art – Pike & Hurricane

The Polanski affair: Should we differentiate the artist from his work?

Aimée Niau Lacordaire — Mon, 06 Jan 2020 18:16:25 +0000

A big debate is back in France raising the question: “should we separate the man from the artist?”. In fact, Roman Polanski, the famous director, is accused of multiple rapes of minors. On 8 November 2019, the photographer Valentine Monnier accused Polanski to have raped and beaten her in 1975 which he disputes. However, she is the fifth woman to officially declare having been raped by the director since the Samantha Geimer case in 1977. To the case of this 13-year-old girl who Polanski allegedly drugged and raped during a photo shoot for Vogue magazine were added the more recent accusations of three actresses in the end of 2017.

The accusation of Valentine Monnier appeared only a few days before the release of the new movie of Polanski, aptly named “J’accuse”. So the question arises, can we go see this artistic work of an alleged rapist, repeat offender?

While Roman Polanski has been exclude by the Academy of Oscars in the United States, the French cinema community is regularly suspected of protecting. In fact, he was convicted by the American courts in a case of sexual abuse of a minor in 1977. Roman Polanski is considered by Interpol as a fugitive: following his conviction, after having served his first sentence in the United States, he fled the country before being sentenced again in the same case.

This is why some feminists have decided to boycott his movie, and some have mobilized to block the access to the film’s preview at the “Champollion” cinema in Paris. Polanski is protected by the state because he appears as a man of power and a great artist which is not acceptable. The boycott of his film is then the only weapon that the population has to campaign against this injustice and show their dissatisfaction with the French justice.

This problem has already arisen in France with Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably known for his work “Journey to the end of the night”. But this famous writer was a racist and wrote antisemitic works.

The problem is quite recent because indeed before, it was a taboo and was considered as normal. So those artists, that we know to have done some criminal activity can no longer be tried and can no longer defend themselves in face of these accusations, recalling the presumption of innocence which says that “everyone charged with a penal offense is presumed innocent until proven guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defense.“

Understanding is not forgiving

If Polanski is a rapist, I think that as with every criminal, we need to interest ourselves for his history for a better understanding, but to understand is not to forgive.

Polanski was born in Paris in 1933, to a Jewish Polish father and a Russian mother. He lived in France for three years, but his family left for Poland after the German invasion of Poland. There, he was forced to live in the Warsaw ghetto where he escaped deportation but his parents and sister did not. His mother died in Auschwitz. He was interested in cinema since his childhood, he notably made one of his greatest successes with “The Pianist” which is adapted from the homonymous autobiographical novel by Władysław Szpilman in which he tells how he survived in the Warsaw ghetto, then after its liquidation, until the insurrection of the Polish resistance, and the Soviet invasion. His childhood story therefore strongly inspired Polanski to make this film.

In 1969, Sharon Tate, the wife of Roman Polanski, was assassinated by repeated stabbing in their house in Los Angeles while she was pregnant. The murder was organized by Charles Manson and perpetrated by his “family”, the name of the sect that the serial killer had founded.

So if we judge the artist in relation to his work it is important to look at and judge it in relation to his childhood and the traumatic elements that he himself suffered. Several artists have been accused of mistreatment like Chris Brown or paedophilia like Michael Jackson … You are free to boycott their works or not according to your convictions.

by Aimée Niau Lacordaire

Photo credits

Devant l’affiche de “J’accuse” (Polanski), Jeanne Menjoulet, CC BY 2.0

missing bricks, Warsaw ghetto wall, Nina Childish, CC BY-ND 2.0

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The Nazi Treasure

Maya Diekmann — Tue, 26 Feb 2019 19:42:33 +0000

When my sister was living in Argentina a few years back, she, more than once, encountered the myth of the Nazi-Treasure. Does she know where to look? Does she know what exactly to look for? She is German, she must know something. And although South and Central America are known to be popular destinations of refuge for accused Nazi criminals, it turns out their treasure never made it over the big pond. In fact, it never even made it out of Germany.

In February 2012, German authorities made a spectacular discovery. What started out as an investigation for tax evasion against Cornelius Gurlitt, resulted in the finding of over 1,400 works of art that had disappeared over the course of the Nazi art theft. Although an official inventory was never published, the findings include pieces by renowned artists like Picasso, Monet, Liebermann, Matisse and Dürer. A minimum of 300 pieces were declared to belong to the body of Nazi “degenerated” art. The question is, how did this collection of Nazi stolen art art, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, end up in a small apartment in Munich?

An Expensive Ingenious Idea

It is commonly known that Adolf Hitler had a thing for art. Rejected as an artist by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, he understood himself to be an unrecognized genius ruling both politics and culture with the power of a true artist. The notion of the genius and the Ingenious Idea, which Hitler largely adopted from philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, would become a major influencing factor on the Nazi’s disdain of modern art. According to Schopenhauer, the genius perceives an idea from the phenomenal world. Through technical skill he will manifest this idea into a piece of art and thereby help the ordinary person embrace the idea that is invisible to him normally. Vice versa, in Hitler’s opinion flawed and inferior ideas could also be worked into a painting or sculpture and consequently be internalized by the observer–something that would cause great harm to his perfect Aryan population.

What started out as an ideological move against any non-Aryan artistic idea soon turned into million dollar–or rather Reichsmark–business. Overall, Nazis stole an estimate of one-fifth of all artworks within Europe. Confiscated art, both from museums and private ownership, wasn’t only pilloried but sold to foreign buyers to finance war efforts, or traded for classical artworks Hitler desired for his planned Führermuseum. The business of stolen art caused a boom in the global art market, with artworks confiscated in Germany and German occupied countries ending up in museums and private hands all over Europe and North America.

Monuments Men

The first big Nazi-Treasure was discovered right after the end of the Second World War by the Allied armies’ Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) Program, better known as the Monuments Men. The Altaussee salt mine in Austria contained over 12,500 stolen artworks, including 6,577 paintings, 230 sketches and watercolors, 954 illustrations, 173 statues, 1,200 cases of books and more. The MFAA, after a laborious recovery, soon began the long process of returning the stolen pieces of art to their rightful owners. And this is where the first problem arises–figuring out the rightful owner. Whereas the only appropriate thing to do–ethically and according to the ‘Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art’–was return the art to those it had been stolen from, things rarely happened that way. Buyers of stolen art, among them Hitler’s left hand Hermann Goering’s family, successfully claimed art confiscated from the family after the end of the war. Museums are often reluctant to give up pieces which have been claimed by their rightful owners. An example is the legal battle between the family of Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy–a descendant from famous classical composer Felix Mendelssohn–and the state of Bavaria. At dispute is Picasso’s ‘Madame Soler’, with an estimated worth of $100 million.

The Burden of the Gurlitt Name

The 2012 Munich discovery hasn’t only revived the legal and historical issues around looted art but also the controversy around the Gurlitt family name. Hildebrand Gurlitt, Cornelius Gurlitt’s father, was one of the four art dealers in the Third Reich entrusted with the business of looted art. Being one-quarter Jewish and an aspiring young museum director with a liking for modern art, his relationship with the Nazis couldn’t be more complex. The chance to protect his family and save modern art from destruction by selling it abroad does not hide the fact that Gurlitt profited immensely from his deals, let alone that he knowingly dealt with stolen art. It’s difficult to pin him down as the good or the bad guy, and it is even more difficult to reappraise his deeds through his son, Cornelius. In an interview with him, German news magazine ‘Der Spiegel’ portray Cornelius as a man whose life “has become an infinite loop of remorse and coincidence”, a tragic figure bearing the consequences of his father’s actions. Whether Cornelius was aware of the full dimensions of his father’s business, remains questionable. What the interview does reveal is the intimate relationship of an 80-year-old man, “the heir of a collection with dubious origins”, with long-lost masterpieces of art. It is cases like these, which illustrate the difficulties that come with the restitution process, going far beyond legal issues. How can you ever truly make past injustices right and what if this involves an unjust procedure in the present?

An undeniably positive effect of the Gurlitt discovery is the attention and publicity it has drawn to the issue of stolen art. The Louvre has started to highlight works in their collection suspected of having been looted by the Nazis and then returned to France and the V&A Museum in London has invested in their provenance research. These little improvements initiated by individual museums, however, don’t release governments, above all the German, from facilitating the restitution process. Only if the government stuck to their obligations under the Washington Conference Principles and systematically identified looted art and encouraged pre-war owners to come forward and claim their property, could there be a chance of obliging museums to return objects of questionable nature to their rightful owners.

Even a domestic law in accordance to the Washington Conference Principles would not solve the problem of looted art as a whole. The Principles only apply to looted art in museums and do not concern private ownership, such as the case of Cornelius Gurlitt. So who knows how many more treasures of long-lost art are waiting to be discovered behind the plain doors of an ordinary apartment?

by Maya Diekmann

Photo Credits

IMG_0470A Pablo Picasso. 1881-1973, Jean Louis Mazieres, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Stolen Art, RV1864, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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Big Issues Through Little Eyes

Taminka Hanscamp — Thu, 03 Nov 2016 14:46:47 +0000

In the leafy suburban outskirts of Oslo is a white house. It is almost as unassuming as the subject matter it contains, it is the International Museum of Children’s Art. Compared to the White House in Washington DC this one greets you with colourful giant snails, butterflies and a cow. This joyful expression of childhood and imagination does not however, preclude the Museum from being properly viewed as a centre of international and political concern. The Museum provides a unique opportunity to see and consider the perspective of children on international issues. It also gives a platform for children to be recognised in our society and works for the promotion of the rights of the child.

For too long we have dismissed the voices, wisdom and concerns of children, especially in politics, but this forgets that children are already involved in the ‘adult’ world. When we do remember, our responses are often paternalistic and disempowering. This is wrong as it is also their world and their future that is being dealt with. Children are key stakeholders in many serious international issues, for example concerning work, slavery and violence and when it comes to child labour and child soldiers we are quick to voice outrage and concern as these practices are seen as abhorrent abuses of the rights of the child and the sanctity of childhood. Children are also at the centre of issues such as education, health, climate change, immigration and population growth. Acknowledging that children are involved in international issues places the need and value of showcasing their views and contributions, through their art, squarely in the field of foreign affairs. Further, it seems absurd that the International Museum of Children’s Art in Oslo is the only one like it in the world. This is especially because children produce art on a prolific scale and the ability and time to do this epitomises the realisation of the ideal childhood that the world invests so much into protecting and developing.

Sharmin Chait, 10 years, Bangladesh, ‘Child Worker’

The Museum hosts exhibitions inviting contributions from children around the world on different themes. In this way it captures the perspectives, concerns and understandings of local and global issues in a unique way. The Museum is currently exhibiting the best works from the last three decades to celebrate its 30th birthday. This special exhibition and the Museum’s archives provide valuable insight into how time, technology, perspectives and cultures have both changed and collided across the globe. For example two exhibitions on fatherhood were done in the last 30 years allowing for a comparison of how family roles have changed in this time. Whilst the newspapers that previously featured were replaced with computers and phones, depictions of anger and fear were unfortunately common to both eras.

Left, Michiru Shioji, 3 Years, Japan, ‘My Father is Angry!’; Right, Jonas Lindborg, 10 Years, Sweden, ‘Papa’

What remained with me as I wandered through the galleries was the ability for children to distil very complex issues into a clear sentiment. Pieces from exhibitions on environment and disaster highlighted how the challenges of climate change are already felt very seriously in the lived experiences of those who will be affected the most. Some pictures showed the grave concern and hopelessness of the issues whilst others had a quixotic tone. The greed and waste that have so clearly contributed to climate change are outlined so simply that you can’t avoid this truth staring you in the face. The works and indeed the gallery shone a light on how adults are often indifferent to the concerns of children and the type of world they want us to leave them.

Left, Emma Lorena Cabaldoens, 13 years, Panama, ‘NATURE See, Smell, Feel and Admire It. Don’t Forget What It Was. Preserve It’; Right, Olga Crasik, 15 Years, Ukraine, ‘The Dream

In displaying contributions from around the world on single topics, the Museum provides a rich resource for understanding different cultures and nations. Children’s art reconnects us to the basic truths of our shared existence on the planet, and the gallery is a beautiful reminder of the importance and value of giving children the respect they deserve and a voice in matters of international concern.

Taminka Hanscamp

Photo Credit: Pictures 1-5 Permission from the International Museum of Children’s Art

Cover image: 5 years, India, ‘I am going to the Moon’ International Museum of Children’s Art Used with Normal One Time Permission

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