"American Jews have made tremendous contributions in all aspects of
general culture. In the professions, in music, in ltierature, in painting
and
sculpture, in the academic world, and in the area of science, Jews are
often distinguished and in many instances pre-eminent."
-- Milton Plesur, 1982, p. 168-169
Jews are dominant in virtually all controlling
facets of the modern art world. In the world of "high-culture" dance,
music, and theatre, for decades S. Hurok Productions was the major force
in performance promotion. When Sol Hurok (born Solomon Izrailevich
Gurkov) died in 1974, notes Harlan Robinson, "he was the last
large-scale independent commercial producer of high culture in the United
States ... [ROBINSON, p. xv]
... [He] was an important force behind the establishment of the National
Endowment for the Arts." [ROBINSON, p. xiv] An early Hurok partner was
Jacob Berman. [ROBINSON, H., 1994, p. 120] An early competitor in the
"concert management business" was Daniel Mayer's and Marks
Levine's National Broadcasting and Concert Bureau, with links to
the fledgling NBC broadcast network. [ROBINSON, H., 1994, p. 133] In 1972
Hurok's head of publicity, Martin Feinstein, became the Executive Director
of Performing Arts for the newly created John F. Kennedy Center in Washington
DC. (Hurok's son-in-law, Barry Hyams, originally hired Feinstein to
the Hurok firm. [ROBINSON, H., 1994, p. 298] In 1975, the president of Hurok
Concerts, Sheldon Gold, was replaced by Maynard Goldman. Gold
became president later of the major talent agency ICM
Artists Ltd., a newly formed classical music and dance division of Marvin Josephson Associates.
In assessment of Hurok's closest associates,
Harlan Robinson notes that "beyond his domestic employees [cook, servant],
Hurok had not real close friends, with the possible exception of [Jewish violinist
Isaac] Stern. The violinist was also a favorite with Peter
Hyams and Peter's sister Nessa. They also remember their grandfather
had a group of 'cronies,' including some Russian Jews, whom he had known for
years and to whom he remained steadfastly loyal. These included his accountant
and his longtime lawyer, Elias Lieberman, an old-time socialist who
had helped to found the International Ladies Garment Workers Union" [ROBINSON,
H., 1994, p. 405] At Hurok's death, he "left money to his grandchildren
and to a variety of Jewish charitable organizations ... Surprisingly, only
one performing arts organization was included in Hurok's will: the Musicians'
Emergency Fund, Inc." [ROBINSON, H. 1994, p. 462]
Hurok was even succesful in getting a Hollywood
movie made about his life (screenplay writers: Harry Kurnitz and George
Oppenheimer; producer: Georgie Jessel). [ROBINSON, H., 1994, p.
320] "Highest on the list of Hurok's demands [for the movie] was the
removal of any Jewish ethnicity in the character of the impressario hero or
his associates ...[ROBINSON, H., 1994, p. 321] ... Similarly, Hurok strongly
objected to the presence of 'the stock figures of cigar-smoking impresarios'
present in the script's original opening sequence. Such images would, he feared,
detract from the image of refinement and good taste he wanted his fictionalized
self to convey ... [He did not want to appear as] some sort of back-room shyster."
[ROBINSON, H., 1994, p. 322] In the mainstream, the resultant film was not
widely acclaimed. The Jewish Ledger declared, however, that "Jews
in America will be proud of the film ... Himself a very modest person, Mr.
Hurok is very much interested in everything that is Jewish and lends a helping
hand in Jewish affairs." [ROBINSON, H., 1994, p. 332]
In the world of theatre, notes Lester
Friedman, "by the early 1890s a good deal of the theatrical booking
business in New York City was in Jewish hands, thanks to the Klaw &
Erlanger syndicate, the Shubert brothers, Marcus Loew
and Adolph Zukor, the Schenck brothers, and a host of other
agents and stage managers." [FRIEDMAN, L., 1982, p. 9]
Likewise, for decades the most prominent
mogul on Broadway was a Jewish producer, David Merrick (born David
Margulies). Merrick's abusive personality saddled him with a widely known
nickname: "the abominable showman." Another Jewish theatre mogul,
Joseph Papp (Papirofsky), founded the New York Shakespeare Festival,
created the influential Public Theatre for playwrights, and produced such
Broadway hits as Hair and A
Chorus Line.
Papp's "ego was huge," says Jewish author Helen Epstein,
"but instead of slickness, he
exuded reserve and a sobriety that made me think
of Old Testament patriarchs ...
Papp had influenced a huge number of his
contemporaries and younger people
in the arts. Hundreds of writers, actors,
directors, composers, dessigners,
producers, arts administrators, stage managers, journalists
and critics traced the beginnings of their careers to the [Shakespeare]
Festival. Thousands more dated
thier first exposure to Shakespeare to a production
in Central Park. Millions of
others had seen yhis productions on television and on
Broadway. The name Joseph Papp
embodied the history and very best possibilities
of New York." [EPSTEIN,
H., 1994, p. 10-ll]
Oscar Hammerstein I, also Jewish, by the
early years of the 20th century built thirteen theatres/music hall (often
for the opera) in New York, Philadelphia, and London. "The name and
personality of Oscar Hammerstein," notes Vincent Sheean, "became
as familiar to the nation as if he had been elected its President ... Oscar
Hammerstein ... commanded more space in the press than the Vanderbilts,
Astors, Morgans, than William Jennings Bryan or indeed any other personage
of his day except President Theodore Roosevelt." [SHEEAN, V., 1956,
p. 3-4] Hammerstein (and son Willie) even owned the Victoria Theatre
("the great nut vaudeville house of New York") which was famed
for freak shows, featuring "persons notorious for whatever reason"
-- "bridge jumpers and stunt flyers, divorcees, channel swimmers, and
record-breakers of any kind; whether they had stage talent was irrelevant."
[SHEEAN, 1956, p. 112] Hammerstein's greatest rival in the opera world (who
eventually bought him out) was also Jewish, Otto Kahn, "banker
and connoisseur of the arts [and] principal financial power of the Metropolitan
[Opera Company]." [SHEEAN, V., 1956, p. 296]
But the most powerful entrepreneurial network
in theatre production and control has long been the Shubert company.
Jerry Stagg notes that Samuel, Jacob, and Lee (Levi)
Shubert "invaded New York City in 1900, armed with tireless
energy, boundless confidence, a lust for money, power, and fame, and $15,000,
most of it borrowed. A quarter of a center later, their worth was estimated
at half a billion dollars. [The Shuberts] took control of theatre in America."
[STAGG, p. 3] (Shubert CEO in the year 2000? Gerald Schoenfeld).
More at ground level, Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler of New
York's Group Theatre were legendary and profoundly influential acting teachers.
Lawrence Langner was one of the founders of the Washington Square
Players.
As
Ellen Schiff notes:
"A few years ago, Tyrone Guthrie speculated
that if Jews withdrew from the
American theatre, the institution 'would
collapse about next Thursday.'
Guthrie was no doubt assessing Jewish
contributions at every level of
of show business from artistic, to administrators,
to 'angels.' [i.e,
philanthropists]." [SCHIFF, E., 1986,
p. 79]
By 1999, Jewish entrepreneur Robert F.X.
Sillerman's SFX company was causing shock waves in the live theatre and music
promotion worlds. In one and a half years it had spent $1.5 billion in gobbling
up other companies. The Financial Post noted that he was still attempting
to "strengthen his domination of live theatre promotion in the United
States. SFX also is the single
largest player in [music] concert promotion. So large, in fact, that regulators
expressed concern last year ... SFX
is now believed to be close to purchasing its only major rival, Universal Concerts, a division of Montreal
firm Seagram Company [controlled
by the Jewish Bronfman family]." [LANG, A., 5-28-99, p. C1, C17]
SFX
also owns or operates over 80 venues in the United States, mostly concert
halls, as well as the rights to many theatrical productions (Phantom of
the Opera, et al). It also produces over 13,000 events a year. Its recently
purchased Falk Associated Management
Enterprises division manages 650 professional athletes and broadcasters
-- basketball star Michael Jordan among them. "Talent agencies, ticketing
companies, and independent promoters," notes the (New York) Daily
News, "have complained that the new live entertainment giant exerts
too much control over the industry." [FURMAN, 6-7-99, p. 57] In August 1999 SFX moved into Great Britain too, purchasing the Apollo Leisure Group (one of the largest theatre and arena operators in that
country) for $254 million. The purchase also included Tickets Direct and the Barry
Claymore Corporation. [FARMER, N., 8-21-99, p. 13]
In the dance world, Martha Graham was one
of the icons of this art form in the 20th century. She wasn't Jewish. But
in her early seventies her "right hand man" became Ron Protas,
Jewish and in his twenties, who eventually positioned himself to inherit her
entire estate at her death. As Ismene Brown notes
"When dance great Martha Graham died
at the age of 96, she left him
[Protas] everything. It was the greatest
legacy to dance this century.
Five years later Ron Protas stood as the only inheritor of
the Graham
works, the Graham company, and the Graham
industry. After reading
the section on Protas in the huge biography
of Graham by her long-term
colleague and fellow choreographer Agnes
de Mille (Rodeo, Oklahoma!);
it's hard not to expect to meet Svengali,
Mephistopholes, and a leech
rolled into one. No one could have been
more damned in print. He
caused a 'blood-letting,' 'policed' Graham,
de Mille says; turned her
against old friends, made her into an elderly
fool performing into
her seventies, and tainted a monumental
career with sleazy celebrity
games. The object of this scorn (shared
by many) is a shock to meet --
an amiably shambling, hunched-up man of
49, black curly hair,
chubby Jewish features, constantly wreathed
in smiles, very disarming."
[BROWN, I., 10-16-96, p. 17]
Famed dancer Isadora Duncan's accompaniest was Max
Rabinovitch. [ROBINSON, H., 1994, p. 91] Duncan's husband, Russian poet
Seregei Yesenin, was once publicized as an "anti-Semite." "Not
surprisingly," notes Harlow Robinson, "and probably with [Jewish
impresario Sol] Hurok's help, the story of Yesenin's anti-Semitism
immediately hit the newspapers, elaborately embroidered." [ROBINSON,
M., 1994, p. 92] As Julia Foulkes declares about the Jewish angle to the modern
dance world:
"Although the leaders of modern dance in
the 1930s -- Martha Graham, Doris
Humphrey, Chalres Weidman, and Haya Holm --
were not Jewish, Jewish
women filled modern dance classes, companies,
organizations, picket lines,
and concert audiences. Teachers, such as Blanche
Talmud and Edith Segal,
taught performers, such as Lily Mehlman and
Lillian Shapero; performances
by choreographers such as Anna Sokolow and Sophie
Maslow, were reviewed
by critics, such as Edna Ocko; while organizers,
such as Helen Tamiris and
Fanya Geltman, hassled labor unions and the
federal government for increased
attention to dance. These efforts in substantiating
a new art form have been
overlooked because our view of the arts tends
to focus on a few stars,
emphasizing individual genius rather than collective
momentum and organizational
drive. Jewish women shaped the foundation of
modern dance, and in the mid-
1930s their impact was well enough known that
the eminent social commentator
[and Jewish comedian] Fanny Brice could unleash
her satire on the subject,
playing Martha Graham in a sketch entitled 'Modernistic
Moe,' in which she
cried 'Rewolt!' in a Yiddish accent." [FOULKES,
J., JUNE 2000, p. 233-252]
Even the best known mime in history, Marcel
Marceau (originally Mangel), is Jewish. To his credit, he once told a
Jewish ethnic newspaper: "I find it hard to identify with Jewish issues
-- humanity is my overriding battle cry." [JOSEPHS, J., 3-30-01] Performer
Meredith Monk is also Jewish. [TWICE BLESSED, online gay/Jewish website]
Jewish influence in the visual arts is
a huge story. "Modern art" (hereafter defined as painting, sculpture,
and other visual arts) in capitalist society is a paradox. Its practitioners
generally believe that their personal expressions of the human experience
through physical objects are secularly sacred. Yet, to survive and prosper
as artists, to garner the support to do further work that transcends mere
consumerism, this belief itself must be fundamentally prostituted. "Fine
art," notes anthropologist Stuart Plattner, "is similar to religion
... as an institution that counteracts the crassly commercial search for advancement
in a capitalist art world. At the same time, these objects of supposedly sublime
vision are bought and sold as commodities." [PLATTNER, p. 4]
The elitist "art world" strata
-- so-called "High Art"-- is the milieu of painting provenances,
artist pedigrees, and the changing "avante-garde" superstar brand-names.
There are, strangely, no objective standards in this strata to discern quality
or value in either the artist or his creations. Not only are there no clear
standards of evaluation, "in the age of conceptual, minimal, and performance
art, it is often unclear what museum quality art is supposed to look like."
[PLATTNER, p. 5] The confirmation of artistic importance (and, hence, quality
and value) is merely the decision of the "informed opinion" of High
Art insiders, whose dictates are often self-rewarding. Such insiders include
an incestuous cabal of professional art curators, critics, and dealers who
swim back and forth among these occupational categories of art trade. (There
are other entrees to the art community, of course. One of the most prominent
art critics of the 1960s and 1970s was Harold Rosenberg who was trained
as a lawyer and who became an influential "art critic" after a career
in advertising. [JACOBY, p. 110] As Rosenberg himself once noted, "Since
the rise of art history, in the nineteenth century, art historians have been
directly linked with the market prices of paintings and sculptures because
of their authority in deciding attributions. By the 1970s, art history, having
achieved the leading role in the day-to-day life of art, had overgrown all
its theoretical boundaries and gone to seed; it was now prepared to put the
stamp of value on anything, not excluding publicized fakes." [MEYER,
K., 1979, p. 186]
While there is no clearly unifying and
objective standard of art evaluation, there is a referential High Art history,
the entwined tales of artists and wealthy business patrons who brought them
to public attention and acclaim. There is also an art jargon, and meta-language
"art talk" for those in the know.
As Duncan Cameron, once-director of the Brooklyn
Museum, said in a speech to the United Nations:
"In summary, then, the traditional museum
has been administered by a curatorial
elite whose members are trained as scholars
in disciplines relevant to the museum
collections ... structured according to specific
models of knowledge. These
models are generally incomprehensible to other
than those trained in a
specific discipline and may be said to be encoded
in the private languages
of scholarship ... This situation has persisted
through the reluctance of the
public to protest it and the willingness of
governing bodies to support it.
Both have been in awe of the mystique of curatorship,
both have been
unprepared to admit that the content of the
museum is meanignless and lacks
a personal relevance ... For a few, the upper-middle
class with higher
education and therefore some key to the secret
codes, it becomes a
domain with class and status connections."
[MEYER, K., 1979, p. 236-237]
"Art has become a commodity,"
notes Sophy Burnham, "Collectors bought art as profitable speculation.
Museums bought what their trustees (these same collectors) demanded they immortalize.
Critics pushed art in which they had financial interest ... The artist had
no part in these exchanges. Once his work passed out of his hands ... he received
no further royalties. He watched the prices rise and the dealers in art get
fat ... Art was whatever would sell." [BURNHAM, p. 9]
"On the assumption that "he who
pays the piper calls the tunes," says Judith Huggins-Balfe, "critics
have accused both individuals and institutional private patrons of altering
some presumably 'natural' development of art, in their own class and commercial
interests." [BALFE, p. 314] Si Newhouse, for instance, (whom we
have met before as chairman of the huge Advance media chain)," said dealer
Leo Castelli, "is one who has put together a perfect choice of
artists, starting out with Pollack and de Kooning." [WATSON, p. 104]
While trained "art professionals"
are influential, the foundation of the modern art world is those who buy and
sell it (sometimes these very art professionals). Such people decide what
has value, and even what art is and is not. Most do not truly care about cutting
edge perceptual insights or transcendent visions but, rather, money. Most
buying and selling of art today, especially in the realm of High Art, is an
economic investment. In 1984 major art journals, including ArtNews
and Art and Antiques, even began publishing lists of major art collectors.
60% of the list were Americans. The next most populous were Japanese, then
Germans. [WATSON, p. 388] (In more recent years, with Japanese economic woes,
Japanese influence has correspondingly diminished and a significant percentage
of today's "German" art activity we can safely presume to be Jewish).
The heart of the American (and international)
High Art market is New York City. "Although Los Angeles, Chicago, San
Francisco, Santa Fe, and other centers have large demands [for art],"
says Stuart Plattner, "New York is hegemonic on the national scale, and
even the international level, meaning that only elite gallery exposure in
New York creates art-historical significance." [PLATTNER, p. 8] New York
City is also home for the most important art magazines and other periodicals
whose sphere of reportage is usually its immediate vicinity. By 1973, some
estimated that 75-80% of the 2500 core "art market' personnel -- art
dealers, art curators, art critics, and art collectors -- were Jewish. [BURNHAM,
p. 25] These people -- and their progeny -- in New York largely control American
artistic tastes and values at the most important tier. (In 2001, according
to ARTnews, at least eight of the "Top Ten" art collectors
were Jewish: Debbie and Leon Black, Edythe and Eli Broad, Doris
and Donald Fisher, Ronnie and Samuel Heyman, Marie-Josee and
Henry R. Kravitz, Evelyn and Leonard Lauder, Jo Carole and Ronald
S. Lauder, and Stephen Wynn). [ESTEROW, M., SUMMER 2001]
When Alice Bellony-Rewald (an artist, critic,
and art model) first moved into the New York art world from France, she noted
that :
"I was plunged into a world of highly
sophisticated Jewish art collectors,
and it took me a long time to reconcile
my mental picture of speakeasies
and the Wild West with people who spoke
five languages fluently and
lived surrounded by period furniture,
Meissen china, and Old
Masters." [PEPPIATT, p. 16]
Jewish author Howard Jacobson wrote
in 1993 about his experiences with prominent New York City art critic Peter
Schjeldhal:
"'I came to New York to be Jewish,'
[Schjeldhal] once told me.
'Did you make it?'
'No.'
'What were you before?'
'Porcelain-sink Lutheran.'
'And
now? Since you haven't made it across as one of us?'
He paused. He wasn't sure he wanted to
be that un-Jewish.
'A certain transformation has occurred;
but a certain gulf
remains.'
It takes me a little while to put it together
-- the fact that just about
every gallery/space/loft we go into is
run by a Jew. This isn't Jewish
how I like it. This is slow-drawl, camp
Jewish, retreating, high-toned,
not very sense-of-humorish Jewish. The
pallid women gallery-owners
whose walls and wine we absorb are also
Jewish." [JACOBSON, H.,
1995, p. 84-85]
Famous Jewish novelist Judith Krantz
notes in her biography her avenue into the upper tiers of the art world: "Polly
Guggenheim, a sculptor who'd lived in Paris most of her life, became our
guide into the art world." [KRANTZ, J., 2000, p. 324]
In 1996, Jewish art historian Eunice
Lipton admitted that the main reason she went into a career as an art
historian was to be in a field dominated by Jews:
"I wanted to be where Jews were --
that is, I wanted a profession that
would allow me tacitly to acknowledge
my Jewishness through the
company I kept." [RUBIN- DURSKY,
p. 289]
Elsewhere, she notes that:
"On the face of it, art history seemed a gentile profession.
For one thing,
the study of Christian art was its center.
In addition, there was an ancient
Jewish injunction against making graven
images. But the fact is, the
field was filled with Jews. One might
even say it was shaped by them.
Art history is characterized in this century
by studies in connoisseurship,
formalist analysis, the study of iconography
and iconology, and social
analyses. Jews have been prominent in
all categories." [LIPTON, p. 285]
"Today," wrote Gerald Krefetz
in 1982, "... Jews enjoy every phase of the art world: as artists, dealers,
collectors, critics, curators, consultants, and patrons. In fact, the contemporary
art scene has a strong Jewish flavor. In some circles, the wheelers and dealers
are referred to as the Jewish mafia since they command power, prestige, and
most of all, money." A few important members of the Jewish mafia in recent
decades included dealers Leo Castelli, Ben Heller, and Larry
Rubins (as well as Rubins' brother, William, a curator at the Museum
of Modern Art), free lance art critic Clement Greenberg and Hilton
Kramer (long time art critic for the New York Times, Henry Geldzahler
(curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art), among many others. "This
group is a formidable power," noted Krafetz, "in forming tastes
and promoting some schools of art to the exclusion of others." [KRAFETZ,
p. 161]
The study of iconography and iconology
[keys in modern art evaluation] says Eunice Lipton, was "developed
by Erwin Panofsky and practiced by [other] Jewish scholars like Leo
Steinberg, Irving Lavin, and Linda Seidel." [LIPTON,
p. 286] Still other Jewish art scholars of prominence include Meyer Schapiro,
Walter Friedlander, Robert Rosenblum, and Rosland Krauss,
to begin a list just among those termed "formalist." Joseph Hodin
was a prominent Jewish art scholar in Britain, as was the Viennese-born E.
H. Gombrich, author of the internationally influential textbook in every
art student's locker, The Story of Art.
"The notion of Jewish culture," he curiously claims, "was
an invention of Hitler." [SEARLE, p. T9]
Traditional Judaism has prohibited "graven
images" and idolatry, and throughout most of history Jews were usually
reluctant to engage in many types of activities western culture describes
today as "art." "It
is ... forbidden to draw the picture of a man," declares the Orthodox
Code of Jewish Law, "even only the face of a man." [GANZFRIED,
p. 53] "This is when [Jewish] religious law became all powerful,"
noted the prominent Jewish religious philosopher Martin Buber, "The
human body is despicable. Seeing is a sin. Art is a sin ... Everything creative
is smothered at its first appearance." [OLIN, p. 45] "To a non-Jewish
reader," says Margaret Olin, "such judgments appear damning.
Buber's readership, however, was Jewish, since his book appeared under Zionist
auspices." [OLIN, p. 45]
In 1887, two French archaeologists, Georges
Perrot and Charles Chipiez, reconstructed models of ancient Jewish temples
and decided that Jews were the "least artistic of the greatest people
of antiquity." [OLIN, p. 42] A year later a prominent German art historian,
Wilhelm Lubke, declared that "Jews, having no artistic sensibility of
their own, borrowed architectural forms on an eclectic principle from the
nations dwelling around them." [OLIN, p. 42]
"[This] remark sounds innocent from
a postmodern standpoint," says Margaret Olin, "but for Lubke to
characterize Jews as a people who borrowed from others the art they could
not create on their own lent a historical basis to the anti-Semitic stereotypes
of Jews as chameleon-like parasites." [OLIN, p. 42]
Even the well-known Jewish turn-of-the-century
art historian Bernard Berenson reiterated what Olin calls a recurrent
anti-Semitic theme. "The Jews," said Berenson, "like
their Ishamaelite cousins the Arabs, and indeed perhaps like all pure Semites
(if such there be), have displayed little talent for the visual, and almost
none for the figure arts." [OLIN, p. 49]
But, although there was "absent a Jewish
visual tradition prior to this century," [FREUDENHEIM, p. 9] there was
nothing to prevent them from engaging in the market place of it. Even "in the avant-garde circles of the
twenties, thirties, and forties," notes Nathan Glazer and Patrick
Moynihan, "Jews were very often the critics (and entrepreneurs), non-Jews
the creators. This was so in literature, painting, music, and the theatre."
[GLAZER/MOYNIHAN, p. 173]
"In the broad spectrum of Judeo-Christianity,
one group, often figured as Jewish," says Marc Shell, "is
relatively comfortable with money and uncomfortable with representational
art, while one group, frequently reckoned as Christianity, is relatively comfortable
with art and uncomfortable with money. It is, according to this stereopticon,
the essence of Judaism to reject representational art and the essence of Christians
to expel changing coins from the temple." [SHELL, p. 7]
There is, as we have repeatedly seen, little
sacrosanct in Jewish religious tradition that prohibits money-making; certainly
the exploitation of objects of human expression would fall within the marketable
sphere. The merger of money and art as a single consumer commodity, the whole
art world as a field for exploitation, and the profanation of modern art that
is regarded as illusorily -- yet secularly -- "sacred," has in our
own day been profoundly effected by Jewish influence. Norman Cantor,
for example, notes that:
"A member of the Warburg banking
family single-handedly started up
the field of art history ... [CANTOR,
p. 271] ... All the art history
departments in the world are direct descendants
of Aby Warburg's
Institute (moved from to London in 1932
to escape the Nazis) and his
great Jewish disciple, Erwin Panofsky.
Is it anomalous that a Jew would
have been so creative in the study of
art that was so little cultivated in
Jewish tradition? All the more that a
liberated white Jew should pursue
art history. But one can see a Judaizing
tendency in Warburg's method
of art historical criticism. The picture
is studied for its 'iconology,' its
pattern of ideas illustrating textual
passages. Art is thereby approached
in hermeneutic fashion, again recalling
Talmudic exegesis, rather than for
its aesthetic content. Yet the most significant
aspect of Warburg's
development in art history is the demonstration
that market capitalism
could embrace and fund a purely cultural
and academic operation. The
distinct equality of capital was not
its materialism, but its liquidity, the
fungible capacity of capital to transform
into any commodity, including
art and humanities literature that represents
a dynamic power in society.
Aby Warburg's historical and critical
mastery of art was structurally the
same as his brother's mastery in their
international bank of money and
its investment potential. The transformative
interaction between art and
capital is central to the nature of the
market economy." [CANTOR, p.
271]
(As Jewish scholar George Mosse notes
about the Warburg art circle: "Erwin Panofsky, one of the Warburg
library's most famous collaborators [was] like almost all of its early collaborators
a Jew ... [Ernst Cassierer was] the Warburg library's most prolific
author.") [MOSSE, G., 1985, p. 53]
"Jews may or may not have become more
culture conscious," suggests Gerald Krefetz, "but they certainly
were among the first to realize that modern art is not a bad investment ...
[Some Jews saw] in modern art one of the most lucrative ways to duplicate
money since the invention of compound interest." [KREFETZ, p. 146] "The
linkage of art and commercial gain," notes Alfred Lindemann, "became
more important in the United States than in any other country in history."
[LINDEMANN, p. 207] (Coincidence that Jewish administrator Lee Caplin
"created and directed the Federal Program 'The Business of Art and the
Artist' while serving as Special Assistant to the Chairman of the National
Endowment for the Arts?") [CAPLIN, L., 1989, p. ix] "Some dealers
are commodity brokers, not selling pork bellies or soybean futures, but work
by recognized artists, mostly dead," says Krafetz, "They buy and
sell their works as they would any other product ... They are basically brother
traders." [KRAFETZ, p. 147]
A good example of such attitudes of quite
literally "brother traders" can be found in a 1994 article in ARTnews
that profiles three Jewish art investors -- brothers Joseph, David,
and Ezra Nahmad, heirs to a Syrian banking fortune. "Secretive
and elusive," reporter Andrew Decker also observes that the brothers
"are among the richest art traders in the world. They are also among
the least known ... They have one of the largest stockpiles of art in the
world ... The inventory ... consists of about 1,000 paintings that usually
sit untouched in a warehouse ... [DECKER, p. 116] ... According to several
sources, Joseph's greatest interests are money, art, and women, roughly in
that order." [DECKER, p. 119] Joseph has been convicted in France for
currency violations; in Italy he was jailed for having 25,000 stolen British
pounds in his possession. He was also investigated in Italy for income tax
evasion, owing over $13 million. In 1973 the Nahmad brothers were found to
be in the possession of Giacometti bronzes that had been stolen eight years
earlier.
In Israel, the hundreds of thousands of
Jews flooding into Israel in recent years have brought with them art treasures
from Russia, particularly old Russian Orthodox Christian icons. They are sold
in Israel to dealers, collectors, or tourists for anywhere from $500 to $30,000.
Their values can range from $500 to $2.5 million; the best quality pieces
are sent from Israel to Europe or America for higher price resale. "Taking
them out of the Soviet Union -- or
its successor independent republics," notes the Atlanta Journal Constitution,
"is illegal. But the immigrants take the risk, often bribing custom officials
to look the other way." [SALOME, p. A6]
In 1995 Dmitri Yakubovsky, once
kicked out of Russian military school for what he decried as anti-Semitism,
and later owner of a $5.3 mansion in suburban Toronto, had a new home. It
was "a decrepit Russian prison cell in St. Petersburg's Kresty Detention
Center. He was arrested in Moscow last December and is charged with complicity
in the theft of a historic $130-million collection of rare far Eastern and
antique European manuscripts from the Russian National Library." [GOLD,
J., p. 37] The police laid a trap
for Yakubovsky, "his arrest followed immediately, and the net expanded
to Israel, where a group of Israelis were arrested." [WARD, p. B6]
A venerable Israeli "Holocaust museum" has
even been involved in international art smuggling from the former Soviet Union.
In 2001, the Associated Press noted that
"In a secret operation, Jerusalem's Yad
Vashem Holocaust memorial has
smuggled out of Ukraine fragements of murals
by Polish-Jewish artist Bruno
Schulz, sparking an international controversy.
Yad Vashem maintains it
was merely exercising its right to preserve
the works of a prominent
Jewish writer, artist and Holocaust victim,
but Ukrainian and Polish
officials say their removal was a crime."
[SHARGORODKY, S., 6-20-01]
In such an international art sphere, in
1995 ARTnews published a piece about the man who "is spending
more freely than any other collector in history," an Iranian-born Jew,
now an American citizen living in Great Britain, Nasser Khalili. His
personal collection of Islamic art alone is insured for $1.5 billion. Khalili
spent $7.5 million just to publish a thirty volume catalogue of the Islamic
works he owns. Among other genres of his 27,000 art objects is a Japanese
art collection worth as much as $100 million, Russian enamels and Faberge,
ancient Mesopotamian pottery figures, 19th-century Spanish metalwork, Swedish
bridal tapestries (1750-1850), Indian woven silks (1200-1500), and 16 of 50
pre-16th century silks "all in Tibetan monasteries until the 1980s."
[NORMAN, p. 120] An early Jewish-Iranian adviser to Khalili was Mehdi Mahboubian
"who was the most important of the group of Jewish Iranian art dealers
in Tehran in the 1970s and acted as a personal adviser to the shah and shahbanu
[the shah's wife]." [NORMAN, p. 120]
Rabbi Alan Lew notes the curiously incongruous
expressions of Zen master/art dealer "Rudrananda":
[There was] a guru named Rudrananda, or, as he was
known, Rudi. Rudi's
real name was Albert Rudolph. He was
a Jewish guy who grew up in Brooklyn
... [LEW, A., 1999, p. 51] [He had] a large
store ... where all of Rudi's students
lived. The store was lined with tonkas, Tibetan
tapestries, and priceless Buddhas.
Some of them were very large, over six feet
tall, and all of them were
exquisite. Rudi had stood at the Indian border
when the Tibetans were fleeing
the Chinese, buying all their priceless Buddhas
and art treasures. Now he
was an art dealer, selling his treasures to
museums and extremely wealthy
people. I had to wait a long time while he obsequiously
waited on museum
representative and millionaires, periodically
going to the back of the store
where one or two of his students were meditating
on him. He would put his
hand on their heads and somehow transmit energy
to them, and they would
go into convulsions. Other students were coming
to see him for consultations.
It was as if Rudi was giving off electricity.
The more advanced the students
were, the more electrified they would become until
they were trembling, all
in the midst of high-powered transactions over
statuary. The millionaires who
came to buy art objects seemed totally oblivious
to everything that was going
on and never got jolted. It was in the midst
of all this that Rudi told me I
should drop everything and come study with him,
that he would make me
rich, and that I would get laid all the time.
'You should have seen the knockers
on the woman I was just with in Boston,' he
said." [LEW, A., 1999, p. 54-55]
In Switzerland, Werner and Gabrielle
Merzbacher own "one of the world's greatest accumulations of modern
art." [GREEN, D., p. 37] 139
works by 77 artists were exhibited at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in 1998.
In Los Angeles, "in the early 1990s," notes Tom King,
"with his purchased of David Hockney's
Double Portrait, [Jewish Hollywood mogul David]
Geffen began a buying spree that soon made the art world take
note. He built a collection of modern masterpieces
that, for the artists and periods
he favored, was unparalleled, including many of the
most valuable works by Jackson
Pollock and Jasper Johns. [KING, T., 2000, p.
477]
In England, Jewish advertising mogul Charles
Saatchi and his wife "have built a collection of modern art that
is regarded today as perhaps the most important of its kind in the world in
private hands," largely concentrating on "American minimalists."
[FALLON, p. 325] By the 1980s Saatchi
was spending $1 million a year on new art acquisitions. Among his
interests was a "heavy investment in the art of [Jewish painter] Julian
Schnabel." [GLUECK, p. 2, p. 27] Norman Rosenthal of the British
Royal Academy suggested that "the Saatchis are probably the most important
collectors of modern art in anywhere in the world." [FALLON, p. 335]
Political artist Hans Haacke once held an exhibition
(called "Taking Stock") "which was an attack on the
Saatchis, their advertising empire, and on Mrs. Thatcher [the British Prime
Minister who was built to power with the help of Saatchi advertising]."
[FALLON, p. 334]
Kevin Goldman even suggests
that:
"Advertising is an industry in which
the amount of money to be made
rivals the fortunes made by investment bankers
and robber barons.
Indeed, one [advertising] man, Charles
Saatchi, made so much money
in advertising that he was able to control
the world's contemporary art
market." [GOLDMAN, p. 21]
"The Saatchi Collection," says
Alison Fendley, "has been a focus of debate in the world of contemporary
art since it opened to the public in 1985. Little is known about the inner
workings of the Saatchi Gallery; even today, its finances are mysterious."
[FENDLEY, p. 6]
Looking for an ikat, "a rare textile
from Uzbekistan?" Try Guido Goldman, who in the last twenty years
has amassed the largest private ikat collection from Central Asia in the world.
(Goldman's father, Nachum, was the "President of the World Jewish
Congress and key player in a host of other Jewish organizations.") [CEMBALEST,
HOW, p. 11] )
Suits of armor? Medieval artifacts? Judaica?
Barry Trupin "owned one of the largest private collections of
Judaica in America, as well as a world-renowned collection of medieval artifacts
and suits of armor. His pride and joy was a suit of armor from Hever Castle
in England that had belonged to Henry II. Trupin wanted to own the armor so
passionately that he paid $3.2 million for it at auction, outbidding both
the Tower of London and the Louvre." [GAINES, S., 1998, p. 231]
How about the works of French poet, artist,
and filmmaker Jean Cocteau? In 1995 Jewish business mogul Severin Wunderman
shut down his "Severin Wunderman Museum" in southern California
and donated "the world's largest collection of works" by Cocteau
to the University of Texas. Wunderman planned to move to France to live in
his restored 15th century castle. [HOWLETT, p. E1] The works of artist
Andrew Wyeth? In the 1980s, Hollywood producer Joseph E. Levine sold
the world's largest collection of Wyeth paintings. [ARONSON, S., 1983, p.
187]
Jewish TV personality Allen Funt (of Candid
Camera fame) began buying relatively cheap paintings by artist Sir Lawrence
Alma-Tadema (1836-1912) to "decorate his apartment." Ruskin had
once described Alma-Tadema as "the worse painter of the nineteenth century."
"Funt," says Karl Meyer, "proceeded to acquire more and more
of the artist's work; soon enough, publicity being what it is, there were
newspaper features describing his hobby, and Funt had become the unlikely
agent of Alma-Tadema's rehabilitation." After the Metropolitan Museum
put on a show of Funt's collection, Funt sold it all ("In all fairness,"
says Karl Meyer, "he needed the money since he had recently been defrauded
of $1,200,000 in Candid Camera profits by his longtime accountant, who later
committed suicide.") [MEYER, K., 1979, p. 184-185]
Native American art? In 1998 Stanley
Marcus, chairman emeritus of the Neiman Marcus luxury store, put his American
Indian art collection up for auction at Sotheby's. In charge of the sale was
Ellen Taubman, the head of Sotheby's Indian art department for 25 years,
and the daughter of Sotheby's board chairman, Jewish real estate mogul Alfred
Taubman. Picasso? In 1998, Victor and Sally Ganz put up for auction their
art stash, including "the most important privately-held collection of
works by Picasso in America." Expected sales figures ranged from $125
million to half a billion dollars. [HANDWERKER, 11-10-97]
(Picasso's first art "contract" was signed with prominent
Jewish dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler in 1912). [MEYER, K., 1979, p. 168]
In 1999, an auction of art (returned after confiscation by the Nazis decades
ago) netted the Rothschild family $90 million.
Art from Germany? Going to auction in 2000,
Marvin and Janet Fishman's properties were worth an estimated
$16 million. It was "a collection of some 160 works, one of the most
comprehensive groups of early 20th century German art ever to be formed in
private hands." [RONNER, M., 7-30-2000, p. 16]
Anything else? Jewish dealer Ronnie
Darvick has, over the years, even
sold the gun that killed Lee Harvey Oswald (for $220,000), Marilyn Monroe's
certificate of conversion to Judaism when she married Jewish playwright Arthur
Miller in 1956, the writings of mass murderer Charles Manson, and Adolf Hitler's
autograph. "My mother had her whole family wiped out in Poland,"
says Darvick, "Her attitude was, he'd be turning over in his grave if
he knew a Jew was making money off his autograph." [THOMAS, p.G8]
In 1981 Charles Hamilton, an art and documents
dealer, wrote about his auction world experiences:
"In November, 1975, I put up at auction
several unusual Nazi items, one of
which instantly captivated the press. It was
an ornate, gold-plated license plate
used on Hitler's parade limousine. He'd presented
it to his mistress, Eva Braun,
because she was intrigued by flashy beauty.
The plate was made of heavy brass
plated in gleaming gold. There was an emobssed
swastika in the upper left and
a Nazi eagle in the upper right. The plate
bore the legend: 'Reichskanzler -- Deutschland.'
Not more than two doors away from the
Conrad Suite at the Waldorf-Astoria where
I was holding the sale of Hitler's license
plate, there was by chance a meeting of the
B'nai B'rith, an assemblage of pensive graybeards
wearing yarmulkes. A television reporter
perceived the anomaly.
'May I borrow that license
plate for a few minutes?' he asked.
'Of course,' I said.
I followed him and his television crew
into the B'nai B'rith conference. The
reporter selected an old man who looked as
though he might have suffered the
brutalities of a concentration camp.
'Sir,' he said, 'Mr. Hamilton,
the autograph dealer, is auctioning off, just down
the hall, this license plate from Hitler's
limousine. May I have your opinion of the sale?'
'Disgusting! I cannot believe
that anyone would sell or buy such a revolting object.'
The reporter asked the same question of three
or four other elderly members of the assemblage.
The answers were all vehement denunciations of me and my auction.
After the license plate was sold for $3,500
to a Jewish dealer, the reporter asked me what I
thought of the sale." [HAMILTON, C., 1981, p. p. 180-181]
Elsewhere, Hamilton notes another such story:
"In the fall of 1979 a young man, who introduced
himself as Aaron Goldberg, brought
me for auction a small shief of unused stationery
imprinted with Hitler's name and address.
'I take it your father
brought these back from Germany after the war,' I said, recognizing
the paper as that often used by Hitler in writing to lower army echelons.
'No,' he explained.
'My father was too old for the army. He owned a printing shop
in Brooklyn. Two or three years before we got
into the war, he was asked by the Nazi embassy
in New York to print some official stationery for Hitler. It was tough at
that
time to get any sort of work and although Jewish,
my father took the job. I found
these sheets in the back of the shop.'"
[HAMILTON, C., 1981, p.182]
In England, in 1989 a Jewish entrepreneur,
Andrew Benjamin, was evicted by his Jewish landlord when it was discovered
that Benjamin's rented space was a store called "Cutdown," which
was "selling Nazi clothing and medals, as well as racist records, literature,
and videos." [HOROWITZ, D.] (Conversely, in a Jewish censorial action
against an Internet provider, France's International League Against Racism
and Anti-Semitism and the Jewish Student Union went to court in Europe to
seek to ban an on-line Yahoo Internet auction of Nazi memorabilia. "Is
Yahoo expected," complained the company, "to check who is on-line
and comply with the laws of every other country?") [AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE,
5-16-2000]
Jewish activism to stop the sale of Nazi memorabilia
is odd considering the vast experience of art and documents dealer Charles
Hamilton in the selling of Nazi items:
"In the past twenty years I've sold at
auction thousands of Nazi relics and
documents. And nearly always such sales have
evoked criticism, harrowing
experiences, or even threats on my life ...
Today the big threat to me is not
from bombs [Hamilton once had a bomb threat
for having a Hitler photo for
sale in his gallery window] but from collectors
who are stampeding me and
other autograph dealers in their frenzy to
stock up on letters and documents
of Hitler and his henchmen before the price
goes through the roof. A letter of
Hitler's is now worth five of Churchill's and
ten of Franklin D. Roosevelt's.
Who's in the Third Reich rat race? The
Germans are buying. The British are
buying. But most of all it's Jewish collectors
in America. They bid with aliases
or anagrams, from behind pillars or half-closed
doors, or signal the auctioneer
furtively. Their names are top secret.
Is it just the fascination of evil and
violence? Maybe. But as one Jewish collector explained
to me: 'It's like having the head of the hunter on the wall instead of the
hunted.'" [HAMILTON, C., 1981, p. 172,
174]
Hamilton continues:
"One of the outstanding Nazi collections
in America was formed by the late
Philip D. Sang, whose collection of Judaica
I recently appraised for presentation
to Brandeis University. I helped Sang to build
his superb assemblage of Jewish
letters and documents and I helped him to gather
his huge and important Nazi
collection. Among the historic items that came
from my sales were the Nazi
top-secret plan for the invasion of Holland
and Belgium and Mussolini's own
copy of Nietzche's Man and Superman, annotated
with Il Duce's own ideas for implementing
the philosphers's vision.
Another Nazi collector, famed for his
physical education courses, once told me
that his entire family was wiped out in an
Austrian concentration camp during the Holocaust.
Yet I never met any man so enthralled with the Nazis, especially the
more brutal of them. He liked to ensconce his
villains in spectacular frames. I
once put together for him an 'ensemble' of
Hitler and Goering, with examples of
some of the medals worn by the Fuehrer and
his pompous air marshall. As my
customer stood admiring the finished product,
glittering with medals, he commented
on my 'superb job' and I couldn't refrain from
asking: 'What are you going to do with it?'
'Why,' he said, 'I'm going to hang it in my
living room.'
I couldn't think of any reply except:
'Not the place I'd pick to hang Hitler and
Goering.'" [HAMILTON, C., 1981, p. p.
172, 174]
In Miami, among other business projects,
Jack Sugarman, "prominent auctioneer" and owner of Jack Sugarman
Auctioneers, once organized an auction of paperweights owned by Oscar Schindler
(of "Schindler's List" fame). In 2000, Sugarman went to prison for
embezzlement of funds from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. [ASSOCIATED
PRESS, 4-18-2000] Then
there is "Chicago collector" Million [Is this the Jewish
source magazine's typographical error?] Kohn, who has amassed 700 Holocaust-related
artifacts, including "a list of people scheduled for extermination on
July 5, 1943," "a stuffed pillow with human hair, a bar of soap
made from human body fat, and a patch of skin bearing a tattoo." He has
exhibited his collection in 14 countries. [LUM, R., 11-19-99, p. 3A]
The man, Jack Ruby, who killed Lee
Harvey Oswald was Jewish. So was Abraham Zapruder, the man who filmed
President J.F. Kennedy being shot in Dallas. Zapruder sold the original 8mm
film to Time magazine for $150,000. "Concerned that a Jewish man's
profiting from the assassination could touch off a wave of anti-Semitism,"
notes Washington Post reporter George Lardner Jr., "his lawyer
suggested that he donate the first $25,000 to a fund for a Dallas police officer
killed that day, J. D. Tippett. Zapruder readily agreed." [LARDNER, G.,
1998, p. A11] Zapruder died in 1970.
Inexplicably, the film was returned to Zapruder's
heirs in 1975 by Time Inc. Over the years, the Zapruder family (one
of Abraham's sons is a Washington DC lawyer) has been known to charge outlandish
fees for the use of the assassination footage. Two independent filmmakers
who were told that permission to reproduce the footage in their own movie
would cost $30,000, successfully sued the Zapruders to use the historical
material. [MARGOLICK, D., 1988, p. B20] In 1997, the U.S. government appropriated
the original movie film (it was already in storage, at the Zapruders' request,
at the National Archives.) The Justice Department went to arbitration with the Zapruder family
to decide "just compensation" for the 26 seconds of footage. The
government offered $3 million; the family asked for $30 million. Three Justice
Department judges eventually decided (2-1) to give the family $16 million.
(Kenneth Feinberg and Arlin Adams voted yes, and Walter Dellinger no
-- he suggested $3-5 million as a fair market value). Incredibly, the Zapruders'
also retained copyright -- any reproduction of the film would be subject to
a fee to the family. [REICHMAN, D., 8-3-99]
As the Quincy Patriot Ledger (Quincy,
Massachusetts) editorialized:
"You and I [taxpayers] get the bill
and the government gets to keep the
original footage. Besides the $16 million,
the Zapruder heirs retain the
copyright, so they can sell the footage
another 16 million times ... The
family compared its treasure to a Van Gogh
painting." [QUINCY, p. 12]
(Even the man who painted John F. Kennedy and
his wife "for their White House portraits" was Aaron Shikler,
also Jewish. [Jacqueline Onassis] also notes in her biography "David
Levine, the now-legendary caricaturist.") [KRANTZ, J., 2000, p. 208]
Elsewhere, Stanley Slotkin, the Jewish
founder of the Abbey Rents company,
once bought a pile of rocks dug from a tunnel next to Christianity's traditional
Jesus nativity site (in Bethlehem) in the 1960s; in more recent years his
descendants set the souvenir stones in jewelry frames and are marketing them
in TV commercials (featuring actor Ricardo Montalban) as "nativity stones,"
selling for as high as $395 apiece. [DART, J., p. B1]
Of course Jews are active in the specifically
Jewish art market too. Wilbur Wendell Pierce (originally: Wilbur Persofsky),
for instance, even has "an international reputation for his collection
of concentration camp currency, which he amassed during the past five years
[1991-96]." [BIBERMAN, p. 69]
In the field of archeological swindles, Moses
Shapira was the pioneer in the field. "Shapira," notes Israeli
art curator Irit Salmon, "was the first to recognize that archeology
could be a profitable business." Shapira, a Russian Jewish transplant
to Jerusalem, sold a variety of fake archaeological artifacts in the late
1800s, including recently manufactured items he misrepresented to major European
museums. "His exposure as a fraud in 1884," notes Shoshana Sappir,
"led to his suicide a few months earlier." [SAPPIR, S., 7-31-2000]
In Great Britain, famed Jewish swindler Adam Worth was behind the theft
in 1876 of Thomas Gainsborough's painting of the Duchess of Devonshire, which
only a few weeks earlier "had been sold at auction for 10,000 guineas,
at that time the highest price ever paid for a work of art, causing a sensation."
[MacIntyre, B., 1997, p. 3]
Stephen Nohlgren notes the illustrious art fraud history
of Elmyr de Hory:
"While foraging at one garage sale, I paid
a few bucks for a book called
FAKE! [full title: FAKE! The Story
of Elymyr de Hory, the Greatest Art
Forger of Our Times, by Clifford Irving],
a biography of Elmyr de Hory,
perhaps the greateest art forger of all time.
De Hory was a Jewish Hungarian
aristocrat and would-be artist who lived in
Paris in the 1920s ... During
World War II, De Hory's parent's were killed
and the family riches
confiscate. He was stranded in Paris with no
allowance -- but an undiminished
taste for high living ... [He] launched a 20-year
forgery career. Never
successful with his own work. De Hory cranked
out a prodigious body
of fakery. He could mimic almost all of his
old acquaintances. To sell his
fakes, he'd drop hints that his father had amased
a private collection in
the 1930s that was later smuggled out of Hungary.
He sold to art dealers
and museums. His work started showing up in
art books as originals. He
forged so many Dufys that an expert once rejected
two real Dufy's as
fraudulent because he mistakenly assumed that
De Hory's hand and style
were the correct ones. He was finally caught
in 1967 and spent a few months
in a Spanish jail." [NOHLGREN, S., 7-16-00]
Auction gallery owner Charles Hamilton notes another
Jewish con-man:
"The ability to bilk one's clients at auction
is a fine art, make no mistake
about it. To succeed for a lifetime without
detection or exposure, the auction-
buying crook must have the cunning of
a polecat, the ethics of a
Gabon viper, and the acquisitive drive
of a dung-beetle. All these
feral qualities were uniquely fused in
the late Lew David Feldman,
a rare book and manuscript dealer who
opeated under a firm name
devised from his cutely bastardized initials
-- The House of El
Dieff." [HAMILTON, C., 1981, p. 19]
More recently, in 1987, the Jewish Week
ran an article with a headline declaring "Israeli Art World Stunned By
Forgery Allegations." Ten Israelis were eventually arrested in the scam,
including gallery owners and art dealers. "80 high quality fakes"
of prominent Israeli artists were discovered in the ring, as well as stolen
art from important artist Eliahu Gat. [JW, 4-7-87, 4-10-87]
In the United States, in 1982 the state
of New York created a law, sponsored by the Jewish Community Relations Council,
which sought to undermine the busy market in stolen Torah scrolls ("150
.... in recent years in New York alone"). Much of the Torah market theft
was attributed to a "Brooklyn-based Russian Jewish crime ring."
[KALMANOFSKY, p. 58] In the new system, documentation of the previous scroll
owner would henceforth be necessary for any sales transaction. [GALLOB] Although a Sefer-Torah "is the holiest
object in the Jewish religion," a Manhattan Judaica dealer, Herbie
Stavsky, noted that "as long as people like money, there will always
be someone who will steal it. Goes to show you that nothing's sacred. Anything
for the almighty dollar." [KALMANOFSKY, p. 55]
As evidenced with stolen Torah pages, a
growing realm of corruption is the business of buying and selling Jewish antiquities.
In 1990 the Jewish Week noted recent criminal cases including the $60,000
forgery of a 15th century haggadah by an Italian Jew, an antique Hungarian
book of Psalms that "was stolen only to appear at an Israeli auction,"
and a Hassidic art dealer, Chaim Schneilbalg, who was murdered in a
Jerusalem hotel while meeting an art client. A suspect was an Israeli living
in West Germany who was "reportedly involved in counterfeiting, the running
of brothels, and a previous insurance claim of dubious validity." Schneilbalg,
reported the Jewish Week, "was said to have been jockeying for
control of the market in Jewish manuscripts suddenly available in newly capitalist
Eastern Europe." [MARK, J, p. 31]
In an overview of the growing art market
for Jewish artifacts, Jonathan Mark in Jewish Week noted that
"Ignorance and fraud were creating such
havoc that in the last twenty
years Judaica buyers and sellers increasingly
turned to non-Jewish auction
houses to protect themselves from each other
... With many American
Jews experiencing a rise in their discretionary
incomes in the 1970s and
80s, more began buying and selling Judaica
as an investment or hobby. It
was often used for Jewish fund raising ...
But even in auction houses ...
certain dealers were known to work in collusion
... The recent fascination
with the Holocaust has inflated the market
even further. Purchasing an item
that was desecrated by the Nazis was considered
to be very chic
'mitzvah.'" [MARK, J, p. 31]
By 2000, not much had changed. "Synagogues
across Europe are being robbed of treasures worth hundreds of thousands of
dollars," noted the Jerusalem Report. Highly suspect were "two
Israeli con artists" who continued to reappear at synagogues, particularly
in the Netherlands. [LEVY, R., 2-14-2000] In 2001, Israeli police arrested
Yerahmiel Hershler, Aharon Stefansky and Amnon Edri in
the Jewish state with stolen religious artifacts from synagogues from "Britain,
Gibraltar and a number of European countries" worth "at least $2
million ... A fourth suspect was arrested in northern Israel. A police spokesperson
said additional arrests were expected." HAAS, D., 3-2-01, p. 2]
*********************************
Entrepreneurial Jews have been especially
active in the European "art scene" since Emancipation in the 1800s.
"By the opening of the late 19th century," says Howard Sachar,
"Jewish [art] salons in Berlin were well established as the center of
German social life ... Writers, artists, intellectuals and viveurs all found good food and even better
conversation at the gatherings." [SACHAR, p. 150] (Much earlier, the
wealthy Amsterdam Jewish community often paid for their depiction by the great
painter Rembrandt. [37 of his 200 male portraits are of Jews. "When Rembrandt
fell on hard times in his later years and became bankrupt," says M.
H. Goldberg, "he was given both spiritual and material help by a
rabbi.") [GOLDBERG, M. H., 1976, p. 122]
There were also the likes of Jacques-Louis David:
"Realizing the propaganda potential of
art and eager to assert France's
primacy in all fields of culture, Napoleon reshaped
the academy into a
superb machine for the production of art. Jacques-Louis
David, a former
member of the Royal Academy and an ardent Bonapartist,
was one of
the governing elite who spurred artists to glorify
France in painting classical
themes or the battles and heroes of the day."
[MEYER, K., 1979, p. 170]
Jews have been particularly preeminent in
the economic exploitation of art and the formation of its commercial value
since the rise of "modern art" in the 1880s. In that era the center
of the art world was Paris. "[There were] two groups of important art
dealers in Paris in the first half of the twentieth century," notes Peter
Watson, " ... one was made up of [Daniel-Henri] Kahnweiler,
Paul Guillaume, Felix Feneon, and the Rosenbergs [Leonce
and Paul], dealers in contemporary works .... The other was an equally
tight-knit but smaller group of dealers who formed the elite secondary markets
dealing with Old Masters ... and increasingly in the Impressionists. At the
center of this group were [Nathan] Wildenstein, [Rene]
Gimpel, and [Jacques] Seligmann. Loosely attached to
them were three other dealers in London and New York, [Samson] Wertheimer
and [Roland] Knoedler [later run by Charles Henschel
until after World War II]." [WATSON, p. 219-220]
"[Paul] Rosenberg's strait-forward approach and
steep prices shocked Parisian art circles and made him the subject of savage
criticism." He even once said, "As for me, a painting is beautiful
when it sells." [FELICIANO, p. 54] Among those in Rosenberg's art stable
was Picasso, formerly signed to David-Henry Kahnweiler and Rosenberg's
brother Leon. All these people were Jewish.
Further, "one of the oldest art dynasties
in France" was founded by Alexandre Bernheim [FELICIANO, p. 75]
and David David-Weiss, a prominent art collector, became the
President of the Board of Directors of the French National Museum in 1933.
Across the border, Max Friedlander, "one of the leading experts
on Rembrandt," directed the Berlin Museum in the
same era. [EPSTEIN, 1996, p 290]
Disgruntled with such Jewish control of
the art market, in 1915 a lecturer, Tony Tollett, delivered an address to
the French Academy of Sciences, Literature, and Arts in Lyon entitled: "On
the Influence of the Jewish-German Corporation of Paris Art Dealers on French
Art." [WATSON, p. 190] By 1930, notes Pierre Assouline, "according
to dealer Pierre Loeb, during this period four art dealers out of five
were Jewish, as were four out of five art collectors ... Wilhelm Uhde who
had made the same observations, added art critics to the list." [ASSOULINE,
p. 230] After the Nazi's takeover of France, notes
Hector Feliciano, "deploring the lack of experts available to advise
German clients, a number of the Nazi information services in Paris explained
that this was because most of the premiere art experts had been Jews. Since
the 1920s, they had contributed to the development and maintenance of a worldwide
network of wealthy art buyers. This network collapsed as soon as they were
denied a role in Europe's largest art market." [FELICIANO, p. 124]
Nachum Gidal notes that in Germany,
James Simon "made a gift of his world famous collection of Italian
renaissance paintings, sculptures, medallions, and bronze" to the Kaiser
Friedrich Museum in Berlin, "on whose governing board he sat." [GIDAL,
p. 348] Other prominent German Jewish collections included those of Marcus
Koppel, Franz and Rober von Medelssohn, Alfred Beit,
Oscar Huldschinsky, Eduard Arnhold, Leopold Sonnemann,
H. H. Meyer, and Philip Rothschild, among others. "The greatest
collection of German 19th century painters," continued Gidal, "belonged
to Max Bohm and Rudolf Mosse; the greatest collection of Old
Master drawings was assembled by Paul Davidson." [GIDAL, p. 348]
Among the major Jewish German art dealers were Alfred Flechtheim, Herwath
Walden, and Paul Cassirer in Berlin, and Bernheim & Heinemann
in Munich.
Many Jewish art dealers grew to be extraordinarily
successful. In 1909 Jacques Seligman "astounded Paris by acquiring
the Palais de Sagan, an even more luxurious house ... Seligman was the main
[art] supplier for the French Rothschilds as well as [J. D.] Morgan; he was
also known for his contacts in Russia ... " [WATSON, p. 224] "Possibly
the most successful, and certainly, the most secretive [art dealer] was [Nathan]
Wildenstein," says Peter Watson, " ... Another reason for Wildenstein's success was
his close association with Duveen and Gimpel, which made each
others businesses truly international." [WATSON, p. 220-221]
"Georges Wildenstein,"
notes Hector Feliciano, "was very well known and actively involved in
art circles in a number of countries, including those within the Nazi sphere
of influence. Even after the French armistice and the German occupation, Wildenstein
seems to have taken advantage of this network to organize a number of deals
with the Germans." [FELICIANO, H., p. 61] Feliciano was actually sued
for such statements about Wildenstein and the Nazis by the art dealer's heirs
in the 1990s. Feliciano counter sued, and with relevant historical evidence,
won the case.
"Notoriously dishonest," [WATSON,
p. 166] Joseph Duveen was another prominent Jewish art dealer in the
early decades of the 1900s, "the most successful art broker of the twentieth
century, this trade -- thanks to his undoubted charisma and his gift for salesmanship,
laced with lavish doses of corruption." [SIMPSON, ARTFUL, p. 1] Upon
his move from Europe to New York City, Duveen was charged (in a legal "case
that attracted enormous publicity") with evading customs duties of --
at today's values -- $102 million. Connections with several United States
Senators and other men of influence helped Duveen evade the law. [WATSON,
p. 166]
Duveen had a long -- and secret
-- association with the very prominent and influential
Jewish art connoisseur, critic, and esthete, Bernard Berenson. Berenson (whose original name was Bernhard
Valvrojenski), an expert on Christian art, converted to Protestantism
and then Catholicism, but noted in his diary,” At times I seem to myself to
be a typical 'Talmud Jew.'" He also wrote that he longed to drop "the
mask of being goyim and return to
Yiddish reminiscences ..." [RUBIN, p. 75] In 1944, Berenson wrote
a piece called, "Open Letter to American Jewry." In it, notes Barry
Rubin, "Berenson warned that envious Christians would persecute them,
'even if you were innocent as the angels ... and you are far from that.'"
[RUBIN, p. 76]
For his less than innocent part, Berenson
regularly colluded with Duveen over a twenty-five year period in perpetuating
continuous fraud and deceit upon unsuspecting art collectors. "Berenson was a genius," writes Colin
Simpson, "who early in life channeled his gifts into the study of that
finest flower of Christian art: Italian Renaissance painting. By the age of
35 he had become the world's leading authority ... The curators of many of
world's greatest museum's were either his former pupils or his disciples ...
They came to hear his opinions, take his advice, and pay homage to his scholarship
and his intellectual integrity. A small minority saw him as a disgustingly
rich, opinionated, spiteful tyrant ... But only a handful were aware that
it was Berenson, not Duveen, who was probably the most successful and unscrupulous
art dealer the world has ever seen." [SIMPSON, ARTFUL, p. 1]
"The raw truth about both men,"
notes Peter Watson, "... is... complex and considerably ... sordid."
[WATSON, p. 167] For his part, from 1911 to 1937 Berenson's hidden
association with Duveen netted him alone the equivalent -- in our day
-- of $150 million. [SIMPSON, ARTFUL, p. 2]
"Berenson,' notes Eunice Lipton, "shaped the very
terrain of Renaissance studies, not to mention the market for what became
its masterpieces." [LIPTON, p. 285]
Another of Berenson's Jewish contemporaries
who had a strong hand in shaping American art history was Paul Sachs.
"Though not as widely known as Berenson," notes George Goodman,
"Paul Joseph Sachs, too, had a patriarchal influence in the world
of art museums -- in America and abroad. Unlike Berenson, however, Sachs was
born to privilege." [GOODMAN, #2, p.2, p. 54] Sachs' father and uncle founded the prominent Goldman, Sachs New
York investment firm. Paul
Sachs, an Associate Director of Harvard's Fogg Museum and chairman of
that college's Fine Arts Department, aided a number of Jewish art scholar
protégés, including James Rorimer (eventual Director of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art)." "Two other Jewish protégés," notes Goodman,
"happened to be Sach's relatives" -- Charles Kuhn and James
Sachs Plaut (eventual head of the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art).
[GOODMAN, #2, p. 57] Yet another Sachs relative, Samuel Sachs II, became
head of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in 1973, then later Director of
the Detroit Institute for the Arts and New York's Frick Collection. Paul Sachs'
grandson, Franklin W. Robinson, also became -- in 1979 -- the Director
of the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design, and later Director
of the Johnson Museum at Cornell University. The patriarch Sachs, says Goodman,
"largely invented the notion of curatorial training." [GOODMAN,
#2, p. 145]
Jewish pre-World War II influence in the
European art world -- and Jewish influence in it now -- may be appreciated
by this observation by John Conklin. While some wealthy German-Jews -- like
financiers William Weinberg, Georges Lurcy, Siegfried Kramarsky,
and Jacob Goldschmidt -- were able to get their art out of Europe as
capital,
"In 1973 the Austrian government declared
that the art in its possession
that it had been unable to return to the
rightful owners and heirs would
become state property, saying that there
were no longer many claims
being made. Art magazines and Jewish groups
challenged that position
... From then until 1985, the Austrian
government and Jewish
organizations worked together to find
the owners of the unclaimed
pieces. In 1985, the Austrian Parliament
passed a law to return to their
rightful owners and heirs more than 8,000
works of art that the Nazis
had confiscated. Some from museums but
most from European Jews ...
The law established a period until September
1986 for claims to be
processed; unclaimed works were then to
be auctioned off and the
proceeds divided among Austrian [World
War II] resistance groups,
the Jewish community in Vienna, and Jewish
groups in the United