The Jackdaw

Tag: Matisse

  • Laura Gascoigne: Crime Without Punishment

    In May, policemen with shovels moved in again on 79-year-old mobster Robert Gentile’s Connecticut ranch. It’s the third time they’ve searched the property and the second time they’ve dug it up in the hope of finding the 13 masterpieces, including Rembrandt’s Storm on the Sea of Galilee, stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990. A few years ago Gentile boasted in jail that he knew the whereabouts of the loot, a mistake the old Mafioso – and his missus, if he still has one – is presumably regretting.

    With the $5 million reward still unclaimed after 26 years, expectations of the works’ survival are vanishingly slim. According to the Art Loss Register’s reckoning, 15% of missing masterpieces never reappear, but the fact that some do keeps hope alive. Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter to Her Maid, stolen from Russborough House in 1986 by Dublin underworld ‘General’ Martin Cahill in 1986, was tracked down seven years later by Scotland Yard Art and Antiques Squad sleuth Charles Hill, and of course the Tate got back its two Turners nicked from the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt in 1994 after eight years of dodgy negotiations with Serbian gangsters and the payment of a £3 million ransom, ahem, reward for information.

    If museum heists seem to have passed their heyday, it’s because WikiArt-educated criminals have come to realise that world-famous paintings can’t be shifted. There is still idiocy among thieves, however. The works by Monet, Matisse and Picasso stolen by Romanian gangsters from the Kunsthal Rotterdam in 2012 were eventually incinerated by one of their mothers, on the principle that ovens are the best place for hot potatoes. Some mobsters do ’ave ’em. But museum thieves with half a brain today make sure of their market (black if possible) in advance. Hong Kong was the destination of the Chinese antiquities nicked from English regional museums in 2012 in a spate of burglaries by the romantically named Rathkeale Rovers. Limerick tinkers they may be, but the Rovers twigged that profit margins are wider on intact jade carvings than on melted down Henry Moore bronzes, and there’s less heavy lifting involved.

    Like the hoary ‘Diamond Wheezers’ who tunnelled into Hatton Garden last year, the Rovers were good old-fashioned breakers-and-enterers – the last of their three incursions, into Durham’s Oriental Museum, was through a brick wall. In the digi-crime era, the public has a special affection for analogue thieves. We relish the effrontery, ingenuity and occasional battiness of the stubbornly unmodernised criminal enterprise. We have a particular soft spot for the crackpot with a social conscience like John Bunton, who lifted Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington though an open toilet window at the National Gallery in 1961 in aid of his unemployed bus driver father’s protest against the imposition of the BBC licence fee on the poor. And it pleases us to think of art-loving thieves enjoying quiet possession of their booty, as Vincenzo Peruggia did for two years with the Mona Lisa after liberating her from the Louvre in 1911 with the aim of repatriating her to Italy. Peruggia’s mistake was to expect a reward for his patriotism – a thief has to live – but became a national hero on his arrest.

    Sadly, the ‘gentleman thief’ and the ‘cachet crime’ are becoming history – one reason why Lund Humphries’ new publication Crime and the Art Market by Riah Pryor is not the page-turner you might expect. A former art crime researcher at Scotland Yard and assistant art market editor at The Art Newspaper, Pryor promises in the preface to address the issue of “whether the art market, with its opaque structures and secretive ways of doing business, is fundamentally facilitating criminal activity.” She looks at different categories of crime – forgery, theft and trade in looted antiquities – and different attempts, official and unofficial, to deal with them.

    In the case of looted antiquities, the book is a depressing catalogue of international declarations, conventions and protocols endlessly wriggled out of by rich ‘market’ countries to the continued despoliation of poor ‘source’ ones. We British are expert at deferring ratification: it took us until 2002 to ratify the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export, and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, and last year, when finally ready to ratify the 1999 protocol to the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property, we ran out of parliamentary time. On the domestic front, an equally dismal picture emerges of a police force that is underfunded, sclerotic and generally indifferent to a crime it (and the mass of the public) considers low priority. The recovery of stolen art is now mainly left to private consultants with police backgrounds – money attracts cops as well as robbers – and justice is more quickly (though expensively) achieved through the civil courts.

    It’s hard to know who this book is for. It won’t teach professionals anything they don’t know and amateurs will find it disappointing. After challenging the view “that criminals involved in art (particularly forgers) are deserving of an admiration not offered to criminals targeting other markets”, Pryor can hardly regale us with tales of their exploits. She seems equally loath to investigate the shady financial practices that have turned the art market into a global ‘marché ouvert’ for anyone rich enough to retain the services of Mossack Fonseca. The chapter headed When is a Problem a Problem? would be better titled When Is a Crime a Crime? The answer, she suggests, is when the money says so: laws are enforced “where patterns of criminal activity threaten the market’s profit margins.” On page 147 comes the understatement of the century: “Secrecy around the identities of those involved in a transaction, combined with the highly subjective and dynamic value of cultural property, can lead to fears of market manipulation.” Well I never.

    You can’t escape the feeling throughout this book that its author is covering her back in case she never works in the art world again. Her conclusion, when she reaches it, is no conclusion at all: “With no quantifiable means by which to determine how many professionals are tempted into criminal activity and how this compares to other markets, any sweeping conclusion of art market behaviour only ever seems to be based on a foundation of snapshots, gut feeling and anecdotes.” In other words, the exercise is pointless. Still, a few more anecdotes would have leavened the loaf, and some observations from the horse’s mouth might have raised the philosophical tone. Take this pearl of wisdom from the late lamented Peter Scott, cat burglar to the stars and author of Gentleman Thief: “The people I burgled got rich by greed and skullduggery. They indulged in the mechanics of ostentation – they deserved me and I deserved them. If I rob Ivana Trump, it is just a meeting of two different kinds of degeneracy on a dark rooftop.”

    Now that Ivana Trump’s ex-husband is running for President of the United States, will anything change? I’ll give the last word to Charles Hill, who told a Guardian interviewer in 2006: “The amount of beauty matched by moral turpitude in the art world generally, but specifically in the world of art crime, is fascinating. There’s a great fluctuating moral tide and people just bob along on it.”

    Ten years on, the fascination is becoming morbid as the tide of turpitude keeps rising with no sign of any flood barriers going up.  

    Laura Gascoigne
    The Jackdaw

  • Matisse at the Tate: cut and paste

    Edward Lucie-Smith admires an ambitious exhibition but with the reservation that something is missing

    The big new exhibition of Matisse’s Cut-Outs at Tate Modern in London is, certainly on the face of it, everything that a major museum of Modern and Contemporary Art should be doing. It is beautifully presented, very professionally curated, has an extremely thorough, excellently illustrated catalogue and has been greeted with ecstatic reviews. It is thronged with visitors, but fortunately not to the point of suffocation (as was the case, alas, with the National Gallery’s recent Leonardo da Vinci exhibition). The rooms in which it is shown are big enough to allow the visitor enough space to view the exhibits from a variety of distances, and the works themselves are often on a suitably grand scale.

    I departed from it thinking that here was exactly the kind of show that an institution of this kind ought to present. Tate Modern is, currently, the most visited gallery of modern art in the world, outstripping both the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Pompidou in Paris, although, to be frank, its own permanent collection is not on a par with the stellar holdings of either of these rivals. It was only after I left that doubts began to make themselves felt, and I’m not sure that these doubts are the fault of Tate Modern or of the organizers of the occasion. Perhaps they are inherent in our present cultural situation, where the creative force of the Modern Movement seems to be inexorably dwindling away.

    Just over 113 years ago, in November 1910, the Grafton Galleries in London opened a show called Manet and the Post-Impressionists. It was apparently the first time that the term ‘Post-Impressionist’ was used in English. Matisse, who had sprung to fame at the Paris Salon des Indépendants of 1905, was one of the artists included. The British press was excoriating about the exhibition. The anonymous reviewer in The Times of London commented that the work shown “throws away all that the long-developed skills of past artists had acquired and bequeathed. It begins all over again – and stops where a child would stop.” How times have changed!

    Yet it is immediately obvious that in some respects Matisse’s work during his last years did not move very far from what was shown in Paris in 1905 and in 1910 and in London. The famous Luxe, calme et volupté, shown at the Indépendants in 1905, and now in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, is a very recognizable ancestor of the compositions with nudes shown in London.

    What changed was the technique. The compositions were no longer painted, they were made with pieces of cut paper. Matisse did the cutting, and the papers he used were painted in gouache to his exact specifications. Once cut, they were pinned in place according to his directions.

    Matisse had already experimented with designs made from cut and pasted paper in the 1930s – the projects he tackled included decors for the ballet and maquettes for book covers. When he did these collage was already long established as one of the typically ‘modernist’ methods of image making. Picasso and other Cubists had made radically experimental use of it. Collage techniques had also been extensively employed by amateur artists throughout the 19th century. Interestingly the word ‘collage’ seems to be absent from the catalogue. Matisse was not completely an innovator in this phase of his work.

    The real starting point for the Cut-Outs was the serious illness that Matisse suffered from in 1941. He was operated on for duodenal cancer and nearly died from resultant complications. As a result he was unable to stand up for long periods, and had to make art while seated in a wheel chair, from another specially adapted chair, or reclining in his bed. Using scissors and cut paper he could, with the help of assistants, continue to create work on an ambitious scale.

    Because of Matisse’s long-established celebrity the process of making these works and the various stages they went through were extensively documented photographically. The catalogue published in connection with the current Tate Modern exhibition has a very rich series of illustrations of this kind, made by various photographers, some working under the artist’s direction, and some not.

    If one reads the Tate catalogue attentively, it is possible to detect a certain note of nostalgic regret that appears when these records of the images in situ in Matisse’s several studios are discussed. What the authors of the various essays seem to long for is permission to hail Matisse as the pioneer, perhaps even the God the Father, of the current Post Modernist tendency to promote installation as the pinnacle or ne plus ultra of late Modernist and Post-Modernist creativity. The problem is that they can’t quite bring themselves to say this in so many words. As it happens, their silence is justified by what one actually sees at the Tate.

    Wonderfully decorative as many of them are, it is clear that a certain loss of freshness took place when the Cut-Outs were removed from Matisse’s studio and made ready for public exhibition. All too often, one feels as if one is looking at an exquisitely beautiful, immaculately preserved corpse. There is another problem as well. The aged Matisse, armed with a pair of scissors, confidently slicing through the sheets of coloured paper prepared for him, was wonderfully skilful at simplifying natural forms – nude female bodies, birds, fish, leaves, even algae floating in water. Yet the compositions only occasionally add up to something more than decoration. Some extra dimension of emotion is missing.

    Towards the end of the presentation there is something not technically a Cut-Out – a stained glass window called Christmas Eve, commissioned by Time Inc. in New York. The composition is curiously perfunctory – banal symbolism for a safely ecumenical Christmas card.

    Despite the fame of the Matisse-designed chapel at Vence – maquettes for its windows are also included in the show – religious emotion was clearly not part of Matisse’s temperament. With this exhibition ‘What you see is what you get’. Exactly what you get – don’t ask for more. I left thinking it was 99% wonderful, and regretting the missing one per cent perhaps more than I should have done.