Galerie St. Etienne

The growth of the international auction market inevitably fueled competition between the principal houses, Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Recognizing that they were cannibalizing one another’s business, the two firms colluded to fix commissions, a crime for which Taubman served ten months in prison in 2002. Today, the competition is more cutthroat than ever. To woo choice consignments, Sotheby’s and Christie’s drop the seller’s commission, kick back a portion of the buyer’s premium and offer guarantees, financed either by third parties or out of the firms’ own pockets.

Unmoved by Taubman’s decades with Sotheby’s, his heirs solicited a sales proposal from Christie’s as well. One may imagine that it was a point of pride for Sotheby’s to win its former chairman’s art collection. Hence the $515 million guarantee. The sales on November 4 and 5 pulled in roughly $420 million, and Sotheby’s predicts that, taking into account post-sales activity and a smattering of Taubman lots scheduled for upcoming auctions, they are on track to earn back the guarantee. Whether they will make a profit is another question. Auction houses today can sell half-a-billion dollars’ worth of art and still lose money.

The hefty guarantee undoubtedly prompted Sotheby’s to push up its presale estimates, which discouraged bidding at the high-ticket evening auction on November 4. Observers described the atmosphere as “dismal” and “lackluster.” On the other hand, because the auctioneer was not necessarily constrained by specific reserves, the guarantee gave Sotheby’s unusual latitude in accepting bids. While the evening’s sales total barely exceeded the low estimate, 90% of the lots found buyers.

Comprising chiefly material that falls within the “Impressionist and Modern” category, Taubman’s collection was remarkably diverse. The great majority of the pieces were acquired at Sotheby’s. If his Egon Schiele holdings (about which I wrote an introductory catalogue essay) are any indication, Taubman often bought at or just below the low estimates, works that might otherwise have gone unsold. In this fashion he was both boosting his company’s bottom line and potentially getting bargains. His acquisitions seem relatively random. The Schieles cover a broad array of subjects, but there are few masterpieces in the group.

Because I wrote the first comprehensive Egon Schiele catalogue raisonné, I took a particular interest in the Bondi case. In letters to my grandfather, Leah Bondi had described how the Nazi art dealer Friedrich Welz came to her apartment shortly before she was scheduled to leave Austria and threatened her into giving him, without compensation, Schiele’s Portrait of Wally. After the war, Portrait of Wally was mistakenly restituted to a different claimant, and then sold to the Österreichische Galerie. From there the painting passed, through an exchange, to the collector Rudolf Leopold. Although both Leopold and the Director of the Österreichische Galerie were aware of Bondi’s claim, they chose to ignore it. And she, struggling to reestablish herself professionally in London, lacked the funds and the stamina to take legal action against Austria’s largest museum and most powerful private collector.

From the moment I read the letters in my grandfather’s Bondi file, I began trying to get journalists to cover the story. At first (this was in the early 1980s) there wasn’t any interest, but gradually people became more aware of the magnitude of unrestituted Holocaust loot, and Egon Schiele became more widely known. In 1997, the Leopold Museum loaned Portrait of Wally to an exhibition of Leopold’s Schieles at the Museum of Modern Art. I decided to give my grandfather’s Bondi file to the New York Times, which published what proved to be a groundbreaking exposé. Literally hours before MoMA was scheduled to ship the Schiele show back to Austria, New York’s District Attorney, Robert Morgenthau, stepped in with subpoenas for Portrait of Wally and a second painting, Dead City, that had been claimed by another family.

Morgenthau’s subpoenas created a furor in Austria. Reactions ranged from angry denunciations of America for “meddling,” to calls for Austria to finally come clean about its Nazi past. The cultural minister, Elisabeth Gehrer, determined to seize the moral high ground and at the same time show the world that Austria could handle its own affairs. In the first months of 1998, she opened the archives of all institutions under her jurisdiction to researchers, and established a commission to study the provenances of art in Austria’s federal museums. To implement the findings of this so-called historians’ commission, the Austrian parliament, in September 1998, passed an act authorizing the restitution of Nazi looted artworks in state collections. The 1998 law also attempted to rectify the fact that many exiled survivors had been deprived of restituted artworks by Austria’s export laws, which forced them to sell their property in Austria, or in some cases to “donate” part of a collection to a museum in order to get an export permit for the rest. This portion of the 1998 law was expanded in 2009 to include artworks sold to state museums by claimants if there was a close connection between the denial of an export permit and the sale.

Some seventeen years after its passage, Austria’s 1998 restitution act remains a model of its kind. Few nations have in the interim made such a coordinated, systematic attempt to deal with Nazi loot in public collections. Moreover, Austria put its money where its mouth was, funding teams of provenance researchers to investigate state collections. The complexity and cost of in-depth professional provenance research is often underestimated by those who blithely call for wholesale restitution. Few privately funded cultural institutions in the US have the staff or money to deal with this issue as thoroughly as they should.

At the same time, Austria’s restitution law is far from perfect. For one thing, it isn’t really a law. In Austria, as in all the nations of continental Europe, a good-faith purchaser gets good title to stolen property after a prescribed period of uncontested possession. In Austria, this so-called prescription period is three years, or six years if the former owner doesn’t reside in the province where the property is located. Thus most claims for the return of Nazi loot are, to this day, time barred under Austrian law. Rather than change the law—which would admittedly be almost impossible—the 1998 parliamentary act established an extrajudicial procedure applicable only to government-owned museums, and only under certain very specific circumstances. Ultimately, the members of the historians’ commission (also known as the Beirat) are in each instance charged with making a moral determination.

The idea of a panel of Austrians passing moral judgment on Jewish claims seems a bit suspect in principle, and in practice, the Beirat’s decisions often appear untenably subjective. The process is far from transparent: the Beirat meets behind closed doors, the dossiers submitted for its consideration are never made public, nor does the committee provide much, if any, explanation for its findings. Most problematically, the Beirat’s mandate provides absolutely no possibility for compromise. Decisions are black-or-white: either the work stays in the museum, or it is returned.

Unfortunately, seventy years after the end of World War II, few restitution claims are today matters of black-or-white. Just about all the relevant witnesses have died, and surviving documents can easily be misinterpreted. By now, many of the more straight-forward claims have been dealt with. The Wally case, which resulted in a $19 million settlement for the Bondi heirs, was relatively clear-cut. The theft itself was dramatically documented in Leah Bondi’s letters, and Leopold admitted that he was aware of her claim. Hence, according to the doctrine of prescriptive possession, he never acquired good title under Austrian law.

Many of the restitution cases that have recently come up for adjudication in Austria are far more ambiguous. Take, for example, Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, which was sold by Erich Lederer to the Austrian state in the 1970s. In accordance with the 2009 restitution act, the Beirat here had to determine whether there was a “close connection” between this sale and the fact that the Austrian ministry of culture had, for some twenty years, deliberately pressured Lederer to relinquish the Frieze by denying him an export license. Or take the case of Karl Mayländer, who gave a group of Schiele drawings to his girlfriend, Etelka Hoffmann, before being deported by the Nazis. In each instance, Austrian officials were asked to read the mind of a dead man. Was Lederer acting of his own free will, or did he feel coerced? Would Mayländer have given Hoffmann the Schieles under different circumstances? Did it make a difference that the Beethoven Frieze is a national monument, whereas the Mayländer Schieles were just several among many dozens in Austrian public collections?

In the end, Mayländer’s Schieles were restituted to his heirs, because he and Hoffmann had never married. (Had she been his wife—an impossibility under Nazi anti-miscegenation laws—the case would probably have been decided otherwise.) On the other hand, the Beirat decided not to restitute the Beethoven Frieze. In my opinion, both decisions were unjust. The poignant efforts that doomed Jews like Karl Mayländer made to preserve their possessions (which at the time often had only sentimental value) should be respected, not annulled on legal technicalities. And the Beethoven Frieze case clearly demonstrates the unenforceability of the 2009 restitution act. Compromise—an alternative not permitted to the Beirat—would in this instance have been a more just solution.

The question before us is: where do we go from here? Personally, I believe that restitution is, and will always be, justified in well-documented cases of outright theft. But such cases are increasingly rare. The myriad other types of transfers that took place during the dark years of Hitler’s reign are almost impossible for us, today, to judge. So many years after the fact, we must recognize that there is a limit to what we can know, and that moral certainty is as elusive today as it ever was.

Americans do not like “gatekeepers.” We prefer to think of ourselves as an egalitarian nation, and we resist the notion that members of a privileged elite may be better qualified than the average citizen to pass judgment on our cultural achievements. Nevertheless, for generations the very definition of art was controlled by a self-anointed cadre of professional curators, art historians, critics, dealers and collectors. Alfred Barr, founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, crafted the formalist narrative that was taken up by the critic Clement Greenberg and used to justify the “triumph of American painting” in the latter half of the twentieth century. Dealers such as Leo Castelli ensured that this dogma was accepted abroad, and collectors could rest easy knowing their purchases had been vetted by commonly respected gatekeepers.

Today, the reign of the gatekeepers is over. The chain of “isms” that begat one another like Biblical ancestors has been broken, and no narrative dominates the way formalism once did. Formalism itself has been largely discredited, as ongoing research into modernism’s various byways shows it to have been a more fragmented series of developments than Barr’s paradigm would suggest. We now recognize that this paradigm was not only inaccurate, but unfairly biased. Women, people of color and non-Western developments were for the most part excluded, while the European tradition was manipulated to support America’s cultural ascendancy.

Gone, too, is the barrier between “avant-garde” and “kitsch” that Greenberg and his allies struggled so hard to maintain. In truth the boundaries between high and low art, culture and commerce, were never as impermeable as the twentieth-century gatekeepers pretended. Still, the formalist narrative kept the focus on aesthetic innovation and the laudable (if unrealistic) ideal of artistic purity. Absent the gatekeepers, it can seem there is no metric for assessing value beyond that provided by the market itself.

Despite (or because of) the virtually unopposed dominance of free-market capitalism in the twenty-first century, there is a palpable nostalgia for the less overtly mercenary ethos of the modern era. Ever since Thomas Krens lined the Guggenheim’s spiral ramp with a parade of motorcycles in 1998, critics have been lamenting the commercialization and corporatization of our major museums. The increase in income inequality during the intervening period has only exacerbated the situation. Shortly before the Whitney Museum of American Art opened its new building earlier this year, protestors projected a sign reading “1% Museum” on the facade. Art advisor Abigail Ascher termed the spring auctions (which cumulatively grossed over $2 billion) “a spectacle of excess at the highest level.” Big, bold and brightly colored, Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger broke all auction records when it fetched $179 million at Christie’s, although many scholars consider it a minor work. People worry that “checkbook art history” has replaced genuine connoisseurship.

For museums today, the sweet spot often seems to lie at the nexus of popularity and collector appeal. Jeff Koons personifies this phenomenon: his giant enlargements of children’s toys and Hummel figurines are sure-fire crowd pleasers, and at $58.4 million, he also holds the current auction record for most expensive work by a living artist (Balloon Dog [Orange], sold at Christies in 2013). To be sure, the current predilection for entertaining, easily marketed museum exhibitions regularly receives its share of critical scorn. Jed Perl, writing in the New York Review, likened the Whitney’s 2014 Koons retrospective to the “apotheosis of Walmart,” repackaged for sophisticates who would not ordinarily set foot in that store because they disapprove of its labor practices. MoMA’s recent exhibition of the Icelandic singer/composer Björk was so widely reviled for pandering to celebrity that an online campaign was mounted to fire its curator, Klaus Biesenbach. “We want MoMA to behave itself as the combined Fort Knox and Vatican of modern art that it has been,” declared New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl.

Matti Bunzl, an anthropologist who spent five months embedded with the staff of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, describes the relentless financial pressures confronting today’s curators. “With reductions in public funding,” he writes, “museums need to seek corporate support; to gain such support, they need to attract larger audiences; to bring in larger audiences, exhibits have to become more spectacular; with more spectacular shows, exhibitions costs are spiking; to cover these expenses, institutions need to be aggressive in seeking individual donations; to appeal to donors, museums have to become destinations that properly reflect on their benefactors and the art they lend or donate to the institution; to do this in style, old buildings have to be expanded, new ones erected; the bigger buildings have greater staffing needs and raise overhead costs; to cover these costs, museums have to pursue corporate support even more aggressively; to do so effectively, visitor numbers need to be increased even more, which requires more histrionic shows, with even greater appeal to individual donors, etc., etc.”

Just as museums rely on donor support, donors need the support of the museums. “With the value of art centrally dependent on institutional acceptance,” Bunzl writes, “what we get is the unprecedented financial incentivization of museum patronage.” Donors and trustees try to direct museum agendas toward the artists they collect. Dealers likewise want to get their artists into museums, and frequently allow clients to jump to the top of a hot artist’s waiting list if the buyer agrees to donate the work in question. It is not unusual for dealers to support museum exhibitions directly (by, for example, paying for the catalogue) or indirectly (with research and help securing loans). The Art Newspaper’s revelation that nearly one third of solo American museum shows of living artists go to those represented by five galleries (Gagosian, Marian Goodman, Hauser & Wirth, Pace and David Zwirner) is both shocking and unsurprising. (At the Guggenheim and MoMA, the figures are higher: 55% and 45% respectively.) “These galleries take on artists in their mid- to late careers,” explains museum consultant András Szántó, “at the very stage where their longevity and critical recognition reaches [sic] a peak.”

Without the hierarchical control once exerted by the gatekeepers, power naturally becomes more diffuse. At a time when everything is “curated”—menus, wardrobes, playlists—everyone, it seems, is a curator. Many major collectors are choosing to bypass traditional institutions altogether by opening their own museums. Dealer Stefan Simchowitz (recently profiled in the New York Times Magazine) undercuts both museums and the conventional gallery system by selling directly over the Internet to a band of loyal followers, who include the heiress Anna Getty, Hollywood royalty like Orlando Bloom, Harvey Weinstein and Steven Tisch, and Napster co-founder Sean Parker. While Simchowitz considers himself the art-world equivalent of Mark Zuckerberg, using technology to disrupt the establishment, others see the dealer as a craven speculator. (New York Magazine critic Jerry Saltz called him a “Sith Lord.”) Simchowitz has the mindset of a venture capitalist: invest in numerous startups (in his case, emerging artists) in the hopes that one or two hit big, and sell the others before demand peaks. Constant flipping turns collecting into a game of musical chairs, explains Simchowitz’s partner, Rosi Riedl. When the market tops out, “the artist is over. You don’t go back to a reasonable price—you’re cooked, you’re finished.”

The impact of the Internet on the art world has only begun to be recognized. Collectors post works on Facebook or Instagram and make purchasing decisions based on the number of “likes” they get. The Internet imposes itself between the viewer and the object, diluting or altogether transforming our experience of the original. Works are judged according to how they look on a small screen, how colorful they are, how readily they can be cropped to fit the Facebook or Instagram format. Much recent art seems to be designed with selfies in mind, a prime example being reflective sculptures like Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate in Chicago’s Millenium Park. The Whitney’s wide-open new exhibition spaces are great for social media, not so good for intimate encounters with small paintings.

The formalist narrative, with its prescribed linear trajectory, provided a framework within which artistic production could be judged. Today almost anything goes. Now that “the art-historical certainties” of modernism have dissipated, writes British critic Ossian Ward, we are left in “the soupy dustbin of history and culture.” In his book, Ways of Looking, Ward helpfully tries to break contemporary art down into categories such as “Art as Entertainment,” “Art as Meditation,” Art as Joke” and “Art as Confrontation.” But this only begins to scratch the surface of an “art world” that for the first time is truly global, with inputs from rising powers in Asia, Russia, the Middle East and Latin America. Nor does Ward’s schema take into account the disparate visual traditions developed by “outsiders” within Western society, be they African Americans, indigenous peoples or simply those who did not receive formal artistic training. It does not help, either, that the entire concept of “quality”—suggesting a white, male Eurocentric bias—has become suspect in academia.

How is a curator to make sense of all this? Without any sort of overarching narrative, it is especially difficult to organize encyclopedic installations. The new Whitney is a case in point. In the Abstract Expressionism room, Lee Krasner surprises and delights by more than holding her own against her famous husband, Jackson Pollock, but Alfonso Ossorio’s quirky mix of Surrealism and folk art requires a more nuanced and particular context. Although the Whitney is to be applauded for showing James Castle, Horace Pippin and Bill Traylor alongside mainstream masters, it is hard to see what the self-taught artists have in common with Georgia O’Keeffe and Arshile Gorky, with whom they are grouped in a chapter titled “Breaking the Prairie.” The chapter approach (also taken by the Metropolitan Museum in the reinstallation of its modern collection) favors superficial visual and/or temporal links over the artists’ deeper art-historical roots.

This curatorial strategy works better on a micro than a macro level. While the individual chapters at the Whitney and the Met may not cohere into a whole, many of them could fruitfully be expanded into full-blown exhibitions. The demise of a singular narrative encourages curators to reexamine modernism’s legacy from multiple angles: to discover unexplored areas, to interrogate contemporaneous social, political and economic influences, and thereby to deepen our understanding of the artists’ contexts and achievements. MoMA may not always do an exemplary job of sorting through the mire of contemporary art, but it does remain a bastion for the earlier avant-garde, whether revisiting well-known masterpieces, like the Matisse cut-outs, or investigating less familiar subjects, like Gauguin’s prints or Jacob Lawrence’s Migration series.