Speaker 1: Pushkin in March of eighteen eighty six. Vincent then go
Speaker 1: moved from Antwerp to Paris to live with his brother
Speaker 1: Theo in montmart He very soon became befriended with some
Speaker 1: of the other artists living there who would become very
Speaker 1: famous within the next decades, like for example, Paul Signac,
Speaker 1: only to lose ludreque, Emil Bernard and some others, and
Speaker 1: he learned a lot from them Stefan Koldohoff German art expert,
Speaker 1: and that led to his willingness to make experiments in
Speaker 1: becoming an artist. When he painted in rather dark brownish
Speaker 1: grayish tones during his time before in the Netherlands, he
Speaker 1: now was willing to try out what to do with color,
Speaker 1: how to form things with color. In Vango's effort to
Speaker 1: master oil painting, he painted still lives, mostly flowers he
Speaker 1: couldn't afford models. In a space of a few years,
Speaker 1: he produced dozens and dozens of paintings. The Paris period
Speaker 1: means that Vangour just had decided to become an artist.
Speaker 1: He no longer wanted to try other professions like he
Speaker 1: did before, like being a preacher or a teacher, or
Speaker 1: helping people. He now made the decision I want to
Speaker 1: be a painter, and he knew that Paris is the
Speaker 1: place to be. My name, Miss Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening
Speaker 1: to Revisionist History, my podcast about things Overlooked and misunderstood.
Speaker 1: This episode is a continuation of my investigation into the
Speaker 1: hoarding habits of art museums. It's about one of those
Speaker 1: dozens of still life's Vango painted in his Paris period,
Speaker 1: a small canvas seventeen inches by fourteen inches vase with carnations.
Speaker 1: That little painting, it turns out, has a strange and
Speaker 1: troubled history. Vengo painted vase with carnations right after his
Speaker 1: arrival in Paris. At some point after his death four
Speaker 1: years later, it was acquired by a wealthy German couplet.
Speaker 1: Ullman and her husband Abbett Ullman were one of the
Speaker 1: most important art collector couples in Frankfurt in Western Germany.
Speaker 1: They made their money out of business. They very early
Speaker 1: decided to invest money in works of art which were
Speaker 1: not commonly regarded as very important works. So they were
Speaker 1: very daring collectors and that shows that it was not
Speaker 1: only investment, it was also the love of art which
Speaker 1: led them to buying works, for example, by Fangoch, but
Speaker 1: also by several Impressionist painters. Dwick Oulman sold boz with
Speaker 1: Carnations on consignment to an art dealer who took it
Speaker 1: back to New York just before the Second World War.
Speaker 1: That dealer, in turn sold it to William Gets, one
Speaker 1: of the most powerful producers in Hollywood. Gets and his
Speaker 1: wife Edith, daughter of the legendary Louis b. Mayer, had
Speaker 1: one of the greatest private collections of Impressionist art in
Speaker 1: the world. My grandmother was called the Hostess of Hollywood,
Speaker 1: and she spent her entire life hosting lavish dinner parties
Speaker 1: people the likes of Laurence Olivier and Trimach of Pody
Speaker 1: and Jil Brenner. That Gets his granddaughter, Victoria Bleeden. I mean,
Speaker 1: I had dinner with Laurence Olivier when I was six
Speaker 1: years old, you know, maybe sitting amongst the fans of
Speaker 1: Latour and the day Guy and the Mane and this
Speaker 1: is this is this is our childhood, you know, finger
Speaker 1: bowl in the whole my yard. And then they would
Speaker 1: have movies in the living room and in the living
Speaker 1: room far of who've seen any pictures of it. But
Speaker 1: I mean, this is where the money, the blue Picasso,
Speaker 1: the other Picasso which she had, a Harlequino was called,
Speaker 1: And all these things are on the wall, and all
Speaker 1: of a sudden we sit in the living room and
Speaker 1: all couches and everything, and that a painting would come up,
Speaker 1: and the screen would come down, and then we watched
Speaker 1: movies of our childhood. The priceless art would disappear into
Speaker 1: the ceiling and a movie screen would descend in its place.
Speaker 1: If that isn't the greatest metaphor for Hollywood, I don't
Speaker 1: know what is. In nineteen fifty six, Kirk Douglas started
Speaker 1: a movie about van Gogh called Lust for Life. A
Speaker 1: few people know the real story of this intense, strong
Speaker 1: willed man. Now his tumultuous career is revealed for the
Speaker 1: first time with frankness and intimacy, with all that. If
Speaker 1: you look at the corner of the movie poster for
Speaker 1: Lust for Life, there it is voles with carnations. But
Speaker 1: by then gets it sold it. He didn't hang on
Speaker 1: to his van Gogh the way he did his other treasures.
Speaker 1: It wasn't for him. The painting passed to the heiress,
Speaker 1: to the kmart fortune Catherine Kresgi, who, among other things,
Speaker 1: was once married to a Swedish baron. She convinced him
Speaker 1: to leave London and come live with her in her
Speaker 1: native Detroit. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Swedish baron's order for missus
Speaker 1: Kresgy did not survive the move to Michigan. When Kresgi
Speaker 1: died in nineteen ninety, she willed vaz with carnations to
Speaker 1: the Detroit Institute of Art. She gave it without restriction,
Speaker 1: meaning the DA as it's known, could do with it
Speaker 1: what they wanted, sell it, trade it. They didn't have
Speaker 1: to make it part of their permanent collection. Kresgi clearly
Speaker 1: didn't care any more for the painting than Ghets did,
Speaker 1: and neither did the DIA. They put it in her
Speaker 1: basement for twenty years. Vincent van Go painted many remarkable canvasses.
Speaker 1: This is not one of them. He also painted larger
Speaker 1: flower still lives in Paris, but this is a smaller one.
Speaker 1: Thus kind of canvas which I think was not meant
Speaker 1: for sale or as a present for acquaintances or girlfriends
Speaker 1: or his models or so. It was just for trying
Speaker 1: out things. Are experts like to damn with faint praise.
Speaker 1: Was with Coronations gets a lot of faint praise. It's
Speaker 1: very nice, it's very profound, but it's not a very
Speaker 1: well spectacular composition or color combination. It's just a kind
Speaker 1: of let me try out what happens if I do this,
Speaker 1: if I do this, and so it's a nice but
Speaker 1: not really an important work. The current head of the
Speaker 1: Detroit Institute of Art, Salvador Cellar Ponds, says, the problem
Speaker 1: is that Was with Coronations just doesn't look like a
Speaker 1: van When you say it doesn't look like a vano,
Speaker 1: what do you mean, does it look like the sunflowers? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's not a typical work like you would
Speaker 1: like the self portrait or the works that he did
Speaker 1: when he was in the South of France. Those are
Speaker 1: the most famous works that the general public knows Vango did.
Speaker 1: Then there's the fact that the painting had a stamp
Speaker 1: on the back, a sign that it was painted on
Speaker 1: a fancy bit of stretch canvas. Then go in his
Speaker 1: Paris heres was broke. What was he doing with a
Speaker 1: fancy canvas? It took years to resolve that particular discrepancy,
Speaker 1: and in the meantime, lots of people began to think
Speaker 1: of us with carnations was a fake. Later we discovered
Speaker 1: that that canvas with the staff on the back was
Speaker 1: not actually part of the work. It was added later.
Speaker 1: So you had the original canvas, then you have a
Speaker 1: lining canvas glued to the original canvas. Then when you
Speaker 1: have these third canvas with a stencil or a stamp
Speaker 1: on the back. So once we removed that, we understood
Speaker 1: that was not part of the original word. So here
Speaker 1: we have a vang that does not look like a
Speaker 1: van Go, that was never intended to be sold or
Speaker 1: shown or even given away, that a German couple bought
Speaker 1: somewhere around the turn of the century and then sold
Speaker 1: that turned up in the home of a Hollywood mogul
Speaker 1: and served as a prop in a Kirk Douglas movie poster,
Speaker 1: then finally landed in Detroit with a Kmart heiress who
Speaker 1: threw it in as an afterthought when she made her
Speaker 1: bequest to the da whereupon the painting languished in a
Speaker 1: cellar for a quarter century because of a dubious bit
Speaker 1: of canvas glued to the back. What's your personal feeling
Speaker 1: about this painting? Do you like it? Are you drawn
Speaker 1: to it. I like it because I have a personal
Speaker 1: story connected to it. You know, when I came to
Speaker 1: the museum, the painting was in the storage as an
Speaker 1: attributed painting by Vangal with basically no value. I was
Speaker 1: able to bring it up to the galleries and put
Speaker 1: it together with the other four Van goals that the
Speaker 1: DII has a word that it looks like a painting
Speaker 1: by a Sunday painter, as considered by a forger, would
Speaker 1: have no value, no monetary value. But the minute we
Speaker 1: consider it as Bivango, it has a value of several
Speaker 1: million dollars. However, the painting has not changed. The painting
Speaker 1: continues to be what it is. What has changed is
Speaker 1: the perception that we have on the painting, and that
Speaker 1: is a really interesting concept to think about. So I
Speaker 1: like the painting a lot for that. Yeah. But if
Speaker 1: someone said to you, when you retire director, you can
Speaker 1: take one of the DA's, then goes with you which
Speaker 1: one would you take? Not this one? Now? So why
Speaker 1: should we care about VARs with carnations. We shouldn't. It's
Speaker 1: not the painting that matters. The painting is just a mcguffin.
Speaker 1: In case you don't know what I mean by mcguffin.
Speaker 1: Let's consult the Dick Cavato nineteen seventy two. Cavat's guest
Speaker 1: is the legendary film director Alfred Hitchcock, the great proponent
Speaker 1: of mcguffin's, can explain what a mcguffin. Mcguffin you see
Speaker 1: in most films about spies. It is a thing that
Speaker 1: the spies are after. In the days of Roger Kipling,
Speaker 1: it would be the plans of the fault on the
Speaker 1: Kaiba Pass, it would be the plans of an airplane engine,
Speaker 1: and the plans of an atom bomb, anything you like.
Speaker 1: It's always called the thing that the characters on the
Speaker 1: screen worry about, but the audience don't care. The mcguffin
Speaker 1: is an object used to propel the plot, to motivate
Speaker 1: the characters, but which has no intrinsic value to anyone else.
Speaker 1: Voice with carnations is a mcguffin. It's described in a
Speaker 1: scene in an English train going to Scotland, and one
Speaker 1: man says to the other opposite him, he said, what's
Speaker 1: that package above your head there? Now? The man said, Oh,
Speaker 1: that that's a mcguffin. It's it. What is a mcguffin said, well,
Speaker 1: it's an apparatus for trapping lines in the Scottish Highlands Mancay,
Speaker 1: but there are no lines in the Scottish Islands. It said.
Speaker 1: Then that's now mcguffin, thank you for clearing that out
Speaker 1: for it. I repeat, it's not the painting that matters.
Speaker 1: That has always been the mistake with the way people
Speaker 1: have thought about boswith Carnations. No more mcguffins. After the break,
Speaker 1: let's start this story again. Let's just talk about your family.
Speaker 1: Your great grandmother is Hedwig Allman. Yes, that's correct. Yes,
Speaker 1: she came from a family who had for a very
Speaker 1: long time lived in Frankfurt, many relatives, very embedded history
Speaker 1: in the city. I'm talking with Sophie Allen. She lives
Speaker 1: in Melbourne. Her great grandmother was Hedwig Alman, the first
Speaker 1: known owner of ozwith Carnations. Hedwig was born in eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy two into a wealthy family in Germany, married Albert Allman,
Speaker 1: lived with him in a grand residence called the Villa
Speaker 1: Gerloc in Frankfurt, and together built an extraordinary art collection.
Speaker 1: So she collected with a great passion medieval sculpture that
Speaker 1: was a huge passion of hers. She collected porcelain, she
Speaker 1: collected silva, and you know, I believe she had different
Speaker 1: rooms for each of these passions in her home. Hedwig
Speaker 1: and Albert had two sons and many grandchildren, one of
Speaker 1: whom was named Claude. Sophie's father. Did he remember Hedwig? Oh,
Speaker 1: he was so attached to Hedwig. He was I think
Speaker 1: the favorite, and she was his favorite. He always spoke
Speaker 1: of her really fondly, and I think he felt that
Speaker 1: was probably the person he loved the most. Did he
Speaker 1: talk about what she was like, Yes, a little bit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean from what he could remember as a young boy,
Speaker 1: very warm and loving and quite gentle, incredibly interested in
Speaker 1: the arts. But the life of Claude's grandparents took a
Speaker 1: sudden turn because the Almonds were Jewish. Frankfurt was already
Speaker 1: starting to change in by nineteen thirty three, and I'm
Speaker 1: not sure exactly what date, but I know that going
Speaker 1: to the opera became an issue. If you had a
Speaker 1: Jewish heritage, you couldn't. There was a stage where you
Speaker 1: couldn't go to the opera, and that was something that
Speaker 1: Hedvic did constantly. She lived around the corner from the
Speaker 1: opera house. You know, her lifestyle started change, and so
Speaker 1: did my grandparents. So they left. They left first, and
Speaker 1: Hedvig didn't come to Milan to write, you know, maybe
Speaker 1: within six months or the last six months that they
Speaker 1: were there, She's going to be line in what year?
Speaker 1: Thirty eight, thirty nine? What year do you know? I
Speaker 1: think it was right at the end of nineteen thirty eight.
Speaker 1: The end of nineteen thirty eight was, of course, Crystal Knocked,
Speaker 1: the Knight of Broken Glass, when at Hitler's direction, mobs
Speaker 1: destroyed hundreds of synagogues and Yeshiba's across Germany. It was
Speaker 1: impossible to be a German Jew after Krystal knocked, and
Speaker 1: imagine that you were safe. Hedwig sold off as much
Speaker 1: of her art collection as she could. She fled to
Speaker 1: Milan to join her sons. Then the intentions of Mussolini
Speaker 1: towards Jews became clear, and the whole family fled again,
Speaker 1: this time to Australia. So they got out in the
Speaker 1: neck of time, Yes they did, and they go via
Speaker 1: the Panama Canal. I remember my father. I don't know
Speaker 1: how on earth he could have remembered that, because he
Speaker 1: was just he was under two years of age, but
Speaker 1: I think it was about a six week trip and
Speaker 1: the two brothers with their families. They both had two
Speaker 1: children each, and head Viggers as the matriarch. They brought her,
Speaker 1: so there were nine of them. They admitted to Melbourne
Speaker 1: Chain their last names Allman became Allen and in May
Speaker 1: of nineteen forty five, four days before the end of
Speaker 1: the war, Hedwick died. My father and my uncle probably
Speaker 1: spent most of their lives just assimilating and embracing the
Speaker 1: life they had, and I think bearing the sadness as
Speaker 1: much as they could, because there's definitely a sadness. There's
Speaker 1: gratitude and there's sadness. They go they kind of almost
Speaker 1: they go along together in our life, and it's come
Speaker 1: through my generation too in a way. Yeah. Then late
Speaker 1: in his life, Claude Ollen decided to revisit the family's
Speaker 1: past to find the famili's art collection that had been
Speaker 1: lost in the desperate escape from Germany. What do you
Speaker 1: think motivated him? What was his How would he expressed
Speaker 1: his desire to pursue his claims Without sounding dramatic, It's
Speaker 1: just I know that my father all throughout his life
Speaker 1: to some degree, maybe within his psyche or. He struggled
Speaker 1: with the fact that the family had had to leave Europe.
Speaker 1: It was like a baseline in his life that there
Speaker 1: had been this massive disruption, and and it just carried
Speaker 1: this sense of loss. It started. It would have started
Speaker 1: with the loss of head Vic. That would be the
Speaker 1: first loss he could understand, because it was a loved grandmother,
Speaker 1: the one who gave him, who doated on him. From
Speaker 1: the stories, I thought he was the bee's knees, and
Speaker 1: he was closer to head Vic than he was to
Speaker 1: his own mother. So Claude Allen sat down and went
Speaker 1: through his grandmother's papers, trying to reconstruct what artworks she
Speaker 1: and her family had owned in the years before the
Speaker 1: war and where they had ended up. Some of the
Speaker 1: works had vanished, others were in plain sight. You can
Speaker 1: find a few for yourself if you spend a few
Speaker 1: hours poking around the internet. There's a Paul Gogain sold
Speaker 1: by Hedwig's sister in law in nineteen thirty eight as
Speaker 1: she too fled Frankfort. That painting ended up at the
Speaker 1: Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio. The family had sold
Speaker 1: the Goggin along with a lovely Vango called the Diggers.
Speaker 1: The Diggers ended up in the hands of a department
Speaker 1: store air, who then gave it to the Detroit Institute
Speaker 1: of Art in the late nineteen sixties. There's a Virgin
Speaker 1: and Child by Lucas Cronoch the Elder from the sixteenth century,
Speaker 1: now in the University of Arizona Museum of Art. Then
Speaker 1: there were the four beautiful wall panels in Hedwig's dining
Speaker 1: room by the prominent German landscape painter Hans Toma Spring, summer, winter, fall.
Speaker 1: Claude Ullen couldn't find out where any of those had gone.
Speaker 1: And finally there was the small, modest still life acquired
Speaker 1: by Hedwig and her husband back in the heyday of
Speaker 1: their collecting, vozwith Carnations Vincent Vango eighteen eighty six. I
Speaker 1: wasn't alive during Hedwig's lifetime. I wasn't even born. I
Speaker 1: wasn't born for another quarter of a century even more.
Speaker 1: But she was very much a part of our lives,
Speaker 1: which she was talked about constantly and very fondly, and
Speaker 1: her life was all around us in some way. As
Speaker 1: Claude Allen began his investigation into Hedwig's last art collections,
Speaker 1: either Holocaust survivors and her family started to do the
Speaker 1: same thing. There were conferences, laws passed. Europe in particular
Speaker 1: had a growing movement to reconsider the status of art
Speaker 1: sold last or confiscated during the war, and it seemed
Speaker 1: that the world was changing and in restitution might be possible.
Speaker 1: My father was very excited and hopeful, deeply hopeful about it,
Speaker 1: whilst I had a very different reaction. I was a
Speaker 1: young adult at the time. I was almost sort of like,
Speaker 1: I don't let's don't catch your hopes up, don't go there.
Speaker 1: It's it's it's just going to bring up. I think
Speaker 1: it's because I thought it was going to bring up
Speaker 1: all these feelings that I knew were down there, but
Speaker 1: I didn't know what they were. And it's it's very
Speaker 1: it's actually for someone whose third generation is still very confronting,
Speaker 1: and that's actually surprises me. And still it continues to
Speaker 1: surprise me. I never met Headvic, so why do I
Speaker 1: feel like this? But I do. It is very much
Speaker 1: a part of me, and it's almost inexplicable. It's I'm
Speaker 1: sort of trying to interrogate it a little bit more
Speaker 1: now because I have to face some of these things,
Speaker 1: some of these situations with the paintings and what to
Speaker 1: do with the legacy. I think it's a really interesting
Speaker 1: and important point because you know, it was when your
Speaker 1: father pursued some of these claims. It's not just about
Speaker 1: the art, it's about healing. Oh yeah, absolutely, it's not
Speaker 1: necessarily about material possessions. The material possessions a kind of
Speaker 1: like the MARKA. It's all everything orients itself around, but
Speaker 1: it's not actually what this is really all about. The
Speaker 1: art is a symbol. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's
Speaker 1: important to understand what Claude Aullen was up against in
Speaker 1: his attempt to locate his grandmother's lost art collection. So
Speaker 1: allow me a digression about a man named Charles Venable.
Speaker 1: Some years ago, Venable was named director of the Speed
Speaker 1: Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. It was his first director's job,
Speaker 1: and he decided to begin by taking a close look
Speaker 1: at the museum's collection. And it started with our works
Speaker 1: on paper collection, where we were just going to get
Speaker 1: an get some expertise in and we were to look
Speaker 1: at every single work on paper. To help him, Venable
Speaker 1: brought in a former curator from the Cleveland Museum of Art,
Speaker 1: which has one of the country's best collections of works
Speaker 1: on paper. The time we went through everything, she said,
Speaker 1: you have about fifty exceptional pieces out of how many.
Speaker 1: It wasn't a huge collection, but we probably had a
Speaker 1: couple of thousand pieces. And then she said, and here's
Speaker 1: another group that are nice. But in the end it
Speaker 1: was like, you should just get rid of all of these,
Speaker 1: keep the fifty good ones, the a pluses. The rest
Speaker 1: Venables sold at auction. And if I'd asked you before
Speaker 1: that process began in Louisville, what percentage were a plus?
Speaker 1: What would you have said? Works on paper? Not in
Speaker 1: my cutorial area. But nevertheless I would have said, you know,
Speaker 1: you would have to have half of them, I suppose
Speaker 1: the exceptional works of art or why would you have
Speaker 1: taken them? Venable next became the director of the Indianapolis
Speaker 1: Museum of Art, or as it is now known, New Fields.
Speaker 1: When he arrived, the museum had fifty five thousand objects,
Speaker 1: It was adding close to a thousand new objects a year,
Speaker 1: and was on the verge of building a multimillion dollar
Speaker 1: storage facility to house its ever expanding collection. And Venable's
Speaker 1: main thought was what if Indianapolis was like Louisville and
Speaker 1: much of the stuff they were storing at such great
Speaker 1: expense wasn't worth keeping. So he and his curators at
Speaker 1: Newfields began combing through every one of the objects in
Speaker 1: the museum's collection. They assigned each artwork a grade. A
Speaker 1: was for something that any museum in the world would want.
Speaker 1: Bees were things that made sense for Indianapolis to have
Speaker 1: it ins collection. Ss D's didn't belong at all. The
Speaker 1: good stuff and the bad stuff were easy to identify,
Speaker 1: but it took years to figure out the bees and sees.
Speaker 1: The curators did tons of research, debated, and kept going
Speaker 1: piece by piece. Our collection is now about forty four
Speaker 1: thousand works of art, down from fifty five thousand, but
Speaker 1: Venable's still not finished. Right now, our collection, based on
Speaker 1: six years of ranking, is about thirty three percent a's
Speaker 1: so right there. Those are going nowhere. So there's you know,
Speaker 1: thousands of works of art, and then clearly we would
Speaker 1: want a good number of bees of works that we
Speaker 1: couldn't replace or they're considered totally worthy to be in
Speaker 1: the gallery for one reason or not. But if you
Speaker 1: take just the seas and the rest of our D's.
Speaker 1: You know, there's probably I'm guessing will be at twenty
Speaker 1: five thirty thousand works of art. They have thousands more
Speaker 1: to go to be auctioned off were given away. We
Speaker 1: had huge, big holdings in contemporary glass, but we don't
Speaker 1: need four hundred pieces in storage, so we gave one
Speaker 1: hundred pieces of contemporary glass to the Glick Center for
Speaker 1: Glass at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, so students
Speaker 1: could learn techno from them. Now, if you listen to
Speaker 1: the previous episode, you know that no one does this
Speaker 1: in the museum world. No one tries to get smaller.
Speaker 1: No one gives things away like that, certainly not on
Speaker 1: the scale that Venable is doing in Indiana, because most
Speaker 1: art museums are like smog the dragon. They're hoarders, deep
Speaker 1: in their layers, fiercely guarding their treasures. Here's an actual
Speaker 1: headline from Art News, one of the major publications of
Speaker 1: the Art World. Quote is Charles Venable democratizing a great
Speaker 1: art museum in Indianapolis or destroying it? Are you a
Speaker 1: kind of Marie? Are you the Marie condo is your apartment?
Speaker 1: Like minimalists, do you get rid of old clothes? You
Speaker 1: no longer wear them. I mean, does this carry over
Speaker 1: to your private life? Oh? Not particularly. I mean my
Speaker 1: husband is much more than eat Nick, who would say
Speaker 1: I'm going to go through my close and get rid
Speaker 1: of all these things, whereas I'm saying, well, I just
Speaker 1: love that shirt and it might hang in my closet
Speaker 1: for you know, years years. It could be ten years old,
Speaker 1: and she's even worse. But that's not running an ar museum.
Speaker 1: Charles Venable is different, not because he's some kind of
Speaker 1: weird neat Nick. He's different because he sees the problem
Speaker 1: his profession has and he's figured out a way to
Speaker 1: do something about it. I asked Randy Frost about what
Speaker 1: it takes to convince a hoarder to thin their collection.
Speaker 1: He's the psychologist we met in the last episode who
Speaker 1: studies hoarding. He told me that with hoarders, the first
Speaker 1: step is talking about the object. So you're saying, in
Speaker 1: this case, the act of forcing someone to conceive and
Speaker 1: verbalize their attachment to the object helps them get rid
Speaker 1: of it. Yes, it shatters the bond in some way,
Speaker 1: or well, I think it puts their attachments into the
Speaker 1: context of the values of their life. Because we focus
Speaker 1: a lot on values. What is it that you value
Speaker 1: in your life? What do you want your life to
Speaker 1: be like? And once you start talking about this and
Speaker 1: have this set of ideas about the value and where
Speaker 1: you want to go in your life together, it changes
Speaker 1: the valance of the object. This is what Charles Venable
Speaker 1: and his curators were doing in Indianapolis as they worked
Speaker 1: their way through the collection, changing the valance of the objects.
Speaker 1: They were asking what is it that we value as
Speaker 1: a museum? Is this object consistent with those values? Acquiring
Speaker 1: art costs money. The museum is a nonprofit with a
Speaker 1: mandate to serve the people of Indiana. Veniable doesn't see
Speaker 1: how collecting more and more stuff that the public will
Speaker 1: never see, not to mention spending millions of dollars to
Speaker 1: warehouses somewhere is consistent without responsibility. You know, you need
Speaker 1: more conservators, You need more art handlers, you need more registrars,
Speaker 1: you need bigger computer systems. If you ask Charles Venable
Speaker 1: to give up a work of art for some broader,
Speaker 1: larger reason, he could do it because he's developed a
Speaker 1: system for giving things up. So I asked him theoretically
Speaker 1: about how he and his curators might evaluate Vaz with
Speaker 1: carnations if it were in their collection. So there's a
Speaker 1: about as famous an artists as you could find, but
Speaker 1: it's very much a minor work of that artist. Is
Speaker 1: that is that an A or not an A? I
Speaker 1: mean not knowing that particular painting. So I'm just thinking
Speaker 1: as a as a sort of a tract question famous
Speaker 1: artist minor work. We wouldn't call it an A. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we would get we would give it a little bump
Speaker 1: because it's by van go a very famous artist, but
Speaker 1: it wouldn't make it an A just because it had
Speaker 1: his name on it. It would It would be a
Speaker 1: minor work by that artist. And then the questions we
Speaker 1: would ask is are we doing a great artist by
Speaker 1: van Gogh, who in many ways change the course of
Speaker 1: Western art history. Are we doing his legacy and his
Speaker 1: work a good deed by showing a pretty minor mediocre
Speaker 1: work in a great institution, and particularly an institution that
Speaker 1: has much better works by Vango? You know where you
Speaker 1: can show an A plus at a place like Detroit.
Speaker 1: Why would you bother with a minor thing? If we
Speaker 1: were offered a painting like that, we would if somebody
Speaker 1: wanted we wouldn't buy it for sure, and if somebody
Speaker 1: wanted to give it to us, we would say, well,
Speaker 1: this is not something that's right to go on our walls.
Speaker 1: If you want to give it to us, are you
Speaker 1: willing to let us sell it and then bring the
Speaker 1: money back to the collection and buy something that your
Speaker 1: name can go. Charles Venable is adept at changing the
Speaker 1: valance of the objects in his possession. He can give
Speaker 1: things up, but he's exception. The rest of the art
Speaker 1: world is still in the grip of their compulsion. So
Speaker 1: back to Claude Ullen, who as a child fled Europe
Speaker 1: with his family. About fifteen years ago. Ullen started asking
Speaker 1: the museums holding Hedwig's art to do a version of
Speaker 1: what Charles Venible does at Indianapolis, or what Randy Frost
Speaker 1: tries to teach hoarders to break their attachment to a
Speaker 1: specific object by asking a broader question about its relationship
Speaker 1: to their own values. In essence, Allen told the museums,
Speaker 1: my grandmother and her family sold some of their prized
Speaker 1: possessions in a moment of desperation and panic to help
Speaker 1: finance their escape from certain death. Are you sure you
Speaker 1: feel right about owning an object with that kind of history.
Speaker 1: Allens started with the Gougain Street in Tahiti and the
Speaker 1: Van Gogh The Diggers, that were once owned by Hedwig's
Speaker 1: brother and sister in law. Allen and a group of
Speaker 1: his relatives approached the Toledo Museum and the Detroit Institute
Speaker 1: of Art with their requests. The family was forced to
Speaker 1: give these paintings up under duress in nineteen thirty eight.
Speaker 1: Could they get them back? And what happened? The two
Speaker 1: museums turned around and sued the Allens. That was in
Speaker 1: order too, and this is one of those wonderful legal euphemisms,
Speaker 1: quiet the title to the painting, And when the case
Speaker 1: went to court, the museums won on the narrow grounds
Speaker 1: that the statute of limitations had expired. According to the
Speaker 1: Federal Court in Detroit, the Allen's case would have been
Speaker 1: valid only if they had filed a claim for the
Speaker 1: Diggers within three years of the painting was first sold.
Speaker 1: It was sold in nineteen thirty eight, so they needed
Speaker 1: to have asked for it back by nineteen forty one,
Speaker 1: when those members of the Allen family who had not
Speaker 1: managed to flee for their lives were sitting in concentration camps.
Speaker 1: Allen had asked the museums to consider the morality of
Speaker 1: their attachments. They responded by pointing to the legality of
Speaker 1: their attachments. They don't want to make this about values.
Speaker 1: No hord Or would consider the story of another of Ango,
Speaker 1: a spectacular painting called the Night Cafe. It was once
Speaker 1: owned by a Russian collector. The Bolsheviks seized it when
Speaker 1: they took power in nineteen eighteen. It's worth hundreds of
Speaker 1: millions today. Later it was sold by the Soviets to
Speaker 1: the heir to the Singer's sewing machine fortune. The Soviets
Speaker 1: collected a huge profit. The air later willed it to
Speaker 1: the Yale University Art Museum. Then the original owners descendant
Speaker 1: came to Yale and said that painting was stolen from
Speaker 1: my great grandfather. Did Yale give it back? Of course not.
Speaker 1: They soothed the great grandson and won. There's a picasso
Speaker 1: in the Metropolitan Museum in New York called The Actor,
Speaker 1: worth well over one hundred million dollars. It had been
Speaker 1: owned by Paul and Alice Lefman, a Jewish couple in Cologne, Germany,
Speaker 1: who fled for Italy in nineteen thirty seven. Sound familiar.
Speaker 1: They sold the painting to pay for their escape. Their
Speaker 1: great grandnees soothed the Met to get it back, saying
Speaker 1: that it was given up under duress. The court ruled
Speaker 1: in favor of the Met. The judge in the case
Speaker 1: said that the Leftmans weren't technically under duress because duress,
Speaker 1: for the purposes of the law requires quote fear induced
Speaker 1: by a specific and concrete threat of harm purposefully presented
Speaker 1: by its author to extort the victim's consent. In other words,
Speaker 1: in order for the Leftman's to get their Picasso back,
Speaker 1: an official in the Nazi Party would have had to
Speaker 1: come to them in nineteen thirty seven, put a gun
Speaker 1: directly to their head and say sell me your Picasso.
Speaker 1: And because the Fascists chose to be a touch more
Speaker 1: subtle in their methods of extortion, that painting still hangs
Speaker 1: today on the walls of the Met and Vaz with carnations.
Speaker 1: There's a legal loophole in that case as well. Hedwig
Speaker 1: gave it to an art dealer in nineteen thirty eight,
Speaker 1: but that was to sell on consignment, and the art
Speaker 1: dealer took it to New York and didn't get around
Speaker 1: to selling it until after the war was over. Hedwig
Speaker 1: may have given it up under darrests of the Nazi threat,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't sold under the duress of the Nazi threat.
Speaker 1: Claude Allen had no legal claim to Vaz with Carnations,
Speaker 1: just a moral claim, and moral claims matched up against
Speaker 1: the compulsions of the hoarder don't amount to much. In
Speaker 1: the end. It was not a museum that returned any
Speaker 1: piece of Hedwig's original art collection. It was a packaged
Speaker 1: goods company. One It sells flower, biscuits and beer. The
Speaker 1: Utcar Group, based three hours north of Frankfort, the Kraft
Speaker 1: Foods of Germany. The company's former CEO, Rudolph August Utcher,
Speaker 1: had an extensive art collection. The company did a providence
Speaker 1: check of his paintings and they discovered that in nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty four, Rudolf had bought one of the four Hans
Speaker 1: Tomo wall paintings that had once hung in Hedwig's living room,
Speaker 1: a large canvass of children dancing around a blooming tree.
Speaker 1: One day, out of that blue, your father hears that
Speaker 1: one of his beloved grandmother's paintings is coming back. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it sort of really hit him to the corps. The
Speaker 1: Airs did not know the whereabouts of the painting. I'm
Speaker 1: reading now from the short statement release by the UCA
Speaker 1: group after they contacted the Islands. The company advised them
Speaker 1: that the painting was in its possession and that it
Speaker 1: wished to return it to them on moral grounds. The
Speaker 1: Airs have gratefully accepted. Do you remember, can you describe
Speaker 1: what happened when he first Dad would have cried. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he was quite emotional and he was quite emotional about
Speaker 1: this aspect, and we had several conversations over it, and
Speaker 1: he would cry nearly every single time. Yeah. Yeah, Is
Speaker 1: it a beautiful painting, Yes, yeah it is. It's a
Speaker 1: beautiful painting. But it also starts to complete the circle
Speaker 1: within our family. The stories we would tell because head
Speaker 1: Vic had a room where they were they the Hans
Speaker 1: Toomer works. It was a dining room and they were
Speaker 1: painted around the room and Hans Toomer I think was
Speaker 1: one of the eye she loved the most. So to
Speaker 1: have a work returned was it was like almost a
Speaker 1: completing of the circle. And yeah, it was. It was
Speaker 1: deeply meaningful, especially to my father. Claude Ellen died shortly
Speaker 1: after his grandmother's painting was returned. As for us with Carnations,
Speaker 1: it's still in Detroit. The Islands are not pursuing their
Speaker 1: claims to that painting. They know they'll never win. And
Speaker 1: where is the painting currently? Is it now on display
Speaker 1: or is it still in storage? Where is it now
Speaker 1: in the in the museum, it's on display, It's been
Speaker 1: on display, and it was recently featuring an exhibition in
Speaker 1: the Barberini Gallery post Arm next to Berlin about Bano
Speaker 1: still lives. The Detroit Institute of Art is in midtown Detroit,
Speaker 1: across Woodward Avenue from the main branch of the Public Library.
Speaker 1: A beautiful building with an extraordinary collection. If you get
Speaker 1: a chance, go and see Vas with Carnations, And if
Speaker 1: you like it, stop by the gift shop and pick
Speaker 1: up a pair of Vas with Carnations socks for nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety five, one size fits all, and Vas with Carnations
Speaker 1: aloe soap for sixteen ninety five in a little round
Speaker 1: ten with van Go's Carnations on the cover. But don't
Speaker 1: spend too much time thinking about the painting. The painting
Speaker 1: is a mcguffin. Think about where it came from and
Speaker 1: what it stands for, and then do me a favor.
Speaker 1: When you leave, put a note in the suggestion box.
Speaker 1: I have seen vas with carnations. It doesn't belong here.
Speaker 1: Revision's History is produced by Mela Belle and Leemingistu with
Speaker 1: Jacob Smith, Aloise Lynton and Anna and I. Our editor
Speaker 1: is Julia Barton. Original scoring by Luis Gara, mastering by
Speaker 1: Flawn Williams, fact checking by Beth Johnson, and special thanks
Speaker 1: to the Pushkin Crew head of Fane, Carl Migliore, Maya Kanick,
Speaker 1: Maggie Taylor, Jason Gambrell and of course l Hafe, Jacob Weisberg.
Speaker 1: I'm Malcolm Glabo.