“Clean” Collections: On the Idea of Contamination in the Provenance Discussion

Abstract

“Clean” Collections: On the Idea of Contamination in the Provenance Discussion Roger Fayet Debates over provenance and how to handle museum objects are increasingly using the vocabulary of “clean” and “unclean” to characterize objects that are thought to be in some way “contaminated” by their histories. This essay will first give some examples for this discussion and then examine theoretical assumption behind the notion of contamination that transfers certain problematic events linked to guilt into the essence of objects. Beyond that, I am interested in knowing whether this makes any sense and should be continued. The terminology of “clean/unclean,” “contaminated,” and “toxic,” as far as I can tell, first arose noticeably in the context of the Gurlitt case. When Cornelius Gurlitt donated his art collection to the Bern Museum of Art, some were referred to as “clean” paintings—meaning unproblematic and admissible to the art collection of the Museum, while others were considered “contaminated” and even “toxic.” When the media reported about the contract signed between the Bern Museum of Art, the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Bavarian State Ministry for Justice on November 24, 2014, they emphasized that only the “clean works” of the Gurlitt collection were to be admitted into the Museum. For instance, the Berner Zeitung writes on June 29, 2017: “Since 2014 the complete body of work, which contains many works of classical modernism, has been carefully examined. According to the contract of the Museum of Art with the German authorities, only ‘clean’ paintings are to be permitted to come to Bern.” This means concretely that any work suspected of being looted was not to be handed over to the Museum but was to remain in Germany in order to be returned to its rightful owners. In their statements, those responsible for the Museum used the same terminology. Marcel Brülhart, vice president of the board of trustees of the Bern Museum of Art, told the Schweizerische Depeschenagentur in November 2016 that the Museum would not accept works that “are not clean in their provenance.” A year later, the Swiss tabloid Der Blick quoted Museum director Nina Zimmer saying that all of the works shown in the Gurlitt exhibit are “clean,” and none are under suspicion for being looted art. Asked by the Berner Zeitung about the state of provenance investigation in the Bern Museum of Art in general, then director Matthias Frehner replied that the Museum has “a clean inventory practice.” In another vein, the notion of “clean” paintings also appears, when writers insist that cleanness can never be restored. Thus, the art critic Philipp Meier commented on the contents of the exhibit in the Bern Museum of Art for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung: “All of them are ‘clean’ works, and hence under no suspicion for being looted art […] But has this art been, as it were, washed clean? Of course not. It remains part of their history. And this filter will always cloud the view of them.” As early as February 2016, Philipp Meier, together with Luzi Bernet, conducted an interview with the President of the World Jewish Congress, Ronald Lauder, who declared with references to the acquisition practice of art collector Emil Bührle: “Good faith doesn't make these paintings clean.” The interviewers liked this remark so much that they turned it into the title for the entire interview. About the Bern Museum's taking over the Gurlitt collection, Lauder said: “What's the good of that? The whole Gurlitt collection is contaminated.” The art critic Hans‐Joachim Müller even suggested in Die Welt on this context that such “stains” adhere to the paintings: “One cannot—and that above all is the lesson from the meritorious self‐examination of the Bern Museum—simply wipe away the history of these paintings with research. It will always stick to them—like stains that cannot be removed with anything.” With the word “contamination” from the Latin contaminare, to soil or defile (German besudeln), yet another term from the semantic field of the pure and impure makes its appearance in the discussion of provenance. As mentioned, Lauder uses the adjective “contaminated” to characterize the Gurlitt collection. An article published in the Neue...