The Broader Battle of the WCTU

Diana by Augustus
Saint-Gaudens. Thirteen
feet of smut!

If the Women’s Christian Temperance Union got everything they wanted, the United States would be a different place today.[1] A much more repressive place. We have the Women’s Christian Temperance Union to thank for Prohibition (thanks a lot, ladies), but it looks like we got off easy. An article in the September 30, 1894, New York Sun makes it clear that their ambitions went far beyond just alcohol. There doesn’t seem to be anything that they wouldn’t complain about.

It’s a long article, but in the end, I decided to include the whole thing, mainly to get the smug statements of Mrs. Martin. Mrs. Martin seems (by her own statements, at least) to have been quite involved in the late nineteenth century reform movements. The WTCU was active in the suffrage moment, and found that the United States Brewers Association was funding the anti-suffrage side.[0] [0]: As noted in the Wikipedia article on the WCTU.

As the article shows, politics (even the politics of temperance) can make strange bedfellows, particularly when there’s mission creep involved.

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Art Historian Displays Innovative Slides

Frederick Mortimer Clapp
Art historian.
Photographic pioneer.
Not really a professor.

On July 28, 1909, the Los Angeles Times reported that Professor Frederick Mortimer Clapp made his first public exhibition “by means of a stereopticon reproduction of paintings of the world’s master artists.” Clapp’s claim was that his color process was better than those employed previously.

Wikipedia notes that prior to his becoming the first Director of the Frick Collection in 1931, Clapp had been the chair of the Art History program at the University of Pittsburgh from 1926. The Dictionary of Art Historians makes it clear that from 1906 to 1908, he was teaching Elizabethan drama and Russian literature at the University of California, Berkeley’s extension school. This clears up why some of the articles on his make reference to public lectures on Shakespeare, while others talks were about the exaltation of the nude in art (Clapp preferred the undraped figure). If the Dictionary of Art Historians is correct, then reports from 1908 of his being a professor at the University of Chicago or Harvard are likely erroneous. To be a real stickler, the term professor was erroneous.

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Does the Norton Simon Hold Art Wrongfully Sold after Nazi Seizure?

Anything to
sneak in a
picture of a
naked man.

The LA Times today reported on the continuing legal dispute over the twin paintings of Adam and Eve by Lucas Cranach the Elder at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. My first thought on seeing the article was, "funny, I could swear that I’ve seen a Cranach Adam and Eve pair. I had. There’s a similar pair of paintings at the Uffizi in Florence. I’ve seen those. On a personal note, it’s amusing that I’ve been to the Uffizi twice, but never to the Norton Simon. Maybe I should go.

And maybe I should go soon, since a recent ruling in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals gave new life to a lawsuit that claims that the Cranach paintings were illegally seized by the Nazis during World War II and never appropriately repatriated.

The two paintings hung in a church in Kiev, until the Soviet Union seized them as national property and sold them at auction in Berlin in 1931. So far, regrettable but maybe legal. The pairings were bought by Jacques Goudstikker, a Jewish art dealer in the Netherlands. When Germany invaded the country, they were seized by the Nazis. After the war, the Dutch government sold the repatriated painting to a Russian aristocratic family, the Stroganoffs, who made a claim that the painting had been their property when the Soviets seized it in the 1920s.

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Neue Galerie - Too Small for the Price

You can take a picture of the
outside of the building, of course

Visiting museums in New York is a pricey proposition. Every time you walk in the door of one, it seems you’re shelling out another twenty bucks. Generally, I think you’re getting some value for this. I don’t begrudge the Frick Museum its admittance fees, it’s a stunning collection.

But yesterday, I visited the Neue Galerie, which I wasn’t even aware of the previous time I visited New York (it opened in 2001, but gained a lot of attention when Ronald S. Lauder bought the Klimt pairing, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer). One nice thing about the Neue Galerie was that when I saw this and four other Klimts at the LA County Museum of Art, the crowds were so large that it was impossible to appreciate the paintings. This was shortly after the paintings were returned to their proper owner, Maria Altmann. (The Austrian government had forced Altmann’s uncle, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, to deposit the paintings in the Austrian national museum during the Nazi era, but they did not manage to get him to actually donate the paintings.)

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