Several works on view at “Sam Spratt: The Monument Game” at the Docks Cantiere Pietro Cucchini in Venice.
Image courtesy 1OF1. Photography by Anna Blubanana studio.
Art
Did the Nazis Force an Art Sale? The Question Lingers 88 Years Later. – The New York Times
The case of Curt Glaser, an art historian who sold his collection before fleeing Germany, illustrates how differently museums can respond to similar restitution claims.
The Nazi authorities removed Curt Glaser from his post as director of the Berlin State Art Library in April 1933 because he was Jewish. He was also evicted from his home and, the following month, sold most of his art collection at two auctions.
Since 2007, 13 private collectors or institutions — including the Dutch Restitutions Committee, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the city of Basel — have concluded that Glaser sold his collection in May 1933 as a result of Nazi persecution, and agreed to either return or pay some compensation to his heirs for art he sold that wound up in their collections.
But the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston have repeatedly rejected the heirs’ claims for paintings that were sold at the same auctions. They argue there is not enough evidence that Glaser sold under duress.
The disparity in the decisions highlights how, 76 years after World War II ended, the criteria for determining whether a work of art that changed hands during the Nazi persecution of Jews should be returned still remains a matter of debate.
Both the Met and the Museum of Fine Arts have a record of recognizing claims on art sold under duress. The Met has settled eight claims for art looted by the Nazis or sold under duress since 1998, when the United States endorsed the international Washington Principles, which called for “just and fair” solutions in handling claims for looted art. In 2009, the Terezin Declaration, also approved by the United States, specified that this requirement also applied to sales under duress. The Museum of Fine Arts has previously settled heirs’ claims for 13 objects sold under duress.
But in the cases of two works sold at a May 9, 1933 auction — Abraham Bloemaert’s 1596 painting “Moses Striking the Rock,” which is owned by the Met, and Joachim Anthoniesz Wtewael’s “Actaeon Watching Diana and Her Nymphs Bathing” from 1612, which is owned by the Museum of Fine Arts — the museums have taken a position at odds with other institutions who held Glaser works from that sale.
The Dutch Restitutions Committee, for example, returned a painting to Glaser heirs in 2010, determining that the sale of the work at the May 9 auction “can be considered involuntary.” The committee concluded it was “likely that Glaser was not able to freely dispose of the proceeds from the auctions” but “probably had to use them to fund his escape to the United States.”
Glaser fled Germany two months after the sale. He died in New York in 1943.
The complexities in evaluating art sales more than 80 years after the fact mean diverging views can emerge. “It can be very difficult to determine whether a sale was under duress or not,” says Friederike von Brühl, a Berlin-based lawyer specialized in art law. “In practice, we are looking at numerous criteria: Was the purchase price adequate? Was the seller free in spending the proceeds? When exactly was the sale?”
For Agnes Peresztegi, a lawyer and the former president of the New York-based Commission for Art Recovery, the situation highlights the limited state support for claimants in the U.S. “In Europe, it is often the culture ministry or a commission that makes the decision,” she said. “In the U.S., it’s all private. The current possessor is the decision maker. Museums are free to reject or fight claims and there is no one to tell them this is wrong. For many claimants, lawsuits are prohibitively expensive, especially for lower value works.”
The Met takes the view that Glaser didn’t sell under duress. “After years of careful research and consideration, the Museum continues to stand by its assertion that ‘Moses Striking the Rock’ was not unlawfully appropriated, and belongs at the Met,” a spokesman for the museum wrote in an email.
The MFA said in an emailed statement that “there is no disputing that Curt Glaser lost his position at the Kunstbibliothek and the residence that went with it due to racial persecution.” However, it argued that his decision to sell the art may also have been influenced by his personal life. Glaser’s first wife, with whom he had built the collection, had died in 1932.
The museum added “there is nothing to indicate that Glaser did not receive or could not have accessed the proceeds from the auctions, nor that he was under financial duress.” The price paid for the Wtewael was “fair and consistent with those for other Dutch Mannerist paintings,” it said.
In an earlier claim, the United Kingdom’s Spoliation Advisory Panel ruled against restituting eight drawings to the heirs in 2009. It said Glaser’s decision to sell the works was informed by a number of factors and the price he got was fair.
Born in Leipzig in 1879, Glaser began his career as an art critic, became a purchaser for the Royal Gallery of Prints in Berlin and was appointed director of the city’s Kunstbibliothek, or art library, in 1924. At regular Monday art salons, he and his wife entertained artists and intellectuals in their apartment in the 1920s. He counted Edvard Munch and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner among his friends.
But when Adolf Hitler’s government passed a law removing Jews and political opponents from the civil service in 1933, Glaser was forced from his post and auctioned most of his art collection, library and furnishings. The first sale, held at the Internationales Kunst- und Auktions-Haus on May 9, 1933, was followed by a second, two-day sale at the Max Perl auction house in Berlin on May 18 and 19. The market was depressed. The curator Otto Fischer, in a report to the Basel Art Commission about his acquisitions at the second auction, said prices were “not exactly rock-bottom” but nevertheless “low.”
In 2020, some 12 years after it had rejected a claim by the Glaser heirs, the city of Basel agreed to pay them an undisclosed sum on the basis of a review of the case. In return, the city’s Kunstmuseum kept works on paper estimated to be worth more than $2 million by artists including Munch, Kirchner, Henri Matisse, Max Beckmann, Auguste Rodin and Marc Chagall.
The city said Glaser “held an exposed position at the time the National Socialists seized power and was the target of the unjust regime.” The persecution he suffered was “the reason why Curt Glaser emigrated and on 18-19 May 1933 auctioned off a considerable portion of his artworks.” But in contrast to the Dutch position, it argued that full restitution “is not an appropriate solution” because “it would be too one-sided.”
Both American museums offered to label the works to acknowledge Glaser’s contribution to art history. In a letter this year to a lawyer for the family, the Met said its label would also recognize that Glaser “lost his position due to the anti-Semitic policies of the newly elected Nazi government.” It added, though, that the label would say the sale of his collection “may be attributed to both the political situation in Germany and to personal factors.”
Glaser’s family reject the suggestion that his wife’s death motivated him to sell. The Met and the MFA “are putting forward a counternarrative and want to argue on a speculative basis about Glaser’s psychology instead of talking about the material facts and historical circumstances for all Jews at that time,” Paul Livant, Glaser’s great-nephew and one of his heirs, said.
David Rowland, the New York lawyer who represents the Glaser heirs, agreed, describing the situation as “restitution roulette” — the chances of success hinge as much on where the art has landed as on the merit of their case, he said.
“How is it that the Dutch, the Swiss and the Germans found that the sales were made under duress, but the Met and MFA did not?” he asked. “A physical confiscation by the Nazis is not necessary for the Washington Principles to apply and for a ‘just and fair’ solution to be warranted.”
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Welcome to the Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News that delves into the places where the art world meets the real world, bringing each week’s biggest story down to earth. Join us every week for an in-depth look at what matters most in museums, the art market, and much more, with input from our own writers and editors, as well as artists, curators, and other top experts in the field.
The art press is filled with headlines about trophy works trading for huge sums: $195 million for an Andy Warhol, $110 million for a Jean-Michel Basquiat, $91 million for a Jeff Koons. In the popular imagination, pricy art just keeps climbing in value—up, up, and up. The truth is more complicated, as those in the industry know. Tastes change, and demand shifts. The reputations of artists rise and fall, as do their prices. Reselling art for profit is often quite difficult—it’s the exception rather than the norm. This is “the art market’s dirty secret,” Artnet senior reporter Katya Kazakina wrote last month in her weekly Art Detective column.
In her recent columns, Katya has been reporting on that very thorny topic, which has grown even thornier amid what appears to be a severe market correction. As one collector told her: “There’s a bit of a carnage in the market at the moment. Many things are not selling at all or selling for a fraction of what they used to.”
For instance, a painting by Dan Colen that was purchased fresh from a gallery a decade ago for probably around $450,000 went for only about $15,000 at auction. And Colen is not the only once-hot figure floundering. As Katya wrote: “Right now, you can often find a painting, a drawing, or a sculpture at auction for a fraction of what it would cost at a gallery. Still, art dealers keep asking—and buyers keep paying—steep prices for new works.” In the parlance of the art world, primary prices are outstripping secondary ones.
Why is this happening? And why do seemingly sophisticated collectors continue to pay immense sums for art from galleries, knowing full well that they may never recoup their investment? This week, Katya joins Artnet Pro editor Andrew Russeth on the podcast to make sense of these questions—and to cover a whole lot more.
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Art
In Venice, 1OF1 and Collector Ryan Zurrer Introduce Web3 Phenom Sam Spratt to the Art World – ARTnews
Digital artist Sam Spratt is living the artist’s dream. This week, he celebrated the opening of “The Monument Game,” his first-ever art show. But it wasn’t a group show in some DIY space in New York, where he is based, like so many artists typically start out, but a solo exhibition in Venice, during the art world’s biggest event of the year—the Venice Biennale. How did Spratt–a virtually unknown name in the art world–make such a tremendous leap? With a little help from his friends, of course, including Ryan Zurrer, the venture capitalist turned digital art champion.
“Something the capital ‘A’ art world doesn’t recognize is the power of the collective, it sometimes leans into the cult of the individual,” Ryan Zurrer told ARTnews during a preview of the opening. “But this show is supported by the entire community around Sam.”
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Spratt’s Venice exhibition was put on by 1OF1 Collection, a “collecting club” set up by Zurrer to nurture digital artists working in the NFT space. Since its launch in 2021, 1OF1 has been uniquely successful in bridging the gap between the art world and the Web3 community. Last year, 1OF1 and the RFC Art Collection gifted Anadol’s Unsupervised – Machine Hallucinations – MoMA to the museum, after nearly a year on view in the Gund Lobby. Zurrer also arranged the first museum presentations of Beeple’s HUMAN ONE, a seven-foot-tall kinetic sculpture based on video works, showing it first at Castello di Rivoli in Italy and the M+ Museum in Hong Kong, before sending it to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas.
With “The Monument Game,” Zurrer is once again placing digitally native art at the center of the art world. While Anadol and Beeple had large cultural footprints prior to Zurrer’s patronage, Spratt is far earlier in his career. But, what attracted Zurrer, he said, was the artist’s shrewd approach to building a dedicated, participatory audience for his work. He did so by making his art a game.
“When I first started looking at NFTs, I spent a long time just figuring out who the players were,” Spratt told ARTnews. “The auctions were like stories in themselves, I could see people’s friends bidding, almost ceremonially, to give the auction some energy, and then other people would come in, and it would get competitive, emotional.”
Spratt released his first three NFTs on the platform SuperRare in October 2021. The sale of those works, the first from his series LUCI, was accompanied by a giveaway of a free NFT to every person who put in a bid. Zurrer had been one of those underbidders (for the work Birth of Luci). While Spratt said the derivative NFTs were basically worthless, he wanted to give something back to each bidder. Zurrer, and others it seems, appreciated the gesture and Spratt quickly gained a following in the Web3 space. The offerings he gave, called Skulls of Luci, became Sam’s dedicated collectors that now go by The Council of Luci. 47 editions were given out and Spratt held back three.
All the works from LUCI are on view at the Docks Cantiere Cucchini, a short walk from the Arsenale, past a rocking boat that doubles as a fruit and vegetable market and over a wooden bridge. Though NFTs typically bring to mind glitching screens and monkey cartoons (ala Bored Ape Yacht Club), the ten works on view depict apes in a detailed, painterly style and emit a soft glow. Taking cues from photography installations, 1OF1 ditched screens in favor of prints mounted on lightboxes.
“We don’t want it to look like a Best Buy in here,” said Zurrer.
Each work represents a chapter in a fantasy world that Spratt dreamed up. Though there’s no book of lore to refer to, there seems to be some Planet of the Apes story at play in which an intelligent ape lives alongside humans, babies, and ape-human hybrids. Spratt received an education in oil painting at Savannah College of Art and Design and he credits that technical training with his ability to bring warmth and detail to the digital works. He and the team often say that his art historical references harken to Renaissance and Baroque art, though the aesthetics—to my eye—seem to pull from commercial illustration and concept art. That isn’t too surprising given that this was the environment that Spratt started off in after graduating SCAD in 2010.
“After school I was confronted with the reality that for a digital artist the only path was commercial,” Spratt said.
He did quite well on that path, producing album covers for Childish Gambino, Janelle Monae, and Kid Cudi and bagging clients like Marvel, StreetEasy, and Netflix. Spratt also enjoys a huge audience of fans who have followed him as he’s migrated from Facebook to Tumblr to Twitter and Instagram, posting his hyper-realistic fan-art on each platform. Despite the apparent success, Spratt spoke of the work with bitterness.
“I was a gun for hire. A mimic, hired to be 30% me and 70% someone else,” he said.
Spratt’s personal life blew up when he turned 30 and he traced some of the mistakes he made in his relationships with the fact that he had spent so much of his career “telling other people’s stories.” NFTs seemed like a way out of commercial illustration and a way into an original art practice.
For his latest piece in the LUCI series, Spratt digitally painted a massive landscape set in this ape-human world titled The Monument Game. For the piece, Spratt initially sold NFTs that would turn 209 collectors into “players” (since another edition of 256 NFTs was given to the Council to “curate” new champions”). Each player would then be allowed to make an observation about the painting. The Council of Luci would vote on which three observations were best, and those three Players would receive one of the Skulls of Luci NFTs that Spratt held back. By creating these tiers of engagement, with his Council and player structure, Spratt pushes digital collectors to give the kind of care to his work that more traditional collectors do.
A work at “Sam Spratt: The Monument Game” at the Docks Cantiere Pietro Cucchini in Venice.
Image courtesy 1OF1. Photography by Anna Blubanana studio.
“Jeff Koons said that the average person looks at a work of art for twenty seconds,” Lukas Amacher, 1OF1’s Artistic Director and the curator of the show, told ARTnews. “Sam has found a way to get people to engage in his work for much longer.”
The game Spratt has designed for the Venice exhibition might seem too gamified to fit the art world’s notion of art, but as Amacher and Zurrer suggest, in the Web3 environment, value is built by finding alternative ways to create investment and attention in what are typically immaterial digital artifacts. And it’s working. Thus far, the LUCI series has generated $2 million in primary sales and about $4 million in additional secondary volume. The challenge now, as it has been for the past three years, is to see if art’s gatekeepers will take this work seriously.
At the presentation of The Monument Game in Venice, an observation deck, built by platform Nifty Gateway, sits in front of the mounted work. Participants can click on the painting on the screen and write down their observations of the work in front of them, no NFT required. The first observation came from star curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the director of Castello di Rivoli and curator of Documenta 15: a tribute to art dealer Marian Goodman. The second was from Zurrer. Who’s next?
“Sam Spratt: The Monument Game” is on view until June 21 at the Docks Cantiere Pietro Cucchini in Venice.
Art
Explore local comedy, art and music: Five things to do this weekend in Saskatoon, April 19-21 – Saskatoon Star-Phoenix
Take in improv comedy, art discussions and shows, locally-produced theatre and live instrumental or choral music.
Published Apr 19, 2024 • Last updated 1 hour ago • 2 minute read
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Unseasonable snow this week isn’t slowing the arts down; nor should it hamper the enjoyment of events around town. Get out and take in a variety of comedy shows, art exhibitions and theatre this weekend.
1 — Laugh along with the Soaps
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Saskatoon Soaps Improv Comedy presents We Love the ’90s. Return to the 1990s improv-style, complete with flannel, grunge and gangsta rap jokes coming faster than the old dial-up internet connection. The troupe performs live comedy based on audience suggestions, so be prepared with your classic references and ideas. The all-ages show is Friday at the Broadway Theatre at 8 p.m. Learn more at broadwaytheatre.ca.
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2 — Chat with a local artist and take in an exhibition
The Ukrainian Museum of Canada presents an artist talk by its second artist in residence, Amalie Atkins. The Saskatoon-based artist discusses her residency and how her creative expression resonates with the history of Ukrainian heritage. The free event is Saturday at the museum at 3 p.m. Atkins’s exhibition will be on display through May 18. Learn more at umcnational.ca.
GlassArt showcases glasswork by members of the Saskatoon Glassworkers Guild. The annual show features unique works made through a variety of processes and techniques. Artists are in attendance and there will be some demonstrations. The exhibition runs Friday through Sunday in the Galleria at Innovation Place. Learn more at saskatoonglassworkersguild.org.
3 — Experience live, local theatre
Live Five Independent Theatre presents Bat Brains (or let’s explore mental illness with vampires), a new comedy by Sam Kruger and S.E. Grummett. Inspired by a months-long mental breakdown, the dark comedy follows Scud the vampire, who hasn’t left his house in 53 years. The arrival of an unexpected visitor launches Scud on a journey through his home, his mind and beyond. The show opens Friday and runs to April 28 at The Refinery. Learn more at ontheboards.ca.
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4 — Sing along with a local choir
The Saskatoon Men’s Chorus presents the spring concert, Meetin’ Here Tonight. Enjoy gospel and classic favourites with special guests: bassist Bruce Wilkinson, baritone Adam Brookman and the Outlook Men’s Chorus. Sunday at Zion Lutheran Church at 2:30 p.m. Learn more at saskatoonmenschorus.ca.
Cecilian Singers present their spring concert, Come Sing with Me. The singers are joined by three guests: soprano Kelsey Ronn, violinist Wagner Barbosa and percussionist Darrell Bueckert. The concert is Sunday at Grosvenor Park United Church at 3 p.m. Learn more at ceciliansingers.ca.
5 — Listen to historic instruments
The University of Saskatchewan presents Rawlins Piano Trio, the final concert of the season in the Discovering the Amatis series. The chamber music performance features violinist Ioana Galu and cellist Sonja Kraus from the piano trio. They are joined by flutist Joey Zhuang and violinist Véronique Mathieu. Showcasing the historic Amati string instruments, the concert is Sunday at 3 p.m. in Convocation Hall at the U of S. Learn more at leadership.usask.ca.
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