Sachs poster collection going under the hammer

Just ten months ago after seven years of litigation, the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe, Germany, ruled that 4,529 rare turn of the century posters collected by Hans Sachs before he and his family fled Germany in 1939 belonged to Sachs’ son Peter. Hans Sachs, a dentist with an unfailing eye and unquenchable thirst for graphic art, had amassed 12,500 posters starting when he was a teenager in the late 1890s right through to the precipice of World War II. His collection, replete with small print run rarities, political propaganda, sports events, advertising for movies, operas, art exhibits and consumer goods, some of them by masters like Toulouse-Lautrec and Gustav Klimt, was the biggest and best in Germany, probably in the world.

He was a pioneer in the recognition of the value of the graphic arts, and in an era when posters were meant to be stuck to a wall and torn down or covered up a few days later, he treated his collection like a fine gallery of oil paintings. He put his money where his mouth was, too. He had an addition built to his home to house the collection and opened it to the public as the Museum of Applied Arts.

The rise of the Nazi party ruined all this. In the summer of 1938, the poster collection was confiscated by Joseph Goebbels who coveted the art for a museum of his own. A few months later, on November 9th, 1938, during the infamous Kristallnacht pogrom against the Jews, Hans Sachs was arrested and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp outside of Berlin. Thanks to the tireless efforts of his wife Felicia in securing visas to England, he was released three weeks later. Together with his wife and one-year-old son Peter, Hans fled to London and from then to New York.

When the war was over, Hans assumed his collection could not have survived, so he applied for a refund under West German’s compensation program. In 1961, he received 225,000 German marks (about $50,000 at that time). Five years later, Sachs discovered that as many as 8,000 of his posters had indeed survived the war but were squirreled away in an East German museum. His attempts to share his knowledge with the museum were rebuffed and Hans died in 1974 never having laid eyes on his beloved collection again.

After reunification, the collection, now reduced to 5,000 pieces (no one knows what happened to the rest), was moved to the German Historical Museum in Berlin where it was kept in storage. Only scholars were allowed access to it. Peter Sachs had no idea a considerable chunks of the collection had survived until 2005. He immediately initiated a campaign to get the posters back. He offered to repay the compensation, now tip money compared to the market value of the rare collection, and took the museum to court.

Because his father had accepted the money, the courts consistently ruled that Peter had no legal grounds to reclaim the posters. The final court of appeals overruled those letter-of-the-law judgments because even though it was true that technically the posters now belonged to Germany, the whole point of compensation laws was to redress the injustices of the Nazi regime. Thus the court ruled in Peter’s favor in the interest in justice.

When the story broke last year, one of Peter Sachs’ lawyers, Matthias Druba said: “Hans Sachs wanted to show the poster art to the public, so the objective now is to find a depository for the posters in museums where they can really be seen and not hidden away.” That objective is no longer. I don’t know what kind of effort he made to place the entire collection in the past 10 months, but apparently he was unable to find any takers so instead he’s going to sell the vast majority of it.

Starting tomorrow and going through Sunday, 1,233 of the posters will go under the hammer at Bohemian National Hall in New York City. Guernsey’s Auctions is handling the sale, and you can bid online via Live Auctions (day one here, day two here, day three here). Thousands more will be sold at later auctions planned for September and next January.

Peter Sachs will be keeping exactly four posters with sentimental value for himself and plans to donate another 800 or so to museums. He’s entirely content with this decision.

“There’s of course no practical way that I could frame and hang 4,300 posters, so I just didn’t see any other alternative than to do what we’re doing,” Peter Sachs, 75, said by telephone from his home in Las Vegas. “But I don’t feel guilty in any way whatsoever — even with them being auctioned I think it’s far preferable that they will wind up in the hands of people who truly enjoy them and appreciate them rather than sitting in a museum’s storage for another 70 years without seeing the light of day.”

Yes well, that’s debatable, I suppose. Researchers who will now have to visit a few thousand collectors and museums all over the world to view a collection that was once in a single museum might beg to differ. There’s no question what his father’s position on the issue would have been. He kept his collection together even under the unspeakable duress of the Nuremberg Laws and volunteered to help the museum that was keeping it hidden behind the Iron Curtain.

Sachs has reimbursed the German government for the 225,000 marks compensation payment, and why not? The full 4,300 poster collection is valued at between $6 million and $21 million, so Mr. Sachs is looking at quite the plush retirement.

The only bright side to this, and it ain’t much of one, is that at least we get to see the collection in pictures via the online catalogs. There’s also a print catalog available for $52 that has pictures of all the posters being sold this weekend.

Burne-Jones’ Days of Creation drawings for sale

A complete framed series of six highly detailed pencil drawings by Victorian artist Sir Edward Burne-Jones depicting the days of creation is coming up for auction for the first time in 40 years. The Days of Creation painting is considered one of Burne-Jones’ greatest works, and this pencil drawing is more than just a study for the later masterpiece. There are distinct differences between the painting and the drawing. It’s a fully realized exhibited work in its own right.

Burne-Jones made the drawings around 1871 during a period of withdrawal from public exhibition. The year before he had stormed off when the Society of Painters in Water-Colours asked him to modify a painting of Phyllis and Demophoön which was deemed a little too spicy to display as is because the mainly naked Phyllis was clearly recognizable as model Maria Zambaco, his lover and the daughter of his patron. Also she was embracing Demophoön in a manner that suggested more sexual hunger that Victorian womanhood was supposed to evince. He refused to make the change and withdrew from the exhibition and from the society.

For the next seven years he stopped showing his work but he never stopped working. In 1870 he designed six stained glass windows for his old Oxford friend and frequent collaborator William Morris. This was his first exploration of this version of The Days of Creation idea. Each of the six windows featured an angel with a flame on his forehead holding a globe depicting God’s actions on that day — the separation of light from dark, separation of the waters, and so forth. As the days progress, the number of angels increased to match. Morris & Co. turned Burne-Jones’ designs into stained glass and they were installed in the west window of All Saints Church, Middleton Cheney, Northamptonshire.

The pencil drawings are similar to the stained glass in concept and iconography, but are more complex and detailed. We know from a note in his work-record that he began the drawings in 1871. In 1872, he began work on the paintings, a gouache watercolor with shell gold and platinum paint on linen panels more than twice the size of the pencil drawings. He worked on the paintings off and on through 1876. Once completed, the panels were framed in a huge Renaissance revival contraption designed by Burke-Jones specifically to hold all six Days.

In May of 1877, Edward Burne-Jones exhibited The Days of Creation painting in his comeback show at Grosvenor Gallery in London. It was a sensation. Oscar Wilde went to the Grosvenor Gallery show, describing his visit in detail in an article for Dublin University Magazine (the essay is included in his book of collected writings, Miscellanies). He critiqued works on display by the likes of Sir John Everett Millais and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema before lingering on Burne-Jones’ triumphant return with The Days of Creation, The Beguiling of Merlin, and the Mirror of Venus. Here’s his description of The Days of Creation:

The next picture is divided into six compartments, each representing a day in the Creation of the World, under the symbol of an angel holding a crystal globe, within which is shown the work of a day. In the first compartment stands the lonely angel of the First Day, and within the crystal ball Light is being separated from Darkness. In the fourth compartment are four angels, and the crystal glows like a heated opal, for within it the creation of the Sun, Moon, and Stars is passing; the number of the angels increases, and the colours grow more vivid till we reach the sixth compartment, which shines afar off like a rainbow. Within it are the six angels of the Creation, each holding its crystal ball; and within the crystal of the sixth angel one can see Adam’s strong brown limbs and hero form, and the pale, beautiful body of Eve. At the feet also of these six winged messengers of the Creator is sitting the angel of the Seventh Day, who on a harp of gold is singing the glories of that coming day which we have not yet seen. The faces of the angels are pale and oval-shaped, in their eyes is the light of Wisdom and Love, and their lips seem as if they would speak to us; and strength and beauty are in their wings. They stand with naked feet, some on shell-strewn sands whereon tide has never washed nor storm broken, others it seems on pools of water, others on strange flowers; and their hair is like the bright glory round a saint’s head.

The painting was considered a triumph. Burne-Jones’ Renaissance influences (particularly Michelangelo and Mantegna) and clean style moved him out of the orbit of his early mentor pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and placed Burne-Jones firmly at the head of the burgeoning Aesthetic movement. Days was so popular that stained glass versions of it were commissioned by a variety of churches for years even after Burne-Jones’ death. Morris & Co made a neat version in Della Robbia ware ceramic between 1893 and 1906 for Dyfrig Chapel at Llandaff Cathedral in Cardiff, Wales.

The painting went through various private hands until its last owner, Grenville Winthrop, bequeathed it to Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum in 1943. The series remained on display in Cambridge for the next 47 years. It was on loan in a dining room in Dunster House at Harvard University in 1970 when the fourth panel was stolen. It is still missing today. The surviving five panels are still at the Fogg Art Museum.

That makes this series of pencil drawings even more important. They’re complete and framed together as Burne-Jones’ intended. Their ownership history is also illustrious. Their first owner was Aglaia Coronio, a friend, model and muse of Burne-Jones’ who probably received the drawings as a gift from the artist. After her suicide in 1906, her niece Zoë Ionides purchased the drawings from the estate before they could be put up for auction. The first time they came up for sale on the public market was 1973, after Zoë’s death. It was bought by an art gallery who sold it to the mother of the present owner who of course wishes to remain anonymous.

The Days of Creation drawing will be sold at Bonhams in London on January 23rd. The pre-sale estimate is $340,000 – $400,000.

Medieval church graffiti reveals fascinating details

The Norfolk Medieval Graffiti Survey (NMGS) is a community archaeology project which enlisted volunteers to document pre-Reformation graffiti in Norfolk churches. From January 2010 until June 2012, project workers did completely surveys of 65 of Norfolk’s medieval churches (10% of the total) and preliminary surveys of another 40. Medieval graffiti were discovered in 80% of the surveyed churches.

These are some remarkably beautiful and illuminating works. It’s not your standard “Kilroy wuz here” stuff, although names found have found, and it’s definitely not the bawdy libels of Roman Pompeii. They are line drawings, some abstract, some of people, demons, ships and crosses. Circles are also a popular theme. It’s social history, contributions of the regular parishioners who attended church but couldn’t afford to leave their mark by sponsoring rich vestments, dazzling stained glass or soaring bell towers.

Most of them are inscriptions scratched into the lower walls. They’re hard to see today without making a point of looking for them with the aid of angled lighting, but when they were first made, the lower walls were painted with bold colors so the scratched out images would look white against a bright red, black or ochre background. In some of the churches, the lower walls were crowded with graffiti but they did not overlap, suggesting that people made a point of not messing up earlier works, perhaps because they had a devotional purpose. A ship could have been inscribed as a prayer for a safe voyage, for example. It also suggests the authorities didn’t cover them up or scrape them off but rather tolerated them for very long periods, sometimes centuries even, until the walls were repainted, whitewashed or stripped.

It’s really an extraordinary new vision of medieval church aesthetics. Can you imagine what the walls of these churches looked like at peak graffiti? All those clean white drawings on bold backgrounds must have been like a reverse toile.

The project has also discovered important information about church construction. At one of the first sites they explored, Binham Priory, they found an eight-foot inscription depicting the great west window. It wasn’t a free hand drawing, but rather was made using compasses and straightedges, thus NMGS believes it was the work of the master mason who used the wall for architectural drawing.

Although much of the drawing was obscured by later painting, it’s a find of major historical significance because the west window’s Gothic bar tracery design was revolutionary when it was built between 1220 and 1245. It was the first of its kind in England, predating its successors by decades. The lower part of the great west window collapsed in the early 19th century and the window was bricked up, so the earliest sketches of the traceried window can provide invaluable information. Already experts who have examined the drawing note that the design is considerably more elaborate than they realized.

The next step for the project is to expand the massively successful pilot program into a full survey of the remaining 90% of Norfolk’s medieval churches. Volunteers are very much needed, so if you’re in Norfolk and want to have a unique opportunity to scour the walls of churches for centuries-old graffiti, call Project Director Matthew Champion at 07810 677723 or email info at medieval-graffiti.co.uk. You can also contact them via their Facebook page.

The program’s success has inspired six other counties to launch similar projects, so check your local listings.

Possible 9-foot model of Brunelleschi’s dome found

Archaeologists excavating inside an 18th century theater slated to become an addition to the Museum of the Works of the Cathedral in Florence have discovered what appears to be a builder’s model of the cathedral’s famous dome. The mini-dome is nine feet in diameter and features bricks laid in a herringbone pattern, a unique characteristic of the dome designed and built by architect and engineer Filippo Brunelleschi.

It was found in a layer two-and-a-quarter feet below surface level which contains copious metal and marble fragments from the period when the space was used as a construction workshop during the late 14th and 15th centuries, the same time when Brunelleschi was working on his dome. Herringbone brickwork had been used before in Persian domes, but Brunelleschi’s was the first in Europe, which means this model may be the first brick herringbone dome built on the continent.

The dome of Santa Maria del Fiore was built between 1420 and 1436, and the herringbone pattern was one of the key elements to Brunelleschi’s brilliant design. An octagonal dome had been planned for the cathedral by Arnolfo di Cambio in 1296, but even as the rest of the church was built, the dome never moved past the model phase. The decision to eschew Gothic buttresses in favor of a classical dome was made when the design of architect Neri di Fioravante was accepted in 1367. That left the Duomo’s builders with a dilly of a pickle: how to build a huge octagonal dome without elaborate scaffolding that would make the interior of the church unusable and without exterior buttresses.

In 1418 the wool guild sponsored a contest to solve the thorny problem. Brunelleschi studied the dome of the Pantheon in Rome — still today the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world — but he couldn’t use the Pantheon’s techniques for the Duomo dome. The Roman recipe for concrete was lost, for one thing, and for another, it had required massive wooden forms to keep the dome standing while the concrete dried. There literally wasn’t enough timber in Tuscany to scaffold and frame even a masonry dome 144 feet in diameter. Also the outer walls of the cathedral had already been built, and there was no way they could withstand the compression forces of a massive, heavy dome. Besides, there was still the stricture that the interior of the church had to be open to the public during construction.

Brunelleschi’s solution was brickwork rather than concrete or stone. He built wooden vertical ribs that curved upwards from each corner of the octagonal base. The ribs had slits that wooden planks could be attached to, and then terrifying skinny platforms built off the planks for workers to use building the dome without the need for scaffolding. The bricks were then laid in a diagonal herringbone pattern that would transfer the weight of the bricks to nearest vertical rib while the mortar was drying instead of pressing downwards and collapsing onto the heads of assembled worshipers.

Even today there are many questions about how he accomplished this extraordinary feat of architecture. Brunelleschi kept his overall plan close to his chest, releasing snippets on a need-to-know basis so he couldn’t be easily replaced. The discovery of a brick and mortar model (as opposed to the small mock-up style model which is on display at the Museum of the Works of the Cathedral) could add to our understanding of Brunelleschi’s methods.

Unfortunately the top of the mini-dome is missing, probably sheared off during the construction of the theater in 1779. The theater was commissioned by the Grand Duke of Tuscany Peter Leopold, son of Maria Theresa of Austria and future Holy Roman Emperor. It replaced the many workshops used by artisans and craftsmen employed by the Works of the Cathedral since the Middle Ages, one of which may well have been the place where Michelangelo sculpted the David. The Theater of the Intrepids became known for its low-brow entertainment, raucous audiences and wholly crappy acoustics.

In the 1900s the theater was gutted and used as a garage until it was purchased by its former owners, the Works of the Duomo, in 1998. For the next decade or so, the organization used it for storage and as a restoration laboratory. In 2009, construction began to transform the space into an adjunct space for the museum. The new addition is scheduled to open in 2015. The newly discovered domelet will be fully excavated, restored as much as feasible and put on display in the new museum.

Portrait on a snuffbox identified as Mozart

Experts at Salzburg’s Mozarteum have identified a miniature portrait on ivory embedded in the lid of a snuffbox as an authentic portrait of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In preparation for Pictures of Mozart: A Portrait Between Imagination and Reality, an exhibition of authenticated, dubious and fake Mozart portraits which opens January 26th in the Mozart Residence, researchers re-examined all the portraits belonging to the International Mozarteum Foundation in detail. By analyzing the wee oval painting (it’s just 3 by 2.5 centimeters) and the historical record, they were able to confirm that the miniature on the tobacco tin is a portrait of the composer painted in 1783 by Johann Grassi.

Mozart was 27 in 1783, living in Vienna and already famous as an exceptional keyboard player and composer. It’s known that he and Grassi met in Vienna at this time. The portrait is unusual because it’s most of the images of him depict him in profile or looking away from the viewer. This is one of few that shows him looking directly at the viewer, and it’s the only one painted after 1781. It’s also rare to see Mozart not wearing his peruke. His hair is powdered, but it’s his real hair.

The box was acquired by the International Mozarteum Foundation in 1956. The Foundation has been able to trace the ownership record of the tin back to Johann Grassi himself. He apparently added his portrait of Mozart to the snuffbox after the composer’s death in 1791, eight years after the miniature was painted. We know an 1829 engraving of Mozart by Dresden printmaker Johann Gottschick was modeled after the miniature because Gottschick said as much. It wasn’t until this latest research that experts were able to confirm the snuffbox miniature was the authentic original.

Research can’t always produce good news. Another portrait owned by the Foundation which has long been considered a portrait of Mozart as a child has been found to be a fake, not a mistake, a fake. Boy with a Bird’s Nest, a sweet portrait of a boy holding a nightingale nest, is inscribed “Mozart 1764.” The artist was eight years old in 1764 and the boy in the painting looks around that age. The large (31 by 24 inches) oil painting was purchased by the Mozarteum Foundation from a British art dealer in 1924 for what was a considerable sum at the time.

Unfortunately, what the experts found is that the inscription was not original the painting. It was added around the time of the sale, an intentional deception to raise the price and sell the piece to the Mozarteum. Even the claimed artist, Joseph Zoffany, and his signature is fake. The painting is by some unknown British painter and its subject is a nameless English noble child. It bears no relation to Mozart whatsoever.

There are only 14 confirmed portraits of Wolfgang Mozart known. The Foundation owns 12 of them. The exhibition brings them all together with pieces loaned from other institutions to compare authenticated portraits to questionable ones to known fakes. It’s the first time all these images of the genius will be together in one place.