This Wednesday January 26, 2011
come see “Upon My Word”
a musical play written by Alec Coiro, produced by Erin Krause.
I saw it once and it is HILARIOUS! And I am going back for more!!!
Buy tix soon because it will sell out again!!!
THE BLEECKER COMPANY/Arclight Theater
152 WEST 71ST ST

Martin Monnickendam (Dutch, 1874-1943), Portrait of Jacques Goudstikker, image via The Jewish Museum
(Reclaimed begins with this portrait of Jacques Goudstikker, a handsome young man at age 19.)

Reclaimed: Paintings From the Collection of Jacques Goudstikker at The Jewish Museum is partly an exhibition of Dutch, Northern Baroque, and Southern Renaissance paintings, and more interestingly, the story of a Dutch Jewish art collector and taste maker, the Nazi looting of his collection, and the eventual restitution, decades later, of part of the collection to his heirs.

Jacques Goudstikker’s grandfather had founded the Goudstikker gallery and his father was an art dealer as well.  After studying in Amsterdam, Leiden and Utrecht, Jacques joined the family business at age 22.  He brought immediate drastic change to the Goudstikker Gallery as well as the entire Dutch art market by showing not only old Dutch Masters, but also Italian Renaissance painting, early Northern painting, and modern European painting.  He curated thematic as well as monographic exhibitions at his own gallery and other museums.  These exhibitions were accompanied by elegant catalogs which he often wrote himself and some of which are on view here.

Goudstikker married the Viennese opera singer Désirée von Halban Kurz (Dési.) and the two had a son, Edo.  Goudstikker moved his family and the gallery to a mansion on a canal in Amsterdam and entertained guests at his country estate at Nijenrode Castle.  The exhibition includes a painting from Goudstikker’s collection by Jan van der Heyden of the castle.

Jan van der Heyden, View of Nyenrode Castle on the Vecht, late 17th-early 18th century, Image via Museum Security

In 1940, as German forces approached Amsterdam the Goudstikkers found escape on the S.S. Bodegraven.  While crossing the English Channel, Goudstikker fell in the dark through an open hatch into one of the ship’s holds and was killed by the fall.  The exhibition includes the brief, devastating telegram Dési sent to alert family members of the accident.  A black notebook (now known as the Blackbook) in which Goudstikker meticulously recorded his inventory of paintings, was found on his body.  Dési, Edo and the Blackbook went on to Canada, eventually settling in the United States.

Within weeks of Goudstikker’s death, Nazis looted the Goudstikker Gallery which had about 1400 works.  Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring took hundreds of paintings for himself, and some were given to Hitler for a museum he was planning in Linz- the Fuhrermuseum.  Over Dési’s objections, Goudstikker’s gallery and country estates were transferred in a forced sale to a German banker, Alois Miedl, who continued to operate the gallery throughout the war.

Immediately after the war the Allied forces recovered approximately 200 of the looted paintings and returned them to the Netherlands, expecting them to be returned to the rightful owners.  Instead, these works remained in the Dutch government’s national collections.

Goudstikker’s Blackbook was the key piece of evidence in the family’s legal battles to reclaim the works of art.  Now on display in a vitrine at the Jewish Museum, the Blackbook is opened to a page featuring names such as Rubens and Rembrandt.  Visitors may flip through all the pages of a virtual version of the Blackbook on touch-screen monitors.  There is also a really cool website where you can flip through the book: http://www.goudstikkerblackbook.info/
(It may take a minute to load but it’s worth it.)

In 2006, the Dutch government returned 202 works to Goudstikker’s only living heir, his daughter-in-law and Edo’s wife, Marei von Saher.  Reclaimed presents about fifty of these works.  Reclaimed was originally on view at the Bruce Museum in Connecticut and will continue to other American museums.

Reclaimed: Paintings From the Collection of Jacques Goudstikker is on view at The Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Ave (92nd Street), New York, NY through August 2, 2009.

LINKS
Goudstikker [The Jewish Museum Website]
Tale of Return, Vividly Illustrated [New York Times]
Old Masters Reclaimed [Museum Security Network]
A Life’s Work Looted by the Nazis [Jewish Week]
Jacques Goudstikker [Wikipedia]
Goudstikker’s Blackbook

More images from the exhibition:

Jan Steen, The Sacrifice of Iphigenia 1671. Image via Rijks Museum.

One of my favorites:

Jacob Isaacksz van Ruisdael (1628/9 – 1682), Sailing Vessels in a Thunderstorm, (Date unknown, but early)
Image via Bruce Museum.

Master of the Mansi Magdalene (active 1510-30), St. Mary Magdalene, image via Bruce Museum.

P.S. Goudstikker’s collection included works by Jan Steen, Adriaen van Ostade, Isaac van Ostade, Jan van Goyen, Salomon van Ruysdael, Jacob van Ruisdael, Simon de Vlieger, Jacopo del Casantino, Francois Boucher, Pietro Longhi, Pacchiarotti, Hieronymous Bosch, Vermeer, Luca Signorelli, Pesellino, and Phillips Koninck.

The U.E.S. Journal’s Archive of
Pictures (of or relating to the) Upper East Side.

P.U.E.S. is located in the sidebar menu. I will add as many categories as appropriate and welcome submissions.  I recently added an exciting new category: Ads (Vintage Advertisements)

Here is one I acquired last week:

The Pierre Hotel – 1939

by Jesse Max Creed

At the MoMa, whose location below Central Park should provoke no dispute over territorial possession as is being discussed about the east-west divide for the Met, I discovered a bawdy, yet compelling piece on women in history entitled Notes in Time (1979) by the artist-against-injustice-turned-feminist Nancy Spero.

The piece finds itself in the middle of a dazzling exhibition most accurately described by its titled, Multiplex: Directions in Art 1970 to Now, open from now until July, 2008. The central message of the exhibition flows from the post-1945 artistic obsession with paradox, long brewing since impressionism’s ability to, at once, represent, yet distort reality. We have long abandoned the Platonic obsession with perfect imitation and harmony and embraced the beauty of asymmetries and paradoxes. In the section of works called Abstractions, the museum describes the paintings as visually communicating a message without conventional representation. To put it differently, a painting communicates to its viewer more a mood than a picture; in short, it is, paradoxically, the anti-image image. The paradoxes proliferate as the works are at once centralizing and decentralizing, structuring and de-structuring, layering and delaying, constituting and de-constituting, constructing and destructing, ad infinitum, reductio ad absurdum etc. I have always believed that these antitheses ultimately stem from the greatest modern paradox of all, order and disorder – order brought about by the political, economic, and social complexity of the modern state and, at the same time, disorder spawned by total war between these same states. In Nazi Germany, for instance, the most hierarchical and totalized society signified the New Order of the efficient modern state yet collapsed under the stresses of total war as Russian tanks shook the ground of Berlin and British aircraft bombed the architectural gems of Dresden.

In the section Mutability is appropriately located Spero’s work juxtaposing the long antithetical genres of painting and poetry, the image and the word, to form, yet again, another set of paradoxes: the word as image and history as dance. She presents a series of poetic texts deriding or belittling women alongside feminine images of women dancing in motion. The word meets image; history meets dance. As examples, you will see some of the images and texts attached to this post: Juvenal’s satirical depictions of women’s sexual impulses; the American poet Hilda Doolittle’s description of a woman’s weapon as neither sword, nor dagger, nor spear, but as persuasion; Spero’s own depiction of the feminine weapon as something not feminine at all, a pointy dick. Too many texts, too many images, too much history to be exhaustive for this post.

It is here that I found intellectual inspiration. Naturally, it aroused in me as one member of the tyrannical and oppressive gender a desire to reflect on where we were, where we are, and where we will be with respect to a woman’s role in our civilization.

It is no remarkable suggestion to note that, at the heart of our civilization, two women have scarred the reputation of this gender since the dawn of Western man: Helen of Troy and Eve of Eden. Both characters set in motion two of the (arguably) most important books in Western history, the Bible and Homer’s Iliad.

Helen, impulsively enraptured by her love of Paris, arouses the Spartan rage of the Greeks and ignites the fires of the Trojan war. Hers is the face that launched a thousand ships and, in her, men have concluded through the centuries that women represent an impulsive, short-thinking, and unrestrained lot. Until the rise of the feminist movements in the twentieth centuries, it was customary to draw several readings from this story ultimately leading to women’s demise: in search of vengeance for the unhappiness brought by her marriage to Menelaus, Helen exacted precisely what she sought by forcing the young and virile Greek from the warmth of his home and setting in motion the mobilization of entire civilizations. Or, to spin this story towards another poisonous reading, she was a feeble, weak woman unable to control herself against Paris’s seduction. If chastity is a virtue, Helen was soaked in vice.

That other noteworthy woman, seduced by the serpent, has been represented through the centuries as one who single-handedly brought about the fall of man – Eve. By her hand, man was introduced to mortality, corruption, and sin; man no longer incarnated, in whole, the divine and perfect image of God, but also harbored the Dante-esque tripod of earthly evils: the self-reflexive pride of a cat, the wrathful ferocity of a lion, and the deceitful guile of the she-wolf. By her hand – or rather her mouth – Man fell from the grace of God to the absurdity of our instinctive animal nature.

So, now, these stories of our origins as a Western society beg the question of where we are in Spero’s “dancing history.” Running for president of the single most powerful nation, Hillary Clinton seeks to fill the constitutional role of the president as commander-in-chief of the most sophisticated Armed Forces in the world. Contrary to Hilda Doolittle’s world, Hillary’s will represent one where woman bears the sword, the dagger, and the spear. Contrary to Spero’s metaphorical image, a woman will no longer carry a limpid dick across the centuries as her weapon. Contrary to Juvenal’s classical Latin poem, Hillary represents a woman who does not simply crave sex ravenously (clearly, this must be the case as shown by Bill’s smoking forays to fill this sexual void). She seeks not persuasion, but, rather, power and dominance. She no longer wants to write with the pen – she wants to wield the sword.

Knowing our human instinct to draw absurdly irrational and wrong conclusions, a lot is at stake for women, should one sit behind the desk at the oval office. I make this declaration not so much in the vein of masculine ignorance or as an uneducated imbecile; after all, I come from a household where my mother and sister are wildly successful.

The stakes of a woman president are inevitably high in light of the irrational science of interpretation. Despite what readings were drawn from the Helen story, it is often forgotten that Paris did not simply seduce Helen – he abducted or even raped her. His impulse to unclothe such a beautiful woman as Helen inspired within him an urge to forcefully seize and kidnap her. Yet, the ages have only recently seen the story convey this interpretation. So when I say a lot is at stake, I intend it to mean that should Hillary fail in her duties as officer – whether she is too pacific, impulsive, or irresolute – it will be hard to escape the possibility that her victories and vanquishes will be colored, for better or worse, by the history of women so poignantly portrayed, in image and word, by Spero.

Taking a page from a rather obscure medieval book The Romance of the Rose by Jean de Meun and Guillaume de Lorris, which arguably sparked the first feminist debate in Western history between the leaders of the Paris universities and the medieval female writer Christine de Pisan, I can sum up the problem of interpretation. The allegorical character Reason, whose defining characteristic lies (surprise!) in her rationality, lectures the Lover, seduced and spellbound by a beautiful woman, on the sleepless nights, insuppressible and sometimes grotesque thoughts, and general anguish brought about by love. After hearing about love’s “peaceful hate and hateful peace” – what Shakespeare calls later love’s “sweet sorrow,” the Lover replies: “There are so many contradictions in this lesson that I do not know how to understand even one word of it. Yet I know how to recite it well by heart, for my heart has forgotten none of it at all.” We have come a long way from Helen of Troy or Eve of Eden, but cultural history – the aesthetics of interpretation – we cannot escape.