Beth's Everything Blog

Archive for the ‘Art’ Category

According to the Belvedere Gallery Adele had bequeathed the Klimt paintings to the gallery.  It was not until the late 1990s that the ugly twisted saga of Vienna’s acquisition of the Klimts began to unfold.  In 1998 Austria joined other countries in signing an agreement  to examine the provenance of its museum collections.  The effort was finally going to be made to return stolen works to their owners.  Federal archives were opened to the public.   And so once confidential records now revealed how the Bloch-Bauer Klimts became the property of the Belvedere. The paintings had been stolen not once but three times–first by the Nazis and then twice by the Austrians.  A series of articles exposed the scandal and crucial evidence  came out about Adele’s will.  Belvedere officials had insisted that Adele had bequeathed the works to the gallery.  Maria Altmann’s lawyer had asked to see the will of Adele but was repeatedly fobbed off with excuses that it was mislaid.  Ignoring the injustices suffered by Holocaust survivors was an accepted form of procedure.  By barring the export of works of national heritage, the Austrian government was able to blackmail many refugees living abroad into surrendering valuable property.  Claimants could get export permits for works of art only by letting the state retain its choice of many of their most valuable items.  The lawyer and his clients  had to “donate” the Klimts to the Belvedere before they could begin to reclaim minor remnants of Ferdinand’s collection.  The government made threats and false assertions that the gallery had a right to the pictures under Adele’s will.   But actually Adele’s will was not legally binding; she was leaving all her property to her husband and she only requested that he might leave the Klimts to the gallery after his death.  The works had been commissioned and paid or by Ferdinand and were really his property.   Actually he probably would want the gallery to have the works in 1925, but he most certainly did not want the portraits to go to Austria after the Anschluss.  There is no doubt that he wanted his relatives to inherit the works.  The confiscation of all his property and his exile by the Nazis and Austria had left him virtually penniless.

The paper trail of all seven Klimts shows that they passed through the hands of a Nazi lawyer appointed by the Gestapo to liquidate Ferdinand’s property.  In 1941 the Fuehrer gave the portrait to the Belvedere with a note signed “Heil Hitler”.  The lawyer dispensed the Klimts to various museums in Vienna.  Adele’s golden portrait was Aryanised; its new title was Woman of Gold.  Maria Altmann was most upset when she found out that the director of the Belvedere knew even during the Nazi era an incontestable declaration of gift in favor of the state was never obtained from Ferdinand.  The new director of the Belvedere wrote to the former director “the situation is growing into a sea snake…I hope you can get me out of this not undangerous situation.”  Even during the Nazi era an incontestable declaration of a gift in favor of the state was never obtained from Ferdinand.  And so when Maria and her lawyer put the claim to Austria they felt that it was an unanswerable claim both legally and morally; yet the claim was turned down.  Austria’s culture minister stated publicly that the Klimts were not stolen.  Maria’s anger made the decision for her that they would now take the case through the US courts.  It took seven years for her lawyer to finally win the case of Altmann vs the Republic of Austria.  The Austrian government case was rejected by the courts.  Altman’s victory was a bad day for Austria.  They had gone to astonishing lengths to prevent the return of the Bloch-Bauer Klimts, which they had treated as their own national patrimony.  It was a bitter blow to their pride and heritage.

Shortly after the decision there was controversy again when Maria sold Adele to Ronald Lauder for $135,000,000.00.  Comments were made that this decision made her a money greedy person.  She has said that the painting has no place in a private home and Lauder has placed it in the Neue Gallerie for the world to see.  The art critic of the New York Times accused her of “cashing in” and thus “transforming” a story about justice and redemption after the Holocaust into yet another tale of the crazy and intoxicating art market. He argued they should give the works away to a public institution. Lauder says that Adele is “our Mona Lisa”.  When he was ambassador to Austria he was involved in the case on the behalf of Maria Altmann. There is still anger and resentment in Austria over the loss of this great portion of their cultural possessions.  To some Adele represents the need for a more reform and efficient means of handing over these works; to others it exemplifies the need to close the door on this chapter and suspend the process of restitution altogether.  During Hitler’s reign more than 650,000 art works were looted or confiscated from their Jewish owners, but most of these were not valuable.  They were mainly sentimental and symbolic.  But today Adele reigns in a museum that we would like to think would have been her choice of final residence.

The world record sale in 2006 of a Gustav Klimt portrait marked the culmination of its sensational journey from the salons of Vienna  via the hands of Nazi looters to the Neue Museum in New York.  The painting is a portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, a beautiful wealthy Austrian woman which took Klimt 3 years and hundreds of drawings to produce.   This is a story that fascinates the public not only because at that time it became the world’s most expensive painting but also because it is at the center of a sensational case about Nazi looted art  The journey of Adele ended 68 years of injustice.  When an arbitration court ruled that Vienna’s state owned Belvedere Gallery must return 5 Klimt paintings to Maria Altmann, a U.S. citizen now living in California who was the last direct relative of their original owner, restitution experts reacted with joy and disbelief.  This case was a bitter legal battle that was waged for more than seven years, and it was a classic David and Goliath confrontation that most experts thought impossible to win.  A federal court in California and then the U.S. Supreme Court determined that Altmann could sue the Republic of Austria in the U.S. courts for the return of the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer which had been stolen by the Nazis in World War II.  The Austrian government had claimed immunity as a sovereign nation, but its case was finally turned down.  Austria, confronted with a full U.S. trial finally agreed to arbitration and appointed Austrian arbitrators .

Altmann’s ultimate victory was a bad day for the Austrian government, whose government officials had planned and plotted and blocked the return of the Bloch-Bauer Klimts for over 60 years.  Losing the art was about so much more than money; it was a terrible blow to Austria’s pride and heritage. Gustave Klimt is an Austrian icon, the most celebrated artist in his lifetime.  His works stand as the most important of the Jugendsthil and Secessionist movements and the portrait of Adele is his finest work.  It is an elaborately gold embellished canvas and one of Klimt’s most notable masterpieces.  Adele is seated as if in a floating sea of gold with signs and symbols as decoration on her mantle that hark back to the Ravenna Byzantine gold mosaics imagery but also look forward with geometric decorations to the future.  Rumors abound that Adele and Klimt had a 12 year affair; this portrait took 3 years to complete and almost 200 preparatory drawings so that took up some time.  It is known that her arranged marriage was not a happy one; her personal maid and her physician both confirmed the relationship of painter and subject.  But to return from the tangential aspects of the story, Adele was the wife of Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, the owner of Austria’s largest sugar refinery.  He assembled the biggest most valuable collections of 17th century porcelain and 19th century Austrian art.  Adele inherited a fortune from her banker father.  Together they were among Vienna’s  moat prominent art patrons.  Fin de siecle Vienna rivalled Paris largely through the cultural passions of families such as theirs.  The Bloch-Bauers  lived in unimaginable luxury in a mansion where all the art including the paintings Ferdinand commissioned from Klimt were displayed.  Adele held her famous weekly salons for guests like Gustav and Alma Mahler, Richard Strauss, artists Klimt, Egon Schiele, Kokoschka, the writers Stefan Zweig and Arthur Schnitzler, and leading socialist theoreticians. Yet there was little happiness in the marriage.  She was known to be a rather cold intellectual  a woman who was very politically aware, but she was childless.  Her double niece, Maria Altmann, said she remembered her as extremely elegant tall, dark and thin.  When she died of meningitis at the age of 43, her husband turned her bedroom into a memorial chapel hung with all their Klimts and freshly cut flowers.

Niece Maria Altmann married an aspiring opera singer in the last fashionable Jewish wedding before the Germans annexed Austria.  Her uncle gave her a diamond necklace and earrings which had belonged to Adele as a wedding present. In the following March, Hitler’s troops marched into Vienna amid ringing bells and jubilant people.  One week later a Gestapo official  came to her door; he took all her valuables incuding her engagement ring and Adele’s necklace and earrings.  These were later presented to Hitler’s deputy, Hermann Goering, as a gift for his wife.  The next day her husband was arrested, imprisoned, and later deported to Dachau.  His brother Bernhard had a successful cashmere business in Austria, but he had moved to Paris.  The Nazis said that they would release Maria’s husband if he signed over his knitwear factory to them.  He did so and Fritz was freed.  Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer’s assets, including the sugar refinery, his two homes and his art collections had already been seized and he had fled to Switzerland.  The Altmanns were under house arrest but they managed to escape to England and then moved to America in 1940. Ferdinand died in 1945.  In his will, drawn up several weeks earlier, he named Maria Altmann and her sister and brother as his heirs.  However there was virtually nothing of value in the estate.  The Vienna mansion was now the headquarters of the Austrian State Railway; shares from the sugar company held in trust under Ferdinand’s name by a Swiss bank had been sold to an investor with Nazi connections; the summer palace in Prague became the chief residence of Reinhard Heydrich, who ruled Czechoslovakia and helped mastermind the “final solution”.  After Heydrich’s assassination in 1941, other Germans plundered its treasures and after the war ended the property was sequestered by the Czech communist government.   Bloch-Bauer’s art collection had been divided up; many works had been presented to Hitler, Goering and other deputies while ohers lay in a German depot with thousands of looted artworks earmarked for Hitler’s planned musuem in Linz.  Maria Altmann said that the porcelain collection had been auctioned off.  She knew that everything was gone but she was busy with 3 small children and struggling to make a living.   They did hire a lawyer but he found that the heirs had no claim to the Klimts, because they had been donated to the Belvedere Gallery allegedly under the terms of Adele’s will.  The heirs did not ever see the will but assumed that this was so.  …………continued tomorrow, July 30th.

Jackson Pollack painted this picture in 1947.

He said “On the floor I am more at ease, I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around in it, work from the four sides and be literally `in’ the painting.”

I look at that painting and I think to myself, “I could do that.”

I went to the Nerman Museum in Kansas City and saw something made out of bottle caps. It was very expensive. “I could do that,” I thought.

One of my friends, a Kansas City artist of note, made a few black squiggles on a white piece of paper. Hum, I mused. “I could have done that.”  It sold at a charity auction for a lot of money.

I’ve been to the Louvre in Paris and seen the Mona Lisa by Leonardo and Rembrandt’s  Bathsheba at Her Bath. I definitely could not have done either of those or Monet’s Water Lilies or Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. But as for the famous black dot on a white canvas that once hung, and may still hang in the Modern Museum of Art, I know for sure I could have done that.

The point is, I didn’t . . . and therein lies the genius of creativity, which has been defined as bringing into existence something new. Happily, it doesn’t have to be just about art. The simplest form comes in the creation of ideas. As a writer, I love that Carl Rodgers who is widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of psychotherapy and a clinician second only to Freud says  (loosely) that the emergence of the written word grows out of the uniqueness of the individual.

In truth, I find myself overwhelmed with creativity. Who can keep up with the deluge of new digital stuff brought to us by our steep learning curve computers and cell phones. (Let me remind you that when I sold a new piece of x-ray equipment, it was obsolete by the time it was installed.)

Nor is creativity limited to tangibles. As new social problems arise, unique ways of dealing with them continue to evolve. Years ago, who would have ever thought that mothers would have trouble bonding with their children? Yet today, due to the explosion of foster care and overseas adoption, attachment and bonding problems proliferate.

One doesn’t need to be a genius to create. It is a human quality we all possess. To make a thing of beauty, a quilt, a garden,  an apple pie, provides the creator with such joy and satisfaction as to be hard to equate.

I once spent a week at Anderson Ranch surrounded by creativity.  It is an art center in Aspen Snowmass Colorado where artists of all kinds have the opportunity to share, learn and expand their talents. Each day brings new experiences, new techniques and new acquaintances whose excitement and enthusiasm  are infectiously contagious. I took a photography course from a National Geographic photographer who taught me to see my surroundings in a whole new way and to use my little point and shoot camera creatively. I ate lunch with artists working on wood projects or with clay, or paint or metal. My  exhilaration  blended with theirs. At night, everyone went home completely exhausted yet hungry for more.

A member of my family is a set designer. He spends days, weeks, months creating sets for everything from grade school plays to Broadway shows. Yet after each final performance, he breaks up the sets  and throws them away. That must be called ‘disposable art.’

Another of my family uses his computer for striking pictures and portraits, and still another makes gorgeous doors and windows and outdoor sculptures out of melted glass.

I think about them now and then and every once in awhile say to myself, I bet I could do that. Then again, unqustionably not.

I created this: the picture, not the spirea

One of the real thrills of travel to Russia is to go to  the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoe Selo to see the Amber Room.  Amber is the anciently dried resin from prehistoric trees and is most easily obtained by buying amber jewelry  in St. Petersburg.  However the Amber Room was created from several tons of carved amber and  many many gemstones  The room is actually a series of large amber panels, backed with gold leaf and mirrors which covered the inside of a chamber.   The original Amber Room represented a joint effort of German and Russian craftsmen.  Construction began in Prussia in 1701  at the Charlottenburg Palace.  In 1716 the panels were given by Fredrich Wilhelm of Prussia to his then ally Peter the Great of Russia in a deal between the two nations that they were united against Sweden. In its new habitat it was expanded and after several renovations, it covered 55 square meters and contained more than six tons of amber.   In 1755 Czarina Elizabeth of Russia had it transferred and installed in the Winter Place and then in the Catherine Palace. When Nazi Germany invaded Russia they discovered the panels under wallpaper which the Russians had used to hide the room because they had been unable to disassemble and remove the amber because it began to crumble.  The German soldiers found and removed the room within 36 hours  in 1941.  27 crates were evacuated to Konigsberg in east Prussia, for storage and display in the town’s castle.  In 1945 Hitler gave orders  that allowed the movement of cultural possessions for their safety.  Eyewitnesses claim that they saw the crates at the railway station.  It was suggested that the crates were put aboard the Wilhelm Gustloff and this ship was sunk by a Soviet submarine.  Later in the war Konigsberg was heavily bombed by the British and it suffered further extensive damage at the hands of the Russians before and after its fall later in the year.  The city was renamed Kaliningrad.  The Amber Room has never been seen again.

However, there are conflicting stories and theories that continually surface even to the present.  For example, the Amber Room was destroyed by the bombing, or it was hidden in a now lost subterranean bunker in Konigsberg.  Perhaps it was buried in mines in the Ore Mountains, or it was taken onto a ship or submarine which was sunk in the Baltic Sea.  Searches have been mounted without any success.  At one point in 1998 two separate teams announced that they had located it –one in a silver mine, the other in a lagoon.  Neither project was successful in finding the room.  However, in 1997 one Italian stone mosaic that was part of a set of four which had decorated the Amber Room did turn up in west Germany.  It was found in the possession of the family of one of the German soldiers who had helped pack up the Amber Room to take it to Germany.

More recently there came the latest discovery.  In 2008 German treasure hunters  found a 20 metre pit in Deutschneudorf, a small town near the German Czech border.  The site reportedly matches intelligence from other survivors who helped loot the fabled room; it responded to electromagnetic pulse measurements and the manmade cavern  is thought to contain an estimated two tons of gold or silver.  Now here is the catch to the solution–opening the cavern to get into the chamber cannot be completed because the room may be secured by booby traps.  Sappers who are experts at dealing with explosives will have to determine how to safely bring up the materials contained in the room.  Nevertheless the mayor  of the village says “we’re confident it’s part of the Amber Room.”  The treasure hunters  believe that there are close to two tons of Nazi gold down there and that there might also be clues to the whereabouts of the room.  Then comes the disappointment that the treasure hunters have given up the expedition because  they cannot agree on how to reach the treasure trove.  In the meantime still another discovery was made by the Amber Room Organization in the mountains about 30 miles from Weimar.  The German spokesman told the media that he knows where the Amber Room is hidden.  He  says that the room was brought to Weimar together with a treasure of the Hohenzollern and Prussian Crown Insignia.  It was then transported to the county of Saalfeld and hidden in an old underground mining chamber.  This group is looking for a production company that will subsidize the search and film what is discovered.  Somehow all of these  ”discoveries” seem to involve the expense of proving them.  As of July 2010 none of these theories have proven true.  There have been no new verifiable leads  and new claims at this point bring a general skeptism about ever finding the Amber Room.  What is valid about all these searches is that the room’s hiding place is the biggest mystery of WWII.   Today the general opinion held by experts and investigators is that the Amber Room was destroyed when Konigsberg Castle was burned down, shortly  after it was surrendered to occupying Soviet forces.

Documents from the archives show that this was also the conclusion of the chief of the first formal mission sent by the Soviet government in 1945.  However some years later this same man recanted.  The general opinion about this change is that it was firmly requested by the Soviet government officials.  What is absolutely certain is that they did not want to be held responsible for the loss of the Amber Room.  So too, the German government would prefer not to think that this world’s greatest lost treasure is not due to dereliction on their part.  And what is more a German company has already donated 3.5 million dollars in retribution to the Russian government for its theft and destruction.  Why would the Russian government try to incriminate the Germans in the loss even when the preponderence of evidence indicated that they were at fault?  Those who have studied the situation intimate that the Soviets made the effort to obscure the fact that it was Soviet soldiers not only in order to blame the Germans but also to hide the facts even from other branches of the Soviet government.  It was a useful Cold War propaganda tool and it  may also have been a way to evade criticism for the destruction for not having provided the safe removal of the room at the start of the war.  The Russian government states that “the destruction of the Amber Room during the Second World War is fault of the people who started the war.”  In all honesty there seems to have been enough blame to easily go around.

So what did we think of the Amber Room that we saw three years ago?  The Russians have replaced countless pieces of furniture, floors, fabrics in the palaces of Russia.  Whole factories have been devoted to replicating destroyed palaces, museums, and homes.  We have seen photographs of many of the Russian antiquities and the destruction visited on palaces and churches by the Nazi hordes who held St. Petersburg captive for over 900 days in the war. One of the major projects has been the Amber Room restoration.  It is true that not a single piece of original amber is in place at the Catherine Palace.  Reconstruction began in l979 and was based on black and white photographs of the original Amber Room.  The new room was finally dedicated in 2003 by Vladimir Putin to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the founding of St. Petersburg.  If any of the original amber actually was buried underground it has most certainly crumbled into dust. The designs have been copied to perfection and we literally gasped at the splendor of the room.  They have done a fantastic job and I would be thrilled to go back tomorrow to see it again.  Perhaps this is the rationalization of a viewer not involved emotionally in a tragedy, but it was an experience I will never forget.

One of my great joys is to see the magnificent works of art “in the flesh” that I studied and lectured about over the years.  One of the great downers for my husband has been to visit works of art  in all the churches and museums of the world.  We were in Bruges, which he refers to as a fantastic Disneyland for adults, and I asked him whether we might go to Ghent to see the altarpiece in St. Bavo.  He said we could go although he was really satiated on hinge paintings.  By this he meant works that open and close and have a number of panel paintings within them depicting scenes from the life of Christ together with pious depictions of the donors of the work.  After Bruges the city of Ghent is not particularly lovely or clean; we hit Ghent in the midst of a storm and headed for one of the greatest hinge paintings known to the world.  The church was dark and gloomy and we came upon the altarpiece situated in a small chapel,  and suddenly the world was bright and beautiful.  My husband dropped his jaw and said that the color in the works was virtually alive and seemed almost wet.  We were looking at the multi panelled Ghent Altarpiece, a 600 year old six-hinged polyptych work that is 12 feet high by 17 feet wide when fully opened.  The work is believed to have been begun by Hubert van Eyck in the early 1420s and finished by Jan van Eyck, a revolutionary innovator who was at least as important to Northern European painting as Giotto had been to Italian painting.  It literally took our breath away.  The panels have definitely been proven to have come from the workshop of Jan van Eyck and the attribution of the entire work is normally credited to Jan with a questioning of the exact contribution of Hubert as well as the other members of the workshop.

It had been commissioned by a wealthy textile merchant and has resided in various locations in St. Bavo for 6 centuries except for a number of prudent removals–to rescue it from Protestant iconoclasts, from a fire and confiscations by French soldiers and by Hitler.   The latter thief had the panels hauled to a castle in Bavaria and then to a salt mine in Austria from which it was rescued in 1942.  In 1986 the work was relocated to a chapel in the church and placed in a huge aquarium like box of bulletproof, reflective greenish safety glass that renders it scarcely seeable.  Fortunately we saw the work in 1985.  It is considered the defining monument of the new realism of Northern Renaissance art and is regarded as both the foundation of a distinguished tradition and an exemplary achievement to challenge all later artists.  One might justly describe it as encompassing the whole art of painting.

There is no more astounding work of art than the Ghent Altarpiece.  It is the first really ambitious and consummate use of oil paint, and it marks the birth of realism as a guiding principle in European painting. Jan van Eyck’s glazes pool like liquid radiance across his pictures’ smooth surfaces trapping and releasing graded tones of light and shadow and huge portions of brilliant color.  The figures have sculptural roundedness, warm flesh, splendid raiment and distinctive personalities that literally leap to the viewer’s eye.  We were engulfed in details such as hands that touch and grip with pressures, masses of hair given depth and definition by a few highlighted strands.  Overall, the pictures generate sweet and visual music.  Two panels show lovely winged angels singing and playing instruments and some scholars have said the notes they sing are discernible from the shapes of their mouths; an organ is so detailed that organists could recognize its sounds.  Adam and Eve are depicted resplendent in their nakedness and seem to project out of the depths of their niches into real space.  Typical of Netherandish painting of the period Eve has a protruding stomach which signifies fertility and style rather than pregnancy.

Even the arrangement –there are two ranks of panels, as if of two altarpieces stacked–is a format unique in art history.  One panel was stolen in 1934, and is replaced by a bland copy, but the overall magic of the work overpowers any misgivings about the astonishing realism of the figures, plants, and animals.  The lower level is a continuous heavenly landscape, verdant and rich through which a multitude of figures travel on horseback and on foot to adore the mystic Lamb of God on the central altar.  There are clerics, pagan philosophers, martyrs, saints and angels approaching the altar.  The lamb, whose blood flows into a chalice symbolizes the sacrifice of Christ.  A stream of crystal clear water tic trickles  to the bottom of the panel  from where it may have fallen to thirsty souls in Purgatory on a predella — a strip of small narrative scenes– that was lost sometime before 1568.  An art historian of the time lamented its ruin by restorers  with “calf hands”.  The complex theological program is based on the liturgy for All Saints Day, however no single text has been found to “explain” the entire program. But that is an area of the work which does not interest me at all.  It is the upper level which is both awe inspiring and confusing.  Mary is seated to the the left and John the Baptist to the right of a central figure, a young enthroned and bejeweled male figure holding a crystal sceptre and raising two fingers in blessing either Christ or God.   Who the middle figure is has never been established with any degree of certainty, however the three figures have a staggering sophistication.    The intricacy and sumptuousness of the images are achieved with economical technique.  Each of the hundreds of pearls that decorate Mary’s robes is just a dollop of gray hit with a spot of white.  There is a seductive softness in the flesh of Mary’s throat which can be seen to be one long stroke indicating a crease of slightly varied flesh color.  It is as if van Eyck understood that realism dos not require verisimilitude and needs only enough visual cues to fire the mind’s own abilities.  His style is the result of training he received from manuscript illumination and the study of modelling of bodies and drapery of sculpture at that time.

The Ghent Altarpiece is the alpha and the omega of altarpiece painting.  Viewing it is so overwhelming that I began to wonder what it would look like with perfect museum lighting, but then this will never come to pass.  It will remain in some dark chapel or nook of St. Bavo that depends on the work to sustain the prestige and finances of the church.  However, when I suggested that my husband might enjoy seeing the Isenheim Altarpiece, he advised me that once you have seen the greatest, there was no need to seek out other hinge paintings.  He was finished with them.