My Favorite Rant: on Education, Restitution and the Culture of Museums

by Ori Z Soltes

One of the questions that, as a former Museum Director and Curator I remember having frequently asked my staff, my advisory board and myself is: what is the purpose of our museum? Clearly the raison d’être that every visitor observes in visiting a museum is the ingathering and display of objects. But why collect objects, besides, in the case of many of them, particularly in art and ethnographic museums, the fact that they are simply beautiful? There is no question but that most viewers’ eyes will be challenged in the most positive of ways and even, perhaps, their souls softened, by standing before Michelangelo’s David or before a handful of Monet’s explorations of the Rouen Cathedral in different kinds of light. One of the fascinating things about us as a species is that we respond differently to the same work of art and are moved by some works and not by others—one individual’s hour-long meditation before a Rothko painting is another individual’s swift passage by that painting in search of the Bernini sculptures on exhibition three galleries away.

Art museums presumably need and want to take cognizance of these differences and, as far as possible, provide an enjoyable viewing experience to as wide an audience as possible. More than that, though, they should want to help the viewer understand how Michelangelo’s statuary derived from and differed from the sculpture that preceded it and how it led to and yet not necessarily to Bernini’s different sort of visual vocabulary; why and how Monet’s vision offered such a revolutionary departure from the vision of Leonardo and in turn how Rothko, differently, continued that revolution—and how others since Rothko have further shaped the history of how art is made and seen. We want, that is, to educate our audiences—for a better-educated audience is likely to be both a more appreciative audience and one more capable, on occasion, of responding to exhibitions in ways that may lead the Museum itself to think differently and more deeply about the cultural world it engages.

So we don’t collect just to hoard and we don’t collect just to beautify the spaces devoted to what we collect. Museums are an essential part of the ongoing mechanism of not only preserving human culture and its concomitants but of exploring and explaining how civilization has evolved—what human culture is. Our raison d’être is to teach how the paths of art have diverged and converged, again and again across human history and geography; how our vocabularies of style and symbol have interwoven our aesthetic impulses and have articulated our need to access feelings and thoughts beyond the verbally expressible.

With the history of human culture—twisted in a particularly painful direction during the middle of the last century—as a focus, my HARP colleagues and I have been beating on the doors of our museums for nearly twenty years to be educated and to educate their audiences from a particular angle. We have pushed them to be conscious of provenance possibilities for works of art that have made their way into museum collections with certain holes in the accounts of their ownership histories. The results, as readers of the plundered art blog are aware, have been mixed at best. Most recently, of course, the case of Leone Meyer’s claim against the Fred Jones, Jr. Museum at the University of Oklahoma for her father’s Nazi-stolen Pissarro has revealed that the museum has never done provenance research on its collections, within which a goodly number of works may well have experienced the same sort of depredational fate that La Bergère experienced at the hands of Alfred Rosenberg’s ERR. They failed to research La Bergère’s ownership history even when specifically warned by a colleague from another museum that it might have been stolen by the Nazis from its pre-war owners.

The point here is not to focus on whether or not La Bergère will end up restituted to the family from which it was taken. That outcome, morally unquestionable (that it be returned to Leone Meyer) remains invisible (due to the vagaries of our law courts), unless one is a prophet, and I am not one. The point, however, is to focus on what lies behind the museum’s failure to inquire into the painting’s ownership past. Appropriately enough, this focus is tangent to the comment made by Eric Sundby, President of the student-run Holocaust Restitution and Remembrance Society at the University of Oklahoma, toward the end of his speech supporting the Oklahoma legislature’s proposal of a bill, HR 1026, that would compel the university’s Fred Jones, Jr. museum to fulfill the provenance research obligation that it has steadfastly ignored. Sundby commented that, as students, he and his organization want their tuition dollars to go not to high-paid lawyers who will defend the museum and university from those demanding restitution of Nazi-plundered paintings, but to education. The point that runs tangent to Sundby’s comment is that every museum, and not only those located on college or university campuses, should be committed to education—that this should be a raison d’être, a priority of museums.

One of the obvious contexts for this priority is, to repeat, the explanation and exploration of the aesthetic developments that connect and disconnect Leonardo and Rothko or Michelangelo and Bernini. Important in quite another way is the information—the explanation and exploration—provided by provenance research, whether in the Holocaust or other contexts. Art has never existed in a vacuum; it has always intersected religion (depicting or exploring or addressing divinity, from Egyptian statuary to Leonardo’s Last Supper) and politics (from the depiction of the pharaoh, Khafra, as god-like, to Jacque-Louis David’s painting of the coronation of Napoleon’s wife by the hand of the self-proclaimed Emperor himself)—and economics (without the financial resources, neither Khafra nor Napoleon could have commissioned the works that immortalize them). Without patronage, artists starve (and many have starved precisely for that lack).

Knowing who has owned a work throughout its history is not a footnote to history but essential to understand the work’s place in history: when all those crowds flock to the Louvre to stare at Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, if it does not occur to them to wonder how that Italian girl painted by that Italian man ended up in Paris, the museum is failing its role as an educational institution if it does not provide that information—clearly, simply, right there, for all who choose to do so to be able to read it, and with that reading, to be able to gain some insights into the history of that era and the art that reflects the era.

La Bergère, by Camille Pissarro

ERR card for La Bergere

The essence of history, well-explained, is, like the root of the word itself, story. This is what humans are all about. This is what works of art so often can be, aside from and in addition to their role as sources of visual pleasure. The story of Leonardo’s dying in the arms of his last patron, the French King, Francis I, to whose court he had come with, among other things, his Mona Lisa as a prized possession, is an important part of understanding who Leonardo was, who Francis was, what Italy and France were and are; it fills in an important as well as compelling part of the picture (pun intended) of the human experience. The story of Leone Meyer’s father’s Pissarro and that of others whose art was plundered, whether by the Nazis or by Soviet trophy squads as the war wound down; the story of what American galleries were doing with regard to plundered art during and after the war—like the story of what and how Napoleon dragged back that obelisk from Egypt that graces the Place de la Concord not far from the Louvre, or how the Romans eighteen centuries earlier dragged obelisks back to Rome—matters, if we wish to have a deeper and broader understanding of what we are as a species.

Leone Meyer

It should matter to museums above all. If our collections are not mere eye candy or mere symptoms of an obsession with hoarding or mere bait for tourists willing to pay money to see what we have gathered within our walls—if we are to be what we claim to be, protectors and preservers of culture (which is why some museums argue that Egyptian or Greek or Turkish antiquities are better off, because they are better protected and preserved, within French or English or German or American museums than in their own original countries; and also why, at the outset of the push during the past two decades to garner cooperation from museums regarding research within their collections with an eye toward the matter of Holocaust-era plunder and restitution, there was such stiff opposition within the museum community: they often asserted that, as bastions of civilization it was unthinkable that they might have ill-gotten gains within their walls)—then museums must exhaust every possibility and extend every effort to educate, teach their audiences and not just show them beautiful works of art.

Stroll through some museums and consider how much information regarding ownership history is available—particularly works that came into the collections between, say, 1935 and 1965. Examine the label next to paintings, perhaps some of those at the Fred Jones, Jr. Museum gifted to the museum by the Weitzenhoffer family and purchased by them from the David Findlay gallery in New York, as they had purchased La Bergère from that gallery and gifted it to the museum; or the label identifying Egon Schiele’s Dead City III, hanging on a wall at the Leopold Museum in Vienna;

Dead City III, by Egon Schiele

 or the label discussing the pastel, Landscape with Smokestacks, by Edgar Degas, at the Art Institute of Chicago;

Landscape with smokestacks, by Edgar Degas

or the label next to that beautiful set of Louis XV furniture at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris that belonged to a Jewish family before the war still struggling to gain acknowledgment of its claim—

Musee Carnavalet

or better, examine the labels of paintings and statuary that have not been claimed by Holocaust survivors or their heirs, that have not made the news, the recent circumstances of which have not forced the museums to think about the information that they provide to their audiences. How much do you get from this examination exercise?

Ask yourself—and if the answer is too minimal and unsatisfactory, ask the museum—what is the story within the history of this painting and who owned it? How did its ownership change, particularly in the last century—particularly between 1930 and 1945? Do it! If the Museums don’t educate the public and if the public doesn’t push the museums to educate them more effectively with regard to this, among the myriad aspects of interest in the discussion of art and culture, then what is the purpose of the museum experience beyond aesthetics? How is civilization being preserved when the key details pertaining to the history of objects created and enjoyed by and bought and sold by or stolen from fellow humans disappears from our telling and our understanding?

If it is to matter, our museum staffs must educate ourselves and care about educating ourselves as much about this as about other aspects of the works that we collect and study; and we must further the educational process by educating our audiences—so that they will continue to press us to be more educated in order to educate them better.

In the realm of Nazi-plundered art there is a further turn to this screw. The educational process—even more than the occasionally achieved restitution of cultural property to its pre-Nazi owners or their heirs that research may yield—is also part of another key aspect of human experience and a facilitator of education regarding civilization (indeed an integral part of the process of shaping civilization): memory. In learning and teaching about Raoul Meyer, or the Paris art dealer Paul Rosenberg (no relation to Alfred, of course) or the Dutch banker Fritz Gutmann, we remember those who were an important part of the patronage and ownership of classical and modern art—those whom the Nazis sought not only to divest of their art and their lives but whom they sought to de-humanize and efface from human memory.

Museums’ failures to educate themselves and their audiences regarding those whose works now grace their galleries mark a continuous, posthumous fulfillment of Hitler’s goal of obliteration. Those who make a real effort to learn and teach about those patrons and collectors—often (not always) champions of modern art that had only small audiences in the first third of the twentieth century—offer an ongoing challenge to everything that Hitler and his minions stood for. To offer that challenge is a modest enough and fulfillable goal for institutions claiming to be bastions of civilizations and preservers of human culture.

Memorial Day Ruminations

by Ori Z Soltes

Three related issues interwove themselves in my mind thanks to a serendipitous catching up with emails on this sunny Memorial Day weekend. Since "memorial" derives from the same Latin root as "memory" then it is particularly appropriate that, on a weekend when we are reminded to remember our war dead, the singular human capacity for memory and its verbal, visual and other articulations direct itself to related matters pertaining to the dead--and the living--from a range of different kinds of wars.

I was impressed by the youtube record of a brief speech by Eric Sundby, president of the student-run Holocaust Remembrance and Restitution Society at Oklahoma University in Norman, OK. The speech was in support of a resolution before the Oklahoma State legislature, HR 1026, that would call on the Fred Jones Museum of Oklahoma University to engage in a full process of provenance research.

In his speech, Sundby observed that, in practical terms, this means that the museum must both research the ownership history of objects in its collections that were acquired without the benefit of that research at the time of acquisition, and for which there is the possibility that they were stolen; and that it must commit itself to rigorously research the ownership history of potential acquisitions in the future.

The specific issue that prompted the legislation and Sundby's speech is the claim by Leone Meyer, in France, for the small Pissarro painting, La Bergère ("The Shepherdess"), which was stolen (together with dozens of other works of art) from the Meyer family, by the Nazis, under the aegis of the Alfred Rosenberg-guided task force whose purpose it was to plunder cultural property from the Nazis' victims. (Rosenberg's earlier claim to fame had been his orchestration of the Nazi theory that differentiated "Aryans" from Jews, Slavs, Roma and others, physiologically, mentally and morally).

La Bergere, by Camille Pissarro

As anyone who is interested in the issue of Nazi-Plundered cultural property is aware, the President of Oklahoma University and the Director of the Fred Jones Museum have steadfastly refused to consider restituting the painting to Ms. Meyer, based on a remarkable combination of pseudo-legal technicalities and egocentric obtuseness. Sundby referred to the Museum's assertion that restitution would set "a bad precedent" and that "the history of [the painting's] ownership history is not known." Sundby held up a document from the US Archives, stamped with Alfred Rosenberg's ERR Task Force stamp, indicating unequivocally that  La Bergère was item #13 plundered from the Meyer family.

Meyer 13-RG 260 M1943 Reel 15 NARA

ERR labeling on photo of Meyer 13

The Museum's refusal to accord justice and pursue an ethical path in the face of remarkably clear evidence as to the Nazi theft of the Pissarro from the Meyers, and its cynical use of an earlier failed effort by Meyer's father to gain restitution in Switzerland, (due, at the time, to what is now universally regarded as a faulty legal issue: the time limits within which claims might be made and to the Swiss judiciary's refusal to call into question the "good faith" of art dealers suspected of recycling art looted in Axis-controlled Europe) as a legal precedent, is profoundly disturbing. This is what has prompted virtually the entire state of Oklahoma, from students and ordinary citizens to State legislators, to rise up in protest and demand restitution.

Almost equally troubling is the documentary evidence suggesting that well over a decade ago a colleague from a different museum had alerted the Fred Jones museum curators of a potential provenance problem with this painting--and perhaps with some 30 others that had come from the same source--and that the Museum staff chose to minimize the alert at that time. That is to say, they chose not to engage in provenance research (and in this case, that research would not have been overly complicated), as if they had hoped that the issue would disappear.

Instead, it has returned, with a vengeance. Which leads me to the second issue that has been bothering me this weekend. The verbiage of HR 1026 is virtually drawn, in its entirety, from statements made well over a decade ago by Museum Directors in both the American Association of Museums (AAM) and the Association of American Museum Directors (AAMD) in response to a concatenation of public events that began with an all-day conference at the B'nai B'rith Klutznick National Jewish museum and the founding of HARP (September 4, 1997); and led to the HARP-inspired State Department conference that produced the so-called Washington Principles (in December 1998), signed by nearly four dozen nations at that time.

The august statements made by both AAM and AAMD pledged strong new efforts toward provenance research and a concerted effort to restitute works in their collections that had been plundered by the Nazis, where victims or their heirs could be found. Alas, the track record has meandered gradually downhill for the most part since then, as, with some noteworthy exceptions, American museums preferred to downplay the demand for provenance research and in many cases resisted the requests of claimants for judicious consideration of their claims, for their plundered works and for justice.

More subtly, museums still offer remarkably little information about works of art to their visitors, with respect to the narrative of plunder within the narrative of ownership. Where bona fide art historical enquiry should crave every bit of information about a work of art--who made it and when and where, and also who first and then who next owned it, and indeed what the entire trail of ownership up to the present has been--for this last sort of datum is essential to the larger story of culture and within it, economics and cultural patronage--the available information to the staff, by the staff and to the public (that the museum presumably wants to educate and edify and not merely entertain), remains remarkably limited.

In part this is because of the apparent limits on museum-staff skill at engaging in provenance research--at reading and understanding the documents that offer information on ownership history. (How else could the Fred Jones Museum argue that the provenance of La Bergère is unknown, when the archival documents are so clear?) Mind you, the museum and gallery community has continued to mouth its interest in understanding all of this better, but when seminars and short courses have been made available to it, the classroom remains devoid of participation from that community. If the museums don't understand or cannot tell the story of objects that have been plundered, they certainly cannot be expected to understand why restitution even matters, much less be sympathetic to the process; they cannot be expected to share a story that they don't know with their audiences. The trail from 1997 to 2015 and from Washington, DC to Norman, Oklahoma is a rugged one, with very uneven footing.

The contexts of history and art history are large ones. I noticed while watching Sundby's youtube-recorded speech that, in the background, behind him, there stood a life-sized bronze statue of a Native American. From my viewing angle it appeared generic: a non-specific American Indian. But then I thought--this is Oklahoma, after all--that the sculpture may well have been of a Cherokee. And I thought: how ironic! In 1838 in what is known as the Trail of Tears, tens of thousands of Cherokee, native to Georgia and surrounding areas were force-marched all the way to Oklahoma. The reason: white Euro-American settlers wanted access to the rich farmland and forests that the Cherokee had inhabited for generations. The outcome: a small-scale genocide. Thousands of Cherokee perished along the way to Oklahoma, where those who survived the journey were forced to take up residence in an area reserved for them--a reservation--that offered nothing like the land from which they and come, nothing that would be conducive to living lives anything like those they lived back east.

North America, then, and the United States in particular, has a lamentable history with regard to the treatment of Native Americans by whites and by the white federal government. So--and this is third part of my interwoven Memorial Day rumination--there on youtube is a functional symbol of that horrific past, a past which the United States is still in the process of trying to shape toward a happier present. And before that symbol a speech is being offered to support legislation intended to push an American museum to restitute a painting to the heir of a family that was part of a different tale of tears.

And meanwhile, in Paris, in the country from which that Jewish claimant comes, the EVE auction house is about to offer up, for the third time in barely a year, objects sacred to various Native American tribes--in this case, specifically the Hopis, from Arizona. The French have apparently completely forgotten that they are signatories to acts that recognize the rights of indigenous peoples world-wide with regard, among other things, to their cultural and sacred heritage and property. American dealers who know that they cannot hope to unload others' sacred property anywhere in the United States have turned to France to help preserve and extend this particular tale and trail of tears.

Mr. Sundby, in his elegantly concise speech with that statue behind him and the ERR document before him observed that his organization supports the legislation of HR 1026 because "we stand for our community, our nation and our fellow human beings." As students at Oklahoma University, his organization would prefer their tuition dollars to go toward, well, education, and not toward lining the pockets of lawyers defending a classic, unethical case. But it seems that the Fred Jones Museum has forgotten about moral education, as have most of the American museum staffs who remain uneducated with regard to provenance research and its role in larger historical and cultural contexts, and as the French and their auction houses seem to have forgotten about the meaning of community and of humanity. Memory is an important human instrument but a flawed one indeed, particularly when it is embedded so deeply in ego and arrogance.