A Holocaust Restitution, a Newly Discovered Rembrandt, and a Native American Artist at the Biennale

Plus Hispanic Republicans cave, abandoning their effort to kill a new Latino museum poisoned by politics.

I’ ve been writing about miniskirts, transvestite potters, dog portraits, Picasso, and El Greco over the past few weeks, but art news happens. Once a month or so, I cover the most piquant and teachable stories.

It’s more than a coincidence that one news story — a huge restitution of art seized during the Holocaust — should happen just a few days before the barbaric attack on Israel. Hamas, with help from a cast of kingpins and enablers, targets civilians, most young, with a purpose and passion of Nazi proportions. Hundreds in places such as Harvard rally in support of Hamas. Call them kooks, or sadists, or educated beyond their intelligence, but they show a dark side of our own country.

I tend to be a free-speech absolutist but am not without opinions about what people say and do. I’m a critic, after all. Antisemitism, the thing that love of the Palestinians disguises, is profuse, sometimes blatant, sometimes subtle, on elite campuses and, of course, among left-wingers. This leaches, sooner or later, into the arts.

On Sunday, we prayed for Israel in my little church, which is both Methodist and Congregationalist. I’ll keep praying as well as cajoling, at least on the culture front.

The restitution story? I’ve written a bit about the Manhattan district attorney’s office aggressive — too much so, I think — treatment of museums and private collectors who bought antiquities that might have been looted. The DA’s office has seized, sometimes, it seems, willy-nilly, Greek and Roman antiquities from museums and private owners. These objects have been restituted to their source countries.

It’s another story, but I’m uneasy about what’s happening. I wish the Soros-backed DA in Manhattan would focus less on antiquities and more on the city’s thriving, giddily unhampered criminal class. Lots of thugs need to be restituted to Sing Sing.

That said, I very much salute the DA’s office for its Holocaust restitution work. It’s law-and-justice enforcement at its best. Over the past two weeks, nine works by Egon Schiele were returned to the heirs of Fritz Grünbaum, a Vienna art collector best known in his lifetime as a famous cabaret performer, screenwriter, and operetta lyricist. A Jew, he died in the Dachau concentration camp in 1941.

Grabbed by the Nazis in 1938, he was coerced into signing a power of attorney giving his wife control of his property. She later, under duress, sold Grünbaum’s collection. The money landed in the bank account of the Austrian Nazi Party. Grünbaum’s wife died in a concentration camp as well, in Minsk.

Grünbaum was best known in Vienna for political cabaret. He’d walk onto a dark stage and begin a skit with “I can’t see a thing . . . I must have stumbled upon Nazi culture!” He was, I’m told, a cross between Mel Brooks and the emcee in Cabaret. A brave man, he ran a one-man cabaret in Dachau on New Year’s Eve in 1940. He died a few days later.

He had very good taste in Schiele. Girl with Black Hair, from 1911, for instance, is valued at $1.25 million. It belonged to the Allen Memorial Art Gallery at Oberlin. Restituted Grünbaum Schieles came from, among other places, MoMA, the Carnegie in Pittsburgh, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Morgan Library, and the Neue Galerie in Manhattan. As late as September 15, the Art Institute of Chicago said, “We are confident of our legal acquisition and legal possession of this work.” Days later, it sent its Schiele back for restitution.

The value of the restituted works, mostly watercolors but also a drawing or two, is said to be about $10 million. In the years after the Second World War, Grünbaum’s art was scattered to the four winds. Some was sold eventually by Otto Kallir, the New York dealer specializing in German and Austrian modern art.

This New York sale gave the Manhattan DA jurisdiction over the heirs’ lawsuit, though at least three of the Schieles were still physically in New York, another path to jurisdiction. Most of Grünbaum’s collection is still out there, somewhere.

Nazi theft came in many shapes and sizes. Sometimes, jackbooted thugs took things from the walls. Often, though, the Nazis coerced Jews to sell to get visas or to avoid deportation. As a judge in the case dryly observed, “a signature at gunpoint cannot lead to a valid conveyance of property.”

Grünbaum’s family, some of whom I know, are selling the restituted art to fund scholarships for young musicians. Rita Reif, his cousin, was a crack art reporter for the New York Times for years and one of my buddies. Her son, Tim Reif, who led the restitution charge, is a judge at the U.S. Court of International Trade.

It’s a heartening end to a nightmare. I’m always glad to see the good guys win. May it happen more often! May it happen in Israel without an 80-year wait.

This summer I wrote — speechless as I was when I heard the news — about a House Appropriations Committee vote, 33 to 27, to defund the carbuncular Museum of the American Latino, a new Smithsonian museum housed temporarily at the Museum of American History. Congress actually on the verge of killing a bad idea? The age of miracles might not be over yet.

The Museum of the American Latino is a waste of what will be a billion smackeroos once it’s finished, and most of the money will come from debt since the federal government pays for very little in cold hard dinero these days. The Smithsonian — and Washington — have too many museums already. American Latino art and history are best interpreted by local museums serving the dozens of different Spanish-acculturated groups.

Hispanic members of Congress, all Republicans, led the rebellion over ¡Presente!, the Museum of the Latino’s inaugural exhibition. It’s a mishmash of fake history, race-baiting, and victim politics. I advised the righteous and indignant to cleave to the line since they’d certainly be lobbied to relent.

Alas, they folded like a sombrero stampeded by Pancho Villa’s cavalry. The director of the Latino museum and Lonnie Bunch, head of the Smithsonian, whispered sweet nothings, said it was all a misunderstanding, pledged never to do a fake, racist, and dispiritingly political exhibition again, and promised that the next big show will be about salsa. Salsa, the dance, not the dip, I assume. They caved. Merrily, a politicized, racialized Latino museum rolls along.

“Nace un bobo cada minuto,” as P.T. Barnum would have said. What these suckers saw in ¡Presente! was a preview, not a fleeting mistake in judgment. And why do we need a billion-dollar, new museum to do an exhibition about salsa?

Every two years I cover the Biennale in Venice. It’s the world’s biggest and most prestigious contemporary-art exposition. The U.S. always mounts a pavilion. A few weeks ago, we learned that the multimedia artist Jeffrey Gibson will represent the country in a show organized by Oregon’s Portland Art Museum.

Gibson (b. 1972) isn’t a bad choice. I like his show now on view at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., the New York dealer. They have unusually good taste in artists. He’s the first Native American artist shown in the American pavilion, a sad omission I’ve noted in writing about the Biennale.

The pavilion is programmed by the State Department’s Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs, the weedy bog that runs the Fulbright grant program and other programs to “promote mutual understanding,” which, I intuit, means a slush fund. The bureau also “strives to embed diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in all its work,” which means ineptitude, racism, vanity, and d-for-dull-and-dreary.

But I d-for-digress. The sublime Peggy Guggenheim Collection is involved to mediate between the pavilion, an American project, and Italian work habits. American cultural organizations, usually museums, nominate artists and projects. The State Department bureau selects, and most of the time it selects poorly. It probably lacks the chops to do otherwise. Hence the Martin Puryear and Simone Leigh pavilions, in 2019 and 2022 respectively, with their ponderous and preachy art. Puryear is past his prime, and Leigh has a few choice tunes but little else. Foreigners seeing their work in the past two Biennales — the 2021 Biennale was Covid-canceled — left thinking that American art of today is d-for-depressing.

Will they think the same when they see Gibson’s work? I hope not. It’s buoyant. Still, in pushing a pavilion of Native American art, and knowing it’ll be the first such showing at the Biennale, I’ve suggested a group exhibit with a wide range of media, approaches, geography, and ages. There’s a huge amount of Native American talent in our polyglot country. Why push only one artist out there? Marie Watt, Erica Lord, James Lavadour, Wendy Red Star, and Raven Halfmoon are among my favorites, as is Gibson.

The American pavilion almost always did group shows but hasn’t done one since the ’80s. Showing a single artist is far easier, I know, but doesn’t suit a place as big and, must I say, as diverse as America.

And, pray tell me, what else does this State Department bureau actually do?

In December, Sotheby’s in London is selling a newly discovered Rembrandt, Adoration of the Kings. The 9.6-by-7.3 inch painting has an estimated value of £10 million to £15 million ($12.2 million–$18.3 million). In a palette of cool grays and warm browns, Rembrandt created a nocturne with a complex figure scene of kings — or magi — visiting the newborn Jesus. They dressed for the occasion, with their beads, brasses, and gems sparkling ever so subtly in light from the Star of Bethlehem. It’s thought to be from the late 1620s, when Rembrandt was 22 or so and still living in Leiden. Scholars think it was an oil sketch for an etching. Rembrandt was inexperienced in etching and abandoned the idea for other things.

This has to be an embarrassing moment for Christie’s. Its Amsterdam outpost sold the picture in 2021 in an online auction as “circle of Rembrandt,” with an estimate of $15,000 even though scholars from the 1940s into the ’50s and early ’60s considered it an early Rembrandt and it was exhibited in Dutch shows as a Rembrandt. Granted, the world of Rembrandt studies then was a muted, diffuse one. Kurt Bauch, the German art historian working on the comprehensive Rembrandt catalogue in the early ’60s, ruled it “circle of Rembrandt,” based on a black-and-white photograph.

Thus it was published. Adoration of the Kings stayed in private hands. Over 60 years, everyone forgot about both the picture and that it was once considered the real appelflap. In 2021, Christie’s accepted the received wisdom.

Christie’s might have belly flopped into Amsterdam’s Singel Canal in cataloguing the picture, but a dealer here and there sniffing about either had a better eye or an intellectual shovel made to dig deeper into past scholarship. At the Christie’s online sale in 2021, Adoration of the Kings went for $908,000 This sometimes happens when speculators as well as deeply informed dealers think the auction house has made an attribution mistake.

Art’s a risky business. In this case, the painting soon landed at Sotheby’s, which took two years to develop a paper trail back to 1714 — not bad for a little thing — and a scholarly consensus drawing in part from technical analysis available now. Until, say, the ’70s, attributions came from provenance, to be sure, but mostly from the eyes and hunches of scholar-connoisseurs. Science and technology were seen as suspicious. The Dutch art-history world is less clubby now, which helps to produce an unbiased view.

Of Christie’s boo-boo as well as Bauch’s, in the parlance of bureaucrats and bunglers everywhere, “mistakes were made.”

The auction is on December 6, which is my birthday. “A splendid gift idea,” I told my husband. “I won’t object if you make it a birthday and Christmas present,” I helpfully added. December babies abhor twofer-bundling but, for a Rembrandt, I’ll rise above it. He’s checking under the sofa cushions for lost quarters as I write.