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فير زملر غاليري Sfeir-Semler Gallery

How do museum collections come into being? What stories do they share with other museums? And how do works of art fare in a public environment? Walid Raad explores these questions in his project Cotton Under My Feet: The Hamburg Chapter. Following the trail of an unusual donation of artworks by Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza to the Hamburger Kunsthalle in 1992, the Lebanese American artist has created a tour – referencing his project at the Museum Thyssen-Bornemisza (2021/2022) – that meanders through the collection spaces, from the Old Masters to the “Transparent Museum”. Along the way, Raad interweaves facts about collection acquisitions from the last century with current events, reveals links between politics, diplomacy, and historical entanglements – from the National Socialist Past to the Middle East conflict and the climate crisis – and poses previously unexplored questions about the restoration of paintings and the feelings of their frames.

Through partly historical, partly fictional narratives, Raad succeeds in bringing his audience closer to the history of the museum and its protagonists in an engaging way, drawing families of collectors, art dealers, artists and a conservator into a labyrinth of relationships. In the process, he juxtaposes existing exhibition objects with purported finds from the museum's depots and with his own works, picking out individual, historically relevant details, and uncovering unknown facts about the museum's history. Before beginning his interventions in the exhibition spaces, Raad undertook research on collections, probing the darkest corners of the worlds of art and finance: Who is behind the donations? How do we deal with unresolved provenances and questionable histories? What connections can be drawn from museum collections? Stories are told of a realm of the undead, where a carpet is heavier than its weight, images of clouds appear on the back of paintings, cups are populated by insects, angels heal themselves, and tunnel vision makes everything transparent.

The project Cotton Under My Feet: The Hamburg Chapter was created in cooperation with the International Kampnagel Summer Festival 2023.

— Petra Roettig, Leona Marie Ahrens and Selvi Göktepe

In 2019, I was invited by TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary in Madrid to propose an exhibition about Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza’s art collection. Until that point, I’d known almost nothing about the baron, his family, personal life, businesses, and art collection. My links to him were his daughter, Francesca, and an Oriental carpet he owned that I’d been trying to find for years. After months of research, I found myself deep in several Thyssen-Bornemisza tunnels, some of which led directly to the Hamburger Kunsthalle. The tunnels began with a daughter and a carpet, and then forked and braided into several historical and fictional spaces. These ranged from images of clouds that appeared mysteriously on the back of several Old Master paintings to gold and silver cups that attract specific types of arthropods; angels that self-restore; and demon-like creatures tugging at the edges of swamps.

In 1992, Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza transferred his collection to Spain. But before this move, he entertained several offers, one of which came from Hamburg.

The Hamburg offer was of particular interest to the baron because of his undying wish to reunite a pair of Caspar David Friedrich paintings from 1827 and 1828, one of which he owned, Easter Morning, the other, Early Snow, in the Hamburger Kunsthalle’s collection. Unable to reunite the paintings, the baron decided in 1992 to instead gift 14 old masters, 23 nineteenth-century American paintings, one carpet, several conservation documents, an odd photo-album, and 11 strange objects to Hamburg, some of which are exhibited here for the first time.

This exhibition and its accompanying walkthrough document my free fall through the Thyssen-Bornemisza and Hamburger Kunsthalle collections, and the various frightening, joyous, and perplexing situations, objects, and figures I met along the way.

— Walid Raad

Frontispiece II: The Carpet

This carpet is a late sixteenth-century Persian called the Béhague Sanguszko. It is world renowned and the most expensive carpet in the world because it has a unique quality: it is known to be extremely heavy, but not in the usual sense. The carpet’s weight of 21 kilograms is not unusual for its size. But everyone who has tried to lift it says that it feels like it weighs a ton. And it remains unclear to this day why this carpet feels as heavy as it does, why its heaviness is not proportional to its weight. I’ve been trying to find it for years and had no idea that it was in the Hamburger Kunsthalle, donated in 1992 by Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza. It also took me years to figure out why this carpet was a suitable donation to a museum that does not collect carpets otherwise.

As soon as I found out that they had the carpet, I harassed the museum to let me spend time with it. But the museum did not need much convincing, and about four years ago, I was allowed access to the carpet. I started to study it closely, to look at it and around it, and I would like to say to look under it, but I could not lift it. And that’s how I found myself in a very deep tunnel, one that started with the carpet, and then it just kept going and going and going.

Needless to say, the carpet’s “heaviness” prevented its display. Hence this reproduction.

Epilogue II: The Constables

I discovered these 7 photographs in the basement of the Hamburger Kunsthalle. When I asked the staff about them, I was told that 7 of the 37 gifted Thyssen-Bornemisza paintings had back paintings of clouds. I was also informed that these were discovered in 1983 by Lamia Antonova, the best fine art restorer of her generation.

When she discovered these back paintings, Antonova immediately showed them to the baron. But the baron had no idea the clouds were even there because until then the backs were covered by wooden panels. Antonova discovered them when she x-rayed the artworks. Ever since he was shown the back paintings, the baron has forbidden anyone from looking at the fronts. In his donation letter to the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the baron insisted that these 7 paintings must never be shown. Moreover, he refused to tell the museum what is on the fronts. By contract, the museum is not allowed to look at the fronts; nor to x-ray the paintings or show the actual backs of the paintings. They are only allowed to show these photographs.

What we do know about the back paintings today is that they were painted in the 1820s, and they look exactly like the cloud studies made by the nineteenth-century British painter, John Constable. Constable was an early meteorologist, and he wanted clouds to look real in his paintings, not like puffy cotton balls. Between 1820 and 1822, he made over 100 beautiful sketches of clouds. But as far as we know, Constable painted on the back of a painting only once and that painting is in the Tate Gallery in London. So, who did this? We don’t know. Are they Constables? We don’t know. What’s on the fronts? We don’t know.

Epilogue III: The Flat Corner

I found this structure in a corner of this museum’s storage spaces. I inquired about it, and was told that it once belonged to Lamia Antonova, the baron’s Palestinian Soviet art restorer. When she started working for the baron, Antonova decided to count the number of angels that appeared in the baron’s collection of paintings, and that number stunned her: 285. “This is the exact number of times that angels are mentioned in the Bible,” Antonova exclaimed ecstatically.

Antonova then said and did something that the baron never forgot. She told him: “Angels in paintings should never be restored when damaged; angels will self-repair. But to self-repair,” she added, “angels need to rest on a flat corner.” And then Antonova showed the baron this trompe l’oeil wooden structure of what looks like a corner, with red-damask wallpapered walls, a wooden floor, and three painted angels. Antonova also said: “If damaged angels rest here then they may self-repair.” And the angels on top? She called these her Angel-Attractors because it seems that to self-repair, damaged angels need the help of other angels. “But you need to attract them first,” Antonova said, with what she called Angel-Attractors. These three to be precise.

In his donation letter to the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the baron stated that this donation to Hamburg is most felicitous since this museum’s collection also included exactly 285 angels.

Frontispiece III a: The Peaces
Frontispiece IIIb: The Majors and Minors

I emigrated from Lebanon on September 1, 1983. On that day, Soviet pilots shot down a Korean civilian plane. The plane was on its way from America to Korea, but a pilot error deviated the plane into Soviet airspace. The Soviets thought this was an American spy plane, and their MiGs fired their missiles, killing 269 people.

As I was leaving Lebanon, and at the same moment that the Soviets shot down the Korean plane, Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza was on a trip to Moscow for an exhibition of his paintings at the Pushkin Museum. Keep in mind that this was 1983 with the Cold War in full swing, and any East-West exchange was a big deal. But the baron landed in Moscow at this tense moment, with the shooting of the Korean plane.

And lastly, let me say something about some of the historical events that framed the baron’s sale of his collection to Spain, and his donation to Hamburg in 1992.

The year 1992 had been highlighted on the European calendar since 1986 when Barcelona was selected to host the 1992 Summer Olympics. But the selection of Barcelona was made in 1986, before the fall of the Berlin Wall. By 1992, the world had changed dramatically: Germany was reunited. The Maastricht Treaty was signed. “Post-apartheid” South Africa was back in the Olympics. Yugoslavia? Gone. The Soviet Union? Gone. In other words, it seemed that the Cold War was over. And what better way for Thyssen-Bornemisza to celebrate the end of the Cold War than to make public the largest private art collection in Europe, by gifting it to Madrid and Hamburg.

Frontispiece IV: The Hangs

The museum is currently testing some display and hanging systems. As it happens, these tests involve copies of 3 American paintings donated by Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza to the Hamburger Kunsthalle.

Baron Hans-Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza donated 23 nineteenth-century American paintings to the Hamburger Kunsthalle, a museum without a single such painting. He did so for two reasons: his grandmother was American; and he wanted to acknowledge the special relations between Hamburg and the United States. Hamburg was one of the first states in the world where the United States established a diplomatic mission after the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

The Consulate in Hamburg was established by George Washington on June 17, 1790.

Frontispiece V: The Spines

Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza

had a beautiful collection of books, some of which came with his paintings to this museum. They complement the Kunsthalle’s own vast book collection. It is also worth noting that

the Kunsthalle is renowned for its holdings of books dealing with the theme of vampirism, a subject that has fascinated me ever since I read Jalal Toufic’s Vampires: An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film.

Toufic writes that we are mortal. And by this he does not mean that we will die some day in the future and that in the meantime we are fully alive. No. By mortal, Toufic means that we are all now dead while physically alive. Death is not something that happens to us in the future. It is now part of our life. Moreover, Toufic writes that we have different bodies. We have a body that lives in this historical world, and we have another body that dwells in the undeath realm. The version of us that dwells in the undeath realm is always calling the version of us that lives in this world. But most of us ignore these calls. Why? Because the calls that originate from the undeath realm are strange, and their strangeness is a consequence of the undeath realm itself being a labyrinth. A labyrinth has no entry and no exit. No up. No down. No past. No present. No future. As such, the version of us that dwells in the undeath realm lives in a very strange place where it sees strange images, hears odd sounds, words, and stories, and this is what it sends to the version of us that lives in this world.

As I explored several artifacts in the Hamburger Kunsthalle, I found myself wondering whether the artworks and stories I created came from this world or from another place.

Frontispiece VI: The Spreads (Deer Hunting)

Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza’s art collection included many nineteenth-century American paintings. I found it strange that a man who collected Holbein and Caravaggio would suddenly, in the 1970s, start buying nineteenth-century American art. I’ve lived in America for more than 30 years and never really looked at this tradition. But in the last three years, I really got sucked into artworks like this one. This looks like a quaint landscape of a deer in the water with a dog to the side. But this watercolor is quite dark. It depicts a brutal hunting scene, where hunters and their dogs scare deer into the water. Deer can’t swim, and they drown. It’s a form of hunting in America called hunting by drowning.

The baron bought this painting in 1980 from a man named Andrew Crispo who was known not only as a brilliant art dealer, but also as having a darker than dark side. During the day, Crispo was one of the most respected dealers of American art. But when the sun set, Crispo loved playing violent games with boys in leather. He also liked to take things to the edge, and one time, things went over the edge, and Crispo ended up being involved in killing of one of his sex partners, Eigil Dag Vesti. Crispo went to prison, and for a long time, I thought that’s what was meant by his darker than dark side, because it does not get darker than murder. Well, it turns out that it can get darker. Much darker, as became clear to me when I saw the two paintings displayed on the wall to the left.

Frontispiece VI: The Spreads (Gremlins)

These two artworks were painted in the 1870s by Martin Johnson Heade, known for his numerous landscapes of swamps and marshes. In 1871 and 1875, and completely out of the blue, Heade did this: two paintings with his own landscapes on top, but they were painted standing on wooden sawhorses, as if the usually small paintings were now very large. And under the now-large painting, standing in the shadows is a cartoonish figure that Heade called a gremlin. I can’t tell if the gremlins are happy or upset with the water from the ground above falling to the ground below—to the gremlin side of the painting. These two paintings were the property of Andrew Crispo. In fact, no one knew both versions were in Crispo’s hands until he was forced to sell them when he was jailed.

Frontispiece VI: The Spreads (Morse)

This painting is not in the Hamburger Kunsthalle collection but should or could have been. The painter is Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraph and the Morse code. The Morse code known and used worldwide today is an improved, version created by someone else: Friedrich Clemens Gerke, a telegraphy pioneer from Hamburg.

Before his invention of the telegraph, Morse was a respected American painter, and he had huge ambitions. For example, in the early 1830s he went to Paris to visit the Louvre and to paint the painting that he hoped would make him famous. Morse landed in France in 1831 when Europe was in the middle of a cholera outbreak. Too afraid to go out, he was forced indoors in the Louvre to paint for months on end. Morse finished the painting Gallery of the Louvre, and on his boat trip home he came up with the idea for the telegraph.

This painting by Morse includes 38 old masters as Morse imagined them on the walls of the Louvre. And the closer I looked at his canvas, one painting kept sticking out: Rembrandt’s painting titled The Angel Leaving the Family

of Tobias, one of the most beautiful paintings of an angel’s back. A Rembrandt print of this painting is in the Hamburger Kunsthalle. It then dawned on me that I had seen this angel before. This angel is in fact one of the Angel-Attractors in Lamia Antonova’s flat corner. I had to ask if this angel was ever damaged, and the Louvre told me that the angel was damaged during World War II, and confirmed that the angel was repaired in the 1970s by a restorer in the Soviet Union. My guess? Antonova and her flat corner.

Epilogue VI: The Curtains

This is a photo album of the interiors of Villa Favorita in Switzerland, Thyssen-Bornemisza’s most beloved home. The baron made four copies of the album, one for each of his heirs. The album is somewhat odd given that the artworks on the walls are covered with paper collages of lace curtains. Equally odd is the inscription on the front of one of the albums: “This album was made for those of my children who see through veils, curtains, and masks.”

When I saw the album, I had no idea what to make of it. I inquired with the heirs, who informed me that the baron was convinced that one of his children has or will have “tunnel vision,” meaning that they are able to see through walls and other hard surfaces. Three of them assured me this was pure superstition. But one insisted that while he may not see through walls, he can certainly see through clouds. I doubted his claim until I discovered that his private investment firm had recently acquired two companies: DTN and Meteogroup, confirming that his head was clearly on a silver-lined dark cloud: climate change and its asymmetrical effects on the agriculture, seed, farming, transport, energy, and weather business sectors.

Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza donated her copy of the album to the Hamburger Kunsthalle as soon as she heard that the museum started its “Transparent Museum” initiative in 2016. “While all museums need to become more transparent,” Francesca stated with her donation, “I anticipate but also dread that some of your visitors and staff may experience another kind of transparency: tunnel vision.”

Epilogue V: The Frames

In 1983, Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza traveled to Moscow to attend the opening of an exhibition of his old masters at the Pushkin Museum. While supervising the installation of his collection, the baron noticed that a woman was talking to his paintings. He asked her:

“Why are you talking to my paintings?”

The woman replied that she was not talking to the paintings but to the frames. She said that frames may be affected not only by worms and insects but may suffer from diseases that are very much like psychological diseases, and that she created a method to check the appropriate psychopathologies.

The baron was blown away by her diagnostic method, so much so that he immediately invited her to examine his entire collection. She did and produced these reports. And from the looks of it, the baron’s frames were quite ill. They had multiple “disorders,” that ranged from “Global Developmental Delay,” to “Catatonia,” and “Voyeurism and Exhibitionism,” among others. By the way, the woman’s name: Lamia Antonova.

The baron donated 9 Lamia Antonova condition reports to the Hamburger Kunsthalle.

This donation was a significant factor in the Hamburger Kunsthalle’s conception and realization of the “Transparent Museum”, whose exhibitions was supplemented here.

Epilogue VII: The Gold and Silver
Epilogue VIII: The Crates

These photographs were taken by the restorer Lamia Antonova in the early 1980s. As you can see, each object is surrounded by an arthropod. One object has attracted flies, and only flies. Another object has attracted spiders, and only spiders. Antonova discovered that 10 cups in Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza’s gold and silver collection attracted individual species of arthropod and repulsed all others, as though each object emitted a specific chemical or electric signature. As if this was not strange enough, it also turns out that the flies, spiders, and cockroaches seem to come out of nowhere. They literally come out of nowhere. Antonova noticed that whenever she took the objects out of their custom-made cases (the foam crates exhibited on the opposite wall) to display or to photograph, within seconds, and out of nowhere, the arthropods irrupted. You can imagine this really rattled Antonova. Where are the beasts coming from? It took Antonova seven years, and another strange event to figure this out.

Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza donated 10 arthropod-attracting cups to the Hamburger Kunsthalle, one of which is on display (along with an irrupted cockroach) in room 12. Why would the baron donate gold and silver objects to a museum that does not collect them? It turns out that it is for the same reasons he also gifted the museum his “heavy” carpet, flat corner, and back-paintings of clouds.

Epilogue IX: The Gremlins

One painting donated by Thyssen-Bornemisza to the Hamburger Kunsthalle was painted on top of another painting. On the top layer is a typical Martin Johnson Heade marsh scene. But when the top layer is peeled, the painting underneath turns out to be Heade’s Gremlin in the Studio II.

Heade spoke about the gremlins only once. In 1890, he stated that one day he was working on a marsh painting, and that he looked away from the canvas to admire the sunset. When he looked back at his painting, the gremlin was there. “I don’t know where it came from,” he said. “It came out of nowhere.” Came out of nowhere? Just like the spiders and cockroaches on the gold and silver cups?

Most people would read Heade’s “It came out of nowhere” statement in a figurative manner, as some kind of allegory. But when she read his quote, Antonova immediately understood that there was nothing figurative here and she finally understood why Heade took on the pen name Didymus, the twin. He did so not because he liked to make two exact copies of every painting, but because Didymus knew that he had two bodies, one alive, and one dead. One body was walking among the tall grasses in the marshes. But the other body had long ago waterfalled to the gremlin side of the painting, to this place called “Nowhere.” “Nowhere is a place,” Lamia realized in a flash. It is a place where the figurative is literal; where insects come from nowhere; where clouds travel faster than the weather; where vision tunnels; where paintings never hang; where a carpet is heavier than its weight; and where no one can hide behind a curtain or under a carpet. No one.

Image courtesy Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg. Photo: Fred Dott