Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [139]
“At the end of the 1927 Berlin show, all the works were crated by the art-transport firm of Gustav Knauer and sent for storage at the Provinzialmuseum in Hanover, which waited for further instructions from Malevich. Some works were exhibited there, but when the Nazis came to power in 1933 and denounced ‘degenerate art,’ which included, of course, avant-garde Russian art, the Malevich paintings were returned in their Knauer crates and hidden in the museum cellar.
“We know that they were still there in 1935, when Albert Barr, the director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, visited Hanover. He purchased two paintings and smuggled them out of Germany rolled in his umbrella. The Hanover museum decided that possession of the rest of the Malevich collection was too dangerous and shipped them back to one of Malevich’s original hosts in Berlin, the architect Hugo Haring, who hid them first in his house and then, during the Berlin air raids, in his hometown of Biberach in the south.
“Seventeen years later, the war over and Malevich dead, curators of Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum traced the route of the Knauer crates to Haring, who was still alive in Biberach, and acquired the paintings that now comprise the largest collection of Malevich work in the West. But from photographs of the Berlin show, we know that fifteen major paintings are missing. We also know from the quality of the Amsterdam collection that some of the finest paintings Malevich brought to Berlin were not exhibited in the Berlin show at all. How many of those private works are missing we will never know. Did they burn during the Berlin Blitz? Were they destroyed in transit by a zealous postal inspector who had discovered ‘degenerate art’? Or in all the confusion of the war, were they simply crated, stored and forgotten in Hanover or in the East Berlin warehouse of the Gustav Knauer transport firm?”
Malevich was replaced on the screen by a battered box covered with stamps and yellowed documents. It was the one standing in the gallery. Irina said, “This crate came to the gallery a month after the Wall came down. The wood, nails, style of construction and bills of lading are consistent with the Knauer crates. Inside was an oil on canvas painting, fifty-three by fifty-three centimeters. The gallery knew at once that it had found either a Malevich or a masterful fraud. Which?”
The crate faded and on the screen the painting reappeared in its actual size, a hypnotic beacon. “There are less than a hundred and twenty-five oil paintings by Malevich in existence. Their rarity, as well as their importance in the history of art, accounts for their extraordinarily high value, especially such masterpieces as ‘Red Square.’ Most of the Malevich paintings were suppressed in Russia for fifty years as ‘ideologically incorrect’ art. They’re still being released now, like political hostages finally seeing the light of day. The situation is complicated, however, by the number of counterfeits flooding the Western art market. The same forgers who once produced counterfeit medieval icons now produce counterfeit works of modern art. In the West, we rely on provenance—exhibition catalogs and bills of sale that provide the dates when art was shown, sold and resold. The situation was different in the Soviet Union. When an artist was arrested, his work was confiscated. When his friends heard of his arrest, they hastened to either hide or destroy whatever works of his they had. The artworks of the Russian avant-garde that exist today are survivors, with the unlikely stories that survivors have of being stuffed in false bottoms or hidden behind wallpaper. Many genuine works have no provenance at all in the Western sense. To demand the usual Western provenance from a survivor of the Soviet state is to deny its survival at all.”
On videotape, hands in rubber gloves gently turned “Red Square” over and delicately peeled off a chip, which was analyzed and found to be of German manufacture from the correct time period; Irina pointed