Patrons,
Poltroons and
Pirates
of the Art Industry
We
must understand that even the views of the most intelligent people cannot be
trusted when their personal desires block the truth. Not only does their intelligence not keep
them from erring, but they use their intelligence to mislead others into
accepting their foolish conclusions as if they were based on the most rigorous
logic.[1]
“A
little bit of Learning is a dangerous Thing” — Alexander Pope[2]
Hitler, Goering,
Rosenberg and their cronies and henchmen—who pretentiously and fatally thought
of themselves as artists, connoisseurs and critics of art—show that more was at
stake than just killing private collectors and coercing reluctant Jews into
selling their valuable collections for a pittance or than grabbing what was
left behind when families were sent off to death camps or beaten up in the
streets. These Nazis sought to
reproduce—to parody—the complex inter-relations of all those individuals,
groups, and institutions that constituted the “establishment” of art in the
early decades of the twentieth century in Europe.
Thus it starts
to become clear why collectors, patrons and art dealers were so important to
the art world. And therefore we must
understand more than simple desire for the return of lost possessions is
important when considering what to return and to whom and what compensation is
due when objects of art were destroyed or cannot be found We can read, for
example, that,
The figures of Siegfried Bing and Louis C. Tiffany
loom large in the history of decorative arts at the turn of the century. Men of great taste, they used their wealth
and status to further their very particular conceptions of artistic beauty. Acting as impresarios to promote their
artistic visions through commercial empires, they dealt in that precious and
most fickle of commodities: objets d’art.[3]
Though Martin
Eidelberg here elides two technical terms, entrepreneur
and impresario, the meaning is
clear: those who play out the classical role of Maecenas, that is, individuals
with a lot of money, influence and taste can help shape the course of art
history in their own time, make favoured artists and styles known, encourage
public and private directors of museums and art galleries to display such
works, and therefore form part of a continuum with the creators themselves in
the whole process we call art.[4] But what happens when a gang of thugs, such
as the Nazis, not only interferes in the system through murder and
appropriation, but decides to take-over the roles of respected men and women
and thus create a grotesque parody of modern civilization? To answer this question it is not enough to
say that what was stolen should be returned and the victims of this massive
enterprise of expropriation be compensated for their losses? What the Nazi actions show, and even now more
dishearteningly what their heirs and imitators reveal in current attempts to
block such correction of historical crimes through a variety of obfuscations
and lies, is that the whole world of art, at least as conceived in the course
of the nineteenth century and the first four decades of the twentieth, exists
in a complicated, intertwined pattern of relationships between creators and
critics, patrons and dealers, entrepreneurs and scholars. The ethical and legal grounds for returning
plundered art to the families from whom it was taken, even after several
generations and across national boundaries, reside in recognition of this
paradigm of inter-relationships. That
Jews were disproportionately represented as patrons, purchasers, collectors,
critics, dealers, directors and scholars can only be part of the reason why
restitution of stolen property is the right thing to do: the aesthetic,
historical and intellectual truth must also be retrieved from the clouds of
unknowing the fascist thugs and their educated henchmen stirred up before,
during and after World War II.[5]
The collector is
a private individual, sometimes part of a family enterprise in purchasing art
from favoured living artists in need of support and painters or sculptors who
have at the same time potential as investment, if not directly in a financial
sense at least, a more or less small distance, an indicator of the stability,
cultured status of the house to which these art works now belong. Such a person should, however, be
distinguished from both the entrepreneur and the impresario, both of whom are
collectors in a professional sense: an entrepreneur is, in a general sense, the
person who invests, manages, and trades in works of art, as well as in other
commodities, but whose primary reason for dealing in aesthetic objects is
neither personal nor cultural`; whereas the impresario, a term most appropriate
to producers and managers of opera, ballet and concert performances, may by
extension designate the person who organizes exhibitions of paintings,
sculpture and other works of art for the purpose of establishing the reputation
and value of the artist, selling these works to private collectors and public
institutions, and evoking critical attention in the popular and specialist
press. The patron, like the collector, tends
to do several of the tasks associated with the commercial investors and
managers, but above all to enter into a personal relationship with the artist,
encouraging him or her, often at an early stage in his or her career, and
commissioning new works, introducing the artist to influential friends and
colleagues who also may become supporters, and undertaking to protect the
artist from political, legal and social opposition. The Maecenas is the classical term for a rich
and powerful patron, advocate and protector of creative individuals. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
very often it is the art dealer who performs all of these roles at once on
behalf of his or her clients.[6]
The arguments
that such objets d’art belong to the nation where the works were
originally kept as part of the patrimony of the state or that they should be
displayed in museums and public galleries where the largest number of people
can enjoy and study them rather than being kept in private collections or in
vaults have limited validity.[7] Thus there are two related sets of problems
to be resolved.
On the one hand,
the question has to do with the integrity of individual works of art in
relation to the whole corpus of an artist’s achievements or in the context of
the social and aesthetic milieu in which each artist interacts with other
artists and his or her public. Each
individual artist lived in a complex matrix that shifted and changed throughout
his or her career. Home environment,
family encouragement or negativity towards the artist’s chosen career, informal
and formal education, influences of teachers, friends and acquaintances are
certainly very significant factors in assessing how innate talents and tastes
in the artist learn to articulate themselves in various media and styles. However, it is important too to consider who
supported the artist to live and work, who purchased works, collected them,
offered commissions, put them on private or public display, and made other
arrangements to allow the artist to develop fully and in one direction rather
than another. Alongside public figures
who made awards and arranged for works to be purchased and held in national or
local museums and galleries, there are private collectors whose own tastes and
predilections create both the sense of
group identity for particular styles and technologies favoured by individual
painters, sculptors or other artists and craftsmen and who generate interest
in their works among their own circle of
rich, famous and influential friends and colleagues, who ensure that the value
of the works inside and outside their own collections is sustained and
enhanced, and who often write or commission studies of these works to spread
the word and ensure the place of such artists in history. For these reasons, returning looted art to
their original owners and their families recreates the meaningful contexts in
which the artists and their productions emerged. It is also a way of recognizing the
importance of the Maecenas in the history of art, along with the artists
themselves, their earlier patrons, the dealers and professional critics. Insofar as Nazi officials sought to replace
these figures with politically correct individuals from their own midst and
hence to read out of history the achievement of the collectors and patrons,
many of them Jewish—as were the dealers, critics and art historians—the legal
rectification through return is also a moral and an aesthetic obligation. Secondary to this, of course, is the matter
of whether the original owners and surviving family members wish to place these
art works individually or collectively on more or less permanent loan to art
galleries and museums or to sell them at public auction so as to allow these objets
d’art to circulate again on a free market.
On the other
hand, the question is whether or not the provenance of a work should or should
not include the history of its possession, including illegal and violent
seizure, accidental displacement, and the consequences of misattribution or
faulty contextualization. So long as
museum directors, auction houses, and bureaucrats perversely attempt to deny or
obfuscate the status of paintings and other objects of art that were plundered
from public and private owners during the Nazi regime and conquest of most of
Europe, the true history of how these works came to be where they now are
remains confused.[8]
Moreover, lies and denials about the various titles of ownership are mixed up
with statements that certain works have disappeared, were destroyed, or
actually were created by some other person as claimed by a petitioner for
redress. What the Nazis attempted to do
was to make art history Judenrein, and to do this they had not only “to
disappear” Jewish and other degenerate art works or Entartete Kunst from
public and private view,[9]
but to take over the art establishment, recreate it in their own image and
assert their own parodic version of history.
As one anonymous website’s author puts it, albeit in a somewhat clumsy
manner:
The possession of cultural products was essential to
the Nazi leaders elite status. In hoping
to displace the traditional aristocracy atop the social order, they endeavoured
to dislodge art works in the hands of the old elite. Many of the Nazi leaders took great pleasure
in buying artworks from the nobility because it symbolized in their minds a
changing in the guard.[10]
It was, of
course, not only the traditional Junker class the National Socialists wished to
imitate and replace, but the aristocracy of education, taste and influence,
that is, very much the Jewish elite families in Germany, Austria, France and
elsewhere, like the Rothschilds and the Ephrussis. One of the essentials of anti-Semitism is the
fear and jealousy of the other, and the Nazis sought grotesquely to become incarnations
of the Jewish bankers, art collectors and cultural connoisseurs they were
eliminating in the gas chambers by the million. “The stupidity of the Nazis knew no limits,”
remarks the anonymous author “Hitler and the European Art”, and these would-be
aristocrats were duped by German, French, Austrian, Italian and other dealers,
collaborators who sold them second-rate paintings and sculptures at outrageous
prices. But such stupidity and greed on
both sides has no humor to it when we consider the enormous numbers of
innocent people killed, millions of lives ruined, and ancient cultures crushed
by such activity.[11]
The crimes of destruction
and misattribution concern more than single objects or groups of art works; it
also involves ideas—the ideas of where and when schools of artistic style and
taste were developed, who belonged to these schools and how the ideas were
originated and exchanged, and therefore what the history of European art should
look like. Disturbingly, the process of
stealing ideas, transferring ownership from one person or group to another, and
creating new paradigms of historical development, as manifest in exhibitions,
accompanying catalogues, and historical surveys of particular times and places
still continues.
[1]
Rabbi Eliyahu E. Dessler, Strive for the Truth, Parashat Korach,
cited by Ellen Horowitz, “The Lustic Files: A Guide to Intellectual Fools” Halls of Academe posted on East European Jewish History (23 June
2004).
[2] From “The Essay on Human Understanding.”
[3] Martin Eidelberg, “S. Bing and
L.C. Tiffany: Entrepreneurs of Style” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide
4:2 (Summer 2006) online at mhtml:file://F:\Martin Eidelberg on S_Bing and
L_C_Tiffany Entrepreneurs of Style (seen 23/09/2011).
[4] For the most part in the
nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, these collectors did not
have as their main goal stocking up on investments in the form of “portable
property”, but of proving to themselves and others their right to be part of
the European cultured elite. Where Jews
could not participate in civil and state politics and management, they put
their considerable talents and energy, as well as funds, to work in supporting
the arts. One need only read Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas or study the career of the New
York Schiffs in Paris as patrons of the arts to see the extent of this Jewish
involvement.
[5]
A legalistic description of
these swirling clouds of obfuscation and manipulation of technicalities can be
seen in Anna Blume Huttenlauch, “Street Scenes and other Scenes from
Berlin—Legal issues in the Restitution of Art after the Third Reich” German
Law Journal 7:10 (2006) 819-831. Also see the interview of Kerry Skyring by
Damien Carrick, “Art and Law, the Case of Altmann versus the Austrians”, The
Law Report, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 25 May 2004 (online at http://www.bslaw.net/news/040525). Skyring reports from Vienna on the
controversy surrounding the efforts by Randol Schoenberg to win back for Maria
Altmann a number of Klimt paintings once owned by her family.
[6]
See for instance, Pierre
Assouline, Discovering Impressionism: The Life of Paul Durand-Ruel,
trans, Willard Wood and Anthony Roberts (New York: The Vendome Press/A Mark
Magowan Book, 2004 [2002]).
[7] Huttenlauch, “Street Scenes”
shows how courts of law, government committees and public opinion can clash
over what constitutes the national patrimony, the responsibility of public
institutions to maintain ownership rights even where there are doubts as to the
way in which art works came into their possession, and where even provenance is
in dispute. But at least in regard to
controversy based on lack of knowledge among the general public and
professionals, it is now possible to
wipe away any legitimacy from the argument that the actions of the Nazi party
during the Shoah was not known or realized by anyone outside the inner circles
of the party; see Elke Schmitter, “Nazi Crimes: Diaries Reveal How Much Wartime
Germans Knew”, Der Spiegel online at
http:www.spiegel.de/intrernational/germany/0.1518.789900.00; circulated on eejh@yahoogroups.com on 6 October 2011; this is a review of Friedrich
Kellner’s 900-page book, which also mentions several other wartime journals by
Germans such as Victor Klemperer, proving that the knowledge was available and that
refusal to see the Holocaust then or afterwards are acts of wilful disregard.
[8]
Anonymous, “Hitler and the
European Art: An Orgy of Looting and Corruption” online at http://schikelgruber. net/rapebis.html (seen 03/10/2011).
[9]
Among the great ironies
involved in this attempt to excise such degenerate art from the national
heritage of Germanic civilization by the Nazis, one can enumerate only a few:
(a) very few of the hundreds of works on display at the exhibition of Entartete
Kunst were by Jews, the exhibition itself showcased the very objets d’art
the Nazis wished to remove from public view, the very basis of this so-called
Jewish art lay right in the fountainhead of the authors, such as Kant,
Schopenhauer and Wagner, as well as the painters, and composers the National
Socialist leaders proclaimed as their fathers and mentors. See Richard Begam, “Modernism and Degeneracy:
Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron” Modernist Culture 3:1 online at http://www.js-modcult.
bham.ac.uk/ fetch.asp%3Farticle%3Dissue5_Begam
(seen 15 September 2011). According to Begam, “...Schoenberg takes over the
Nazi rhetoric on aesthetics and moral degeneracy, but he turns it on his
head. Degeneracy is the product of the
cult of the image, particularly the image conceived of in ritualistic and
revelatory terms, the image as the incarnation of a higher deeper reality....Moses
und Aron participates, then, in the broader challenge modernism mounted
against a mimesis that in the German-speaking world had begun to assume
negative, even nightmarish political implications” (p. 34).
[11] “The stupidity of the Nazis knew
no limits,” remarks the anonymous author “Hitler and the European Art”, and
these would-be aristocrats were duped by German, French, Austrian, Italian and
other dealers, collaborators who sold them second-rate paintings and sculptures
at outrageous prices. But such stupidity
and greed on both sides has no humour to it when we consider the enormous
numbers of innocent people killed, millions of lives ruined, and ancient
cultures crushed by such activity.
No comments:
Post a Comment