Pictures at an Exhibition

48. Pictures at an Exhibition, by Sara Houghteling

What is the loss of art, compared to the murder of millions of human beings? Perhaps little. Yet art is part of what makes us human, and the destruction and theft of art because of its associations with people of a particular ethnicity is soul murder.

During World War II, the Germans looted the great museums and the great private collections of Europe. Much of this loot has never been recovered, and, even where it has, much of it has not or cannot be restituted, because of lack of records, resistance from its current "owners" or because there are no survivors left to reclaim it.

This is the historical backdrop for Sara Houghteling's beautiful first novel.

Max Berenzon (a nod, perhaps, in the direction of Bernard B?) is the son of a Parisian art dealer and his concert pianist wife. Though his father, Daniel, spends hours with him, getting him to memorize the paintings in his exhibitions, Max is not encouraged to enter the business, but rather is urged to go to medical school. Daniel instead hires as assistants young curators from the Louvre, with one of whom, Rose Clément, Max will fall in love. Despite that time spent together, there is no real closeness between Max and his father, and his one attempt at sharing in the business ends in disaster, as he bids on a Manet that turns out to be a forgery. Then the war closes in and the Berenzons flee to the town of Le Puy, and hide in the home of a gentile.

The Germans are routed from Paris. It is August, 1944, and the Berenzons return to their home to find thee had been a fire, and that the paintings in the gallery vault have disappeard. They will learn that many more entrusted to a bank vault are also gone. Max begins his attempts to find and recover his father's collection. In the process, he learns family secrets that go a long way to explaining that lack of closeness, that lack of encouragement, that he experienced.

The first, pre-war, part of this novel describes a Paris under the cloud of the coming war. The warnings are there, observed. Some heed the warnings, others, like Max's friend Bertrand's family, cannot believe that the service and sacrifice they have given France will not protect them.

The second part I found even more compelling, as Max learns the extent of the losses. These are not merely losses of art, but losses of trust, learning of how other dealers have turned a blind eye to the sources of what is now hanging on their walls. But there is honor and bravery, too. Believed by some to be a collaborator, Rose (whose character is based on a real person, Rose Valland) has, in fact, spent the war protecting art, letting the Resistance know the trains on which it is being spirited out, so they will not be bombed, secretly documenting what art the Germans have taken. She is living now with her piles of paper, knowing they will be needed.

Art is important. Its loss, particularly under these circumstances, is a tragedy. But Houghteling does not let us forget the greater loss, the loss of life under circumstances which are almost unimaginable. While Max searches for the lost paintings, he is also searching for news of his friend, Bertrand, and is taken under the wing of a survivor of the camps, who wonders when he will learn the news of his wife and son. There is a particularly compelling passage in which Max's wartime experience at LePuy is contrasted with that of Chaim Tenenwurzeil:

"It was at Auschwitz that [Chaim] learned of the German surrender at Stalingrad, thus locating his arrival there in February of 1943.

"That same winter, I was in Le Puy, where the stark, bare tree branches were like Chinese calligraphy against the sky. After a storm, Monsieur Bickart enlisted me to shake the snow from their boughs so they would not be damaged . . .

"The winter Chaim was first interned, Mother embroidered handkerchiefs for us all and gave them out on Christmas morning, out of respect for our host. We drank a fierce hot cider, then Father and Mother played belote while Monsieur Bickart stirred the fire, lost in thought, with the flush of the fire and the cider in his cheeks."

Suffering is relative.

This is a stunning debut novel, well-researched, with characters who are psychologically believeable. The portraits Houghteling draws of Paris in the days before and after the fall of Paris have the absolute ring of truth.

(If you know the whereabouts of art stolen in the war, or if you or your family had art stolen from you, there are resources available to seek restitution:
A resource list
B'nai B'rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum Holocaust Art Resource List.)

Never forget.

Death with Interruptons

47. Death with Interruptions, by José Saramago

"The following day, no one died." Thus begins this odd little book in which Saramago imagines what happens in a country in which no one dies. People who should die remain just this side of death. At first, the country rejoices. Death is vanquished! But then reality sets in. Who will care for those who ought to be dead? What will become of undertakers, and the issuers of life insurance policies? The Catholic Church realizes that if there is no death, there could no resurrection, and therefore no point to having a church. When it is discovered that death's hiatus is confined to one country, a profitable business springs up to smuggle across the border those who ought to be dead.

Then, after several months of no one dying, a letter on violet-colored paper mysteriously appears on the desk of the director-general of television, a letter from death (small "d", as she insists). Te letter announces that people will start to die again, but that from now on they will receive due warning from her, in the form of a violet-colored letter. So death begins again, but, to her surprise, one letter keeps coming back to her. The intended recipient does not die on schedule. She, curious, follows him. What happens when death falls in love?

How does an individual react to the unexpected? How does a society? When social norms are upended, uncontrollably, what happens?

State of Jones

46. The State of Jones: the Small Southern County that Seceded from the Confederacy, by Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer

There is a part of the history of the American Civil War that is not very well-known, that is rarely taught in the schools. It is the story of southerners who believed in the Union, who not only refused to fight for the Confederacy, but actively fought against it. Some did so by joining the Union forces, others did so by engaging in guerrilla warfare. The rural county of Jones in Mississippi was a stronghold of men who opposed secession. Some were staunch Unionists. Some were anti-slavery. Some believed it was a rich man's war and a poor man's fight. One such man was Newton Knight, and this is his story.

Newton Knight was the grandson of Jackie Knight, one of the early settlers in this part of Mississippi. By the time war came, he was "merely a rich man in a state full of tycoons", but the owner of several hundred acres of cotton and rice, and of a couple of dozen slaves. But his son, Albert, Newton's father, unlike Jackie's other children, refused to own any slaves, and led a modest life as a shoemaker and tanner. This split in the family would echo down through the years and the generations.

When the Civil War began, Newton, like many others, was forced into service in the Confederate Army. After Vicksburg, he, like many others, deserted. He spent the rest of the war with a band of like-minded souls, fighting the Confederacy in Jones County. The book does not, however, end with Lee's surrender, because the war really didn't end there. There was a period when men like Knight were in the ascendancy, when it looked as though the Union had won the war. But it soon became apparent that, in Mississippi at least, the South had won. National politics meant that the federal government soon declined to enforce the rule of law, and ex-Confederates came to power through murder and intimidation at the polls, leaving a legacy of racial injustice that still haunts this country today.

There's another part of Newton's story that's told here, the story of his love for a black woman, a woman named Rachel who was owned by his grandfather. Newton was married to a woman named Serena, by whom he had several children, but he also had children by Rachel. Now, it wasn't unusual for a white man to have children by a slave woman. What was unusual was that theirs was a true consensual relationship. He viewed her as his wife (the authors suggest that later conversions of some members of the family to Mormonism might have been caused, at least in part, by that faith's then recognition of plural marriage), he recognized and helped to raise and support his children by her, he made sure she had financial independence.

One would like to know what it was that caused Albert (and, through him, his children) to be not only opposed to slavery, but a friend to African-Americans. I cannot, however, fault the authors for being unable to answer this question; it is, at this remove, likely unanswerable.

I was, for the most part, riveted by this book. If I have any quibble with it, it is that in the early part it jumps around a bit too much for my taste. However, the authors combine serious scholarship and research (among other things, they located and interviewed descendants of Knight) with good storytelling. Civil War buffs will appreciate the vivid descriptions of the battle of Corinth, the siege of Vicksburg, and the guerrilla bands. About the only folks who won't like this book are those who don't want their preconceived ideas about the south and the Confederacy disturbed.

(For another story of Union sympathizers in the South, this one fiction, I highly recommend Sharyn McCrumb's Ghost Riders, one of her "Ballad Series".)

Johannes Cabal the Necromancer

45. Johannes Cabal the Necromancer, by Jonathan L. Howard

When you sell your soul to the devil, there's always a catch. When Johannes Cabal sold his, he thought it was irrelevant to his researches. He found that it wasn't. So he went to Hell to get it back.

Now Satan isn't generally inclined to return souls, but he also loves a wager. So he made a bet: if Cabal garnered him 100 souls within a year, he could have his soul again. To assist him in this endeavour, Cabal was supplied with the Carnival of Discord, which he will staff with "people" conjured from bits of bone and hair and fat, with runaway insane asylum inmates (who chant a hymn to Cthulhu) and various and sundry other odd fellows. They travel the country, and at each stop Cabal gets more contracts signed.

The Faust legend is so old, and has been done so many times, that it's hard to find a fresh take on it. This Howard accomplishes, and he does so with a delightfully wry sense of humor. Did you know that you must apply to be admitted to Hell? If you don't fill out the "Infernal Regions (Local Authority) Hades Admission Application -- Provisional (AAAA/342)" properly, back you go to the end of the line, and a couple of thousand more forms, all vetted by the very annoying Arthur Trubshaw.

But there's more to this story than humor. We learn that Cabal is responsible for his brother's transformation to a vampire, yet he calls upon him for help in his quest. The brother is the moral side of Cabal, and as they travel, carnies together, this rubs off on Cabal, until, at last, he must trick the Devil again.

A most enjoyable first novel, and it's not a surprise when one reads in the Acknowledgements a brief homage to Ray Bradbury, whose Something Wicked this Way Comes caused Howard to wonder where an evil carnival would come from. He has given us a quite credible answer here.

The Lost Chalice

44. The Lost Chalice: the Epic Hunt for a Priceless Masterpiece, by Vernon Silver

Anyone who pays any attention to art news these days cannot have missed the increasing number of stories about archaelogical artifacts being sent back from the museums where they have been housed to the countries from when they came. This book is the saga of artifacts stolen from Etruscan graves at Cerveteri in Italy, who profited, how they were dispersed, and the struggle to recover them.

Late in 1971, a few months before the effective date of UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, tomb robbers in Cerveteri, Italy (Etruscan Caere), dug into an Etruscan necropolis and uncovered a trove of grave goods, including fragments of a krater signed by the Athenian vase painter Euphronius, depicting the death of Sarpedon. This and other artifacts were ripped from the site, wall carvings hacked away. Sold to a regular buyer of antiquities, Giacomo Medici, who smuggled it out of the country, through him to the collector and dealer Robert Hecht, taken by Hecht to the Swiss vase restorer Fritz Bürki, the krater ended up at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, where blind eyes were turned to the question of its origin.

(Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Shortly after the million dollar purchase and all its attendant publicity, the existence of a kylix by Euphronius, decorated with the same subject, was revealed. It had come from the same tomb. But where was it now? That's one of the plot lines of Silver's book, which reads like a good thriller. If only it were fiction.

There are many villains here. One can, to a small degree, feel sympathy for those in poverty who know that what is buried deep in the ground can bring them a modicum of comfort. No sympathy can be felt for the dealers in stolen grave goods, and the collectors who buy them.

Most disturbing of all, however, is the attitude of people like those at the Met, who not only didn't care if an item they desire was stolen patrimony, they actually thought it didn't matter. Silver quotes Philippe de Montebello, the Met's recently retired director, as saying "How much more would you learn from knowing which particular hole in -- supposedly Cerveteri -- it came out of? Everything is on the vase." It is astounding to me that anyone with an ounce of concern about items such as the Euphronius kylix could fail to understand or care about the importance of the context in which it was found. To think that such an item exists in a vacuum, and is of value only for itself and in relation to the artist's other work, is abysmally short-sighted and narrow-minded.

Silver is right on the money when he notes that what was exciting about the find of Tutankhamen's tomb, and the exhibit of the artifacts therefrom, was the fact that it was the discovery of an undisturbed tomb. Despite the minor importance of Tutankhamen in the political history of Egypt, this find gave us a vast amount of information because the artifacts were found and recorded in situ.

Sadly, as long as there is arrogance and greed in this world, it is unlikely that even the most aggressive action against it will stop the theft, smuggling and sale of the cultural patrimonies of this world. Items looted during the American invasion of Iraq are still turning up, as collectors with more money than ethics pretend not to know.

From the New York Times: Michael Kimmerman on the Euphronius krater at the Villa Giulia

Cecil Beaton's Fair Lady

43. Cecil Beaton's Fair Lady, by Cecil Beaton

When noted photographer and stage designer Cecil Beaton went to Hollywood to work on the film of My Fair Lady, he took pen and paper with him and kept a daily diary, which was subsequently published to the great delight of his admirers, as well as anyone with an interest in film history. Beginning on the day he first met with director George Cukor in London, and ending just over a year later as he flies home, his journal is a fascinating and edifying glimpse into the world of film-making in the old days of the Hollywood studio system.

He describes the difficulty in getting just the right extras to set off his glorious Ascot costumes, the ease of getting offices painted and sets built, the vast treasure trove of furniture and decorative items in the Warner studios warehouses, and the hard work, talent and dedication of the costume shop ladies. Interspersed throughout are wonderful photographs (I'm particularly delighted by the ones of Audrey Hepburn wearing several of the Ascot gowns worn by extras), and, even better, costume sketches.

Beaton is a fine writer, and amidst the hustle and bustle of getting the film's design just so, he takes some time for introspection. On seeing a delphinium, he waxes eloquent on the lack of seasons in L.A.: Here, everything comes out within the same week. In England, the departure of winter is a long, drawn-out process, and how welcome is the first scylla and grape hyacinth! When the lilac is in blossom we feel spring upon us. We have to wait for high summer for a delphinium! But here it has no value, because it grows too readily when everything else is available. Nothing is rare except quality.

He describes his anxieties, the vicissitudes of Los Angeles freeway driving, and the startling lack of real conversation. It is no wonder that his most pleasant times seem to be those weekly dinners with fellow Englishman Christopher Isherwood, "in this sympathetic atmosphere with the talk that invigorates".

I picked this book up assuming I would find it a quick bit of fluff to while away an hour or so. What I found, instead, was "talk that invigorates". Thank you, Cecil, for sharing.

Inside Job

42. Inside Job, by Connie Willis

Rob is a professional skeptic. He makes a living debunking psychics, channelers, mediums and other frauds. One day, his employee, Kildy Ross, urges him to go see Auriaura Keller, who channels a spirit named "Isus", but she won't tell him what's so different about this woman. They go, and, what a surprise! In the midst of the usual New Age b.s. from this so-called spirit, a second voice interrupts, calling the proceedings "hokum" and Keller a "snakecharming preacher". What the heck is going on?

As they attended in their own names, and being known in their profession, Keller appears at the office and blames Rob for what has happened. In the midst of her ranting, she again begins to talk about "quacks and crooks". But it's her reference to a trial in Dayton, and "boobus Americanus" that causes Rob to realize she's spouting H.L. Mencken. Why would she fake channeling the skeptic's skeptic? And is Kildy in on it? Is she "a beautiful, calculating woman who seduces the hero into helping her with a scam"? Or is it real? And if it's real, what a can of worms!

A very engaging, clever and amusing novella.