Mary MacPherson Lane | |
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Born | October 1987 (age 37) Lynchburg, Virginia, U.S. |
Occupation(s) | Journalist, art historian |
Mary MacPherson Lane (born October 1987) is an American non-fiction writer and journalist specializing in Western European art and history.
Lane gained recognition as the chief European art reporter for The Wall Street Journal , [1] and for publishing numerous scoops on the art trove of Hildebrand Gurlitt. One of Adolf Hitler's main art dealers, Gurlitt bequeathed a collection of roughly 1,300 artworks, many looted from museums and Jewish European families, to his son Cornelius Gurlitt. [2] [3] Her book-length narrative on Nazi-looted art was published in 2019 by Hachette under the title Hitler's Last Hostages: Looted Art and the Soul of the Third Reich. [4]
Lane was born and grew up in Virginia. She graduated from Episcopal High School, outside of Washington, D.C. Lane spent her senior year of high school in Beijing, where she became proficient in Mandarin Chinese. [5] Lane worked as a Chinese-English interpreter in Beijing during the 2008 Summer Olympics.[ citation needed ]
In 2010, Lane graduated from Middlebury College with degrees in German and Chinese. She received a DAAD Journalism Scholarship in 2010 and one of five Fulbright Journalism Scholarships for 2010 through 2011, both based in Berlin. [6]
Lane began her professional journalism career writing for the Associated Press in 2009 from their Berlin bureau, covering the effects of the euro crisis on Berlin's legal sex workers. [7] [8]
She wrote in German for the Berliner Zeitung on a DAAD journalism scholarship in 2010. Lane began at The Wall Street Journal as a Fulbright scholar in early 2011 as part of their Berlin-based euro crisis team.[ citation needed ]
French designer and art collector Hubert de Givenchy worked with Lane on her first major coverage of European art and the art market. In a trio of interviews between Givenchy and Lane that the Journal published in 2012, they discussed his collection of artworks by sculptor François Girardon, [9] Givenchy's dressing of Rose Kennedy [10] for the funeral of her son, President John F. Kennedy, and the designer's friendship with Audrey Hepburn. [11]
In 2013, Lane became the Journal's chief European art reporter, responsible for the paper's coverage of auctions at Sotheby's and Christie's, including the rivalry between the two auction houses. [12] [13] [14] This coverage was heavily investment-focused, including analysis of the volatile prices of contemporary artists [15] and the increased presence of Chinese collectors in the European art market. [16]
Lane also led the Wall Street Journal's coverage of European galleries and art fairs including Art Basel [17] and Frieze, [18] gallery shows in London and Paris, and exhibitions at prominent European museums including the Louvre, the Tate, [19] the Rijksmuseum, [20] [21] and the Kunsthistorisches Museum. [22] [23]
Sotheby's auctioned a $47.9 million drawing by Raphael in December 2012, making the work the most expensive drawing ever auctioned. Lane published an investigation in June 2013 documenting that the anonymous buyer was billionaire financier Leon Black. [24]
Lane was the first international journalist granted an interview with Louvre director Jean-Luc Martinez in October 2013. [25]
In 2014, she became the first journalist in nearly a decade to conduct an interview with German artist Gerhard Richter. [26]
Between November 2013 and late 2015, Lane published a series of scoops on the front page and numerous articles inside of the Wall Street Journal about the art trove of Hildebrand Gurlitt, one of Hitler's primary art dealers. [27] [28] [29]
In February 2012, the German government in Bavaria had confiscated the works from Gurlitt's son, Cornelius Gurlitt, but had kept the find a secret, in violation of the Washington Principles, a set of international guidelines on looted art that Germany had signed in 1998. The collection of over 1,200 paintings, sculptures and works on paper included pieces by Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, George Grosz, and Henri Matisse. [30] Lane was the first to publish the news of how Cornelius Gurlitt decided to bequeath his art cache to the Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland and that the museum was prepared to accept the estate. [31]
Much of Lane's work tracked two oil paintings stolen by the Nazis from Jewish Europeans, Matisse's "Woman with a Fan" and "Two Riders on a Beach" by Max Liebermann, both present in the Gurlitt trove. After four years of holding the works, Germany returned them to the families of the original owners. [32]
Alt-right activist, white supremacist, and Holocaust denier Carolyn Yeager has targeted Lane's coverage of art collector and World Jewish Congress head Ronald Lauder and Lauder's calls for increased investigation of artworks looted from Jewish Europeans by the Nazis currently held in German museums. [33]
Lane researched the Gurlitt family and Hitler's art looting programs for her first non-fiction book, Hitler's Last Hostages: Looted Art and the Soul of the Third Reich. [34] [35]
Since leaving the Journal in December 2015, Lane has worked as a European art contributor for The New York Times , ARTnews, [36] and contributed to Mike Pesca's reporting at Slate . [37]
Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix was a German painter and printmaker, noted for his ruthless and harshly realistic depictions of German society during the Weimar Republic and the brutality of war. Along with George Grosz and Max Beckmann, he is widely considered one of the most important artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit.
Franz Moritz Wilhelm Marc was a German painter and printmaker, one of the key figures of German Expressionism. He was a founding member of Der Blaue Reiter, a journal whose name later became synonymous with the circle of artists collaborating in it.
Otto Müller was a German painter and printmaker of the Die Brücke expressionist movement.
Nazi plunder was organized stealing of art and other items which occurred as a result of the organized looting of European countries during the time of the Nazi Party in Germany.
Paul Rosenberg was a French art dealer. He represented Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Henri Matisse. Both Paul and his brother Léonce Rosenberg were among the world's major dealers of modern art.
Curt Valentin was a German-Jewish art dealer known for handling modern art, particularly sculpture, and works classified as "degenerate", seized from public museums or looted from private collectors by the Nazi regime in Germany.
The Museum of Fine Arts Bern, established in 1879 in Bern, is the museum of fine arts of the de facto capital of Switzerland.
Alfred Flechtheim was a German Jewish art dealer, art collector, journalist and publisher persecuted by the Nazis.
The Degenerate Art exhibition was an art exhibition organized by Adolf Ziegler and the Nazi Party in Munich from 19 July to 30 November 1937. The exhibition presented 650 works of art, confiscated from German museums, and was staged in counterpoint to the concurrent Great German Art Exhibition. The day before the exhibition started, Adolf Hitler delivered a speech declaring "merciless war" on cultural disintegration, attacking "chatterboxes, dilettantes and art swindlers". Degenerate art was defined as works that "insult German feeling, or destroy or confuse natural form or simply reveal an absence of adequate manual and artistic skill". One million people attended the exhibition in its first six weeks. A U.S. critic commented that "[t]here are probably plenty of people—art lovers—in Boston, who will side with Hitler in this particular purge". This view was controversial, however, given the greater political context of the exhibition.
Hildebrand Gurlitt was a German art historian and art gallery director who dealt in Nazi-looted art as one of Hitler's and Goering's four authorized dealers for "degenerate art".
The Gurlitt Collection was a collection of around 1,500 art works inherited by Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of one of Hitler's official art dealers, Hildebrand Gurlitt (1895–1956), and which was found to have contained several artworks looted from Jews by the Nazis.
Rolf Nikolaus Cornelius Gurlitt was a German art collection owner. The son of Hildebrand Gurlitt, an art gallery director and Nazi-era dealer of looted art, Gurlitt inherited from his father a collection of over 1,400 artworks known as the Gurlitt trove or Gurlitt Collection, a small number of which were subsequently demonstrated to have been looted from Jews by Nazis. Upon its public discovery, the collection was impounded by the Augsburg Prosecutor's Office as evidence in a possible case for tax evasion that was never mounted; the works were not returned to Gurlitt's estate until after his death. In his will, Gurlitt left the entire collection, minus any works that turned out to be looted, to a lesser known gallery in Switzerland, the Museum of Fine Arts Bern, apparently in reaction over his perceived poor treatment by the German authorities.
Two Riders on the Beach is the title of two similar paintings by the German artist Max Liebermann. Both were painted in 1901 while Liebermann was on vacation in Scheveningen on the North Sea. The paintings are considered masterpieces of German impressionism, heavily influenced by the style of French impressionist painters Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas.
Eberhard W. Kornfeld was a Swiss auctioneer, author, art dealer, and collector based in Bern.
Adolf Hitler's art collection was a large accumulation of paintings which he gained before and during the events of WWII. These paintings were often taken from existing art galleries in Germany and Europe as Nazi forces invaded. Hitler planned to create a large museum in Linz called the Führermuseum to showcase the greatest of the art that he acquired. While this museum was never built, that did not stop Hitler and many other Nazi officials from seizing artwork across Europe. The paintings that the Nazis acquired were often stored in salt mines and castles in Germany during World War II. Eventually, many of these works of art would be rescued by a group called the Monuments Men. While this task force of art dealers and museum specialists were able to retrieve many of the stolen works of art, there are still many paintings that have yet to be found. In 2013, Cornelius Gurlitt, a son of one of Hitler's art dealers, was found with an apartment full of paintings which his father had kept from both the Nazis and the Monuments Men. This discovery of paintings has brought to light once more many paintings that were considered lost.
Karl Buchholz was one of Hitler's Nazi art dealers specialized in selling looted "Degenerate Art".
Hermann Voss was a German art historian and museum director appointed by Hitler to acquire art, much of it looted by Nazis, for Hitler's planned Führermuseum in Linz, Austria.
Armand Dorville (1875–1941) was a French art collector and lawyer whose art collection was plundered during the Nazi occupation of France.
Margarete Eisenmann was a Jewish art collector and Holocaust victim.