ART
State Sales
WHEN a London art dealer wants to put on view all the miscel- laneous paintings which he has in stock in order to make an exhibition to fill a gap between more carefully organised shows, he always chooses for it not a general non-committal title, like "Nineteenth Century French painting," but something in the form of " From Ingres to Picasso," so that the visitor may at first have the impression that this is a considered exhibition, de- signed to show the exact development of painting in the period between these two artists. This is so with the show at present on view at Rosenberg's, where a miscellaneous collection of canvases, many of which have been shown before in this and other galleries in London, is arranged quite pleasantly in the rooms producing rather the effect of a job-lot sale at Christie's of rather higher quality than usual. As paintings of interest only one stands out as at all exceptional, namely, a landscape by Van Gogh, painted in the last year of his life at Anvers.
One painting, however, in the exhibition is of interest, not so much on aesthetic grounds as for a sinister entry in the catalogue against it. This is the small head by Ingres, which is described as coming from the museum at Cologne. Now it has been known for some time that the State museums in Ger- many are willing to part with their contents, provided a sufficient price is offered, but the whole matter has recently come so much more into the open that it is perhaps worthy of some comment.
The Mannheim Gallery has for many months been named as one of those which are ready to sell ; and now rumour has it that some of the Munich galleries are prepared to follow suit. In addition we have the evidence of the painting at Rosenberg's that the paintings at Cologne are also potentially in the market ; and, most important of all, there is the case of the recent public sale, by Boehler of Munich, of works of art from various State museums in Berlin. These works were originally described as " duplicates," but in this case apparently the word is taken to mean not a work of which another version exists in the gallery, but a work by an artist of whose work the gallery owns another specimen—a very different definition, and one which if carried to its logical end will allow half the paintings in the State galleries to be sold. It is hard to see on what principle the works sold were chosen. It was at first said that the purpose of the sale (apart from that of getting foreign exchange) was to exchange non-German works for those by the masters of German art, especially those of the nineteenth century. But this theory has been exploded by the evidence of the Munich sale, in which many of the objects of art, if not of the paintings, were actually by German artists—a group of models by Kaendler being among the most important items sold. It is incidentally interesting to note that of the paintings offered very few found a buyer at all. The objects of art fetched good prices.
This is not, of course, the first time that a State has sold its art collections. The Commonwealth sold the whole of the collection of Charles I, with the exception of the Raphael and the Mantegna cartoons. But in this case we may suppose that the sale was due to the moral objections of the Puritans to all works of art as either idolatrous or luxurious. More recently the most important case has probably been that of the sales from the Hermitage by the Soviet Government. But these sales were effected at a moment of incredible financial stress with which the state of Germany at the moment can hardly be compared, and they ceased as soon as this situation improved, so that it is now quite impossible to extract a single work of art from any of the State museums in the Soviet Union.
This action on the part of the German State museums com- pares unfavourably with that of the Spanish Government which, even in the crisis of a civil war, has spent much energy in saving works of art from threatened churches and in collecting them from provincial towns to a central gallery where they will be well cared for. Further, the Catalan government arranged a big exhibition of Catalan art in Paris some months ago, and the Valencia government is showing the most important paintings from the Prado in the Louvre after July 12th. No doubt these shows are in part arranged in order to enlist sympathy for the cause of the Spanish Government, but they do at any rate show a realisation of the importance of the arts. But then, of course, it was a Nazi and not a Spaniard who said: " When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver."
ANTHONY BLUNT.
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