Palatial Losses

John Haber
in New York City

Hare with Amber Eyes: The Ephrussi Collection

Modern Worlds: The Neue Galerie

One hundred and fifty years ago, one of the most successful families in Europe devoted itself to art. Its dedication brought palaces, paintings, and Japanese carvings—and that much more to lose.

Maybe not exclusively a devotion to art, for Ignace Ephrussi also expanded the family business into international finance. It earned him a knighthood in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and no small fortune. And then, only halfway to the present, the family was in exile, and its fortune had vanished along with its art. Will the devotion alone survive? The Jewish Museum and Edmund de Waal tell of precious possessions lost to the Nazis and of mansions come and gone. So, too, does the Neue Galerie, not with a family collection but with its own.

A palace on the Ring

Banks aside, Ignace also built the Palais Ephrussi on the Ringstrasse, in the glorious heart of Vienna. It boasted a monumental stairwell, a ballroom, and the finest in period architecture, by the designer of Austria's parliament. Ignace commissioned ceiling paintings, canvases, tapestries, fine furnishings, and torah scrolls as well, for this was a Jewish family, and it was to cost them everything but their lives. As his influence reached Paris, he added a palace there as well. Were they no more than a display of wealth? His nephew would not have said so, but he wanted more than status and money.

Charles, namesake of the founder of the family business, was a critic, art historian, and patron of the latest in art. Based in Paris, he bought work from the Impressionist circle and made lasting friends. He may (among other candidates) have served Marcel Proust as the model for Charles Swann, the principal character in Proust's seven-volume novel, In Search of Lost Time. He also encouraged a growing interest in Japanese art following Europe's trade opening to the East, and his collection ran to more than two hundred fifty netsuke carvings. And he gave them all as a wedding present to Ignace's youngest son. That man's children included an artist and a fashion designer. His eldest daughter dared to study law in the 1920s, but became a poet and novelist as well.

And then it all came crashing down. With the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria in 1938, the Nazis seized it all, and surviving family scattered to the winds. The horror has special poignancy for the Jewish Museum, in what was once a Fifth Avenue mansion. It has even more for a descendant, Edmund de Waal, who turned the story of a dramatic rise and fall into a memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes. It is also the story of the netsuke that lends the book its title, a palace or two, and Nazi-looted art. Now it is an exhibition at the Jewish Museum as well, with nearly two-thirds of the netsuke on view. A fresh look at the Neue Galerie gains in poignancy, too, from its lavish site only six blocks away—and between old world and new.

One could argue that the Ignace family got off easy as terrible things go. The Nazis arrested one son on the spot, but released him when he ceded his wealth. That gave him and his siblings just enough time to escape overseas, and some art was repatriated after the war—but not a library of two thousand volumes. The netsuke got away intact hidden in a mattress. Of the survivors, two returned to Europe with the invasion of Normandy, and the fashion designer's career only got going in years to come. Still, there is no minimizing the Holocaust, and what is now saga of rise, fall, and rise again has an arc all its own.

With the Frick collection at the former Whitney Museum, while its mansion expands, you may be dying for a palace or two. You may also be dying for the human dimension. The Jewish Museum has a full exhibition on Nazi lootings, but it tells way too many stories, none of them all that complete or human. It has a mere handful of looted works from among a good million, a limited account of repatriation (mostly credited to the museum itself), and a few contemporary artists with their own take on the loss. de Waal, in contrast, takes everything personally, and his voice on headsets accompanies the exhibition upstairs, responding on its own to one's movements from room to room. He reads, breathlessly, from his book's breathless prose.

One must listen while reading wall labels, deciphering documents, and contemplating art. It is no easy task, and facing out is a complicated family tree. Suffice it to say that it begins with Charles Joachim Ephrussi, a grain merchant who rose from a Russian shtetl. Still, feel free to take the story personally yourself. The exhibition design by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the firm behind Boston's ICA and an expanded MoMA, does not attempt period rooms or a strict chronology. Rather, its sets out displays for successive generations in a moving family history.

A family saga

A table in front of the family tree has netsuke (pronounced net-skay or net-skee, with a near silent u), set out in a grid like a well-managed playground. The wood and ivory miniatures date from the Edo period—ending in 1850, only twenty years before Charles got going. The curators, Stephen Brown with Shira Backer and Elizabeth Diller, stress that they were decorative but also functional, clipped to a kimono to hold a bag. Their whimsy has touches of naturalism in humans and animals like that hare, but also a sly mania. Their wide eyes are looking at something unnatural while also looking out for themselves. Charles would have set them out in front of Japanese paintings that never appear.

Charles does, though, as a historian, with shelves for a treatise on Albrecht Dürer and volume after fat volume of the Gazette des Beaux Arts. Paintings from his collection cluster on partitions, some in grainy reproduction. He commissioned a still life of asparagus by Edouard Manet and purchased work from Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Berthe Morisot. His acquisition of Gustave Moreau, the Symbolist, drew an anti-Semitic rant from Renoir. Still, Charles had his old-world side, much like his ancestors. Other clusters center on Jean Honoré Fragonard and German contemporaries now lost to time.

The closer things come to disaster and recovery, the more art fades from view. Typescript in German authorizes the first, while photos of younger family members attest to the second. Iggie, later the fashion designer, poses in uniform. He fled first to Japan before coming to America and enlisting. Others settled in Mexico and Tunbrdige Wells, in England. How to resolve their stories is pretty much up to you.

A second table near the end has more netsuke, while a wall of slides has more still—sold off to fund the Refugee Council in the United Kingdom. This is ultimately their story, that of the netsuke and of those seeking asylum. For all its promises, the show goes by fast, with too little to see. Still, there is plenty to remember. This is a family saga, much like ones you may have seen on TV, and a Jewish saga, one that you have not. The palaces survive to this day, in photos by Iwan Baan, but the life within can never return.

The Neue Galerie is back, with "Modern Worlds," and you may never be as conscious of its old-world setting. You surely will on your way into its luxuriant Fifth Avenue mansion. You may lose yourself from the start in a painted one as well, with White Interior by Carl Moll from 1905. It marks a new beginning well enough, on its first display here, and Moll may be a new name at that. And its subject, a collector in Vienna, did her best to keep up with the times. Still, the woman in a white dress, back to the viewer, herself lost in her collection, belongs to a lost world.

And then you may look around you with the shock of recognition. The gallery has the same pristine whiteness—and display cases much like those in the painting's foreground, lending it its wealth, interiority, third dimension, and spots of color. A museum dedicated to German and Austrian art from 1890 to 1940 turns over the building to its collection, including (yes) an example of Nazi-looted art. You may think of that art as still shocking after all these years, brutal in its satire and more brutal still in its confessions. Yet it turns out to have a greater diversity of moods and, often as not, a touch of elegance. You may miss more of the old shocks, but there will always be another show.

An old-world modern

It would not be quite right to call this a rehanging of the collection, a nice complement to the 2021 "fall reveal" at MoMA or the Chinese wing of the Met. The museum just does not have space to accommodate much beyond current exhibitions and its old-world cafê. Still, it always leans heavily on its holdings, and it can only start modestly with art after Covid-19. Anything is bound to look lavish after a lockdown and "virtual exhibitions." Then, too, it is still the museum that has shown what Hitler denounced as "degenerate art." Portraits by Oskar Kokoschka still have their swollen hands and harsh gestures, and bodies by Egon Schiele still look first starved and then flayed alive. A scowl from Max Beckmann or a Berlin street from Ernst Ludwig Kirchner still looks forbidding.

Yet their portrait scan still look eminently respectable, even "semi-nudes" by Otto Dix, and Kirchner also had his tightrope walkers in a fashionable circus. Taken singly, a city park or portrait for Gustav Klimt can look remote and artificial, but a sequence in white, green, gold, and mixed colors taken together puts on quite a show. The museum has exhibited self-portraits before from Schiele to Beckmann, but here rooms for portrait sketches and photos of the artists look supremely self-confident. Max Pechstein poses in front of a woman's portrait while smoking, their faces like a couple at their ease. Some of the same confidence and fellowship motivates a wall of posters for new movements as well. German Expressionism was all about movements.

Then, too, the Neue Galerie insists on a wide range of movements beyond expressionism. Wall text is spare, apart from the story of a restoration to its owners of Nazi-looted art. Intro text, though, spells out the place of Dada, and a photo in the stairwell show artists on the roof of the Bauhaus. Another photo gathers the artists of the Blue Rider, and the museum has dedicated a past show to Franz Marc and August Macke. Here it has a wall for Gabrielle Münter and Wassily Kandinsky from their years working side by side, outdoors and with exuberant color, and another wall has abstract paintings akin to late Kandinsky.

The display runs not chronologically but by artist circles. One room has the sharply contrasting colors of Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Die Brücke. Another has the urbanism and myths of Beckmann, Dix, and the Neue Sachlichkeit (or New Objectivity), conceived as a reaction against expressionism. Klimt has almost a room to himself. The display is also responsive to the galleries. The decorative arts have the center of the more elaborate east galleries, with ceramics on one floor and Bauhaus chairs on another.

Works run up to 1940, with a portrait by Felix Nussbaum bold as he can manage in a camp. He died four years later in Auschwitz. Still, by far the most work is from a still-new century. Shows have looked at how art after World War I reflected its horror, with World War II as a terminus. Nussbaum's portrait also shows the influence of Surrealism, and it makes clear how changing styles and the Nazis brought things to a terrible end. Could, though, the first world war have already marked an ending?

One room foregrounds the very question of modern worlds. It includes Of Times to Come by a less-familiar name and with a prophetic title. Georg Scholz paints corporate moguls towering over their factories, with thin spumes of smoke rising higher still from the chimneys. Still, well-dressed men, like Richard Gerstl in a young self-portrait or an older man for Dix, are not just villains. Schiele later turned to city views with an almost monumental quiet. It is the "Old Town," but the old world was not altogether dying so that a new world could be born.

jhaber@haberarts.com

"The Hare with Amber Eyes" ran at the Jewish Museum through May 15, 2022, "Modern Worlds" at the Neue Galerie through March 13.