Lisa Jardine: When War Disburses Art
[The theft of art during war has always taken place, says Lisa Jardine. But the recent plundering of historic remains in Iraq and Afghanistan threatens the permanent loss of the record of ancient civilisations.]
I went to look at a painting at Christie's on Monday, by the early-20th-Century Austrian artist Egon Schiele. Wilted Sunflowers is a largish landscape - about a metre square.
In the foreground are half-a-dozen tall, withered sunflower stems, silhouetted against distant, daisy-covered hills. Framed by dying leaves, the blackened sunflower heads droop heavily.
Behind them the autumnal air is pale, and a white sun struggles through a wall of grey-brown mist. Painted in 1914, the work is considered to be a sombre homage to Van Gogh's Sunflowers. It hints at decay, and the looming loss and destruction of the first world war.
This is a melancholy painting with a dark history. In the 1930s it belonged to the collector Karl Grünwald, a Viennese art and antiques dealer. During the First World War Grünwald and Schiele had served in the army together, and Grünwald, recognising the younger man's artistic talents, lobbied successfully to have him appointed as a war artist, rather than being sent to the front. Schiele died of influenza in 1918.
In 1938, the year Hitler annexed Austria, Grünwald fled to Paris. His finest art-works were packed up to follow him, but they were intercepted in Strasbourg and auctioned off by the Nazis in 1942. ...
Grünwald himself survived, but his wife and a daughter died in a concentration camp. After the war, first Karl Grünwald and then his son devoted much time, money and energy to searching for the stolen art works, with small success.
Then, a year ago, Wilted Sunflowers resurfaced in France. On Tuesday, the painting was sold to an anonymous buyer for an astounding £11.8m, the money going to Grünwald's heirs, closing a sombre chapter in the family's history.
War and the pillaging of art and antiquities have always gone hand in hand. The callous accumulation by the Nazis of looted fine-art, in the form of personal possessions seized from Jews, many of whom were rounded up and sent to the gas chambers, is a shameful story of our time.
But it is only one of the most recent and high-profile historical examples of the glories of a nation taken by force by its invaders. ...
Read entire article at BBC
I went to look at a painting at Christie's on Monday, by the early-20th-Century Austrian artist Egon Schiele. Wilted Sunflowers is a largish landscape - about a metre square.
In the foreground are half-a-dozen tall, withered sunflower stems, silhouetted against distant, daisy-covered hills. Framed by dying leaves, the blackened sunflower heads droop heavily.
Behind them the autumnal air is pale, and a white sun struggles through a wall of grey-brown mist. Painted in 1914, the work is considered to be a sombre homage to Van Gogh's Sunflowers. It hints at decay, and the looming loss and destruction of the first world war.
This is a melancholy painting with a dark history. In the 1930s it belonged to the collector Karl Grünwald, a Viennese art and antiques dealer. During the First World War Grünwald and Schiele had served in the army together, and Grünwald, recognising the younger man's artistic talents, lobbied successfully to have him appointed as a war artist, rather than being sent to the front. Schiele died of influenza in 1918.
In 1938, the year Hitler annexed Austria, Grünwald fled to Paris. His finest art-works were packed up to follow him, but they were intercepted in Strasbourg and auctioned off by the Nazis in 1942. ...
Grünwald himself survived, but his wife and a daughter died in a concentration camp. After the war, first Karl Grünwald and then his son devoted much time, money and energy to searching for the stolen art works, with small success.
Then, a year ago, Wilted Sunflowers resurfaced in France. On Tuesday, the painting was sold to an anonymous buyer for an astounding £11.8m, the money going to Grünwald's heirs, closing a sombre chapter in the family's history.
War and the pillaging of art and antiquities have always gone hand in hand. The callous accumulation by the Nazis of looted fine-art, in the form of personal possessions seized from Jews, many of whom were rounded up and sent to the gas chambers, is a shameful story of our time.
But it is only one of the most recent and high-profile historical examples of the glories of a nation taken by force by its invaders. ...