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SPEAKER_12: In March of 1886, Vincent Van Gogh moved from Antwerp to Paris to live with his brother Theo in Montmartre. He very soon became befriended with some of the other artists living there who would become very famous within the next decades,
SPEAKER_10: like for example Paul Signac, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Emile Bernard, and some others. And he learned a lot from them. Stefan Koldohoff, German art expert.
SPEAKER_10: And that led to his willingness to make experiments in becoming an artist. When he painted in rather dark brownish grayish tones during his time before in the Netherlands, he now was willing to try out what to do with color, how to form things with color. In Van Gogh's effort to master oil painting, he painted still lifes, mostly flowers. He couldn't afford models.
SPEAKER_12: In a space of a few years, he produced dozens and dozens of paintings. The Paris period means that Van Gogh just had decided to become an artist.
SPEAKER_10: He no longer wanted to try other professions like he did before, like being a preacher or a teacher or helping people. He now made the decision, I want to be a painter, and he knew that Paris is the place to be.
SPEAKER_12: My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is a continuation of my investigation into the hoarding habits of art museums. It's about one of those dozens of still lifes Van Gogh painted in his Paris period. A small canvas, 17 inches by 14 inches, vase with carnations. That little painting, it turns out, has a strange and troubled history. The Art Collection Van Gogh painted vase with carnations right after his arrival in Paris. At some point after his death four years later, it was acquired by a wealthy German couple. Hedwig Ullmann and her husband, Albert Ullmann, were one of the most important art collector couples in Frankfurt, in Western Germany.
SPEAKER_10: They made their money out of business. They very early decided to invest money in works of art which were not commonly regarded as very important works. So they were very daring collectors. And that shows that it was not only investment, it was also the love of art which led them to buying works, for example by Van Gogh, but also by several Impressionist painters. Hedwig Ullmann sold vase with carnations on consignment to an art dealer who took it back to New York just before the Second World War.
SPEAKER_12: That dealer, in turn, sold it to William Goetz, one of the most powerful producers in Hollywood. Goetz and his wife Edith, daughter of the legendary Louis B. Mayer, had one of the greatest private collections of Impressionist art in the world. My grandmother was called the hostess of Hollywood and she spent her entire life hosting lavish dinner parties. People the likes of Laurence Olivier and Trimica Potti and Eul Brinner.
SPEAKER_03: That's Goetz's granddaughter, Victoria Bleeden.
SPEAKER_03: I had dinner with Laurence Olivier when I was six years old. I'd be sitting amongst the fans from Latour and the Degas and the Manet and this is our childhood. Finger bowls and the whole nine yards. And then they would have movies in the living room. And in the living room, I don't know if you've seen any pictures of it, but this is where the Monet, the blue Picasso, the other Picasso which had the Harlequin it was called. And all these paintings were on the wall and all of a sudden we sit in the living room and all couches and everything and a painting would come up and the screen would come down. And then we'd watch movies. And that's our childhood. The priceless art would disappear into the ceiling and a movie screen would descend in its place.
SPEAKER_12: If that isn't the greatest metaphor for Hollywood, I don't know what is. In 1956, Kirk Douglas starred in a movie about Van Gogh called Lust for Life.
SPEAKER_00: Few people know the real story of this intense, strong-willed man. Now his tumultuous career is revealed for the first time with frankness and intimacy. If you look at the corner of the movie poster for Lust for Life, there it is. Vows with Carnations.
SPEAKER_12: But by then, Getzert sold it. He didn't hang on to his Van Gogh the way he did his other treasures. It wasn't for him. The painting passed to the heiress to the Kmart fortune, Katherine Kresge, who among other things was once married to a Swedish baron. She convinced him to leave London and come live with her in her native Detroit. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Swedish baron's order for Miss Kresge did not survive the move to Michigan. When Kresge died in 1990, she willed Vows with Carnations to the Detroit Institute of Art. She gave it without restriction, meaning the DIA, as it's known, could do with it what they wanted. Sell it. Trade it. They didn't have to make it part of their permanent collection. Kresge clearly didn't care anymore for the painting than Getz did. And neither did the DIA. They put it in her basement for 20 years. Vincent Van Gogh painted many remarkable canvases. This is not one of them. He also painted larger flower still lifes in Paris, but this is a smaller one.
SPEAKER_10: That's a kind of canvas which I think was not meant for sale or as a present for acquaintances or girlfriends or his models or so. It was just for trying out things. Art experts like to dam with faint praise. Vows with Carnations gets a lot of faint praise.
SPEAKER_12: It's very nice, it's very profound, but it's not a very well spectacular composition or color combination.
SPEAKER_10: It's just a kind of let me try out what happens if I do this, if I do this. So it's a nice but not really important work. The current head of the Detroit Institute of Art, Salvador Celler-Pons, says the problem is that Vows with Carnations just doesn't look like a Van Gogh.
SPEAKER_12: When you say it doesn't look like a Van Gogh, what do you mean? Does it look like the sunflowers?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. I mean it's not a typical work like you would like the self-portrait or the works that he did when he was in the South of France. Those are the most famous works that the general public knows Van Gogh did. Then there's the fact that the painting had a stamp on the back, a sign that it was painted on a fancy bit of stretch canvas.
SPEAKER_12: Van Gogh, in his Paris years, was broke. What was he doing with a fancy canvas? It took years to resolve that particular discrepancy. And in the meantime, lots of people began to think Vows with Carnations was a fake. Later, we discovered that that canvas with the stamp on the back was not actually part of the work. It was added later.
SPEAKER_02: So you had the original canvas, then you have a lining canvas glued to the original canvas, and then you had this third canvas with a stencil or a stamp on the back. So once we removed that, we understood that was not part of the original work.
SPEAKER_12: So here we have a Van Gogh that does not look like a Van Gogh. That was never intended to be sold or shown or even given away. That a German couple bought somewhere around the turn of the century and then sold. That turned up in the home of a Hollywood mogul and served as a prop in a Kirk Douglas movie poster. Then finally landed in Detroit with a Kmart heiress, who threw it in as an afterthought when she made her bequest to the DIA. Whereupon, the painting languished in a cellar for a quarter century because of a dubious bit of canvas glued to the back. What's your personal feeling about this painting? Do you like it? Are you drawn to it?
SPEAKER_02: I like it because I have a personal story connected to it. You know, when I came to the museum, the painting was in storage as an attributed painting by Van Gogh with basically no value. I was able to bring it up to the galleries and put it together with the other four Van Goghs that the DIA has. A work that looks like a painting by a Sunday painter, as considered by a forger, would have no value, no monetary value. But the minute we consider it as Van Gogh, it has a value of several million dollars. However, the painting has not changed. The painting continues to be what it is. What has changed is the perception that we have on the painting. And that is a really interesting concept to think about. So I like the painting a lot for that.
SPEAKER_12: But if someone said to you when you retire as director, you can take one of the DIA's Van Goghs with you, which one would you take? Not this one. No. So why should we care about Vase with carnations? We shouldn't. It's not the painting that matters. The painting is just a MacGuffin. In case you don't know what I mean by MacGuffin, let's consult the Dick Cavett Show, 1972. Cavett's guest is the legendary film director Alfred Hitchcock, the great proponent of MacGuffins.
SPEAKER_01: Can you explain what a MacGuffin is? Yes, a MacGuffin you see in most films about spies. It is a thing that the spies are after. In the days of Roger Kipling, it would be the plans of the fort on the Khyber Pass. It would be the plans of an airplane engine and the plans of an atom bomb, anything you like. It's always called the thing that the characters on the screen worry about, but the audience don't care.
SPEAKER_12: The MacGuffin is an object used to propel the plot, to motivate the characters, but which has no intrinsic value to anyone else. Vase with carnations is a MacGuffin. It's described in a scene in an English train going to Scotland and one man says to the other opposite him,
SPEAKER_01: he said, what's that package above your head there? The other man said, oh that's a MacGuffin. He said, well what is a MacGuffin? He said, well it's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands. The man said, but there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands. He said, then that's no MacGuffin.
SPEAKER_12: Thank you for clearing that out for us. I repeat, it's not the painting that matters. That has always been the mistake with the way people have thought about Vase with carnations. No more MacGuffins. After the break, let's start this story again. The MacGuffin Show Let's just talk about your family. Your great grandmother is Hedwig Ullmann.
SPEAKER_15: Yes, that's correct. Yes. She came from a family who had for a very long time lived in Frankfurt. Many relatives, a very embedded history in the city. I'm talking with Sophie Ullmann. She lives in Melbourne. Her great grandmother was Hedwig Ullmann, the first known owner of Vase with carnations.
SPEAKER_12: Hedwig was born in 1872 into a wealthy family in Germany, married Albert Ullmann, lived with him in a grand residence called the Villa Gerlach in Frankfurt, and together built an extraordinary art collection.
SPEAKER_15: So she collected with a great passion medieval sculpture. That was a huge passion of hers. She collected porcelain, she collected silver, and I believe she had different rooms for each of these passions in her home.
SPEAKER_12: Hedwig and Albert had two sons and many grandchildren, one of whom was named Claude, Sophie's father. Did he remember Hedwig? He was so attached to Hedwig. He was, I think, the favourite and she was his favourite. He always spoke of her really fondly and I think he felt that was probably the person he loved the most.
SPEAKER_12: Did he talk about what she was like? Yes, a little bit. From what he could remember as a young boy, very warm and loving and quite gentle.
SPEAKER_15: Incredibly interested in the arts. But the life of Claude's grandparents took a sudden turn because the Ullmann's were Jewish.
SPEAKER_15: Frankfurt was already starting to change by 1933 and I'm not sure exactly what date but I know that going to the opera became an issue. If you had a Jewish heritage, there was a stage where you couldn't go to the opera and that was something that Hedwig did constantly. She lived around the corner from the opera house. Her lifestyle started to change and so did my grandparents. So they left first and Hedwig didn't come to Milan until right, maybe within six months, the last six months that they were there.
SPEAKER_12: She's going to Milan in what year, in 1938 or 1939? What year, do you know? I think it was right at the end of 1938.
SPEAKER_15: The end of 1938 was of course Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, when at Hitler's direction, mobs destroyed hundreds of synagogues and yeshivas across Germany.
SPEAKER_12: It was impossible to be a German Jew after Kristallnacht and imagine that you were safe. Hedwig sold off as much of her art collection as she could. She fled to Milan to join her sons. Then the intentions of Mussolini towards Jews became clear and the whole family fled again. This time to Australia. So they got out in the nick of time? Yes, they did. And they go via the Panama Canal. I remember my father, I don't know how on earth he could have remembered that because he was under two years of age.
SPEAKER_15: But I think it was about a six week trip and the two brothers with their families, they both had two children each and Hedwig as the matriarch, they brought her all out. So there were nine of them. They made it to Melbourne, changed their last names, Ulman became Olen and in May of 1945, four days before the end of the war, Hedwig died.
SPEAKER_15: My father and my uncle probably spent most of their lives just assimilating and embracing the life they had and I think bearing the sadness as much as they could. Because there's definitely a sadness. There's gratitude and there's sadness. They go along together in our life. And it's come through to my generation too, in a way.
SPEAKER_12: Then, late in his life, Claude Ulen decided to revisit the family's past. To find the family's art collection that had been lost in the desperate escape from Germany. What do you think motivated him? How would he have expressed his desire to pursue these claims?
SPEAKER_15: Without sounding dramatic, it's just I know that my father all throughout his life, to some degree, maybe within his psyche, he struggled with the fact that the family had had to leave Europe. It was like a baseline in his life that there had been this massive disruption and it just carried this sense of loss. It would have started with the loss of Hedwig. That would be the first loss he could understand because it was a loved grandmother, the one who doted on him from the stories. I thought he was the bee's knees and he was closer to Hedwig than he was to his own mother.
SPEAKER_12: So Claude Ulen sat down and went through his grandmother's papers, trying to reconstruct what artworks she and her family had owned in the years before the war and where they had ended up. Some of the works had vanished. Others were in plain sight. You can find a few for yourself if you spend a few hours poking around the internet. There's a Paul Gauguin sold by Hedwig's sister-in-law in 1938 as she too fled Frankfurt. That painting ended up at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio. The family had sold the Gauguin along with a lovely Van Gogh called the Diggers. The Diggers ended up in the hands of a department store heir who then gave it to the Detroit Institute of Art in the late 1960s. There's a Virgin and Child by Lucas Cranach the Elder from the 16th century, now in the University of Arizona Museum of Art. Then there were the four beautiful wall panels in Hedwig's dining room by the prominent German landscape painter Hans Thoma. Spring, summer, winter, fall. Claude Ulen couldn't find out where any of those had gone. And finally, there was the small, modest still life acquired by Hedwig and her husband back in the heyday of their collecting. Voswith Carnations, Vincent Van Gogh, 1886.
SPEAKER_15: I wasn't alive during Hedwig's lifetime. I wasn't even born. I wasn't born for another quarter of a century or even more. But she was very much a part of our lives. She was talked about constantly and very fondly. And her life was all around us in some way. As Claude Ulen began his investigation into Hedwig's lost art collections, other Holocaust survivors and their families started to do the same thing.
SPEAKER_12: There were conferences. Laws passed. Europe in particular had a growing movement to reconsider the status of art sold, lost or confiscated during the war. And it seemed that the world was changing and restitution might be possible.
SPEAKER_15: My father was very excited and hopeful, deeply hopeful about it. Whilst I had a very different reaction, I was a young adult at the time, I was almost sort of like, I don't, I, let's, don't get your hopes up. Don't go there. It's, it's, it's just going to bring up, I think it was because I thought it was going to bring up all these feelings that I knew were down there, but I didn't know what they were. And it's, it's very, it's actually, for someone who's third generation, it's still very confronting and that's actually surprises me and still, it continues to surprise me. I never met Hedwig, so why do I feel like this? But I do, it is very much a part of me. And it's almost inexplicable. It's, I'm sort of trying to interrogate it a little bit more now because I have to face some of these things, some of these situations with the paintings and what to do with the legacy. I think it's a really interesting and important point because in other words, when your father pursued some of these claims, it's not just about the art, it's about healing.
SPEAKER_12: Oh yeah, absolutely. It's not necessarily about material possessions. The material possessions are kind of like the marker or it's, it's, it's all, everything orients itself around, but it's not actually what this is really all about. The art is a symbol.
SPEAKER_17: Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_15: Yeah.
SPEAKER_12: I think it's important to understand what Claude Ulland was up against in his attempt to locate his grandmother's lost art collection. So allow me a digression about a man named Charles Venable. Some years ago, Venable was named director of the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. It was his first director's job, and he decided to begin by taking a close look at the museum's collection. And it started with our works on paper collection, where we were just going to get an, you know, get some expertise in and we were to look at every single work on paper.
SPEAKER_12: To help him, Venable brought in a former curator from the Cleveland Museum of Art, which has one of the country's best collections of works on paper.
SPEAKER_16: By the time we went through everything, she said, you have about 50 exceptional pieces. Out of how many? It wasn't a huge collection, but we probably had a couple thousand pieces. And then she said, and here's another group that are nice. But in the end, it was like, you should just get rid of all of these. Keep the 50 good ones, the A pluses, the rest Venable sold at auction.
SPEAKER_12: If I'd asked you before that process began in Louisville, what percentage were A plus, what would you have said? Books on paper, not my curatorial area, but nevertheless, I would have said, you know, you would have to have half of them, I suppose, be exceptional works of art, or why would you have taken them?
SPEAKER_12: Venable next became the director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, or as it is now known, Newfields. When he arrived, the museum had 55,000 objects. It was adding close to a thousand new objects a year and was on the verge of building a multimillion dollar storage facility to house its ever expanding collection. And Venable's main thought was, what if Indianapolis was like Louisville? And much of the stuff they were storing at such great expense wasn't worth keeping. So he and his curators at Newfields began combing through every one of the objects in the museum's collection. They assigned each artwork a grade. A was for something that any museum in the world would want. B's were things that made sense for Indianapolis to have in its collection. C's were eh. D's didn't belong at all. The good stuff and the bad stuff were easy to identify, but it took years to figure out the B's and C's. The curators did tons of research, debated, and kept going, piece by piece.
SPEAKER_16: Our collection is now about 44,000 works of art. Down from? 55,000. But Venable's still not finished. Right now our collection, based on six years of ranking, is about 33 percent A's.
SPEAKER_16: So right there, those are going nowhere. So there's, you know, thousands of works of art. And then clearly we would want a good number of B's of works that we couldn't replace or they're considered totally worthy to be in the gallery for one reason or not. But if you take just the C's and the rest of our D's, you know, there's probably, I'm guessing we'll be at 25, 30,000 works of art.
SPEAKER_12: They have thousands more to go, to be auctioned off or given away.
SPEAKER_16: We had huge, big holdings in contemporary glass, but we don't need 400 pieces in storage. So we gave 100 pieces of contemporary glass to the Glick Center for Glass at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, so students could learn technique from them.
SPEAKER_12: Now, if you listened to the previous episode, you know that no one does this in the museum world. No one tries to get smaller. No one gives things away like that. Certainly not on the scale that Venable is doing in Indiana. Because most art museums are like Smog the Dragon, they're hoarders, deep in their layers, fiercely guarding their treasures. Here's an actual headline from Art News, one of the major publications of the art world. Quote, Is Charles Venable democratizing a great art museum in Indianapolis or destroying it? Are you a kind of Marie, are you the Marie Kondo? Is your apartment like minimalist? Do you get rid of old clothes when you no longer wear them? I mean, does this carry over to your private life? Oh, not particularly. I mean, my husband is much more the neat-nick who would say, I'm going to go through my closet and get rid of all these things.
SPEAKER_16: Whereas I'm saying, I just love that shirt. And it might hang in my closet for, you know, years, years. It could be 10 years old, shoes even worse. But that's not running an art museum. Charles Venable is different, not because he's some kind of weird neat-nick. He's different because he sees the problem his profession has and he's figured out a way to do something about it.
SPEAKER_12: I asked Randy Frost about what it takes to convince a hoarder to thin their collection. He's the psychologist we met in the last episode who studies hoarding. He told me that with hoarders, the first step is talking about the object. So you're saying in this case, the act of forcing someone to conceive and verbalize their attachment to the object helps them get rid of it? Yes. Yes. It shatters the bond in some way?
SPEAKER_13: Well, I think it puts their attachments into the context of the values of their life because we focus a lot on values. What is it that you value in your life? What do you want your life to be like? And once you start talking about this and have this set of ideas about the value and where you want to go in your life together, it changes the valence of the object.
SPEAKER_12: This is what Charles Venable and his curators were doing in Indianapolis as they worked their way through the collection, changing the valence of the objects. They were asking, what is it that we value as a museum? Is this object consistent with those values? Acquiring art costs money. The museum is a nonprofit with a mandate to serve the people of Indiana. Venable doesn't see how collecting more and more stuff that the public will never see, not to mention spending millions of dollars to warehouse it somewhere, is consistent with that responsibility. You know, you need more conservators, you need more art handlers, you need more registrars, you need bigger computer systems.
SPEAKER_12: If you asked Charles Venable to give up a work of art for some broader, larger reason, he could do it because he's developed a system for giving things up. So I asked him, theoretically, about how he and his curators might evaluate vase with carnations if it were in their collection. So there's about as famous an artist as you could find, but it's very much a minor work of that artist. Is that an A or not an A? I mean, not knowing that particular painting. So I'm just thinking as an abstract question. Famous artist, minor work, we wouldn't call that an A.
SPEAKER_16: Yeah, we would get we would give it a little bump because it's by Van Gogh, a very famous artist, but it wouldn't make it an A just because it had his name on it. It would have it would be a minor work by that artist. And then the questions we would ask is, are we doing a great artist by Van Gogh, who in many ways changed the course of Western art history? Are we doing his legacy and his work a good deed by showing a pretty minor mediocre work in a great institution? And particularly an institution that has much better works by Van Gogh, you know, where you can show an A plus at a place like Detroit. Why would you bother with a minor thing? If we were offered a painting like that, we would if somebody wanted, we wouldn't buy it for sure. And if somebody wanted to give it to us, we would say, well, this is not something that's right to go on our walls. If you want to give it to us, are you willing to let us sell it and then bring bring the money back to the collection and buy something that your name can go on? Charles Venable is adept at changing the valence of the objects in his possession. He can give things up, but he's the exception. The rest of the art world is still in the grip of their compulsion.
SPEAKER_12: So back to Claude Ulland, who as a child fled Europe with his family. About 15 years ago, Ulland started asking the museums holding Hedwig's art to do a version of what Charles Venable does at Indianapolis, or what Randy Frost tries to teach hoarders. To break their attachment to a specific object by asking a broader question about its relationship to their own values. In essence, Ulland told the museums, my grandmother and her family sold some of their prized possessions in a moment of desperation and panic to help finance their escape from certain death. Are you sure you feel right about owning an object with that kind of history? Ulland started with the Gauguin, Street in Tahiti, and the Van Gogh, the Diggers, that were once owned by Hedwig's brother and sister-in-law. Ulland and a group of his relatives approached the Toledo Museum and the Detroit Institute of Art with their requests. The family was forced to give these paintings up under duress in 1938. Could they get them back? And what happened? The two museums turned around and sued the Ullands. That was in order to, and this is one of those wonderful legal euphemisms, quiet the title to the painting. And when the case went to court, the museums won on the narrow grounds that the statute of limitations had expired. According to the federal court in Detroit, the Ullands' case would have been valid only if they had filed a claim for the Diggers within three years of when the painting was first sold. It was sold in 1938, so they needed to have asked for it back by 1941, when those members of the Ulland family who had not managed to flee for their lives were sitting in concentration camps. Ulland had asked the museums to consider the morality of their attachments. They responded by pointing to the legality of their attachments. They don't want to make this about values. No hoarder would. Consider the story of another Van Gogh, a spectacular painting called The Night Café. It was once owned by a Russian collector. The Bolsheviks seized it when they took power in 1918. It's worth hundreds of millions today. Later it was sold by the Soviets to the heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune. The Soviets collected a huge profit, the heir later willed it to the Yale University Art Museum. Then the original owner's descendant came to Yale and said, that painting was stolen from my great-grandfather. Did Yale give it back? Of course not. They sued the great-grandson and won. There's a Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum in New York called The Actor, worth well over $100 million. It had been owned by Paul and Alice Lefman, a Jewish couple in Cologne, Germany who fled for Italy in 1937. Sound familiar? They sold the painting to pay for their escape. Their great-grandniece sued the Met to get it back, saying that it was given up under duress. The court ruled in favor of the Met. The judge in the case said that the Lefmans weren't technically under duress. Because duress, for the purposes of the law, requires quote, Fear induced by a specific and concrete threat of harm, purposefully presented by its author to extort the victim's consent. In other words, in order for the Lefmans to get their Picasso back, an official in the Nazi party would have had to come to them in 1937, put a gun directly to their head and say, sell me your Picasso. And because the fascists chose to be a touch more subtle in their methods of extortion, that painting still hangs today on the walls of the Met. And vase with carnations? There's a legal loophole in that case as well. Hedwig gave it to an art dealer in 1938, but that was to sell on consignment. And the art dealer took it to New York and didn't get around to selling it until after the war was over. Hedwig may have given it up under duress of the Nazi threat, but it wasn't sold under the duress of the Nazi threat. Claude Ulland had no legal claim to vase with carnations, just a moral claim. And moral claims matched up against the compulsions of the hoarder don't amount to much. In the end, it was not a museum that returned any piece of Hedwig's original art collection. It was a packaged goods company, one that sells flour, biscuits and beer. The Utkagruppe, based three hours north of Frankfurt, the Kraft Foods of Germany. The company's former CEO, Rudolf August Utker, had an extensive art collection. The company did a provenance check of his paintings, and they discovered that in 1954, Rudolf had bought one of the four Hans Toma wall paintings that had once hung in Hedwig's living room. A large canvas of children dancing around a blooming tree. One day out of the blue, your father hears that one of his beloved grandmother's paintings is coming back. Yeah, it sort of really hit him to the core.
SPEAKER_12: The heirs did not know the whereabouts of the painting. I'm reading now from the short statement released by the Utkagruppe after they contacted the Ullands. The company advised them that the painting was in its possession and that it wished to return it to them on moral grounds. The heirs have gratefully accepted. Do you remember, can you describe what happened when he first...
SPEAKER_15: Dad would have cried. He was quite emotional about this aspect.
SPEAKER_15: We had several conversations over it and he would cry nearly every single time.
SPEAKER_17: Yeah, yeah. Is it a beautiful painting?
SPEAKER_15: Yes, yeah it is. It's a beautiful painting but it also starts to complete the circle within our family, the stories we would tell because Hedwig had a room where there were the Hans Toma works. It was a dining room and they were painted around the room. Hans Toma, I think, was one of the artists she loved the most. So to have a work returned was like almost a completing of the circle and yeah, it was deeply meaningful, especially to my father.
SPEAKER_12: Claude Ulland died shortly after his grandmother's painting was returned. As for Vaas with carnations, it's still in Detroit. The Ullands are not pursuing their claims to that painting. They know they'd never win. And where is the painting currently? Is it now on display or is it still in storage? Where is it now in the museum?
SPEAKER_02: It's on display. It's been on display and it was recently featured in an exhibition in the Barberini Gallery in Postam next to Berlin about Van Gogh's still lifes.
SPEAKER_12: The Detroit Institute of Art is in midtown Detroit, across Woodward Avenue from the main branch of the Public Library, a beautiful building with an extraordinary collection. If you get a chance, go and see Vaas with carnations. And if you like it, stop by the gift shop and pick up a pair of Vaas with carnations socks for $19.95, one size fits all, and Vaas with carnations aloe soap for $16.95 in a little round tin with Van Gogh's carnations on the cover. But don't spend too much time thinking about the painting. The painting is a MacGuffin. Think about where it came from and what it stands for. And then do me a favor. When you leave, put a note in the suggestion box. I have seen Vaas with carnations. It doesn't belong here. The Division's history is produced by Mia Lobel and Lee Mingistu, with Jacob Smith, Aloise Linton, and Ana Naim. Our editor is Julia Barton. Original scoring by Luis Guerra, mastering by Flawn Williams, fact checking by Beth Johnson, and special thanks to the Pushkin crew, Heather Fain, Carly Migliore, Maya Koenig, Maggie Taylor, Jason Gambrell, and of course El Jefe, Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Malcolm Gladwell here. Let's re-examine employee benefits. With the Hartford Insurance Group Benefits Insurance, you'll get it right the first time. Keep your business competitive by looking out for your employees' needs with quality benefits from the Hartford. The Hartford Group Benefits team makes managing benefits and absences a breeze while providing your employees with a streamlined, world-class customer experience that treats them like people, not policies. Keep your workforce moving forward with group benefits from the Hartford. The Bucks got your back. Learn more at theheartford.com slash benefits.
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SPEAKER_12: Original art collection. It was a packaged goods company, one that sells flour, biscuits, and beer. The Utker Group, based three hours north of Frankfurt, the Kraft Foods of Germany. The company's former CEO, Rudolf August Utker, had an extensive art collection. The company did a provenance check of his paintings, and they discovered that in 1954, Rudolf had bought one of the four Hans Toma wall paintings that had once hung in Hedwig's living room. A large canvas of children dancing around a blooming tree. One day out of the blue, your father hears that one of his beloved grandmother's paintings is coming back.
SPEAKER_15: Yeah. It sort of really hit him to the core. The heirs did not know the whereabouts of the painting.
SPEAKER_12: I'm reading now from the short statement released by the Utker Group after they contacted the Ahlins. The company advised them that the painting was in its possession and that it wished to return it to them on moral grounds. The heirs have gratefully accepted. Do you remember? Can you describe what happened when he first...?
SPEAKER_15: Dad would have cried. Yeah. He was quite emotional about this aspect. We had several conversations over it, and he would cry nearly every single time.
SPEAKER_17: Yeah. Is it a beautiful painting?
SPEAKER_15: Yes. Yeah, it is. It's a beautiful painting, but it also starts to complete the circle within our family, the stories we would tell. Because Hedvig had a room where there were the Hans Tomer works. It was a dining room, and they were painted around the room. Hans Tomer, I think, was one of the artists she loved the most. So to have a work returned, it was almost a completing of the circle. Yeah, it was deeply meaningful, especially to my father. Claude Ahlin died shortly after his grandmother's painting was returned.
SPEAKER_12: As for Vause with Carnations, it's still in Detroit. The Ahlins are not pursuing their claims to that painting. They know they'd never win. And where is the painting currently? Is it now on display, or is it still in storage? Where is it now in the museum? It's on display. It's been on display. And it was recently featured in an exhibition in the Barberini Gallery in Postam next to Berlin about Van Gogh's still lifes.
SPEAKER_12: The Detroit Institute of Art is in midtown Detroit, across Woodward Avenue from the main branch of the Public Library. A beautiful building with an extraordinary collection. If you get a chance, go and see Vause with Carnations. And if you like it, stop by the gift shop and pick up a pair of Vause with Carnations socks for $19.95, one size fits all. And Vause with Carnations aloe soap for $16.95 in a little round tin with Van Gogh's carnations on the cover. But don't spend too much time thinking about the painting. The painting is a MacGuffin. Think about where it came from and what it stands for. And then do me a favor. When you leave, put a note in the suggestion box. I have seen Vause with Carnations. It doesn't belong here. Revisionist History is produced by Mia Lobel and Lee Mingistu, with Jacob Smith, Aloise Linton, and Ana Naim. Our editor is Julia Barton. Original scoring by Luis Guerra. Mastering by Flawn Williams. Fact checking by Beth Johnson. And special thanks to the Pushkin crew. Heather Fain, Carly Migliore, Maya Koenig, Maggie Taylor, Jason Gambrell, and of course El Jefe. Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Glabo.
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