There is a particularly irritating commentary to the film accompanying the sale of 'A Treasured Legacy: The Michael and Judy Steinhardt Judaica Collection',
New York
April 29, 2013. Much of the material on offer in this sale is from Europe, and now it is being held and sold by rich people in America to more to rich people in America:Theyre's nothing personal about taking the whole collection that Michael, particularly, has put together and having them put in a museeum. This waay [ie, flogging them off at Sotheby's], people, can really enjoy this collection and pass it on to the next generations, so that people can have these abjects in their homez and youse them, and I think that's a beautiful thing, to be able to expose them to the public.Instead of having them shut away in collector Steinhardt's home she means. If, however the collection is split up for financial reasons, it is not the collection which is passed on to the future generations. Neither is it clear which "public" this woman has in mind - probably not America's - or anyone else's - 99%. Where did these items come from? How did they enter the market? Through whose hands did the central European ones pass in the War years?
CultureGrrl (Lee Rosenbaum) writes that Steinhardt has recently flatly refused to donate some of 'his' objects to the Metropolitan Museum, reportedly adding "that he was “less than overjoyed” with how that institution has handled antiquities controversies".
The catalogue reveals that several objects in this collection are listed as coming from "Poland" with no mention of how and when. Did they go west with pre-occupation refugees, or did they 'surface' on the market from Nazi seizures of household goods (blood antiques) or from post-War Poland? There is not a word on the collecting histories of any of the items from "Poland" (and "Germany") which I looked at. Surely in precisely this sort of ('post-Holocaust') case, there jolly well should be.
Photo: the Steinhardts interviewed
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