Inna Rogatchi’s The New Dutch School series of modern still-life works has entered the LensCulture Critics’ Choice Award 2021.
The LensCulture Critic Choice 2021 Award is one of the top international events in the field of photography. Inna Rogatchi’s series participate in the fine art photography category.
In her new series, Inna Rogatchi examines a new ways of expression, by combining the two major streams of art tradition: contemporary art’s approach in its dynamic, edge-feeling and boldness of the statement with classic art tradition in shadow-light resolution, its grouping of subjects in still-life works and its subject matter.
The artist motivation behind creation of the series of modern still-life works is also to imagine ordinary subjects of a daily life through the lens of art.
Inna Rogatchi (C). Two and One, One and Two. 2020. The New Dutch School series.
In her The New dutch School series, the artist is also interested to examine various interactions: between different forms, between a form and a colour, between different materials, between different forms of life: organic and non-organic, between a subject and a surface, all that in a way of modern symbolism and by creating poetic metaphors.
The entire 10-piece series could be watched at the LensCulture Critics’ Choice Award 2021 site here.
Inna Rogatchi’s Love Story I artwork has been selected for London Art Biennale 2021. The London Biennale is regarded as “the second most important curated Art Biennale after Venice” ( Lonnie Schlein, Pulitzer Prize winner, New York).
Inna Rogatchi is the only artist from Finland selected among 454 finalists from 76 countries at the Biennale.
Love Story I. Zen Lines. Geometry of Love series. Original drawing in watercolour, wax pastel, oil pastel, lapice pastel, encre l’alcool, perle le blanc, hand-applied pigment of silver on authored original print on cotton Hahnemuhle paper 308 mg/cm3. 100 x 100 cm. Unique.
Love Story I artwork is part of Inna Rogatchi’s Geometry of Love series examining emotions via shapes in the collection of artworks created with Zen inspiration. Inna Rogatchi is known for her interest and works in the modern re-visiting of the Japanese philosophy, aesthetic and tradition. The series can be viewed here.
The Biennale will take place on the King’s Road, Chelsea at its traditional place. The official inauguration of the London Art Biennale 2021 will take place on Wednesday 30th June 2021, by invitation only.
General admission to The London Art Biennale is open to the public from Thursday 1st to Sunday 4th July, 2021.
Part I. From Unremarkable Acquisition To Major Re-discovery
With special thanks to inspired and inspiring colleagues: director of Amos Rex Museum, Dr Kai Kartio, director of the Sinebrychoff Art Museum-Finnish National Gallery Dr Kirsi Eskelinen, chief curator of the Sinebrychoff Art Museum-Finnish National Gallery Dr Ira Westergard, researcher at the University of Helsinki Kersti Tainio.
Year 2021: the 25th anniversary of re-appearance of believed to be lost rare artwork
This year, the end of April 2021, marks the 25th anniversary of a very special art acquisition which resulted in one of the most stunning re-discoveries in the present day art history. In April 1996, an initially unremarkable acquisition was made by the Sinebrychoff Art Museum in Helsinki, Finland. It was an Italian artwork of the XVIII century, by an anonymous artist. As it turned out, it was the beginning of an extraordinary story which has become the subject of my forthcoming art historical documentary.
Eight months after the acquisition, in December 1996, the Museum and the Finnish National Gallery had had to call the press-conference. There it was announced that since now on, the Museum owns not one Tiepolo, as it was known since the Museum’s establishing, but two of them, with the second work being identified as the masterpiece of Domenico Tiepolo, the son of the great Venetian master of the XVIII century and the famous artist himself.
The one of the foremost Tiepolo and Venetian art authorities in the world, Dr George Knox was the first one who confirmed the re-discovery of the painting which was believed to be lost for a half of a century. The work in question was modello, an oil sketch on canvas, the medium which was quite popular among Venetian artists in the XVIII century. The artists of the period used these modelli as samples of the future works, of usually giant size, while negotiating the commissions with potential clients or art dealers. Because of their size and convenience for transportation, modelli has become much sought after artworks in their own right, which were happily bought for very good prices by numerous art collectors all over the world.
The work resurrected in Helsinki in 1996 was not an ordinary piece of art. It was the missing part of the series created by Domenico Tiepolo on Trojan Horse, the series which were widely well known and described in the art literature in detail.
The re-discovery was a major one. For a number of reasons, it had to wait until now, almost 25 years since the time of the work’s re-appearance, for the focused look into its incredible story in detail, to be amazed and to learn from it.
Helsinki, 2020-2021: first unification of Tiepolo’s Trojan Horse triptych in more than 200 years
Year 2020 was the time of the 250th anniversary of the death of Domenico Tiepolo’s father, the great Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo. In commemoration of it, the Sinebrychoff Art Museum in Finland has organised a gem of an exhibition Tiepolo: Venice in the North, which I dubbed as ‘the exhibition of discoveries’ .
Giambattista who was the one of the major masters of Venice, and was highly appreciated also in Spain, Germany and Russia in the second half of the XVIII century, all his life was working very closely with both of his sons, Domenico and Lorenzo. After Tiepolo Senior’s death in Madrid in 1740, his son Domenico who had become the master of his own, returned to Venice and worked there quite successfully until his death in 1804. As a rule, most of the Tiepolo exhibitions world-wide are exhibiting the works of both father and his sons. The same was the approach at the exhibition in Helsinki in the autumn 2020-winter 2021.
If not tiresome restrictions caused by the covid pandemic, the exhibition at the Sinebrychoff Art Museum in the capital of Finland would be saluted widely internationally, due to several very meaningful discoveries it brought in an elegant way and with its superb exhibition design. I wrote about it in detail.
It was at that exhibition, when one of the most notable events in the world of fine arts in recent time has occurred. For the first time in over 200 years, the series originally created as the three-parts entity by Domenico Tiepolo on Trojan Horse has been exhibited in its entirety. For the first time in over 200 years, the two parts of that notable work which belongs to the London National Gallery for over the century, were united with its third part which was presumed to be lost under the most dramatic circumstances, at the most dramatic time, before it resurrected in Finland, over 70 years ago, and was re-identified a quarter of century ago.
Domenico Tiepolo. Trojan Horse series in three parts at the Tiepolo: Venice in the North exhibition at the Sinebrychoff Art Museum – Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki, Finland. Autumn 2020 – Winter 2021. Photo (C) Hannu Pakarinen. Credit: Sinebrychoff Art Museum – Finnish National Gallery, Finland. With kind permission of the Sinebrychoff Art Museum.
Helsinki, 1996: the missing part
It was a regular monthly auction at Hagelstam auction house in Helsinki in April 1996, with a few potential buyers presented, and with nothing extraordinary mentioned in the preliminary published catalogue. Among those several people at the well-known Hagelstam auction rooms, there was a young curator from the Sinebrychoff Art Museum. When he saw the photo of the work planned for sale at Hagelstam a bit earlier, he who always had a soft spot for Tiepolo, was thinking to himself: “Hmm, this dark old work of Venetian art does resemble Tiepolo , or his workshop, perhaps”. Today, Kai Kartio, now one of the leading culture figures in Finland, director of the new and popular Amos-Rex Museum recalls the events of the 25 years back in our conversations, with still recognisable amazement.
The bid was quite low, and the young curator had had the mandate from the Museum’s director at the time for such modest purchases which would fit a very small acquisition budget that the Museum had in the mid 1990s.
As Kai Kartio recalls today, ‘at the time when we still operated in Finnish marks, the estimate was equivalent to a few hundreds Euro”. There were other bidders for the work, as well, so when Kai eventually got the painting for the museum, its price fetched the sum which was the equivalent of under 2000 Euro. The Sinebrychoff Art Museum does not commit itself for public estimate of their treasure, understandably. According to some professional Italian estimates, the works could be conservatively valued today at 500 – 600 thousand Euros.
Domenico Tiepolo. The Greeks Sacking Troy. 1773-1775. (C) Sinebrychoff Art Museum – Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki. With kind permission of the Sinebrychoff Art Museum.
Kai Kartio knew his field well, and he also was attracted to works of the certain periods. It was clear, Kai told me, that ‘this dark obscure work in a bad condition was really a Venetian work of the 18th century’. But what is it? He was curious.
Being an able researcher, at the Helsinki University library, he consulted the best possible source, published in Munich and Zurich 8-volumed detailed catalogue of iconography of Christian symbols in art, Lexikon der christlichen ikonographie. Forty leading experts from France, Italy and Germany were working on the Lexicon for decades, with gradual publishing it from 1967 to 1976. The Lexicon, known as LCI, has become the indispensable source for any qualified art provenance research of the works of old masters.
“ As it turned out, the subject of the Trojan Horse has been depicted in art surprisingly rarely, – Kai Kartio told me recently, – and the Domenico Tiepolo’s series of three paintings on the subject were well-known and properly described in that really extremely thorough Lexicon. Moreover, at the Lexicon, there was also mentioned that the article in the German art magazine Pantheon, the leading German art publication at the time, has written about the one of the works in the series in particular in the 1930s, due to the big Tiepolo exhibition in Chicago where it has been shown.”
Dr Kai Kartio, director of the Amos Rex Museum, Helsinki. (C) Jussi Mankkinen. With kind permission of Dr Kai Kartio.
As art experts know, the Domenico Tiepolo’s two works depicting the Trojan Horse were at the National Gallery in London from 1918, and before that they were in the UK from the 1830 onward. It was not these works which were exhibited in Chicago. What was it then? And who brought it there?
After reading the description at the Lexicon, Kai Kartio ran to Finnish National Gallery archive where, as he knew, they had kept some of the Pantheon magazines, due to ‘the extremely close ties between Germany and Finland before the WWII in the culture field’, he mentioned. He found it. As it happened, Pantheon wrote about this particular work by Domenico Tiepolo twice, first in the beginning and then in the end of the 1930s, due to the two different occasions in the connection with the work.
When Kai opened the issue of Pantheon magazine on international art from 1930, he saw the picture of the work which he had just bought at the Hagelstam monthly auction a few months before for peanuts as the work of ‘anonymous, Italy, XVIII century” .
“Of course, I went to see Wenzel Hagelstam, the head of the auction house ( and the long-term host of the Finnish franchise of Antic, Antic TV-show), and showed him my discoveries. He was completely stunned. My quest for him was any documentation regarding the work which the auction house might have, and of course, I wanted to know now who was the seller, and any possible circumstances around the sale”, – recalls Kai Kartio.
As it turned out, the Hagelstam auction house has indeed obtained letter correspondence between Germany and Finland with regard to that work. In that exchange, the work was discussed among some other acquisitions of the certain Finnish diplomat, and it was described there as the work of ‘unknown Venetian artist, XVIII century’.
From that moment on, the story around Domenico Tiepolo’s TheGreeks Sacking Troy in a blink of an eye has moved half a century back, and brought us to Berlin soon after the end of the Second World War, in 1948.
In the saga of tracing the provenance of the 245-year-old work by Tiepolo-son undertaken by my Finnish colleagues, aspiring and thorough art historians, this aspect and time period has attracted my attention in particular, due to my own historical research in different aspects of the post-Second World War period. I have spent several months looking in the specific aspects of the history of this painting: a possibility of a Jewish ownership of the work, all possible circumstances in connection with the work in a period between 1930 and 1948, historical, cultural and human context of the unwitting adventures of the Venetian master’ masterpiece.
My primary interest was in understanding the people involved, the process unfold, and the phenomena occurred in both micro- and macro approach to this amazing story: from one hand, in the history of one believed to be lost but founded artwork, the drama of the XX century which still reverberate to us, has been reflected. At the same time, from another hand, it can be also seen as the opposite process: a vast historical and human spectacle had been concentrated in this story in the most intriguing and not quite resolved as yet way. Remarkably, this story still poses open questions.
Berlin, 1948: Unanswered questions. How Tiepolo Jr. has become ‘an anonymous artist’?
The man who unexpectedly for himself has become into possession of the dark, unclear work of ‘anonymous Italian artist’ was Finnish diplomat Tauno Sutinen who was stationed in Germany before and during the Second World War as the Second Secretary of the Embassy of Finland in Berlin. According to the recent thorough research by the Finnish art historians that we will come to, due to the course of the war Sutinen had to return to Finland from Germany rather abruptly in 1944. Many of his dealings in Germany, including his ongoing relations with a certain art-dealer there, were left in the middle.
When Sutinen realised that he won’t be returning back to Germany as planned originally, he asked some of his acquaintances there to handle these unfinished businesses on his behalf. This is how the batch of six artworks from Berlin had eventually got to Helsinki in 1948, preceded by the letter of Sutinen’s acquaintance in Berlin describing that in return of the money that he left with the dealer, the later provided several artworks, including the one ‘rather impressive work by an anonymous Italian artist of the XVIII century’. The work was marked in the letter as being worth 15 000 RM ( Reich Marks) by the German art dealer. The sum in 1948 was equivalent of $ 6000. It is comparable to 55.000 Euros of the money value of today.
. The building in Helsinki where the Hagelstam Auction House is situated.
From that time onward, Domenico Tiepolo’s unrecognised masterpiece had been hung on the Finnish diplomat’s wall at his apartment in Helsinki. More than twenty years after his death in 1974, followed by the consequent death of his widow, the family decided to sell some of their art via Hagelstam auction. There are amusing details on how the auctioneers were not that much interested in that dark unclear painting, and almost had left the Sutinen’s apartment without it, picking it up, nonchalantly, on their way out at the last moment.
The dealer in Berlin who sent the batch of six artworks to Tauno Suutinen in 1948 via certain Georgy Ribakoff was Herbert Ulrich. According to the German vast and ongoing art historical research on the Nazi period and art, he was an established dealer with an impressive gallery at Unter der Linden in Berlin, the best possible spot of the Reich’s capital. As established by the Finnish researches, in 1944, the gallery was bombed severely, but he was able to resume his business, at the other location, surprisingly quickly, as early as in 1946, running it until his death in 1991. The business continued after his passing, and I saw that there is an art gallery with this name in the prestigious area of Berlin today.
So we know now how and when the lost third part of Domenico Tiepolo’s triptych on Trojan Horse has found its way to Finland. What we do not know – and the question is still an open and intriguing one – is why on earth a savvy German art dealer in Berlin has decided, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, to attribute a well-known and properly described artwork as the work of ‘an anonymous artist’. What he was aiming to hide? Whom, when and how did he get the work from?
When the Finnish TV crew entered the premises of the Ulrich gallery back in 1999, to ask his widow who was still running the business, a couple of questions, the real-life drama went straight on the tape. Frau Ulrich’s polite tone in the beginning of the encounter has changed dramatically in no time after the first question by the Finnish investigating reporter. Her smile went off momentarily, and with a stoned face, she declared coldly and angrily that she ‘has no recollections’, after which she uttered just one word: “Aufiderzein”.
A quarter of the century on, there is no doubt among the few experts who are still on the case, that Herbert Ulrich knew very well that the work in his possession was by Domenico Tiepolo’s.
The only reason prompted him to change The Greeks Sacking Troy’s authorship from Tiepolo to ‘ an anonymous’ was the previous owner of the work, or a middleman who dealt in the total upheaval of the art market during WWII. The most tricky detail which was brought to public attention as recently as in the autumn 2020, by the publication of the findings by the Finnish art historians Dr Ira Westergard and Kersti Tainio ( Travelling with Tiepolo, Helsinki, 2020) is the fact of the cut of the top edge of the label note on the back side of the work’s frame. The note is in German, and it describes the topic of the work. As the Finnish researchers justly noticed, with the photograph illustrating their point, the note is cut precisely at the place where the name of the artist is supposed to be.
Historical postcard with Unter den Linden canonic view. Wiki Commons open archive.
The time window of the modello’s change of hands in Germany has been also established, thanks to another discovery by the same experts who were able to confirm where the work was until 1942. That window has been narrowed to five years, between 1942 and 1947. These years rings a lot of bells, with regard to art works and their sometimes unbelievable adventures, doesn’t it?
When I undertook my own art historical research based on professional thorough work of my colleagues from the Sinebrychoff Art Museum in Helsinki, I was looking into any possible further lead coming of their discoveries, in the given period between 1930 and 1948. In the beginning of my research, I was electrified to see the name of the art dealer in Paris who, as it was established recently, have had the Tiepolo’s work in his possession until 1942, and who, actually, brought it to the USA, to participate at the mentioned already exhibition in Chicago in 1938. He was also privately negotiating possible sale of the Trojan Horse modello in New York and possibly Los-Angeles during his trip to the US in the end of the 1930s.
London 1945: A very special intelligence unit. In search of looted art of Europe.
I was electrified because I knew that name already. I came across it in the course of my previous research related to post-WWII Europe and the US. I saw that name in the OSS ( the US Intelligence) files on wanted Nazis. At the time of completing the files, in 1945-1946, the OSS in Europe was overwhelmed with the volume of their tasks. Established special unit gathering intelligence on looted art known as ALIU was actually run by just ten people who were supposed to get to the bottom of that incredible, giant looting organised by the Nazis that swept Europe during the six years of the war. More, in many cases, the business already started to thrive as soon as the beasts had ensured their power – and their appetites for art. I saw the documentation about the transactions which were actual robbing of intimidated Jewish families completed already in 1937.
Being formed as an intelligence unit in the end of 1944-beginning of 1945 and run from the OSS office in London, ALIU experts were able to distill the mess of personalities involved in the process of the Nazi crimes against culture down to 2000 individuals, both Nazi officials tasked with mass art looting and those dealers and middlemen who cooperated with them eagerly.
The list was serious, with proven facts, due to the fact of a brief arrests and detainment of many leading figures in the Nazi looting ‘industry’. With just a few exceptions, arrested senior art looters were eager to feed the American interrogators with a trove of information incriminating the others while trying to whitewash themselves. Typical.
A page of the OSS ALIU report on looted by the Nazis art, declassifed in 1951. Commons Open Internet Archive.
ALIU OSS Unit was closely cooperating with most senior American art experts, and in the final list and report, their opinion was accounted as checking and verification of the intelligence collected in the field.
I have been working on the theme of looted art since the early 1990s, and have first-hand knowledge about how the process of investigation of that aspect of the Nazi crimes had been evolving from its very start in 1945. My knowledge comes from a number of great people who did participate in it personally or who have had their personal knowledge about it. Among them are my dear friends, like late Simon Wiesenthal who was working closely with the OSS in Austria in particular with regard to Hitler beloved project, his future Linz Art Museum, a giant operation which had an undisputed priority among all Reich projects on looted art.
Among them is also a legendary Peter Sichel who was running super-secret the CIA Strategic Unit in Berlin from 1946 onward and whose role in the restitution process in general and art in particular is crucial. There is also a leading art dealer and art historian Achim Moeller whose role in ongoing process of restitution of the looted by the Nazis art has been extremely important since the process has been started, widely recognised authority among historians, professor Konrad Kwiet who was the Chief Historian at the Commission of the Nazi Crimes Investigation in Australia, former minister for foreign affairs of the Czech Republic and mentor of Vaclav Havel, dear friend Prince Karel von Schwarzenberg,whose family’s property and possessions had been looted by the Nazis, and some other serious and highly reputable people who were and are still involved in that painful and saddening part of our modern history.
Inna Rogatchi and Simon Wiesenthal at the Wiesenthal’s office in Vienna, 1995. (C) Michael Rogatchi. Courtesy: The Rogatchi Archive.
Based on that massive first-hand knowledge, I would like to emphasise that if the OSS and its Art Looting Intelligence Unit, ALIU, back in 1945-1946 has put a certain art dealer in their Wanted list, known also as Red-Flag list, it means that the evidence against that person’s dealing with the Nazis were overwhelming.
The essay is part of Inna Rogatchi’s Vincent: Etudes on Van Gogh (C), special project, Outreach to Humanity series
To the best knowledge of the author and her editors, the work in question is the first published research and analyses addressing the subject.
The shortened version of the essay has been published by The Jerusalem Report magazine, issue 1, January 11, 2011. It can be read here.
The publication of the study in French in Tribune Juive can be read here.
Fanny and That Painting
On March 8, 1903, Fanny Flodin heard the news that her long effort to sell that painting to the museum had been approved, finally. Fanny sighed with relief. It was quite an effort for her to sell that painting which she brought with her to Helsinki from Paris when she returned to her family after the death of her husband.
Everything in this passage hints to things special and unique in history of art and civilisation: Fanny Flodin, notable pianist whose teacher was the last pupil of Franz Liszt, was the daughter of an important Finnish statesman of Swedish origin and sister of sculptor Hilda Flodin who worked with Auguste Rodin. Fanny’s husband, recently deceased in Paris, was no one else, but Julien Leclercq, well-known in France as a poet, art critic and cultural figure. The museum in question was Ateneum, the National Art Gallery of Finland, the country’s principal art museum. That painting was Van Gogh’s.
Leclercq who was a close friend of Van Gogh, have had several of his works by the artist that he bought from Theo Van Gogh’s widow, and which he also obtained in the process of that vivid non-stopping exchanges of ‘trophies’ within the artist circle in France.
Emile Schuffenecker (C). Portrait of Fanny and Lucien Leclercq. Pastel on paper. 47 x 61 cm. ca 1898. The Johnson Museum of Art. Cornell University, the USA. Gift of Mrs Carol Meyer in memory of Seymour Meyer. 1936.
In 1901, just Lecreque got ill suddenly and died very quickly from tuberculosis to complete shock of his wife and everyone else. He was just 35. Fanny inherited 5 or 6 of Van Gogh’s paintings from her husband. She sold all but one of them in Paris before her return to Finland. But that one painting she just could not sell. So she brought it with her when she did return to Helsinki to live there with her young daughter after her recent trauma caused by the sudden death of her husband.
The family has put quite an effort to convince the board of Ateneum Museum to acquire Van Gogh’s work. They used their powerful connections to influence the decision, including securing the learned opinion of leading Finnish Swedish artist Albert Edelfelt who was the member of the board of Ateneum and who lived and worked in Paris and understood the quality and meaning of Van Gogh art far better than many others in the artistic world which largely regarded Van Gogh as ‘an obscure mad Dutchman’. According to the Ateneum documentation and thorough historical study work by prominent Finnish journalist Antti Virolanen, apart from Edelfelt, no one among the members of the Board of Ateneum have not heard Van Gogh’s name, which was completely normal in 1903. It looks like it was Edelfelt insisting and his repeated opinion that have decided the matter positively for Fanny Flodin.
Even after the positive final decision of the Ateneum Board to acquire that painting of Van Gogh, they were bargaining with Fanny about the price back and force. Finally, the sides agreed on the sum of 2 500 marks. The equivalent of it today is Eur 11.300 . Such was the price that Ateneum Museum has paid for great Van Gogh’s Street in Auvers-sur-Oise work ( 1890) which was initially known as Rue de Village. This very work is especially valued for two reasons: it was the one of the last works that Van Gogh painted in Auvers-sur-Oise just two months before his death; and this work has its distinct mark: the part of sky there seems to be unfinished. For a long time, art critics were discussing: was the spot with unfinished sky left by Van Gogh intentionally, or he simply did not finish the painting? This discussion is still ongoing.
Vincent Van Gogh (C). Street in Auvers-sur-Oise. Oil on canvas. 1890. Ateneum, the National Art Gallery of Finland, the Antell Collection.
Street in Auvers-sur-Oise has become the only Van Gogh work existing in Finland. For Ateneum it is simply priceless, and it is regarded as a special treasure among their very solid collection of 650 works by many great artists.
Ateneum was very kind to loan this bright, wonderful work to the ongoing Becoming Van Gogh exhibition ( 5.09.2020 – 31.10.2021) which has been organised, despite all covid pandemic obstacles, at The Didrichsen Art Museum in Helsinki to celebrate the 55th anniversary of this special art institution.
The Didrichsen Art Museum is based on the unique collection of modern art assembled by legendary patrons of art Gunnar and Marie-Louise Didrichsens. Their son Peter led the museum for many years. Currently his wife Maria is leading it.
The Long Road Towards the Appreciation
Why was it so difficult, back in 1903, to convince the members of the Board of Ateneum to acquire a big and expressive canvas by Van Gogh? Because at the time, just 13 years after Van Gogh’s death at the age of 37, his name was not that well known beyond France and partially Belgium, and he certainly was not understood as an artist even there.
The situation was not helped much by the fact that Theo Van Gogh who was supporting and promoting his genius brother died just six months after Vincent being shocked beyond anything by his beloved brother’s death. 23 years later his burial, and at the same time of publishing substantial selection of Vincent’s famous letters, in 1914 devoted Theo’s widow Johanna Van Gogh-Bonger, to whom we owe the preservation of Van Gogh’s works and legacy, re-buried her husband next to his brother at truly beautiful spot on the cemetery in Auvers-sur-Oise which is covered all over by ivy, the brothers’ favourite plant.
Burial site of Vincent and Theo van Goghs. Cemetery at Auvers-sur-Oise. Open Internet Archive.
The first ever positive – and quite providential – critic opinion on his art Van Gogh received from a colleague and acquaintance, the Dutch artist of Jewish origin Joseph Jacob Isaacson ( 1859 -1942) nine months prior to his death. Visiting Paris, Isaacson got to know Theo, and via Theo, he befriended Vincent. Isaacson, who was a deep and well educated person who specialised in Jewish mysticism, realised the merits of Vincent’s art and wrote about it in “The Portfolio” art magazine. “Who is there that conveys, in form and colour, the magnificent, dynamic energy the 19th century is against becoming aware of? I know one man, a lone pioneer, struggling on his own in the depths of darkest night. His name, Vincent, will go down to posterity. There will be more to be said about this heroic Dutchman in the future” – Jewish artist have written. It is the very first positive art critical mentioning of van Gogh’s art, and a very rare one made during his life-time.
Joseph Isaacson over-lived once briefly be-friended Vincent for over a half of a century, during which he changed his opinion on Van Gogh’s works, at least publicly so. After Van Gogh’s large exhibition 16 years after his death, and 17 years after his first first so positive and providential critique, Isaacson was not that impressed any longer. Or so he said in his 60-pages “A new point of view on art’ critic work in which he concludes that although Vincent’s work ‘is impressive, it does not move’ him any longer. It is quite possible that posthumous exploding fame of Van Gogh was somewhat irritating for Isaacson who was the first one to see that Vincent belongs to posterity.
Joseph Isaacson’s own destiny was as terrible as the destiny of all Jews of Europe who were unfortunate to live to see humanity’s surrender to Nazism. Old artist and his not that old wife were murdered in Auschiwtz in 1942, upon their arrival. Joseph Isaacson was 82 years old at the moment.
* * *
Coming back to Fanny Flodin and her husband Juliene Lecrercq whose first name was Joseph, he did, in fact, for Van Gogh more than any other person except Theo and Johanna Van Goghs.
Van Gogh’s obituary is the one written by Joseph Juliene Leclercq.
With the help of his wife Fanny and her family’s connections in Scandinavia, Lecrercq organised an important travelling exhibition of Post-Impressionists to Scandinavia, bringing their works, including Van Gogh ones, to Helsinki, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Oslo as early as in 1898. A rare and charming portrait of the couple done by Emile Schuffenecker which now is at the collection of The Johnson Museum of Art at the Cornwell University, was done by the artist in appreciation of Fanny and Julien’s efforts to bring his and his fellow artists work to Scandinavia. Schffenecker who was a close friend of Gaugin, knew Van Gogh well.
Leclecrq was the person who organised Van Gogh’s first important exhibition ever, the artist’s first retrospective in Paris which consisted of 65 of Van Gogh’s oil paintings and six of his drawings. It was one of the fundamentally important exhibitions not in defining the Van-Gogh’s posthumous destiny, but in the history of modern art in general, too, not only because it brought a sizeable collection of Van Gogh works to wide public for the first time, but also because solely due to that exhibition, several important groups of French artists that developed into the main-stream art of the XX century, such as Fauvists who did include the most important artists of the XX century such as Matisse, Derain, Braque and many others, were inspired by Van Gogh deeply right there and then.
It was Van Gogh who, eleven years after his death, did influence and actually defined the development of the important and rich direction of modern art, and that’s why he is known as the father of modernism ever since. That crucial development was originated thanks to the exhibition organised by Julien Lecrecq at the Bernheim-Jeune galleries in Paris.
Juliene Lecrecrq died within a half of a year after that legendary exhibition. But before that, he has bought several Van Gogh’s works from Johanna Van Gogh-Bonger, among those was the work which was acquired by Ateneum two years later. Very importantly, it was the very first acquisition of Van Gogh for public collection world-wide. It has to be stated clearly, to clarify the established fact of the first ever display of Van Gogh’s work which had happened in 1908 for Städel Museum in Frankfurt.
But display and acquisition are two different things. The first ever museum acquisition of Van Gogh in the world had happened for the Finnish Ateneum in March 1903. Ironically enough, in the Ateneum documentation there is a note regarding new acquisitions in which Van Gogh’s work is mentioned as ‘that peculiar Dutch impressionist Van Gogh’ ‘Village Street’ work”.
Van Gogh’s German Jewish Connection
It was at that very exhibition in Paris in March 1901, without which the world simply would not know any Vincent Van Gogh, that a wealthy German Jewish art dealer walked in the Bernheim-Jeune Galleries. The Bernheim-Jeune family was of Jewish origin, their input into the development of modern art is quite substantial, and the history of the family and its business under the Nazi occupation during the WWII is painful and tragic. Their role in laying ground for initial understanding and appreciation of Van Gogh as the major artistic genius is crucial.
The man who was coming from Berlin in 1901 to see that largely unknown artist with a strangely sounding name at the Bernheim-Jeune Galleries in Paris was Paul Cassirer, the person who basically has made Van Gogh famous and desirable artist first in Europe and then in the USA. Cassirer would be never able to do it unless two factors: the article that he read about Van Gogh and which was the sole reason for him to travel to Paris to seeing that exhibition, and the exhibition itself where Cassirer was smitten by Van Gogh to the depth of his innermost.
Leopold von Kalckreuth . Portrait of Paul Cassirer. 1912. Markisches Museum, Berlin.
The article that has prompted Paul Cassirer’s initial interest in Van Gogh was published in 1900, shortly before the exhibition in Paris although independently from it. It was written by Julius Meier-Graefe, great German Jewish art historian who lived most of the time in Paris. Meier-Graefe has noted and understood Van Gogh as no one else has done before him, and it is largely thanks to him that reading public in Germany received his deep and brilliant appreciation that has really made Van Gogh known in Europe.
Lovis Corinth. Portrait of Julius Meyer-Graefe. Musee d’Orsay, Paris.
After publishing his first large essay on why Van Gogh is a great artist, the one which has been read by Paul Cassirer, Meier-Graefe expanded it first into a tiny book, then worked on it more and more, until his books on Van Gogh published in between 1910 and 1929 became the world’s classic.
It is worth noting that Meier-Graefe who lived until 1935 and who escaped Germany in time, was instrumental with his wife in establishing the art community of German Jewish refugees there and providing hospitality to many of them.
Paul Cassirer did not live to see the Nazis seizing power in Germany. He died a decade earlier than Meier-Graefe, in 1926, and his death, in a weird way, was quite similar to that of his beloved artist, Van Gogh. Paul Cassirer took his own life , on the emotional grounds, as the result of tormented relations with his wife, and quite like Van Gogh, did not die immediately, but was suffering for two days, just like Van Gogh, before succumbing to his wound. There was quite a parallel in Cassirer’s ending of his own life – in the way Van Gogh did. If to believe that Van Gogh committed suicide, the fact which has quite substantial reasons to be questioned.
Paul Cassirer was under a total spell of Van Gogh from the moment he stepped into the Bernheim-Jeune Galleries in Paris in March 1901 at the first retrospective of the artist organised by Josef Julien Lecrercq. His first purchase of five Van Goghs were actually borrowings. These were the first Van Gogh paintings brought by Cassirer to Germany soon after the exhibition he saw in Paris. Very soon after, towards the end of 1901, Paul Cassirer pursued, thanks to his good relations with Johanna Van Vogh-Bonger, about twenty first Van-Gogh paintings from many he would acquire during his 25 years of very energetic efforts of building Van Gogh’s appreciation and fame.
Until the moment when WWI had started, Cassier was organising annual Van Gogh exhibitions in his gallery in Berlin, coming to 14 of them. Thanks to his leading and some other people’s efforts, it was Germany, where Van Gogh’s fame had actually evolved, first in Europe and then world-wide. By the start of WWI, German private collectors, largely, and some museums, as well, owned as many as 120 oil paintings and 36 drawings of Van Gogh, the master about whom nobody heard a bit over a decade back. It was an extraordinary boom which has no precedent in the history of art.
One has to remember that it all had happened against the background in which the criteria of ‘a good art’ meant traditional and imperial ones. The Van Gogh boom in conservative Germany in the first and second decade of the XX century was a truly revolutionary change of a public taste not just in art, but also in further and wider aesthetic context.
Another twist of irony is not that widely known fact that in the early period of Nazism, from 1933 to 1937, some modernist German artists and the functioners of arts and propaganda at the period, who were trying hard to adjust to the Nazi regime in hope to be able to continue their career in Judenfrei Germany, and who identified with anti-Semitic nature of the regime in a full measure, tried to hijack van Gogh for a short period of time. There were some articles in the pro-modernist art and propaganda publications still allowed by the Hitler regime until 1937, in which their authors were writing that misunderstood and unappreciated by decadent impressionists and post-impressionists in France, ‘van Gogh with his Dutch, and close to German one, upbringing and background, belongs to us, he is German’ ( Kunst der Nation publication, March 1934, cited in Artists Under Hitler by Jonathan Petropoulos, 2014).
Soon after, of course, that inclination was effectively shut down by two factors: in the eyes of pro-Nazi German art circles, French impressionists and post-impressionists were awful and unacceptable largely due to the fact that they all were dealt and appreciated by the Jews, Jewish art dealers, Jewish art critics, Jewish writers, and Jewish connoisseurs of arts. The very same art-dealers who were dealing with Van Gogh works. So, with this total anti-Semitic purge in arts, and anywhere else, Van Gogh who was dealt by famous Jewish art dealers as Cassirer, was not considered ‘German’ any longer by those desperate lunatics. He was moved in the official Nazi propaganda art perception to the suspicious, not racially pure cohort of non-real artists according to the Nazi doctrine.
The second fact of life in Nazi Germany was that from 1937 onward, all pro-modernist tendencies in art, culture and propaganda were shut down completely. It did not prevent, however, a big art consumer, or rather shark Göring to grab the one of the best van Gogh’s works, the one of the two portraits of Dr Gachet, from the piles of the Nazi-stolen art and to boast about it proudly as about the gem of his stunning collection of stolen treasures . That particular work has a very dramatic history and is believed to be the one of the five van Gogh’s major works to be destroyed or disappeared during and in the connection with the Second World War.
But yet before all that nightmare started, the combination of brilliant writings by Julius Meier-Graefe which were captivating mind of German public widely, with actual top-class elegant and assured, understanding and energetic art dealership by Paul Cassirer based on his closeness to Theo Van Gogh’s widow who kept the Van Gogh’s works, has prompted the name of Van Gogh to become famous and his works to be sought after by growing number of art collectors.
Vincent Van Gogh. Self-Portrait. 1887. Collection Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo, the Netherlands.
The one of such prominent collectors was Helene Muller, who started to collect Van Gogh being introduced to the artist by Paul Cassirer as early as in 1907. Helene Muller was married to prominent Dutch industrialist Anton Kroller, and was guided in further amassing her collection by well-known Dutch art historian and artist Henk Bremmer whom she authorised to buy for her collection practically without restrictions. Bremmer admired Van Gogh, so Muller was lucky to have, as the result, the second largest Van Gogh collection in the world, after the Amsterdam Van Gogh Museum based on the van Gogh family’s collection. This is a unique and unprecedented case in the museum world.
It has to be noted that Helene Muller has a straightforward, factually based, pro-Nazi record, even more than her husband, and not less that her closest confidant Sam van Deventer who led the museum long after her death and the end of the WWII, despite being questioned by the Netherland’s legal authorities after the war on his open and enthusiastic support of the Nazi regime. To the credit of the museum, the institution has dealt with these historical facts openly, without hiding or finding excuses.
This outstanding collection known nowadays as Kroller-Muller Museum in Otterlo, the Netherlands, has 91 Van Gogh’s oil paintings and 180 of his drawings.
Another Circle in Never Ending Spiral
In a remarkable meeting of echoes of historical events and deeds of people who lived somewhat a hundred and more years ago, some of the heroes of our story have met again in the Autumn 2020 in Helsinki, at the Becoming Van Gogh exhibition at The Didrichsen Art Museum. The only Van Gogh’s painting in Finland has met at this exhibition with 40 works from the Kroller-Muller Museum in a celebration of the 55th anniversary of the special Finnish art institution.
Art always matters. But in the time of tough pressure and its growing effect, it is art that enlightens our life. Not to speak of such a catalyst of emotions as the art of Van Gogh.
The only Van Gogh in Finland has landed there thanks to the widow of the man who was the first to realise who Van Gogh was in art. The Didrichsen Museum partner in this important exhibition is the museum that has a stunning collection of Van Gogh that had originated and was prompted as the results of the Berlin Jewish art-dealer’s visit to Paris in March 1901 to see the exhibition which had been organised by the same man whose widow had returned to Finland after his death a half of year after the exhibition in Paris.
Maria Didrichsen (C). Becoming Van Gogh exhibition at The Didrichsen Museum of Art. September 2020. Helsinki, Finland.
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71 years after the death of Van Gogh, in 1961, a rather special statue of his was unveiled in Auvers-des-Oise, the first one of several memorials to Van Gogh in France. It was also special because of its author, famous Jewish sculptor Ossip Zadkine ( 1988-1967) who, being born in Vitebsk, lived and worked in Paris most of his life, from 1910 onward.
Ossip Zadkine. Vincent Van Gogh. 1961. The first Van Gogh memorial in France. Auvers-sur-Oise.
Zadkine was fascinated by Van Gogh a big deal. He created at least five Van Gogh’s sculptures, including the one dramatic sculptural double-monument to both Van Gogh brothers in the Dutch town of Zundert, next to the small church which had been memorable and quite important for both brothers, next to the place where they both were born. That special monument was unveiled in May 1964 by the Queen of the Netherlands Juliana.
Ossip Zadkine. Monument to Vincent and Theo Van Gogh. Zundert, the Netherlands, 1964.
Zadkine dedicated a decade of his life to Van Goghs, from 1955 through 1964. The sculptor has produced so much various creative material during that decade that he was preoccupied with Van Gogh brothers that at the large Zadkine retrospective in early 2010s, the one room was specifically dedicated to display it.
Ossip Zadkine with a model of his first statue of Van Gogh.
During the years and decades, there were some more Jewish people who did contribute to Van Gogh’s world-wide fame: some collectors, writers, film-makers, art historians. Among them, were notably, writer Irwing Stone ( Tannebaum) who authored ever popular Lust for Life novel in mid-1930s, followed by yet more popular film biopic with the same name produced in Hollywood twenty years later, by semi-Jewish great producer John Houseman, and Izzy Danilovich from Belarus shtetl who world knows as Kirk Douglas playing Vincent.
Very important contribution in what we nowadays know and how we are perceiving Van Gogh was made by great American Jewish art historian Meyer Shapiro from Columbia University who from the 1950s onward was the first one to introduce into the art history the method that is known nowadays as interdisciplinary studies. That pioneering approach which was practised by Shapiro widely has started from and had Van Gogh as its main subject of this multifaceted studies. It was also the first time when psychology has become a valid part of art history and art studies. Today, we cannot imagine any qualified art study without this vital component. Meyer Shapiro’s thinking and understanding of Van Gogh has brought it to modern culture in the first place.
Of course, there are many more people, most of them not Jewish, from different walks of life and occupations who with their fundamentally important contributions have built the understanding of Van Gogh as the established phenomenon of culture. Actually, understanding is a wrong word. One cannot really understand Van Gogh. Van Gogh is a kind of artist who could be loved, unconditionally and overwhelmingly, or the opposite.
Theo and Johanna Van Goghs did preserve Vincent’s art and his letters, in their fundamental service to humanity in the XX century.
But the initial, principal boost that led to Van Gogh’s professional and public appreciation followed by his unparalleled world’s fame, had been created due to the efforts of three Jewish men: Jewish gallerist ( Alexandre Bernheim-Neuve) , Jewish art historian ( Julius Meier-Graefe) , and Jewish art dealer ( Paul Cassirer).
All of them were not just liking, or appreciating Van Gogh among the other artists, but loving him deeply in a unique, all-consuming way, the only way to love Van Gogh. All three of them were being motivated and energized by their encompassing love for Vincent and their aspiration to work for his sake with all their devotion and success, establishing his world-wide fame and appreciation.
Why did that happen? What is the answer behind this distinct and not cracked yet phenomenon? Yes, all three of them were extremely well educated, and mastered the heights of their professions, with Julius Meier-Greafe being the grandson of Germany’s principal expert on Latin and Greek literature and history, the man who basically laid ground for famed German education in these fields. Broad education and erudition of those three Jewish men did help to place Van Gogh in the context of culture, but it would not do a trick of understanding him as an artist. Besides, there is no context for Van Gogh in the history of art. I think that Van Gogh could appear at any time and be exactly his own self at any period of art.
I think it is the paradoxicality of these great Jewish men’s brilliant minds that allowed them to grasp the genius of Van Gogh. They were so right. There was not and will be no the same artist as Vincent Van Gogh. And our deep Thank You should go to all three of them and to Josef Julien Leclercq who did see and realise the magnetism of the unsolved Van Gogh’s mysteries so early, for the sake of us all.
October – December 2020
Featured image: Inna Rogatchi (C). Thinking on Vincent. 2020.
Inna Rogatchi (C). Vincent: Etudes on van Gogh. Special project, Outreach to Humanity series.
