A Matisse Looking for Owners

For Roni
This beautiful Matisse painting will soon be for sale. It has the most extraordinary and bizarre story going back to WWII, so here are a few words on the subject.

But let me start with my own recollection of nazi looting. People my age know that the Germans during WWII looted a lot of museums and private collections. Little as I was, I remember that the bells of all the churches from my native Belgium were taken to be melted and used for weaponry. When I was a child, people were too poor to have a watch: they usually got one for their retirement, and when people worked in the field, it was the sound of the bell that gave them the time. The loss of the bells was resented by all, but mostly by small children, because we believed that the bells travel to Rome and come back at Easter with eggs and gifts.
Some of our bells of course never came back from Germany. Belgium lost forever 3,358 bells to be precise. But some were found in Hamburg and came back for Easter 1947. These are the bells I remember. The whole country celebrated the return of our bells, and it did not matter what religion you had.
Belgium is a country of belfries. The city of Mechelen has a belfry dating back to the 13th century which is part of the UNESCO World Heritage. The city hosts an international school of carilloneurs.

During WWII, the Nazis stole art from all of occupied Europe and from their own Jewish countrymen in Germany. The saving of some paintings by the French resistance is illustrated by a still superb movie with Burt Lancaster: The Train
So, when a German citizen named Harry Fuld Jr. flew Germany in 1937, his belongings were confiscated by the Germans. He had a Matisse representing the hospital of Ajaccio in Corsica named the pink wall. The painting was discovered by the French in 1948 in Germany, hidden by the man responsible for delivering the poison to the gas chambers of Auschwitz death camp. Nobody knew who the real owner of the painting was, so it ended up in a museum in Paris.

Years passed, Harry Fuld died. But there were, all over the world people interested in the history of the looting, and families wanting their paintings back. Where do you find what belongs to you and how do you prove it belongs to you? It is almost impossible to win. But little by little the various French governments, with varying amounts of enthusiasm and perseverance, found the owners of about 60,000 works of art; 2,000 remained without an owner, about 10 percent belonging to Jewish families which have not been found. The rest is thought to have been taken in France and sold on the German black market. A catalogue of these lost paintings was published and an exhibit of about 50 paintings was shown in Israel and then in Paris from June to October 2008.
The Paris exhibit was at the Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme. The name of the exhibit was appropriate: Looking for owners. It is not small stuff: there is Ingres, Degas, Monet, Delacroix, Vlaminck. One painting by the Flemish painter Pieter de Hooch (The Drinker) did belong to Edouard de Rothshild. It had been stolen and it was found back in the collection of Goring. Later, it was given back to Edouard's daughter and she offered it to the Louvre.

The owner of the lost Matisse was found after many years of research by German art historian Marina Blumberg. It so happens that the actual owner, through a series of wills, is a British charity involved with emergency medical needs in Israel. So, they intend to sell the painting and fund more work with the proceeds. The French Minister of cultural affairs, Christine Albanel, gave back the painting to the rightful owners on Nov 27th and said that this would bear testimony to a major work of remembrance and justice.

Bad plumbing at the space station

This image from Wikipedia illustrates a typical squat toilet, that Americans call a "French" toilet with good reason because it is common in France, but the French call it "Turkish."


I read the announcement that the "Space station's new urine recycler has glitches" with glee.
I am not surprised. In close to three quarters of a century, I have never seen decent plumbing anywhere. I am left to admire what the Romans did over 2000 years ago. It is frustrating that we made such progress in quantum physics, in the understanding of the universe, with the new world communication, and I still cant find a competent plumber.

Well, it is not quite true. Years ago, I was waiting for a colleague at Orly airport and the plane was late, so I got to talk with a guy who was waiting for the same plane. I expected a chemist, he expected a plumber.
-"We just finished a new bathroom for a sheik", the man said. I was horrified:
- "Are you telling me that we export French plumbing?" I asked somewhat bluntly.
-"We are the best in the world, the man said, nobody equals us in solid gold plumbing."

Some CEOs have a big fall too

General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner is still hanging in there, but there is some cleaning going on. Image from USAtoday.com

From Bloomberg.com: Removing CEOs
``There's the feeling that next to financial services, automotive execs are the dumbest people in the world,'' said Thomas Stallkamp, a former Chrysler president who worked at the car company when it received emergency government loans in 1980. ``There are probably some symbolic moves that somebody's going to ask for.''

From the Times on line today:
"George Davies is stepping down as chairman of Per Una, the phenomenally successful fashion brand he created for Marks & Spencer (M&S)."
"Carrefour, the world's second biggest retailer, sacked José Luis Duran as chief executive today after shareholders grew impatient with the slow pace of reform at the struggling French group."

From CNN
co-founder of Yahoo Jerry Yang will step down from the CEO slot.

From Networkworld.com
Symantec on Monday announced that chairman and CEO John Thompson is retiring

Economists should work as chemists do

The notebook of Marie Curie, tragically, is smeared with radioactive fingerprints: people of her generation did not know how dangerous radiations could be. This image is from aip.org


If like me you keep a look on C-SPAN, you got to admit (surprise, surprise) that some people in Washington are smarter than you and me. So what is it that does not work? It is not corruption, we always have too much corruption, but not enough to justify our stagnation.
Some people get so exasperated by our muddy economics, that they would gladly let go of the federal reserve altogether (check for instance the interesting site of co-stumbler LesLafave here). But I am not sure that any ideology is the guilty part: past experiences show that zero intervention does not work and too much intervention does not work either.
I think that sometimes, smart people get lost in the details instead of keeping the aim in mind. They should do like the old chemists did.
Many years ago, a chemistry Prof of New Zealand, Keith Hunter,check him here told me that a chemist notebook should always start with writing down what is the aim of the experiment. In a chemistry notebook, you write down everything, because trivial things like using glass or plastic could explain why you have contamination or why you cannot reproduce earlier results. Why do you write down the aim? Because you can get lost in so many sub-experiments, such as checking the use of plastic vs the use of glass that your original intention can very well get lost in the details.
Dear economists, please work as chemists do. After consulting, getting counter-proposals, after the interventions of various ideologues, politicians and lobbyists, after incorporating all the details you had forgotten in the first place, please check again your final thoughts against what you first wanted to accomplish. Are you off course? Does your solution answer the question?

How my freedom withered

Do you remember all these governmental reassurances about the high professionalism of the terrorist surveillance program? It did not bother me: as my neighbor said: "If they want to listen to my conversations with my aunt Amy, they are welcome to it!" Most of us have a boring life. The problem is that there is no such a thing as high professionalism, so of course we now hear stories of American soldiers abroad being listened to and laughed at when they have intimate conversations with their spouse. I do believe that the temptation to listen to political adversaries is also very great, and if we do, it is the end of democracy.

The police, or maybe your offended spouse, can easily add a GPS to your car (without a warrant) or, would you believe it, in the soles of your shoes. Then of course with credit cards and internet information, almost anybody will know more about you than you know yourself, because one can apply mathematical models to what you do. Why we still refuse to have an identity card does not make that much sense any more: we just refuse to face the truth.

But the worst enemy of freedom is not the government, it is science. Most of what we call adventure is now a fake: the world has been discovered, and if you do not prepare adequately for a trip, you are just a fool. I know in the morning how to dress because I look at the weather channel. I know it is bad to smoke, to drink in excess and to have unprotected sex (who knew much about these three things fifty years ago?) I am overwhelmed by dieting advice and I am instructed to measure my waist and make penance if I want to live longer. I am told how many steps I should walk everyday; science has counted them. Recently, the environmentalists got on my back too, and every detail of my house is reconfigured.

It is all for the better good, but freedom?
Freedom has one foot in the grave and it is the price we pay.

Fame, Glory and other laurels

Yesterday, the press was still full of adrenaline, but there was not much to say in Washington, so my RSS feed came up with fascinating stuff about Mrs O.'shoes and the president-elect's barber.
I took my neighbor Imogene to the restaurant. She is 93, so the conversation was all about her health and about her cat, as it should be. But politics must have been on her mind, because she suddenly turned to me and said: "I am so glad that I never was famous!"
I'll drink to that. We raised our glasses and sipped our wine in perfect bliss.

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The nationalism of science

I was talking with a fellow stumbler and marvelous friend acompas about innovation in Australia (understand that we do not really "speak", we co-stumble) and it came to my mind that the history of science is still so driven by nationalism. For instance, who is the most important inventor of the cinema? For an American, Edison; for the French two brothers named Lumiere who actually invented/commercialized the first projectors. For me, being of Belgian origin, I hold for Joseph Plateau who invented in 1832 the Fantascope...What is the claim of the Australians? "In 1906 Dan Barry and Charles Tait of Melbourne produced and directed The Story of the Kelly Gang, a silent film that ran continuously for a breathtaking 80 minutes, definitely the world's first feature film."(quote from www.powerhousemuseum.com/).
Of course in a serious history of the cinema, you will find all these names, but in schoolbooks, the national hero has the largest part, and what we remember as adults is "our guy" (I will tackle the history of women later).

Now can you tell me ten Russian, ten Chinese or ten Australian inventions? Don't you know that there are great inventors in these countries? And coming back to America, could you give me the name of five great black scientists?

See what I mean?

Not in my lifetime?

It is a bit heart wrenching to hear all these people say that they did not think an election like this would happen in their lifetime, meaning: the election of a president of mixed race. It did not occur to me, probably because I was born in Europe.
This being said, I did not think that Barack Obama would win against the powerful Mrs Clinton. I did not expect either that both Senators Clinton and McCain would rely so much on their "experience"and allow Senator Obama to be the only candidate of "change". And I certainly underestimated the superb organization of Senator Obama, so I am not claiming good insights here, I am just saying that the race subject escaped me until the Bradley effect was brought up daily by the news.

Well, what happened in my lifetime?

My early life started with being saved by the American Army from the horrors of WWII, for which I have been grateful every minute of my life. I did not know the army was segregated because we lived close to an army hospital, and both white and black soldiers were welcome in our home. In the sixties, when Martin Luther King became known all over the world, I learned that the American democracy was not as perfect as I had imagined. A century after President Lincoln, the race problem was not solved? One needed soldiers to get to school with small black children? How rotten is that! Ah, but after President Johnson, the American society, surely would be perfect. I still remember President Johnson's words (1965) "Freedom is the right to share, share fully and equally, in American society--to vote, to hold a job, to enter a public place, to go to school. It is the right to be treated in every part of our national life as a person equal in dignity and promise to all others."

Two generations later, at some time before the new century, I found myself in Georgia, reunited with my American family. It took me about a week to learn that I was white, something I had superbly ignored for 60 years...
Not only every paper you sign asks you about your race (official papers, job papers "for statistics purpose only", poll papers, you name it) but people of both races talk to you differently because of the color of your skin. Nevertheless, most white people down here are not racists, some are just not very sensitive. But how many racist remarks does it take to impact a young black life? According to my observations and my conversations with kids around here, one nasty remark per month is all it takes to change their expectations. So, that does not take many racists. Those amongst you who suffered nasty remarks from family and friends (for whatever reason) when they were young understand what this means.
It is not much, and it is too much. Way too much, in my lifetime.

Journalists, dear pundits, keep your flies up!

What is all this talk about Sarah Palin? What she knows about Africa and how many skirts she bought? Do I have to listen to that for 24 hours? Enough already: how do you justify that this is "news"? I did not even think that miss Lowinsky skirts were news. I just looked at a bunch of old CNN journalists discussing Mrs Palin's wardrobe, and I got so irritated that this image came to my mind:Sarah and the old pundits.

Let it go, give me news, and I mean information. That should be your job. Give us information instead of repeating what everybody says. This is lower than the Enquirer.
Mrs Palin will come out of this or she wont. Leave it alone and tell me more about Detroit.

Rahm Emanuel chief of staff

I am surprised by the lack of good sense of many comments about this nomination, and believe me, I am old enough to appreciate what is good in both political wings.
As chief of staff, even in a very small administration, you want somebody who knows people and who knows how things work.

THIS YOU DO NOT WANT
- a newcomer. for efficiency reasons
- a bi-partisan or a neutral person : you would not accomplish anything. On the contrary, you want somebody who will have your back: there are enough traitors on the hill as it is. There are many positions where it would be nice to see Republicans. Chief of staff is not one of them.
- a pleaser. I have been a pleaser many many years, I can tell you it makes it hard to be successful and to accomplish what you want.

Come on! If you ever had a staff of any kind, tell me who you did hire at the top? Somebody who loved compromises?
These comments are more than absurd, I find them bizarre, bizarre...


A friend asked me if I would defend Larry Summers too. I would not trust him with anything at all. The racist, misogynist ex-president of Harvard? How can you think the man has any sense at all? Maybe he should take a job as an apprentice of Joe the Plumber.

Welcome back, American dream!

This was the comment of an Italian lady for ABC this morning: "Welcome back, American dream!"
The message remarkably summarizes how Europeans reacted to the election. BBC news even talked about the "messianic" quality of this election. I got emails congratulating me from my European friends (as if suddenly they forgave me for living in the USA!)
As you probably heard, the reputation of America was not at his top level for the last decades. It is significant that it all changed back in a few seconds. I doubt that many Europeans felt like this after a careful examination of the democratic platform, it has nothing to do with the contents.
It is the symbolism of it all. A young President rising from poverty and adverse personal circomstances. A President of mixed race. A President with a dream, talking like and referring to Lincoln.
Well, this is what I think: do not ever underestimate this country.

Welcome back, American dream.