Deutschen Kunst," said the inscription on the building's exterior. "For German Art." I was not surprised, then, to find the place concentrated with Teutonic works, including some lovely landscapes by Schinkel. I also saw minor works by Renoir, Gauguin, Degas and Cézanne, though I was most attracted to the work of an obscure Austrian artist.
In 1876, Franz von Defregger completed a Dutch-inspired history painting titled "Tyrolean Home Guard Returning Home in the War of 1809." At first glance, it was not much -- an aesthetically fine but unremarkable rendering of young soldiers marching through a small downtown. When I leaned in, I started to appreciate the nuance: I saw that one soldier happily gallops, one looks stoic, another slogs as though his bones are too heavy to lug. I ended up fixating on the panicked expression of a young woman -- she's tucked in the shadows, but I recognized that she's searching the faces of that troop, as if looking for a boyfriend or husband. After 15 minutes like this, another museum guard materialized and, alas, it was time again to go. For me, the art of the Altes pales beside the architecture of the Neues, but this expressive painting, I will always remember.
From StarTribune: Berlin knockout
Article by: CHRISTY DESMITH
An art lover hunts for treasure on Museum Island, a hub of culture and war-ravaged buildings in the heart of the German capital.
I was perusing a gallery of art from ancient Cyprus when I first saw the bomb blasts. Even the lovely stone figure of Aphrodite, an impressive 2,000 years my senior, was no match for this, a room filled with weathered columns, vestiges of decorative plaster and shell-torn holes that once exploded through the room's southwest wall. I could clearly see the damage because it had been plastered over and covered with slightly lighter paint.
I'd never heard of this place -- the remarkable Neues Museum, a World War II ruin brought back to life -- until my boyfriend returned from Berlin with a book detailing its recent 10-year, $300 million restoration. As I flipped the book's pages, oohing and ahhing over its luminous images of crumbling stonework and decaying friezes, I became fascinated by the peculiar past of this history museum.
Built between 1843 and 1855 on orders of a Prussian king, the Neoclassical Neues Museum (named "new" because it followed the nearby Altes Museum, or "old" museum, by about 30 years) was lushly appointed with Greek mythology-themed frescos and hieroglyphic ceiling paintings, designed to complement the king's growing collection of ancient Grecian treasures and classical antiquities.
Years later, the Neues became a casualty of Allied bombing during World War II. In another stroke of bad luck, it was parceled to the government of East Germany. For the much of the next 60 years, its crumbling chambers were left exposed to the elements.
Sturdier sections served as storage facilities for the city's other museums, especially the other four museums on Berlin's Museumsinsel, or Museum Island.
Walking through the exhibit space 12 months after I first saw that book, I witnessed firsthand how the decaying building has been imaginatively restored. Between 2003 and 2009, the British modernist David Chipperfield undertook the task of rebuilding this broken museum. He never endeavored a copy of the original. Rather, he sought to preserve the building's checkered history, the original opulence as well as the wreckage.
The result? Architectural accolades (the building most recently claimed the 2011 European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture/Mies van der Rohe Award in April) -- and a building with better stories than many of the objects it holds.
Nefertiti's domed showroom
The Neues drew me to Berlin, but the city itself has its own fascination. I was struck by the stark character of the western half of Berlin's downtown. There is some interesting contemporary architecture, but the scene is dominated by beige office complexes and generic glass towers. I preferred the east side with the compact, more urban feel of its neighborhoods and the charming patina of its old brick buildings.
From the Brandenburg Gate, I marched eastward along Unter den Linden, the city's most beautiful tree-lined boulevard, to see the sights of the former Soviet sector. I passed the onetime site of the Stadtschloss, a royal palace that was razed by the German Democratic Republic in 1950. A placard there notes the government's plan to rebuild the mammoth edifice (groundbreaking is planned for 2014). Next I crossed the newly restored Schlossbrücke, or palace bridge, and saw the scaffolding that surrounds the famous Berlin State opera house. Finally, I landed at my destination, Museum Island and its cluster of five classical museums, each badly damaged during World War II but none so badly as the Neues.
Though I was somewhat intrigued by the displays of Egyptian works at the Neues, in particular the museum's showpiece, a vibrant bust of Nefertiti that dates to 1334 B.C., I was more intrigued by the renovation. I spent less time admiring Nefertiti than I did her private showroom: a dark, parlor-like vestibule with decayed domed ceiling and reconstructed skylight. I kinked my neck by lingering so long on the cracked frescoes that cling to the coffered walls.
Later, I shuffled through the museum's so-called Greek Courtyard, one of two atria at the heart of the building. I was looking upward toward the wraparound frieze that depicts "The Last Days of Pompeii" when I nearly collided with an exhibition of recent archaeology: 11 pieces of so-called degenerate art, or modernist sculptures confiscated by the Nazis during the 1930s. These were uncovered in January 2010, during excavations for a new Berlin subway station. Among this tattered bunch, the standout is Marg Moll's 1930 "Dancer," now fractured in a few places but curvy and smooth in others--just like the Neues.
In another gallery, I admired the whimsical curlicue pattern of the ceiling. Here, too, the roof was destroyed, so Chipperfield simply rebuilt it using hollow clay pots -- these put less weight on the room's compromised pillars, plus they lend an earthy appeal to the fussy décor. Chipperfield's masterstroke, though, is the museum's elegant main stairway, a geometric study of steps and ramps, where the walls are made of bricks salvaged from old German buildings. I was gaping at the gorgeous thing when a museum guard approached and directed me toward the exit. I hadn't finished combing the building for old bullet markings but, alas, the Neues was closing for the day.
Tour of Museum Island
The next morning, I resolved to see as much of Museum Island as possible. The Neues is one of the greatest buildings I have ever encountered, but with it being my last day in Berlin, its neighbors deserved a look.
I started at another of Berlin's dazzlers, the Pergamon Museum and its jaw-dropping array of archaeological architecture, most famously, the gigantic Pergamon Altar. A reconstruction of a sprawling terrace that once graced an ancient acropolis, the altar features copious columns, a vast staircase and a stone frieze depicting Olympian gods at battle. After World War II, the Red Army famously seized the altar. Soon enough, though, it was returned to the Pergamon, which had been built to house the altar between 1910 and 1930. I spent 2 1/2 hours climbing all over the piece. And I was awed by two of the museum's other city-sized displays: the brilliant blue Processional Way of Babylon and the delicately carved Mshatta Façade.
Of the island's five museums, I was apathetic about just one. In reading about the Bode Museum, I was put off by its collections of Byzantine and early Christian art. So I set out for the Altes Museum, the area's oldest building, a work of Greek-inspired classicism by the iconic German painter and architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel. But I got lost and found myself standing before the Bode and its enormous, heavily ornamented dome. An imposing baroque structure, it was designed to look like it rises from the river Spree. I decided to enter.
Once inside, I found I had the place to myself, whereas the Neues and Pergamon had been packed. I relished the silence while perusing a gallery of Italian Renaissance altars. By the time I reached the German classicism gallery, with its stodgy Madonnas and oak-paneled ceilings, I was ready for a change of scenery.
Soon I was skipping through the colonnades that frame the Alte Nationalgalerie, a temple-like building on a plinth. There, finally, was a collection that hooked my attention: a stash of 19th-century sculpture and painting. It was a lucky thing, too, since the building's 2001 renovation was a straight-up rebuild, the ravages of World War II simply erased. As I entered, I saw all the trappings of a proper old German (or British) art museum: dark marble, white banisters, red carpets.
"Der Deutschen Kunst," said the inscription on the building's exterior. "For German Art." I was not surprised, then, to find the place concentrated with Teutonic works, including some lovely landscapes by Schinkel. I also saw minor works by Renoir, Gauguin, Degas and Cézanne, though I was most attracted to the work of an obscure Austrian artist.
In 1876, Franz von Defregger completed a Dutch-inspired history painting titled "Tyrolean Home Guard Returning Home in the War of 1809." At first glance, it was not much -- an aesthetically fine but unremarkable rendering of young soldiers marching through a small downtown. When I leaned in, I started to appreciate the nuance: I saw that one soldier happily gallops, one looks stoic, another slogs as though his bones are too heavy to lug. I ended up fixating on the panicked expression of a young woman -- she's tucked in the shadows, but I recognized that she's searching the faces of that troop, as if looking for a boyfriend or husband. After 15 minutes like this, another museum guard materialized and, alas, it was time again to go. For me, the art of the Altes pales beside the architecture of the Neues, but this expressive painting, I will always remember.
Von Ribbentrop in St Ives, Kettle's Yard, Cambridge
From The Independent (UK): Von Ribbentrop in St Ives, Kettle's Yard, Cambridge
Andrew Lanyon plays with his viewers in a show that gleefully sacrifices accuracy to imagination
Reviewed by Charles Darwent
Andrew Lanyon plays with his viewers in a show that gleefully sacrifices accuracy to imagination
Reviewed by Charles Darwent
Tug on one of the wooden curtain-rings that dangle beside many of the vitrines in Andrew Lanyon's new show, Von Ribbentrop in St Ives, and any one of a number of things might happen.
A black-gloved hand may jiggle obstetrically in a puppet-shaped cut-out, or a red light, apparently intended to emulate gunfire, may flicker through a keyhole. Then again, tugging could cause the door of a tiny wardrobe to slide open just a crack, or a semi-transparent grid to move fractionally so that bombs falling from the cartoon aircraft behind it become ack-ack shells shooting upwards.
Actually, you'll have to take the last one on trust since, as far as I could see, pulling on this particular ring has no optical outcome at all. The grid did at least move, but absolutely nothing happened when I tugged on some of Lanyon's strings, his dramas-in-boxes being disarmingly prone to failure. In other circumstances, this might be annoying. In this exhibition it seems only apropos, the subject of Lanyon's show being accident.
The idea that Joachim von Ribbentrop might ever have holidayed in St Ives sounds like a joke in poor taste, but no: Hitler's ghastly ambassador to the Court of St James stayed in the village in 1937, while on a tour of Cornwall. The Führer had offered him St Michael's Mount after an eventual English surrender, and the future Nazi foreign minister was checking out his seaside-cottage-to-be. This is bizarre enough, but there was worse.
In 1927, Ben Nicholson had met a slightly deranged ex-sailor called Alfred Wallis in St Ives, and the meeting changed his life. Something about Wallis's naïve, boat-paint-on-cardboard images struck a note with the world-weary Nicholson, and his own work became more two-dimensional, simplified. In 1934, Nicholson met Piet Mondrian in Paris, and that meeting pushed him further along the road towards the pure abstraction which marked his art of the mid-1930s. St Ives became (and, for half a century, remained) a hotbed of English Modernism. In July 1937, Joseph Goebbels' exhibition of "degenerate art" opened in Munich, aimed at purging modernism from Aryan culture; the Entartete Kunst show included two Mondrians. Thus it was that the man sent to bring Nazism to Britain and the man who introduced the British to Mondrian found themselves in the same Cornish village at the same time.
It's worth pointing out that Lanyon's aforementioned curtain-rings are hung from elasticated thread, which is also apropos. The overlap of Nicholson and his German adversary is by no means the only historical accident in Von Ribbentrop in St Ives, nor even the most unlikely. Lanyon's aim is to tax our belief, to see how far he can stretch our credulity before we snap and say, "Oh, come on."
Thus he cheerily points out that a German bomb hit the Porthmeor gas holder on 8 August 1942, killing a local woman and damaging dozens of houses. (Lanyon misses a trick here: the site of the derelict gasworks is now occupied by the gasometer-shaped Tate St Ives, as neat a bit of art/war coincidence as you could hope for.) By turning the handle on a blue-painted drum and looking through a visor, you can see a rickety recreation of what the Luftwaffe pilot might have seen that day. While on the subject of bombs, Lanyon then goes on to note that uranium from a St Ives tin mine was used in the Manhattan Project to develop the A-bomb (really?), before adding that, had Mondrian taken Ben Nicholson up on an invitation to join him in Cornwall for the duration of the war, local radioactive radon "would have knocked his verticals askew". "Maybe it is not the gods above but the minerals below that manipulate us," muses a wall chart, echoed in the book that accompanies the show.
You are about to yell "What bollocks!" when you realise that you are being played with, that harrumphing is exactly what Von Ribbentrop in St Ives wants you to do. This is not the history of art but a history through art; accuracy is gleefully sacrificed to imagination, what-was to what-if. Lanyon's is a story of possibility, not probability. If you wanted to categorise his work you might reach for "neo-surrealist". The what-the-butler-saw clunkiness of his vitrines, interspersed with the artist's own works on paper, have the child-like feel of Jannis Kounellis. Rather than furrowing your brow, you are asked to marvel, to giggle, to gasp at some of Lanyon's leaps of imagination, and snort at others. A jolly combination altogether.
Friday, August 12, 2011
Historical Society Speaker Series Focuses On Army Art Collection
From Nanuet Patch: Historical Society Speaker Series Focuses On Army Art Collection
While being shot at in Afghanistan, Master Sgt. Martin Cervantez didn’t exactly have time to stop and think about what was going on. He was focused on the task at hand.
Sketching and taking photographs.
Afterward, though, he was amped. Cervantez is the Army’s artist-in-residence, one person who documents Army history through art, and to fully capture the life of American soldiers he tries to go out on as many missions as he can.
“It’s like being a pro athlete,” he said. “If you’re on the bench, you’re not in the game.”
Cervantez just passed his 25th anniversary with the Army, and during that time he’s held many positions, including drill sergeant. He didn’t always plan on joining the Army, though. Cervantez grew up in Detroit and knew he wanted to go out in the world.
He enlisted shortly after high school, after a recruiter at his school told him the Army has positions for artists. Cervantez hadn’t thought at all about joining the Army, but liked sketching, so he signed up as an illustrator knowing nothing about the military.
“My exposure to the military before that was just from M*A*S*H,” he said.
His earliest tasks included illustrating leaflets and pamphlets during the Cold War to distribute as propaganda. Now Cervantez sketches and takes pictures of soldiers, and then uses those as inspiration for paintings. He began painting fairly recently, when he was asked to become the artist-in-residence because he could sketch and draw.
“I understood color and layers, I knew how to layout a picture,” he said. “But I’ve really tapped into this whole new side of myself.”
Cervantez talked about his time with the military and his artwork Thursday night at the Historical Society of Rockland County. He and Sarah Forgey, curator of the Army Art Collection, were speaking as part of the historical society’s ongoing Thursday night speaker series.
“First off, yes, the Army has an art collection,” Forgey said, adding that there are about 16,000 pieces in the collection, which is a combination of artists brought in to document war and soldiers who create art in their spare time.
Forgey said the collection is spread out in various Army museums around the country, as well as out on loan to exhibits, schools and museums. She said the National Museum of the United States Army, which is scheduled to open in 2015 in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, will house the collection, with different exhibits on display throughout the year.
The two were brought in after a few trustees of the historical society saw them interviewed in a documentary about the Army Art Collection. They were also brought in because they vaguely tie into the society’s current exhibit, Ghost Army.
The exhibit chronicles a battalion sent of artists and actors were sent to Europe in 1944 solely to deceive the enemy into thinking the Army was located where it was not by using rubber tanks, fake artillery and sound effects. The work of the Ghost Army was not made public for around 50 years, up until about 10 years ago.
Besides involving art, Cervantez said he sees a similarity between the Ghost Army and some of the work he has done, specifically the propaganda.
“It’s about deception,” he said.
Because some countries in Europe sent artists to chronicle wars, the United States decided to do the same in World War I, marking the first time the U.S. had a program for artists to document war. The U.S. sent eight artists that war with the instructions that nothing is off limits and to “Go to war, bring back art,” Forgey said. They sent back around 500 pieces, which the Army donated to the Smithsonian.
In World War II, the US sent 43 artists, some civilian and some soldier, to document the war. Three months after being deployed, Congress cut funding on the program and told people to stop making art, sending the soldier artists to different units. The civilian artists, however, didn’t have anywhere to go.
Life Magazine heard about the artists overseas and offered jobs to all 19 of them, and 17 accepted. Six months later, Congress reversed its not art policy, and said if soldiers wanted to in their spare time they could create art as long as it didn’t interfere with their duties. From World War II, around 3,000 pieces were collected, and an additional 1,000 were submitted to Life that were later donated to the Army Art Collection.
“It set the foundation for the Army Art Collection,” Forgey said, adding more art was submitted during World War II than any other war.
There was no art program during the Korean War, but for the Vietnam War, the U.S. set up 10 teams of between three to five artists who toured Vietnam sketching and taking pictures. They then traveled to Hawaii to paint works for the collection. Four artists traveled around during the Persian Gulf War.
“Since Desert Storm, we’ve hard one artist-in-residence at all times,” Forgey said.
Since there’s just one artist, she added that there hasn’t been as much documentation of the current wars as she’d like. Another reason for that is the collection is getting only a few submissions from soldiers.
“It might just be they don’t know about us, or we don’t know about them,” she said.
If there is someone willing to donate artwork to the collection, Forgey said they’ll even provide supplies, although some soldiers make due with what they have already. One piece she showed in a slideshow was a painting submitted on canvas cut from a tent by a soldier. One thing Forgey has noticed is that no matter the war or year, soldiers tend to focus on similar subjects.
“It’s connecting soldiers from generation to generation,” she said.
Forgey also said there are no restrictions on subject matter.
“We get the human element of war,” she said. “It’s not these grand battle scenes, but it’s these little funny moments. I showed that painting of a soldier in a bathtub. There are a lot of ones that come from camp life, people shaving or just waiting around.”
Even without restrictions, Cervantez has certain restrictions he sets for himself. He said he won’t paint or sketch anything relating to suicide bombings because he doesn’t want to help make a martyr out of the bomber. He also said he doesn’t want to document an injured or dead soldier because he doesn’t want the enemy to see what they’ve done and possibly use it as propaganda.
Cervantez said on a 12-hour mission, he typically takes 500-600 photos, which he then burns onto DVDs and hands out to the soldiers and officers. He said it helps him form relationships with the troops.
“It also is something they can give to their families to show them what they’re doing,” Cervantez said. “They’re not out there snapping pictures, they’re pulling triggers.”
The Ghost Army exhibit is open until October 16 at the Historical Society of Rockland County. The society is also planning a special event for Sunday, September 18 at the Lafayette Theater in Suffern, where a screening of a documentary called The Ghost Army will air. More information on the event can be found at rocklandhistory.org and ghostarmy.org.
While being shot at in Afghanistan, Master Sgt. Martin Cervantez didn’t exactly have time to stop and think about what was going on. He was focused on the task at hand.
Sketching and taking photographs.
Afterward, though, he was amped. Cervantez is the Army’s artist-in-residence, one person who documents Army history through art, and to fully capture the life of American soldiers he tries to go out on as many missions as he can.
“It’s like being a pro athlete,” he said. “If you’re on the bench, you’re not in the game.”
Cervantez just passed his 25th anniversary with the Army, and during that time he’s held many positions, including drill sergeant. He didn’t always plan on joining the Army, though. Cervantez grew up in Detroit and knew he wanted to go out in the world.
He enlisted shortly after high school, after a recruiter at his school told him the Army has positions for artists. Cervantez hadn’t thought at all about joining the Army, but liked sketching, so he signed up as an illustrator knowing nothing about the military.
“My exposure to the military before that was just from M*A*S*H,” he said.
His earliest tasks included illustrating leaflets and pamphlets during the Cold War to distribute as propaganda. Now Cervantez sketches and takes pictures of soldiers, and then uses those as inspiration for paintings. He began painting fairly recently, when he was asked to become the artist-in-residence because he could sketch and draw.
“I understood color and layers, I knew how to layout a picture,” he said. “But I’ve really tapped into this whole new side of myself.”
Cervantez talked about his time with the military and his artwork Thursday night at the Historical Society of Rockland County. He and Sarah Forgey, curator of the Army Art Collection, were speaking as part of the historical society’s ongoing Thursday night speaker series.
“First off, yes, the Army has an art collection,” Forgey said, adding that there are about 16,000 pieces in the collection, which is a combination of artists brought in to document war and soldiers who create art in their spare time.
Forgey said the collection is spread out in various Army museums around the country, as well as out on loan to exhibits, schools and museums. She said the National Museum of the United States Army, which is scheduled to open in 2015 in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, will house the collection, with different exhibits on display throughout the year.
The two were brought in after a few trustees of the historical society saw them interviewed in a documentary about the Army Art Collection. They were also brought in because they vaguely tie into the society’s current exhibit, Ghost Army.
The exhibit chronicles a battalion sent of artists and actors were sent to Europe in 1944 solely to deceive the enemy into thinking the Army was located where it was not by using rubber tanks, fake artillery and sound effects. The work of the Ghost Army was not made public for around 50 years, up until about 10 years ago.
Besides involving art, Cervantez said he sees a similarity between the Ghost Army and some of the work he has done, specifically the propaganda.
“It’s about deception,” he said.
Because some countries in Europe sent artists to chronicle wars, the United States decided to do the same in World War I, marking the first time the U.S. had a program for artists to document war. The U.S. sent eight artists that war with the instructions that nothing is off limits and to “Go to war, bring back art,” Forgey said. They sent back around 500 pieces, which the Army donated to the Smithsonian.
In World War II, the US sent 43 artists, some civilian and some soldier, to document the war. Three months after being deployed, Congress cut funding on the program and told people to stop making art, sending the soldier artists to different units. The civilian artists, however, didn’t have anywhere to go.
Life Magazine heard about the artists overseas and offered jobs to all 19 of them, and 17 accepted. Six months later, Congress reversed its not art policy, and said if soldiers wanted to in their spare time they could create art as long as it didn’t interfere with their duties. From World War II, around 3,000 pieces were collected, and an additional 1,000 were submitted to Life that were later donated to the Army Art Collection.
“It set the foundation for the Army Art Collection,” Forgey said, adding more art was submitted during World War II than any other war.
There was no art program during the Korean War, but for the Vietnam War, the U.S. set up 10 teams of between three to five artists who toured Vietnam sketching and taking pictures. They then traveled to Hawaii to paint works for the collection. Four artists traveled around during the Persian Gulf War.
“Since Desert Storm, we’ve hard one artist-in-residence at all times,” Forgey said.
Since there’s just one artist, she added that there hasn’t been as much documentation of the current wars as she’d like. Another reason for that is the collection is getting only a few submissions from soldiers.
“It might just be they don’t know about us, or we don’t know about them,” she said.
If there is someone willing to donate artwork to the collection, Forgey said they’ll even provide supplies, although some soldiers make due with what they have already. One piece she showed in a slideshow was a painting submitted on canvas cut from a tent by a soldier. One thing Forgey has noticed is that no matter the war or year, soldiers tend to focus on similar subjects.
“It’s connecting soldiers from generation to generation,” she said.
Forgey also said there are no restrictions on subject matter.
“We get the human element of war,” she said. “It’s not these grand battle scenes, but it’s these little funny moments. I showed that painting of a soldier in a bathtub. There are a lot of ones that come from camp life, people shaving or just waiting around.”
Even without restrictions, Cervantez has certain restrictions he sets for himself. He said he won’t paint or sketch anything relating to suicide bombings because he doesn’t want to help make a martyr out of the bomber. He also said he doesn’t want to document an injured or dead soldier because he doesn’t want the enemy to see what they’ve done and possibly use it as propaganda.
Cervantez said on a 12-hour mission, he typically takes 500-600 photos, which he then burns onto DVDs and hands out to the soldiers and officers. He said it helps him form relationships with the troops.
“It also is something they can give to their families to show them what they’re doing,” Cervantez said. “They’re not out there snapping pictures, they’re pulling triggers.”
The Ghost Army exhibit is open until October 16 at the Historical Society of Rockland County. The society is also planning a special event for Sunday, September 18 at the Lafayette Theater in Suffern, where a screening of a documentary called The Ghost Army will air. More information on the event can be found at rocklandhistory.org and ghostarmy.org.
Monday, August 8, 2011
Poland gets back painting missing since WWII
From TaiwanNews.com: Poland gets back painting missing since WWII
A valuable 19th century Polish painting that went missing during World War II has been returned to Poland after being removed from auction in Germany, the culture minister said Wednesday.
Aleksander Gierymski's "Jewish Woman Selling Oranges" was unveiled to reporters by Culture Minister Bogdan Zdrojewski, who said the painting was returned to Poland after many months of on-and-off negotiations with lawyers representing a German person.
The German, who had the painting for more than 30 years, has requested anonymity, Zdrojewski said.
"During those long months, my main thought was to have this picture returned to Poland," Zdrojewski said.
The work _ sometimes referred to as the "Orange Vendor" _ was painted around 1880-1881, and is one of several works Gierymski produced showing Jewish life in one of the city's poor districts.
The oil-on-canvas painting shows an old woman in a cap and a thick shawl over her shoulders knitting as she holds two baskets, one filled with oranges. She has shrunken cheeks that give her an impoverished look, and is set against a foggy Warsaw skyline.
The painting has been returned to its original home in the National Museum in Warsaw where it will undergo many months of renovation, museum director Agnieszka Morawinska said.
She described it as a "priceless masterpiece" that pleased the painter, rarely content with his own work.
Its return is a "very special day and a true gift for the museum," she said.
The picture went missing from the National Museum in 1944, five years into Nazi Germany's occupation of Poland during the war. It was among a huge numbers of cultural artifacts stolen or plundered by German and Soviet forces during their joint wartime occupation of Poland. Poland's government is making efforts to find and bring the works of art back.
The work resurfaced last November among items offered for sale at a small auction house near Hamburg. Poland's chief insurer PZU SA supplied an undisclosed sum of money for a compensation that was agreed on in negotiations with the German who had it.
A valuable 19th century Polish painting that went missing during World War II has been returned to Poland after being removed from auction in Germany, the culture minister said Wednesday.
Aleksander Gierymski's "Jewish Woman Selling Oranges" was unveiled to reporters by Culture Minister Bogdan Zdrojewski, who said the painting was returned to Poland after many months of on-and-off negotiations with lawyers representing a German person.
The German, who had the painting for more than 30 years, has requested anonymity, Zdrojewski said.
"During those long months, my main thought was to have this picture returned to Poland," Zdrojewski said.
The work _ sometimes referred to as the "Orange Vendor" _ was painted around 1880-1881, and is one of several works Gierymski produced showing Jewish life in one of the city's poor districts.
The oil-on-canvas painting shows an old woman in a cap and a thick shawl over her shoulders knitting as she holds two baskets, one filled with oranges. She has shrunken cheeks that give her an impoverished look, and is set against a foggy Warsaw skyline.
The painting has been returned to its original home in the National Museum in Warsaw where it will undergo many months of renovation, museum director Agnieszka Morawinska said.
She described it as a "priceless masterpiece" that pleased the painter, rarely content with his own work.
Its return is a "very special day and a true gift for the museum," she said.
The picture went missing from the National Museum in 1944, five years into Nazi Germany's occupation of Poland during the war. It was among a huge numbers of cultural artifacts stolen or plundered by German and Soviet forces during their joint wartime occupation of Poland. Poland's government is making efforts to find and bring the works of art back.
The work resurfaced last November among items offered for sale at a small auction house near Hamburg. Poland's chief insurer PZU SA supplied an undisclosed sum of money for a compensation that was agreed on in negotiations with the German who had it.
Sunday, August 7, 2011
Women War Artists
From Morning Star Online: Women War Artists
The Imperial War Museum sends out conflicting messages. Its very name implies an acceptance of establishment values and much of its exhibits glamourise war.
Visitors are greeted by the intimidating twin barrels of massive naval guns which must be braved to reach the museum entrance.
Numerous military weapons including tanks, jet fighters, guns, V2 rocket and a polaris missile dominate the first and largest gallery and are clambered over by excited children.
They and their parents also converge on audio-visual and olfactory reconstructions of the Trench Experience and the Blitz Experience - both open to being interpreted as vicarious thrills rather pacifist warnings especially if not contextualised by an educational visit.
The shop sells child-sized army fatigues and capitalises on the currently fashionable nostalgia for WWII austerity with 1940s objects such as Brown Betty tea pots and flowery tea cups.
Yet some displays do decry the horrors of war - nowhere more so than in the quiet spaces of the two modestly sized art galleries.
Avoiding the razzmatazz of war as entertainment they exhibit works selected from the museum's vast art collection based on British government official commissioning schemes in both world wars.
The commissioning bodies mostly excluded, sidelined or underestimated women artists so that they formed only 5 per cent of official war artists in WWI and 13 per cent in WWII.
One current exhibition explores the social attitudes behind this situation, introduces us to the exceptions and affirms the progress made since the 1980s by showcasing the work of recent artists. The imaginative inclusion of non-commissioned works by "unofficial" women war artists adds depth and context.
These rebellious women are among the most interesting. During WWII for security reasons artists had to obtain official permits to draw in public places.
As a Communist who had produced posters supporting the Spanish republic Priscilla Thornycroft was unlikely to get one so she went ahead anyway surreptitiously drawing the everyday around her.
Her drawings and prints brilliantly convey the wartime ambiance of Camden Town - then a working-class district of London. The warmth, humour and humanity of her work shines out among the more emotionally restrained commissioned works such as Ethel Gabain's.
Many paintings such as Gabain's do not differ stylistically from the mainstream styles of those by male fellow artists. But their subjects differ. Since women war artists were not allowed to go on active service they focused more on the home front. We see service men at leisure or hospitalised and women working in factories, queuing for food, working on the land, in canteens and in hospitals.
Victoria Monkhouse's WWI watercolours show women doing jobs previously reserved for men. A window cleaner gingerly holds her ladder, yet she daringly wears trousers under her overalls and she has cropped hair - both of which signal her modernity. Such women would go on to claim greater social and political freedoms in post war.
This is reflected in the larger number of official commissions received by women in WWII. Perhaps the best known of these then, as now, is Laura Knight's Ruby Loftus Screwing A Breech-Ring, 1943.
Unusually for a woman Laura Knight had already achieved success before the war - a Dame of the British Empire since 1929 and the first woman to be elected to the Royal Academy in 150 years her works were much sought after.
The Ministry of Supply identified Ruby Loftus as a model worker and commissioned the subject from Knight to encourage recruitment of young women into skilled factory jobs. The painting celebrated the 21-year-old Ruby's mastery of a process which had previously only been done by men with eight years' experience. Artist, painting and sitter were much discussed in the mass media so that Loftus also became a celebrity.
The curators argue that this propaganda painting glamourised its subject to recruit women into harsh factory work and that both artist and subject were singled out as exceptional people which implied that most women were incapable of such high achievements.
Organised thematically the exhibition sets up resonances across time. Near Knight's ultra-realist painting is Rosanne Hawksley's non-commissioned Pale Armistice, 1991- a wreath is made up of overlapping women's gloves holding a single artificial lily.
Worked in the "feminine" technique and materials of stitching textiles it commemorates the concealed suffering of the artist's grandmother and her generation who lost their brothers, sons, lovers fiancées and husbands in WWI.
The gloves' fingers appear to clasp each other in friendship and succor - their repeated white fingers recalling fragile petals or the feathers of the white dove of peace. Knight's painting is an energetic call to action, Hawksey's wreath a gentle lament.
This intelligently curated, informative exhibition is based on serious research and brings little known women artists to a wider public.
Exhibition ends on Sunday November 27 For more information: www.london.iwm.org.uk
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Lucian Freud: from Nazi Germany to Britain's art elite
From The Jewish Chronicle Online on July 22, 2011: Lucian Freud: from Nazi Germany to Britain's art elite
By Jennifer Lipman, July 22, 2011
The celebrated painter Lucian Freud has died in London at the age of 88. Described by many as Britain's greatest living artist, he had been unwell.
Mr Freud, the grandson of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, was born in Germany. Just 11-years-old when Adolf Hitler came to power, his family moved to Britain in 1933 to escape the rise of Nazism.
He served briefly in the Merchant Navy during the Second World War, but dedicated most of his life to doing what he loved best – painting brilliant and unforgiving portraits of everyone from the famous to the unknown.
His subjects included Jerry Hall, Kate Moss and the Queen, but it was his portrait of a benefits supervisor that broke all records when it was bought by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich in 2008.
Mr Freud and his brother, the late former Liberal MP Sir Clement Freud, did not grow up in a Jewish environment. However his daughter, writer Esther Freud, explored her Jewish heritage with a novel about a Jewish family in Germany as war loomed.
Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota said the artist's work guaranteed him a "unique place in the pantheon of late-20th-century art"
"His early paintings redefined British art and his later works stand in comparison with the great figurative painters of any period," added Sir Nicholas.
Lord Jacob Rothschild, a friend of the artist's for four decades, told the JC that it was a great compliment to be asked to sit for a portrait by him. He said Mr Freud was "great company" and "terribly intelligent".
Friday, August 5, 2011
Uncovered: The touching picture of a cherub surrounded by love hearts drawn by HITLER... in the year he started WWII
From Daily Mail Online: Uncovered: The touching picture of a cherub surrounded by love hearts drawn by HITLER... in the year he started WWII
This touching sketch of a cherub sitting on a cushion covered in love hearts was amazingly drawn by Adolf Hitler - in the year he started World War Two.
The small drawing shows the winged figure in front of a mirror and is inscribed 'Frau Esser'.
It is almost certainly a birthday card to the wife of one of the Fuhrer's oldest political allies, Hermann Esser.
The card measures 9.5 x 3.5ins and is thought to have been sent in January 1939 - the same month Hermann Esser released his book The Jewish World Plague.
It is an unusual picture for Hitler, who had been an aspiring artist in his younger days and mainly painted landscapes and buildings.
They often come up for sale, but this more intimate and later artwork is quite rare and very collectable.
Richard Westwood-Brookes, from Mullock's auction house, which is selling it, said: 'This is an usual picture from Hitler and the date is quite revealing.
'It was done in 1939 when he had already decided upon murdering Europe's Jews.
'Despite those feelings of hate he produced this touching and delicate little painting. It highlights the fact that there were two sides to the man.
'It is made out to 'Frau Esser' - almost certainly the wife of Hermann Esser - and signed and dated by Hitler.
'Hermann Esser joined the Nazi party with Hitler in 1920 and despite numerous scandals he knew too much to be cast aside completely.
'He was hugely anti-semitic and wasn't liked by his fellow Nazis, but lived until the 1980s. Little is known about his wife although she does appear in pictures.'
Hermann Esser was a co-founder of the Nazi party along with Hitler in 1920.
He edited its paper, Volkischer Beobachter, and became its propaganda chief.
But he was a renowned pervert and disgusted other top Nazis and for a time was suspended form the organisation.
Even Hitler said of him: 'I know Esser is a scoundrel, but I shall hold on to him as long as he is useful to me.'
This touching sketch of a cherub sitting on a cushion covered in love hearts was amazingly drawn by Adolf Hitler - in the year he started World War Two.
The small drawing shows the winged figure in front of a mirror and is inscribed 'Frau Esser'.
It is almost certainly a birthday card to the wife of one of the Fuhrer's oldest political allies, Hermann Esser.
The card measures 9.5 x 3.5ins and is thought to have been sent in January 1939 - the same month Hermann Esser released his book The Jewish World Plague.
It is an unusual picture for Hitler, who had been an aspiring artist in his younger days and mainly painted landscapes and buildings.
They often come up for sale, but this more intimate and later artwork is quite rare and very collectable.
Richard Westwood-Brookes, from Mullock's auction house, which is selling it, said: 'This is an usual picture from Hitler and the date is quite revealing.
'It was done in 1939 when he had already decided upon murdering Europe's Jews.
'Despite those feelings of hate he produced this touching and delicate little painting. It highlights the fact that there were two sides to the man.
'It is made out to 'Frau Esser' - almost certainly the wife of Hermann Esser - and signed and dated by Hitler.
'Hermann Esser joined the Nazi party with Hitler in 1920 and despite numerous scandals he knew too much to be cast aside completely.
'He was hugely anti-semitic and wasn't liked by his fellow Nazis, but lived until the 1980s. Little is known about his wife although she does appear in pictures.'
Hermann Esser was a co-founder of the Nazi party along with Hitler in 1920.
He edited its paper, Volkischer Beobachter, and became its propaganda chief.
But he was a renowned pervert and disgusted other top Nazis and for a time was suspended form the organisation.
Even Hitler said of him: 'I know Esser is a scoundrel, but I shall hold on to him as long as he is useful to me.'
HERMANN ESSER: WHO WAS HE?
He was a co-founder of the Nazi party along with Hitler in 1920.
He edited its paper, Volkischer Beobachter, and became its propaganda chief.
But he was a renowned pervert and disgusted other top Nazis and for a time was suspended form the organisation.
Even Hitler said of him: 'I know Esser is a scoundrel, but I shall hold on to him as long as he is useful to me.'
He was involved in a scandal when he sexually assaulted the underage daughter of a businessman.
But he knew too much, however, and Hitler gave him various minor roles in the party. He was a good public speaker and an effective jew-baiter.
In 1940 he was filmed with his wife on the terrace of Hitler's getaway in the Bavarian Alps, Berghof.
Later he became a member of the Reichstag and through the war he was the undersecretary for tourism in the Reich propaganda ministry.
He was imprisoned twice for a total of four years and died aged 80 in 1981.
Thursday, August 4, 2011
MOMA Stein collection worth journey out of Marin
From Marinscope Community Newspapers: MOMA Stein collection worth journey out of Marin
“The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde” will show through Sept. 6 at SFMOMA, 1511 Third St., San Francisco. Tickets are free for members and kids 12 and under accompanied by an adult, $7 to $25 nonmembers. Information: 357-4000 or go to sfmoma.org.
By Woody Weingarten
“The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde” will show through Sept. 6 at SFMOMA, 1511 Third St., San Francisco. Tickets are free for members and kids 12 and under accompanied by an adult, $7 to $25 nonmembers. Information: 357-4000 or go to sfmoma.org.
By Woody Weingarten
For Marin devotees of Pablo Picasso, his art on display across the Golden Gate is worth the trip.
Indubitably.
A short journey to “The Steins Collect,” a San Francisco Museum of Modern Art exhibit, can also mean a major bonus — an intimate view of Gertrude Stein, her family and her soirées on the Left Bank of Paris.
Expatriates from the Bay Area in the early 20th century, the Stein siblings immediately started purchasing art, first acquiring Matisses and Picassos and eventually amassing more than 300 works.
Gertrude — considered by some a literary colossus, by others a no-talent runaway ego, and by yet others an icon in the nascent lesbian movement — was quoted by Ernest Hemingway in “A Moveable Feast” as saying, “You can either buy clothes or buy pictures … No one who is not very rich can do both.”
She and brother Leo, an art critic, weren’t wealthy (though they did live off family investments). So they dabbled in art.
And when Picasso’s paintings became too pricey, they shifted to less established artists such as Andre Masson, according to notes at the 200-piece SFMOMA exhibit.
Gertrude and Leo lived in one ill-lighted French apartment, older brother Michael and his wife, Sarah, in another. The exhibit reflecting their bohemian lifestyle, “The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde,” tracks their acquisitions — much like the Picasso display at the de Young Museum — more or less chronologically.
In 17 rooms at SFMOMA, one of them dedicated to the Michael and Sarah’s patronage of modern architecture, viewers can find 40 works by Picasso, 60 by Henri Matisse.
If that’s not enough, there are pieces by Paul Cezanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Juan Gris and other household names.
Some were regathered from private collections for the show, others from museums.
In addition to paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and illustrated books are many Stein family snapshots (some posed formally, some casual), albums and correspondence — as well as huge photo blowups.
Family mementos add insight, including Michael and Sarah’s marriage certificate, in Hebrew.
Among the most renowned pieces displayed is the 1905-06 oil “Gertrude Stein,” owned by New York’s MOMA. When told the portrait didn’t look like her, Picasso supposedly predicted, “It will.”
“The Steins Collect” also features less-striking portraits of Gertrude: a 1937 oil by Francis Picabia, a 1929 ink rendition of “Gertrude Stein in Bilignin” by Eugene Berman and a 1934-35 oil on plaster by Pierre Tal-Coat.
But no one should miss Jo Davidson’s bronze sculpture of her in the hallway outside the exhibit.
Other Picasso works that compel attention are “Boy Leading a Horse” and “Lady With a Fan,” his bronze sculpture titled “Head of a Picador With a Broken Nose,” a 1906 portrait of Leo Stein and a self-portrait finished that same year.
His blue and rose periods are represented, as are works showing his predilection for African motifs, one dramatic example being a study for “The Dryad (Nude in a Forest)”.
Matisse is hardly ignored.
Witness “Woman With a Hat” (a portrait of his wife, Amélie), “Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra,” “The Girl With Green Eyes” and a 1906 self-portrait.
Because the Steins befriended Matisse and Picasso, both artists painted members of the family. Sarah and Michael’s son, for example, are the subjects of two extraordinary pieces, Matisse’s “Boy With a Butterfly Net” and Picasso’s “Portrait of Allan Stein,” which depicts him at age 10.
Also noteworthy are “Portrait of Michael Stein” and “Portrait of Sarah Stein.” Matisse altered the latter, enhancing Sarah’s features and neckline to make her more iconic than human.
She reportedly said she liked the portrait of her husband better.
Shortly before those two paintings were completed, Leo and Gertrude’s relationship disintegrated — partially because he was jealous of her literary success, partially because he detested Picasso’s evolving style.
He moved out.
She kept the cubist pioneer’s creations (except for two Picasso ink sketches of Leo) and he hung onto the Renoirs.
They split the Matisses and Cezannes.
Luckily for art lovers, the best of the best are represented here.
If there’s any hole in the exhibit, it’s that it dances lightly around Gertrude’s approval of Spanish dictator Gen. Francisco Franco and a German fellow named Adolf Hitler — and skirts questions of how she, Jewish by birth, kept her art collection intact under a Nazi-powered Vichy government.
The display doesn’t slight her relationship with Alice B. Toklas, though, or the Stein family’s ties to the Bay Area (Gertrude and Leo grew up in Oakland, and Michael and Sarah, who’d lived in San Francisco before moving to France, relocated in Palo Alto).
Finally, this review might be remiss if it didn’t tweak Gertrude’s most-quoted phrase. Be assured, then, that “a spectacle is a spectacle is a spectacle.”
Indubitably.
“The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde” will show through Sept. 6 at SFMOMA, 1511 Third St., San Francisco. Tickets are free for members and kids 12 and under accompanied by an adult, $7 to $25 nonmembers. Information: 357-4000 or go to sfmoma.org.
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Orange man selling Hitler's parents' portraits
The Orange County Register: Orange man selling Hitler's parents' portraits
ORANGE – An Orange resident is auctioning off oil-paint portraits of Adolf Hitler's parents that once hung in one of the Nazi dictator's mountain homes.
Ken Biggs, 72, says he acquired the portraits of Alois and Klara Hitler in France in the early 1970s from his wife's cousin, who was "terrified" to have the paintings and intended to cut up the relics.
The cousin's husband, the story goes, was a French soldier in World War II and took the artwork as war souvenirs from somewhere near the Austrian-German border during the Allied occupation after Nazi forces were defeated.
The soldier cut them out of their frames and rolled them up – along with five other paintings Adolf Hitler owned – and put them into some type of weapon to take home. They sat in a burlap sack at the soldier's home for more than two decades. The soldier's wife was never fond of having them, and she told Biggs she seriously was considering destroying them.
But Biggs talked her into letting him take possession of the artwork for their historical value and so he could sell them to help the cousin, who has experienced financial hardship since the death of her spouse in the 1950s.
"I thought they should take their place in history," he said of the paintings.
Biggs had to promise his wife's cousin that he would never reveal who gave him the paintings, which is why he asked the Register not to disclose his French wife's first or maiden names.
"Anything to do with Hitler still puts a lot of fear in many Europeans who lived through the war," Biggs said.
Biggs said he will keep some of the proceeds to reimburse himself for the money he put into the effort but most of the proceeds will go to his wife's cousin.
The five other paintings that Biggs acquired include depictions of a bridge in Amberg, two separate bunkers, Roman ruins and an eagle in the Alps.
All seven paintings owned by Hitler are up for auction Sept. 1-17 at cgmauctions.com by Craig Gottlieb Militaria, but the two pictures of Hitler's parents are clearly getting the most attention.
"These portraits are very famous images from the Third Reich period, having appeared on postcards, on Klara Hitler's gravestone, as well as in a period-catalog of art owned by Hitler," stated the auctioneer. "Until recently, the whereabouts of these portraits were unknown."
Gottleib says black-and-white photographs of the two portraits held in the "Katalog der Privat-Gallerie Adolf Hitler" listing at the Library of Congress depict the exact two works of art, "down to every last brush stroke." Another photograph from the era shows the set of portraits hanging in one of Hitler's rooms at Berghof, one of Hitler's residences in the Bavarian Alps of Germany, he said.
Due to improper storage, the paintings suffered minor damage and were professionally restored by a company that performs work for major museums worldwide, Gottleib said. He estimates the pair of portraits of Hitler's parents, which will be auctioned together, will fetch at least $100,000.
ORANGE – An Orange resident is auctioning off oil-paint portraits of Adolf Hitler's parents that once hung in one of the Nazi dictator's mountain homes.
Ken Biggs, 72, says he acquired the portraits of Alois and Klara Hitler in France in the early 1970s from his wife's cousin, who was "terrified" to have the paintings and intended to cut up the relics.
The cousin's husband, the story goes, was a French soldier in World War II and took the artwork as war souvenirs from somewhere near the Austrian-German border during the Allied occupation after Nazi forces were defeated.
The soldier cut them out of their frames and rolled them up – along with five other paintings Adolf Hitler owned – and put them into some type of weapon to take home. They sat in a burlap sack at the soldier's home for more than two decades. The soldier's wife was never fond of having them, and she told Biggs she seriously was considering destroying them.
But Biggs talked her into letting him take possession of the artwork for their historical value and so he could sell them to help the cousin, who has experienced financial hardship since the death of her spouse in the 1950s.
"I thought they should take their place in history," he said of the paintings.
Biggs had to promise his wife's cousin that he would never reveal who gave him the paintings, which is why he asked the Register not to disclose his French wife's first or maiden names.
"Anything to do with Hitler still puts a lot of fear in many Europeans who lived through the war," Biggs said.
Biggs said he will keep some of the proceeds to reimburse himself for the money he put into the effort but most of the proceeds will go to his wife's cousin.
The five other paintings that Biggs acquired include depictions of a bridge in Amberg, two separate bunkers, Roman ruins and an eagle in the Alps.
All seven paintings owned by Hitler are up for auction Sept. 1-17 at cgmauctions.com by Craig Gottlieb Militaria, but the two pictures of Hitler's parents are clearly getting the most attention.
"These portraits are very famous images from the Third Reich period, having appeared on postcards, on Klara Hitler's gravestone, as well as in a period-catalog of art owned by Hitler," stated the auctioneer. "Until recently, the whereabouts of these portraits were unknown."
Gottleib says black-and-white photographs of the two portraits held in the "Katalog der Privat-Gallerie Adolf Hitler" listing at the Library of Congress depict the exact two works of art, "down to every last brush stroke." Another photograph from the era shows the set of portraits hanging in one of Hitler's rooms at Berghof, one of Hitler's residences in the Bavarian Alps of Germany, he said.
Due to improper storage, the paintings suffered minor damage and were professionally restored by a company that performs work for major museums worldwide, Gottleib said. He estimates the pair of portraits of Hitler's parents, which will be auctioned together, will fetch at least $100,000.
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