When the Long Museum, the private institution founded by Chinese mega-collectors Liu Yiqian and Wang Wei, began selling work last year, it felt like a sign of the times. It meant that Asian collectors were not only being less active in terms of buying. They were actively selling, too.

Previously, the paintings being sold by collectors like Liu and Wang—a $34.9 million Modigliani that appeared at Sotheby’s last year, for example—came from the West and made their way to China via flashy purchases. Today, it is the opposite: these very same paintings are being sent back to the West, where they will likely find new buyers.

Now, there is news of at least two major paintings on the market that appear to come from China: a Warhol that, according to a source close to the gallery, is priced in excess of $100 million and a Basquiat that sold in 2013 for $29 million.

In mid-May—not coincidentally, during the major auctions in New York—Gagosian opened “Icons From a Half Century of Art,” an exhibition of paintings and sculptures by Basquiat, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, Richard Serra, Frank Stella, Cy Twombly, and Warhol. It is open only to collectors, and can only be seen by appointment at Gagosian’s 24th Street gallery in New York. The image the gallery used to promote the exhibition on its website is of a Warhol “Mao.” Warhol famously created no fewer than 199 images of “Mao,” but this isn’t just any “Mao.” It is the only one of the four so-called “giant Maos”—they stand a full 15 feet high—that is not in a museum.

The last time the Gagosian “Mao” was publicly on the market was in 2008, when Christie’s, in collaboration with London dealer James Mayor, sent the painting to Hong Kong with a price tag of $120 million. As described in write-up at the time in the Wall Street Journal, that price would have set a record for the artist: the auction record for a Warhol then was the $71.7 million Christie’s got in May 2007 for the 1963 silkscreen Green Car Crash. (The record today is the $195 million that Larry Gagosian paid for a painting of Marilyn Monroe at Christie’s in 2022.) But the “Mao” didn’t sell in 2008 in Hong Kong, and then came the recession. According to a source with close knowledge of the painting, it did, however, sell around 2013 for a price within the range of $120 million.

The person involved in that transaction, dealers say, was Rosaline Wong, who has in the past reportedly worked on behalf of Henry Cheng, chairman of Hong Kong–based New World Development. According to Forbes, Cheng, who succeeded his own father at New World, is China’s third-richest person. New World’s shares dropped 60 percent between January 2023 and January 2024, and the Cheng family’s net worth dropped by nearly a fourth, to $22.1 billion.

Wong is a former Hong Kong barrister that Artnet News and the South China Morning Post previously linked to the purchase of a $150 million Gustav Klimt painting. The painting was previously owned by Oprah Winfrey, and the transaction was brokered by Gagosian, according to Bloomberg. More recently, Artnet News linked Wong with a Klimt that sold at Sotheby’s last year for $108.4 million. Dealers who worked with Wong between 2013 and 2015 say she appeared to be buying on behalf of a foundation that was in formation.

According to South China Morning Post, around 2015, Wong founded an investment advisory company, HomeArt, which matches individuals and companies with art for sale. The SCMP reported in 2022 that at that time Wong was “in the middle of setting up a US$1 billion ‘museum-grade’ art investment fund with Hong Kong- and Singapore-based asset management firm Zheng He Capital, which counts among its heavyweight advisers Gagosian and Wong’s close friend, the Hong Kong billionaire Henry Cheng Kar-shun,” head of New World Development and father of collector Adrian Cheng, executive vice chairman and CEO of New World Development and founder of the K11 , a venture that blends art, commerce, and development, and that has an associated foundation, the K11 Art Foundation. Artnet News reported last year that Wong was “launching a fractional ownership fund specializing in museum-quality works for a broader pool of investors.”

Wong has also been linked to Joseph Lau, whose purchase of a smaller Warhol “Mao” painting in 2006 for $17 million set the stage for Christie’s bringing the “giant Mao” to Hong Kong.

Since 2021, Homeart has since done several exhibitions in collaboration with Christie’s, among them an 11-work Basquiat show in Hong Kong. That exhibition, held in May 2021, included an untitled 1982 painting that was purchased at Christie’s London in 2013 for $29 million. (It’s worth noting that Christie’s made a point of telling the New York Times just after that sale that there was a large amount of bidding from Asia.) That Basquiat painting is also in the current Gagosian “Icons” exhibition, according to several sources who have seen the show.

A representative for Gagosian declined to comment on the identity of the consignor of the Warhol and Basquiat paintings. Wong did not return a request for comment submitted to Homeart.

The four “giant Mao” paintings are so big that Warhol had to make them in the Factory’s screening room rather than the painting studio. They were so expensive to produce that he needed backing from two galleries (Knoedler & Co. and Castelli) and an avid collector of his (Peter Brant). In return, each of those parties got a “giant Mao” painting. The one Christie’s sent to Hong Kong in 2008 went through Castelli to James Mayor, who placed it in a private collection in Europe. Another was sold by Knoedler in 1974 to the Art Institute of Chicago. The third, Brant gifted in 1977 to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The fourth “Mao” Warhol kept, and eventually sold it to Charles Saatchi , who eventually sold the piece to the late German collector Erich Marx, who, in 2007, put it on long-term loan to the Hamburger Bahnhof museum in Berlin.

Coincidentally, the Hamburger Bahnhof “Mao” was in the news this week. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ran an op-ed by art historian Von Hubertus Butin, who speculated that the painting might soon hit the market. Marx died in 2020; three paintings from the Marx collection—two Warhols and a Twombly —that previously appeared at the Hamburger Bahnhof have been removed from the museum by his heirs. Butin writes that those paintings, which he claims are collectively worth some $170 million, have been consigned to Gagosian and that some may have sold. (Gagosian declined to comment on this; the museum said only that the paintings have been removed.) The Marx collection’s “Mao” could be next to go, Butin claimed, writing that there had at one point been a $155 million offer made for that “Mao.” The museum said it had no knowledge of this, and dealers told ARTnews that the figure seemed unrealistic. One dealer even called the sum “aspirational,” particularly in the current art market conditions.

As for whether the “Mao” at Gagosian has found a buyer, the gallery isn’t saying. The “Icons” show is up through July 19.

The reading, a performance called Where Your Ideas Become Civic Actions (100 Hours Reading The Origins of Totalitarianism), was staged at the Hamburger Bahnhof this past weekend. During the performance, Bruguera and others read from a 1951 book in which Arendt theorized how totalitarian movements such as Nazism arise.

Yet the marathon reading did not go entirely as planned. Twice, the event was interrupted—once at Bruguera’s urging, with activists reading statements about Kurdistan, Sudan, and other locales, and once in an unplanned protest. That latter interruption involved protestors shouting “Zionism is a crime” and other variations, and then personally confronting Bruguera.

On Instagram, a group called Thawra posted what appeared to be video of that second interruption, which took place during a reading by Mirjam Wenzel, a scholar of German Jewish art and history. She has previously urged “empathy” for the Israelis taken hostage by Hamas, and the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt, where she serves as director, issued a statement that accused some pro-Palestine protestors of demonstrating to “celebrate Hamas’ terror as a decolonial liberation move.”

In the video, protestors accused Bruguera of platforming Zionists, supporting Israel, and failing to include Palestinians in the event. (In fact, Bruguera was one of thousands of artists who signed a recent letter that labeled the killing of thousands of Palestinians a “genocide.”) A heated moment ensued in which the protestors confronted Alice Koegel, the curator who organized the event, and told Bruguera, who is Cuban, that she is a “gringa” who comes from a privileged background.

“First of all, you don’t know who I am,” Bruguera shouts back, having listened to them for a period. “You don’t know my history. You don’t know everything I’ve done for Palestinians and for all the people in the world.”

“You’re still a white person!” a protestor shouts back. “Gringa!”

While certain reports in the media this past weekend stated that both interruptions were unplanned, Bruguera refuted this in a statement posted to her Instagram on Monday.

“They came, they protested, they made their points, people listened, some reacted, some observed, and they departed peacefully. The performance continued,” she wrote of the unplanned protest. “I don’t understand the fear of confrontation or accountability. I also condemn if further action is taken against the activists.”

Her statement seemed to contradict one issued the day before by the Hamburger Bahnhof in which the museum said the protestors had “attacked” the museum two times on Saturday. The Hamburger Bahnhof statement accused protestors of using “violent hate speech” against a reader and directors Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath. (Bruguera, in a second follow-up statement on Monday, said that Bardaouil, who was born in Lebanon, had been “unjustly labeled in various hurtful racist ways (he was called a racist, an Arab with light skin, etc)” by the protestors.)

“We respect and fully stand by the decision of the artist and refuse categorically any form of hate speech and violence,” Bardaouil and Fellrath wrote in the museum’s statement, which was posted to Instagram. “It is to our deep regret that we have to proceed this way in order to protect the safety of the participants of the performance. We invite people to reflect upon the consequences of not respecting the #FreedomOfArt.”

German officials echoed the language of the museum. Hermann Parzinger, the leader of a Berlin consortium of museums that includes the Hamburger Bahnhof, called the protests “unbearable.” Claudia Roth, the country’s culture minister, said in a statement, “Hate, anti-Semitism, racism and such forms of violence are absolutely unacceptable and have no place in art or anywhere else. This evil anti-Semitism and racism was obviously directed directly against a Jewish cultural worker, the Cuban artist and a manager of the Hamburger Bahnhof.”

The fracas surrounding the Bruguera performance was yet another event that exposed a gaping fault line in Germany, where the art scene has been polarized by the October 7 Hamas attack and the conflict taking place in Gaza. Shows have been canceled, and invitations for professorships and talks have been rescinded.

Another recent controversy that previously embroiled the writings of Arendt, who was Jewish, also surrounded the Bruguera performance. Journalist Masha Gessen was to receive an award in Arendt’s name in Bremen, but after Gessen compared Gaza to Nazi-era ghettoes, an organization pulled out of the ceremony. Gessen did ultimately receive the award in a scaled-back ceremony.

Gessen was among those who was slated to participate in the Bruguera reading performance, alongside artist Bani Abidi, Unorthodox author Deborah Feldman, and others.

The Headlines

RISING STARS dominated at last night’s Phillips auction of modern and contemporary art in New York, Angelica Villa and Daniel Cassady report in ARTnews. A María Berrío painting went for more than double its estimate, selling for $1.6 million with fees, and a Lucy Bull abstraction tripled its low estimate, going for a total of $478,000. Still, the $138.9 million sale just barely managed to meet expectations. Even its top lot, a Cy Twombly abstraction that was bought for $36 million, only rose slightly above its low estimate. “The market feels more tentative,” New York collector Max Dolciger told ARTnews following the auction. Whether that sense of apprehensiveness will be felt tonight at Sotheby’s, where two contemporary art sales are taking place, remains an open question.

ART AWARD ALERT. The future of ArtPrize, once one of the biggest art awards in the U.S., appears to be uncertain. MLive reports that the prize’s board has disbanded. Why this is happening now remains unclear, although ArtPrize has promised that it will continue to live on in some form. Artist Rinko Kawauchi has won the Outstanding Contribution to Photography Prize from the Sony World Photography Awards, per the National. More than 20 of her works are now on view in a related exhibition at Somerset House in London. And the city of Miami has announced that it is planning to offer $35,000 in prize money to participants in its No Vacancy, Miami Beach initiative, which will place 12 artworks in a dozen hotels in the area.

The Digest

Anonymous Was a Woman, an organization that offers grants to women-identifying artists over 40, has named its 2022 winners. Among them are Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Abigail DeVille, and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. [ARTnews]

After a lengthy negotiation with real estate developers, the German state and the Berlin government have bought back the building that hosts the Hamburger Bahnhof museum and the adjacent Rieckhallen. The deal cost a reported $176.1 million. [Artnet News]

Workers at the Storm King Art Center in Upstate New York have revealed plans to unionize. So far, the art center has not said it would voluntarily recognize a union. [The Art Newspaper]

Russia’s Parliament is currently displaying art by Viktor Bout, a prisoner being held in the U.S. whom Russia is hoping to exchange for the basketball player Brittney Griner. Bout was convicted of terrorism for allegedly trying to sell up to $20 million in weapons. [ABC News]

Giuliano Ruffini, a dealer accused of having forged dozens of Old Masters paintings, cannot be found by French police, who put a warrant out for his arrest. Investigators are not even sure whether he is still in Italy. [The Art Newspaper]

The Kicker

POTTY HUMOR. In a vibrant interview with the New York Times, the composer Brian Eno discussed a famous story about how he once peed on a Marcel Duchamp readymade composed of a urinal turned on its side. If you were sitting there, wondering how he managed to do it, now you have an answer. Here it is: “I went to a plumber’s near the Museum of Modern Art and I found some fine plastic tube that I knew I could get through it. I used that and a pipette. I went to the toilet and peed in the sink—God, they’d hate to know this. I pipetted it up, covered the end so it held the golden liquid in there, and then stood by the vitrine and was feeding the pipe through. I mean, it was symbolic in a way because it was a tiny amount of pee.” [The New York Times]

The negotiations with the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which oversees the Hamburger Bahnhof, may also become a crucial part of the city government’s larger efforts to repurchase the museum’s main building. In 2020, the German press agency dpa reported that local officials were seeking to buy back the Hamburger Bahnhof, the largest building in the Berlin Neue Nationalgalerie, from the real estate company CA Immo.

According to Die Welt, the German government does not own the Hamburger Bahnhof’s building, despite the fact that the museum is state-run. Only the extension was at risk of demolition, however.

Known as the Rieckhallen, the extension is a 65,000-square-foot space that was once used by the shipping company Rieck. After the company left the building in 2001, the structure became an art venue. In 2004, a bridge was added that connected it to the Hamburger Bahnhof.

Since that time, the Rieckhallen has been where the Hamburger Bahnhof staged presentations of works from the Flick collection, which has been on long-term loan to the city of Berlin since 2004. That collection is considered important due to the breadth of the artists represented in it. Among them are Alberto Giacometti, Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman, Francis Picabia, On Kawara, Neo Rauch, Pipilotti Rist, Wolfgang Tillmans, Dieter Roth, Cindy Sherman, Katharina Fritsch, and countless others. Since 2004, Flick has gifted more than 250 works to Berlin.

In 2020, amid fears that the Rieckhallen would be demolished by CA Immo, Flick was prepared to let the contract guiding the loan of his collection run out. Udo Kittelmann, then the director of the Neue Nationalgalerie, called the potential loss “a great pain.” CA Immo’s agreement with the city government has arrived just in time, given that the contract was expected to expire on September 30.

“With the securing of the Rieckhallen, the Hamburger Bahnhof will have great prospects for the next decades, and the museum will be sustainably strengthened in its mission to collect and preserve the art of the present for the future,” said Gabriele Knapstein, director of the Hamburger Bahnhof, in a statement.

Andreas Quint, chairman of CA Immo’s board, said in a statement that he was “very pleased” with the agreement.

The news comes amid a regime change at the Hamburger Bahnhof. With Knapstein’s contract set to time out, the curatorial duo Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath were named directors of the museum earlier this month. They are expected to begin January 1.

Marx, who was named on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list each year between 1990 (when it launched) and 1996, might best be remembered for his decision to give the Nationalgalerie (also known as the Berlin State Museums) much of the work in his key collection of postwar art, centered around the work of Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol, whom Marx collected in depth.

When Marx gave the works to the Nationalgalerie, the institution, which manages several art museums in the capital city, was in need of a place to show them. Then came the idea to transform the Hamburger Bahnhof building into an art museum.

The Neoclassical building opened in 1846 as a train station for the line that connected Berlin to Hamburg, but ultimately closed in 1884. In the subsequent years, the building served various purposes, including serving as a transportation museum at one point, until it was transferred to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in the late 1980s.

After a renovation to the building overseen by Josef Paul Kleihues, the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart opened in 1996 with the ambitions of a museum for a daring contemporary art in a recently reunified Germany. Among the iconic works given by Marx to it were Rauschenberg’s Pink Door (1954), Warhol’s Double Elvis (1963) and Mao (1973), and Beuys’s Straßenbahnhaltestelle (Streetcar Stop), from 1976.

Marx also collected work by other major contemporary figures from the 1960s onward, including Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Roy Lichtenstein, Cindy Sherman, Sandro Chia, Georg Baselitz, Günther Förg, Keith Haring, Jeff Koons, and Matthew Barney, as well as more recent pieces by Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, Rachel Whiteread, and Ugo Rondinone.

Among the most important works in Marx’s collection is a more recent addition, Beuys’s 1980 installation work Das Kapital Raum 1970–1977 (The Capital Room 1970–1977), which includes, among other things, 50 chalkboards covered in text, an axe resting on a piano, a ladder, a microphone, and film projectors.

“I viewed it as a general statement that was being made by Beuys,” Marx said of the work in an interview with Udo Kittelmann, who was then the Nationalgalerie’s director, that was published by the English-language publication DW. “In it he brings together everything he had created in one work. That was what this is.”

Kittelmann then said, “It expresses the idea that ‘true capital’ is human creativity.” To which Marx replied, “Yes. That’s exactly right. If you don’t understand that sentence you don’t understand Beuys and you never will understand him.”

Marx gave that work, which was first exhibited at the 1980 Venice Biennale and is currently installed in the Hamburger Bahnhof, to the Nationalgalerie in 2015 as a permanent loan. He had bought Das Kapital Raum the year before for an undisclosed price (in the multiple millions, according to Marx) from a Swiss museum, the Hallen für Neue Kunst, where it had resided since 1984 and where Beuys himself had reconstructed the piece. (The Hallen für Neue Kunst was forced to close its doors after a legal battle involving the Beuys piece and its owners.)

Erich Marx.

Speaking more broadly about Beuys’s contribution to art that informed his own large, Marx added, “I always saw something in Beuys that is out of the ordinary when it comes to art appreciation. You have to be open-minded about it to realized it’s something entirely new that you’ve never experienced. That is, the fact that you have art that is portrayed in this way.”

Erich Marx was born in 1921 in a village in the southern Baden region of western Germany. He studied law after World War II and worked as a legal advisor for Berda Verlag, the German publishing company that was co-run by another notable art collector, Frieder Burda, who died last year.

Marx soon left law and established his own real estate and property development company in 1967, which focused on building hotels and, later, clinics and rehabilitation centers. Through that company, he amassed a fortune that eventually allowed him to purchase art. He went on to build one of the largest collections of postwar and contemporary art in the world.

Marx’s dedication to collecting art was unwavering. As he once said, according to RBB 24, “The decisive factor is the curiosity you have. Either it jumps at you, or you get curious and say: I would like to know what’s behind it.”

After Marx gave his collection the Nationalgalerie, the Hamburger Bahnhof reoriented its displays such that Marx’s holdings were later augmented by other notable donations from prominent collectors. This allowed the museum’s curators to rotate out works from Marx’s collection, much to the collector’s dismay.

That experience would eventually lead him to be the driving force in the development of yet another museum in Berlin, the Museum of the 20th Century, which is currently under construction. When it opens, a portion of the Marx collection will also be displayed, and the focus will be art of the 20th century, as opposed to emerging art.

It was his experience making Marx’s first art acquisition, though, that perhaps best sums up his dedication to collecting art. While on vacation in the German island of Sylt, he bought five works by graphic artist Friedrich Meckseper. “I would say that it was actually no coincidence that I discovered a gallery while walking,” Marx once said. “I went into this gallery, to see what’s new? I just saw that art lived on after the war and came back to life.”

News

The German government is attempting to purchase the Hamburger Bahnhof, which houses Berlin’s main contemporary art museum and is owned by an investor who wants to demolish in favor of new office buildings. [The Art Newspaper]

To balance its budget amid coronavirus-related shortfalls, the City of Philadelphia has slashed its public funding to the arts by 40 percent and eliminated its Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy. [The New York Times]

Artist Tania Bruguera was detained in Havana ahead of a protest against police brutality in the wake of the killing of Hansel Ernesto Hernández Galiano, a Black Cuban man shot by Cuban law enforcement. [Hyperallergic]

Hauser & Wirth will open a second exhibition space in Zurich, as the mega-gallery expands its presence in Switzerland. [ARTnews]

Art & Artists

Angie Jaime writes that “the ‘art world’ can’t exist in a decolonized future.” [Teen Vogue]

Noah Simblist writes about Dread Scott’s Slave Rebellion Reenactment work, which was performed in New Orleans last November, and how it relates to the ongoing protests against police violence and systemic racism. [Art in America]

Jason Farago looks back on 10 signature images by Milton Glaser, the famed graphic designer behind “I ♥ NY” who died last week. [The New York Times]

Watch a video tour of the Las Vegas mansion of collector Steve Wynn, which is filled with high-priced art. [The Sacramento Bee]

Art Market

Undeterred by looming National Security Law, the Hong Kong Art Gallery Association organized a small local art fair with 12 exhibitors that brought in almost 3,000 visitors over 10 days.  [The Art Newspaper]

Scholars have searched for some 60 years for Frida Kahlo’s lost painting The Wounded Table. A Spanish art dealer says its waiting in a London warehouse with the price tag of $45 million—but experts aren’t buying it. [AP]

Emil Nolde, Kriegsschiff und brennender Dampfer (Warship and Burning Steamer), undated (ca. 1943), watercolor.

DIRK DUNKELBERG, BERLIN/©NOLDE STIFTUNG SEEBÜLL

On November 9, 1933, German artist Emil Nolde attended what he considered his most important networking event to date: a dinner party with Adolf Hitler commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch, the failed coup in which some 2,000 Nazis in Munich attempted to seize power from the Bavarian government. “The Führer is great and noble in his aspirations and a genius man of action,” Nolde wrote in a letter to a friend after the soiree, noting that Hitler “is still being surrounded by a swarm of dark figures in an artificially created cultural fog.” The “dark figures” to which he referred were Jewish Germans who, the artist believed, sought to destroy what he considered “pure” German art through cultural diversity.

Nolde, then 66 years old, was aware that he was a test case for Hitler and his sycophantic propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. Revered as a founding father of 20th-century German Expressionism, he had nonetheless generated controversy among Nazi elites for respectfully depicting a wide variety of subjects, including ethnic minorities. He did not paint in the hyperrealistic style that Hitler preferred, favoring instead bold brushstrokes and electrifying colors to evoke visceral feelings of primal passion.

Emil Nolde in Munich, 1937.

HELGA FIETZ/© NOLDE STIFTUNG SEEBÜLL

But Nolde was determined to enter Hitler’s good graces. A year after meeting at the dinner party, he wrote an autobiography modeled on Hitler’s Mein Kampf—with Nolde’s titled Jahre der Kämpfe (or Years of Struggle, using the plural of “Kampf”). And he advocated eugenics: “Some people, particularly the ones who are mixed,” he wrote in his book, “have the urgent wish that everything—humans, art, culture—could be integrated, in which case human society across the globe would consist of mutts, bastards and mulattos.”

Nolde’s attempts to ingratiate himself with the genocidal Nazi regime did not go as planned. Displeased with his Expressionist style, Hitler featured more works by Nolde than any other artist in his notorious 1937 “Degenerate Art” exhibition (which included 27 of Nolde’s paintings, watercolors, and etchings) and confiscated 1,052 Nolde works from German museums. Stung, the artist retreated to his home in Sebüll, a remote area in Frisia, the northwest region of Germany considered by many Germans to be the cradle of the nation’s language and culture. There, Nolde began crafting an image as a persecuted artist that he promoted to the Allies and his fellow Germans after the war.

It was a farce that most Germans were happy to entertain. As late as 2013, when historian Manfred Reuther published his official biography Emil Nolde. Mein Leben (Emil Nolde. My Life), the 456-page book omitted any mention of Nolde’s admiration for Hitler and condensed World War II to roughly five pages.

Emil Nolde’s Das Leben Christi, from 1911/12, on view in the Nazi’s 1938 exhibition “Degenerate Art” in Berlin.

PHOTO: ©ZENTRALARCHIV – STAATLICHE MUSEEN ZU BERLIN; ART: ©NOLDE STIFTUNG SEEBÜLL

After the artist’s death, in 1956 at the age of 88, the Nolde Foundation (or Nolde Stiftung in German) worked to hide his racist past. But recently the foundation has started to acknowledge the dark side of history—as evidenced by an exhibition at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof museum that opened this summer and remains on view through September 15. “Nolde: A German Legend, the Artist in National Socialism” (the title on display at the museum, as opposed to its online mantle “Emil Nolde. A German Legend. The Artist during the Nazi Regime”) is the first attempt by the foundation to break the German public’s impression of Nolde as a victim of Hitler’s regime rather than an advocate for his anti-Semitic worldview.

For many years, Bernhard Fulda and Aya Soika, a husband-and-wife team well-respected in the international art research community and co-curators of the show with Christian Ring, the head of the Nolde Foundation, tread a fine line with Nolde’s legacy. Though they have published numerous articles shedding negative light on the artist—most notably a 2014 catalogue essay for an exhibition at Neue Galerie in New York—they have done so with caution. “For decades, the foundation did really sit as gatekeepers on all this archival material,” Fulda told ARTnews. “Access to his written legacy has been notoriously difficult.”

Emil Nolde, Gaut der Rote, undated (ca. 1938), watercolor and India ink.

DIRK DUNKELBERG, BERLIN/©NOLDE STIFTUNG SEEBÜLL

That changed when Ring took over in 2013, ending a long history of what Fulda called “the artist’s marketing campaign,” and the exhibition marks the first time Nolde’s racist views have been fully exposed. To expedite the transparency, the exhibition’s hefty catalogue has been published in both German and English, a bilingual gesture often avoided with controversial German exhibitions.

The show opens with Pentacost (1909), a painting that fueled Nolde’s anti-Semitism when it was rejected for an exhibition by the Berlin Secession, an artist group founded in 1898 in opposition to European salons and as a defender of traditional German culture. Nolde was deeply attached to the work depicting the visitation of the Holy Spirit upon Jesus Christ’s apostles after their savior’s death and resurrection, and after its dismissal he wrote a scathing letter to Berlin Secession president Max Liebermann that leaked to the press, much to Nolde’s horror. The episode, according to Fulda and Soika, led Nolde to give serious weight to the idea that Liebermann, a Jewish German, and what Nolde called the “Jewish-dominated” press were subverting true German culture. “Throughout his life Nolde suffered from negative art-criticism,” the researchers write in the exhibition catalogue, “and in this anti-Semitic conspiracy theory he found something it could be convincingly attributed to.”

Rather than deflecting the subject of anti-Semitism by focusing on Nolde’s most iconic works, including his nine-part 1912 masterpiece The Life of Christ, the curators chose to focus on art by Nolde that reflects the racist myth of Nordic superiority in which he believed even after the Nazis rejected his work. In 1938, Nolde created the luminous blue and golden watercolor Mistress and Stranger as part of a series celebrating vikings that counted as a failed attempt to have Hitler reconsider his fate when he refused to paint the Nordic subjects in the realistic hues that the Führer preferred. In Three Old Vikings, a trio of warriors are fierce and ready to fight—but unusually colored in fiery burnt orange and saffron. In Veterans, two soldiers stare out with stoic, determined faces and clenched jaws, yet Nolde thwarted his mission once more by painting their skin an odd golden hue.

After the war, Nolde touted these and other works as a sign of his bravery against the Nazis—a position thoroughly debunked by the exhibition. A quote from Nolde’s wife Ada prominently displayed in the Hamburger Bahnhof boasts that the couple had stood “fully and completely behind our Führer” long after other Germans had denounced him. And a lengthy essay in the catalogue (and excerpted in the exhibition) analyzes the anti-Semitism in Nolde’s Jahre der Kämpfe.

Emil Nolde, Verlorenes Paradies (Lost Paradise), 1921, oil on canvas.

FOTOWERKSTATT ELKE WALFORD, HAMBURG, AND DIRK DARK MOUNTAIN, BERLIN/©NOLDE STIFTUNG SEEBÜLL

“He is an artist we would not normally celebrate: an anti-Semite, someone who joined the Nazi party and who for the rest of his life never apologized,” Fulda said. The previously predominant view of Nolde as a wartime victim owed much to the Nolde Foundation’s tight grip on his reputation, and it was also influenced, Fulda said, by the fact that many past historians, curators, and journalists might have not wished to offend living relatives who may have been admirers of the Nazi regime themselves.

But all the recent research has started to lead to change. Earlier this year, German Chancellor Angela Merkel removed  Nolde’s Breakers, a striking 1936 seascape, from a prominent place on her office wall. And revelations about the artist’s past of the kind on display in Berlin may stand to change thoughts about his work forever. “Whenever people think that art and cultural context are entirely distinct spheres—[that] art is totally autonomous—they are kidding themselves,” Fulda said.

But Fulda and Soika’s role as historical researchers is only part of an equation that includes viewers, too. “We don’t pass any judgment in that regard,” Fulda said. “We don’t say, ‘This is what you should do with this cultural context.’ We tell art lovers: ‘Deal with it—now you figure out how this new knowledge frames the artworks of Nolde that you’re seeing.’”

Gülsün Karamustafa’s work explores the processes of modernization, political turbulence, and civil rights issues that have arisen in Turkish society in a period that spans, among other events, the military coups of 1960, 1971, and 1980. Her retrospective at the Hamburger Bahnhof consists of videos, sculptures, installations, and paintings from the 1970s to today organized thematically, charting her reflections on subjects ranging from orientalism to transgender politics to nation building and domestic aspirations. 

Hailed as one of Turkey’s most influential contemporary artists, Karamustafa (b. 1946) stands out among peers such as AyÅ?e Erkmen and Füsun Onur for her incorporation of pop culture, folklore, and personal biography into her work. Concepts of staging and role play are also significant features for Karamustafa, who worked as a set designer and art director for theater and film. Colorful textile collages, plastic masks, theatrical costumes, assemblages of readymade objects, photocopied articles pinned to walls, and loosely shot handy-cam videos combine artifice and kitsch with charged political content. 

The sculpture Double Reality (1987/2013) greets visitors to the top floor of the exhibition. A male mannequin, its head cocked to one side, wears a pale mauve housedress and is missing an arm. The crippled, androgynous figure is encased within two open iron cubes (one green and the other red)—held captive behind invisible walls. Nearby is the mixed-medium installation Kültür: A Gender Project from Istanbul (1996), in which two televisions sit on a table, playing episodes from popular Turkish variety and talk shows of the 1990s hosted by transvestite actor Seyfi DursunoÄ?lu (whose stage name is Huysuz Virjin) or transgender actress Bülent Ersoy. Both celebrities fought long-standing censorship battles with the government for their “deviant” gender-bending activity. Pinned to the wall behind the TVs are news articles, posters, and essays attacking or supporting their struggles for expression.

Karamustafa has also focused on the role of marginalized women in contemporary Turkish society in works such as the installation Objects of Desire/A Suitcase Trade (100 Dollars Limit), 1998. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, waves of Russian and Balkan women came to Istanbul, many of them seeking commercial commodities to smuggle back for sale and offering sex in exchange for money to finance their purchases. Their dealings became known as “suitcase trading,” and the phenomenon led to increased human trafficking. For Objects of Desire, Karamustafa purchased goods from Istanbul markets and brought them in suitcases to Western cities, where she presented and sold the goods in gallery performances. At the Hamburger Bahnhof, Polaroids of the items hang in a grid on the wall and a short video documenting the performance component plays on a small TV nestled in a pile of plastic flowers, toys, wigs, cheap lingerie, and clothes. 

In a darkened room hang Karamustafa’s “Prison Paintings” (1972–78), a somber series of figurative works on paper recounting the six months she was incarcerated in a women’s prison for harboring a political dissident in her home. Two portraits show forlorn women in isolation, while others depict people engaged in daily activities, like eating or sleeping, while clustered together in tight quarters. Karamustafa’s right to travel abroad was taken away for sixteen years following her imprisonment, constraining her to her home country. 

With July’s attempted coup against President Recep Tayyip ErdoÄ?an’s authoritarian regime—in which some three hundred people were killed and thousands injured—and the mass arrests and extensive purge of the civil service and other sectors of Turkish society that have occurred since, it is clear that the social battles Karamustafa has fought in over the decades are hardly over. Her humanism resonates loud and clear today, as Turkey cycles back to right-wing conservatism.

Slavs and Tatars, Qit Qat Club, 2015, mirrored Plexiglas, fiberglass steel.

DAVID VON BECKE

New York’s Tanya Bonakdar Gallery announced today that it represents the collective Slavs and Tatars, which is known for its work that deals with politics and cultural identity in Eurasia. Slavs and Tatars is currently nominated for this year’s Preis der Nationalaglerie, and the news comes on the opening day of a show of work by the nominees at the Hamburger Bahnhof, in Berlin.

Founded in 2006 as a book club, Slavs and Tatars defines its interest as the area “east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China.” The collective has explored that region’s languages, rituals, and belief systems, usually through humorous combinations of high and low. Written text continues to be a major part of the collective’s practice, though it has also made installations and sculptures and staged lectures.

Slavs and Tatars’ greatest exposure in the United States to date has been a 2012 project for MoMA called Beyonsense, in which a reading room allowed museum visitors to access their print-based material. In addition to their new representation in the United States by Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, the collective is also currently represented in Dubai by the Third Line, in Warsaw by RASTER, and in Berlin by Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler.

Paul Pfeiffer’s masterful sound-and-video installation The Saints premiered to considerable acclaim in 2007 in an empty warehouse next to London’s new Wembley Stadium. Based on the famous 1966 World Cup Final match between England and Germany, the piece now has an impressive reincarnation at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof. Those flush and confident days in the art world of 2007 seem far away now, but Pfeiffer’s work is well suited to our much-questioning and more precarious era.

On your way to the installation, you first encounter a wall projection, Pfeiffer’s video Empire (2004), a real-time recording over three months of wasps building their nest. Because the video is so long, you can see only fragments of the process, and are left to imagine the entire patient and elaborate effort. There are myriad connotations for humans in the collective energy on view, analogous to that required for erecting grand buildings, organizing societies or establishing far-flung empires—though those will pass. Nearby is Vitruvian Figure (2009), a large, exquisitely crafted model of a sports stadium. From its outside you see a half stadium interrupted by glass partitions. Peering down from above, standing on a ladder beside the model, you see the half stadium reflected in mirrored walls to become a dramatic, but also illusory, whole. The work seems curiously mobile in time, suggesting both ancient Roman amphitheaters and massive future stadia built for sports that have yet to be invented.

Beyond is a spacious white exhibition hall that seems empty at first, save for a miniature video screen on the far wall. Filling the space is the overwhelming roar of a crowd at a soccer game broadcast from 14 vertical loudspeakers set into the side walls, like serially repeated elements in Minimalist sculpture. The sound of anticipation swells into that of excitation and joy but then becomes a collective groan of disappointment. Occasionally the crowd noise reaches fever pitch, presumably when a goal is scored, but far more often there is a repeating sonic voyage from hope to frustration and back again. This raucous mass vocalization is oddly akin to a full-throated choir in a cavernous church, one of the many religious references with which Pfeiffer seeds his work.

According to Pfeiffer, and as evidenced in another video in a room beyond, the soundtrack combines a recording of the original spectators (at the old Wembley Stadium) with a hired crowd of a thousand Filipinos—cued and coached by the artist—cheering and chanting in a Manila cinema while watching footage of the match. The passion of the crowd actually present at that bygone soccer game blends with the simulated excitation of the ad hoc actors, and while there is something hilarious about this combination of authenticity and theatricality, there is also something deeply evocative in it. Europe of long ago and today’s ascendant Asia, imperial powers and a colonized nation, white European soccer stars and brown-skinned Filipino onlookers, even the stark thought that England and Germany had been mortal enemies in two world wars—all fuse in Pfeiffer’s highly mediated spectacle.

On the miniature screen, a snippet of the original 1966 game plays, but with all the players deleted, save for one. This solitary player (in fact a composite of players on the victorious English team) darts forward and retreats, shuffles about aimlessly, charges forward again, abruptly stops. At some times he is all purposeful action, at others seemingly vulnerable and uncertain, constantly finding and losing his way. Manipulating one of the most famous soccer games ever played, Pfeiffer’s savvy work is chock full of raw, conflicted humanity. As the disembodied crowd cheers this isolated athlete on the pitch, he embodies our own hesitation and exuberance, ungainliness and grace, ambitiousness and failure.

In the room beyond, a two-channel video, playing on a large screen, pairs grainy black-and-white footage of the 1966 game with a full-color film of the enthusiastic Filipino spectators. In this nerve-racking game, which remains England’s only World Cup victory, that nation took the lead in overtime on a still hotly debated shot that may or may not have actually crossed the goal line. Ambiguity, uncertainty and constant reinterpretation are fundamental to the legend of this game—prime territory for Pfeiffer, who excels at recasting well-known athletic and entertainment events with surprising, open-ended nuances. Pfeiffer’s looped pageant of spectatorship, athleticism, history and historical simulation makes for riveting viewing; his show is all about process, not goals.      

Photo (left) Vitruvian Figure, 2009, birch plywood, one-way mirrored glass and polished stainless steel, 191⁄4 by 151⁄2 by 8 feet.

Photo (right) Paul Pfeiffer: The Saints, 2007, video projection, 33 minutes.

Both at the Hamburger Bahnhof.