Good News from European Museums

Museums in Dublin, London, Paris, and Florence lead in progress, justice, and engagement.

H ow rare is that headline? Things in the Old World, after all, tend to land on “dire” on the spectrum of grim to buoyant, especially these days. I read the news, as you do. Mutti is out of gas. Macron is morose — he’s behind Le Pen in the polls. The EU’s vaccinated fewer people than Zimbabwe. The pope’s best bud is Greta Thunberg, who acts like the girl in The Exorcist.

People are locked up, joblessness is sky-high, the Dutch are all potheads, and Putin is Putin. The Greeks rattle sabers at the Turks, the Catalonians at Madrid, the Flemings at the Walloons, and Meghan and Harry at the palace. “Duchess Made to Cry Over Dresses,” read today’s tabloids. Spoiled, entitled tears over dresses? Unprecedented in the annals of human emotion! I err, though. That’s a British story, and everyone knows the Brits aren’t part of Europe.

Only kidding! They’re still part of Europe, but they’re now liberated from Europe.

There are three feel-good museum bits in the news, all heartening to me, one from London and Dublin, one from Paris, and another from Florence. As American museums wallow in red herrings such as racism and plug their deficits by selling art, museums in Europe seem to be focusing on substance and are getting results.

On Thursday, I ever so nicely said “blarney” to suggestions that the IRA has the stash of art stolen from the Gardner Museum in the waning hours of St. Patrick’s Day, 1990. Yes, Ireland’s just gotten its hands on some big-league art, but it’s no thanks to Boston’s Irish Mafia. The story starts with a visionary, an early death, a bequest, a disputed codicil, and dueling heirs.

It involves the Dublin City Gallery, called the Hugh Lane Gallery. It opened in 1908 through the philanthropy of Hugh Lane (1875–1915), a visionary. The Hugh Lane is Europe’s first gallery dedicated to modern and contemporary art. It’s one of my favorite museums — a small, perfect gem. More specifically, the story involves 39 paintings that are to the Irish more than a bit like the Elgin Marbles are to the Greeks. That’s the bequest.

I knew the Hugh Lane from legend until one of my big Andover donors, Tom Foley, became the ambassador to Ireland in 2006. The gallery on Parnell Square focuses mostly on Irish art. It owns and shows Francis Bacon’s studio, a temple both to a swirling, creative mind and to the god of clutter. I visited Tom in Dublin and got involved in Dublin high culture. Last week, the Hugh Lane and the National Gallery in London took a big step toward redressing a giant wrong.

The bequest, as I noted, wasn’t for granny’s Waterford punchbowl. It was for a dazzling cache of works by Manet, Renoir, Vuillard, Monet, Morisot, Pissarro, and Degas. Lane was an aesthete, philanthropist, and business genius — not unique, but rarer than a four-, five-, or six-leaf clover. The National Gallery in London and the Hugh Lane agreed two weeks ago to a deal for access to the art in Dublin and a partnership on its care, scholarly interpretation, and promotion.

London for the first time will acknowledge that the Hugh Lane has an interest in the art. It’s vaguely defined, suggestively proprietary, and called a partnership. Still, a mountain has indeed been moved. The diplomats are Barbara Dawson, the longtime director of the Hugh Lane, and Gabriele Finaldi, the director of the National Gallery in London.

Who was Hugh Lane? He was born poor, the son of a rector, and wasn’t educated, but he had what can only be called a savant’s sense for the best in new art and a venture-capitalist’s nose for smart investments. His aunt was the rich and formidable Lady Gregory, the Irish playwright and impresario who, with Yeats, Edward Martyn, John Millington Synge, and others formed the Abbey Theater. She managed the theater for years and is regarded as a giant of Irish arts.

Lane’s rise could be a story from Trollope or Dickens, or Maeve Binchy channeling Oscar Wilde. His connection to Lady Gregory gave him street cred in Dublin and London and, more materially, a front-row seat for the larger drama that was Irish nationhood. While never radical, interest in his country’s path ripened with time. Enhancing high culture in Ireland generally and Irish identity specifically came to define him, as did an uncanny and prescient eye.

Lane started buying and selling avant-garde French art in the 1890s. He was younger than Paul Durand-Ruel, the pioneer in marketing cutting-edge French art, and he didn’t keep starving artists afloat as did Durand-Ruel, but Lane was his peer in selling it in London. He kept what he loved most for himself.

And lovable it all is. There’s Manet’s La Musique aux Tuileries from 1862 that isn’t Impressionist. The first Impressionist show isn’t until 1874. That makes it even more radical. It’s painted gesturally, freely, and with bombast. Its subject, a concert in the park whose audience is bourgeois, is treated with the grandeur of a royal portrait. When the Irish writer George Moore, a friend of Manet, saw Manet’s Portrait of Eva Gonzalez in a show in Dublin, he said, “The Irish will benefit more by looking at the raised arm of Eva Gonzalez than the meager thighs of martyred saints.” There’s a Monet view of London in fog and Renoir’s famous Les Parapluies from 1886.

In 1914, Lane, already a millionaire and an esteemed collector, became the director of the National Gallery of Ireland. He wanted to be home in Ireland, which was on the cusp of so many changes. He quickly hired Edwin Lutyens to design a vast new gallery with two wings, one on each side of the River Liffey. Dramatically and outrageously connecting them was a corridor gallery topping the Ha’penny Bridge, much as the Vasari Corridor in Florence spans the Arno. Lane was ambitious. He dreamt big.

Miffed when the Dublin authorities rejected his gallery plan, he made a new will leaving his entire art collection, once destined for Ireland, to the National Gallery in London. Weeks later, he changed his mind, writing and signing a codicil that restored the gift to Ireland, but he never got it witnessed. Weeks after that, Lane died on the Lusitania.

When the codicil was discovered in Lane’s desk, each page initialed and the document signed, the Irish howled. His collection, one of the best of French modern art, belonged in Dublin. But the art was in London, and the National Gallery, an arm of the Crown, wouldn’t budge. It had a technicality on its side.

Coinciding with Lane’s death and troubled bequest were the Easter Rising, the war for independence, strife between north and south, and the Free State’s growing pains. Irksome for the British was Ireland’s neutrality during the Second World War. The Troubles then cast a pall over everything.

Over the years, luminaries in Ireland approached British prime ministers seeking resolution, and received a sulky, sullen “no.” In the 1950s, Denis Mahon, a National Gallery trustee, scholar of Italian art, and heir to an Anglo-Irish banking fortune, brokered a deal. Lane’s art would regularly visit Dublin and the Hugh Lane, but ownership would remain strictly English.

The new deal massages things. The old arrangement sent four paintings at a time to Dublin, rotating over a period of years. This year, ten paintings will be in the mix. It doesn’t sound big, but the labels in both London and Dublin will now read: “Sir Hugh Lane Bequest, 1917, The National Gallery, London. In Partnership with the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin.” The new phrasing elegantly proposes the two museums together hold them in trust for the public.

Praise the Lord for the rise of the pithy, verbless phrase and the enigmatic though visibly pregnant period. Dawson, the Hugh Lane’s director, is happy with the new plan and “acknowledges the history and role of the Hugh Lane Gallery in the provenance of these paintings.” Dublin’s lord mayor, the U.K.’s culture minister, and Finaldi note the fresh spirit of collaboration and collegiality.

It’s diplomacy in action and a good result. I’m looking forward to seeing Lane’s art in Dublin. The Brits have enough Impressionists to choke a herd of French cows.

Speaking of the French, I was delighted and moved to read that the Musée d’Orsay in Paris has agreed, without having a cow, to return the only painting by Gustav Klimt in the French public collection to the heirs of Nora Stiasny, a Viennese Jew coerced in 1938 by Austrian Nazis to sell it in a fire-alarm sale to protect the lives of herself and her family. Stiasny and her husband ultimately died in a Polish camp in 1942.

I know Rosebushes Under a Tree well and borrowed it from the French for an exhibition on Klimt’s landscapes in 2002 at the Clark Art Institute. The show was one of the thorniest in my career. When we decided to partner on the show with the Galerie Belvedere in Vienna in the late 1990s, restitution of Nazi-looted art was a new, barely plowed field in Austria and, for that matter, all of Europe outside of Germany. The Austrians still saw themselves as victims of the Nazis.

I’ll write more some day about my work with the Austrians over the Klimt show. I felt then that as much as I enjoyed Vienna, Austrian remorse and rehabilitation were some years into the future.

For the French, restitution of Nazi loot is newer still. A new commission established last year, part of the central government, is charged with resolving what is thought to be claims for 100,000 works of art. An older commission, created in 1999, was not as centralized and, alas, stalled. The morose Macron, when not thinking about Le Pen and his political decapitation, has made restitution of ill-gotten art a priority; not only Nazi-looted art but art raided from French colonies.

Stiasny inherited the painting in 1927 from her uncle, Viktor Zuckerkandl, one of Klimt’s big patrons. In 1938, she sold it under duress to Philipp Hausler, a Viennese academic who’d gone to elementary school with Stiasny and was, she thought, her friend. Hausler worked for Josef Hoffmann in the Teens and ran the Wiener Werkstatte from 1920 to 1925. He’s a nebulous character and, safe to say, “nicht zu gut,” which means a skunk. Hausler died in 1966, leaving his art to Herta Blumel, his lady friend. Blumel sold the picture to Galerie Nathan in Zurich. The Musée d’Orsay bought the painting in innocence in 1980.

I’ll take its word for it. In 1980, there was no Art Loss Register, the world’s most comprehensive database of stolen art and what are called “red flag names.” These are dodgy dealers and various other no-good-niks. The French say “newly discovered archives” linked Blumel to Hausler. War, invasion, occupation, and the Holocaust roiled art markets in Vienna, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Brussels, as well as in dozens of smaller cities. Works of art seized number in the hundreds of thousands of objects. Households were broken suddenly, sharks were everywhere, and records — always rudimentary — were often lost. Now, 88 years after the Nazis took power in Germany and 75 years after the war ended, discoveries happen all the time. Collectors alive in 1933 or 1939, 1940, or 1945 are dead. Their heirs are often numerous and scattered. Each object presents a puzzle.

The painting is an example of how tentative and iffy provenance research is. I remember Stiasny’s claim. Hermine Mueller-Hofmann, Stiasny’s sister, claimed at the time, in the late 1990s, that a painting by Klimt titled Apple Blossoms II, owned by the Galerie Belvedere (the state museum in Vienna for Austrian modern art), once belonged to Stiasny and was the picture sold in the pressure sale in 1938. In 2001, to the satisfaction of all, the Galerie Belvedere returned the painting. Mueller-Hofmann, I believe, died in 2001. The picture went to her nephew, who sold it for $20 million.

In 2018, further research established that Apple Blossoms II never belonged to Stiasny. Stiasny’s picture was Rosebushes Under a Tree. Apple Blossoms II is a later version and, coincidentally, had a Nazi provenance problem all its own. It was donated to the Galerie Belvedere in 1961 by Gustav Ucicky, who was a Nazi party member and maker of propaganda films during the Nazi era. Ucicky is thought to have been one of Klimt’s six illegitimate children.

The fate of Apple Blossoms II is up in the air. A Swedish collector paid Stiasny’s heirs $20 million for it. I’m sure that money, if Stiasny’s family is like me, has been spent a hundred times over. Stiasny’s family, though, is getting the Musée d’Orsay’s Klimt. Another Jewish family contends that Ucicky twisted arms to get it from their grandfather, but evidence points to a market-value sale, which means the Galerie Belvedere is the legitimate owner.

I hear that the Austrians knew as early as 2015 that Apple Blossoms II was wrongly sent to Stiasny’s heirs. To their very limited credit, the Austrians are dealing with many thousands of claims. Museum time is like geological time. The French did the right thing, and that’s good news.

“Uffizi Diffusi” is my last piece of good news and, for Americans, the most instructive. Eike Schmidt, the director of the Uffizi in Florence, announced last month that his museum, massive in acreage and in art, will begin a program of diffusion, or sharing. It’s sending art, all very good, to small museums throughout Tuscany on long-term loan. He’s calling it a move to build tourism in cities and towns beyond Florence and, as a consequence, encouraging tourists to wander Tuscany rather than congest Florence. “Uffizi Diffusi” means “scattered Uffizi.” I call it “share the wealth.”

I knew Schmidt when he was a curator of Italian art at the National Gallery in Washington, the Getty in California, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. He’s German and a sculpture scholar. Since 2015, he’s directed the Uffizi, its first director who isn’t Italian. He came to the Uffizi as part of an Italian government initiative to hire museum directors who aren’t part of the Italian museum bureaucracy but, rather, have meaningful experience in American, British, or German museums.

“Sclerotic” best describes Italian museum tradition. Though unjust and wrong to tag all Italian curators with chronic, genetic lackadaisia, it’s safe to say it isn’t rare. I’ve written about Italy’s new hiring scheme. It’s revolutionizing museums there.

Schmidt is a visionary. He’s hoping to “ground culture in people’s daily lives,” and while he speaks most about diffusing tourism, he’s just as focused on Italians outside Florence. Even for them, going to a museum in Florence or Pisa is not an easy trip — it’s a special occasion. Tuscany is big. He wants to boost local galleries in Lucca, Livorno, Arezzo, and a dozen small places, making visits to look at art more frequent for families and easier for individuals who want to pop into a museum to refresh themselves by looking at great art.

The program is just starting. The Uffizi sent work last year to Vinci, Leonardo’s birthplace, honoring the 500th anniversary of his death, and to Anghiari, site of the 1440 battle that established Florence’s hegemony over central Italy. Leonardo painted a long-lost mural of the battle that, before it was destroyed, artists came from all over Europe to see and to copy. This year is the 200th anniversary of Napoleon’s death. Before Waterloo, Napoleon went rancid as a political and military proposition, and he took a forced breather in the Forte Falcone on Elba. Schmidt is sending art there to mark the anniversary.

There are many Medici villas in Tuscany, and some are still house museums, but others are worse for wear. Schmidt wants to send Medici-themed art to the houses already functioning as museums and to encourage the government to restore those looking ratty.

It’s a brilliant idea. I believe America’s powerhouse museums such as the Met, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art should share their own immense art wealth. Rather than navel-gazing, which is what the diversity-equity-and-inclusion moment promotes, these museums should make it a priority to engage with small, less rich museums all over the country. Big and small museums need to treat their employees fairly, but the DEI movement, which is becoming a racket, is taking the air out of everything, and it’s of no interest to the art-loving public.

Get art languishing in vaults out to the country and on walls where people can see it. This will advance the cause of culture more than debating who among a museum’s dead donors owned slaves, what new hiring quotas are to be forced upon curators and other professionals, and who among younger staff needs a noisy, public cry over not “belonging.” When Americans have to look to Europe for positive, engaged museum thinking, we know we have a problem.