Occasional Prose (13 page)

Unlike Orwell, I do not have a remedy. A few men and women in public life who spoke and wrote clearly might help, since people are imitative or, as the current phrase goes, need “role models.” But I think any real improvement would have to be effected by the popular will.

A final comment. It is curious that the sciences of linguistics and semiology—both highly abstruse—should have come into vogue just at this time, when the structures they so learnedly analyze—sentences—are a gruesome mass of rubble. On the professorial level, this corresponds to the inroads of “hopefully” as denoting the utter absence of hope.

Philadelphia and Lawrence, Kansas, November 1973

Living with Beautiful Things

I
N THE LAST FEW
years, art objects—primarily paintings and sculptures—have achieved an unusual prominence, almost notoriety, in the news. You have probably read in the papers about the furor caused in Japan by the arrival of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. A young woman sprayed its glass case with red paint in order to protest the Tokyo National Museum’s policy of excluding persons in wheelchairs from the exhibition. The museum then complied by setting aside a special day—May 10—for physically handicapped visitors to see the famous painting. To guard against frauds, those presenting themselves that day in wheelchairs were warned to carry medical certificates of disability, which would entitle them and their attendants to free entry; ordinary visitors and non-bona-fide invalids were banned. In a parallel demonstration, eight women’s liberation activists passed out handbills in front of the museum denouncing the Japanese Cultural Affairs Agency’s policy of “alienating the masses from the Mona Lisa,” and some Japanese Air France stewardesses seized on the occasion to distribute handbills of their own protesting a management decision to transfer them from Tokyo to Paris. The women’s liberation handbills maintained that the museum was practicing discrimination not only against cripples but also against working women, who were being denied the chance to view the painting. It was not clear how the museum had been able to do this discriminating—working women could hardly have been singled out and turned away at the door; perhaps the protest was against the museum hours, which, if they ran from nine to five, would automatically exclude most of the working population. Or maybe the price of admission was discriminatory. Still, if the hours were selective and the price of admission high, Japanese working men were being “alienated from the Mona Lisa” too. Why the rights of women to see the picture were regarded as more brutally violated than those of men was not explained in the news stories. Because the
Gioconda
is a woman?

The Mona Lisa, a disturbing work of art, has a kind of sorcery about it that provokes disturbances. People have been tempted to draw moustaches on it, to attack it with a knife; it was stolen by an Italian house painter in 1911—supposedly to protest Napoleon’s looting of Italian art treasures a hundred years before; he took it back to Florence, where he repatriated it in his hotel room. It is always heavily guarded against the designs or sudden impulses of madmen. The confused storm that raged around it in Japan—while the painting itself remained still as the brooding eye of a hurricane—was almost predictable. You could say that it was in the painting’s “character.” Yet other paintings and sculptures with no international reputation as troublemakers or
agents provocateurs
have suddenly become eventful. A psychotic young man from Australia attacked the peaceful
Pietà
of Michelangelo in St. Peter’s with a hammer and inflicted awful damage. While on exhibition in Belgium, a Vermeer from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam was savagely cut from its frame, and, despite careful restoration, will never be quite the same. From Colmar Cathedral, in Alsace, someone took the famous little Schongauer, the
Virgin of the Rose Garden
, and returned it more than a year later; so far as I know, the circumstances remain mysterious. In Poland, last May, a Breughel and a Van Dyck disappeared and were replaced by fakes. And in Florence, in 1958, a queer episode took place: someone went through the first three rooms of the Uffizi and pierced tiny holes in the eyes of the
trecento
saints with a sharp pointed object. In 1960 acid was thrown at a Rubens in the Pinakothek in Munich.

Last winter, another Vermeer, from Kenwood House in Hampstead, just outside London, was stolen and held for ransom, with dramatic threats to burn it if the ransom terms were not met. Several months later, acting on a tip, Scotland Yard men recovered it from a churchyard, propped up, wrapped in a newspaper, between gravestones. No ransom had been paid (the original demand had been for £500,000 worth of food to be distributed among the poor of a West Indian island); nor had the two Price sisters, held in English jails for car-bombing, been transferred to an Irish prison, as the ransom notes had ordered. In Ireland, a daring raid on Sir Alfred Beit’s collection, which included a Vermeer, a Goya, a Velasquez, a Franz Hals, had striking similarities: a ransom price of £500,000 was demanded, plus the transfer of four jailed IRA terrorists from England to Ulster. Here again the pictures were recovered, unharmed. Bridget Rose Dugdale, who was caught wearing a wig in a cottage in Cork, turned out to be a second offender; she had been convicted last October of stealing £87,000 worth of art and silver from her father. Shortly afterwards, in June, the letters “IRA,” two feet high, were found scratched across Rubens’
Adoration of the Magi
in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge.

These sensational daring crimes and outrages against illustrious works of art should be seen against the background of the enormous publicity given in the press recently to art auctions and art sales generally. The prices fetched have had something scandalous about them, shocking to common sense and maybe even to common decency. And the publicity surrounding the sales has awakened public alarm for the national patrimony, particularly in England but also elsewhere in Europe. The flight of artistic capital to American museums and the homes of American millionaires has been viewed as a national calamity, similar to the “brain drain,” and mass movements have been initiated to “save the Titian,” “save the Leonardo,” through voluntary contributions. This collective enthusiasm recalls old-time war efforts and historic sieges, when women heroically sacrificed their wedding-rings, their gold bracelets and earrings, to melt down to buy cannon and ammunition for the
patria
.

It was different in the days of Lord Duveen: when an English lord sold a Titian from his country seat, that was
his
business; what happened to locally owned works of art was of no interest to the common man. Today this whole sphere has been democratized.

Along with the shock or scandal of the inflation of art prices, other scandals in the art world have surfaced, some of a deflationary nature. The most famous instance, at least for Americans, is the case of the celebrated Etruscan warrior statues in the Metropolitan Museum, familiar to every visitor, to virtually every New York schoolchild, which were suddenly admitted to be early twentieth-century fakes. In Paris, last spring, there came the shock of the Picasso collection—a donation he had made to the Louvre. The big exhibition planned for it was hastily canceled when a number of the paintings he had owned for years were exposed as fakes. Shortly after this, in Italy, a gang of picture-forgers, picture-doctorers, and their accomplices—two art critics—were seized by the police, along with the evidence: twenty-two paintings ascribed to masters ranging from Caravaggio to Modigliani.

Of course there have always been forgeries and hoaxes in the art world; Michelangelo was guilty of one, as a poor young artist, when he passed off as an antique a “Sleeping Cupid” he had carved, rubbing it with earth and scarring it to make it look as if it had been dug up. What is new is the fascination exercised on the public by art frauds and forgeries—all the more compelling because of the vast sums of money to be made in this field, though usually not by the counterfeiter himself, who turns them out by the dozen like a sweated laborer. New also, probably, is an element of pathology: the modern counterfeiter, unlike Michelangelo, does not do it primarily for money but for some kind of ego-satisfaction—the thought of his works passing, under an alias, through the marts of trade to mingle with the great in priceless collections. A forger turning out false Renoirs is making a protest against accepted art names and art values. He proves by demonstration that he is in the same class with the recognized master he simulates, all the while bitterly conscious that if he signed his own name to his products they would have no market at all.

In fact, pathology enters into most of the bizarre episodes I have been speaking of. The motive of gain, where present at all, is minimal, more a hope than an expectation. It is true that church robberies of an unsensational kind have been greatly on the increase—in rural France and Italy they are so common that you do not even read about most of them—but the art objects stolen, not being famous, are marketable, and unguarded country churches offer a natural temptation. Such thefts can be plotted on the graph of a general increase in lawlessness and hence belong to normal criminality. In the current epidemic of sensational art snatches, though, as in the bodily attacks on defenseless works of art, there are signs of some new and contagious social malady. The fact that every one of those world-renowned paintings has been returned or recovered by the police shows that the thieves were not acting according to a well-thought-out rational plan, unless the plan was to seek publicity. And indeed all those acts, taken as an ensemble, of burglary and vandalism can be best seen as advertisements; the main achievement has been free space in the newspapers. Advertisements for a cause, as in the huge letters “IRA” scratched on the Rubens, or else pathetic commercials for an unrecognized individual, like the Michangelo
Pieta
’s assailant. Yet even when the grievance crying for remedy seems to be clear and specific, one can sense, underneath, a murkier umbrage. That Japanese woman with her spray-can—was she merely protesting museum traffic-regulations that denied the Mona Lisa to an already disfavored category in the population, those unable to walk? Or was her protest also directed at its enigmatic target, the Mona Lisa herself, and at the disproportionate attention, the tribute, paid her, that is, paid art with a capital A, by society? The exclusion of society’s weakest and most infirm members from the spectacle may have been only the last straw, the final determinant for an assault on art and art values as that protestor conceived them.

Certainly the group that seized the Kenwood House Vermeer in an armed raid was proclaiming a state of war against bourgeois values and specifically against the value bourgeois society appears to set on art. “You transfer our freedom fighters out of your bloody prisons or we will kill your precious picture.” That was the tone of the ransom messages—a tone of furious contempt for prevailing English standards, which rate an inanimate object, a piece of property, higher than two lives. And the hijackers were right in their perception of the English value scale; it took the theft of the Vermeer to advertise the worth of the Price sisters’ lives, which up to then nobody but fellow terrorists had thought to weigh or appraise. As the appointed Sunday drew near when the death sentence pronounced on the Vermeer was to be carried out, the general feverish concern over its fate proved—no doubt to the hijackers’ satisfaction—where the public’s sympathies lay. With the picture, obviously.

I am not going to condemn that attitude. I shared it. And the equation as posed by the revolutionaries was not exactly a fair one: the poor Vermeer had not “done anything,” whereas the two girls had committed a capital crime. On the other hand, mixed with the agonized sense of the hostage’s total innocence and helplessness, there was probably another feeling that reflected less credit on humanity—the feeling that the Vermeer was irreplaceable, the corollary being, of course, that the Price sisters were not. Nor is that idea, though repugnant, utterly false. We like to say that each human life is unique and therefore sacred, but we
know
that Vermeers are very rare and that there will never be any more. While violence-prone girl terrorists are, by comparison, common, and, it would seem, quite easily and quickly manufactured—look at Patty Hearst. And if, as a private person, each Price sister is unique, as revolutionaries they must hold themselves to be as interchangeable as standard parts of a machine: if one militant is struck down, another will spring into her place.

In the end, the hostage was not sacrificed. Maybe, as with Iphigenia at Aulis, some Olympian god intervened. Or, more factually, the people that took it did not have the heart to make good their threat, so they gave it back. Like a frightened airplane stewardess, held at gunpoint, the Vermeer had a terrible ordeal but survived, much to everybody’s relief. The picture was luckier than some of the businessmen and diplomats who have been held for ransom during these last years, and its escape suggests that the group that hijacked it were less contemptuous of art values than the ransom messages implied. Or else that they did not consider the picture “worth” destroying and instead just dumped it where the cops could pick it up.

In any case, what we have here and in the Dugdale heist is a novel guerrilla tactic. Art objects are kidnapped and held for ransom just as though they were South American Exxon representatives or USIA foreign-service officers or millionaires’ grandchildren, like Patricia Hearst and the Getty boy. A little strip had been cut off the back of the captive Vermeer and mailed to a newspaper to show that the kidnappers meant business—just like the Getty boy’s ear. And on the public the effect was very much the same: we winced with sympathetic pain, as though the picture were sentient, as though it were alive and bleeding. The Vermeer’s captors evidently aimed at striking terror into the English public through the newspapers, perhaps seeing this as a means of having their demands met by the authorities. With the Vermeer, this tactic (borrowed from the Mafia or from the Getty boy’s kidnappers) did not work. The effect of terror on a mesmerized community is to convince the community that the assailants will strike again, and the sense of an omnipresent threat may induce resistance as well as compliance. Had the demands for the return of the Vermeer been met, no painting or sculpture in England would have been safe or so the public reasoned and no doubt the authorities too. Mr. Getty, in refusing to pay Paul Getty’s ransom, thought along the same lines. “I have many grandchildren,” he declared, meaning (I hope) that if he paid the price set on Paul, he would be putting the others in danger.