The Lost Museum at the Bode: info keeps alive what war once killed

He detested violence, yet welcomed the cataclysms that flung fresh works of art onto the market. “Wars, pogroms and revolutions”, he used to say, “offer excellent opportunities for the collector”.

Bruce Chatwin, Utz, 1986.

 

It is still not clear who has been responsible for the two devastating fires that in May 1945, during the days of Germany’s unconditional surrender and a month after Adolf Hitler committed suicide, burned the Friedrichshain bunker where the majority of the Berlin museum’s holdings was stored for security reason. Similarly to what is happening today in Syria and Iraq due to the Islamic State’s absurd policy of destruction – but on a larger scale -, a precious part of the international cultural heritage got destroyed, damaged, or just lost in what was probably a crime committed with clear aims in mind.

 

Seventy years after this tragedy we are still missing masterpieces such as the astonishing Botticelli’s Virgin and child with angels carrying candlesticks (ca. 1485-1490), or the so called San Lazzaro altarpiece by Ercole de Roberti (ca. 1475). Nevertheless, since most of these pieces were well known to the art community and already kept by institutions devoted to their study and preservation, information about them has survived and in some ways these works of art have continued to be studied by hopeful scholars and collectors from all over the world. One day or another some of them may reappear from some hidden refuges (or prisons?), just like the Rudolf Just collection, that has inspired the seminal art novel by Bruce Chatwin we have quoted at the beginning of this article.

 

But now a question arises: is information the real subject of “The Lost Museum” exhibition currently at the Bode Museum in Berlin? We would say so, and the main reason of our positive answer lies in the effect produced by this new case of re-enacted reality: keeping alive what war and perhaps personal interests once killed.

 

Moreover, thanks to this brilliant show that we would directly link to “Serial classics” at the Fondazione Prada, those copies are now legitimately asking for the visitor’s attention by taking the place on the museum’s walls of the artworks they once were at the service of .

 

Today nothing remains but the frame of the beautiful tondo by Botticelli we mentioned, originally owned by the Gëmaldegalerie. As art historian Julien Chapius notes, “only a small black and white photo in the Catalog of Loss reminds us vaguely of Botticelli’s work”. Similarly, only the head has survived of the touching marble sculpture known as “A Princess of Naples” attributed to Francesco Laurana (1470). The lady’s shoulders were taken to the Soviet Union by the Red Army between 1945 and 1946 along with other 2.5 million art objects – only 1.5 million of which have been returned to East Germany during the 1950s. But luckily a bust plaster cast exactly corresponding to the original work was made before the war, so the Princess dignity could be somehow preserved, thanks to a copy, and respecting those historical traces the Venice Charter of 1964 asserts that need to be preserved as fundamental information… but what is art in the end if not information?

August 6, 2015