A Night at The Museum

Valentin Diaconov

Exactly a hundred years ago, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti urged the readers of the first Futurist Manifesto, “Turn aside the canals to flood the museums! …Oh, the joy of seeing the glorious old canvases bobbing adrift on those waters, discolored and shredded!” Then, the horrors of the First and Second World Wars ameliorated the pathos of destruction which the Futurists used as their weapon. If for no other reason then because there was no dearth of destruction in the aftermath. The new, post-war sentiments leaned towards the paradigm of preservation and assumed as a given the fragility of culture and historical heritage. Thus, the museum again took center stage. The museum  in 2013 has become a part of an industry of entertainment on a very mass scale.  Permm Museum of Contemporary Art in Russia  staged an interesting exhibition in 2009 aimed not at showing the work of an artist but at addressing the audience that comes to see art in a museum. It addressed that fact that this audience is usualy bewildered when seeing Contemporary Art. Most often, the problems for this audience come from the unfamiliar “rules of the game,” i.e. stylistic and formal differences that set it apart from earlier epochs, its seeming indiscrimination in means of expression, and the conceptual basis of various artistic gestures and objects. This exhibition therefore aimed at showing how in different movements from Pop Art onwards Contemporary Artists often referred to past masters but they manipulated  the material revived it and venerated it. “The Night at The Museum” show was aimed at showing art that was in dialogue with works of the past but at the same time drew the viewer in by showing him images he could read and understand – and then therefore, through them ,what Contemporary Art strove to do. The exhibition reversed the role of the museum as a place where artists are honored by having their work hung and shown into a place aimed at pleasing the public, honoring the public and acknowledging that art was difficult to understand – and the public should not be made to feel uncomfortable in not understanding Contemporary Art. The exhibition  was curated by Marat Guelman, a curator who is one of the leaders in Russia in bringing Contemporary Art to a Russian Audience. It would have been good to have this show travel to the West.

A Nazi Plundered Art Work returned to its Owner

The German Jews were, besides collections inherited over centuries, among the foremost collectors of the early 20th Century. However when the Nazis came to power scores of artworks were sold under duress while countless more were simply confiscated by the German secret police. While many of these artworks were later shipped to the Soviet Union by the Russians when they conquered Germany – thousands of paintings, sculpture, books, silver and objet d’art made their way into German Museums. Since 1950 families and survivors of the holecaust have identified works either in museums or appearing at auction and battled to get them back.

Among the collectors forced to sell his collection was Max Stern whose father Julius opened the Stern gallery in Dusseldorf in 1913, built a vast collection of treasures and developed relationships with museums across Germany. Among the items taken by the Germans was 15th century painting of the Virgin and Child attributed to the Master of Flemalle, a work appraised at close to $1-million.  Recently , the Stuttgart Museum  in Berlin officially

returned the painting to the estate of Max Stern, who settled in Montreal in 1941 and became a legendary figure in the Canadian art world and a pioneer in recovering priceless works stolen by the Nazis.  Hundrends more stolen pieces remain in museums throughout the world most especially in America where curators admit the lack of provenance before 1950 but do not acknowledge that the works are war plunder. 

The Loss of a Great Monet Water Lilly

Monet’s work and espescially his Waterlilly Paintings received new attention after the 1950’s with the onset of abstract expressionism in America. A Monet revival seized both Europe and America which led to a radical revaluation of his late work which had previously been rejected as formless and passé. Suddenly they were newly celebrated for the freedon of their brushstroke and same luminescent openness which shaped the new way of seeing intorduced by Abstract expressionism. Critics attributed the paintings as expressing forms of consciousness for which there were no words.

Monet meant for his waterlillies to encompass the viewer, to dissolve the demarcations both between nature as much as between viewer and work. What he did was to present various phenomena of reality in a close interweaving with an unknown reality conveying an impression of infinite openness and luminous unity between water, sky, flowers – a unity into which the viewer deprived of the firm anchor of a stable perspective is drawn.

Burnt by Fire

 

The Museum of Modern Art which had acquired a giant a 8 foot long triptych of Monet’s water lillies in 1956 tragically lost this great work with a devastating fire in 1958. This loss is recorded as one of the saddest losses to the world of art in the 20th century

One of England’s Great 20th Century Tastemakers – Oliver Messel

Oliver Messel was one of the early tastemakers of the 20th Century in England. He was also the foremost stage designer of the 20th Century in England

He began work in the 1920s, when the detailed style of realism had given way to a more selective, distilled truth. He understood that a stage designer was part of a team and was extraordinarily sensitive to the dramatic requirements of action and atmosphere. He could set the mood as surely as any producer or actor and complemented the work of both.Perhaps Messel’s finest moment was designing the sets and costumes for the Sadler’s Wells Ballet performance of Sleeping Beauty at the Royal Opera House, London in 1946.  His fantastic and flamboyant designs and inventive use of unusual materials (due to scarcity of conventional materials in post-war Britain) provided the perfect antidote to British post-war austerity, and the ballet became known as the ‘Messel Production’.  His designs endured many Royal Ballet revivals to 1970.

In 1953, he was commissioned to design the decor for a suite at London’s Dorchester Hotel,.The lavishly ornate Oliver Messel Suite, shows his ornate love of design and ability to create an atmosphere of fantasty with monkeys painted onto the wall and bronze scrolls winding their way across mirrored walls.The suite, along with other suites that he designed in the Dorchester, are preserved as part of Britain’s national heritage. It was restored in the 1980s by many of the original craftsmen, overseen by Messel’s nephew, Lord Snowdon (Anthony Armstrong-Jones), the former husband of Princess Margaret

The Oliver Messel Collection is held by the Victoria and Albert Museum London, Department of Theatre and Performance

French Return works Stolen During 2nd World War to Rightful Owners

France is to return 7 paintings stolen during the second world war to their families this week. Four of These paintings have been hanging in the Louvre. Between 1933 and 1944 the Nazi stole over 100,000 artifacts and paintings from Jewish families in Europe. After the war about 65,000 paintngs and sculpture were found and returned to their rightful owners. However  2,140 of the most valuabe paintings and sculptures made their way into French museums. Six of the works being handed back belonged to Robert Neumann and Austrian Jew who escaped to Cuba.

These six works being returned will be given to Tom Seldoff, 82 – Neumann’s grandson who lives in New York. The seventh work by the German painter Pieter Janz Van Asch belonged to a  Jew from Prague who died in Auschwitz and whose collection was stolen by the Nazis in 1941, Josef Wiener.

The attached picture –  a section from La Tentation by  by Saint Antoine Sebastion Ricci  has been on display in theLouvre