Thursday, 5 September 2013

Maecenas Part 2


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 AronModernist 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).

[10] Anonymous, “Hitler and the European Art”. 

[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.

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