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☆ Heirs Awarded Nazi-Looted Art Are Still Waiting, 17 Years Later
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-13 | by ( Nina Siegal | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

In a museum storage depot in Amersfoort, the Netherlands, a 17th-century painting by a Dutch old master is packed away, unseen and unappreciated. Once the property of an elderly British-Jewish couple living in France, it was seized by Nazi collaborators during World War II and sold to Hermann Göring, Hitler’s second in command. Because of an administrative error in the war’s aftermath, it ended up in the Netherlands, where it was displayed in a museum for decades. The collectors heirs sought its return in 2006, and the country investigated the case and recommended restitution the following year. But the family still doesn’t have the painting back, and they don’t know when that will ever happen.

Persons: Hermann Göring, ”, Alain Monteagle Locations: Amersfoort, Netherlands, British, France, Nazi

☆ Surrealism Is 100. The World’s Still Surreal.
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-28 | by ( Nina Siegal | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

It’s a fish in the shape of a piano, floating in a clear blue sky, seen through a keyhole. Surrealism, the art movement that gave us disembodied eyeballs, melting clocks and animals with mismatched parts, was born in 1924 when the French poet André Breton published a treatise decrying the vogue for realism and rationality. Breton argued instead for embracing the “omnipotence of dreams” and exploring the unconscious and all that was “marvelous” in life. “The mere word ‘freedom’ is the only one that still excites me,” Breton wrote in his “Surrealist Manifesto.”It was a literary idea that became an art movement and revolutionized nearly all forms of cultural production. It’s now commonplace to call pretty much any weird experience “surreal.”

Persons: André Breton, Breton, ” Breton Locations: French

☆ After 9 Years in Limbo, Treasures From Crimea Return to Ukraine
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-27 | by ( Nina Siegal | More About Nina Siegal | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Hundreds of ancient artifacts from Crimea that were stored in a Dutch museum for nine years while Russia and Ukraine waged a legal battle over their ownership are now back in Ukraine, officials in Amsterdam said on Monday. The works arrived on Sunday at the Museum of Historical Treasures of Ukraine in Kyiv, said officials at the Allard Pierson Museum, an archaeological museum at the University of Amsterdam, which borrowed around 400 works from four Crimean museums in 2014 for the exhibition “Crimea: Gold and Secrets of the Black Sea.” The artifacts included gold jewelry, gold plaques, precious gems, Greek and Roman stone ornaments and ceramics. A month into the show’s run, Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, and when it came time to send the objects back, a legal conflict emerged: Should they go back to the Crimean museums, now under Russian state control, or to Ukraine, which argued that the works were part of its national heritage? The nine-year struggle over the treasures became a kind of proxy war over national sovereignty and cultural property. Els van der Plas, the director of the Allard Pierson Museum, said in a statement that it was “a special case in which cultural heritage became a victim of geopolitical developments.”

Persons: Allard Pierson, Els van der Plas Organizations: Museum, Historical, Allard, Allard Pierson Museum, University of Amsterdam Locations: Crimea, Russia, Ukraine, Amsterdam, Kyiv, Crimean

☆ Erwin Olaf, Photographer With an Eye for the Theatrical, Dies at 64
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-22 | by ( Nina Siegal | More About Nina Siegal | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Erwin Olaf, a contemporary Dutch photographer known for the precision of his staged photographs of both countercultural figures and Dutch royalty, died on Wednesday in Groningen, the Netherlands. Shirley den Hartog, his business partner, said the death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of a recent lung transplant. Mr. Olaf had struggled for years with hereditary emphysema, she said. Mr. Olaf began his career as a photojournalist documenting the gay liberation movement in the 1980s before becoming one of the first photographers in the Netherlands to stage photos using theatrical costuming and sets. “He made explicit images or very suggestive images that became iconic,” said Taco Dibbits, director of the Rijksmuseum, which owns and displays Mr. Olaf’s work.

Persons: Erwin Olaf, Shirley den Hartog, Olaf, ”, Taco Dibbits, Olaf’s, “ Locations: Dutch, Groningen, Netherlands

☆ An Effort to Focus on Long Overlooked Roma Suffering in the Holocaust
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-29 | by ( Nina Siegal | More About Nina Siegal | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

Before the Second World War, Helena Malíková grew up in Uherské Hradiště, a town in Czechoslovakia, where her family lived with other Roma in a settlement of old freight wagons lined up behind a sugar factory, near the Morava River. About 150 families lived in the converted train cars. Malíková and her family had the only brick house. Hundreds of thousands of Roma people, once derisively referred to with the slur Gypsies, were killed by the Nazis. It was recorded in May 1991 and is now featured in “Testimonies of Roma and Sinti,” a new database devoted to the Romani genocide of World War II.

Persons: Helena Malíková, Malíková, Roma Organizations: Roma Locations: Uherské Hradiště, Czechoslovakia, Hodonín, Auschwitz

☆ Overlooked No More: Dolores Alexander, Feminist Journalist and Activist
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-25 | by ( Nina Siegal | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times. Dolores Alexander had a few distinct careers throughout her life. She was executive director of the National Organization for Women, working alongside its president and co-founder, Betty Friedan. And she was a founder of the organization Women Against Pornography. This was a women’s club.

Persons: Dolores Alexander, Betty Friedan, Mother Courage, Jill Ward, ” Lucy Komisar, ” Organizations: The New York Times, Newsday, National Organization for Women Locations: Times, United States, Manhattan’s meatpacking

☆ This Little Amsterdam Improv Club Launched Big American Careers
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-19 | by ( Nina Siegal | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

Seth Meyers had no idea what to expect when he got a job in 1997 performing at a fledgling comedy club in Amsterdam called Boom Chicago. He was in his early 20s, and had never traveled outside of the United States. He had to apply for a passport. “I knew not one thing about the Netherlands,” he said in a recent interview. “My first thought was to get some good hiking shoes, I guess because I thought I was going to Switzerland.

Persons: Seth Meyers, “, ”, ” Meyers didn’t Locations: Amsterdam, Boom Chicago, United States, Netherlands, Switzerland

☆ Trailing Michel Houellebecq From the Bedroom to the Courtroom
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-01 | by ( Nina Siegal | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

In a joint interview, Ruitenbeek and Sinha said they developed the concept for the Houellebecq film with the author and shot 600 hours of footage of him, with his contractual consent. Houellebecq only objected when they put together a two-minute trailer for the work in progress, according to Ruitenbeek and Sinha. (Houellebecq has a long history of making critical statements about Islam, and some readers have found Islamophobic sentiments in his books.) In a French court, Houellebecq argued that the trailer violated his privacy and damaged his image. After Houellebecq left the project, KIRAC filmed in and around the court proceedings, as well as shooting other moments, such as Saturday night’s cockroach show.

Persons: Ruitenbeek, Sinha, Houellebecq, “, ” Ruitenbeek, KIRAC, Jacqueline Schaap Locations: Morocco, Paris, Amsterdam

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