Patrons crowd before the Mona Lisa at the Louvre Museum in Paris, unaware of the reason it’s the most famous painting in the world. Similarly, the dispute over the ownership of an Egon Schiele sketch draws attention the louche Austrian artist would never otherwise receive.
Photo by Neil Steinberg
Paul Gauguin abandoned his family in France and sailed around the world seeking paradise in Polynesia. He married a 13-year-old Tahitian girl. “Are you not afraid of me?” he asked.
That type of thing is frowned upon today, and the placard next to one of Gauguin’s paintings in the Art Institute of Chicago dispatches the issue thus: “Gauguin’s predatory behavior toward young girls was a well-documented and integral aspect of his self-fashioned artistic persona.”
OK then. Gauguin’s paintings are still on display, as they should be. Qualms over the personal lives of artists are so random. The Medicis were bad guys, too.
Yet time mediates their excesses. As does fame. No matter how badly Picasso treated his mistresses, his big rusty baboon — made of the same COR-TEN steel as the building behind it — will still be on display at the heart of Chicago.
Art is a window into the past, and the past is often a terrible place. The Art Institute is being vigorously reminded of this over a small pencil drawing — 17 inches by 12 — tinted with watercolors, “Russian War Prisoner.” An undistinguished sketch by Austrian artist Egon Schiele, possessing none of the raw sexuality for which he was infamous.
Schiele died at 28 of the Spanish flu, and the work fell into the possession of Jewish cabaret star Fritz Grunbaum, whose art collection was snatched by the Nazis after he was shipped to Dachau concentration camp.
His heirs have been suing to get the collection back. Nine of 10 works have been returned. But the Art Institute demurs. My colleague, Emmanuel Camarillo has been documenting the lawsuit, noting how the museum is accused of “willful blindness.”
The Art Institute claims it legally owns the work, neatly illustrating the box the museum finds itself in. Legality is a weak argument in this realm. The Holocaust was legal, too.
Art has trends like anything else, and the latest rage is for treasures to find their way home. Nigeria is hoping to draw tourists with the Benin bronzes, scattered across the world after being looted by British troops in 1897, now flooding back. The Smithsonian returned 29 bronzes; the British Museum refused, no doubt thinking of the Elgin Marbles. The Greeks opened a museum at the foot of the Acropolis in 2009, with plaster stand-ins for the friezes pried off the Parthenon.
The Brits have yet to take the hint, but they should, whether Lord Elgin got a receipt from a nearby goatherd or not.
As a member of the Art Institute, I wish they’d just return the Schiele sketch. This is a situation where being right, legally, is secondary to the terrible optics. The museum says it doesn’t want to set a bad precedent where every great-grandson of a past owner of one of their masterpieces can rear up and demand it back.
Point taken. But keeping this particular artwork is also bad precedent, making the Art Institute a silent business partner with the Nazis, their de facto art dealer.
Heck, the Art Institute can return it, then later buy back the doodle with the $1 million they won’t be losing from donors who won’t become disgusted and stop supporting the museum. They’ll surely make money on the deal.
Bottom line: Whoever ultimately gets the sketch, the media is highlighting Egon Schiele; how would that be possible otherwise? We don’t give the role of notoriety its due in art.
Paul Chabas’ “September Morn” was anonymous soft porn kitsch in a Wabash Avenue shop window in 1913 when Chicago’s mayor at the time, Carter Harrison Jr., sent the city’s official art censor to buy a copy. Now the original is owned by the Met.
The Mona Lisa is by no means the best Da Vinci in the Louvre, never mind the greatest painting in the world. Yet tourists hurry past better paintings to jam a room — crowded as an ‘L’ car and smelling like a high school locker room — to take selfies before it. Why? Because the Mona Lisa was stolen in 1911 — when it was so obscure the Louvre didn’t realize it was missing for a day. The painting became famous, a notoriety that continues to this day.
Schiele, by the way, gave Gauguin a run for his money in the bad man department, between incest with his 12-year-old sister, and his arrest for seduction of a 13-year-old. I suppose the Art Institute will explain all that on a card when they put the work on display and visitors flock to see it.