Pictures in Peril

In The Cleaning of Paintings, Hulmut Ruhemann sums up the book Pictures in Peril as follows:

The various hazards to which pictures may be subjects--war, fire, mutilation, repainting, incompetent or dishonest restoration--are classified and illustrated by notable cases. An interesting but rather popularized account.

Details from Jacob Jordaen's Adam and Eve (De Zondeval: Eva biedt Adam het fruit aan (Genesis 3:6), ca. 1630, at the Budapest Szépmüvészeti Múzeum

Above: A 19th century of overpainting of the work
Below: The restoration after the removal of the overpainting (source: ThinkVisual'2 blog)

The images above show how greatly a work of art can be distorted and damaged by its owner.  In Pictures in Peril, the pseudonymous author H.H. Pars the tale of how a Hungarian nobleman gave away this painting that had hung in a servant's quarters and later in a lumber room.  Although the painting had been retouched, the recipient recognized a great difference in skill between the brushwork of the faces and the rest of the work. Experts appraised the painting and realized that the original work lay underneath and could be restored.  We can see that the searching, questioning faces of the original Adam and Eve below are far more powerful than touched-up Adam's jovial smile and the touched-up Eva's stern countenance.

That "the art treasures of Europe have been in constant movement" is the central idea behind Pictures in Peril. For centuries, art masterworks have been carried off through pillage, as war plunder, and seized by theft and fraud. A good many more have been destroyed through human folly, in fires, earthquakes, and lost in sunken ships.  The author gives the example of Caravaggio's Danaë which was mutilated by a mad king, but many other artworks were neglected in more mundane ways like being used to prop open a door or becoming a window shutter.

No history of lost and destroyed art can be complete without discussing iconoclasm, the breaking or destroying of images to prevent idolatry and their use in worship.  The author quotes Friedrich Schiller's account of the mobs who, at the instigation of Calvinist iconoclasts, vandalized and looted churches, destroying organs, artworks, stained glass window.  They even hacked a wooden sculpture of Christ on the cross to pieces while leaving the crucified thieves intact.  This movement took its name from the 9th century Byzantine iconoclasm which the author notes produced the benefit of causing great artists and their secret knowledge of painting materials and techniques to migrate to Western Europe.

The French revolution and subsequent Napoleonic Wars led to great destruction and displacement of artworks. While occupying Rome, French forces seized many golden and silver art objects, melting them down. Other objects became spoils of war to "adorn the reign of freedom" in revolutionary France.

At the same time the author recounts many heroic figures who did their best to rescue precious works of art, hiding them or moving them to safety. There are also many tales of individuals who worked to restore damaged or neglected art works. However, the author points out that many of the earliest attempts at art preservation were more akin to alchemy than to chemistry in their techniques and often caused greater harm than good.

While most of the book deals with outright theft and destruction of artworks, a subtler way to pillage for artwork is with the checkbook. There is a chapter devoted to the Duveen Brothers, London art dealers who supplied European masterworks to mega-wealthy of America's Gilded Age. Possession of important cultural icons lifted the collectors to a "new social plain." These artworks could also confer tax benefits if they were donated to public institutions like art museums. San Franciscans who visit the California Palace of the Legion of Honor are beneficiaries of the collecting prowess of Samuel H. Kress, the magnate who founded the Kress "five and dime" retail chain.

After reading this chatty book, I later learned that H.H. Pars is the pseudonym for Hans Diebow who during the German Third Reich was a Nazi journalist and active anti-Semitic propagandist.  In a book review of the Handbook of Anti-Semitism (Handbook des Antisemitismus - De Gruyter, 2009), the author singled out Diebow as a "rightly forgotten writer" (zu recht vergessenen Schriftstellers). 

Nevertheless, the 13th chapter of Pictures in Peril devotes several pages to the destruction of art during the Second World War and lays a good deal of the blame on Adolph Hitler and German Fascism. For Pars / Diebow the Third Reich were the "heirs" of earlier Calvinist and Byzantine iconoclasm. He found the damage was done both through the removal of art works from museum collections

and the sidelining and persecution of artists who would not submit to being tools of the state. Perhaps he sought to pardon his own involvement by stating that those who did not join with the Nazi party "lost the right to practice their profession."  

He also describes the vigor with which high-ranking Nazis looted museums and private collections with some leaders avidly appropriating otherwise banned artworks.  They were happy to "expropriate" collections of the great Jewish families. Inventorying the thousands of precious artworks they pillaged from the Palais Rothschild they enthused over "objects of such singular character that it is impossible to assess their value." (The Monuments Men, a popular book made into a film, tells part of this tale.) 

In order to bring a book like this up to date, it would be essential to detail how dealers and collectors have taken advantage of conflict and poverty to steal works from the developing world.  A recent example that came to light through the Pandora Papers were that Cambodian artworks illegally acquired by San Francisco's Asian Art Museum through disgraced art dealer Douglas Latchford.  The Museum was obliged to repatriate the works that they assumed "had left their places of origin in a legal manner."

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Broder, Henryk M., "Antisemitismus-Forschung: 'Abgefeimte Techniken'," Der Spiegel (January 27, 2010).

Edsel, Robert M. & Brett Witter, The Monuments Men : Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History (Little, Brown and Company, 2013).

Irwin, Veronica, "Asian Art Museum reckons with Cambodian antiquities of disputed provenance," San Francisco Examiner (October 14, 2021).

Pars, H. H., Pictures in Peril, translated by Kathrine Talbot (Oxford University Press, 1957).

"Responses from museums to Pandora Papers antiquities investigation." Washington Post (October 5, 2021).

Ruhemann, Helmut, The Cleaning of Paintings: Problems and Potentialities (Faber, 1968).