Cleveland Museum of Art's Apollo sculpture is a star with intriguing past

By Steven Litt, The Plain Dealer

Lisa DeJong, The Plain DealerThe Cleveland Museum of Art believes its ancient bronze sculpture “Apollo Sauroktonos, "Apollo the Lizard-Slayer," may be the only original bronze in the world by Praxiteles, one of the most famous sculptors of ancient Greece.

Michael Bennett is a confident man these days. The Cleveland Museum of Art's curator of ancient Near Eastern, Greek and Roman art believes that he made the purchase of a lifetime in 2004, when he persuaded the museum to buy a beautiful and controversial ancient bronze statue of Apollo Sauroktonos, or Apollo the Lizard Slayer.
Bennett is now more certain than ever that the Apollo may be the world's only original work by the great ancient Greek sculptor Praxiteles, or a product of his workshop soon after his death in approximately 330 B.C. Only one other sculpture has been attributed to Praxiteles, a marble statue of Hermes with the infant Dionysus, found at Olympia in Greece in 1877, but some scholars say the work was completed after the sculptor's death. Today, Praxiteles is known chiefly through later Roman copies. "We may have here a work by his hand," Bennett said, raising his voice in excitement while examining the sculpture at the museum recently. "We're talking about Praxiteles!"
The sculpture, which stands 5 feet tall with a richly mottled green and dark-red surface acquired from having been buried for centuries, depicts a nude, adolescent boy preparing to spear a lizard with an arrow.
The sculpture's right arm is missing from above the elbow and the left arm is gone from the shoulder down, although the museum has the left hand and forearm -- and the tiny, squiggly lizard Apollo was getting ready to kill.
After several years in storage, the sculpture and its detached pieces are ready to play a starring role in the museum's newly renovated galleries of ancient and medieval art, scheduled to open Saturday.
The firmer attribution to Praxiteles signals that Bennett is moving on from the controversy that has dogged the sculpture since the museum acquired it from Phoenix Ancient Art, a dealership with offices in New York and Geneva, Switzerland.
Chief among the questions about the Apollo is the absence of evidence to eliminate concerns that it might have been looted in recent decades in violation of international agreements.
The museum said that a retired German lawyer, Ernst-Ulrich Walter, had reported that he found the sculpture lying in pieces in a building on a family estate he reclaimed after the fall of East Germany. Walter also reportedly remembered seeing the piece on the family estate in the 1930s, although no photographs of it exist from that time.
According to the museum, Walter said he sold the piece to a Dutch art dealer in 1994 but couldn't remember the dealer's name. The Dutch dealer then reportedly sold the work to at least one other anonymous collector, who then sold it to Phoenix.
Archaeologists have said that the story, which isn't backed up by anything other than the lawyer's word, sends a message to the antiquities market that museums are willing to acquire works with gaps in their ownership histories. This, in turn, encourages looting.
Yet another report, that the sculpture was fished out of the sea between Greece and Italy, was circulated by Agence France-Presse in 2007, though the unnamed Greek officials who made the claim have never presented any evidence or contacted the museum.
Bennett points to scientific tests that indicate the sculpture has been out of the ground for approximately a century, placing it well out of the reach of contemporary laws aimed against looting.
"This is a settled issue," Bennett said. "We've known for a long time that the statue has been outside its archaeological context for at least 100 years."
Labeling makes a telling reference
The museum always has asserted that the Apollo was probably Greek and probably by Praxiteles, but it allowed the possibility that it might have been produced as recently as A.D. 300, which would make it a less valuable Roman copy.
A new label installed with the work removes any suggestion of Roman origins and pushes the sculpture's creation back to a window from 350 to 275 B.C., giving it approximately a 20-year overlap with the lifetime of Praxiteles.
Bennett's attribution stemmed originally from the writings of Pliny the Elder, a Roman historian and philosopher, who described having seen a bronze sculpture matching the description of the Cleveland Apollo in the first century.
Tests performed on samples of metal removed from the sculpture in 2004 proved that the work was made in ancient Greek or Roman times. A half-dozen scholars who examined it before the museum purchased it were also sure it was ancient and not a forgery. But they weren't certain it was a Praxiteles.
Bennett's higher degree of certainty comes from having lived with the work for six years, and from having compared it with other ancient versions of the same motif at the Vatican in Rome, the Louvre in Paris and the Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen.
Slight changes in details such as the wavy pattern in Apollo's hair, the position of his fingers or the crease on the outer edge of his right foot have convinced Bennett that the Cleveland version is the one on which the others were based.
Apart from the details, Bennett said that the overall impression conveyed by the piece, in comparison with the stiffness and heaviness of the other versions, which are carved in marble, is that it's the real deal.
"There's a buoyancy, there's a lightness to it," he said of Cleveland's bronze. "It's not heavy. It looks like it can almost elevate."
In addition to the comparisons, Bennett and other staff members at the museum used medical devices to peer inside the sculpture's cavities and take photographs. The images show, they say, that the sculpture was never exposed to the sea. There are no signs of marine life or corrosion.
Bennett hasn't published his findings yet. Nevertheless, at least one prominent expert in ancient Greek sculpture is prepared to accept his conclusions.
"From photographs I've seen, it does seem quite possible it's Greek," said Malcolm Bell III, an art history professor at the University of Virginia and an expert in ancient classical art, who has led an excavation at Morgantina in Sicily.
Part of the sensation over the work is that only about 30 large ancient Greek bronzes have survived antiquity. The rest were melted down to make everything from other sculptures or weapons to nails.
If Bennett is correct, the Apollo would fall into a truly rarefied category. It would be the world's only original Praxiteles, and the only large ancient Greek bronze attributed to a specific artist by an ancient writer.
Questions persist on provenance
Much as the museum would like to focus the conversation on Praxiteles, however, questions persist about the sculpture's provenance, or ownership history. That is in part, scholars say, because of the dealers involved and in part because the museum hasn't shared all the information it has collected about the work.
The museum doesn't reveal prices in private sales, but a source close to the museum said in 2004 it paid $5 million. The principals of Phoenix Ancient Art, brothers Ali and Hicham Aboutaam, have both had brushes with authorities.
Ali Aboutaam was convicted in Egypt in absentia in 2003 on charges of smuggling and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Hicham Aboutaam pleaded guilty in New York in 2004 to a misdemeanor federal charge that he had falsified a customs document.
Before the museum bought the Apollo, museum officials obtained a written statement from the German lawyer, in addition to the reports and written statements from the scholars it consulted. . But the museum has declined to release those items as well as the data from metallurgical tests performed at Oxford University.
Those tests showed that while the sculpture is indeed ancient in origin, the base to which it was attached is about 100 to 500 years old, the museum said.
However, in 2007, the museum did release a critical piece of information -- an analysis of the lead solder used to join the Apollo sculpture to its base.
That exploration, performed at the University of Tubingen in Germany, showed that production of the solder "must have occurred less than about [a] hundred years ago."
Bennett said the report means that the sculpture was joined to its base around 100 years ago, thus proving it was excavated well before modern laws aimed at the prevention of looting.
Still, the fallout over the Apollo continues. In 2007, under political pressure from Greece, the Louvre declined to exhibit the sculpture in a large exhibition on the influence of Praxiteles, preventing scholars from making side-by-side comparisons with other versions of the Apollo Sauroktonos.
Last year, the museum agreed to return 13 antiquities and a Renaissance-era artwork to Italy after the country showed they had been looted, stolen or handled by traffickers.
The museum also agreed to form a joint committee with Italy to examine scientific and technical evidence about the Apollo and a bronze, Roman-era chariot ornament depicting Nike, the goddess of victory. Italy has made no claim and presented no evidence about either piece, Bennett said.
While the committee pursues its work, the museum won't release any more information about the Apollo, said Bennett and Griffith Mann, the museum's chief curator.
An international symposium on the work, which the museum originally planned in 2006, has been postponed indefinitely.
Deborah Gribbon, the museum's interim director, said she is convinced the museum has revealed all pertinent information.
"The issue is not that there are things to hide, it's that some of this is ongoing research and other elements are proprietary information," she said.
But Patricia Gerstenblith, a law professor at DePaul University in Chicago and a leading expert on looting of antiquities, doesn't support the museum's position.
"It's a public institution supported by the taxpayers and the government," she said. "I think they should come forward with the evidence they have. I don't know who they're protecting by secrecy."

http://www.louvresamothrace.fr/en/#/actualite

WORDSWORDSWORDSWORDS...swords?

Some important art historical terms...

foreshortening
perspective
plan
value
mass
line
volume
contour
elevation
section
texture
hue
proportion
scale
chiaroscuro
bas-relief
iconography
subtractive sculpture
additive sculpture
primary colors
complementary colors
conceptual approach
perceptual approach
in situ
provenance
subject matter
content 
axis
chroma
chronological sequence

Cultural Indicator

Modern art was CIA 'weapon'

Revealed: how the spy agency used unwitting artists such as Pollock and de Kooning in a cultural Cold War

By Frances Stonor Saunders

Sunday 22 October 1995

VIEW GALLERY

For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.

The connection is improbable. This was a period, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the great majority of Americans disliked or even despised modern art - President Truman summed up the popular view when he said: "If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot." As for the artists themselves, many were ex- communists barely acceptable in the America of the McCarthyite era, and certainly not the sort of people normally likely to receive US government backing.
Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.
The existence of this policy, rumoured and disputed for many years, has now been confirmed for the first time by former CIA officials. Unknown to the artists, the new American art was secretly promoted under a policy known as the "long leash" - arrangements similar in some ways to the indirect CIA backing of the journal Encounter, edited by Stephen Spender.
The decision to include culture and art in the US Cold War arsenal was taken as soon as the CIA was founded in 1947. Dismayed at the appeal communism still had for many intellectuals and artists in the West, the new agency set up a division, the Propaganda Assets Inventory, which at its peak could influence more than 800 newspapers, magazines and public information organisations. They joked that it was like a Wurlitzer jukebox: when the CIA pushed a button it could hear whatever tune it wanted playing across the world.
The next key step came in 1950, when the International Organisations Division (IOD) was set up under Tom Braden. It was this office which subsidised the animated version of George Orwell's Animal Farm, which sponsored American jazz artists, opera recitals, the Boston Symphony Orchestra's international touring programme. Its agents were placed in the film industry, in publishing houses, even as travel writers for the celebrated Fodor guides. And, we now know, it promoted America's anarchic avant-garde movement, Abstract Expressionism.
Initially, more open attempts were made to support the new American art. In 1947 the State Department organised and paid for a touring international exhibition entitled "Advancing American Art", with the aim of rebutting Soviet suggestions that America was a cultural desert. But the show caused outrage at home, prompting Truman to make his Hottentot remark and one bitter congressman to declare: "I am just a dumb American who pays taxes for this kind of trash." The tour had to be cancelled.
The US government now faced a dilemma. This philistinism, combined with Joseph McCarthy's hysterical denunciations of all that was avant-garde or unorthodox, was deeply embarrassing. It discredited the idea that America was a sophisticated, culturally rich democracy. It also prevented the US government from consolidating the shift in cultural supremacy from Paris to New York since the 1930s. To resolve this dilemma, the CIA was brought in.
The connection is not quite as odd as it might appear. At this time the new agency, staffed mainly by Yale and Harvard graduates, many of whom collected art and wrote novels in their spare time, was a haven of liberalism when compared with a political world dominated by McCarthy or with J Edgar Hoover's FBI. If any official institution was in a position to celebrate the collection of Leninists, Trotskyites and heavy drinkers that made up the New York School, it was the CIA.
Until now there has been no first-hand evidence to prove that this connection was made, but for the first time a former case officer, Donald Jameson, has broken the silence. Yes, he says, the agency saw Abstract Expressionism as an opportunity, and yes, it ran with it.
"Regarding Abstract Expressionism, I'd love to be able to say that the CIA invented it just to see what happens in New York and downtown SoHo tomorrow!" he joked. "But I think that what we did really was to recognise the difference. It was recognised that Abstract Expression- ism was the kind of art that made Socialist Realism look even more stylised and more rigid and confined than it was. And that relationship was exploited in some of the exhibitions.
"In a way our understanding was helped because Moscow in those days was very vicious in its denunciation of any kind of non-conformity to its own very rigid patterns. And so one could quite adequately and accurately reason that anything they criticised that much and that heavy- handedly was worth support one way or another."
To pursue its underground interest in America's lefty avant-garde, the CIA had to be sure its patronage could not be discovered. "Matters of this sort could only have been done at two or three removes," Mr Jameson explained, "so that there wouldn't be any question of having to clear Jackson Pollock, for example, or do anything that would involve these people in the organisation. And it couldn't have been any closer, because most of them were people who had very little respect for the government, in particular, and certainly none for the CIA. If you had to use people who considered themselves one way or another to be closer to Moscow than to Washington, well, so much the better perhaps."
This was the "long leash". The centrepiece of the CIA campaign became the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a vast jamboree of intellectuals, writers, historians, poets, and artists which was set up with CIA funds in 1950 and run by a CIA agent. It was the beach-head from which culture could be defended against the attacks of Moscow and its "fellow travellers" in the West. At its height, it had offices in 35 countries and published more than two dozen magazines, including Encounter.
The Congress for Cultural Freedom also gave the CIA the ideal front to promote its covert interest in Abstract Expressionism. It would be the official sponsor of touring exhibitions; its magazines would provide useful platforms for critics favourable to the new American painting; and no one, the artists included, would be any the wiser.
This organisation put together several exhibitions of Abstract Expressionism during the 1950s. One of the most significant, "The New American Painting", visited every big European city in 1958-59. Other influential shows included "Modern Art in the United States" (1955) and "Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century" (1952).
Because Abstract Expressionism was expensive to move around and exhibit, millionaires and museums were called into play. Pre-eminent among these was Nelson Rockefeller, whose mother had co-founded the Museum of Modern Art in New York. As president of what he called "Mummy's museum", Rockefeller was one of the biggest backers of Abstract Expressionism (which he called "free enterprise painting"). His museum was contracted to the Congress for Cultural Freedom to organise and curate most of its important art shows.
The museum was also linked to the CIA by several other bridges. William Paley, the president of CBS broadcasting and a founding father of the CIA, sat on the members' board of the museum's International Programme. John Hay Whitney, who had served in the agency's wartime predecessor, the OSS, was its chairman. And Tom Braden, first chief of the CIA's International Organisations Division, was executive secretary of the museum in 1949.
Now in his eighties, Mr Braden lives in Woodbridge, Virginia, in a house packed with Abstract Expressionist works and guarded by enormous Alsatians. He explained the purpose of the IOD.
"We wanted to unite all the people who were writers, who were musicians, who were artists, to demonstrate that the West and the United States was devoted to freedom of expression and to intellectual achievement, without any rigid barriers as to what you must write, and what you must say, and what you must do, and what you must paint, which was what was going on in the Soviet Union. I think it was the most important division that the agency had, and I think that it played an enormous role in the Cold War."
He confirmed that his division had acted secretly because of the public hostility to the avant-garde: "It was very difficult to get Congress to go along with some of the things we wanted to do - send art abroad, send symphonies abroad, publish magazines abroad. That's one of the reasons it had to be done covertly. It had to be a secret. In order to encourage openness we had to be secret."
If this meant playing pope to this century's Michelangelos, well, all the better: "It takes a pope or somebody with a lot of money to recognise art and to support it," Mr Braden said. "And after many centuries people say, 'Oh look! the Sistine Chapel, the most beautiful creation on Earth!' It's a problem that civilisation has faced ever since the first artist and the first millionaire or pope who supported him. And yet if it hadn't been for the multi-millionaires or the popes, we wouldn't have had the art."
Would Abstract Expressionism have been the dominant art movement of the post-war years without this patronage? The answer is probably yes. Equally, it would be wrong to suggest that when you look at an Abstract Expressionist painting you are being duped by the CIA.
But look where this art ended up: in the marble halls of banks, in airports, in city halls, boardrooms and great galleries. For the Cold Warriors who promoted them, these paintings were a logo, a signature for their culture and system which they wanted to display everywhere that counted. They succeeded.
* The full story of the CIA and modern art is told in 'Hidden Hands' on Channel 4 next Sunday at 8pm. The first programme in the series is screened tonight. Frances Stonor Saunders is writing a book on the cultural Cold War.
Covert Operation
In 1958 the touring exhibition "The New American Painting", including works by Pollock, de Kooning, Motherwell and others, was on show in Paris. The Tate Gallery was keen to have it next, but could not afford to bring it over. Late in the day, an American millionaire and art lover, Julius Fleischmann, stepped in with the cash and the show was brought to London.
The money that Fleischmann provided, however, was not his but the CIA's. It came through a body called the Farfield Foundation, of which Fleischmann was president, but far from being a millionaire's charitable arm, the foundation was a secret conduit for CIA funds.
So, unknown to the Tate, the public or the artists, the exhibition was transferred to London at American taxpayers' expense to serve subtle Cold War propaganda purposes. A former CIA man, Tom Braden, described how such conduits as the Farfield Foundation were set up. "We would go to somebody in New York who was a well-known rich person and we would say, 'We want to set up a foundation.' We would tell him what we were trying to do and pledge him to secrecy, and he would say, 'Of course I'll do it,' and then you would publish a letterhead and his name would be on it and there would be a foundation. It was really a pretty simple device."

DeKooning/Pollock

Julius Fleischmann was well placed for such a role. He sat on the board of the International Programme of the Museum of Modern Art in New York - as did several powerful figures close to the CIA.

Mark Rothko

What Is Art? Favorite Famous Definitions, from Antiquity to Today

by Maria Popova

“Art is not a thing — it is a way.”

After the recent omnibus of definitions of science by some of history’s greatest minds and definitions of philosophy by some of today’s most prominent philosophers, why not turn to an arguably even more nebulous domain of humanity? Gathered here are some of my favorite definitions of art, from antiquity to today.
Henry James in his short story The Middle Years:

We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

Leo Tolstoy, in his essay “What Is Art?”:

Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man’s emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.

Frank Lloyd Wright, writing in 1957, as cited in Frank Lloyd Wright on Architecture, Nature, and the Human Spirit: A Collection of Quotations:

Art is a discovery and development of elementary principles of nature into beautiful forms suitable for human use.

Steven Pressfield in The War of Art, one of 5 essential books on fear and the creative process:

To labor in the arts for any reason other than love is prostitution.

Charles Eames, cited in the fantastic 100 Quotes by Charles Eames:

Art resides in the quality of doing; process is not magic.

Elbert Hubbard in a 1908 volume of Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Teachers:

Art is not a thing — it is a way.

Oscar Wilde in The Soul of Man Under Socialism:

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

Thomas Merton in No Man Is An Island:

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

Francis Ford Coppola in a recent interview:

An essential element of any art is risk. If you don’t take a risk then how are you going to make something really beautiful, that hasn’t been seen before? I always like to say that cinema without risk is like having no sex and expecting to have a baby. You have to take a risk.

André Gide in Poétique:

Art begins with resistance — at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor.

Friedrich Nietzsche, made famous all over again by Ray Bradbury in Zen in the Art of Writing:

We have our Arts so we won’t die of Truth.

Michelangelo Pistoletto in Art’s Responsibility:

Above all, artists must not be only in art galleries or museums — they must be present in all possible activities. The artist must be the sponsor of thought in whatever endeavor people take on, at every level.

Federico Fellini in a December 1965 piece in The Atlantic, not currently online:

All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.

Hugh MacLeod in Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity:

Art suffers the moment other people start paying for it.

The Greek philosopher Aristophanes, writing in the 4th century B.C.:

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

And, lastly, my own take in a recent piece I wrote for the National Endowment for the Arts:

This is the power of art: The power to transcend our own self-interest, our solipsistic zoom-lens on life, and relate to the world and each other with more integrity, more curiosity, more wholeheartedness.