From Elation to Deflation @ Daily Mail Story

Crimson Cherry Blossom

So I now I feel all deflated about the sensational Daily Mail story I linked to yesterday. A very dear friend of mine, who also just happens to be a great Berlin-based writer and editor, suggested on Facebook when I linked to said Daily Mail story that he would not believe it (based on some information/hunches he himself has which I cannot elaborate on further here).

Now only time will tell whether this fantastical art news does, indeed, turn out to be true as excavations at the site continue.

Art News Roundup @ Everywhere

Cologne Cathedral (Thomas Wolf/Der Wolf im Wald)

First there was the amazing news that a new Van Gogh painting was recently re-discovered in the Netherlands (Maura Judkis also blogged about this for the Post).

NOW there is even more awesome art news - a veritable treasure trove of Nazi-looted art could be unearthed soon via an "Indiana Jones" style digging expedition in Germany's Erzgebirge mountains, as Alan Hall reported for Britain's Daily Mail on March 25.

"Monets, Manets, Cezannes and masterpieces by other artists, along with sculptures, carpets and tapestries, are believed to be buried in an old silver mine near the Czech-German border, 90 minutes' drive from the city of Dresden," writes Hall.

"The paintings formed the bulk of the Hatvany collection, the property of Baron Ferenc Hatvany, who was a leading Hungarian-Jewish industrialist and art patron."

(I cannot help but note here that Ron Lauder's mother, the late American cosmetics' tycoon Estée Lauder, was partly of Hungarian-Jewish origin - and that I could very well imagine some of these same artworks in Lauder's own amazing private collection.)

Estée Lauder (at left) "in a vivid print from Yves Saint Laurent, puts today's face on a customer by using a darker shade of lipstick" in 1966. (World Journal Tribune Photo by Bill Sauro/Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection/Wikimedia Commons)

So much world-class art looted from Jewish collectors by the Nazis, as well as by Russia's Red Army (some of the Hatvany collection also went to the Russians), still needs to be restored to its rightful heirs - or at the very least displayed in museums for all to enjoy. In this instance such a sensational find would rock the entire international art world.

Sometimes, moreover, art justice is actually served.

Top 50 emerging artists

Hot off the press, the latest edition of artbusiness news profiles 25 of the "Top 50" emerging artists of 2012 - the first 25 were profiled in the magazine's November/December 2011 edition.

Last year, by contrast, ARTnews published this list of the world's "Top 200" art collectors. (Ron Lauder and his wife, Evelyn, incidentally, made the cut.)

Combating "gallery rage"

ARTnews also recently reported on what museums are doing these days to counter the new phenomenon of "gallery rage," which involves increasingly irked museumgoers venting (often virtually) about the overcrowding of major blockbuster art exhibits that marrs the individual's attempts to experience art.

People lined up around the block of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan on August 3, 2011 to see the "Savage Beauty" exhibition showcasing examples of the late British fashion designer Alexander McQueen's work. I tried to enter the Met just to stand in line to see this exhibition on a Sunday in late July 2011, only to hear the people in line ahead of me - this was just to GET IN to the Met itself (!) - say that they had heard that there would be yet another two-hour line just to GET IN to the Alexander McQueen show itself. As I was babysitting two German 15-year-olds at the time who were on their first ever starry-eyed trip to New York City, there was NO WAY I could ever justify spending the better part of a day in line to see a few dresses designed by McQueen. So I never had a chance to experience "gallery rage" that time around because I couldn't even get into that blockbuster show!
(Photo by flickr user Benny Wong)

I recall a clever system involving timed ticket entry to one such blockbuster show I visited in 2005 at the Tate in London. This stunningly atmospheric Turner-Monet-Whistler show was still pretty crowded, but at least the timed entry system helped keep some of the overcrowding at bay and allowed a relatively decent view of the paintings on show at the time.

Throngs of museumgoers take in the Alexander McQueen "Savage Beauty" show at the Metroplitan Museum of Art in New York on May 15, 2011. This is about as close as I ever got to that exhibition. (Photo by flickr user Wesley Chau)

ARTnews earlier this month also published an interesting item on how art fairs are joining forces with the "virtual" world.

"Degenerate" art on view along Polish-German border

The works of several gone - but not forgotten - 20th century artists are meanwhile chronicled in an exhibition I would love to see were I living in Europe right now.

As reported on by Deutsche Welle, a new joint German-Polish exhibition in Mülheim an der Ruhr entitled "Hunting Down Modernism - Forbidden Art in the Third Reich" presents works which were once dismissed and shunned by the Nazis as "degenerate."

Joseph Goebbels (center, in trench coat and hat), Hitler's infamous Nazi propaganda minister (Reichsminister für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda) strolls through the "Entartete Kunst" (Degenerate Art) exhibit at the Haus der Deutschen Kunst in Munich, Germany on a Sunday afternoon in 1937. Hartmut Pistauer (in glasses, at right) was chief curator of this "exhibit," the first of several to denigrate and attack the avant-garde in Germany. Many artworks were lost, stolen or destroyed in the process, and many artists were compelled to flee the country. Some artists and intellectuals even committed suicide. Nazi Germany was not a great place for artists. Many German and Austrian actors, writers and directors, moreover, fled to Hollywood, where they greatly influenced the rise of the Film Noir genre, which unsurprisingly cast a gloomy and mysterious pall on crime and punishment in the 20th century.
(Photo Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive)/Wikimedia Commons)

This reminds me of the excellent LACMA exhibition on degenerate art I saw some two decades ago when it came to the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Last laugh: "naked" art in Cologne

At the same time, Spiegel Online International took note of a "happening" whereby two women with famous works of art by Klimt and Schiele painted across their naked bodies walked around the western German city of Cologne - or at least tried to, until police stopped their bare-it-all "walk of art."

This is reminiscent of the 1960's, when the "shock value" of such a stunt may have been somewhat higher - at least in a place like Germany, where people routinely hang out together in the buff at saunas, pools, parks or FKK, ie nude, beaches. All I have to say about this is that, if I had to be one of those two women, I would have rather "worn" the Klimt than the Schiele painting, given that the former provided more, um, "coverage," as this photo gallery attests.

German children enrolled in a state-run daycare program enjoy some healthy down time together in a sauna in 1984. (Photo Benno Bartocha/Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive)/Wikimedia Commons)

(When I lived in Germany I managed to avoid the FKK beaches, but did get talked into going to the sauna - luckily there is a lot of steam in these places. Suffice it to say I preferred the "women's day" at the sauna, when we were not forced to be naked with a bunch of dudes - bar the male staff members on duty who somehow STILL seemed to be hanging around at the sauna working on various faucets or showerheads etc. - the price one must pay for German "Ordnung" (orderliness) - they are constantly repairing roads, sauna showers, etc. in that country - no potholes or leaky faucets for them!)