30 May 2018

Twenty years of Washington Principles: yet another conference

by Marc Masurovsky

On November 26-28, 2018, almost exactly twenty years after the start of the Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets, the German Lost Art Foundation will host an international “specialist” conference entitled: “20 Years of Washington Principles: Challenges for the Future”. The aims of the conference are as follows:

“Beginning with a look back at the Washington Conference of 1998, the conference aims to discuss the developments that have taken place in the individual countries since then, in order to address a number of questions for the future: What spectrum is there for fair and just solutions? How can open gaps in provenance be dealt with? What does provenance research need in order to be able to work effectively? How can its methods be used adequately in education and training, in exhibitions and in museum communication? And above all: What contribution to a culture of remembrance can provenance research achieve?"

Twenty years ago, eleven Washington Principles were defined and issued as non-binding recommendations for national governments, cultural institutions and the proverbial art market to follow and abide by as a “soft” means of raising awareness about the racially- and politically-motivated displacements of Jewish-held property, cultural and other, between 1933 and 1945, which provoked illegal transfers of title and ownership from Jewish to non-Jewish possessors. Since then, there have been countless lawsuits and judicial proceedings filed by Holocaust claimants and their families in different legal settings on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean to try and recover what they argued was rightfully theirs. At the same time, museums and auction houses were placed under closer scrutiny, not by regulatory overseers, but by lawmakers, Jewish officials, lawyers, historians, researchers, journalists and NGO’s, in how they presented the contents of their collections, especially those items that were transacted between 1933 and 1945. In the case of the two largest auction houses, Christie’s and Sotheby’s, their sales and consignment practices fell under the magnifying glass to screen the provenance of items offered for sale and ensure that they did not indicate possible mishandling during the Nazi years, which could lead to a possible claim to block the sale of the item in order to facilitate a restitution to an aggrieved owner.

How can open gaps in provenance be dealt with?

Way too much ink has been spilled since the late 1990s on the subject of “provenance research.” Art historians and museum professionals had never encountered such pressure to explicitly describe and, many times, justify their recourse to “provenance research” in their daily practice as a means by which to ensure that the institution which they served was freed of any possible accusation of holding items which had been illegally displaced during the Nazi years and never returned to their rightful owners. One of the key issues motivating such research was “how to fill gaps” in the known ownership history of objects under their care or being offered for sale through auction houses or in other market venues. Filling a provenance gap has become a regular feature of provenance research, discussed at a plethora of conferences, symposia, and colloquia, organized both inside and outside academic circles in North America, Europe and even Asia. Researchers of all stripes and convictions have built part time or full time careers (as long as they work for defense lawyers and governments!) delving into the sinews of ownership trails to try and find crucial details that might fill up the spatio-temporal abyss known as “the gap.”

Here we are, in 2018, contemplating yet another international conference to reminisce over the Washington Principles. At that conclave, participants will be asked to contemplate “how to deal with open gaps in provenances.” What exactly has happened since 1998, if it is not putting into place complex strategies on how to address those “gaps.” It is hard to imagine how this question is pertinent unless the organizers of the conference have not been keeping tabs with the evolution of the provenance research field, however quixotic it has been.

What spectrum is there for fair and just solutions?

Washington Principle #8 states:

“If the pre-War owners of art that is found to have been confiscated by the Nazis and not subsequently restituted, or their heirs, can be identified, steps should be taken expeditiously to achieve a just and fair solution, recognizing this may vary according to the facts and circumstances surrounding a specific case.” As stated in previous articles published on the plundered-art blog, the idea of “a just and fair solution” was not the brainchild of a Holocaust claimant seeking the physical return—restitution—of his/her lost property from the possessing institution, be it public or private.

The real question should be: have current possessors been fair and just to Holocaust claimants? Please explain your response, whether positive or negative.

The framers of the November Berlin conference on Washington Principles should make up their minds about the focus of their gathering. Is it about the future of the Washington Principles or is it about provenance research? Is it about assessing the merits and limitations of the Principles or is it about provenance research? Are they suggesting that provenance research lies at the root of restitution proceedings and “fair and just solutions”? If so, they should state this idea openly. In other words, they seem mighty confused about what they are trying to achieve in November 2018, as if twenty years have come and gone without them witnessing too much. One can grow impatient with such “innocent” questions raised almost in rhetorical fashion to stimulate a discussion which might not actually happen. If one wishes to delve deep into the vagaries and limitations imposed on provenance research by institutions subsidizing and acquiring such research, the discussion might soon become contentious. But contention is not a desired outcome, much as it unfolded at the Franco-German Bonn Conference of November 2017 on the wartime art market in France, where the fault lines on the financing of research in Germany by the Lost Art Foundation were exposed in a rather blunt manner. Do we want such a recurrence to take place in Berlin? I doubt it. If that is the case, the line of questioning should be altered and focused on the crucial issues facing provenance research—lack of funding, lack of focus, too much political meddling in the direction of the research.

How can [the] methods [of provenance research] be used adequately in education and training, in exhibitions and in museum communication?

That’s a rather funny question because most museums—public and private—in Europe and North America oppose almost religiously any discussion of National Socialism, the Holocaust, the Second World War, Nazi expansionism, collaboration with the Nazis, as integral parts of the narrative to explain how these movements, trends, and events would have shaped the fate of objects in their collections. So instead of asking “innocently” how these methods can be used “in education and training, in exhibitions and in museum communication”, perhaps the framers of the Berlin conference should provide a sober assessment to the participants as a starting point:

There is no education, there is very little provenance training, if any, there is no talk of the larger historical context in the presentation of ownership histories in exhibitions and in “museum communication”. Ask why that is, instead of pretending that there is training and education.

What contribution to a culture of remembrance can provenance research achieve?

This question is astounding in and of itself. It might subsume that restitutions and “fair and just solutions” combined will become obsolete and a thing of the past. Instead of focusing on justice, why not use the history of objects to engage in “remembrance” of lost lives, lost art, the Holocaust and all of its ugliness. Isn’t it better that way? Remembrance is the ticket out for many people to clear their conscience and feel that they are being morally and ethically correct in how they treat objects with dubious histories. Perhaps, we should just set aside the ugliness of the past and focus instead on the loss of human life, as perceived or hinted at through the history of objects with Holocaust-laden stories and interruptions.

It’s hard to fathom how, after twenty years, adult men and women who are supposed to be experts and who are respected for their wisdom and insights, who occupy positions of leadership in institutions that steer and foster research and education on the most complex, most heinous crime—genocide and its corollary, plunder—perpetrated by men and women against other men, women, and children, only because of what they were—Jews--, can propose a framework of discussion which suggests that not much has happened in the twenty years that elapsed since the Washington Conference on Holocaust Assets.

I am tongue-tied.

In the mean time, the best advice that I can give is to hold a parallel conference that discusses the following themes:

-Throw out the Washington Principles, rewrite them and adapt them to the realities of the 21st century;

-Forget about “fair and just solutions”: they constitute a corporate welfare program for claimants, or how to buy out the claim without losing title to looted works in one’s collection.

-Fund provenance research at much higher levels than they are currently,

-Establish provenance research training programs on both sides of the Atlantic in order to train new generations of researchers, art historians into the finer aspects of contextual research that actually weaves the larger history into the history of displaced objects and inculcates critical thinking into their methodologies.

-Learn how to tell stories that are meaningful and truthful, not spun and woven tales designed to make museums feel better about themselves.

Provenance research can be challenging

by Marc Masurovsky

In the two decades since the now-infamous Washington Conference on Holocaust-era Assets of December 1998 which produced the "Washington Principles." many American museums were placed quite naturally on the defensive since they became the focal point of attention of lawmakers, Jewish organizations, an emerging motley group of art restitution experts, including attorneys, researchers, claimants and assorted historians and NGOs.

In the years following the issuance of the above-mentioned Principles, declarations of faith made by American museum associations--the then-American Association of Museums (AAM) and the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) to the effect that they had the "Nazi-era" provenance problem under control were rarely taken seriously, if at all. The specialized public associated either directly or indirectly with questions of art restitution and Holocaust-related thefts of Jewish-owned property, believed--rightly or wrongly--that a vast majority of museum professionals, including their curators, directors and trustees, held the view that whatever entered their collections was there to stay.  Moreover the threshold of evidence needed to consider returning an object was so high that no one on earth could rightfully claim to meet that standard. Hence, all was good in their minds; restitution would remain a dead letter. So they thought.

Since the late 1990s, Holocaust victims and their heirs have challenged American cultural institutions by asking their representatives for the restitution of their families'  objects which they believed had been spoliated, plundered, misappropriated during the commission of an act of genocide. In response to those claims, museum professionals and their legal representatives have tried to show publicly their "good faith" in meeting these historic claims on a solid footing of historical and forensic inquiry leading to some kind of reasonable outcome even if it meant, in the extreme cases, that they would have to part ways with the claimed objects in their collections.

In that spirit, a number of American museums have gone out of their way to convince the public that the research is challenging. The act of documenting the historical path of these claimed objects for the purpose of unearthing misdeeds which would call into question the museum's ownership of these objects poses challenges.  Here are three examples:
Provenance research can prove challenging as records may have been lost or destroyed in the upheaval of war. In addition, the passage of time and world events often make important information difficult to locate. Gaps in the provenance of a particular work may be attributable to different causes, from an owner's desire for anonymity to the unavailability of records of purchase and sale. Thus, incomplete provenance information does not necessarily mean that a work has been tainted by the events of the Nazi era. In addition, in some cases, a work may have been seized by the Nazis but later restituted to its original owners and subsequently donated or sold by them.

Stanford University
This research can be very complex and challenging due to a number of factors, including changes in the attribution and title; physical alteration of a work; the absence, loss, or destruction of transfer documents and other records; ambiguities in family histories; an owner’s desire for anonymity; societal and political upheaval; natural disasters; and poor record-keeping over time. Consequently, gaps in provenance are common and do not necessarily mean the object has a problematic past.

Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD

Provenance research is conducted by museum staff, fellows, and interns, and information generated by this work is continually added to individual object records. Although the museum seeks to verify and expand the provenance information associated with individual works of art in its collection, establishing a complete history of ownership can often prove challenging. The museum therefore encourages the sharing of information that might help to clarify the provenance of objects in its collection.

All I can say to the "challenging" nature of provenance research is: no kidding!

And here we thought research had always been an integral part of a museum professional's daily tasks to do just that--research--before accepting an object as part of the institution's collection.

Live and learn...

23 May 2018

TD 51072

by Marc Masurovsky

Treasury Directive TD 51072 was passed on June 8, 1944, two days after D-Day, under sections 3(a) and 5(b) of the Trade with the Enemy Act. Its aim was to restrict the importation into the US of any art object with a value exceeding 5000 dollars or is of artistic, historic and scholarly interest irrespective of monetary value.” The method of restriction was sequestration of objects falling under the aegis of the Directive. The Roberts Commission was charged with reviewing the documentation accompanying these sequestered objects and either approving or refusing their release under a license issued by Treasury.

The directive applied to any art object that had changed hands since March 12, 1938, two days after the absorption of Austria into the German Reich, known as the Anschluss. In other words, any art object subjected to “internal plunder” from 1933 to 1938, was exempted de facto from the Directive.

Further exemptions to the TD weakened its impact upon enactment.  For instance, objects imported from the United Kingdom and its dominions were exempted from TD 51072. Also, objects coming in from so-called neutral or non-belligerent countries were exempted from inspection at the US Border. However, importers were still required to file two separate forms, a TFE-1 (license to import) and FFC-168 (questionnaire) [FFC-Foreign Funds Control was the main investigative arm of the Treasury and the predecessor to the Office of Foreign Assets Control at the US Department of Treasury]. These forms were designed to shed light on the origin of the objects and the circumstances of their acquisition prior to their entry into the US.

The loophole created by the “artistic, historic or scholarly” value of the object meant that cultural objects viewed as “ordinary” might be allowed in without further ado. What the US authorities together with the museum professionals of the Roberts Commission did not realize is that the vast majority of art objects looted by the Axis fell under that category of “ordinariness.”

The impact of TD 51072 on cultural imports into the US was limited owing to these many exemptions. Also, the Roberts Commission worked hard to dilute its impact and eventually lobbied the Treasury to have the directive revoked on grounds that there was no evidence of loot entering the US. A note here: the Roberts commission would not have known how to identify a looted cultural or artistic object if if it was staring at them, as there were no exhaustive listings of what had been looted by the Axis at the time the Directive was enacted. The Roberts Commission succeeded in getting the TD 51072 revoked and, feeling that its work was done, voted itself out of existence in July 1946, confident that business as usual should resume post haste.

Why all the fuss about provenance research?

by Marc Masurovsky

Up until the mid-to late 1990s, provenance research remained within the province of trained art historians working in cultural institutions where art objects are cared for and displayed for the benefit of the public. The research aims to enhance the understanding of the object—its author, its physical attributes, the period in which it was produced, the reasons for its existence, and how it evolved over time and space.

This kind of research is an academic/intellectual exercise that helps ascertain the authenticity of an object and its place in the history of art, writ large.

It is not a requirement incumbent upon its practitioner. Provenance research is one of many duties that “come with the job.” If it does not get done, no one gets fired. More often than not, the information that is collected about the object does not enter the “public record” insofar as it is communicated to the general public. If it is communicated, that is left up to the discretion of the institution where the research is conducted.

Then, the 1990s came and went, and, all of a sudden, “provenance research” became something else entirely.

If I had been working in a museum in the wake of the scandal surrounding the misuse of Swiss bank accounts owned by persons of Jewish descent who may or may not have perished during the Holocaust, I would have been rather oblivious to any debate about loot in general. Once the debate about the mishandling of “Jewish bank accounts” (I hate that expression!) transferred into the (mis)handling of art objects nestled in the permanent collections of countless museums both in North America and Europe, provenance research entered the spotlight front and center.

If I had been working in a museum at the time that the “Portrait of Wally” by Egon Schiele had been seized at the Museum of Modern Art of New York in early January 1998, I probably would have wondered: what is that all about? And I would have naturally sided with the then owners of the painting, the Leopold Foundation of Vienna, and the exhibitors, the Museum of Modern Art, wondering what Robert Morgenthau, then district attorney of Manhattan, had had for coffee on the day that he decided to order the New York Police Department to seize the painting.

I would have done so because my training would have precluded me from even wondering if I should even worry about whether or not the institution that I served had actual title to the objects under my care and examination. Why should I have worried about title since I simply assumed that my institution was the rightful owner?

The right thing to do is to acknowledge that the beast that has become “provenance research” has been transformed from an innocuous art-historical practice into a tendentious, litigation-laced, means to an end: does the research into the origins of an object lead to the maintenance of that object in the collection that I help steward or does it lead to the de-accessioning of the object because of some historical wrong that broke the chain of ownership of the object, thus changing its status to “restitutable”?

Since the seizure of “Portrait of Wally” in early January 1998, provenance research lost its innocence. Battle lines have been drawn between defendants upholding their rights to keep art objects under fire for being “looted”, on one side, and plaintiffs demanding the return of those art objects arguing that they were the rightful owners whose families had been despoiled for racial, ethnic, religious and other reasons at some point between 1933 and 1945 during the twelve year reign of the Nazi Party and as a result of the expansionist war decreed by Adolf Hitler and his minions against Europe’s “undesirables”-Jews, Slavs, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, emotionally and physically challenged individuals, and anyone else who was caught in the crosshairs of a continental-wide fit of man-made madness, verging on an apocalyptic nightmare worthy of any painting signed by Hieronymous Bosch.

There had been a glimmer of hope at the time of the so-called Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets of November 30-December 3, 1998. Art was not supposed to be on the calendar of the conference. The seizure of the Schiele paintings (actually, two paintings had been seized at MoMA in early January 1998) changed the configuration of the planning for the Washington Conference. American policymakers were not pleased about the seizure because they argued that it had besmirched the bilateral relations of the United States with Austria. In so stating, the US government had sided against the claimants and had upheld Austria’s argument at the time that the entire flap over “Wally” was a private matter to be resolved between the claimants—heirs of Ruth Bondi-Jarai—and the Leopold Foundation, then owner of the seized paintings. Still, and this is for another installment, Morgenthau’s muscled intervention at MoMA triggered an existential debate inside Austrian political and cultural circles which forced Austria to reexamine its entire relationship with its past as it affected the illegal seizures of Jewish cultural property. The end result: the only restitution law in the world which mandates “provenance research” in all Federal public cultural institutions of the Republic of Austria.

Begrudgingly, the US government and its many allies at the planning table for the Washington Conference inserted art as one of the many different types of looted assets whose fate needed to be deliberated on by the attending nations and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO). The Washington Conference produced the so-called non-binding “Washington Principles”—11 recommendations that have become de facto “policy” for lack of a better word in many nations that want to remove that cultural monkey off their backs.

For some, the Washington Conference was a success. For others, it was a dismal failure. For those who deemed it a success, the Conference provided a unique forum to get a sense of where the world stood as far as justice to Holocaust survivors was concerned. The principles notwithstanding, everyone went home thinking they had done God’s work for three days. Those who saw in the Conference a dismal failure balked at the so-called Principles as yet another diplomatic way out of taking full responsibility for not having done anything concrete to render justice to the victims of plunder while throwing a sop at museums, auction houses, and other privateers of the art market by reassuring them that, although provenance research was highly recommended to fill “unavoidable gaps” in the history of ownership of art objects under their care and stewardship, “fair and just solutions” ought to be sought in order to ensure a measure of justice for all. In the end, for the naysayers, the Washington Conference led to a massive failure of international public policy, thus creating a vacuum of power and decision-making over the fate of countless art objects whose newfound status in legal limbo—plundered or not? Restitutable or not?—had to be resolved not with legislation but through, oftentimes, vicious legal battles pitting museums’ hired guns against plaintiffs’ hired guns.

The search for justice over a massive crime of plunder tied to genocide has turned into an international legal slugfest. Instead of chasing airplane crash victims, it has become more profitable to seek out victims of plunder.

Some frequently asked questions

by Marc Masurovsky

a/ What is the total number of art objects claimed?

One should place the ultimate answer to this question in its proper context. By May 1945, somewhere between 15 and 20 million art objects of all sorts, from masterpieces to portraits of your favorite saints and relatives, had been misplaced due to civil unrest, persecution, war, genocide, and theft.

Of those misplaced cultural objects, a small number fit the moniker of “culturally-significant” or “national treasure” or both, depending on who is defining those two very odd expressions. For the sake of the argument, let’s just say 1 to 5 per cent of the misplaced objects fit those categories, or 100,000 (lowest number) to 1 million (highest number). The rest fell into the general bucket of culturally not so significant or insignificant, again, depending on who is expounding on this odd categorization.

Postwar Allied restitution policy ended up focusing on the 1 to 5 percent of objects lost or missing due to State-sponsored mischief between 1933 and 1945. For the rest, compensation schemes were foisted onto shell-shocked survivors and their kin due to an institutional absence of interest amongst postwar governments to aid those victims in locating and recovering their missing cultural property for reasons mentioned above. Many of the culturally significant objects and those earning the label of “national treasure” came from State collections plundered by the Axis or from private collections owned by rather wealthy individuals with close ties to State museums in countries dominated by the Axis. Those items received favored treatment in the eyes of the Allies and their representatives, referred to as “Monuments Men”.

The Allied powers’ prime directive was the rehabilitation of Europe (read that part of Europe not occupied or influenced by the Soviet Army and its government) especially as the incipient Cold War became a full-fledged game of geopolitical antipathy between former wartime allies.

As a consequence of the aforementioned factors and those tied to the inevitable human condition—people over property—most survivors did not file claims in the immediate postwar period and only did so after deadlines had passed and the only chance of recovering anything was close to 0.

By 1956, the US State Department had estimated that approximately several hundred thousand cultural objects of all kinds and shapes and value were still being claimed through its good offices by individuals from more than 30 nations.

From the mid-1990s to today, since there is no concerted international effort to tally the total number of claimed objects that are registered as such with national governments, we can only guess that, perhaps, the figure is close to or in excess of the number declared by the State Department in 1956, since most of the claims were never satisfied.

Nations that are signatory to international compacts known as the Washington conference of 1998 and the Terezin Declaration of June 2009 should conduct a census of all outstanding cultural claims registered as of now in their care and publish those results for public consumption.

b/ what is the total number of art objects restituted?

Historically, we only have repatriation figures from various postwar governments and official statistics regarding actual physical restitutions up to the early 1950s. Since then, there is very little public information that can be found about how many art objects were returned until the late 1990s.

Those nations that have established restitution committees (the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Austria) have compiled figures regarding the number of objects that have been claimed through their auspices. But no statistics are tallied pertaining to the number of objects returned through direct negotiations with museums, auction houses, institutions, corporations, and private individuals.

c/ what is the total value of art objects sold after restitution?

The only indication of value comes from press reports about items being auctioned after restitution. It can safely be assumed that the objects with an Austrian provenance—mostly oil paintings by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele—have fetched the highest prices at auction following their restitution, mostly due to the infatuation by the upper tiers of the global art market for such works, regardless of their inherent and implicit esthetic value. Those works alone have fetched in toto more than half a billion dollars. It might be safe to conservatively estimate the total value of restituted objects at slightly more than a billion dollars since the late 1990s. But that figure needs to be carefully verified through an elaborate survey of the field of art restitution.

d/ what is the total value of so-called “art restitution litigation?

This question is unfair and unjust but it does capture the collective imagination that impugns all sorts of evil motives to lawyers who seek opportunities wherever they can. We can only surmise how costly litigation efforts can be once we fuse the fees earned from seeking restitution and preventing restitution. Usually, fairly well-heeled law firms are recruited as outside counsel by museums in order to safeguard the integrity of their collections and rebuff attempts by claimants to assert their claims to title. On the plaintiffs’ side, there is an odd mix of solo practitioners and small and large firms involved in art restitution. All told, there are not more than 100 or so attorneys—yes, you read it!—who work on art restitution cases as an integral part of their legal practice if we combined North America, Europe and Israel. Since most plaintiffs cases are adopted on a contingency fee basis, usually 30 per cent, you should take the estimated value of restituted objects and divide that figure by three in order to get an idea on the estimated value of the litigation for plaintiffs’ lawyers. Likewise, for those lawyers defending their clients against outside claims, the fees can easily rise into the millions of dollars for each claimed object. Most of the claimed objects that are subject to intense years-long litigation hold values in excess of 1 million dollars.

Where does all of this leave the bewildered field of provenance research? You guessed it. The two main incentives underlying provenance research are to 1/ safeguard art objects which are part of a museum’s collection or that of an individual collector or 2/ obtain the restitution of such an art object.

What does this mean in terms of the objective and empirical integrity of the research being conducted on the history of an object? How do these legal undertakings affect the very nature of provenance research as distinct from its initial intent as an art-historical practice?

What is the future of provenance research and can it be salvaged as an objective, scientific field of inquiry?

Contextual analysis

by Marc Masurovsky

When looking at an object which is the subject of a claim, one has to know why it is “claimable.”

In other words, the chain of ownership was allegedly broken at some point in its history and the presumed rightful owner never recovered his/her property.

A provenance might not reflect this particular incident whereby one owner loses control of his/her property/the object/through illicit means.

After all, the history of the Third Reich is not contained in a provenance for an object that circulated during the 1930s in Nazi Germany, but anyone reading the provenance should be keenly aware of the historical events that occurred as backdrop to the change of ownership of an object and ask: did those events exert an influence on how this object changed hands?

That is one aspect of contextual analysis.

In this regard, we mean that an object’s history must be viewed in the larger context of events occurring at the time that it changes hands so that we can determine whether that change of ownership was licit or not.

There are also the familiar patterns of complex relations between the presumed owner and colleagues, friends, and business acquaintances alike, which might have weighed in some manner on the ownership trail of the object. In other words, when looking at an object’s history, one must also look at the environment in which the object “evolves.” That is another aspect of contextual analysis.

When discussing forced sales or duress, whereby an individual has no other choice but to sell his property because of the degree to which this person is being exploited, abused, persecuted by representatives of institutions governed by principles that conflict with the owner’s ethos, identity, function and status in the society where he/she operates. The question here is to determine whether or not a forced sale took place. This is all about context. Here again, one has to understand the historical and societal pressures exerted upon the presumed owner of the object to determine whether he/she was in fact compelled to divest him/herself from property that otherwise would have remained unsold had conditions been different. Context and analysis of that context to flesh out the gaps or the spaces in a provenance between different listings of purported owners.

Back to contextual analysis:

Based on the above, can it ever be objective? After all, your forced sale might be my freedom to sell opportunity regardless of who is in power in Germany. What process would close the gap between those two divergent views? How much research would be needed to make a compelling argument for one or the other, but not both? In the Grosz v. MoMA case, inadequate research led to flawed outcomes. The same might be said for the Martha Nathan case against museums inToledo, Ohio and Detroit, Michigan,  and maybe even for the Claudia Seger case against the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, and the New Orleans Museum of Art.

How much contextual analysis is warranted in provenance research? As much as is required to make a reasonable determination of theft or of consent in the way that an object changes hands.

Provenance research: what to do?

by Marc Masurovsky

The fault lines around contrasting views and understandings of provenance research might appear to be subtle to the uninitiated but, in reality, the fissures are brought about as a result of the legal implications of provenance research.

In the view of this writer, a provenance is the history of ownership or possession of an object from the time of its creation to the present days. The older the object, the more likely it will be difficult to account for every movement and place where the object was situated once it left the studio of its maker. But as you all well know, even so-called modern works can have elusive provenances such as “private collection, Zurich”.

The contrast in approach, in my view, stems from the fact that one school, mostly articulated by museum professionals, which we will refer to as “traditional” is not necessarily interested in injecting economic, political and social history into the documentation of the fate of an object, especially as it pertains to the 1933-1945 period. For some strange reason, that entire period remains a taboo subject, difficult to express even in the literature that museums and galleries develop around the objects that they display. This same school also argues that one will never know exactly what happened to an object, maintaining that there is no concrete evidence that something “bad” happened to the owner of the object and, even it did, it might not have affected the legal title to that object. After all, the object might have been sold “legally” and we just don’t know about it. Hence we can never ascertain that the object was in fact misappropriated for racial or political reasons, and therefore should not be restituted to its purportedly rightful owner. This view remains the favorite weapon of individuals who work for those who are best described as the “current possessors” of the object being claimed, namely cultural institutions—public and private.

The other school to which this writer belongs argues that context plays a very important role in determining the fate of an object. One might call it the “organic” school, for lack of a better word. It argues that the object, the place where it is and the person in whose possession it is, represent the three cardinal points around which the history of the object is articulated against the matrix of history which evolves over time and space. Put simply, an object that changes hands in Munich, Germany, and which belonged to a person of the Jewish faith may be moving around for reasons compelled by the change of regime in Germany on January 30, 1933, thus signaling a potentially violent and illegal transfer of ownership after Hitler’s rise to power.

A research training program takes on vastly different features if it follows the “organic” school or the “traditional” school that warrants that the actual fate of an object will never be exactly known, raising the possibility that there could be a document out there that could prove that nothing untoward occurred and the object changed hands legally even in the context of racial and political persecution and genocide.

You would be surprised, but this “traditional” school of thought has led to negative outcomes for claimants more often than not.

When we think about establishing provenance research training programs in colleges and universities, we realize that some schools might adopt one or the other approach. A balanced program would offer both approaches to future practitioners, advising them of the pitfalls and benefits inherent to either approach.

Some participants at the Columbia Conference were very adamant about promoting their own views of how provenance research should be conducted, whether “traditional” or “organic” which is a good thing because it gave those in attendance an opportunity to weigh both in their own minds.
Any museum-guided provenance research training program will likely promote the “traditional” view that provenance research is first and foremost about documenting the itinerary of an object from creation to the present day, with history being relegated to a back seat.

Any provenance research training program guided by the notion that it is essential for the provenance to document who the actual owner of the object is promotes the “organic” view and will assign greater weight to history and the environment in which the object evolved, beyond the narrow confines of conventional art history.

These contrasting views have become an integral part of the landscape of provenance research, influenced and skewed by decades of litigation and legal wrangling between current possessors—in most cases, museums and galleries—and claimants.

The geography of “traditional” vs. “organic”
Where do we find “traditional” views as opposed to “organic” views of provenance research?
In my view, the “traditional” approach is upheld in the hallowed halls of cultural institutions of a certain size located in large metropolitan centers. It can also be found among those who teach in museum studies programs and art history programs. One can even argue that the “traditional” view suffuses the curriculum of these academic programs that train future curators, art historians and other cultural professionals.

The “organic” view, strangely enough, finds its strongest advocates among archaeologists and cultural heritage specialists who take seriously the matrix from which objects are extracted. They are joined by those who research the fate and history of objects lost by claimants and their families. Some government officials, mostly in Europe, have eased their way into an “organic” view of provenance research, especially in the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria.

The future of provenance research
There is no game plan right now. The most important next step is to institute formalized academic offerings in colleges and universities that introduce students to both methodologies—“traditional” and “organic”—as well as in specialized workshops organized by non-profit organizations.

The now-extinct Prague-based European Shoah Legacy Institute (ESLI) offered a Provenance Research Training Program (PRTP) from 2012 to 2015 through a series of five workshops staged in five different cities—Magdeburg, Germany; Zagreb, Croatia; Vilnius, Lithuania; Athens, Greece; and Rome, Italy. Both approaches were offered to participants although most workshops tended to lean towards an “organic” view of provenance.

By contrast, the Washington-based American Alliance of Museums (AAM) and the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) have offered half-day and day-long seminars characterized as workshops in which they introduced curators, librarians, archivists and art historians to the mechanics of working with objects and documenting their history. These programs fit into the “traditional” mold and will likely continue. Likewise, the Smithsonian Museums appear to be thinking about developing some kind of “traditional” provenance research training program of their own.

Proposals abound about how to produce a more structured approach to training. Some efforts are taking shape in France. Provenance research is now being introduced to universities in select cities—Angers and Paris. The Free University of Berlin continues to offer a curriculum on “degenerate art” which tends to steer away from controversy and thus finds comfort in a more “traditional” approach to provenance research. This is perhaps due to the fact that funding comes from the government. On the other hand, in Munich, the Zentral Institut für Kunstgeschichte (Central Institute for Art History) promotes through its research projects a more “organic” vision of provenance research that gives extra weight to the mechanics of the Third Reich, the relationships of power and interest between various groups in the art world, into the understanding of an object’s pathway through the 1933-1945 period. These relationships and “interests” , it is argued, shape the fate of the object.

There is talk about asking the European Union to establish a Europe-wide entity with EU funds that would coordinate research into the history of objects under review for possible taint of looting or misappropriation. The idea makes eminent sense since national governments have skirted the issue rather successfully for the past 70 years. It might just require such a supranational effort to compel provenance research and training of practitioners. For such an effort to even get off the ground, entities and individuals with an “interest” in these matters of restitution, looted art, provenance research, will have to work together, coalesce their strengths and assets in order to lobby successfully for the creation of a funded unit at the EU level.

And still others argue that the only way to provide training is through some sort of international association of provenance researchers. According to this position, this association (which does not yet exist) will be responsible for coordinating at the national and international level all activities pertaining to provenance research and training. For this to happen, national chapters have to be established and more importantly, a clear definition of provenance research has to be adopted. If we follow this duality of “traditional” vs. “organic”, will the association try and reconcile these two approaches or will it favor one over the other? Who will make that determination? Without a clear understanding of what provenance research is, how can such an association see the light of day?

Maybe several associations are required if the two approaches cannot be reconciled. That might not be the worst thing to do. The only organization of provenance researchers that exist today is in Germany, the Arbeitsstelle für Provenienzforschung (AfP) and includes mostly German researchers who are for the most part working for municipal, regional or federal museums and cultural institutions. Expand this idea and we are talking about fundamental different outcomes and approaches shaped by the employer. In most of Europe, the employer is the government. In the United States, the main employer is a private non-profit or profit-making cultural institution, with the exception of municipal, State and Federal museums. Hence, an international association would become a cacophony of conflicting interests, because some researchers would be government civil servants, others would be working for the private art market, while others would be working for claimants and advocacy groups.

Define your terms

Before anything concrete can happen to transform provenance research into an internationally-recognized profession with its requirements, methods and approaches, its licensure procedures, we all must be clear about exactly what provenance research really is, and how it is practiced. Failing that, there is nothing to talk about. Instead of an association and its bureaucratic pitfalls, let’s instead establish a strong global network of individuals and entities interested in the history of ownership of artistic, cultural and ritual objects, a network that would be inclusive and not exclusive, one with a maximalist understanding of the idea of research. That approach might help shape the contours of a generic definition of provenance research on which everyone could agree without feeling as if they betrayed their principles and ideals.

22 May 2018

Provenance is a landscape

by Marc Masurovsky

Provenance is a landscape where every gap is like a gorge that one crosses on a bamboo bridge. Every stretch of time left unexplained is like a desert or a forest that one crosses seemingly without end.

It is the perfect post-modern expression of a history made of fragments of time, place and humanity, and we have to make sense of it.

If provenance is a legal document, it is woefully lacking.

If it is a security questionnaire, It becomes an open invitation to a tight interrogation.

Hayden White would feel right at home with a provenance because it exemplifies that tired motto: history is fiction.

Provenance is supposed to explain the history of an object. The basic components are time, place and people. Sometimes you have more people than places but no time markers.

Sometimes, a provenance will be like a ground hog poking its head up for a brief moment.

Hi, my name is John Smith and I owned a painting by Hans Holbein in 1969 and I won't tell where I bought it, so there. Sure enough, it disappears in its hole and you're left with a ground hog's view of history.

Innocence and truth

by Marc Masurovsky

We are socialized from an early age to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. We are told, at least in the United States, that we are innocent until proven guilty, even if we were caught with the blood-soaked knife in our right hand and the unlit stick of dynamite in the left hand, several hundred thousand dollars of crispy cash in one hundred dollar denominations heaped in a pile in the corner. Innocent until proven guilty. Tell the truth, nothing but the truth, so help you God.

If we are told to tell the truth, we learn that the lie, which is the opposite of the truth, is a bad thing. If we lie, that is, if we do not tell the truth as it is, it makes us into bad people, into liars, and we deserve whatever gets thrown at us by our parents, our friends, and/or total strangers in a position of authority. We will go to hell, no questions asked. We should not do business with people who lie. They should be marginalized, ostracized, condemned for what they are—liars.

If people lie, does that mean that they are dishonest? Can you be an honest businessman and lie at the same time? Does it depend on who you lie to and what you lie about? Are you a liar if you tell only one lie? Or can you tell one lie a month and still not be viewed as a liar? Or one a year? Or one a week? Can you be dishonest once or twice a year and still be considered to be honest?

Can you be in business and tell the truth no matter what? Can you stay in business and tell the truth? What does it really mean to tell the truth? There are so many people who say: “well, I told a small lie today. Nothing much. No one got hurt.” Or someone confesses: “That was a white lie, actually.” A white lie? And what’s a black lie? Or a red lie? One can only infer that the “white lie” is on par with the small lie, it is of no consequence. No one gets hurt. We’re cool, right?

Is an inflated story a lie if it does not reflect accurately the facts as they unfolded? If you overrate the value of an object, are you lying about the object’s true value? Since value, for the most part, is subjective, is inflation or deflation a lie because it is inaccurate? Is the inaccuracy a deliberate part of a negotiating strategy to either buy or sell or exchange an asset? If so, does that make you, the inflator or deflator, a liar, a dishonest person? Should I continue to do business with you?

If you attribute a painting, a drawing, a print, a sculpture, a piece of furniture, to an artist who is not the actual artist and you do so knowingly? In other words, you “mis-represented” the authorship of the object. Is a deliberate, thought-out, calculated “mis-representation” as bad as a lie? After all, you chose not to tell the truth about the object. Does that make you a dishonest person or a clever negotiator or salesperson? Is the art of the deal anchored in calculated misrepresentations, small lies, white lies?

What about the professional relationships between dealers, collectors, galleries, museums and their clients, the artists they represent, the brokers with whom they must deal, the curators and experts who are “in between” somewhere in the transaction, the endless parade of support staff, donors, investors, specialists, historians, and other experts? Are they all telling the truth? Or are they all engaging in a massive cornucopia of white lies, small lies, unaccountable “honest mistakes” quickly patched with a self-flagellating [well-calculated] self-mortifying tweet that same afternoon or the next morning—early!—and accompanying selfie, hinting that forgiveness is in order until the next mishap occurs? If everyone involved in the art trade commits such mishaps, is that person shunned, excluded, treated as a pariah, unreliable, lacking all credibility? If so, no one might be left standing in the art market. It might actually implode from an acute attack of truth telling.

Business as usual

by Marc Masurovsky

The twenty-year old discussion about Nazi looted art and restitution tends to skirt a fundamental point: how was it able to happen? And most importantly, how were its fruits internationalized and monetized on a global scale?

In the interwar years, many paths led to New York, the emerging global center of attraction for artists, bankers, industrialists and intellectuals, including those who were anxious to start a new life away from the Nazi madding crowd.

If one looks at art as a business, then one can understand that the rise to power of Hitler on January 30, 1933, did not put an abrupt end to business relations between Germans and their counterparts outside the nascent Third Reich. In fact, it was business as usual. Many scholars have already covered this ground, but have been shy to point out that the Nazi plan against its perceived enemies, especially the Jewish community of the Reich and ultimately of continental Europe, was grounded in economic motivations as much as it was rooted in age-old anti-Semitic stereotypes and myths of alleged Jewish evil and malfeasance towards civil society and its institutions, even going as far as accusing Jews of holding the Zeitgeist of the nation hostage to their supposed base needs.

That said, the art world continued to function as before January 1933, except for the inevitable casualties of business under the Nazis, who enforced interdictions against artists and intellectuals and their supporters in the cultural and financial spheres. The attack against so-called degenerate art, objectionable forms of expression, forced the disgorgement of thousands of works and objects onto the private art market, followed by the purging of such banned pieces from German state museums and their sale inside and outside the Reich. The international community responded with its checkbook and began acquiring at bargain basement prices, works which had not been so easily available during the Weimar period.

The Nazis understood the financial power of art as a pendant to their attack on Kultur which eventually extended across Europe.
Let’s take a look at the economic infrastructure through which art flows—companies, banks, middlemen—because art is also an investment. Dealers and collectors alike are intrinsically connected to the financial and commercial interests of a nation, as well as its civil servants who rationalize and organize policy to enable economic growth, trade and financial investments both inside the Reich and abroad. Germany is a net exporting country as a consequence of the Versailles Treaty, forced to rely on foreign subsidiaries to generate markets so as to ensure its survival. The interwar era of global cartels brought financiers and industrialists of all major countries together at the table, as well as institutions such as the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), whose members were instrumental in reshaping the financial map of the world, and helping to seal the fate of countries like Czechoslovakia. Should it come as no surprise that art travels with these businessmen, becomes a source of investment, serves as collateral, money is borrowed to acquire art as much as assets are leveraged to ensure transactions which have nothing to do with art.

In sum, the domestic plunder of German citizens and their art collections finds natural outlets in and through networks of affiliation long ago established and strengthened across the international corporate community. The appeal of specific styles by conservative elites—from antiquities to medieval and old masters all the way to the 18thand early 19thcenturies—act as a pump for art dealers with ready access to those works being funneled into the market by desperate people seeking quick cash to subsist and/or to fund emergency trips into exile and to safe havens.

The evidence is compelling that, from the first forced sales of summer 1933 in Berlin, buyers were in attendance from neighboring countries and far-flung ones—Great Britain and even the United States. The incidental business tourists who happened to find themselves in Nazi Germany with some disposable cash frequented auction houses where Jewish-owned property was being sold. These items in turn were repatriated back to their native countries to be included into their places of business and residence.

Hence, from the mid-1930s, looted cultural property is flowing outward following long-established networks of trade and kinship ties between foreign clients and their German dealers and middlemen.

The same scenario is repeated even more brutally following the March 1938 Anschluss of Austria with American investment banks like Goldman Sachs advising its clients to buy up devalued property ensnared in Aryanization procedures. Let’s not be naïve, as there are hundreds of Allied companies operating subsidiaries in the Greater German Reich with which they are not yet at war. Normal business relations continue unimpeded, these subsidiaries allow their boards to be aryanized by transferring out their Jewish cadres in order to appease the New Order.

These accommodations with authoritarian governments began long before Hitler came to power. Indeed, since 1922, Benito Mussolini ruled Italy with an iron fist, which appealed to many foreign businessmen who preferred to have some sense of order that would maintain social peace in their Italian subsidiaries. Moreover, European and American dealers traveled to and from Italy every year throughout the 1920s and 1930s to conduct business, exchange or acquire works of art, organize and borrow exhibits for display in their homelands. Hence, Fascism and later on Nazism did not create moral and ethical qualms for Europeans and American citizens as they pursued business opportunities with authoritarian, racist, racialist governments.

So, when we discuss how on earth did objects looted during the early years of the Third Reich ever manage to enter Western European and American collections, one should not look too far and too deep for an answer to that question. The same reasoning applied to the sale and exchange of other commodities. For instance, the Leipzig Trade fair attracted American buyers up until the late 1930s, even though trade associations in the United States expressed some concerns over the probity of maintaining commercial relations with companies in the Reich that discriminated against their Jewish employees and which had absorbed Jewish businesses through aryanizations, selling the aryanized property to foreign buyers.

Also, the international gold trade had been mired in some controversy after the Anschluss and the invasion of Czechoslovakia with the blessings of France and Great Britain, the gold reserves of both countries having been absorbed by the Reich, and their contents used on international markets to acquire badly needed foreign currencies. The US Treasury became aware of these movements of gold but were unable to prevent those bars from entering the US gold reserves on account of a fundamentalist approach to the international gold market. Nothing should be done to disrupt the inflow and outflow of gold because the dollar’s value was pegged to a fixed value of gold. Hence, any political disruption of the international gold matket rooted in discrimination against gold provided by the Reich as collateral to purchase foreign currencies was prohibited, unless the US wanted to destabilize the dollar’s value and therefore endanger the economic recovery of the US in the years following the Great Depression.

The international art trade mirrored closely the way in which international business relations were conducted between the future Allied and Axis countries. Provenance of goods and services was never held to account as a prerequisite for conducting business. Hence, the desire to question the origin of the goods and services was rarely raised and even when it was, could not be invoked as a reason not to conduct business with a German or Italian entity or individual. One would have to wait for a state of war to exist between the US, Great Britain and the Axis powers to restrict trade relations, including the international movement of art objects.

But, as we all know, where there’s a will, there’s a way.


Organization fit

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[Advaita-l] Saakshii-Jiiva-Iswara Analysis - V

kuntimaddi sadananda kuntimaddisada at yahoo.com
Sun Mar 17 10:49:58 CDT 2013

Analysis of
Saakshii, Jiiva And Iswara
Based on
Vichaarasaagara of Nischaladaasa - V
Nischaladaasa says
when ahankaara is included in - I am -it is called visheshaNa chaitanya and
when ahankaara is excluded in –I am- it is called saamaanya chaitanyam or
upahita chaitanyam i.e upAdhi sahita chaitanyam also called saakshii.
Technically we can say that ‘ahankaara vishiShTa aatmaa is jiiva’ – a qualified
or particularized consciousness; and ahankaara upahita chaitanya, conditioned
non-specific consciousness, is saakshii. Thus one and the same mixture is
called jiiva or saakshii depending on the discriminative knowledge.
Taking the example
of full-moon in the night, both ignorant and wise men experience the moon and
the moonlight. Because of that moonlight only both experience moon as well as
perceive the objects on the earth that are illumined by the moonlight. Luminous
moon is a mixture of moon and the sunlight. An informed or knowledgeable person
looks at the shining moon, excludes the moon and recognizes that what he sees
is the light reflected by the moon and the light that he sees in the form of a
moon is the sunlight. Form or upAdhi is provided by the moon but what he sees as
the moon form is the reflected sunlight only. Sunlight itself does not have any
form of its own but takes the form of the moon when it is reflected by the
moon. For this informed person moonlight is upahita chandraH – that is, the
limited non-luminous moon (upAdhi) has become luminous in the moon-form due to
the sunlight. For an ignorant person the moon is a luminous entity (vishiShTa
chadraH) in the sky, by whose light, moon and the objects on the earth are
visible during full-moon night. There is only one moon, but perceived
differently by the informed and the uninformed persons. Looking at the other
plants in the sky which are illumined similarly are recognized as luminous
objects. An informed person recognizes that there is only one light i.e.
sunlight that is pervading and illuming all these non-luminous bodies in the
sky. The objects reflecting the sunlight are different but what is being
reflected is the same sunlight.  The
uninformed person on the other hand says there are several luminous bodies in
the sky each with their own ahankaara or luminosities. In this example,
saakshii is similar to the sunlight and is only one but illumining several
non-luminous bodies in the sky, and in the process making them appear as
luminous entities. Each is getting illumined depending on their capacities or
upaadhis that differ in size and shape some with own their moons.
Another most
important also to note is that without these objects reflecting the sunlight,
the presence of sunlight cannot be recognized, even though it is there. Exactly
the same analogy holds good for aatma and ahankaara or anaatma. The
all-pervading consciousness gets reflected wherever a subtle body is there.
Local minds get enlivened by reflecting the light of consciousness. The absence
of reflecting medium does not mean the absence of light of consciousness as in
the deep sleep state. If the reflecting medium is dirty or covered by smoke
then the reflection is also of poor quality. Quality or the attributes of the
reflecting media have nothing to do with the all-pervading light of
consciousness. Minds are known only when the consciousness illumines the mind
just as moon is known only when the sunlight gets reflected by it. In addition
one can know the objects of the world via the sense organs and the mind only
when the reflected light from the mind falls on the thoughts or vRittis that
arise when knowledge of the objects talks place in the waking and dream worlds.
It is similar to one seeing the objects on the earth when moon light falls on
the objects. When I see the objects in the moon-light what I am seeing the
moonlight reflected by the objects. However moonlight is nothing but sunlight
which was first reflected by the moon. Same analogy applies in understanding
the saakshii and ahankaara.
The all-pervading
light of consciousness first gets reflected by the mind as chidaabhaasa and
this reflected light falls on the thoughts and get reflected back to the mind
forming the knowledge of the thoughts. The first reflected light of
consciousness and the second re-reflected consciousness from the thoughts
constitute notion of subject thought and the object thought – aham vRitti and
idam vRitti. Both subject and object duality notion arises in the mind only
when the all-pervading consciousness first reflected as chidaabhaasa and then light
from chidaabhaasa gets further reflected by the object thoughts back to the
mind. All the objective knowledge talks place via this process. Although there
is only one all-pervading light of consciousness that is getting reflected
first by the mind and next by the thoughts, a notion that one is subject and
the others are object thoughts is developed due to jiiva paying more attention
to the reflecting media than to the consciousness that is getting reflected. In
a way, it is similar to seeing the moon and the seeing the objects in the
moonlight. In both cases, there is only one sunlight that is being seen. When
we see the moon as luminous entity and then see the objects on the earth when
they are illuminated by the moonlight, we ignore the sunlight and consider that
the moon is shining and in its light objects are seen. An informed person
recognizes that it is sunlight that one is seeing while seeing both the moon
and the objects on the earth due to the moonlight. Meditation is intellectually
ignoring the media of reflections (moon and the objects) and paying attention
to the sunlight that is getting reflected during the full-moon night.  Similarly Vedantic meditation is to shift the
attention of the mind to the light of consciousness that I am that illumines
the mind and the objects that are being perceived or known via the mind and
senses. Hence, Kena Up. says consciousness is revealed in every perception –
pratibhoda viditam matam.
We take some brake
before we post the other parts.
Hari Om!

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Albrecht Dürer, ‘Christ on the Mount of Olives, from: The Engraved Passion (B., M., Holl. 4; S.M.S. 46)’, 1508, Christie's Old Masters

Engraving with watercolour and bodycolour heightened with gold, 1508, trimmed to the subject and mounted on vellum, exquisitely handcoloured by Georg Mack around 1588 and initialled GM in gilt, the vellum border recto decorated with a scroll of flowers and berries, insects, a snake, a snail, a bird and two rabbits, verso with a German manuscript text in brown ink and gilt relating to the birth of Christ, the border decorated with a scroll of flowers and multicoloured leaves and various birds, window-mounted on modern laid paper, a short tear in the upper right border, thinly backed, otherwise in very good condition, framed.

Baltimore, The Baltimore Museum of Art, Painted Prints - The Revelation of Colour in Northern European Renaissance & Baroque Engravings, Etchings and Woodcuts, 2002-2003, no. 46 (ill.).

In the late 16th century, over fifty years after the Dürer's death, there was a renewed interest in the artist and his work - a period subsequently known as the 'Dürer Renaissance'. As the supply of paintings and drawings was necessarily limited demand was partially satisfied by the creation of hand colored engravings and woodcuts, approximating the appearance of painted miniatures.

In the first half of the 16th Century there were two distinct professional groups; the Illuministen, painters of miniatures and illuminated manuscripts and the Briefmaler, literally 'letter painters' who created coats of arms, playing cards and all manner of illustrated documents. However due to the rise of the printed book the demand for illuminated manuscripts diminished and the two professions - although still termed separately - gradually began to merge.

The Mack family - Hans, Georg the Elder and Georg the Younger - were among the most active and important Illuministen and Briefmaler in Nuremberg in the late 16th and early 17th Centuries. Their creations were much in demand, and a 1581 Nuremburg Court record gives some idea just how sought after their work was: 'Georg Mack (the Elder), Illuminist, because of his disobedience and delayed completion of a piece of artwork belonging to the Prince-Elector of the Palatine is to be taken to a tower, the work brought to him and completed there, and when it is done, interrogate him.' That such an important patron thought it worthwhile to pursue Mack through the courts gives some idea as to the magnitude of his reputation.

About Albrecht Dürer

About Georg Mack the Elder

German, Active circa 1556 - 1601, based in Nuremberg, Germany

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He’s Back Across the Pond, but $cotland Yard is Still Edifying Cypher League on UK MC Culture

It’s self-evident that UK hip hop is a derivative of US hip hop yet there are also important nuances to their relationship, such as those discussed in Part 1, which emerge on closer inspection. The bulk of the iceberg that is UK urban music, however, is a strange and multi-faceted creature whose origins can be traced back not only to Afro-Caribbean roots but also the boom of popular electronic sounds coming out of the House and Techno music scenes of Chicago and Detroit in the late 80s and early 90s. Before broaching the electronic evolution of these sounds post-1990, it is important to bridge the cultural gap between the West Indies and England, detailing the historical context of these developments.

The influence of sound system culture and its prevalence in British music takes a bearing from as far back as the 1950s, when Ska had emerged in Jamaica as the island’s popular musical evolution of its native carnival sounds of Calypso. Ska combined its predecessor’s Mento foundations with the Rhythm n Blues coming from America to create a similarly exciting craze which filled the dancehalls of its time. The onomatopoeic name is rumoured to have come from the syncopated scat guitar; the other characteristics being a 4/4 drum beat with a snare on the 3rd beat (lending to the ‘step’ effect) which is accompanied by trumpets and a prominent bass line, all found in much of Jamaica’s music and passed on to the genres which will be discussed herein.

The dancing in the video below aptly anticipates the Skank, already emphasising the movement of the upper body and the stepping movement of the feet, so characteristic of future genres in the legacy of Jamaican and later urban UK music.

Short of having a live band on call to play the dancehall, as was often the case in the ghettos of Jamaican towns, a Sound System was used. In fact, by the mid-50s street parties were more commonly assembled around a system than a live band. A system party was a hugely enjoyable and inexpensive way to spend an evening. Dancing proved a competitive way for young people to build reputation amongst their peers and catch the attention of the opposite sex. The selector turned a decent profit for the facility provided and would gain popularity relative to his competitors by playing the freshest material, much the same dynamic evident in today’s selection circles. As tastes moved toward locally recorded sounds and self-produced ‘exclusives’ or ‘dub plates’, supply lines grew stronger and the competition between DJs to dominate the scene more frantic with frequent sound clashes between systems and their MC hype men in order to determine the champion. These MCs were called Toasters and they provided a commentary for the tunes being run – this might be considered the first example in musical history of spoken word complimenting an instrumental.

Given that these parties were often the only way for poorer communities to hear new musics, there was arguably a lot at stake for all involved, be you behind the decks or skanking out in the dance. This sense of opportunity attracted young provocateurs, nicknamed Rude Boys, and soundmen would oftentimes have a group of them on the payroll to undermine the efforts of their competitors by crashing their set. These chaps took their image from the Trilby and sharp suits of the rock n roll scene and had a profound stylistic influence on British counterculture some ten years later. The term ‘rude boy’ is now applied to a slightly different demographic.

Some of the great pioneers of the System were Count Machuki (the OG Jamaican toaster), King ‘The Ugly One’ Stitt and Duke Reid. With time, systems got larger in both power and physical size through customisation and soon wattage could be as much as 30,000W across frequencies although the bass was always paramount. All this was capitalised on in future years when production, both analogue and digital, came to prominence – the impact of the Sound System in England will be detailed later in the article but it is worth mentioning its forerunners Dennis Bovell (Barbadian) and Duke Vin who immediately appealed to the London West Indian communities with their club nights in Ladbroke Grove and the famous Roaring Twenties in the West End, since ultimately there was nowhere else to hear these genres in the UK.

Rewinding a few years, it was with the ‘Windrush’ generation (the initial influx of post-WW2 West-Indian migrants); 492 of them arriving on the ship MV Empire Windrush in 1948 near London, that a Trinidadian calypsonian named Lord Kitchener was caught on film singing a ditty called ‘London is the Place for Me’ as he disembarked for the first time onto British soil – as this footage was circulated in local media it helped establish and was symbolic of a new precedent for Caribbean music in Britain. From this point onward, the relationship between the underground music of parts of English society and the Caribbean (specifically Jamaica) was a close and symbiotic one. Interestingly, the USA had been considered a more desirable destination by Caribbean immigrants, yet the 1952 Mc Warren-Walter Act restricted their opportunities to settle. It begs the question of how this eventuality may have impacted upon the music of America’s black population, and indeed the UK’s also, not forgetting that the toasting of dancehall MCs served in many ways as a precursor to the Hip hop format of spitting over instrumentals.

Music like Kitchener’s (ironically named after the legendary colonial Field Marshall Horatio Kitchener) provided for the Windrush, a soundtrack to their threshold experience of migration, not only harking back to their former lives but romanticising this new home in England, which sadly held for many de facto hardship where they had expected opportunity and prosperity. Indigenous Brits, shell shocked from the horrors of the WW2 and specifically the Blitz, given its impact on available property, lashed back against the notion of sharing their land, employment and livelihood with foreign migrants. Throughout the 1950s new arrivals experienced extreme prejudice, often manifested in violence across the country with attacks by native, disenfranchised post-war youth disillusioned with the apparent disorder of the world left by earlier generations. These perpetrators were teenage gangs who generally identified themselves as Teddy Boys due to their throwback Edwardian style of dress and passion for American rock n roll music.

Amidst serious riots all over the country from London to Birmingham, the now world famous Notting Hill Carnival was established in 1959 as a positive response to the climate of hostility that many Afro-Caribbean migrants fell victim to during the initial stages of their integration, effectively using music as a weapon for peace.

The belle époque of Ska coincided with Jamaica’s independence in 1962, where the triumphant spirit of freedom could be heard in the songs of bands like The Skatalites, who provided the sound track to what appeared to be the dawning of a liberated Jamaica. The details of this misconception will be discussed soon, but first the proliferation of the earlier Caribbean sounds and their context in the UK might be explored. As can be heard in the above song, in times to come the alternative music scene in the UK would adopt the powerful message of the music brought over by Caribbean immigrants into their own sounds – The Clash made great use of the reggae format to create their unique take on Punk in the 70s and 80s.

The 2-tone scene found its cultural counterpart in the Rude Boys of 60s Jamaica who shared aspects of its ethos but itself originated in socially deprived areas of northern England. Its uplifting qualities were designed as an appeal for unity in a country then blighted by unwanted conflict in the Falklands Islands, economic recession and unemployment as the Thatcherite Conservative Government wrested power from the Unions in predominantly industrial areas. Bands like The Specials, Madness, The Selecter and Symarip spearheaded this element of British subculture, often with band members of mixed race synchronising British Punk with Jamaican Ska and Reggae – a sound which similarly served as a sound track to the socio-political context of the time.

Skinhead culture was also intrinsically connected to 2-Tone, being the natural evolution of the tough Teddy Boy aesthetic of working class youth; yet its shaven heads, its boots and braces were non-discriminatory and embraced all persons from that social stratum, although the lifestyle they led was still often one of rebellion and hooliganism. It is noteworthy that in the same region a mere generation earlier, Northern Soul (borrowed from American Motown) was what filled dancehalls, its associated peer group were The Mods in their fitted pin stripes and scooters. The art of British DJing was born in this setting, where crowds were most impressed upon by the jockey’s selection of lesser-known records – this culture of the esoteric fan base can be seen all over the British urban music scene, where it is not unheard of that the most popular tunes are never officially released at all.

Sadly with rising social tensions due to the factors outlines above, the Skinhead sense of identity began to change with more of them becoming affiliated with far-right nationalist organisations, pre-empting the typical perception of White Supremacist Skinheads so widespread today. The trailer below is for Shane Meadow’s film This Is England, a moving and gritty portrayal of this loss of innocence in underprivileged parts of British society.

Panning back to Jamaica on the dawn of its independence: despite nationwide celebration, in reality the event presupposed a future of economic deficit, poverty and shocking levels of violence due in part to political polarisation, the abundance of illegal firearms and the International War on Drugs. This legacy of national anguish spawned much of the island’s post-independence musical character, with globally treasured icons like Bob Marley leading the chant for peace and love in the world. The ideological vehicle most suited to this rhetoric was the Afrocentric and somewhat militant Rastafari and its mythological battle against the Babylonian oppressor. This music was cultivated in defiance of oppression and given the tainted historical connexion with England – naturally the flourishing heritage of the West Indies in the UK began to appropriate mantras of the Red, Gold and Green.

Alongside the combative essence of the Rasta affiliated genres, formed by the emphasis on the rhythm and bass, the slow tempo and weighty entrancing spell of the two-step is clearly a result of the religion’s enjoyment of cannabis which was allegedly found growing on Soloman’s grave and for some also engenders feelings of happiness and community – emotions central to the composition and experience of the Jamaican music which evolved immediately from Ska: reggae, dub and sometime later, dancehall. Of course the culture growing in England was by no means exempt from this passion for Ganja and nor were the sectors of society in America from which Funk, Soul and hip hop materialised. Setting aside the socio-economic escapist theories about drug-use and its effect on the health, smoking is at best a hilarious and fun activity to partake in which has yielded vast swathes of cultural output. Below is Linval Thompson’s not-so-subtle tribute to the lamb’s bread:

Reggae was created in the late 60’s and succeeded Ska as Jamaica’s national sound, its focus on black consciousness was partly a result of the positive advancement of the Civil Rights Movement in America and the growing struggle of native Jamaicans in their home country, with personalities like Marcus Garvey once bridging the gap and as such becoming icons for Rasta appraisal.

Reggae migrated to the UK first as Lover’s Rock, a watered down version of the Jamaican sound before British bands such as Aswad and Steel Pulse took up the gauntlet of dub and reggae proper in England. British labels such as Trojan and Island Records also emerged with characters such as Chris Blackwell at the forefront; the latter is credited with having forged the career of Bob Marley and thus having brought reggae music to the world. At the age of 21, after a sailing accident which left him unconscious and close to death on a Jamaican beach, Blackwell was rescued by a kindly Rasta and brought back to health – this experience led to his life-long affiliation with the country’s music and culture. It was David ‘Ram Jam’ Rodigan MBE who then picked up the mantle of promoting Jamaican music in England, playing the role of white British aficionado. As a DJ on Capital Radio and Kiss FM and a sound clash champion in his own right, he endorsed these genres with heart and soul and is considered a true hero in the world of reggae; this is evident in the shout outs and references to him in so many songs today not to mention his Order of Chivalry from our glorious Queen. See if you can spot the mad bastard in the video below.

Dub is considered a sub-genre of reggae, yet is more accurately a production style as it was pioneered by the studio technicians of the reggae genre such as the mighty King Tubby, the eccentric Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Scientist or Augustus Pablo. These guys would rework their own dub versions of original songs. This remix process was essentially a matter of removing much of the extraneous audio fills such as the vocals; the instrumental would be stripped to a skeletal fusion of rhythm and bass which would be accentuated with sparse vocal and percussive samples effected under the control of the soundman with reverb and delay. It is this instrumental format, more so than reggae, which provided a platform for synthesis with many of the genres concerned in part 3 of this article. The first track below, “King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown”, is a dub of Jacob Miller’s “Baby I love You So”, and is considered genre-defining, perfectly balanced in its measures of space and sound to create a dark mystical vibe that is both strange and nurturing – true music of the elements.

The second is Lee Perry’s Blackboard Jungle Dub which, just as seminal as the above could be seen as a retrospective lamentation of the racist backlash exacted by the Teddy Boys in their time, bearing the same name as the Rock n Roll era film Blackboard Jungle, the story of youth rebellion in urban schools which alone sparked much of the rioting in England when it was first screened. In a charming statement of pacification, Perry has ‘dubbed’ the original sentiment around a film that led to the plight of so many Caribbeans in 1960s England.

Many of the systems that were originally established in the UK still exist and given the rise of other system-worthy genres, have settled into Dub continuing the tradition and format of their presentation, travelling the country to spread their sound: Selector, Deejay and box-carriers included. Dennis Bovell, mentioned above, accelerated the demand for UK reggae in the 70s though cunning trickery which he outlines in an interview with Red Bull Music Academy (HYP). There lingered a favouritism for native Jamaican records and the way one could tell between imports and the British variety was whether or not the records themselves were ‘dinked’ – the practice of stamping a hole in the middle of the vinyl. “We were accused of not being able to play reggae like Jamaicans, so I set out to disprove that. I made a set of records in this country without putting on any information about who was on the recording. And when I made my 7-inch pressings, I dinked them!” When selectors, under the impression they were spinning an imported record, inadvertently popularised UK reggae songs, they could no longer maintain this snobbery.

So began the 2nd generation of UK sound systems which departed from a reliance on the Jamaican scene. Among these heavyweight pioneers were Jah Shaka, Channel One, Aba Shanti-I, Iration Steppas and Saxon Studio International, many of which are still on the circuit and often play all over the country – literally shaking the walls of the venues they set up in. On one such occasion recently this year, an open air celebration in the British countryside – Aba Shanti’s dubs could be heard some four miles away from the site, in a neighbouring town. Saxon was the ultimate catalyst in establishing UK reggae in its own right in the 80s developing its own take on the growing dancehall craze in Jamaica.

Before unfolding any sounds which claim to be exclusively British, the rise of Dancehall or Raggae must be taken into account since this is when the function of the MC was first realised. The ‘toast’ is a phenomenon that dates back to the early days of the sound system where the B-side of a record would often be the instrumental or ‘riddim’ without the original vocals. The riddim would be circulated around the community and various toasters would lay down verses, vying for supremacy against their competition. Notable riddims from this period were Bam Bam made famous by one of the most significant female reggae artists Sister Nancy. Other distinguished examples would be Sleng Teng (Wanye Smith) possibly the first ever digitally produced musical material out of Jamaica or Satta Massagana from the original roots songs of the same name by The Abyssinians. The video below nicely showcases the use of these instrumentals and the vibe of a dancehall event which more resembles an early version of the ‘rave’ than it does a concert. The characters passing the mic are but a few of the numerous celebrity toasters that came out of the scene; listen for Sleng Teng riddim in play and admire their dress sense, reviving the rude boy style.

This period also saw many of the celebrated reggae artists adapt their style to the new dancehall format. Barrington Levy is just one example, with his seminal jam Here I Come (Broader than Broadway).

The crowd is as transfixed by the relative charisma of each deejay as they are by the music itself. The parallels with hip hop in this video alone are undeniable. The vocal accompaniment would range from singing, usually in a rapid monotone to toasting in the same vein, with lyrical content moving away from the sentimentality of Rastafari to a visceral and rhythmic patois, an ego-centric commentary on violence, dancing and sexuality. These subject matters have now become the pillars of what modern Jamaican music stands for: from certified gangster and murderer Vybz Kartel to homophobia embodied Buju Banton and his pièce de résistance Boom Bye Bye, to the bastardisation of the whole culture by producers like Diplo and his twerk-crazed fan base worshipping a cartoon of a major with a laser gun for an arm; the production moved resolutely to digital sounds, making good use of that controversial effect auto-tune – all for better or for worse.

British artists consolidated their sound before this homogenisation took hold in Jamaica with Saxon deejays such as Tippa Irie taking the wheel and popularising British reggae and dancehall in the homeland. They established the MC style ‘fast speak’ which itself anticipated the ragga vocal tempo and its further evolution.

At last the relationship between Jamaican and UK music was a truly symbiotic one, the Caribbean sound incubated in the cultural history of 20th century England bore its own fruit, influencing generations of UK urban music to come garage, jungle drum n bass, grime and more which will be discussed in part 3 of UK MC Culture. For now, enjoy a historical show detailing the passage of Caribbean music in England by a white artist aptly named YT, England Story.

If you missed part 1 of this mini-series, catch $cotland Yard Came From Across the Pond To Edify Cypher League on UK MC Culture here.