Yet neither film asks a question that goes to the root of our experience of art: why should we care? The fate of the Klimts makes my point. After her family’s paintings were restored, Maria Altmann sold Woman in Gold for $135 million to Ronald Lauder’s Neue Gallery in New York. It is on public display, as it was in Vienna, and no harm has been done. But anonymous private buyers bought the three Klimt landscapes and the flower portrait. Admittedly, the owner of the second portrait of Adele has loaned it to New York’s Museum of Modern Art, but he or she could take it away. The landscapes I admired in Vienna have vanished.
A painting hidden from public view is like a banned book: it might as well not exist. Justice for the rightful owners of a great work is all very well, but the rest of us might worry more about keeping it on public display.
The conflict is close to the difficulties raised by forged or falsely attributed paintings. Fake or Fortune, the BBC series, investigates whether a picture the owners assumed was genuine was truly the work of a master. For all their scholarship, the presenters never ask why provenance matters. If a fine view of the Seine turns out not to be the Renoir its owner believes it to be, so what? The picture remains as good. The reply that it would be worth ten times as much if it were a Renoir merely rephrases the question: why would it be worth so much?
The answer lies in our yearning for authenticity. We want to feel the connection to Renoir, and it would change the way we saw a painting if we knew it were the work of a minor artist or forger. Equally, most people want to know that murderers did not steal the picture in front of them. The Nazis understood this. As with the gas chambers, they knew they could not admit to their crimes.
The Klimt paintings they stole from the Bloch-Bauers passed through the hands of Dr Erich Fuehrer, a Nazi lawyer appointed by the Gestapo to liquidate the property. The Nazi authorities gave the two portraits of Adele to the Belvedere. Woman in Gold is a Nazi name bestowed when it first went on public display in 1943. The gallery could not call it Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer because it would reveal that Adele was Jewish and strongly imply that they had looted her picture.
When I visited the Belvedere in the 1990s, all its Klimts were on public view, compared with just two today. Their display was not the blessing it seemed because the gallery could not tell the truth — be authentic, if you like — without changing the way most visitors would have looked at them. Honesty would have required them to say: “This picture was taken at gunpoint. We have never compensated its rightful owners or secured their consent to hand it here. So keen were our predecessors to cover up the crime that they obliterated the sitter’s name and with it her Jewishness.”
If I — and I hope you — had read that, we would not have seen a work of luscious beauty in front of us but a crime scene, and demanded that the courts intervene.
A painting hidden from public view is like a banned book: it might as well not exist. Justice for the rightful owners of a great work is all very well, but the rest of us might worry more about keeping it on public display.
The conflict is close to the difficulties raised by forged or falsely attributed paintings. Fake or Fortune, the BBC series, investigates whether a picture the owners assumed was genuine was truly the work of a master. For all their scholarship, the presenters never ask why provenance matters. If a fine view of the Seine turns out not to be the Renoir its owner believes it to be, so what? The picture remains as good. The reply that it would be worth ten times as much if it were a Renoir merely rephrases the question: why would it be worth so much?
The answer lies in our yearning for authenticity. We want to feel the connection to Renoir, and it would change the way we saw a painting if we knew it were the work of a minor artist or forger. Equally, most people want to know that murderers did not steal the picture in front of them. The Nazis understood this. As with the gas chambers, they knew they could not admit to their crimes.
The Klimt paintings they stole from the Bloch-Bauers passed through the hands of Dr Erich Fuehrer, a Nazi lawyer appointed by the Gestapo to liquidate the property. The Nazi authorities gave the two portraits of Adele to the Belvedere. Woman in Gold is a Nazi name bestowed when it first went on public display in 1943. The gallery could not call it Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer because it would reveal that Adele was Jewish and strongly imply that they had looted her picture.
When I visited the Belvedere in the 1990s, all its Klimts were on public view, compared with just two today. Their display was not the blessing it seemed because the gallery could not tell the truth — be authentic, if you like — without changing the way most visitors would have looked at them. Honesty would have required them to say: “This picture was taken at gunpoint. We have never compensated its rightful owners or secured their consent to hand it here. So keen were our predecessors to cover up the crime that they obliterated the sitter’s name and with it her Jewishness.”
If I — and I hope you — had read that, we would not have seen a work of luscious beauty in front of us but a crime scene, and demanded that the courts intervene.
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