The Museum Monstrosities

The horror! The horror!
And this isn't one of the freaky ones.

(It’s Halloween. What the hell.)

I haven’t found the ability to mix writing and traveling. Between spending my day doing tourism and writing in my journal at night, I find that there’s no other time for writing. Instead of blogging about my day’s experiences, the last time I travelled, I wrote up a series of blog posts (largely on Esperanto) several days in advance. But in a way, it was good to save writing about the Lausanne Museum of Zoology until now, October 31.

The museum is an a building that houses a number of collections, including a numismatic collection, a geology collection, and an archeology collection. The fine arts museum should have been there, but the collection is currently in storage, awaiting a new home. The museum is open and they have temporary shows, which makes me wonder why they don’t have their collection up, since the new building won’t open until 2017, but I assume they’re doing various behind-the-scenes sort of things, such as preparing new cases, and determining new arrangements.

You may find images below this point disturbing. You have been warned.

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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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You can follow my blog on Twitter (@impofthediverse) or on Facebook. If you like this post, share it with your friends. If you have a comment just for me, e-mail me at impofthediverse@gmail.com.

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