MAK: Recollecting, Looted Art and Restitution

MAK Museum: the architecture

The best museums I went to in Vienna was the MAK–short for the Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art.  The Museum is very modern.  They have a serious collection of art (of all shapes and sizes) and in many instances they ask artists to curate the exhibits.  This means that much of the art is shown off in nontraditional ways–using space, color and design to enhance or complicate the original piece of art.  In addition to this, each exhibit has a description of the choices that that the curator made in order to put the exhibit together.

These descriptions really added a lot to the museum going experience for me.  After visiting a huge number of more traditional museums in Vienna like the Leopold, Kunsthistorishes Museum and the Belvedere, it was a treat to see what people were thinking, considering and contemplating as they decided how to arrange, display and present the art in the MAK.  I guess this approach may not interest the people who go to museums to see “the Picasso,” “the Klimt” or “the Egger-Lienz” because a guide book says that they should in order to be cultured but for those of us for whom this has little appeal the MAK museum is different.  The curators of the museum give the exhibits depth and in this way I got a lot out of both the exhibits and layout of the museum.

MAK Museum: the old & the new

The current treasure of the museum is the exhibit titled Recollecting: Raub und Restitution (or in English the title is Recollecting: Looted Art and Restitution).  It’s only running until February 15th, 2009 so if you’ll be in Vienna in the next month and a half–you must go.

The exhibit is about the restitution (or lack there of ) of Jewish art and artifacts after WWII.  The art came into the hands of the Nazis in a few different ways.  Some lost their art when the Jewish owners fled Vienna packing up their art to be stored or to be shipped and upon inspection of the goods the Nazis halted their transfer.  Others lost their collections when they were forced to leave their homes and everything of value was auctioned off.  Sometimes the owners received a small amount of money for the sale of their belongings but after the war it was determined that these were forced auctions.  Then there were those who were “lucky” enough to own art that Hitler wanted for his Fuhrer Museum.  For the most part, these pieces of art weathered the war in a salt mine in Austria.  I am sure that people lost their art, artifacts and collections in other ways as well but these stand out to me as the major ways that the art was stripped from original owners.

What made the exhibition possible though was the fact that the Nazis documented everything they took very methodically.  They made lists of everything an apartment had of value–each list was written out neatly, numbered and in tidy columns.  Ironically, it’s these lists that make the restitution of the looted art possible as well as the exhibition.

The exhibition ties together the big picture of the history of the theft with the loss of individuals.  This is done through film and narration of the history behind the Nazi theft and the assembly of private histories of Jewish families and individuals.  It is the use of the private and the individual narratives that make the exhibit.

This is done through the use of primary documents like receipts of purchase and pictures of a family’s home and relatives before and after the looting.  These documents were then paired with the Nazi paperwork from the theft; the Nazi paperwork was either type written or written out by hand.  But the start of each individual narrative was often the original pieces of  looted art (now on loan to the MAK) and in many cases video narrative from the descendants.

The collection of these objects in one place is powerful.  You see not only the art object but also the life attached to it.  They are not steril pieces of precious art–as in other museums where they are stripped of history, family and ownership and hung on a wall with a plaque which reads something like: Egon Schiele, Self-portrait, pencil, 1911.

It should be noted that I just made this painting title up but the Leopold Museum also in Vienna does refuse the restitution of works from both Egon Schiele and Albin Egger-Lienz.  Apparently, they are a private museum and they argue that the rules of restitution do not apply to them.   In other words, hung on their museum walls are pieces of art looted by the Nazis during World War II.  But the MAK exhibit explains that it’s not just museums that are guilty of this, a number of Austrian libraries ended up with huge collections of books stolen off the private library shelves of Viennese Jews.  They now argue that these books are a vital part of their collections and that it would be a loss to the public to turn over these books to private hands.  So that some of the books have been returned and others have not–even though they have inside their front cover the nameplates of the person they were stolen from.

The question the exhibit seems to ask over and over again is: so now what? Some of the art has been returned to it’s rightful owners, some of the owners cannot be identified or their descendants cannot be found but for others their lost objects line the walls of museums and the shelves of libraries.  They know exactly where their art is but cannot take it home.  It’s a complicated question now what?

Maybe it’s enough to get us thinking about the issue.  Maybe it’s enough when we wonder: where did this come from? Maybe it’s enough when we in turn ask museums: where did this come from? how do you account for it? and now what?

All of this said, I am not sure that any museum can ever be completely free from the charge that something in one of their collections was stolen, looted or otherwise obtained illegally.  Just this past month an op-ed ran in the NYT regarding the rightful ownership of “the treasures of antiquity” in New York’s Metropolitian Museum.  Sharon Waxman argues in her piece “How did that vase end up in the Metropolitan” for transparency.  And frankly after attending the exhibition at the MAK, I can’t agree more.

The transparency of the exhibit gave the art life and memory and while the exhibit was depressing, I loved it.

I think I loved it because I don’t own art, real art.  I don’t come from a family that owns art.  And frankly I can’t imagine living a life where I would be in the position to buy, commission or own a piece by the likes of Klemt or Schiele but I do know loss.  I’ve had petty inconsequential things stolen from me both in Washington DC and in Walla Walla and at the time they felt pretty major.  Still, I’ve never had my freedom taken from me and when we think about the loss of freedom and the theft of a painting the loss of a painting seems pretty inconsequential.  But thing about art is that, if it is really good art, it will last longer than any one of us.  It has a memory greater than our own. Most of the people who lost their art collections during the war are no longer alive but that does not mean that their loss was any less.

This art, their art, retains this great history and this greater memory.  However when we strip it of this history and this memory we do a great disservice to the artist, the owners (past and present) and the public.  We should, I think, know where our art comes from.  This doesn’t make the work any more or less beautiful rather it makes us as collectors, purveyors, consumers and aficionados of art more accountable.

And in the end, this what the MAK exhibit Recollecting: Raub und Restitution asks of us: to be accountable and transparent even if it reveals an ugly side of the act of collecting.