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Hedwig’s Lost Van Gogh · Revisionist History

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin in March of eighteen eighty six. Vincent then go
0:26
Speaker 1: move from Antwerp to Paris to live with his brother
0:29
Speaker 1: Theo in montmart.
0:31
Speaker 2: He very soon became befriended with some of the other
0:35
Speaker 2: artists living there who would become very famous within the
0:39
Speaker 2: next decades, like, for example, Paul Signac On Reader to
0:44
Speaker 2: Lose Lutrech, Emil Bernard and some others, and he learned
0:48
Speaker 2: a lot from.
0:49
Speaker 1: Them, Stefan Koldorff German art.
0:52
Speaker 2: Expert, and that led to his willingness to make experiments
0:57
Speaker 2: in becoming an artist. When he painted in rather dark
1:01
Speaker 2: brownish grayish tones during his time before in the Netherlands,
1:06
Speaker 2: he now was willing to try out what to do
1:08
Speaker 2: with color, how to form things with color.
1:12
Speaker 1: In Vengo's effort to master oil painting, he painted still lives,
1:16
Speaker 1: mostly flowers he couldn't afford models. In a space of
1:20
Speaker 1: a few years, he produced dozens and dozens of paintings.
1:23
Speaker 2: The Paris period means that van Goch just had decided
1:27
Speaker 2: to become an artist. He no longer wanted to try
1:30
Speaker 2: other professions like he did before, like being a preacher
1:34
Speaker 2: or a teacher, or helping people. He now made the
1:37
Speaker 2: decision I want to be a painter, and he knew
1:40
Speaker 2: that Paris is the place to be.
1:44
Speaker 1: My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History,
1:47
Speaker 1: my podcast about things Overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is
1:56
Speaker 1: a continuation of my investigation into the hoarding habits of
1:59
Speaker 1: art museums. It's about one of those dozens of still lives.
2:03
Speaker 1: Vang painted in his Paris period, a small canvas seventeen
2:08
Speaker 1: inches by fourteen inches, vas with carnations. That little painting,
2:15
Speaker 1: it turns out, has a strange and troubled history. Vengo
2:26
Speaker 1: painted vas with carnations right after his arrival in Paris.
2:30
Speaker 1: At some point after his death four years later, it
2:33
Speaker 1: was acquired by a wealthy German couple.
2:35
Speaker 2: Had Uhlmann and her husband Abert Ulman were one of
2:40
Speaker 2: the most important art collector couples in Frankfurt in Western Germany.
2:47
Speaker 2: They made their money out of business. They very early
2:52
Speaker 2: decided to invest money in works of art which were
2:57
Speaker 2: not commonly regarded as very important works. So they were
3:01
Speaker 2: very daring collectors, and that shows that it was not
3:04
Speaker 2: only investment, it was also the love of art which
3:08
Speaker 2: led them to buying works, for example, by Fangoch, but
3:12
Speaker 2: also by several Impressionist painters.
3:15
Speaker 1: Headwick Ohman sold Vas with Carnations on consignment to an
3:19
Speaker 1: art dealer who took it back to New York just
3:21
Speaker 1: before the Second World War. That dealer, in turn sold
3:25
Speaker 1: it to William Getz, one of the most powerful producers
3:28
Speaker 1: in Hollywood. Getz and his wife Edith, daughter of the
3:34
Speaker 1: legendary Louis B. Mayer, had one of the greatest private
3:37
Speaker 1: collections of Impressionist art in the world.
3:39
Speaker 3: My grandmother was called the Hostess of Hollywood, and she
3:44
Speaker 3: spent her entire life hosting lavish dinner parties people the
3:49
Speaker 3: likes of Laurence Olivier and Trim Caa PODi and Jil Brenner.
3:53
Speaker 1: That's gets his granddaughter, Victoria Bleden.
3:56
Speaker 3: I mean, I had dinner with Laurence Olivier when I
3:58
Speaker 3: was six years old. You know, I'd be sitting amongst
4:01
Speaker 3: the fans and latour and the dagga and the manna,
4:05
Speaker 3: and this is this is this is our childhood. You know,
4:08
Speaker 3: finger bowl, the whole nine yards, and then they would
4:11
Speaker 3: have movies in the living room. And in the living room,
4:15
Speaker 3: perhaps you've seen any pictures of it. But I mean,
4:17
Speaker 3: this is where the money, the blue Picasso, the other
4:21
Speaker 3: Picasso which she had, a harlequin it was called, and
4:24
Speaker 3: all these things through on the wall, and all of
4:25
Speaker 3: a sudden we sit in the dive in the living room,
4:27
Speaker 3: and all the couches and everything, and a painting would
4:30
Speaker 3: come up and the screen would come down, and then
4:32
Speaker 3: we'd watched movies kind of for our child.
4:35
Speaker 1: Is the priceless art would disappear into the ceiling and
4:39
Speaker 1: a movie screen would descend in its place. If that
4:41
Speaker 1: isn't the greatest metaphor for Hollywood, I don't know what is.
4:46
Speaker 1: In nineteen fifty six, Kirk Douglas started a movie about
4:50
Speaker 1: van Go called Lust for Life.
4:54
Speaker 4: Few people know the real story of this intense, strong
4:57
Speaker 4: willed man. Now his tumultuous career is revealed for the
5:01
Speaker 4: first time with frankness and intimacy, with all that.
5:05
Speaker 1: If you look at the corner of the movie poster
5:06
Speaker 1: for Lust for Life, there it is Carnations. But by
5:11
Speaker 1: then Getz it sold it. He didn't hang on to
5:13
Speaker 1: his van Go the way he did his other treasures.
5:15
Speaker 1: It wasn't for him. The painting passed to the heiress
5:19
Speaker 1: to the Kmart fortune, Katherine Kresgi, who among other things,
5:23
Speaker 1: was once married to a Swedish baron. She convinced him
5:26
Speaker 1: to leave London and come live with her in her
5:28
Speaker 1: native Detroit. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Swedish baron's order for miss
5:33
Speaker 1: Gresgy did not survive the move to Michigan. When Kresgi
5:38
Speaker 1: died in nineteen ninety, she willed vaz with carnations to
5:41
Speaker 1: the Detroit Institute of Art. She gave it without restriction,
5:45
Speaker 1: meaning the di Ia as it's known, could do with
5:47
Speaker 1: it what they wanted, sell it, trade it. They didn't
5:50
Speaker 1: have to make it part of their permanent collection. Kresgy
5:54
Speaker 1: clearly didn't care any more for the painting than Getz did,
5:58
Speaker 1: and neither did the di Ia. They put it in
6:00
Speaker 1: her basement for twenty years. Vincent van Go painted many
6:04
Speaker 1: remarkable canvasses. This is not one of them.
6:07
Speaker 2: He also painted larger flower still lives in Paris, but
6:12
Speaker 2: this is a smaller one. Thus kind of canvas which
6:16
Speaker 2: I think was not meant for sale or as a
6:19
Speaker 2: present for acquaintances or girlfriends or his models or so.
6:24
Speaker 2: It was just for trying out things.
6:26
Speaker 1: Our experts like to damn with faint praise. Vaz with
6:30
Speaker 1: Carnations gets a lot of faint praise.
6:33
Speaker 2: It's very nice, it's very profound, but it's not a
6:37
Speaker 2: very well spectacular composition or color combination. It's just a
6:45
Speaker 2: kind of let me try out what happens if I
6:47
Speaker 2: do this, if I do this, and so it's a
6:50
Speaker 2: nice but not really an important work.
6:53
Speaker 1: The current head of the Detroit Institute of Art, Salvador
6:56
Speaker 1: Cellar Ponds, says, the problem is that Viz with Carnations
7:00
Speaker 1: just doesn't look like a van Go. When you say
7:02
Speaker 1: it doesn't look like a van Go, what.
7:04
Speaker 5: Do you mean?
7:05
Speaker 6: Does it look like the sunflowers?
7:07
Speaker 1: Yeah?
7:09
Speaker 6: I mean it's not a typical work like you would
7:13
Speaker 6: like the self portrait or the works that he did
7:19
Speaker 6: when he was in the south of France. Those are
7:21
Speaker 6: the most famous works that the general public knows Bangou did.
7:28
Speaker 1: Then there's the fact that the painting had a stamp
7:30
Speaker 1: on the back, a sign that it was painted on
7:33
Speaker 1: a fancy bit of stretch canvas. Then Go in his
7:37
Speaker 1: Parisiers was broke. What was he doing with a fancy canvas?
7:42
Speaker 1: It took years to resolve that particular discrepancy and In
7:46
Speaker 1: the meantime, lots of people began to think vuzz with
7:49
Speaker 1: carnations was a fake.
7:52
Speaker 6: Later we discovered that that canvas with the stap on
7:58
Speaker 6: the back was not actually part of the work. It
8:01
Speaker 6: was added later. So you had the original canvas, then
8:05
Speaker 6: you have a lightning canvas glued to the original canvas,
8:09
Speaker 6: and then you had the third canvas with a stencil
8:12
Speaker 6: or a stamp on the back. So once we removed that,
8:16
Speaker 6: we understood that was not part of the original work.
8:21
Speaker 1: So here we have a van Go that does not
8:23
Speaker 1: look like a van Go, that was never intended to
8:27
Speaker 1: be sold or shown or even given away, that a
8:31
Speaker 1: German couple bought somewhere around the turn of the century
8:34
Speaker 1: and then sold that turned up in the home of
8:37
Speaker 1: a Hollywood mogul and served as a prop in a
8:40
Speaker 1: Kirk Douglas movie poster, then finally landed in Detroit with
8:44
Speaker 1: a Kmart heiress who threw it in as an afterthought
8:47
Speaker 1: when she made her bequest to the Dia, whereupon the
8:51
Speaker 1: painting languished in a cellar for a quarter century because
8:55
Speaker 1: of a dubious bit of canvas glued to the back.
8:59
Speaker 1: What's your personal feeling about this painting.
9:02
Speaker 5: Do you like it?
9:02
Speaker 1: Are you drawn to it?
9:10
Speaker 6: I like it because I have a personal story connected
9:13
Speaker 6: to it. You know, when I came to the museum,
9:15
Speaker 6: the painting was in storage as an attributed painting by
9:20
Speaker 6: Vangal with basically no value. I was able to bring
9:25
Speaker 6: it up to the galleries and put it together with
9:27
Speaker 6: the other four bangals that the DIA has a word
9:31
Speaker 6: that it looks like a painting by a Sunday painter,
9:35
Speaker 6: as considered by a forger, would have no value, no
9:40
Speaker 6: monetary value. But the minute we consider it as by Vango,
9:44
Speaker 6: it has a value of several million dollars. However, the
9:49
Speaker 6: painting has not changed. The painting continues to be what
9:53
Speaker 6: it is. What has changed is the perception that we
9:57
Speaker 6: have on the painting, and that is a really interesting
10:00
Speaker 6: concept to think about. So I like the painting a
10:04
Speaker 6: lot for that.
10:05
Speaker 5: Yeah.
10:06
Speaker 1: But if someone said to you, when you retire as
10:08
Speaker 1: to directory, you can take one of the DIA's van
10:11
Speaker 1: goes with you, which one would you take?
10:13
Speaker 3: Not this one? No?
10:18
Speaker 1: So why should we care about Vaz with carnations.
10:21
Speaker 7: We shouldn't.
10:22
Speaker 1: It's not the painting that matters. The painting is just
10:25
Speaker 1: a mcguffin. In case you don't know what I mean
10:33
Speaker 1: by mcguffin, let's consult The Dick Cavett Show, nineteen seventy two.
10:38
Speaker 1: Cavit's guest is the legendary film director Alfred Hitchcock, the
10:42
Speaker 1: great proponent of mcguffin's.
10:48
Speaker 5: Can explain what a mcguffin.
10:49
Speaker 8: Yes, a mcguffin you see in most films about spies.
10:55
Speaker 8: It is a thing that the spies are after. In
10:59
Speaker 8: the days of Roger Kipling, it will be the plans
11:03
Speaker 8: of the fort on the Kaiber Pass. It would be
11:08
Speaker 8: the plans of an airplane engine, and the plans of
11:14
Speaker 8: an anthem bomb, anything you like. It's always called the
11:18
Speaker 8: thing that the characters on the screen worry about, but
11:22
Speaker 8: the audience don't care.
11:25
Speaker 1: The mcguffin is an object used to propel the plot,
11:28
Speaker 1: to motivate the characters, but which has no intrinsic value
11:32
Speaker 1: to anyone else. VARs with carnations is a mcguffin.
11:36
Speaker 8: It's described in a scene in an English train going
11:40
Speaker 8: to Scotland, and one man says to the other opposite him,
11:45
Speaker 8: he said, what's that package above your head there? Now?
11:49
Speaker 8: The man said, oh, that that's a mcguffin. He said,
11:52
Speaker 8: What is a mcguffin. He said, well, it's an apparatus
11:56
Speaker 8: for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands. Man said, but
12:03
Speaker 8: there are no lions in the Scottish Islands. He said,
12:06
Speaker 8: then that's no mcguffin.
12:12
Speaker 3: I thank you for clearing that up for us.
12:16
Speaker 1: I repeat, it's not the painting that matters. That has
12:21
Speaker 1: always been the mistake with the way people have thought
12:23
Speaker 1: about Vozwi carnations. No more mcguffins. After the break, let's
12:29
Speaker 1: start this story again.
12:41
Speaker 9: Let's just talk about your family. Your great grandmother is
12:45
Speaker 9: Hedwig Ulmen.
12:47
Speaker 7: Yes, that's correct.
12:48
Speaker 10: Yes, she came from a family who had for a
12:51
Speaker 10: very long time lived in Frankfurt. You know, many relatives,
12:56
Speaker 10: very embedded history in the city.
12:58
Speaker 1: I'm talking with Sophie Allen. She lives in Melbourne. Her
13:02
Speaker 1: great grandmother was Hedwig Ulmen, the first known owner of
13:06
Speaker 1: Ozwi carnations. Hedwig was born in eighteen seventy two into
13:12
Speaker 1: a wealthy family in Germany, married Albert Ohlmann, lived with
13:17
Speaker 1: him in a grand residence called the Villa Gerlock in Frankfurt,
13:21
Speaker 1: and together built an extraordinary art collection.
13:25
Speaker 10: So she collected with a great passion medieval sculpture.
13:29
Speaker 7: That was a huge passion of hers.
13:31
Speaker 10: She collected porcelain, she collected silver, and I believe she
13:38
Speaker 10: had different rooms for each of these passions in her home.
13:43
Speaker 1: Hedwig and Albert had two sons and many grandchildren, one
13:48
Speaker 1: of whom was named Claude. Sophie's father.
13:51
Speaker 9: Now, did he remember Hedwig?
13:53
Speaker 10: Oh, he was so attached to Hedwig. He was I
13:58
Speaker 10: think the favorite, and she was his favorite. He always
14:02
Speaker 10: spoke of her really fondly, and I think he felt
14:05
Speaker 10: that was probably the person he loved the most.
14:07
Speaker 9: Did he talk about what she was like.
14:09
Speaker 7: Yes, a little bit.
14:11
Speaker 10: Yeah, I mean from what he could remember as a
14:13
Speaker 10: young boy, very warm and loving and quite gentle, incredibly
14:21
Speaker 10: interested in the arts.
14:23
Speaker 1: But the life of Claude's grandparents took a sudden turn
14:26
Speaker 1: because the Almonds were Jewish.
14:29
Speaker 10: Frankfort was already starting to change in by nineteen thirty three,
14:32
Speaker 10: and I'm not sure exactly what date, but I know
14:36
Speaker 10: that going to the opera became an issue. If you
14:38
Speaker 10: had a Jewish heritage, you couldn't. There was a stage
14:42
Speaker 10: where you couldn't go to the opera, and that was
14:43
Speaker 10: something that Hedvig did constantly.
14:45
Speaker 7: She lived around the corner from the opera house. You know,
14:49
Speaker 7: her lifestyle started to change, and so did my grandparents.
14:52
Speaker 7: So they left.
14:52
Speaker 10: They left first, and Hedvig didn't come to Milan till right,
14:57
Speaker 10: you know, maybe within six months or the last six
15:00
Speaker 10: months that they were there.
15:01
Speaker 9: She's going to be a lot of what year thirty
15:03
Speaker 9: eight or thirty nine, what year do you know?
15:05
Speaker 7: I think it was that right at the end of
15:07
Speaker 7: nineteen thirty eight.
15:09
Speaker 1: The end of nineteen thirty eight was, of course, Crystal Knocked,
15:12
Speaker 1: the Night of Broken Glass, when at Hitler's direction, mobs
15:16
Speaker 1: destroyed hundreds of synagogues and yeshivas across Germany. It was
15:20
Speaker 1: impossible to be a German Jew. After Crystal Knocked and
15:24
Speaker 1: imagined that you were safe. Hadwig sold off as much
15:27
Speaker 1: of her art collection as she could. She fled to
15:30
Speaker 1: Milan to join her sons. Then the intentions of Mussolini
15:34
Speaker 1: towards Jews became clear, and the whole family fled again,
15:38
Speaker 1: this time to Australia.
15:41
Speaker 9: So they got out in.
15:43
Speaker 10: The neck of time, yes they did, and they go
15:47
Speaker 10: via the Panama Canal. I remember my father, I don't
15:49
Speaker 10: know how on earth he could have remembered that because
15:51
Speaker 10: he was under two years of age, But I think
15:54
Speaker 10: it was about a six week trip and the two
15:56
Speaker 10: brothers with their families. They both had two children each,
16:01
Speaker 10: and hedvig As as the matriarch. They brought her or
16:04
Speaker 10: so there were nine of them.
16:07
Speaker 1: They made it to Melbourne change their last names Allman
16:11
Speaker 1: became Olan and in May of nineteen forty five, four
16:15
Speaker 1: days before the end of the war, Hedwick died.
16:18
Speaker 10: My father and my uncle probably spent most of their
16:22
Speaker 10: lives just assimilating and embracing the life they had, and
16:28
Speaker 10: I think bearing the sadness as much as they could,
16:30
Speaker 10: because there's definitely.
16:33
Speaker 7: A sadness.
16:34
Speaker 10: There's gratitude and there's sadness. They go they kind of
16:37
Speaker 10: almost they go along together in our life and it's
16:41
Speaker 10: come through to my generation too in a way.
16:43
Speaker 7: Yeah.
16:46
Speaker 1: Then late in his life, Claude Ollen decided to revisit
16:50
Speaker 1: the family's past to find the family's art collection that
16:54
Speaker 1: had been lost in the desperate escape from Germany. What
16:57
Speaker 1: do you think motivated him, what was his How would
17:00
Speaker 1: he have expressed his desire to pursue his.
17:02
Speaker 10: Claims without sounding dramatic It's just I know that my father,
17:09
Speaker 10: all throughout his life, to some degree, maybe within his
17:14
Speaker 10: psyche or he struggled with the fact that the family
17:19
Speaker 10: had had to leave Europe. It was like a baseline
17:22
Speaker 10: in his life that there'd been this massive disruption, and
17:31
Speaker 10: it just carried this sense of loss.
17:32
Speaker 7: It started. It would have started with the loss of Headvig.
17:35
Speaker 10: That would be the first loss he could understand, because
17:37
Speaker 10: it was a loved grandmother, the one who gave him,
17:39
Speaker 10: who doated on him. From the stories, I thought he
17:43
Speaker 10: was the bee's knees, and he was closer to to
17:47
Speaker 10: Headvig than he was to his own mother.
17:50
Speaker 1: So Claude Allen sat down and went through his grandmother's papers,
17:54
Speaker 1: trying to reconstruct what artworks she and her family had
17:57
Speaker 1: owned in the years before the war and where they
18:00
Speaker 1: had ended up. Some of the works had vanished, others
18:03
Speaker 1: were in plain sight. You can find a few for
18:06
Speaker 1: yourself if you spend a few hours poking around the internet.
18:09
Speaker 1: There's a Paul Gogen sold by Hedwig's sister in law
18:12
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty eight as she too fled Frankfort. That
18:16
Speaker 1: painting ended up at the Toledo Museum of art in Ohio.
18:20
Speaker 1: The family had sold the Gogen along with a lovely
18:22
Speaker 1: van Go called the Diggers. The Diggers ended up in
18:25
Speaker 1: the hands of a department store air, who then gave
18:28
Speaker 1: it to the Detroit Institute of Art in the late
18:30
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties. There's a Virgin and Child by Lucas Kronoch
18:34
Speaker 1: the Elder from the sixteenth century, now in the University
18:38
Speaker 1: of Arizona Museum of Art. Then there were the four
18:41
Speaker 1: beautiful wall panels in Hedwig's dining room by the prominent
18:45
Speaker 1: German landscape painter Hans Toma Spring, summer, winter, fall. Claude
18:51
Speaker 1: Ullen couldn't find out where any of those had gone.
18:55
Speaker 1: And finally there was the small, modest still life acquired
18:59
Speaker 1: by Hedwig and her husband back in the heyday of
19:02
Speaker 1: their collecting, Vozwi Carnations Vincent Vengo, eighteen eighty six.
19:13
Speaker 10: I wasn't alive during Hedwig's lifetime. I wasn't even born.
19:16
Speaker 10: I wasn't born for another quarter of a century even more.
19:18
Speaker 10: But she was very much a part of our lives,
19:22
Speaker 10: which was talked about constantly and very fondly, and her
19:26
Speaker 10: life was all around us in some way.
19:29
Speaker 1: As Claude Ollen began his investigation into Hedwig's last art collections.
19:34
Speaker 1: Other Holocaust survivors and her families started to do the
19:37
Speaker 1: same thing. There were conferences, laws passed. Europe in particular
19:43
Speaker 1: had a growing movement to reconsider the status of art
19:46
Speaker 1: sold lost or confiscated during the.
19:48
Speaker 10: War, and it seemed that the world was changing and
19:51
Speaker 10: a restitution might be possible. My father was very excited
19:56
Speaker 10: and hopeful, deeply hopeful about it, whilst I had a
20:00
Speaker 10: very different reaction.
20:01
Speaker 7: I was a young adult at the time.
20:03
Speaker 10: I was almost sort of like, I don't let's don't
20:07
Speaker 10: get your hopes up, don't go there.
20:09
Speaker 7: It's just going to bring up I think it's because
20:12
Speaker 7: I thought it was going to bring.
20:13
Speaker 10: Up all these feelings that I knew were down there,
20:17
Speaker 10: but I didn't know what they were.
20:18
Speaker 7: And it's very it's.
20:20
Speaker 10: Actually for someone whose third generation is still very confronting,
20:23
Speaker 10: and that's actually surprises me, and still it continues to
20:28
Speaker 10: surprise me. I never met Headvig, so why do I
20:32
Speaker 10: feel like this?
20:32
Speaker 7: But I do.
20:33
Speaker 10: It is very much a part of me, and it's
20:37
Speaker 10: almost inexplicable. I'm sort of trying to interrogate it a
20:41
Speaker 10: little bit more now because I have to face some
20:44
Speaker 10: of these things, some of these situations with the paintings
20:49
Speaker 10: and what to do with a legacy.
20:51
Speaker 9: I think it's a really interesting and important point because
20:55
Speaker 9: you know, it was when your father pursued some of
20:58
Speaker 9: these claims. It's not just about the art, it's about healing.
21:03
Speaker 10: Oh yeah, absolutely, It's not necessarily about material possesions. The
21:07
Speaker 10: material possessions are kind of like the marker or it's
21:12
Speaker 10: everything orience itself around, but it's not actually what this
21:15
Speaker 10: is really all about.
21:17
Speaker 7: The art is a symbol.
21:18
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
21:22
Speaker 1: I think it's important to understand what Claude Ollen was
21:25
Speaker 1: up against in his attempt to locate his grandmother's lost
21:28
Speaker 1: art collection. So allow me a digression about a man
21:34
Speaker 1: named Charles Venable. Some years ago, Venable was named director
21:40
Speaker 1: of the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. It was
21:44
Speaker 1: his first director's job, and he decided to begin by
21:47
Speaker 1: taking a close look at the museum's collection.
21:51
Speaker 5: And it started with our works on paper collection, where
21:54
Speaker 5: we were just going to get an you know, get
21:56
Speaker 5: some expertise in and we will to look at every
21:58
Speaker 5: single work on paper.
22:00
Speaker 1: To help him, Venable brought in a former curator from
22:02
Speaker 1: the Cleveland Museum of Art, which is one of the
22:05
Speaker 1: country's best collections of works on paper.
22:09
Speaker 5: The time we went through everything, she said, you have
22:11
Speaker 5: about fifty exceptional pieces out of how many It wasn't
22:16
Speaker 5: a huge collection, but we probably had a couple thousand
22:21
Speaker 5: oh pieces. And then she said, and here's another group
22:24
Speaker 5: that are nice. But in the end it was like,
22:26
Speaker 5: you should just get rid of all of these.
22:28
Speaker 1: Keep the fifty good ones, the a pluses, the rest
22:32
Speaker 1: venables sold at auction. And if I'd asked you before
22:35
Speaker 1: that process began in Louisville, what percentage were a plus?
22:38
Speaker 1: What would you have said?
22:40
Speaker 5: Works on paper not my curatorial area. But nevertheless I
22:43
Speaker 5: would have said, you know, you would have to have
22:47
Speaker 5: half of them I suppose be exceptional works of art,
22:49
Speaker 5: or why would you have taken them?
22:52
Speaker 1: Venable next became the director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art,
22:57
Speaker 1: or as it is now known, New Fields. When he arrived,
23:01
Speaker 1: the museum had fifty five thousand objects. It was adding
23:04
Speaker 1: close to one thousand new objects a year, and was
23:07
Speaker 1: on the verge of building a multimillion dollar storage facility
23:10
Speaker 1: to house its ever expanding collection. And Venable's main thought
23:15
Speaker 1: was what if Indianapolis was like Louisville and much of
23:19
Speaker 1: the stuff they were storing at such great expense wasn't
23:22
Speaker 1: worth keeping. So he and his curators at Newfields began
23:27
Speaker 1: coming through every one of the objects in the museum's collection.
23:31
Speaker 1: They assigned each artwork a grade. A was for something
23:35
Speaker 1: that any museum in the world would want. These were
23:38
Speaker 1: things that made sense for Indianapolis to have it in
23:41
Speaker 1: its collection. C's were d's didn't belong at all. The
23:47
Speaker 1: good stuff and the bad stuff were easy to identify,
23:51
Speaker 1: but it took years to figure out the bees and c's.
23:54
Speaker 1: The curators did tons of research, debated, and kept going
23:59
Speaker 1: piece by piece.
24:01
Speaker 5: Our collection is now about forty four thousand works of art,
24:06
Speaker 5: down from fifty five fifty five five thousand.
24:10
Speaker 1: But Venables still not finished.
24:12
Speaker 5: Right now, our collection, based on six years of ranking,
24:16
Speaker 5: is about thirty three percent a's, so right there, those
24:22
Speaker 5: are going nowhere. So there's you know, thousands of works
24:26
Speaker 5: of art, and then clearly we would want a good
24:29
Speaker 5: number of bees of works that we couldn't replace or
24:34
Speaker 5: they're considered totally worthy to be in the gallery for
24:37
Speaker 5: one reason or not but if you take just the
24:39
Speaker 5: c's and the rest of our d's, you know there's
24:41
Speaker 5: probably I'm guessing will be at twenty five thirty thousand
24:46
Speaker 5: works of art.
24:47
Speaker 1: They have thousands more to go to be auctioned off
24:50
Speaker 1: or given away.
24:52
Speaker 5: We have huge, big holdings in contemporary glass, but we
24:56
Speaker 5: don't need four hundred pieces in storage, So we gave
25:00
Speaker 5: one hundred pieces of contemporary glass to the Glick Center
25:05
Speaker 5: for Glass at Ball State University in Munsey, Indiana, so
25:07
Speaker 5: students could learn technical from them.
25:10
Speaker 1: Now, if you listen to the previous episode, you know
25:13
Speaker 1: that no one does this in the museum world. No
25:18
Speaker 1: one tries to get smaller. No one gives things away
25:21
Speaker 1: like that, certainly not on the scale that Venable is
25:24
Speaker 1: doing in Indiana, because most art museums are like smog
25:28
Speaker 1: the dragon. They're hoarders, deep in their layers, fiercely guarding
25:34
Speaker 1: their treasures. Here's an actual headline from Art News, one
25:39
Speaker 1: of the major publications of the Art World. Quote is
25:42
Speaker 1: Charles Venable democratizing a great art museum in Indianapolis or
25:47
Speaker 1: destroying it?
25:50
Speaker 9: Are you a kind of Marie? Are you the Marie condo?
25:54
Speaker 9: Is your apartment?
25:55
Speaker 1: Like minimalist. Do you get rid of old clothes you
25:58
Speaker 1: no longer wear them? I mean, does this carry over
26:00
Speaker 1: to your private life?
26:01
Speaker 4: Oh?
26:01
Speaker 5: I not particularly. I mean my husband is much more
26:06
Speaker 5: than eat Nick, who would say I'm going to go
26:08
Speaker 5: through my closet and get rid of all these things,
26:09
Speaker 5: whereas I'm saying, oh, well, I just love that shirt
26:12
Speaker 5: and it might hang in my closet for years years,
26:16
Speaker 5: it could be ten years old, and shoes even worse.
26:19
Speaker 5: But that's not running an art museum.
26:22
Speaker 1: Charles Venable is different, not because he's some kind of
26:25
Speaker 1: weird neat Nick. He's different because he sees the problem
26:28
Speaker 1: his profession has and he's figured out a way to
26:31
Speaker 1: do something about it. I asked Randy Frost about what
26:40
Speaker 1: it takes to convince a holder to thin their collection.
26:43
Speaker 1: He's the psychologist we met in the last episode who
26:46
Speaker 1: studies hoarding. He told me that with hoarders, the first
26:49
Speaker 1: step is talking about the object. So you're saying, in
26:53
Speaker 1: this case, the act of forcing someone to conceive and
26:59
Speaker 1: verbalize their attachment to the object helps them get rid
27:02
Speaker 1: of it. Yes, shatters the bond in some.
27:05
Speaker 11: Way, or well, I think it puts their attachments into
27:10
Speaker 11: the context of the values of their life. Because we
27:12
Speaker 11: focus a lot on values. What is it that you
27:15
Speaker 11: value in your life? What do you want your life
27:17
Speaker 11: to be like? And once you start talking about this
27:21
Speaker 11: and have this set of ideas about the value and
27:24
Speaker 11: where you want to go in your life, together, it
27:28
Speaker 11: changes the valance of the object.
27:33
Speaker 1: This is what Charles Venable and his curators were doing
27:36
Speaker 1: in Indianapolis as they work their way through the collection,
27:40
Speaker 1: changing the valance of the objects. They were asking what
27:44
Speaker 1: is it that we value as a museum? Is this
27:47
Speaker 1: object consistent with those values? Acquiring art costs money. The
27:53
Speaker 1: museum is a nonprofit with a mandate to serve the
27:56
Speaker 1: people of Indiana. Venable doesn't see how collecting more and
28:00
Speaker 1: more stuff that the public will never see, not to
28:03
Speaker 1: mention spending millions of dollars to warehouses somewhere, is consistent
28:07
Speaker 1: without responsibility.
28:09
Speaker 5: You know, you need more conservators, you need more art handlers,
28:12
Speaker 5: you need more registrars, you need bigger computer systems.
28:15
Speaker 1: If you ask Charles Vennable to give up a work
28:18
Speaker 1: of art for some broader, larger reason, he could do
28:21
Speaker 1: it because he's developed a system for giving things up.
28:25
Speaker 1: So I asked him theoretically about how he and his
28:28
Speaker 1: curators might evaluate Vaz with Carnations if it were in
28:32
Speaker 1: their collection. So there's about as famous as artist as
28:35
Speaker 1: you could find, but it's very much a minor work
28:38
Speaker 1: of that artist.
28:40
Speaker 8: Is that not?
28:41
Speaker 1: Is that an A or not an A?
28:42
Speaker 5: I mean not knowing that particular painting. So I'm just
28:45
Speaker 5: thinking as a as a sort of track question famous
28:49
Speaker 5: artist minor work. We wouldn't call that an A would
28:53
Speaker 5: get We would give it a little bump because it's
28:55
Speaker 5: by Van Goh, a very famous artist, But it wouldn't
28:58
Speaker 5: make it an A just because it had his name
29:00
Speaker 5: on it. It would have it would be a minor
29:02
Speaker 5: work by that artist. And then the questions we would
29:06
Speaker 5: ask is are we doing a great artist by Van
29:11
Speaker 5: Go in many ways change the course of Western art history?
29:16
Speaker 5: Are we doing his legacy and his work a good
29:21
Speaker 5: deed by showing a pretty minor, mediocre work in a
29:26
Speaker 5: great institution, and particularly an institution that has much better
29:31
Speaker 5: works by Van Go? You know where you can show
29:35
Speaker 5: an A plus at a place like Detroit. Why would
29:38
Speaker 5: you bother with a minor thing? If we were offered
29:40
Speaker 5: a painting like that, we would if somebody wanted we
29:44
Speaker 5: wouldn't buy it for sure, And if somebody wanted to
29:46
Speaker 5: give it to us, we would say, well, this is
29:48
Speaker 5: not something that's right to go on our walls. If
29:51
Speaker 5: you want to give it to us, are you willing
29:52
Speaker 5: to let us sell it and then bring the money
29:55
Speaker 5: back to the collection and buy something that your name
29:57
Speaker 5: can go on.
30:01
Speaker 1: Charles Venable is adept at changing the valance of the
30:04
Speaker 1: objects in his possession. He can give things up, but
30:08
Speaker 1: he's the exception. The rest of the art world is
30:12
Speaker 1: still in the grip of their compulsion. So back to
30:32
Speaker 1: Claude Ullen, who as a child fled Europe with his family.
30:37
Speaker 1: About fifteen years ago, Allen started asking the museums holding
30:42
Speaker 1: Hedwig's art to do a version of what Charles Venable
30:45
Speaker 1: does at Indianapolis, or what Randy Frost tries to teach
30:49
Speaker 1: hoarders to break their attachment to a specific object by
30:53
Speaker 1: asking a broader question about its relationship to their own values.
30:58
Speaker 1: In essence, Alan told the museums, my grandmother and her
31:01
Speaker 1: family sold some of their prized possessions in a moment
31:05
Speaker 1: of desperation and panic to help finance their escape from
31:09
Speaker 1: certain death. Are you sure you feel right about owning
31:13
Speaker 1: an object with that kind of history. Allens started with
31:18
Speaker 1: the Gaugain Street in Tahiti and the van go The
31:21
Speaker 1: Diggers that were once owned by Hedwig's brother and sister
31:25
Speaker 1: in law. Allen and a group of his relatives approached
31:28
Speaker 1: the Toledo Museum and the Detroit Institute of Art with
31:32
Speaker 1: their requests. The family was forced to give these paintings
31:35
Speaker 1: up under duress in nineteen thirty eight. Could they get
31:39
Speaker 1: them back? And what happened? The two museums turned around
31:44
Speaker 1: and sued the Islans. That was in order to and
31:46
Speaker 1: this is one of those wonderful legal euphemisms, quiet the
31:51
Speaker 1: title to the painting. And when the case went to court,
31:55
Speaker 1: the museums won on the narrow grounds that the statute
31:58
Speaker 1: of limitations had expired. According to the Federal Court in Detroit,
32:03
Speaker 1: the Allens case would have been valid only if they
32:05
Speaker 1: had filed a claim for the Diggers within three years
32:08
Speaker 1: of way the painting was first sold. It was sold
32:11
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty eight, so they needed to have asked
32:14
Speaker 1: for it back by nineteen forty one, when those members
32:19
Speaker 1: of the Yellen family who had not managed to flee
32:22
Speaker 1: for their lives were sitting in concentration camps. Allen had
32:27
Speaker 1: asked the museums to consider the morality of their attachments.
32:31
Speaker 1: They responded by pointing to the legality of their attachments.
32:36
Speaker 1: They don't want to make this about values. No holder
32:38
Speaker 1: would consider the story of another vango, a spectacular painting
32:45
Speaker 1: called the Night Cafe. It was once owned by a
32:48
Speaker 1: Russian collector. The Bolsheviks seized it when they took power
32:52
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighteen. It's worth hundreds of millions today. Later
32:56
Speaker 1: it was sold by the Soviets to the heir to
32:58
Speaker 1: the Singer's sewing machine fortune. The Soviets collected a huge profit.
33:03
Speaker 1: The heir later willed it to the Yale University Art Museum.
33:07
Speaker 1: Then the original owners descendant came to Yale and said
33:11
Speaker 1: that painting was stolen from my great grandfather. Did yell
33:15
Speaker 1: give it back?
33:16
Speaker 8: Of course not.
33:17
Speaker 1: They soothed the great grandson and won. There's a picasso
33:23
Speaker 1: in the Metropolitan Museum in New York called The Actor,
33:26
Speaker 1: worth well over one hundred million dollars. It had been
33:29
Speaker 1: owned by Paul and Alice Leffmann, a Jewish couple in Cologne, Germany,
33:33
Speaker 1: who fled for Italy in nineteen thirty seven. Sound familiar.
33:38
Speaker 1: They sold the painting to pay for their escape. Their
33:41
Speaker 1: great grand niece soothed the Met to get it back,
33:44
Speaker 1: saying that it was given up under duress. The court
33:48
Speaker 1: ruled in favor of the Met. The judge in the
33:51
Speaker 1: case said that the Leftmans weren't technically under duress because duress,
33:56
Speaker 1: for the purposes of the law requires quote fear induced
34:00
Speaker 1: by a specific and concrete threat of harm purposefully presented
34:05
Speaker 1: by its author to extort the victim's consent. In other words,
34:11
Speaker 1: in order for the Leftmans to get their Picasso back,
34:13
Speaker 1: an official in the Nazi Party would have had to
34:16
Speaker 1: come to them in nineteen thirty seven, put a gun
34:19
Speaker 1: directly to their head and say sell me your Picasso.
34:23
Speaker 1: And because the Fascists chose to be a touch more
34:26
Speaker 1: subtle in their methods of extortion, that painting still hangs
34:30
Speaker 1: today on the walls of the Met and Vaz with carnations.
34:36
Speaker 1: There's a legal loophole in that case as well. Hedwig
34:40
Speaker 1: gave it to an art dealer in nineteen thirty eight,
34:43
Speaker 1: but that was to sell on consignment, and the art
34:46
Speaker 1: dealer took it to New York and didn't get around
34:48
Speaker 1: to selling it until after the war was over. Hedwig
34:52
Speaker 1: may have given it up under duress of the Nazi threat,
34:55
Speaker 1: but it wasn't sold under the duress of the Nazi threat.
34:58
Speaker 1: Claude Ullen had no legal claim to Vaz with Carnations,
35:03
Speaker 1: just a moral claim, and moral claims matched up against
35:07
Speaker 1: the compulsions of the hoarder don't amount to much.
35:16
Speaker 6: In the end.
35:16
Speaker 1: It was not a museum that returned any piece of
35:19
Speaker 1: Hedwig's original art collection. It was a packaged goods company,
35:23
Speaker 1: one that sells flower biscuits and beer, the Utker Group,
35:27
Speaker 1: based three hours north of Frankfurt, the Kraft Foods of Germany.
35:31
Speaker 1: The company's former CEO, Rudolf Auguste Utker, had an extensive
35:36
Speaker 1: art collection. The company did a providence check of his
35:39
Speaker 1: paintings and they discovered that in nineteen fifty four, Rudolf
35:43
Speaker 1: had bought one of the four Hans Toma wall paintings
35:46
Speaker 1: that had once hung in Hedwig's living room, a large
35:50
Speaker 1: canvas of children dancing around a blooming tree. One day,
35:53
Speaker 1: out of the blue, your father hears that one of
35:57
Speaker 1: his beloved grandmother's paintings is coming back.
36:00
Speaker 7: Yeah, instead of really hit him to the court.
36:03
Speaker 1: The heirs did not know the whereabouts of the painting.
36:06
Speaker 1: I'm reading now from the short statement released by the
36:09
Speaker 1: Ukka Group after they contacted the islands. The company advised
36:14
Speaker 1: them that the painting was in its possession and that
36:17
Speaker 1: it wished to return it to them on moral grounds.
36:21
Speaker 1: The heirs have gratefully accepted.
36:24
Speaker 9: Do you remember, can you describe what happened when he first.
36:27
Speaker 7: Dad would have cried.
36:29
Speaker 10: Yeah, he was quite emotional and he was quite emotional
36:33
Speaker 10: about this aspect, and we had several conversations over it,
36:38
Speaker 10: and he would cry nearly every single time.
36:42
Speaker 2: Yeah.
36:43
Speaker 9: Yeah, Is it a beautiful painting, Yes.
36:46
Speaker 7: Yeah it is. It's a beautiful painting.
36:48
Speaker 10: But it also starts to complete the circle within our family,
36:55
Speaker 10: the stories we would tell because Hedwig had a room
36:59
Speaker 10: where there were the hounds Tomer works. It was a
37:02
Speaker 10: dining room and they were painted around the room and
37:07
Speaker 10: Hans Thomer, I think was one of the art she
37:09
Speaker 10: loved the most. So to have a work returned was
37:14
Speaker 10: it was like almost a completing of the circle.
37:17
Speaker 7: And yeah, it was. It was deeply meaningful, especially to
37:21
Speaker 7: my father.
37:23
Speaker 1: Claude Allen died shortly after his grandmother's painting was returned.
37:29
Speaker 1: As for vas with Carnations, it's still in Detroit. The
37:33
Speaker 1: Olans are not pursuing their claims to that painting. They
37:36
Speaker 1: know they never win. And where is the painting currently?
37:41
Speaker 1: Is it now on display or is it still in storage?
37:44
Speaker 9: Where is it now in the in the museum.
37:47
Speaker 6: It's on display, It's been on display, and it was
37:51
Speaker 6: recently featuring an exhibition in the Barberini Gallery in Postam
37:59
Speaker 6: next to Berlina about Bango still lifes.
38:03
Speaker 1: The Detroit Institute of Art is in midtown Detroit, across
38:07
Speaker 1: Woodward Avenue from the main branch of the Public Library.
38:10
Speaker 1: A beautiful building with an extraordinary collection. If you get
38:14
Speaker 1: a chance, go and see Vaz with Carnations, and if
38:18
Speaker 1: you like it, stop by the gift shop and pick
38:20
Speaker 1: up a pair of Vaz with Carnations socks for nineteen
38:23
Speaker 1: ninety five, one size fits all, and Voz with Carnations
38:26
Speaker 1: Aloes soap for sixteen ninety five in a little round
38:30
Speaker 1: ten with Van Goh's Carnations on the cover. But don't
38:34
Speaker 1: spend too much time thinking about the painting. The painting
38:38
Speaker 1: is a mcguffin. Think about where it came from and
38:41
Speaker 1: what it stands for, and then do me a favor.
38:45
Speaker 1: When you leave, put a note in the suggestion box.
38:48
Speaker 1: I have seen Vaz with carnations. It doesn't belong here.
39:02
Speaker 1: Revision's History is produced by Mielo, Belle and Leemingestou with
39:06
Speaker 1: Jacob Smith, Aloise Linton and Anna and I. Our editor
39:10
Speaker 1: is Julia Barton. Original scoring by Luis Garra, mastering by
39:14
Speaker 1: Flawn Williams, fact checking by Beth Johnson, and special thanks
39:18
Speaker 1: to the Pushkin Crew Heather Fane, Carl Migliore, Maya Canick,
39:23
Speaker 1: Maggie Taylor, Jason Gambrel and of course El Hafe, Jacob Weisberg.
39:29
Speaker 1: I'm Malcolm Glappo.