Raubkunst at the Ringling…

by | 25 Feb 2019 | Animals in Art, Art History, Expressionismus, Franz Marc, German Expressionism / Modernism, Michelangelost©, Re-Enactments© and MashUps

Raubkunst at the Ringling…

…The Story Continues

 Its genesis in 2016 was the glimpse of a fin becoming a feather that ignited a strong intuition at ”Raubkunst als Erinnerungsort,” a research fellowship sponsored by the Zentrum für Historische Forschung der Polnischen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin that same December. Eventually, and with the help of many people, “Raubkunst at the Ringling” ran in the Modernism journal Lapsus Lima on 9 January 2019 and was picked up in the news all the way to the Antipodes that week with, for example, the story “Otago Link to Identifying Art Looted by Nazis.”

On 13 February 2019 I presented this research about Franz Marc’s woodcuts Schöpfungsgeschicte II (1914) and Geburt der Pferde (1913) amid colleagues at the College Art Association conference in New York City. The very next day I learned “Raubkunst at the Ringling” had been formally recognised as a “solved” case of Nazi looted art with the recognition of my findings by the Commission for Looted Art in Europe in the annals of The Central Registry of Information on Looted Cultural Property 1933-1945.

 My hope all along has been that the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, the State Art Museum of Florida operated by Florida State University, would acknowledge the illicit acquisition of the prints by the American UPI reporter Robert Beattie from the notorious “Kunsthändler to the Third Reich” Bernhard A. Böhmer in 1940, prior to Beattie’s donation of them to the Ringling in 1956, where they have been hidden since, and allow these works to be shared with the public.

But wait: I have subsequently learned that there is potentially even more Raubkunst at the Ringling: Paintings by Christian Rohlfs and George Grosz and bronzes by Ernst Barlach with provenance gaps from 1933-1945 are also locked away at the museum as well as some oils and terracottas from the 16thand 17thcenturies that, while not entartete, were simply stolen or subject to forced “sales” from museums or private owners under the Reich.

To more fully bring this story to light, I would like to compile a volume – half catalogue, half detective story – about these works. Please do contact me if you are interested in working together on this project.

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Birds: Ornithology as Art

Birds: Ornithology as Art

by | 12 Jul 2018 | Animals, Animals in Art, Art History, Michelangelost©, Stuff Found in Library Books



Kestrel in Flight

Charles Maurice Detmold (1883-1908), Kestrel in flight, 1901. Watercolour. British Museum. Dept. of Prints and Drawings.

We, as mere humans, cannot see and feel as birds do as they navigate their habitats. Birds have immediate needs that relate directly to food availability, energy, water, and temperature, social contact, reproduction, predator detection, and shelter that are more complex than the features we perceive on their behalf as “nature.” Nevertheless, it is urgent for us to understand what bird species need from their surroundings as human intrusion, habitat loss, and climate change conspire to accelerate our need to make the best use of those habitats we can manage for the remaining populations of birds who survive. This is part of what makes Birds: The Art of Ornithology by Jonathan Elphick such a vital contribution to our historical knowledge.

A recent zoological conference in London featured a game of “Animal Studies Tic-Tac-Toe,” in which “David Attenborough” occupied a central square. Though the game was in jest, it is certainly true – and tellingly so that this is often the case even for those whose profession ostensibly involves the fauna of the wilderness – that for most people, the experience of nature is mediated by films such as those in the Life and Planet Earth series, augmented by precision editing, emotional cue music, and witty commentary.

Though not the overt intention of Birds: The Art of Ornithology, this book is a powerful reminder that connecting meaningfully with nature requires leaving the house, and that this experience is both transcendent and daunting. Birdwatching especially demands patience, silence, and solitude. Elphick conveys this foregrounding with subtlety, and describes the conditions faced by naturalists in the time before photography and video, who, tasked often only by their own passion – what John James Audubon characterized as “…nothing was left to me but my humble talents” – set out not only to observe birds but to record their activities and document their environments.

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