In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris, Beirut and Bamako, the Galerie St. Etienne offers some thoughts first published in October 2001.
Art serves many functions, but in the last decades, undue emphasis was placed on its most superficial aspects. Art has lately been seen as the ultimate consumer luxury good, a status symbol and an investment commodity.
However, art has a deeper purpose. Art is one of the oldest forms of human expression and communication. It speaks to the indomitability of the human spirit, the sacred and ineffable amidst the mundane. Art teaches us what it means to be human, leads to the light even when it exposes the darkest side of our nature. Some art celebrates beauty, other art chides us for our failings in the hope that we may be better and stronger yet than we can imagine. All great art, in all its many guises, is an affirmation of life.
In 1941, the exiled Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig wrote a memoir called The World of Yesterday. The prosperous bourgeois society of his youth had been wiped out by World War I, and Hitler had now appropriated what remained of his homeland. Zweig would commit suicide in Brazil shortly after finishing his memoir. The Galerie St. Etienne, which originated in Vienna in 1923 (under the name Neue Galerie) grew out of that same turmoil which caused Zweig to take his life. Many of the artists whom we represent dealt with the hardships of a world in transition: some (such as the Germans in the 1920s) critically, others (such as Grandma Moses in the 1940s and ‘50s) by offering hope and comfort. Most recently, the contemporary artist Sue Coe has tried to jolt us into an awareness of the concealed horrors, the exploitation of people and animals, undergirding the seemingly safe, secure and incomparably affluent life that most Americans enjoy.
The world of today is different from the world we thought we lived in prior to September 11, 2001. As we grope our way toward an understanding of what has happened to us, and what it will mean, there is still solace to be found in art. Given time and reflection, the answers will come.
(Images, clockwise from left: Leonard Baskin, Man of Peace, 1952, woodcut; George Grosz, Man with Blinders, circa 1925, ink; Sue Coe, Bomb Shelter,1991, photo-etching.)
THE TAUBMAN TEST: WHAT DOES THE $515 MILLION AUCTION MEAN?
Jane Kallir
Co-Director, Galerie St. Etienne New York
Sotheby’s auction of art from the estate of A. Alfred Taubman, to which the firm guaranteed $515 million, was characterized by some as a test of the art market. However, the sales on November 4 and 5 were less a gauge of overall market strength than a reflection of the auction environment that Taubman himself helped create.
Taubman, a shopping-mall developer who purchased Sotheby’s in 1983, pioneered the mass-marketing of fine art. His approach was later echoed by two competitors in the luxury-goods trade: François Pinault, who purchased Christie’s in 1998, and Bernard Arnault, who acquired Phillips auctioneers in 1999 (and sold it in 2003). The transformation of these auction houses, once musty redoubts frequented principally by professional dealers, into retail giants was furthered by income disparities that increasingly pushed wealth to the top of the global economic pyramid.
The growth of the international auction market inevitably fueled competition between the principal houses, Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Recognizing that they were cannibalizing one another’s business, the two firms colluded to fix commissions, a crime for which Taubman served ten months in prison in 2002. Today, the competition is more cutthroat than ever. To woo choice consignments, Sotheby’s and Christie’s drop the seller’s commission, kick back a portion of the buyer’s premium and offer guarantees, financed either by third parties or out of the firms’ own pockets.
Unmoved by Taubman’s decades with Sotheby’s, his heirs solicited a sales proposal from Christie’s as well. One may imagine that it was a point of pride for Sotheby’s to win its former chairman’s art collection. Hence the $515 million guarantee. The sales on November 4 and 5 pulled in roughly $420 million, and Sotheby’s predicts that, taking into account post-sales activity and a smattering of Taubman lots scheduled for upcoming auctions, they are on track to earn back the guarantee. Whether they will make a profit is another question. Auction houses today can sell half-a-billion dollars’ worth of art and still lose money.
The hefty guarantee undoubtedly prompted Sotheby’s to push up its presale estimates, which discouraged bidding at the high-ticket evening auction on November 4. Observers described the atmosphere as “dismal” and “lackluster.” On the other hand, because the auctioneer was not necessarily constrained by specific reserves, the guarantee gave Sotheby’s unusual latitude in accepting bids. While the evening’s sales total barely exceeded the low estimate, 90% of the lots found buyers.
Comprising chiefly material that falls within the “Impressionist and Modern” category, Taubman’s collection was remarkably diverse. The great majority of the pieces were acquired at Sotheby’s. If his Egon Schiele holdings (about which I wrote an introductory catalogue essay) are any indication, Taubman often bought at or just below the low estimates, works that might otherwise have gone unsold. In this fashion he was both boosting his company’s bottom line and potentially getting bargains. His acquisitions seem relatively random. The Schieles cover a broad array of subjects, but there are few masterpieces in the group.
Taubman’s collection touched all the bases and hit the big names. Interior photographs of his homes, reproduced not only in the catalogues but also as wallpaper in Sotheby’s elevators, stressed the collection’s function as décor and lifestyle choice. However, it is difficult to discern an aesthetic thread tying the whole together. There is little evidence of the quirky passion or carefully honed insights that have historically distinguished great collectors. Taubman, an expert in marketing luxury brands, expanded the auction business by blurring the line between collecting and shopping. The Taubman sale epitomizes the financial pressures that today burden all the major auction houses, as well as the declining significance of traditional connoisseurship.
AUSTRIAN RESTITUTION POLICY:
WHERE ARE WE, AND HOW DID WE GET HERE?
Jane Kallir, Co-Director, Galerie St. Etienne
As an American of Austrian Jewish descent, and an arts professional specializing in Austrian classical modernism, I have a very personal relationship to the topic at hand. In 1923, my grandfather, Otto Kallir, founded the original Neue Galerie in Vienna, which was the principal representative of such artists as Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka before World War II. He and my family fled Austria shortly after the 1938 Anschluss, and in 1939 they made their way to New York, where my grandfather established the Galerie St. Etienne. After the war, he renewed his professional ties to the Austrian art establishment, and used these connections to help refugee collectors recover works that had been left behind, looted or otherwise misappropriated. Among the people Kallir tried to help were Alma Mahler Werfel, the heirs of the composer Johann Strauss, and Leah Bondi.
Because I wrote the first comprehensive Egon Schiele catalogue raisonné, I took a particular interest in the Bondi case. In letters to my grandfather, Leah Bondi had described how the Nazi art dealer Friedrich Welz came to her apartment shortly before she was scheduled to leave Austria and threatened her into giving him, without compensation, Schiele’s Portrait of Wally. After the war, Portrait of Wally was mistakenly restituted to a different claimant, and then sold to the Österreichische Galerie. From there the painting passed, through an exchange, to the collector Rudolf Leopold. Although both Leopold and the Director of the Österreichische Galerie were aware of Bondi’s claim, they chose to ignore it. And she, struggling to reestablish herself professionally in London, lacked the funds and the stamina to take legal action against Austria’s largest museum and most powerful private collector.
From the moment I read the letters in my grandfather’s Bondi file, I began trying to get journalists to cover the story. At first (this was in the early 1980s) there wasn’t any interest, but gradually people became more aware of the magnitude of unrestituted Holocaust loot, and Egon Schiele became more widely known. In 1997, the Leopold Museum loaned Portrait of Wally to an exhibition of Leopold’s Schieles at the Museum of Modern Art. I decided to give my grandfather’s Bondi file to the New York Times, which published what proved to be a groundbreaking exposé. Literally hours before MoMA was scheduled to ship the Schiele show back to Austria, New York’s District Attorney, Robert Morgenthau, stepped in with subpoenas for Portrait of Wally and a second painting, Dead City, that had been claimed by another family.
Morgenthau’s subpoenas created a furor in Austria. Reactions ranged from angry denunciations of America for “meddling,” to calls for Austria to finally come clean about its Nazi past. The cultural minister, Elisabeth Gehrer, determined to seize the moral high ground and at the same time show the world that Austria could handle its own affairs. In the first months of 1998, she opened the archives of all institutions under her jurisdiction to researchers, and established a commission to study the provenances of art in Austria’s federal museums. To implement the findings of this so-called historians’ commission, the Austrian parliament, in September 1998, passed an act authorizing the restitution of Nazi looted artworks in state collections. The 1998 law also attempted to rectify the fact that many exiled survivors had been deprived of restituted artworks by Austria’s export laws, which forced them to sell their property in Austria, or in some cases to “donate” part of a collection to a museum in order to get an export permit for the rest. This portion of the 1998 law was expanded in 2009 to include artworks sold to state museums by claimants if there was a close connection between the denial of an export permit and the sale.
Some seventeen years after its passage, Austria’s 1998 restitution act remains a model of its kind. Few nations have in the interim made such a coordinated, systematic attempt to deal with Nazi loot in public collections. Moreover, Austria put its money where its mouth was, funding teams of provenance researchers to investigate state collections. The complexity and cost of in-depth professional provenance research is often underestimated by those who blithely call for wholesale restitution. Few privately funded cultural institutions in the US have the staff or money to deal with this issue as thoroughly as they should.
At the same time, Austria’s restitution law is far from perfect. For one thing, it isn’t really a law. In Austria, as in all the nations of continental Europe, a good-faith purchaser gets good title to stolen property after a prescribed period of uncontested possession. In Austria, this so-called prescription period is three years, or six years if the former owner doesn’t reside in the province where the property is located. Thus most claims for the return of Nazi loot are, to this day, time barred under Austrian law. Rather than change the law—which would admittedly be almost impossible—the 1998 parliamentary act established an extrajudicial procedure applicable only to government-owned museums, and only under certain very specific circumstances. Ultimately, the members of the historians’ commission (also known as the Beirat) are in each instance charged with making a moral determination.
The idea of a panel of Austrians passing moral judgment on Jewish claims seems a bit suspect in principle, and in practice, the Beirat’s decisions often appear untenably subjective. The process is far from transparent: the Beirat meets behind closed doors, the dossiers submitted for its consideration are never made public, nor does the committee provide much, if any, explanation for its findings. Most problematically, the Beirat’s mandate provides absolutely no possibility for compromise. Decisions are black-or-white: either the work stays in the museum, or it is returned.
Unfortunately, seventy years after the end of World War II, few restitution claims are today matters of black-or-white. Just about all the relevant witnesses have died, and surviving documents can easily be misinterpreted. By now, many of the more straight-forward claims have been dealt with. The Wally case, which resulted in a $19 million settlement for the Bondi heirs, was relatively clear-cut. The theft itself was dramatically documented in Leah Bondi’s letters, and Leopold admitted that he was aware of her claim. Hence, according to the doctrine of prescriptive possession, he never acquired good title under Austrian law.
Many of the restitution cases that have recently come up for adjudication in Austria are far more ambiguous. Take, for example, Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, which was sold by Erich Lederer to the Austrian state in the 1970s. In accordance with the 2009 restitution act, the Beirat here had to determine whether there was a “close connection” between this sale and the fact that the Austrian ministry of culture had, for some twenty years, deliberately pressured Lederer to relinquish the Frieze by denying him an export license. Or take the case of Karl Mayländer, who gave a group of Schiele drawings to his girlfriend, Etelka Hoffmann, before being deported by the Nazis. In each instance, Austrian officials were asked to read the mind of a dead man. Was Lederer acting of his own free will, or did he feel coerced? Would Mayländer have given Hoffmann the Schieles under different circumstances? Did it make a difference that the Beethoven Frieze is a national monument, whereas the Mayländer Schieles were just several among many dozens in Austrian public collections?
In the end, Mayländer’s Schieles were restituted to his heirs, because he and Hoffmann had never married. (Had she been his wife—an impossibility under Nazi anti-miscegenation laws—the case would probably have been decided otherwise.) On the other hand, the Beirat decided not to restitute the Beethoven Frieze. In my opinion, both decisions were unjust. The poignant efforts that doomed Jews like Karl Mayländer made to preserve their possessions (which at the time often had only sentimental value) should be respected, not annulled on legal technicalities. And the Beethoven Frieze case clearly demonstrates the unenforceability of the 2009 restitution act. Compromise—an alternative not permitted to the Beirat—would in this instance have been a more just solution.
The question before us is: where do we go from here? Personally, I believe that restitution is, and will always be, justified in well-documented cases of outright theft. But such cases are increasingly rare. The myriad other types of transfers that took place during the dark years of Hitler’s reign are almost impossible for us, today, to judge. So many years after the fact, we must recognize that there is a limit to what we can know, and that moral certainty is as elusive today as it ever was.
(Images, left to right: Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (detail), 1907, Neue Galerie, New York; Gustav Klimt, Beethoven Frieze (detail), 1902, Secession Building, Vienna; Egon Schiele, Portrait of Wally (detail), 1912, Leopold Museum, Vienna.)
Bob Gesinus-Visser was both saint and sinner to Oskar Kokoschka. He bailed the artist out financially when the two met in Paris, and then, in 1933, invited him to his home in Rapallo, Italy. Here Kokoschka did two portraits each of Gesinus-Visser and his wife, Elizabeth. The artist and his patron eventually quarreled about money, however, and this may be why Bob Gesinus-Visser II (with Dog) remains unfinished. The “devil horns” on Bob’s head allude to this fight, while the gap-toothed grin, associated in Kokoschka’s work with childlike innocence, suggests forgiveness. The portrait is on view in our current exhibition, “Recent Acquisitions,” through October 16.
(Image: Oskar Kokoschka, Bob Gesinus-Visser II (with Dog), 1933, mixed media on canvas.)
American self-taught artist Morris Hirshfield, a tailor by trade, planned his compositions with paper templates, like dress patterns. Note the attention to design and texture in Opera Girl (1941), Hirshfield’s tribute to an elegant lifestyle that he, a Lithuanian immigrant working in the garment industry, probably never knew. One of the best-known American self-taught artists of the early 20th century, Hirshfield was given a one-man show at MoMA in 1943.
(Image: Morris Hirshfield, Opera Girl, 1942, oil.)
Anna Mary Robertson moved to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley in 1887, shortly after marrying Thomas Salmon Moses. The couple returned to upstate New York in 1905 after raising five children. Grandma Moses would later remark that, compared to Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, the Adirondacks were like “a swamp.” “The Shenandoah Valley,” she said, “was the paradise of the world.”
UNDERSTANDING THE ART MARKET, PART III
Five Common-Sense Rules for Collectors
The art market may be bigger than ever today, but the basic rules of collecting have not changed much.
•Learn as much as you can about any artist who interests you. What are his or her key developmental periods? Major works? Most important subjects? What condition issues affect the work, and how should a work look if it is in good condition?
• Learn to understand the artist’s market. How do the foregoing issues influence prices?
• Don’t rely too much on extrinsic factors, such as exhibition and publication history. While provenance is important in determining whether the present seller has good title, a flashy history can inflate the price of the work.
• Educate yourself. Try to develop your eye and your intellect at the same time. If you must hire an advisor, find one who is genuinely knowledgeable and can help you learn.
•Don’t buy for investment. Pay an appropriate price and plan to enjoy the work for the long term. Slow appreciation in value is normal.
(Image: Legendary collectors Dorothy & Herb Vogel, who donated over 4,000 works to the National Gallery of Art.)
Part I: How The Market is Manipulated
Part II: What Do Auction Prices Really Mean?
The memory of the Civil War lingered in American memory for decades after the conflict ended. Self-taught artist John Kane (1860-1934), who had emigrated from Scotland in 1879, loved his adopted land and the freedom it promised. He painted several versions of “Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.” The one on view in our current show, "Recent Acquisitions," even includes a portrait of George Washington on the back for good measure.
(Image: John Kane, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (Large Version), oil on cardboard.)
UNDERSTANDING THE ART MARKET, PART II
What Do Auction Prices Really Mean?
Because auction prices are published, people often mistakenly equate them with stock prices. In truth, auctions represent only a fraction of the total art market, and the process is far from transparent.
•The top of the market is extremely thin. There are a few hundred billionaires in the world who can afford to spend over $50 million for a single work of art.
• The qualitative differences between record-breakers and lesser-priced also-rans by the same artist are often minimal. Sometimes the lower priced work is actually better artistically.
• To achieve record prices, auctioneers steer presale interest toward what they believe to be the top lots, or to works in which they have a financial stake. Other works in the sale can suffer as a result.
• Often there is not enough collector demand to support all the lots offered during a given season by the three main auction houses (Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillip’s). Lopsided sales results are the norm.
• It can be incorrect to assume that a work which sells sub-estimate or goes unsold at auction is somehow flawed. Mediocre sales results, particularly in the middle segment of the market, are built into the current system.
This portrait of Anna Kallin, Oskar Kokoschka’s lover in the early 1920s, is on view in Galerie St. Etienne’s current show “Recent Acquisitions.” Ten years younger than the artist, she was a talented coloratura soprano who was studying music in Dresden. The portrait is closely related to Kokoschka’s painting, “The Slave Girl” (1921), in the Saint Louis Art Museum. The oil, which depicts the artist with a naked female slave, suggests why his romance with Kallin eventually fizzled.
(Image: Oskar Kokoschka, Anna Kallin, 1921, black chalk on cream paper.)
UNDERSTANDING THE ART MARKET, PART I
How The Market is Manipulated
Huge art prices have many people concerned that we are experiencing another art market bubble. In truth, the market is more complicated than the flashy headlines suggest:
•Auction houses concentrate their efforts on the top of the market to get consignments and publicity. They cut deals to get choice works, tilting the playing field in favor of certain sellers and buyers.
• The auction houses’ publicity machines concentrate on record prices, and for the most part the press happily plays along. No one is much interested in covering the middle market, though this represents the bulk of sales activity.
•The lower end of the market holds the most appeal for speculators, because it offers the greatest potential for growth.
• Activity is most visible at the top and the bottom of the art market. Relatively rapid turnover at ever-escalating prices creates the illusion of infinite profitability in both sectors.
• However, if too many people decide to cash out, supply can quickly outstrip demand, and prices drop.
The Galerie St. Etienne's 2015 State of the Market Report asks who, in today's increasingly fragmented art world, decides what constitutes a great work of art. Curators? Critics? Collectors? The market?
Americans do not like “gatekeepers.” We prefer to think of ourselves as an egalitarian nation, and we resist the notion that members of a privileged elite may be better qualified than the average citizen to pass judgment on our cultural achievements. Nevertheless, for generations the very definition of art was controlled by a self-anointed cadre of professional curators, art historians, critics, dealers and collectors. Alfred Barr, founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, crafted the formalist narrative that was taken up by the critic Clement Greenberg and used to justify the “triumph of American painting” in the latter half of the twentieth century. Dealers such as Leo Castelli ensured that this dogma was accepted abroad, and collectors could rest easy knowing their purchases had been vetted by commonly respected gatekeepers.
Today, the reign of the gatekeepers is over. The chain of “isms” that begat one another like Biblical ancestors has been broken, and no narrative dominates the way formalism once did. Formalism itself has been largely discredited, as ongoing research into modernism’s various byways shows it to have been a more fragmented series of developments than Barr’s paradigm would suggest. We now recognize that this paradigm was not only inaccurate, but unfairly biased. Women, people of color and non-Western developments were for the most part excluded, while the European tradition was manipulated to support America’s cultural ascendancy.
Gone, too, is the barrier between “avant-garde” and “kitsch” that Greenberg and his allies struggled so hard to maintain. In truth the boundaries between high and low art, culture and commerce, were never as impermeable as the twentieth-century gatekeepers pretended. Still, the formalist narrative kept the focus on aesthetic innovation and the laudable (if unrealistic) ideal of artistic purity. Absent the gatekeepers, it can seem there is no metric for assessing value beyond that provided by the market itself.
Despite (or because of) the virtually unopposed dominance of free-market capitalism in the twenty-first century, there is a palpable nostalgia for the less overtly mercenary ethos of the modern era. Ever since Thomas Krens lined the Guggenheim’s spiral ramp with a parade of motorcycles in 1998, critics have been lamenting the commercialization and corporatization of our major museums. The increase in income inequality during the intervening period has only exacerbated the situation. Shortly before the Whitney Museum of American Art opened its new building earlier this year, protestors projected a sign reading “1% Museum” on the facade. Art advisor Abigail Ascher termed the spring auctions (which cumulatively grossed over $2 billion) “a spectacle of excess at the highest level.” Big, bold and brightly colored, Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger broke all auction records when it fetched $179 million at Christie’s, although many scholars consider it a minor work. People worry that “checkbook art history” has replaced genuine connoisseurship.
For museums today, the sweet spot often seems to lie at the nexus of popularity and collector appeal. Jeff Koons personifies this phenomenon: his giant enlargements of children’s toys and Hummel figurines are sure-fire crowd pleasers, and at $58.4 million, he also holds the current auction record for most expensive work by a living artist (Balloon Dog [Orange], sold at Christies in 2013). To be sure, the current predilection for entertaining, easily marketed museum exhibitions regularly receives its share of critical scorn. Jed Perl, writing in the New York Review, likened the Whitney’s 2014 Koons retrospective to the “apotheosis of Walmart,” repackaged for sophisticates who would not ordinarily set foot in that store because they disapprove of its labor practices. MoMA’s recent exhibition of the Icelandic singer/composer Björk was so widely reviled for pandering to celebrity that an online campaign was mounted to fire its curator, Klaus Biesenbach. “We want MoMA to behave itself as the combined Fort Knox and Vatican of modern art that it has been,” declared New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl.
Matti Bunzl, an anthropologist who spent five months embedded with the staff of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, describes the relentless financial pressures confronting today’s curators. “With reductions in public funding,” he writes, “museums need to seek corporate support; to gain such support, they need to attract larger audiences; to bring in larger audiences, exhibits have to become more spectacular; with more spectacular shows, exhibitions costs are spiking; to cover these expenses, institutions need to be aggressive in seeking individual donations; to appeal to donors, museums have to become destinations that properly reflect on their benefactors and the art they lend or donate to the institution; to do this in style, old buildings have to be expanded, new ones erected; the bigger buildings have greater staffing needs and raise overhead costs; to cover these costs, museums have to pursue corporate support even more aggressively; to do so effectively, visitor numbers need to be increased even more, which requires more histrionic shows, with even greater appeal to individual donors, etc., etc.”
Just as museums rely on donor support, donors need the support of the museums. “With the value of art centrally dependent on institutional acceptance,” Bunzl writes, “what we get is the unprecedented financial incentivization of museum patronage.” Donors and trustees try to direct museum agendas toward the artists they collect. Dealers likewise want to get their artists into museums, and frequently allow clients to jump to the top of a hot artist’s waiting list if the buyer agrees to donate the work in question. It is not unusual for dealers to support museum exhibitions directly (by, for example, paying for the catalogue) or indirectly (with research and help securing loans). The Art Newspaper’s revelation that nearly one third of solo American museum shows of living artists go to those represented by five galleries (Gagosian, Marian Goodman, Hauser & Wirth, Pace and David Zwirner) is both shocking and unsurprising. (At the Guggenheim and MoMA, the figures are higher: 55% and 45% respectively.) “These galleries take on artists in their mid- to late careers,” explains museum consultant András Szántó, “at the very stage where their longevity and critical recognition reaches [sic] a peak.”
Without the hierarchical control once exerted by the gatekeepers, power naturally becomes more diffuse. At a time when everything is “curated”—menus, wardrobes, playlists—everyone, it seems, is a curator. Many major collectors are choosing to bypass traditional institutions altogether by opening their own museums. Dealer Stefan Simchowitz (recently profiled in the New York Times Magazine) undercuts both museums and the conventional gallery system by selling directly over the Internet to a band of loyal followers, who include the heiress Anna Getty, Hollywood royalty like Orlando Bloom, Harvey Weinstein and Steven Tisch, and Napster co-founder Sean Parker. While Simchowitz considers himself the art-world equivalent of Mark Zuckerberg, using technology to disrupt the establishment, others see the dealer as a craven speculator. (New York Magazine critic Jerry Saltz called him a “Sith Lord.”) Simchowitz has the mindset of a venture capitalist: invest in numerous startups (in his case, emerging artists) in the hopes that one or two hit big, and sell the others before demand peaks. Constant flipping turns collecting into a game of musical chairs, explains Simchowitz’s partner, Rosi Riedl. When the market tops out, “the artist is over. You don’t go back to a reasonable price—you’re cooked, you’re finished.”
The impact of the Internet on the art world has only begun to be recognized. Collectors post works on Facebook or Instagram and make purchasing decisions based on the number of “likes” they get. The Internet imposes itself between the viewer and the object, diluting or altogether transforming our experience of the original. Works are judged according to how they look on a small screen, how colorful they are, how readily they can be cropped to fit the Facebook or Instagram format. Much recent art seems to be designed with selfies in mind, a prime example being reflective sculptures like Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate in Chicago’s Millenium Park. The Whitney’s wide-open new exhibition spaces are great for social media, not so good for intimate encounters with small paintings.
The formalist narrative, with its prescribed linear trajectory, provided a framework within which artistic production could be judged. Today almost anything goes. Now that “the art-historical certainties” of modernism have dissipated, writes British critic Ossian Ward, we are left in “the soupy dustbin of history and culture.” In his book, Ways of Looking, Ward helpfully tries to break contemporary art down into categories such as “Art as Entertainment,” “Art as Meditation,” Art as Joke” and “Art as Confrontation.” But this only begins to scratch the surface of an “art world” that for the first time is truly global, with inputs from rising powers in Asia, Russia, the Middle East and Latin America. Nor does Ward’s schema take into account the disparate visual traditions developed by “outsiders” within Western society, be they African Americans, indigenous peoples or simply those who did not receive formal artistic training. It does not help, either, that the entire concept of “quality”—suggesting a white, male Eurocentric bias—has become suspect in academia.
How is a curator to make sense of all this? Without any sort of overarching narrative, it is especially difficult to organize encyclopedic installations. The new Whitney is a case in point. In the Abstract Expressionism room, Lee Krasner surprises and delights by more than holding her own against her famous husband, Jackson Pollock, but Alfonso Ossorio’s quirky mix of Surrealism and folk art requires a more nuanced and particular context. Although the Whitney is to be applauded for showing James Castle, Horace Pippin and Bill Traylor alongside mainstream masters, it is hard to see what the self-taught artists have in common with Georgia O’Keeffe and Arshile Gorky, with whom they are grouped in a chapter titled “Breaking the Prairie.” The chapter approach (also taken by the Metropolitan Museum in the reinstallation of its modern collection) favors superficial visual and/or temporal links over the artists’ deeper art-historical roots.
This curatorial strategy works better on a micro than a macro level. While the individual chapters at the Whitney and the Met may not cohere into a whole, many of them could fruitfully be expanded into full-blown exhibitions. The demise of a singular narrative encourages curators to reexamine modernism’s legacy from multiple angles: to discover unexplored areas, to interrogate contemporaneous social, political and economic influences, and thereby to deepen our understanding of the artists’ contexts and achievements. MoMA may not always do an exemplary job of sorting through the mire of contemporary art, but it does remain a bastion for the earlier avant-garde, whether revisiting well-known masterpieces, like the Matisse cut-outs, or investigating less familiar subjects, like Gauguin’s prints or Jacob Lawrence’s Migration series.
It is, after all, logical that curators, along with the rest of us, should have a better perspective on the past than on the present. It could even be argued that our widespread dismay at the monetization of art is a positive sign. In a capitalist society, money always exerts an influence; it is more prudent to acknowledge that influence than to pretend it does not exist. Every era produces imbalances that can only be corrected over time. History is full of highly acclaimed artists who were subsequently forgotten, and forgotten artists who were later declared geniuses. Gatekeepers come and go; in the end, history decides.
Leonard Baskin’s home, like a Renaissance cabinet of curiosities, was jam-packed with objects: paintings, drawings, etchings, small bronzes, casts of reptiles and crustaceans, skulls, dried pomegranates and lemons, dolls’ heads, medals, inlaid boxes, carpets, shells, thousands of books. These, in turn, served as formative inspirations for his art. Rather than seeing himself as part of a specific modernist trajectory, Baskin constructed an ad-hoc lineage from sources across all time. As the singular narratives that once shaped our view of art history break down, Baskin’s approach has become increasingly paradigmatic.
Click here to read Galerie St. Etienne's exhibition essay for Leonard Baskin: Wunderkammer, on view through July 2.
SPOTTING FORGERIES: POINTERS FROM SCHIELE EXPERT JANE KALLIR
Jane Kallir, Co-Director of the Galerie St. Etienne and author of the catalogue raisonné Egon Schiele: The Complete Works, recently spoke about forgeries at the American Society of Appraisers conference. Noting that the Internet and rising art values have produced a seeming increase in the number of fakes on the market, she said that the Galerie St. Etienne sees an average of one Schiele forgery a week, or about 50 a year.
Kallir identified three categories of forgery:
• Works by other artists to which a forged signature has been added. Stylistically, these pictures have little in common with the famous artist’s work.
• Copies of known, authentic works, sometimes with slight modifications. Usually these can be identified by comparison with a photograph of the original, but some copies are so close that photographs alone do not suffice.
• Wholly original images aping or pastiching the artist’s style. This type of forgery is the hardest to pull off successfully, because it requires a keen understanding of the artist’s style and methods, and an ability to emulate them.
Experts spend years studying “their” artist’s work in order to understand the nuances of technique, style and development that distinguish genuine works from fakes. The good news, Kallir concluded, is that most forgeries are actually very bad and easy to detect. The reason more fakes are coming to light today is that works are being more carefully scrutinized, and expertise has greatly improved. This is one of the positive results of art’s rising value.
(Images from top: Egon Schiele, 1918; an example of Schiele's 1918 signature style.)
Egon Schiele’s Portrait of Paris von Gütersloh was the first painting by the artist to enter a United States museum collection. In 1954, Galerie St. Etienne sold the oil painting for $1,500 to a donor who gifted it to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
(Image: Egon Schiele, Portrait of the Painter Paris von Gütersloh, 1918, oil on canvas. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Gift of the P.D. McMillan Land Co., 1954.)
HARD BEAKS, SOFT FEATHERS, SCALY LEGS, SHARP TALONS
American printmaker, llustrator, sculptor and book-maker Leonard Baskin (1922-2000) loved birds for their textural contrasts and their ambiguity. These four ink drawings of owls, on view in Leonard Baskin: Wunderkammer, a reconstruction of the artist's environment, symbolize an irreconcilable dichotomy of wisdom and tyranny.
“WOMAN IN GOLD”: IS THE MOVIE ACCURATE?
Some Thoughts on Nazi Art Restitution in Austria & Elsewhere
Hollywood is not known for accuracy when it comes to history, much less art history. However, “Woman in Gold,” a film dramatizing the real-life legal battle between Austria and Maria Altmann, an American Holocaust survivor, over a Gustav Klimt portrait depicting her aunt, hews remarkably closely to the facts:
• In 1998, the Austrian Parliament passed a resolution mandating that federal museums return Nazi-looted artworks that meet certain specified criteria. Though often referred to as a law, this resolution is in fact a set of extrajudicial guidelines. The 1998 resolution does not in any way change Austria’s existing laws, which grant clear title to good-faith purchasers of stolen art after three to six years.
• Austrian restitution claims are reviewed by a committee that meets behind closed doors, and the evidence supporting its decisions is never made public. The entire process can seem untenably subjective, regardless of the outcome.
• Austria’s high filing fees make it difficult for foreigners to appeal the restitution committee’s decisions. By prevailing in his arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court, Maria Altmann’s lawyer, Randol Schoenberg, established her right to sue in America. This prospect convinced Austria to accede to binding arbitration.
• Austria’s restitution guidelines provide no possibility of compromise or settlement. Only after the Austrians lost the arbitration proceeding were they amenable to negotiating with Altmann, and by then her position had understandably hardened.
Some Austrians will surely complain that “Woman in Gold” depicts them as unrepentant Nazis. In Austria’s defense, it must be said that the 1998 restitution resolution is virtually unique. Few nations have made similarly comprehensive attempts to deal with the legacy of Nazi art looting. Austria is also one of the only countries that have set aside considerable government funds for provenance research. The cost of such research has hampered restitution efforts elsewhere, including in the U.S.
The unfortunate fact is that Austria was not alone in failing to properly restitute Nazi looted art after World War II. The entire international art world largely ignored the issue for decades. Today, when most witnesses to Nazi theft have died, it can be impossible to determine the circumstances surrounding alleged instances of spoliation. Inevitably, present-day restitution efforts are going to fall short of what might have been achieved had the issue been systematically addressed immediately after the war.
Not all claimants are as successful as Maria Altmann, nor are all restitution claims as seemingly clear-cut. “Woman in Gold” may be accurate, but most such cases are far more complicated and nuanced than the film would lead us to believe.
(Images from top: Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907, Neue Galerie, NY; the late Maria Altmann sitting with her lawyer, Randol Schoenberg, alongside a movie still of actors Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds.)
