Beth's Everything Blog

Archive for the ‘Pinky Says’ Category

It was a really hot day in New York, so hot that our art tour group was already irritable and hoping that somewhere along the line of artists’ studios we were visiting there would be an air conditioned respite. When we stood outside James Rosenquist’s studio we had already been to 3 other places, none of which seemed promising for cool air. Rosenquist opened the door and was startled to see 24 people. One of the jokesters in our group explained that we were the mothers’ march against polio. Rosenquist’s confusion disappeared immediately. He opened the door and greeted us as if we were long lost relatives. This eager bunch of art lovers fell for him hook, line and sinker.

James Rosenquist grew up in a house that had no electricity. He was 14 when he won a scholarship to study art four days at the Minneapolis School of Art. He recognized that he was involved in “serious business” because he was given an eraser that cost 25 cents and sheets of paper that cost 35 cents each. There were no books on art available to him; he was much more familiar with illustrations from adventure and girlie magazines. There was no room in his mind for abstraction in art. He painted things as real as he could. As an adult he painted billboards of Hollywood stars with faces 20 feet high, noses 10 feet tall and eyes 3 feet wide. As a member of Local 230, the sign painting union, he painted Kirk Douglas as a Viking and Elizabeth Taylor in a swimsuit while working on a scaffold 22 stories above Times Square. He also painted signs for Seagram’s Canadian Club and Hebrew National Salami. He would make the salami look mouthwatering. Everything he painted was real. He was a brilliant sign painter and everybody liked him. Today he has been everywhere, knows just about everybody. He has had shows at the Guggenheim and the Whitney and countless major museums around the world. A painting of his appears on the cover of a telephone book in Dubai. And still everybody likes him but they also thrill to his work.

It is the work that Rosenquist does that celebrates him most of all. He has painted soups, salads, spaghetti, beer, movie stars, groceries, cars, airplanes, and space. His own observations of his work are fascinating. “I really work hard to create some kind of meaning out of the things I use…..They suggest meanings but they resist drawing conclusions…..The work has an intrinsic meaning for me, but remains open to multiple interpretations. I want to encourage the possibility of exploring meanings beyond those I put there……I count on the viewer bringing something to the work.” And this is really the purpose of a great painting –it is necessary for the viewer to be a part of the exploration and the understanding of the work.

Rosenquist has never been fond of the term Pop Art, but over 50 years of being described as a pop artist he is resigned to it. He says that he is still unsure of what the term means. “What united us (Warhol, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Wesselman) was dread of the drip, the splash, the schmear,” combined with an ironic attitude toward the banalities of American consumer culture. It was born out of rejection of abstraction and its anarchic angers. But it was also a comment on the boring middle class acceptance of mediocrity. By depicting the household appliances and the movie stars and the foods Rosenquist was understanding the daily needs of Americans as well as revealing their dependence on the trite everyday household they lived in. It was then the work of the viewer to add their own meanings to the art, to be a part of the exploration of the work of art. To viewers who say that his imagery is enigmatic, Rosenquist replies that there is a story behind the pictures. “Nothing is arbitrary in my paintings. If you ask me why there are tubes of lipstick there or why is that dog climbing the stairs I can tell you exactly what got me off the chair to paint it.”

Rosenquist has had his ups and downs in life as have most painters. There were long periods when he could not sell anything. He suffered a terrible automobile accident. A forest fire destroyed his house, office, studio and 62 acres of magnificent vegetation. Today he lives in New York; and Florida and he has befriended ordinary people whom he understands and respects. “People ask me why I paint. I don’t know why except that when I don’t paint I get cranky. Maybe I paint to prove to myself that I had an idea.” It is his decency and his downright niceness, his wonderful sense of humor and his honesty that endears him to all who meet him. He feels strongly about civil rights and moral issues. His paintings protest against “stupid wars, stupid laws, ruthless politicians and greedy entrepreneurs.”

Rosenquist is a remarkable man in that fame has not dimmed his greatness as an artist. And he still abides by his honest definition of his art, “All art is about feeling. Critics may talk about cool abstractionists and hot expressionists, but hot or cold, abstract or representational, it’s all about eliciting emotion, otherwise we wouldn’t do it.” We would have to journey far to get a better picture of Rosenquist’s art and the artist himself.

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.

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.

The opening date for the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts is literally no longer beyond our ken.  It is time to consider what we can visibly see on the horizon and what we see can only be described as monumental, exciting and awe inspiring.  If you are a resident of the Kansas City area you owe it to yourself to see an amazing sight.  We did just that a few weeks ago and I can only tell you that from the first approach we made to the front of the center we were completely blown away.  Try this when you go, because until you see tiny little men cavorting on the roof of the building,  it is only then that you suddenly realize that the strangely interesting buildings that you see from the highway have become huge dynamic and arresting theatres that dwarf all other buildings near it.

There are many remarkable facts about the building that you should know.  First of all it is 100% privately funded and 91% of the $413 million dollar budget has been successfully raised.  The project is based on a 12 year timeline from its start to its completion.  The land was acquired in 1999 construction began in 2006 and the grand opening is scheduled for September 2011.  It contains 285,000 square feet  and provides two separate performance halls.  The Muriel Kauffman Theatre will have 1800 unobstructed seats. The huge stage (50′ deep x 100′ wide x 85′ tall) has the ability to produce virtually any stage production.  The stage aperture can be reduced or expanded by the header which can be raised or lowered and the legs which can slide from the sides of the theatre to reduce the width.  The Helzberg Hall contains 1600 seats arranged in a 360 degree seating configuration.  It will contain a 5548 pipe Casavant concert organ.  Both halls will have awe inspiring acoustics designed by Yasu Toyota who was responsible for the superb sound system in the Disney Hall in Los Angeles.  There are no bad seats in the halls with open site lines from every seat at every price.  A  parking garage is attached and allows covered parking for 1024 cars.  The atrium and lobby area with 17,000 square feet is the largest cable and glass enclosed structure in the world.  Magnificent spaces have been provided  for weddings, corporate and social events.

The Disney Hall designed by Frank Gehry has held the prime reputation for concert venues since its inception and strangely it has been a proving ground for the Kauffman Center.  For example both buildings are sheathed in stainless steel , but the  two halls  of the Kauffman have been bead blasted to reduce the blinding shine and heat of the sun.  The exterior of the building which is not steel is concrete which has been dyed to complement the limestone exteriors of the historic limestone buildings of the downtown area. The acoustic system has been tested on a sound model that was constructed of Helzberg Hall which is exactly 1/10 the size of the hall.  In this manner changes have been tested and different arrangements have been made to enhance and improve the acoustics.  Under each seat is a unique heating and cooling system in play that prevents the noise of huge blasts of cold or hot air.  There are refreshments areas on every level.  AND there are a total of 196 toilets with the ratio of 2 to 1 for women to men facilities!

Moshe Safdie, the architect, is a global citizen, urban planner, theorist and author.  His building projects are worldwide ranging from Canada, India, Bangladesh, Isreal, Singapore and the United States.  Safdie has produced museums, colleges, libraries, condo complexes, parks, office buildings, courthouses. He ‘has always maintained a distance from the idea of imposing a signature style which would make his work visibly recognizable.  ”I just never felt part of it” he says.  And so starting with his Habitat project and  continuing through his whole body of work his guiding principle has been to design his architecture that responds to the essence of the place and create meaningful, vital, and inclusive social spaces that will enable and enrich the community.  He maintains that architecture is not about building the impossible; it is about building what makes sense for a specific need and setting.  It must respond to the issues of energy, conservation, ecology, and  it must weave itself into the historic cultural and social fabric of the sight.  That is a tall order for any building but it seems to have been accomplished in the Kauffman Center.  It’s big and its beautiful. And it is right here in River City!  Congratulations to Kansas City on a project that will be recognized and applauded all over the world.