Lutz Martin told me the restorers began by sorting the pieces into piles: corner and edge pieces; carved surfaces; pieces with relief decoration and, finally, those from the interior of the sculpture. As a reference guide to what went where, all they had were Oppenheim’s photographs of the Tell Halaf museum that was bombed and the excavation site in Syria. At first they thought they’d use a computer, but human brains turned out to be more efficient.
The team loved it, Lutz explained. ‘I thought it was impossible and not my work to do, but every day we had success. So satisfying!’ He continues: At first we found homes for 30 or 40 fragments a day, then it got harder. As we continued, we got a feeling for the stone, so that after a year and a half of working with the material we could identify the pieces of the inner parts of the sculpture. It was like doing a jigsaw puzzle: you have to get your eye in.’ Once everything was in place it took a year to firmly glue everything together. The fragments that could not be placed were laid in boxes labelled with blue stickers. Then tar from the fire was cleaned off the sculptures with high-pressure dry ice.
I could clearly see each individual fragment that makes up each sculpture. There has been no attempt to pretend the bomb never happened. The sculptures look very out of place in the warehouse in suburban Berlin. It felt magical to be standing beside them, thinking of all they had endured. How lucky they were that a team of restorers was excited enough to spend nine years restoring these beauties, piece by piece, just as Oppenheim had hoped, so they could rise like a phoenix out of the ashes.
Relief slabs, stone tools, stone vessels and column bases were reconstructed too. Some engravings were found along the way. Lutz read me the cuneiform writing on the sculpture of the weather god, Teshub: it says, ‘Kapara has built this palace and anyone who destroys his name from this inscription is cursed.’ Lucky for Lutz and his team that they are the ones who restored the engraving.
Some of the restored sculptures were displayed in a brief exhibition in 2011. Then they disappeared back into the depot. I like to think of them resting there in the tall, windowed rooms, surrounded by trees and birdsong. They must need some peace after all they’ve been through.
Their rest will not last for ever. The Pergamon is building a new wing for them, due to open in 2025. Then they will go on display. I asked Lutz whether he would be happy then. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘That’s when I plan to retire.’
[Max von Oppenheim with his ‘bride’]
Agatha Christie wrote in her diary that Oppenheim stopped while showing her around his museum to stroke his ‘enthroned goddess’ sculpture, cooing, ‘Ah, my beautiful Venus.’
[After the war]
Chin up! Bon courage! And don’t lose your sense of humour!’ This was the motto of Max von Oppenheim.
[The ‘enthroned goddess’]
A restorer works to rebuild the sculpture of the ‘enthroned goddess’. It took nine years to recreate each of the sculptures, piece by piece.
[The warehouse in Friedrichshagen]
Lutz Martin told me the restorers started piecing together the bombed statues by sorting them into piles: corner and edge pieces; carved surfaces; pieces with relief decoration and, finally, those from the interior of the sculpture. Slowly the sculptures were brought back to life.
THE NOBEL PRIZES HANDED OUT every year to leaders in the fields of chemistry, physics, physiology or medicine, literature and world peace are Alfred Nobel’s best-known legacy to the world. However, it was nearly a very different story. Over a cup of tea in the museum café, Olov Amelin, the curator of the Nobel Museum in Stockholm told me the story of how the prizes came into being.
The Swedish inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel invested in armaments and had factories that produced dynamite. At first dynamite was used for mining, creating tunnels and channels, but before long it was adapted for warfare. In 1864, his brother Emil and four others were killed by a spontaneous explosion caused by nitroglycerine separating out of dynamite. Nobel invented gelignite, a more stable explosive material, to stop this from happening again. A later, most deadly, invention of Nobel’s was ballistite (smokeless gunpowder), which he saw used during his lifetime, to create havoc and misery. By the time of his death Alfred Nobel had amassed a considerable fortune from destructive forces.
When his brother Ludwig passed away in 1888, the French press mistakenly thought that it was Alfred who had died. Alfred Nobel had a large house in Paris, and so the story was of considerable interest to French journalists. Le Figaro wrote a most uncomplimentary article about him, calling him ‘the Tradesman of Death’.
Nobel was shocked to read how he would be remembered. Or so the story goes. It seems a little neat, but you never know. When Olov told me the story I was reminded of the tale of Scrooge in A Christmas Carol: Nobel had a vision of a future that might be, and decided to change his destiny.
He thought for a while about what to do. Then, on 27 November 1895, he took action. He went to the Swedish Norwegian Club in the Marais in Paris, sat down at a writing desk – which is still there (the venue is now called simply the Swedish Club) – and wrote his last will and testament.
Over four pages, he set out what he wanted to give to his relatives – he had no children – and to his staff. He asked that the rest of his estate be invested into a fund, ‘the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind’.
The interest was to be divided into five equal parts and each part given to the person who had made the most important discovery each year in four fields and, finally, ‘one part to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses’ – the Nobel Peace Prize.
He had no legal assistance, he kept everything very simple, asking four men who happened also to be in the Swedish Norwegian Club that day to witness the document.
Nobel’s last will and testament is kept in a vault at the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, based just ten minutes’ walk from the museum. The vault contains several locked cabinets filled with artefacts that belonged to Alfred Nobel. His death mask is there, which still has bits of beard hair inside it – there has been talk, jokingly, of cloning Nobel from his beard. Inside a box within one cabinet is the will, its pages covered in right-slanted writing in black ink. These words, which he wrote long ago in Paris, marked a fresh start to the way Nobel would be remembered in history.
His will has never been on display. The museum is too small to fit the kind of secure, atmospherically controlled cabinet required to display it safely. The museum is planning on moving to bigger premises in 2018, and hopes to be able to show it one day but, for now, it remains unseen. I find it wonderful that these four pages, down in a dark vault in Stockholm, have a staggering impact on the world each year.
Alfred Nobel had entrusted Ragnar Sohlman, his assistant, to be executor of his will. When Nobel died, in 1896, Ragnar was only 25, so this was quite a job for him, but he raced around Paris in a horse-drawn carriage, collecting cash, papers and bonds from different banks. He packed everything into boxes and shipped it to Sweden, from the Gare du Nord, Paris, as registered luggage. Back in Sweden, he began slowly to sell Nobel’s shares, so the companies he had invested in didn’t crash.
When Nobel’s will was read for the first time, there was lots of resistance to his wishes. For starters, his family was shocked and surprised – they hadn’t known about his plans. The Swedish royal family accused Nobel of being unpatriotic for not supporting just Swedes but, instead, insisting that nationality was not to be considered when choosing the winners of the prizes. And, of course, everyone who was to be involved knew it would take a huge amount of organization each year, and Nobel hadn’t considered the admin costs.
Still, there was also a great deal of support for Nobel’s idea. The Olympics were happening in Greece in 189
6 and there was a general sense of wanting to create a world family and to honour people who were helping mankind. Ragnar found more and more support as he worked steadily to set up the Nobel Foundation, and to make Nobel’s wishes a reality. In 1901, five years after Nobel’s will was first read, the first Nobel Prizes were awarded in Sweden and Norway. A century later, the museum opened in Stockholm.
Each year a ceremony is held in Sweden at the same time as the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded in Norway. The prize itself consists of a medal, a certificate and around 10 million Swedish kronor (the exact amount varies depending on how well the Nobel Foundation has done that year). After the ceremony there is a banquet, held simultaneously in both countries. When Nobel wrote his will, the two countries were one. Norway controlled interior policy and had its own parliament, the Stortinget, whose opinions on peace issues impressed Nobel, which is probably why he gave Norway responsibility for the prize.
The first Nobel Peace Prize, in 1901 was awarded to both Henry Dunant, who founded the Red Cross, and Frédéric Passy, an economist who worked for international peace. In 1991, Aung San Suu Kyi won it while under house arrest in Burma. In her acceptance speech, which she gave when she was finally free in 2012, she talked about how she felt when she had first been awarded it. At the time, she had felt unreal, disconnected from the world, but ‘as the days and months went by, and news of reactions to the award came on the airwaves, I began to understand the significance of the Nobel Prize. It had made me real once again; it had drawn me back into the wider human community.’
Olov’s favourite Nobel-winner’s story is that of is Pyotr Kapitsa, who won the prize for physics in 1978. He was born in Russia, but in 1921 moved with his family to Cambridge to work. He returned briefly to Moscow in 1934, invited as a special guest of Stalin in recognition of his work; however, once he was there, Stalin would not let him leave. He moved his family to Moscow, and set up a laboratory in the city. Kapitsa was asked to work on the atom bomb. He refused and was sent, with his family, to live in Siberia. He might have been awarded the Peace Prize for his refusal, but his Nobel Prize was awarded for physics, for the research he worked on in Cambridge before he was forced to live in Russia.
Olov explained that, of course, there have been controversial prize-winners: ‘Kissinger, Arafat spring to mind’. I wondered if any had been revoked? ‘No, the Nobel Foundation can’t take any prizes back,’ he answered.
He has had the privilege of meeting several Nobel laureates. He met Aung San Suu Kyi last year, and had tea with the Dalai Lama, right where he and I were sitting in the museum café. ‘That was great,’ he said. ‘We sat surrounded by monks, chatting, and the Dalai Lama laughed a lot.’
[Alfred Nobel (1833–96)]
When he invented dynamite, Nobel never imagined how it would be used. Referring to his dynamite factories he said: ‘Perhaps my factories will put an end to war even sooner than your congresses; on the day when two army corps will be able to annihilate each other in a second, all civilized nations will recoil with horror and disband their troops.
[Nobel’s will]
Kept in a vault in the Nobel Foundation these four pages, written in the Marais in Paris, are responsible for the yearly Nobel Prizes.
[Pyotr Kapitsa (1894–1984)]
Olov’s favourite Nobel-winner’s story is that of Kapitsa, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics.
CREATING A PORTRAIT, ON CANVAS or on film, is an intimate act. The sitter must trust the artist. The artist must capture the essence of the sitter. The relationship and the creation of the portrait can so easily go wrong. But then again, after hours of trying ideas, looking intently at the sitter, feeling for their character, sketching, thinking of how best to express their form, the portrait can click into place, with the press of the camera button, or the stroke of a brush dipped in paint.
It’s the portraits that went right that the National Portrait Gallery seeks to collect. I met Dr Tim Moreton, who has been overseeing new acquisitions at the gallery since 1980. He is so intrinsic a part of the gallery that his own portrait is in the collection. ‘Whatever the mysterious magic is that gives a portrait a charge, that is what the National Portrait Gallery is after,’ he explained. Of course they only collect portraits of people who have contributed to the nation, and when they know the portrait – in the case of a painting – was created while the artist was in the same space as the sitter.
Collecting images that contain a certain magic has been the secret to the success of the gallery since its creation. Every portrait that comes into the collection – they’re acquired four times a year – is noted down in a vast ledger book. Whose portrait was the first in the collection? It was William Shakespeare’s.
When I visited, in June 2012, the gallery was on number 6,942 in the book. However some numbers can be entire collections so there are thousands more portraits than that in the total collection. These are the paintings and photographs that made the grade, and will be kept safe for the future.
However, in the back rooms of the gallery are the sketches of a portrait that isn’t in the collection, by an artist who really missed the mark, as far as the sitter was concerned. The sitter was a wordsmith, like Shakespeare. He used his words to win the Second World War. That man was Winston Churchill.
In 1952 Churchill turned 80. He was still the prime minister. As a birthday gift, members of the House of Lords and House of Commons past and present commissioned Graham Sutherland, a modernist artist aligned with Surrealism, to paint Churchill’s portrait. He had painted the writer Somerset Maugham as his first portrait five years earlier so, despite his surreal painting style, the MPs thought he would do a good job.
Churchill was also an artist. Many of his paintings still hang in his studio, in his former home, Chartwell, in Kent, now owned by the National Trust. He must have understood the process of creating a portrait because he had painted some, and because he had sat for over a hundred of his own. He asked Sutherland at the outset, ‘How are you going to paint me? As a cherub, or the Bulldog?’ to which Sutherland replied: ‘It entirely depends on what you show me, sir.’ Sutherland later told Lord Beaverbrook: ‘Consistently … he showed me the Bulldog.’
Churchill sat patiently, several times, for Sutherland, as he sketched the prime minister, in Chartwell. Sutherland took all of the sketches back to his studio and probably pinned them onto the canvas as he worked, creating his portrait in oil paint.
However, somehow the magic of the sketches can’t have translated into the painting for when Churchill was presented with the final, lifesize portrait of himself he was furious. He said it made him look ‘halfwitted’. However, he graciously, perhaps with gritted teeth, went along with the MPs’ desire to present the offending item to him as a birthday gift on 30 November 1954, in Parliament. The prime minister said wryly: ‘The portrait is a remarkable example of modern art. It certainly combines force and candour …’ He took it home with him, and the painting disappeared. It is generally thought that, after it had hung around their house annoying everyone and upsetting Churchill, his wife threw it on a bonfire in their garden.
Only the sketches and two preparatory studies in oil still survive. One of the oils is on display in the gallery and the other is hanging in the Churchill War Rooms, among other treasures belonging to Churchill – speeches, letters to his wife Clementine, a cigar and his red velvet ‘Siren Suit’, which is a precursor to a onesie; he had several of these made in Savile Row, in different colours, and loved to wear them as they were so comfortable.
The oils and sketches were found lying around Sutherland’s studio when he died in 1980, 28 years after he created them in 1952. Perhaps he kept them for sentimental reasons, or maybe he just hadn’t got around to clearing out his studio in a long while, but luckily his wife donated them to the gallery.
I went to see them at the National Portrait Gallery’s prints and drawings storage on Orange Street in London. An underground tunnel filled with framing studios links the building w
ith the gallery itself. All of the collection’s prints and drawings that aren’t currently on exhibition are in here, in controlled conditions inside green boxes, in drawers and stacked against the side of the wall. The sculptures and oil paintings are kept in Southwark.
Tim and his colleague, Rab MacGibbon, who is the gallery’s associate curator, pulled the three sketches of Churchill, and one sketchbook that also belonged to Sutherland, out of their different green boxes and spread them out on top of a chest of drawers.
We looked at the sketchbook first. Sutherland had ripped a lot of the pages out, but a few quick sketches of Churchill’s left arm remain. The sketchbook was a tool; in the pages Sutherland began to work out the angles of his portrait. It was interesting to see his brain in action, try ing out ideas on the page.
Once he’d nailed it, he moved onto the next sketch, beside it, a full study of a hand, in pencil and ink. It has criss-cross pencil lines across the page, which was useful for scaling the study up in size later on. Sutherland probably pinned this one onto his canvas to work from as he painted.
The third sketch I looked at is the one I really like. It’s a sketch in chalk, of Churchill’s face, with a thick line around the profile. There is a sense of melancholy, a trace of the ‘black dog’ Churchill said followed him around, right there, in the lines of the chalk. It is an intimate sketch, drawn as Churchill sat, thinking, perhaps talking, in his iconic gruff voice, a few steps from Sutherland’s easel. It felt very personal, to look so closely at a sketch of his face, created when he was right there. I liked his wispy, slightly mad-looking eyebrow. The sketch is framed but there is no mount, so you can see the edge of the paper, which is frayed, where it has been ripped out of a sketchbook.
The fourth sketch is the largest, and latest, and by this time Sutherland has worked out exactly what he wants to paint. Churchill is enthroned in a chair, legs slightly astride, feet firmly planted on the ground, in a pose akin to the one he was captured in for the final portrait. His character pours forth from the page, the classic Bulldog. This is the Churchill who won the Second World War with his words. This is the look of the man who addressed the nation, on Sunday evenings, when crisis demanded. This is the face of a man whose speeches still echo in the minds of those who were there, and millions who were born once victory for the Allies had been won. Even now his words give you goosebumps. 4 June 1940:
The Secret Museum Page 22