First published in The Times of Israel, September 2025.
At Inna and Michael Rogatchi special visiting dual Shtetl Song exhibition at the restored historical synagogue in Alytus, Lithuania, in September – October 2025, Inna’s works have been presented by her ten-strong Shtetl Memories , also known as Yiddish Songs series. It has been analysed by one of the leading European cultural voices of today Dr Michael de Saint-Cheron in his Hearing the Songs of Our Souls essay.
The series is part of the 25-work special art collection of the artists which The Rogatchi Foundation has donated in 2024 to the Public Library and Cultural Centre in Jonava, Lithuania. Consequently, the collection has become the subject of following exhibitions throughout the country, as the way of the commemorative educational process.
The highlights for Michael Rogatchi’s part of the exhibition and the connections of some of his works from it to the outstanding international Jewish personalities, such as Elie Wiesel, Leonard Cohen, Marian Turski and Lev Dodin, has been covered in the part 1 of this essay.
There also were mentioned the special features of the building, the restored historical synagogue of the early XX century, in which the exhibition is having the place.
Inna Rogatchi artworks from her Shtetl Memories collection at the Shtetl Songs exhibition , in the Audiovisual Arts Centre, Alytus, Lithuania. September – October 2025.
What has positively impacted the exhibiting the special art series of the works of reconstructed memory is a very intense cultural program at the Alytus Audiovisual Arts Centre during the whole period of the exhibition, filled with concerts and special events, many of which have been dedicated to the Jewish heritage, history and traditions. Successfully created the cumulative effect of synthesised arts, music, and history, and public interest and involvement has doubled an effect of all artists and musicians’s efforts and also has produced something new, a synthetic multi-sided, multi-disciplined dialogue with public that speaks on restored memory, and actually creates it. It is a very engaging and rewarding process for everyone who has been lucky to participate in it.
The timing for this exhibition has also been chosen with lots of fitting reasons: it started at the beginning of the two-month celebrations this year of the European Days of Jewish Culture ( scheduled from September 7th through November 4th), and included both the period of the High Holidays and the dates in the second part of September which are annual commemorative days for the Jewish victims of the Shoah in Lithuania, where the crimes had been committed in devastating numbers.
Observing the Inna Rogatchi Shtetl Memories collection on display in Alytus Audiovisual Arts Centre, there are some stories behind the artworks, as told by the artist.
Homecoming in Detail
All eleven works of Inna represented at the Shtetl Songs collection have one feature in common: human faces, details of life gone decades ago, some very concrete images of dreams. All these works are part of Inna’s ongoing project known as Songs of Our Souls which is characterised by the presence of all those faces and details.
It all started back in 2017 with Inna’s first work in her ongoing project, Song of Our Souls I. This work in specific is a homage to French Jewry which has been betrayed cruelly by their own government prior and during the Second World War. Inna’s own great-aunt, famous violinist at the time, Alma Rose, the daughter of outstanding musicians, long-term concertmaster of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra maestro Arnold Rose and his wife, Gustav Mahler’s sister Justine, was deported to her death in Auschwitz in 1943 from infamous Drancy, the French internment camp, among almost 70 000 of the other Jewish victims of Nazism, despite desperate efforts by the family and friends to appeal to their famous French musical colleagues to try to save the niece of Gustav Mahler.
The work that has started the ongoing and large enough by now series, and actually, a special direction in Inna’s art, was dedicated to all of them, who loved France with all their heart, and many of whom brought the fame and brilliance to the country that treated its Jewish population so coldly and cruelly.
This work has participated in the Inna and Michael’s dual commemorative Psalms & Songs of Memory exhibition in Helsinki on the first anniversary of the terrible events of October 7th, in October 2024.
The other work from the same series, seen at the exhibition, Memory Cloud II ( 2018 – 2021) is a continuation of the artist’s thoughts and ideas of artistic visualisation of the people, very concrete people who has gone physically, but who can stay in our memory, if we will apply an effort to remember them. This work refers not necessarily to Jewish people, but to all of us in general. It imagines the air around us as if consisting of images of the people who are not among us any longer, but whose souls are still here – if one strives to remember about it.
The original of this work belongs to a notable private collection in London. For the Shtetl Songs collection, Inna has made a special version of the work, with changed background colours, making it more contrast and referring by this defined colours of the background to four main elements, in their anti-thesis pairs, such as air versus earth, and fire versus water, as well as four seasons, and four astronomic domains of energy and cosmic masses.
The Cry of Heaven ( 2019) work is also dedicated to the Holocaust and the people who have become the victims of it , an absolutely innocent victims of horrific cruelty of extermination, including the members of Inna and Michael Rogatchi families in Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania, Poland, Austria, and France. The real number of the victims of the Shoah is much higher than an accepted figure of six million. Accounting the number of the victims which has been not accounted by the devilish Nazi book-keeping of the death-camps, adding those who were murdered by what is known as ‘Holocaust of bullets’ in innumerous forests and ravines all over the Baltics, Eastern Europe and partially Central Europe, the known figure should be enlarged by 1,5 – 2 million, according to several serious independently conducted historical researches.
The original of this work participated in two notable international exhibitions, one in London commemorating the International Holocaust Remembrance events in 2020, and another in Helsinki in 2024 commemorating October 7th.
For the collection donated to Lithuania, Inna produced a special version of the work, in which the contrast of the field of sorrow has been made more graphic, to underline the message that as we all realised after the October 7th, the eighty years after the Holocaust did not teach people practically nothing with regard to humanity, as sadly and alarmingly as it is.
Several works in Inna’s collection shown in Lithuania are reflecting on prayers and dreams.
A prayer as a process has been always a magnet for artists, as this is an unique human experience, both the most personal, most fervent in its hopefulness and at the same time is most unpredictable in its outcome. Analysing this process via her own artistic reflection in her Psalm work ( 2018), Inna was trying to imagine the condition of a human soul during that very special moment in our lives. The moment of one’s ultimate sincerity.
This work also had quite unexpected art history context recently. When Inna visited Amsterdam in spring 2025, to work at the unique exhibition from The Leiden Collection there, she did show her and Michael’s Shtetl Songs collection to some of their art historian Dutch colleagues. One of them did point out the remarkable resemblance of Inna’s Psalm 18 work with one of the latest works of Van Gogh, his Ears of Wheat.
“One can really rarely see so much resemblance between two works of such different periods, technique, subject-matter and topic. It means only one thing: the point of view. The artists’ point of view, and the way in which their metaphor, on these absolutely different subjects, has been materialised”, – was a comment by one of the leading Dutch art historians who have noticed this unexpected surprise.
The explanation to that can be in the fact that Inna works very closely on van Gogh, his life, his works and his world and vision for many years, starting from early 2000s, and runs her own VINCENT cultural, artistic and educational project.
Mirages of Memory
Dreams are probably the most widely spread dimension of artists’ work, not only because of the flights of imagination, and that special unique quality of freedom that it provides, but also because it so very often opens new horizons about existence of which we have had no idea before getting into the work.
In the case of Inna’s Shtetl Mirage ( 2024), the work, the vision of a shtetl has been created from nothing material, no object was present at the work’s background in the beginning. But then, it all gradually appeared: the houses, the landscape, the signs of life, some birds, some faces. Artistically, it was a process of materialisation of genetic subconscious memory. And it has become a very real portrait of remembrance. Because of its warmth, and maybe because of its projected feelings of mirage which sometimes feels more real than life behind a window, this work is truly special for the artist.
There is also a telling and rewarding episode regarding Inna’s diptych Shtetl Walks & Memories ( 2024). In these works, Inna was drawing an imaginary shtetl, with more and more details coming to it, as if life, or memory of it, has been re-created, almost by itself, in a real-time.
Recently, while working on another project related to shtetls and its culture, Inna found the description of one of so many shtetls that used to thrive in Lithuania, this one was about the shtetl in Valkininkai, not far away from Vilnius. The historical description was written at the time when the Alytus brick synagogue where the Audiovisual Arts Centre is situated today, was built, in the early 20th century.
To her full astonishment, the artist was reading the description of real shtetl from early 1910s that practically described her artworks as she drew it in 2024: the synagogue, the cheder, the bridge, two rivers running in parallel, the houses close to them, all wooden, except three brick houses, a bakery, two water-mills, grocery shops, forest nearby, market place, and so on.
It was an incredible re-discovery from the artist’s point of view. Inna realised that in her drawing of an imaginary shtetl, she actually drew something very close to a real place, with its famous old synagogue that had unique Aron Kodesh ( Torah Ark), extremely elaborated and artistic, and also the place where , according to a written legend, local rabbi Shmuel, who also was rabbi of Vilna at the time, used to walk with legendary Vilna Gaon in the middle, or towards the second part of the 18th century.
According to that written source, Vilna Gaon very much liked to walk there, due to the place’s scenery and its two rivers – just like in Inna’s drawing. Vilna Gaon loved to stay on the bridge and look from it trying to recognise fishes living in those rivers. He was involved in all that deeply.
When things like that happen to an artist, it is a special gift, for which one is very grateful.
Artworks’ New Lives
One of telling samples of a very interesting, always unique and individual process of some artworks’ continuation of life and their development is one of the special works from this collection, Litvak Story I ( 2023). The original work with emphasis on the Litvak culture and its symbols had been created by the artist in 2023, for one of her projects in Lithuania. The work’s second version, Litvak Story II ( 2024) belongs to a well-known private collection in New York of a very notable expert on Yiddish culture and literature.
And now, the artist is working on the third version of this expressive and important for her work, Litvak Story III ( 2025), which is part of The Rogatchi Foundation special Living Memory Appreciation Award which will be awarded later this year to the renown Finnish architect professor Rainer Mahlmäki and his great team at the Lahdelma & Mahlamäki Architects Finland for their fantastic work in creating recently accomplished, after almost decade in making, new museum of Jewish history, The Lost Shtetl in Lithuania.
This is how art helps us to reconstruct our memory, to create an artistic visual dialogue with our history, and to keep its images and symbols close to our hearts. To warm it up at the times of rainy darkness.
SHTETL STORIES. Michael and Inna Rogatchi Special Art Collection at the Audiovisual Arts Centre, Alynas, Lithuania. September 9 – October 4, 2025.
Part 1 of the essay about the stories and great inspirations behind Michael Rogatchi works from his Shtetl Songs collection can be read here.
The essay is published first in the Michael and Inna Rogatchi. SHTETL SONGS & MEMORIES Art Catalogue, 2024. (C).
You readers are holding in your hands a collection of works by Inna and Michaël Rogatchi, in honour and memory of Grigory Kanovich, who left us in 2023, in Israel, at the age of eighty-nine. These pieces have been produced by these two artists in common, in the truest sense of the word: in communion, like musical compositions for two keyboards or two pianos. Inna and Michael act in such communion through love of life (Love), through memory, and through art. Their works stand on these three pillars, together with a fourth: Judaism. Their communion resulted in these twenty-five creations: drawings, studies, sketches and original works on paper. This collection represents a highpoint in their journey of memory; it conveys the force of their art; it springs from their roots in Litvak culture and tradition.
Rabbi Menahem Mendel of Kotzk once uttered words that our dear Elie Wiesel repeated so often (attributing them to Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav): Ein shalem milev shavur (There is nothing more whole than a broken heart). Elie added for his part: “There is no greater faith than a broken faith.” May we not say that the ardent force motivating Inna and Michaël resides in the indescribable faith that springs from broken faith?
The Rogatchis’ love of Yiddish memory, like that of music, shines through each piece in the collection. For visitors to the inaugural exhibition of the Shtetl Songs at the Grigory Kanovich Jonava Library in Lithuania, as well as for those who will view the collection at subsequent venues, it matters little which piece was done by the hand of Inna and which by Michael, so great is the symbiosis between the two.
However, it is important for the critic to distinguish, within this communion of two oeuvres, which pieces were done by each in the couple. We may think of the artists Robert and Sonia Delaunay and recall how Sonia’s work has taken second place to Robert’s, quite unjustly.
In this set of twenty-five works, I would like to emphasise the importance of the works on paper in mixed technique, and in particular those by Inna titled Songs of Our Souls.
If the connection with music is organic for the artist and his oeuvre, it is telling that his Study for Yiddish Son, dedicated to Elie Wiesel, also brings us into a musical domain, in which the character (Elie as a child) plays the violin.
In those works from this exceptional series, we can see here a reminiscence of the Torah portion Re’eh, meaning “See.” In this reading from Scripture, of everlasting importance, G-d gives the children of Israel, and through them humankind in its entirety, the choice between a blessing and a curse. Blessed will be those who follow the divine commandments and thus sanctify life; and cursed will be those who refuse this imperative. To us twenty-first-century human beings, what could speak more forcefully than this choice between life and death, between a blessing and a curse?
And today, what do Inna and Michael, this rare couple of exceptional artists, transmit to us through their art of memory and history, through the heritage they have received from the Jews of Lithuania but also from their friends Grigory Kanovich, Elie Wiesel and Leonard Cohen? They call upon us to convey, beyond what seems humanly possible, love and communion among the living. They demand that we have an ardent heart that perceives the tears of the deceased ones and transform them into song.
Like many artists who lived through the great horror afflicting the Jews of Europe or who were born afterwards with a deep knowledge of it, Michael and Inna Rogatchi opted for figuration rather than abstraction, abandoning the famous Biblical prohibition on representation.
Recently, Gehrard Richter chose to paint his Birkenau series based on four absolutely unique photos taken in great secrecy by members of the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz-Birkenau in the summer of 1944. Several studies have been written on this series, the latest of which is Making It Visible by Eric de Chassey, a French art historian who serves as director general of the National Institute of Art History.
Can we suppose that Inna and Michael Rogatchi did not have to see these terrifying photos of an open-air pyre in which the SS butchers were burning the corpses of those tortured in the gas chambers? These indescribable images of the Shoah (a term I prefer to “Holocaust”) are not necessary in order to paint, compose or write works on the Shoah, as very great artists have done and are still doing after eighty years. To meet such a challenge, one must have decisive mental and artistic force. Such works need not be monumental art, in the case of Gerhard Richter’s four grand paintings titled Birkenau. The Shoah is often present in the work of Michael and Inna Rogatchi, as it is in the entire oeuvre of Anselm Kiefer. To create their works, no photo of horror was needed by these artists, or by Claude Lanzmann in producing his cinematographic masterpiece Shoah.
Michael and Inna choose to bring us, work after work, into their memories, into their imagination, into their timelessness, haunted as it is by the Shoah. Thus, their works—studies, sketches, drawings—depict much more than a boy playing the violin, or an accordionist sitting on a bench in the works of Michael.
Then come the more obviously evocative works by Inna Rogatchi, such as Litvak Story, Shavuot Window, or Cry of Heaven (In Memory of the Six Million). There are many representational figures in these paintings by Inna. Those in the Litvak Story are particularly distressing. From their eternity of ashes, from the flames, they peer at us, like the martyrs burned alive by the SS or the Wehrmacht in Oradour-sur-Glane (France, 1944), or in Lidice (in 1942, Czech Republic) and in so many other places of torment during the Shoah and the Second World War. For eighty years thereafter, in so many places around the world, madness continues to extend the boundaries of atrocity, abomination, desolation.
In this artwork by Inna, Litvak Story, in its eternal flames, one of the faces has the shape of an open book. If man— der Mensch in German, Adam in Hebrew—can be “like the tree of the field” (Deuteronomy 20: 19), we can imagine that the book depicted refers not only to the eternal Book, but also the Book as the extension of the human being. Didn’t Heinrich Heine, a major poet of the 19th century, who left Germany for France, write these words which resonate within us today: “Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people”?
These disappearing faces; these faces amid flames for all eternity in the works of Michael and Inna Rogatchi; these faces presented in Lithuania as an homage to Grigory Kanovich; these Cries from the Sky (Cry of Heaven ) are certainly the faces of the Six Million martyrs of the Jewish people. But I also see, beyond Jewish suffering, the images of human suffering in general, limitless and universal.
This collection of works by Inna and Michael Rogatchi places our time and our imagination into suspension. Their drawings make us hear the songs sung in the secrecy of the soul of Elie Wiesel, in particular his Ani Maamin: “I believe in full faith in the coming of the Messiah, and though he tarry, I shall wait for him every day.” Elie recounts that this rendition of this essential credo for the Jewish soul was handed down to him in the heart of the Shoah. A nephew of his rabbi of Wiznitz sang it in front of him one Shabbat in 1943. Wiesel always remembered that special version, all his life.
The Rogatchis’ works from their Shtetl Songs collection are also infused with magnificent songs by Leonard Cohen, and many other chants and other indispensable music, like that of Gustav Mahler, one of the most gifted ancestors of Inna Rogatchi.
“There is nothing more whole than a broken heart.” There is no artwork greater than what we hear in the Songs of our Souls and this Cry of Heaven.
President, The André Malraux International Research Center (CIRAM)
Philosopher of religions, art critic, author of Soulages, d’une rive à l’autre (2019) and The Seven Heavenly Palaces of Anselm Kiefer (Actes Sud, 2025)
Each of us has memories, from a long ago and recent ones, the circle of one’s own reflections, which are living in their own rhythm, irrelevantly from a real-time chronicles, one’s own ‘capsule’, one’s internal mini-cosmos, which functions as both a guard and a source of anything we do in life. Each of us is more or less lucky with the content of that guarding and a resourceful ‘capsule’. For people of creative professions, that ‘capsule’ could be a blessing and it also could be its opposite, sometimes.
I feel myself very lucky and incredibly privileged to have my ‘capsule’ of the source of what I do in art of loving, humane, ever-thirsty for new knowledge, humoristic-does-not-matter-what Yiddishkeit of my family of teachers, engineers, doctors, musicians in generations. The destinies of all people in my family reflected very much the destinies of the Jewish people in Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Latvia, Austria and France, which did bear the main feature for the Jews in that part of the world: overcoming.
To overcome to study, to overcome to get into profession, to overcome to being accepted, to overcome to excel in what you do, to overcome to maintain one’s and one’s family dignity, to overcome never-stopped chains of obstacles, to overcome a natural behavioural reactions and not to become bitter, grumpy and miserable.
Inna Rogatchi (C). Litvak Stories I. 2024. Fragment.
Sometimes, from the distance of time, I cannot but marvel on my own and many other Jewish families’ never-failing abilities to be kind, helpful, gentle, joyful, to live to the full measure under never-seizing negative circumstances of all sorts which were permanent factors in their all’ lives, from childhood till the advanced age.
This ability to be genuinely kind and naturally open to joy despite having very challenging circumstances of life is probably the main threat amongst the Yiddishkeit which I feel as my own life-rope. This special quality is also to be found in everything that the great Jewish and Yiddish writer Grigory Kanovich ever wrote – because he did feel and perceived life, and lived it, as his family did, and as my and my husband’s families did, through the circumstances which were familiar and close to us all. Due to this common experience of overcoming, we feel the Kanoviches, whom we know for ages, as our family members, and what is also important and truly rarely to find, we feel the heroes of Grigory Kanovich lovely, nostalgic and organically humane books as members of our large Yiddishkeit family, as well.
When reading Grigory Kanovich, one has a difficulty: one does not know exactly if it is him or her who belongs to the family and group of people what the writer portrayed so lovingly and in such detail in his books, or it is them who belong to a reader’s family and friends.
Inna Rogatchi (C). Shavuot Window II. Homage to Grigory Kanovich. 2024.
How lucky is the writer who due to the wisdom of his heart and his vision was able to make this imprint of the Yiddishkeit for us all for good. This is what matters in life. To create the legacy which would stay and which will nourish the hearts for many generations ahead.
My Songs of Our Souls series of artworks has one specific, semi-mystical, but true detail. I never drew a single line of those works that I did not see in front of me as if appearing from the print which I have created. Those lines of faces and anything else materialise before and often in the process of creating these works which are dedicated to the memory of many of our people, those souls which are not anymore in this world, among us. As I discovered to my total amazement, those faces started to transpire from the surfaces of my prints one after another. Every time, for every work from the Songs of Our Souls, a miracle is happening, for which I am whole-heartedly grateful to the Creator, when the faces of our people are appearing – or reappearing? – in between the maze of the lines of my prints when I am focused and am working on those pieces of materialised memory.
When it happened for the first time, with the first work in this seriously special and highly personal for me Songs of Our Souls series, Song of Our Souls, I went dumbfounded. I also knew for sure and felt that all those people in the work were Jews from France, where part of my family on my father’s side has been and lived for more than a century, and are still living.
I am not creating these works too often, but only when I have an inner impulse, inner understanding of a right moment of doing it, and only when those faces, books, candles, those birds and children are there ready to re-emerge.
With Cry of Heaven, dedicated to the memory of our Six Million, it was supposed to be just one or two faces which I thought that I was seeing as appearing on the print. But when I started to work, all of them just started to emerge in front of my eyes exactly in the places where I had drawn them. Not less, and not more, just those who did appear. I have no exact explanation of that phenomenon, it is just my own personal working – and more – experience.
In the Litvak Song, there is the direct reference connection to the Litvak part of our family which in my case is prevailing. Everyone on my mother’s side are Litvaks from Belarus and Poland, and half of my father’s family are from Latvia. And I am deeply grateful to them all for such rich and potent intellectual and spiritual heritage, and such a stimulating background.
Inna Rogatchi (C). Memory Cloud II. 2018- 2021.
I realise that the story behind my Songs of Our Souls series might sound as a funny way of fantasising, but I just reflect on the process, of which I am very grateful and do feel privileged to be able to see those faces and anything else on my prints, to return them all if not to life, but to our all memory. They did deserve it in full measure.
And I am very glad to donate this small series of ten works from my growing Songs of Our Souls collection to such a good place and institution as Grigory Kanovich Public Library of Jonava in the writer’s home-town in Lithuania. I know that they would be at home there.
I also am very glad that the Organising Committee has selected one of my works, Shavuot Windows II, as an artistic part of the Grigory Kanovich Literary Prize 2024. I know that all my family is participating in this together, with smiles, joy, easiness and that impeccable refined humour that my father, talented, sharp-minded engineer and inventor Isaac Bujanover was such a super-master of.
There is a special joy in life. The joy of donating, the joy of gifting. This joy could be called also a champion among all sorts of joys. This is what Yiddishkeit is about, and what our families did teach us, too, so very luckily.
With cordial gratitude for this heart-warming project to all our colleagues who did participate in it.
Remembering Leonard Cohen on the 5th anniversary of his passing in the special series of artistic homages. Inna Rogatchi (C). Postcard from the Bald Monk. Homage to Leonard Cohen. Art collage boarded on panel. 80 x 120. 2021.
“This is not silence
This is another poem” – wrote that remarkable man back in 1958, when I was still a baby, and Leonard, who was from the generation of my parents, was a young poet of twenty four, and who already then said that he ‘knows the silence’.
This man was a pride of Jews and the world: sublime talent in literature, music and painting, genuine warmth, fantastic humour, elegant modesty, rare charm, self-ironic dignity, and immense magnetism. We all were blessed by his presence at our age. I am positive that anyone who once visited Cohen’s concert left the premise becoming a bit better person. I am also positive that that was the real mission of Leonard’s earthly life: to make many of us a bit better by his own inner light, would it be via a couple of lines, or a song which would jump into your subconsciousness for good, or a drawing which is drastically different from anything you saw and is so honest intellectually that it let you to hear the artist voice speaking to you through his as if a bit naive lines.
And we personally, my husband and I, we were very blessed by Leonard’s always amazing and always warm and smiling presence in our both lives. Five years on since you cannot speak with Leonard any longer, his ring is on my husband’s desk in the most central place, just in front of Michael’s eyes, his photos with his autographs to us are in my study and in our dining room, and his books, also autographed, are everywhere, and are read often. The only thing still problematic during these five past years is Leonard’s records. To my own surprise, I still find it uneasy to listen to his records because his voice makes the missing worse.
Towards this sad anniversary, commemorating the five years since Leonard Cohen’s passing, we were asked to prepare a special presentation of our both’ art dedicated to our beloved man.
I am sharing it with a wide audience now remembering the man who ‘knew the silence’ , but who also knew in his masterhood how to ‘ring the bells’.
When Michael created his well-known Jewish Melody series, he did one of the best works in that very strong and universally admired collection as a homage to Leonard. The work Zion Waltz which is well-known today was inspired and is dedicated to Cohen. And he loved it. Michael did a special large version of the work and we sent it to Leonard to Los-Angeles. It was close to his 79th birthday. We heard from Cohen at once: “Michael, at my age, I am busy with giving my things to people. But not this one. Not this.” ( September 2013, Leonard Cohen’s letter to Michael Rogatchi. The Rogatchi Archive).
The smaller version of this drawing ( 50 x 35 cm, 2013) is still a part of our The Rogatchi Art collection. It is really hard to part with this very work.
No wonder that Michael chose dove as an artistic allusion to Leonard. Michael’s own refrain throughout the years that we knew Cohen, was always the same: “Leonard is the real Cohen, in anything he does, and how he does it. Even when he does nothing”.
And I am not surprised for a bit why Leonard who did love Michael’s art in general and appreciated it very highly, why he felt that special attachment to these doves on Michael’s artwork dedicated to him, so immediately and so firmly. ADVERTISEMENT
Here we go: “ I saw the dove come down, the dove with the
green twig, the childish dove out of the storm and
flood. It came towards me in the style of the Holy Spirit
descending. I had been sitting in a cafe for twenty-five
years waiting for this vision. It hovered over the great
quarrel. I surrendered to the iron laws of the moral universe which
make a boredom out of everything desired. Do not surrender,
said the dove. I have come to make a nest in your shoe. I
want your step to be light”.
And his step was light indeed. One might call it a flight.
Later on, Michael has created an emotional oil painting based on the image which has become so close to the heart of Leonard, the doves.
The work was created during the last period of Leonard’s life when he was suffering a lot and was quite fragile, but always customarily brave. Michael painted his homage to the great man full of light and warmth, emphasising that in his perception, the warmth of Leonard’s legacy has filled the world, literally. This one was most likely the last work created by Michael which Leonard saw in the course of our personal exchanges.Michael Rogatchi(C). Zion Waltz. Oil on canvas. Homage to Leonard Cohen. 120 x 100 cm. 2016.
Leonard also knew and appreciated Michael’s earlier homage to him which was created as a result of us attending several of Leonard’s concerts in Europe in 2010 during his famous World Tour 2010. Every one of those concerts was different. It was Leonard’s life, or a serious part of his life lived on stage and generously shared with thousands, every time he performed. Seeing Leonard personally in Florence and Warsaw allowed Michael to get close to his world and the complex way of expressing it. This is how Michael’s first homage to Leonard was born. The work was created in Florence, and was part of Michael’s notable Rogatchi Blues 10-month exhibition in Florence ( 2010-2011). ADVERTISEMENTMichael Rogatchi (C). Blue Sound. Homage to Leonard Cohen. Oil on canvas. 110 x 100 cm. 2010.
But there was a very special story regarding that Leonard’s concert in Florence that has marked that very concert in hearts of many people, including Leonard himself.
I never spoke about that heart-wrenching episode publicly. It was his only concert in Florence in September 2010, and it was organised at the Santa Croce Square with a double-purpose: to accommodate the maximum amount of people while staying in the historical heart of Florence, as Leonard wanted to make this one concert in the great city not in artificially for Firenze modern setting, but in an organic history-breathing centre of it. People were all over Santa Croce that night. Additionally to lucky ticket-holders, dozens of people literally were popping out every single window and balcony from all the houses around the square. It was a super feast, with these added innumerable lights from myriads of windows all around. I never saw anything like that and will remember that light filled with smiling faces from over-crowded windows and balconies forever. Everybody was very happy in that spontaneous multiplied audience. It was late in the night. The concert was supposed to start at 9 o’clock, but ran late. Still, everyone was rather cheerful under the plaids in the fresh air.
When Leonard appeared on the stage, as often, in his customary jumps and with that ever-boyish smile, the thousands of people waiting for him on the square and all around it, up to the evening skies of Firenze, were greeting him cheerfully. He smiled again and started to work, the concert started. Soon into that, some shriek was heard very loudly among the audience. And many people thought – and told each other – ‘Ah, what an exalted person! Why could she not hold her excitement until Leonard will finish his song?.. What a misbehaviour, really.’ The shrieking happened during Cohen’s second or third number during the concert, at the very beginning of it.
Then all lights around the improvised hall under the open skies went on suddenly, and the concert itself was put on hold. The announcement went on informing us that there has been a medical incident among the members of the public and an ambulance is on its way as one woman was very unwell. You need to know Italy and Italians: when it concerns somebody’s health, people are very patient. Fortunately, the hospital was very near. In the silence, with Leonard behind the scene, we all were waiting for the ambulance. People on the balconies saw the situation better. Nobody left, neither from the audience, nor from windows and balconies.
Instead of Leonard’s band playing his melodies, we all were listening to the accelerating sound of the ambulance which rushed in. We waited. Doctors rushed the patient to the hospital. The pause was substantial, up to 40 minutes. When Leonard was able to continue the concert, I saw around – nobody left, neither from the ticket-holders area, nor from the balconies and windows around. No one. When Leonard came back on the stage, in a subdued mood, understandably, people greeted him as a member of one’s family. And we were indeed the one family under the ultramarine skies of Firenze that evening when Leonard Cohen sang there. I was wondering knowing his sensitivity if he would be able to continue to perform that night which started so misfortunately. Not only he did. He did it so cordially, so intimately, so humanly that he and his organic compassion covered us all in the midst of the night which became chilly as it could be in Italy in early Autumn.
There is also Michael’s study for that oil painting, which was done by him after that memorable family-like concert at the Santa Croce. The study is unique. Michael Rogatchi (C). Study for Homage to Leonard Cohen. Pencil on cotton paper. 50 x 40 cm. 2010 Florence.
Leonard’s passing in early November 2016 was a heavy blow to us although we knew that it would be imminent. Still, it is always so incurably painful. As Leonard said himself: “And death is old,
But it is always new”.
Michael’s artistic reflection on Leonard’s passing has become his soulful artwork Full Moon Drink IV.Michael Rogatchi (C). Full Moon Drink IV. Thinking on Leonard Cohen. Indian ink, oil pastel on dark-blue Italian hand-made cotton paper. 65 x 50 cm. 2017.
My own first artistic homage to Leonard was created in 2012, with a special artwork Heart Talk. The work is picturing snow with a red leaf in the middle of it. I actually did nothing to create it. When we returned from a journey, I went to our garden and saw there that leaf on snow, very lonely, and at the same time transforming, melting the snow, making it much less frosty, especially near to the leaf. Making it bearable, in one word. And I thought immediately: “This is the portrait of Leonard. Nothing more, nothing less”. Inna Rogatchi (C). Heart Talk. Homage to Leonard Cohen. 2012. Private collection. Chicago, the US. Special Leonard Cohen Commemorative Edition. 2021.
The work was exhibited widely at many of my exhibitions of various projects, such as The Joy of Mercy, and Horizon Beyond Horizon, and became rather popular among the global fans.
Leonard was aware of this homage to him, my Horizon Beyond Horizon collection, and the video-essay which was opened by his poetry, and he did very graciously thank me for ‘fine understanding’, with that unique smile, always so personal and always so warm. How is it possible to make such a fleeting gesture of our behaviour as a smile into the legacy? – I often think, because of some few people who did manage to do it. Leonard’s smile is indeed a legacy of its own.
Later on, in connection with the second anniversary of Leonard’s passing, I created another artistic homage to him, original art panel Letter to Leonard ( 2018). We were travelling again, it was chilly and busy around. Fortunately, we had a great tree in front of our residence. That tree was almost speaking to me, day and night. Or was it I who was speaking to it?
Letter to Leonard. Homage to Leonard Cohen. Original drawing in mixed technique on authored pigment print mounted on an art panel board. 80 x 120 cm, framed under museum organic glass, size in frame 84 x 124. 2018-2021.
For the first time, the artwork was presented as an illustration in my essay Way Out of the Maze of Longing dedicated to the second anniversary of Leonard’s passing. Later on, I produced a large original Letter to Leonard art panel.
The third of my personal artistic homages to Leonard is a recent work, and it has been created for commemoration of the 5th anniversary of Leonard’s passing. The works refers to Leonard’s famous Anthem song from his Future album ( 1992), the song which has become one of the Leonard’s most popular ones, because of the line which has become a motto for millions,
There is is crack in everything,
That’s how the light gets in. Inna Rogatchi (C). Homage to LCohen. Caran d’Ache Neopastel, encre l’alcool on authored pigment print on cotton paper mounted on board. 80 x 120 cm. 2021.
As we all know, these lines have been overused, possibly. But at the same time, it is so true. So very true. Dear, dear Leonard, he knew it – and so many other essential things – so well. He formed it so eloquently, so beautifully. In that very best possible understated way which gets to you immediately, straight to the heart, no questions asked. And stay there. As it is seen from my fourth artistic dedication to the great and unique man in my new Postcard from the Bald Monk work completed recently. Bald Monk was Leonard’s name in his private email address. I still have it in my email system. How on earth can I delete it?.. It makes me smile every time I came across it. And I hope his spirit smiles as well in its gentle hovering over us here.
Part III. The Legacy of Loot: Crimes Without Punishment
With special thanks to inspired and inspiring colleagues: director of Amos Res 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.
1942 – 1947, Paris-Berlin: the mystery of Domenico Tiepolo masterpiece’s key-time location is still unsolved
In a serious break-through of their research, the art historians from the Sinebrychoff Art Museum – Finnish National Gallery were able to examine the work by the newest infra-red equipment recently. They saw there the detail of crucial importance – number 1942 very well seen under the infra-red examination but completely unseen by a regular eye. That fact has provided the experts with the ground for establishing the fact that Mario d’Atri has sold Tiepolo’s The Greeks Sacking Troy modello in 1942. Previously, it was established that well-seen on the frame (19)38 figure marks the time when the work travelled to Chicago for the exhibition. It is a known habit of art dealers to mark the dates of the works in their possession while shipping or changing hands.
This ‘1942’ mark seen in infra-red most likely solves the issue with potential Jewish ownership of the work, according to all experts with whom I have discussed the matter.
But it keeps opened the key-question in that almost a century-old, from 1930 onward, drama around a single art-piece: where has it been in the period between 1942, after Mario d’Atri sold it to some of the Germans, and 1947 when it has been registered by Herbert Ulrich in his inventory, with changed description of the author to ‘an anonymous’ and tearing off the top of the note on the modello’s back with the name of the painter there?
Domenico Tiepolo. The Greek Sacking Tory. 1773-1775. Oil on canvas. 41 x 55 cm. Finnish National Library – Sinebrychoff Art Museum, Helsinki. With kind permission of the Museum.
Who then bought the work from d’Atri in 1942? The more I am looking into this amazing story, the more I am interested in that crucial moment.
In my view, after serious research has been undertaken, out of the circle of possible buyers, two of them look more potential than the others. On both of them, there are extensive reports prepared by the OSS ALIU, dedicated to them personally, separately, among just a dozen of this kind of personal reports produced by the OSS operatives on the selected major suspects. Those suspects were regarded as the most important ones to come with these reports, initially thought to be the background material for possible prosecution. Some of it had been used during the Nuremberg trial.
One possible person to have the Domenico Tiepolo’s modello from d’Atri would be notorious Austrian Nazi Kajetan Muhlmann. The report on him was prepared by the OSS ALIU intelligence unit as number 8 out of 15 personal reports. Three of the prepared reports, including the report on Muhlmann, were not published, and there is a good reason to investigate in detail why. Still, the material of the report does exist.
Not only Dr Kajetan Muhlmann whose role in plotting the Anschluss from inside was major, benefited hugely being the first appointed Minister for Fine Arts in the post-Anschluss Austria, and having the leading role in total confiscation of art from Jews and anti-Nazi nobility – as Prince Schwarzenberg family was. Later on, he was appointed by Göering personally to be in charge with virtual looting of entire Poland, and later on, entire Holland where richness of art treasures required the establishing of a special Muhlmann Agency – of the loot, of course .
That beast was in the position in the Third Reich that had allowed him to dispute with Hitler over the Hitler’s manner to travel with some of the looted Durer’s originals of which Adolf was fancy, insisting that it is his, Dr Muhlmann’s ultimate responsibility over the safety of the looted art treasures is, and that he was objecting herr fuhrer’s self-indulgent way of endangering the art treasures. Hitler never liked the man.
It is established by the OSS documents that d’Atri has dealt with Muhlmann. Additionally to that, my attention was attracted to the fact that Muhlmann and d’Atri both knew and dealt with and via Gottlieb Reber, active and authorised by the Nazis German art dealer who during the war lived and operated in between Switzerland, France and Italy, and whose special mission was to organise buying for nothing and looting art from Italy to the Nazi Reich. I decided to have a closer look into Reber’s connections and activities.
Reber was also a close working contact of art-dealer d’Atri and might help him to reroute illegal under the French law dealings with the Soviet representatives in the early 1930s.
My attention was alerted by two things: during the war, Gottlieb Reber was on a special mission from the Reich to bring there Italian art treasures, so the work by Tiepolo-son would be very much in the centre of his interest, and he was the perfect person to stash the work with, as Muhlmann was doing with he works which were left in his possession. It was established by the OSS investigators that in the post-war chaos, Muhlmann succeeded to hide quite many of the looted art treasures that he appropriated in a typical gangster way, and then he was gradually selling them via trusted dealers to live on, to sustain himself and many of his girl-friends, including another Hitler’s hysterical but calculative acolyte Leni Riefenstahl. The system worked perfectly well for Muhlmann and his harem for several years, well into the 1950s.
Muhlmann, in an almost exceptional way, did not cooperate with the OSS and ALIU, and have had a sore relationship with them. Co-operating for a very short time initially, he then changed his attitude and decided not to cooperate, not to disclose, but to confront and to disdain.
It is known to art historians that he was very careful with scheduling the appearance of the looted art in his possession that he managed to hide. In theory, the time gap between 1944-45 and 1947 when the Tiepolo’s work re-surfaced at the Herbert Ulrich gallery could be explained as responding to the Muhlmann’s mode of slowly picking up and trading his hidden art treasures from the vaults like the one of Reber’s in neutral and so very convenient Switzerland.
Inna Rogatchi(C). Insomnia. Homage to Primo Levi. Watercolour, wax pastel, oil pastel, encre a l’alcool, perle de jaune on authored original archival print on cotton paper. 50 x 70 cm. 2010-2016-2020.
However, there is another person among that despicable bunch of the Nazi art looters whom I tend to think about as the most plausible buyer of The Greeks Sacking Troy from Mario d’Atri in 1942 in Paris. I have researched this aspect in detail.
Maria-Almas Dietrich was both an exceptional and typical character in the mixed realities of the Third Reich. We know about her because of the detailed material gathered by the OSS and aimed for their special report dedicated to her exclusively. That report was numbered as 13th among 15 prepared personal reports. In her case, similarly to the case of the report on Muhlmann, it was not published, but the materials of it do exist.
The importance of Dietrich is illustrated by the fact that among 2000 personalities collected by the ALIU investigators as being actively involved in the Nazi looting of art, only fifteen of them were selected as the important subjects to complete an individual reports about.
That woman without proper art education managed to compensate for the luck of it by her connections. She who owned a rather unremarkable small antique shop in Munich has had a close relationship with Eva Braun and has managed to get as close to Hitler personally, as one can.
She also has had a long liaison with Heinrich Hoffmann, official photographer and close personal friend of Hitler whom Hitler trusted personally so much that he did appoint him, the person without art education, to supervise the Reich art policy from its beginning in the mid-1930s. From that time on, Hoffmann’s role in the Nazi mass art looting was huge. It was Hoffmann who introduced his acquaintance Dietrich to his boss Hitler in 1936.
As it often happened in the case of the individuals around Hitler, personal chemistry was a defining factor in many otherwise irrational arrangements that he has maintained. When Hitler started to become an art collector, at that stage yet in a personal capacity, it was Dietrich who was shuttling between Munich and Berlin proposing the first subjects for his private collection to him. She tried hard and was always at hand.
It is important to understand the personal and psychological background of the monsters-in-action, otherwise humanity always would foolishly repeat its own mistakes. Hitler felt psychologically comfortable with both Hoffmann and Dietrich. To a certain degree, it was because of the deficiency of their all’ proper art education, and the general education, too, for that matter. He felt at home with people like that, and with two those individuals, in particular. His trust in loyal them originated in this psychological comfortability, born out of evenness of under-educated minds. And corresponding art tastes, not the least.
Unlike many of my historians and writers colleagues, I never was surprised by the most known Hitler’s phrase regarding art, with what he has stamped the pride of human genius blatantly: “ I will not tolerate unfinished art!” As pathetic as it is, he meant it. Because he was willing, but never an artist at all. He was a very limited copyist at very best. The same as press photographer Hoffmann was not a fine photographer at any stage, and the same as specialising in repaired Turkish rugs Dietrich was not an expert in antiques and art whatsoever.
Later on, Dietrich was authorised to buy the looted art for Hitler directly, being the only person who was permitted to act on her own, without otherwise mandatory approval of any purchase by either the director of the planned Linz Art Museum Hans Posse or Martin Bormann. She was also the person who managed to sell the highest number of artworks to the Hitler personal art collection.
Inna Rogatchi (C). Moment V. Watercolour, wax pastel, oil pastel, lapice pastel, encre a l’alcool, Chinese red paste on authored original archival print on cotton paper. 70 x 50 cm. 2016-2020.
To understand the shock and enormous damage that the Nazis imposed on world culture, the damage that still lasts until this day, 80 years since this criminal assault has started, it is also important to see the process through its stages. In my understanding, it can be divided into four characteristic stages: the first, initial assault of culture by the Third Reich machinery from 1933 to 1937, the second, domineering racial principle in art from 1937 to 1939, the third, mass art tooting from 1939 to 1945, and the fourth, hiding the art Assets from 1945 to 1950. I do think that there should be also the fifth stage, from 1950 onward, defined as post-Nazi assault of the looted art. Frankly, it is mind-blowing that the process is still going on.
The art looting by the Nazis was such a vast operation that it has to be compartmentalised, with implementing a rather inflexible system of vetoing. There was the art looted for Hitler personal art collection, the art looted massively for his dreamed Linz Art Museum, the art looted for Göering personal art collection, the art looted for the Reich art depositary, and so on. All these destinations of looting, so to say, were conducted distinctively separately, with special funding for each of them.
The special system by the officials too well known for their skills in applying a method to anything, from railways planning to transport a giant amount of their victims to counting golden teeth thorn from the mountains of still warm corps, was introduced also to deal with mountains of looted art. Special institutions, such as Fuhrer Art Deposit had had a priority in the process of sorting the amassed heist of world culture out.
Inna Rogatchi (C). View From the Past II. History Shadows series. Watercolour, oil pastel, wax pastel, lapice pastel, crayons Luminance, encre l’alcool, Chinese red paste on authored original archival print on cotton paper. 50 x 70 cm. 2011-2020.
In the Nazi war against culture, all designated looted art middlemen had to provide their proposals to the certain Nazi officials in charge of vetoing the process which was conducted through fixed and inflexible machinery. The process was conducted on each of the directions, for each of the collections. In the case of Hitler, his personal art collection soon enough was run closely in parallel with his maniac project for the Linz Art Museum, the designated officials for approval of any object were Posse and Bormann. For all the others, including educated gangster Dr Muhlmann, except a close fuhrer’s trustee, uneducated frau Dietrich.
Enjoying a special favour of the fuhrer, Dietrich also has had easily accessible funds for her frenetic shopping sprees. Being far from an expert, she bought art based on her own taste and understanding of an owner of a second-class antique shop in Munich.
When Nazis occupied France and celebrated their unbelievable luck of being the feared masters of Paris, for many of them just this thought alone was having a champagne-like effect psychologically. It is known that Dietrich was enjoying herself in Paris overwhelmingly, with all her Bavarian crudity. She just could not have enough of it, and has become the talk of the town in no time.
Dietrich was shuttling between Germany and Paris non-stop, and lived there in a vulgar way of a self-appointed bossy celebrity overwhelmed by power and champagne. She also did run through the art galleries in Paris regularly, emptying them efficiently.
Two moments registered in the OSS documents regarding Dietrich got my special attention: in Paris, most frequently she visited the galleries located on rue la Boetie. And she bought quite many modelli – for the same reasons that they were popular from the time of Tiepolo and thereafter – easy to transport, of a manageable size, and still commanding high prices being original artworks executed in oil on canvas and by old masters.
The map of Paris prepared for the Nazi Germany troops before the invasion. Commons Images Library.
Another important consideration is that it is also quite plausible that d’Atri was able ‘to feed’ his false attribution of the work, with its switched authorship and date, to that under-educated art shopaholic much easier than to his other Nazi clients. Of many of those Germans who were hunting the art treasures in Paris and were more professional and better educated, Maria-Alma Dietrich was the type who would not know the difference neither between father and son Tiepolo’s manners, or between the distinctions of XVII and XVIII centuries in nuances of Venetian art .
So, in theory, she could be easily deceived by d’Atri, bought The Greeks Sacking Troy from him and brought it to Berlin in 1942. Hitler might be not that impressed by rather dark work which needed a restoration, thus leaving frau Dietrich with the work in her hands before she passed it to Heinrich Ulrich, selling it to him or leaving it with him on commission for possible sale. Ulrich’s imposing gallery was in Berlin at least until 1944 when it was bombed, and was located just around the corner, eight minutes walk, from the Hitler’s Chancellery where Dietrich was a regular visitor.
With regard to Nazi-registered art gallerist Ulrich, Dr Ira Westergard has noticed in our conversations: ‘ I found it clearly suspicious that Ulrich did register the work in his inventory quite late, in 1947, obviously just before he would send it off as the work of ‘an anonymous’ artist to Finland in 1948. There must be something ( suspicious) in this fact’. I quite agree.
Analysing all pro and contra-s of the case, given the kind of art that has been in the possession of Muhlmann, and his professional awareness of periods and masters, I tend to think that in 1942 in the occupied Paris, it might be that it was rather uneducated and sporadic frau Dietrich whom d’Atri could fool over The Greeks Sacking Troy work’s date and its author, it well may be her who was frequent at his gallery at 23, rue Boetie, and who bought modelli regularly. My bet is on Dietrich as a likely Nazi buyer of the Tiepolo’s work from d’Atri in Paris in 1942.
According to my line of thinking, when Ulrich resumed his business as early as in 1946, he was in need to clear his stock from problematic pieces. Authored by Tiepolo-son modello previously from the Hermitage collection, importantly, – about which Ulrich must knew due to the popularity of the German Pantheon magazine, it was a must reading among professionals – the work that he possibly got from nobody else but the personal provider of looted art to Hitler, was undoubtedly a very undesirable asset to own under the circumstances.
Berlin after the fall. May 1945. Commons Images Library.
The savvy German dealer active during a war-time sacrificed the work’s ownership, physically too, tearing the top of the note on the back of the frame off, and sent the work to Finland, where it was left unrecognised on a private wall for 48 years.
Who would expect that a half of a century later, in a distant Finland 30-something Kai Kartio would possess a required intuition, professional curiosity, and expert approach to know where to check on the provenance of a dark obscure work?
I am so glad that for all their nasty cunningness and shocking escape of justice, the Nazi artsy scoundrels were proven wrong in their arrogant calculations, does not matter that it happened decades later. With this kind of public knowledge on this kind of public crime, there are no time limitations.
Germany, Austria, 1945-1950s: crimes without punishment.
Every time when I am coming in my studies to the period of 1945-1950, and a bit later, into the 1950th, in the connection with different aspects of the Second World War and Holocaust, would it be unspeakable crimes against humanity committed by the Nazis and their collaborators in the concentration camps, Holocaust planning and executing with such enthusiasm all over Europe, massive operation of art looting at every possible and impossible corner, all those big and small, methodic and sporadic intimidations en masse, when I am researching in detail the situation after the war, with that unbelievable success of so many of the Nazis and their collaborators in escaping the punishment, I inevitably come to that powerfully distorted balance of good and evil. In that outcome, good was shrank terribly and evil was laughing big. Even after the defeat of the Third Reich. Namely, after that defeat. And to me, this question is still open.
Inna Rogatchi (C). Broken Lives II. History Shadows series. Watercolour, wax pastel, oil pastel, lapice pastel, encre a l’alcool on authored original archival print on cotton paper. 50 x 70 cm. 2012-2020.
We know the facts and still I cannot accept it. The OSS special unit on the Nazi looted art ALIU was preparing the documentation for possible prosecution of the main Nazi officials who were tasked with the cultural war of an unprecedented scale. How many of them have been prosecuted? None. All of them were briefly detained, questioned, interrogated, and released. All of them were living the years after the war out of the stashes of the looted art that was left in their possession, with most recognisable artworks being hidden and dispersed among their trusted accomplices mainly in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and some of it in Spain.
Göering’s personal art provider Hofer, despite being convicted by the French military court in absentia to ten years of imprisonment, never spent a day behind the bars. Instead, he was nicely and profitably keeping his art dealership business in Munich until his death in 1971. He did not even need to bother to try the rat-line to escape to Latin America, as many of his Nazi colleagues did. You see, Munich seemed to be too far from the French border, in the eyes of the post-war French authorities, in a giant distance of 350 km.
France also did not look into the dealings of the one of the most close to the Nazis dealers Mario d’Atri, who was never charged with anything and who is believed to sell his business, its Parisian part, at his pleasure in the 1960s. There are some indications that d’Atri was benefiting from his Italian citizenship and retreated there during the hot first period after the end of war, but then was able to maintain his business as he pleased well into the 1960s.
D’Atri’s major client Marie-Almas Dietrich was similarly happily running her antique store in Munich as well, until her death at the same year as Hofer’s, 1971, with her daughter – who was that special connection of Dietrich to Eva Braun – continuing the family business thereafter. They did it as practically all the families of the notorious Nazi art looters, middlemen and dealers did. Too many goods to handle, clearly – but the point here is that they all were allowed to do it.
In a jaw-dropping arrogance, Dietrich’s antique shop at Odeonplatz in Munich, that has become an art gallery of course, has been promoted by the art organisations and professional media in Germany as ‘the one of the leading art galleries in Munich’ in the 1970s, alongside with similar establishments owned by many of Dietrich’s pals and some rivals from their happy Nazi days.
Dietrich’s patron who introduced her to Hitler, the close friend of the fuhrer, member of the NDSA number 59 from its earliest days in 1920, and a major figure in the Nazi art looting process, Heinrich Hoffmann was sentenced by the Allies to the devastating punishment of four years of imprisonment – after which, in 1956, he did manage to return to himself and his family ‘his’ personal art collection by the decision of the Bavarian Financial Ministry. Hoffmann collection was not only known to be assembled of the looted art. It has been put into scrupulous inventory by the OSS ALIU officers in its entirety in preparation of its planned confiscation. That closest Hitler associate has been officially designated by the Allies as ‘major offender’ regarding the Nazi art looting process. That designation had a legal meaning as well – implication for complete confiscation of his art looted collection.
But Hoffmann, as many other senior Nazis, had an arrogance – and reasons, importantly – to fight for his rights in astonishing defiance. They all did it because they were provided with many reasons – legal, human, social – in the realities of post-war Germany to be allowed to do that, successfully.
The decision of the Bavarian authorities came two years after Hoffmann was released from his terrible four-years imprisonment, in 1956. The most charming moment there is the disarming phrasing of the decision: “the all art objects (belonging to Hoffmann) under administration of the Bavarian State Paintings Collections to be turned over to Mr. Heinrich Hoffmann, Nazi Party photographer.” ( as cited in the Steffen Winter’s article on the topic in Der Spiegel magazine back in 2013). What is yet more charming is the fact that in black on white, the decision has been referred to as being conducted ‘in the process of (Hoffmann’s) denazification’. Should we invent some new term for ‘a total astoundment’, perhaps? If so, I know where to look.
Inna Rogatchi (C). We Remember. Watercolour, wax pastel, oil pastel, lapice pastel, encre a l’alcool, Chinese red paste on authored original archival print on cotton paper. 50 x 70 cm. 2014-2016-2020.
The one of the most serious criminals of the Third Reich, Kajetan Muhlmann who was ranked Nazi officer, also died there in Munich in 1958 of natural causes escaping prosecution in a mind-blowing defiance of any remnant of any norms of civility of the German and international post-war establishment. This is despite him being tried in absentia by both Poland and Austria, and despite all active efforts by the both countries for his extradition, from also oh-so-very far from Vienna, South Bavaria. The escape of the punishment by Muhlmann in particular is qualified by leading art historians as ‘unbelievable failure of justice’ ( prof. John Petropoulus, 2016).
I think there is more in that. It is also an unbelievable failure of the common sense, total perversion of fairness, and a qualified change of the qualities and sustainability of the nature of civility. And in this, the damage caused by the Nazism, the Nazis and their collaborators to mankind is of an existential character, to this very day.
It is telling to see this screaming phenomenon by the inner look of the decent German journalist: “No one likes to talk about this enormous cache of Nazi treasure, partly because of a feeling of guilt for possessing assets that are often of unclear provenance: Art objects acquired from Jewish collections that were sold off in a panic after 1933, or that were simply taken from their rightful owners before they disappeared into concentration camps” – Steffen Werner wrote in his “A Nazi Legacy Hidden in German Museums” investigative report – no, not in 1956, but in 2013.
Inna Rogatchi (C). Holocaust Travelling I. History Shadows series. Watercolour, wax pastel, oil pastel, lapice pastel, encre l’alcool, crayons Luminance on authored original archival print on cotton paper. 70 x 70 cm. 2019.
No wonder that when I found myself in Munich while working on some of my historical projects, in a few hours of landing at the place I developed a persistent and rapidly worsening medical condition: I could not breath. Instead of working there for a week, as it was planned, overnight I had to relocate and continued to work from Zurich. I still remember how I ran from there, dreaming in agitation that the train to Zurich would have a double engine.
Many years ago, as soon, as I have started to research Holocaust, I knew that the Second World War did not finish in May 1945, but instead it was going on with open wounds and unhealed scars for many millions people world-wide for at least 15 years after it.
Simon Wiesenthal once said to me recalling his sentiments in the early 1960s: “We were sitting with a couple of friends, and I’ve said aloud that all of us knew and felt: “We won the war, but the Nazis won the post-war”.
When I heard it from Wiesenthal for the first time in the early-1990s, I was so stricken that I do remember the episode from over 25 years ago as if it happened today.
The more I learn from the post-WWII period on many of its aspects, the closer I get in my mind and feelings towards the small group of survivors sitting with Simon and Cyla Wiesenthal around the table in their modest apartment in Vienna in the early 1960s.
The unspeakable horror of the Shoah and all the crimes committed during the six years of utter nightmare in 1939-1945 has been transformed into unspeakable inner pain of stunned people all over the world who were facing laughing Nazis and their collaborators living as nothing ever happened. I find this post-war period of the Second World War as an under-appreciated tragedy and massive abuse of humanity which lasted far too long and which had never been addressed properly – not legally, not socially, not culturally, not in any way, still today.
Among the heart-wrenching drawings made, still in a camp barracks, by miraculously surviving 37-old architect Simon Wiesenthal who was barely able to walk being a literal walking corps, there is one especially poignant. During the whole 76-year post-war period, it has been published just twice, in 1945 in a very modestly published brochure, and then forty years later, in 1995, in a commemorative album, both publications of a very limited circulation. To the best of my knowledge, it had not been published in the media before. Now I am publishing it for the third time, entrusted by Simon during the years of our joint work and cordial friendship.
Simon Wiesenthal (C). Welt, Gib Antwort! Drawing. 1945.
Wiesenthal has told me how he felt, still on the border of life and death, after the liberation of Mauthausen where he drew the collection of these screaming 25 pictures. After the years of horror of annihilation he lived through, as many millions, he had some questions to ask, he said to me, on behalf of his own 89 members of the family murdered by those admirers of ‘finished’ art, and all the millions of annihilated people, Jews and not. So he added short comments to his drawings.
In the case of this drawing, the last in his collection, its title and comment was this: “Welt, gib Antwort! Vielleicht bist du auch mitschuldig?” ( World, give an answer! Maybe, you are also complicit?). I always wonder that Simon and all those people on behalf of whom he drew that scream and asked that question never got the real answer, in all its honesty. And this absence is the essence of post-war history.
The matter of the staggering amount of the Nazis and their collaborators who enjoyed such an unbelievable, such successful and such blatant escape of punishment and who did mock the very term of justice to its core is a separate and in my opinion, very important theme to continue to research and to publish the books, the studies, to produce films about. We ought to do it until the task of telling the truth on non-applied justice to the Nazi beasts will be fulfilled in its full scale. Otherwise, humanity will never prevail.
Helsinki & London, 2020-2021: reflections of the united triptych
Coming back to the word of art, the unification of all the parts of Domenico Tiepolo’s series on Trojan Horse that has happened at the Tiepolo exhibition in Helsinki in the autumn 2020-winter 2021 at the Sinebrychoff Art Museum does look different in the light of the restored saga of believed to be lost part of the series. To make it happen, it really needed so many factors to coincide: resurfaced work 25 years ago, its identification and re-discovery, ideas and possibilities of exhibiting all three parts together, multiplied circumstances related not only to the two main cultural institutions in question, the UK National Gallery in London and the Finnish National Gallery, but also to plans and activities of several more leading and very busy international museums in Italy, Russia, Sweden and Denmark.
Domenico Tiepolo. Three-part series on the theme of the Trojan Horse. 1773-1775. Shown together in public for the first time in 203 years at the Tiepolo: Venice in the North exhibition in Helsinki, Sinebrychoff Art Museum. With kind permission of the Museum. Photo: Hannu Pakarinen.
It needed that essentially important research of the work’s provenance – and when one embarks on the journey of this sort, it is extremely time consuming, especially if the case is the work which is 245-years-old. It also depends on resources, the will of your counterparts all over the world, existing – or not – documentation, and , very importantly, luck. And the most importantly, I would add inspiration and a team spirit to that. There are few natural forces in this world which are comparable with the drive of inspired art historians, take it from me.
From this perspective, perhaps, it is not that surprising that the way of the Tiepolo’s re-discovered piece in Helsinki took almost 25 years to be united at the exhibition with the other two parts from the same series. It was a dizzy feeling to look on those works all together, in the way in which they were conceived by Domenico Tiepolo in Venice back in 1773-1775.
Inna Rogatchi (C). Venetian Reflections X. Venice Diary series. Watercolour, wax pastel, oil pastel, encree a l’alcool, perle le blanc on authored original archival print on cotton paper. 110 x 80 cm. 2020.
The staggering fact of the display in Helsinki in 2020-2021 is that it was the very first museum exposition of the series since Domenico Tiepolo created it 245 years ago. It is known that the three modelli were shown to various patrons of arts, privately, at the time. It is also known that the only public demonstration of the modelli together had occurred 42 years after the series creation, in St Petersburg, at that famous public auction of the Niccolo Leonelli’s possessions in 1817 conducted after his death. The series were demonstrated to the public during the day of auction sales then.
For the following 203 years, the three parts of the series were never shown to the public again. Until the exhibition Tiepolo: Venice in the North at the Sinebrychoff Art Museum in Helsinki.
In the mirror of 245-year old artwork
The art curator who re-discovered the Domenico Tiepolo’s masterpiece in Helsinki in 1996, Kai Kartio has told me recently: “Ever since the moment when I knew for sure what the work was, and what it went through during all those years in the past century, since the Bolshevik revolution in Russia onward, I was thinking so very often that the case is incredible from the point of view of how the one not large work of art has reflected the tragedy of the whole century, and what a tragic century that was”.
Similar thoughts and reflections are shared by everyone among my colleagues art historians in Finland, Italy, Great Britain, Russia, Germany, Austria, France, and the United States who were involved in tracing the destiny of this work at different times and in different contexts of their works.
Inna Rogatchi (C). History Pages XII. History Pages series. Watercolour, wax pastel, oil pastel, lapice pastel, crayons Luminance, encre l’alcool, Chinese red paste, perle le blanc, perle d’or on authored original archival print on cotton paper. 50 x 70 cm. 2012-2020.
We all came out of this enriching and rewarding experience with the prevailing thought on how tightly our history is connected to art. How unexpectedly it could turn, how closely it does reflect. There is one thing to know about it in theory, and it is quite another phenomenon to experience it in real life, step by step, putting together a complicated puzzle piece by piece, in what I call art historical detective, or cultural investigation, in practice. What can be more convincing than reconstructed history in faces and destinies? When the art is in question, there is nothing more real than the reflections in its mirror.
Both Domenico’s father Giambattista Tiepolo, his brother Lorenzo and himself were quite a travellers, unusually for the time they lived and created in. I was wondering what they would think of the adventures of the Domenico’s mid-size modelli which has encapsulated not only much of the history well beyond the time when it was created, but most importantly, the pain and drama of it.
Tiepolo: Venice in the North exhibition at the Sinebrychoff Art Museum – Finnish National Gallery. Helsinki. 2020-2021. Photo Hannu Pakarinen. With kind permission of the Museum.
The three parts of the original series on Trojan Horse created in Venice in 1775 had been reunited after more than 200 years in our days, in an elegant way. But it was so much more in this unexpected story.
This Venetian modello depicting the Trojan Horse in the flamboyance and superb craft of Italian masters, has become a witness of unspeakable horrors and tragedies of a totally different period of time. Our newly obtained knowledge on that has come thanks to the work of the group of dedicated art historians. Their efforts and our perception of it has made this mid-sized Venetian artwork a bearer of our awakened conscience. Not a small achievement at all.
Inna Rogatchi (C). Postcard from the Bald Monk. Homage to Leonard Cohen. Art collage boarded on panel. 80 x 120. 2021.
Michael Rogatchi ©. Zion Waltz. Homage to Leonard Cohen. Special version. Original drawing in mixed technique. 65 x 50 cm. 2013. Leonard Cohen estate. Canada.ADVERTISEMENT
Michael Rogatchi(C). Zion Waltz. Oil on canvas. Homage to Leonard Cohen. 120 x 100 cm. 2016.
Michael Rogatchi (C). Blue Sound. Homage to Leonard Cohen. Oil on canvas. 110 x 100 cm. 2010.
Michael Rogatchi (C). Study for Homage to Leonard Cohen. Pencil on cotton paper. 50 x 40 cm. 2010 Florence.
Michael Rogatchi (C). Full Moon Drink IV. Thinking on Leonard Cohen. Indian ink, oil pastel on dark-blue Italian hand-made cotton paper. 65 x 50 cm. 2017.
Inna Rogatchi (C). Heart Talk. Homage to Leonard Cohen. 2012. Private collection. Chicago, the US. Special Leonard Cohen Commemorative Edition. 2021.
Letter to Leonard. Homage to Leonard Cohen. Original drawing in mixed technique on authored pigment print mounted on an art panel board. 80 x 120 cm, framed under museum organic glass, size in frame 84 x 124. 2018-2021. 
Inna Rogatchi (C). Homage to LCohen. Caran d’Ache Neopastel, encre l’alcool on authored pigment print on cotton paper mounted on board. 80 x 120 cm. 2021.
