The Collection, or a “Multiple Portrait”

Two paintings by Raphael, lost and so persistently sought by Raphael’s devotees, are in Magus’s possession. He owns the original of Giorgione’s Mistress, the woman for whom that painter died; the supposed originals are copies of this celebrated canvas, which Magus values at half a million! (…) The remaining ninety-seven paintings are equally rare and valuable. Magus therefore scoffs at our Museum, ruined by sunlight that devours its finest canvases as it passes through panes acting like lenses. Picture galleries should admit light only from the ceiling. Magus himself closed and opened the shutters of his museum, tending his pictures with as much care and caution as his daughter, his other idol. Oh, the old picture-maniac knew the principles of painting well! According to him, masterpieces had lives of their own, had their days; their beauty depended on the light that coloured them. He spoke of them as the Dutch once spoke of their tulips, and would come to view one picture or another at the time when the masterpiece shone in all its glory, when the weather was fair and clear.

Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Pons, Polish translation by Tadeusz Żeleński-Boy

An exhibition of paintings from a private collection creates a particular situation. For what is the difference between someone’s painting and one that belongs to everyone? At times we make a special artistic pilgrimage: to the palaces and churches of Rome and Florence, the museums and galleries of Amsterdam, The Hague, London, Paris, Berlin or New York. When we finally reach our destination, we spend a long time looking at the painting, often filling the general idea we previously formed through reproductions with the countless details that make it a masterpiece. We try to preserve as many visual impressions as possible beneath our eyelids. But at a certain moment we must leave and move on; we must say goodbye. Those few minutes, sometimes half an hour, have to suffice. Sometimes for the rest of our lives, sometimes until the next confidently anticipated encounter with Vermeer, Bouts, Bellini, Van der Goes, Piero della Francesca, Hans Arp, Picasso or Beuys. Yet in a certain sense, as we look at a painting, it becomes ours for a moment. How many images we can possess in this way!

Even as we accumulate this inner wealth and reconcile ourselves to such a fate, we can imagine a situation in which we “move continually in a world of artefacts that attract us”¹. Dr Erich Marx, a collector whose holdings include valuable works by classics of contemporary art, has the opportunity to do just that. In the conversation included in this catalogue, he speaks both about the irresistible force with which paintings attract us and about what compels collectors to seek this experience.

But why does the formation of an art collection intrigue even those of us who have no direct involvement in creating one, and why does the phenomenon appear surrounded by a special aura? A passionate love of the products of humanity and culture, and the subordination of one’s time and financial resources to it, is regarded as one of the more mysterious human attitudes. The best illustration of this passion for collecting, deeply rooted in human nature, was provided by the cabinets of curiosities popular in the eighteenth century: Wunderkammern whose uncanny atmosphere embraced not only works of art but also strange objects, natural anomalies from across the world and apparently impossible inventions.

Yet the ancient Greeks and Romans already collected voraciously. We know the contents of the rival collections assembled by Sulla and Lucullus, for example, from the detailed descriptions of Pliny the Elder and Cicero. The Renaissance also meant a rebirth of collecting. It became popular above all in Italy, rich in ancient monuments and the developing art of modern painting, where the Florentine Medici demonstrated that a place in great history was secured through collecting and generous artistic patronage rather than through victory in a battle against hated Siena. Following the Medici example, France and England, the German lands and the Netherlands likewise developed a taste for collecting.

What, then, distinguished — and continues to distinguish — these private collections from those of museums? Private patronage supplements the role of the state not only when immense wealth allows a collector to create a more valuable collection than a public institution with a limited budget. It does so even when a collector has no extravagant sums to spend, since this encourages the search for artists whose works have not yet reached dizzying prices: artists who are less popular but perhaps all the more interesting to an audience hungry for freshness. By identifying and supporting new phenomena, individual patronage helps to shape the taste of its age while preserving its distinctive components for future generations. Unconstrained by the codes and regulations that form a significant part of every institution, a collector can influence the smallest element of a collection and the way it is presented, classified and stored. Thus, while collecting pictures, collectors simultaneously create an image of their own. Their person becomes the key to the collection and may even be incorporated into it as an indispensable part of the whole.

Although collectors are not always guided by personal taste alone — they usually employ enlightened advisers — the pictures they assemble can reveal a “multiple portrait”. As in Witkacy’s photographic self-portrait of around 1916, made in St Petersburg and known by that title, where a system of two mirrors shows four different reflections of a figure seated with his back to us, so the paintings in a collection present entirely different profiles of the world while simultaneously composing an image of the collector and reflecting different dimensions of their personality.

In this way, a collection becomes an invitation into the personal emotional space of the person who selected these particular works from so many others. At times the private becomes public, when a collector entrusts a collection to an existing museum or opens one of their own. This happened with the Erich Marx Collection, which is ordinarily displayed at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. Examples of this process can be found throughout the world: there is the Cognacq-Jay Museum in Barcelona, the Jacquemart-André and Nissim de Camondo museums in Paris, the Musée Ariana in Geneva and the Frick Collection in New York. Visiting the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni in Venice, which Peggy Guggenheim filled with works by the most important Modernist and Surrealist artists, one can likewise sense the special atmosphere of rooms that breathe art. As we walk through this museum-home, documentary photographs show how naturally masterpieces may surround everyday activity.

Perhaps the most fascinating collections, although the most difficult to access, are those most closely intertwined with the lives of their owners: people unable to imagine life without daily contact with art. It is comforting to know that there are houses where paintings hang in stairwells and bedrooms and — like images of landscapes, abundant still lifes and all the things for which there was no room in the actual space of the Netherlands — open ordinary space onto something so difficult to describe in words.

Under such conditions, a completely different relationship with paintings arises from the one found in the antiseptic temples built especially for works of art — museums. Although there we can examine works attentively and in detail, as though under a microscope, it is paintings acquired by a person and lending value to ordinary space through their very presence that testify to the spell properly formed matter can cast. Perceived more sensually than when they serve as fragments of a movement or evidence of a tendency, they remind us of the beauty of a personal relationship with art, somewhat repressed in contemporary reflection. They rebuild our bond with images and make us wonder why, although painting’s death has been foretold ever since the invention of photography, it endures, offering something no other medium can provide.

Drawing attention to the phenomenon of collecting art through this exhibition is all the more valuable because, for historical reasons, the practice was not well developed in Poland. The few exceptions, including Princess Izabela Czartoryska’s great collection of the late eighteenth century, only confirmed the rule.

Collecting, after all, is more than a form of contact with art that consists in building an ideal world around oneself and withdrawing from reality into the tranquillity of a “collector’s cabinet”. It can become a platform for encounters and the exchange of ideas and — as Władysław Strzemiński and Katarzyna Kobro, creators of the a.r. collection established in the then working-class city of Łódź in the 1920s, intended — for the renewal of the social fabric.

Bibliography:

Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities, Lublin, 2001.

Andrzej Pieńkos, A Collection — What For?, www.signum.art.pl, accessed 23 August 2011.

Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Pons, Kraków, 2009.

Georges Perec, A Gallery Portrait, Warsaw, 2003; Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, Wrocław, 2005.

Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against the Grain, Kraków, 2003.

Piotr Bazylko and Krzysztof Masiewicz, A Six-Week Notebook for Collectors, Warsaw, 2008.

Peggy Guggenheim and Frederick Kiesler: The Story of Art of This Century, ed. Susan Davidson and Philip Rylands, New York, 2004.

Andrzej Płauszewski, a.r.: Myth Made Real, History and Collection, Łódź, 1989.

1. Andrzej Pieńkos, in A Collection — What For?, www.signum.art.pl.