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فير زملر غاليري Sfeir-Semler Gallery

Who was Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza? How does a private art collection become public? These seemingly easy (and not so easy) questions are at the heart of Walid Raad’s new project Cotton Under My Feet, commissioned by TBA21. Spread across several galleries, the exhibition memorializes the genesis of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum. It investigates its collections, archives, and storage space, as well as the Thyssen-Bornemisza family’s remarkable art holdings. In the quest for an untold (art) history, Raad unearths and imagines fragments of stories, archival documents, and puzzling artifacts. Events related to the politics of sugar and its relation to slavery, as well as Cold War art diplomacy, silver speculation, and weather forecasting interweave with other unexpected traces hiding under an extremely rare Oriental carpet. Raad also profiles a diverse group of entrepreneurs, collectors, art dealers, artists, and conservators and explores their tangled relations. Some of them originate in this historical world, while others come from a place called fiction, and yet others from the realm of undeath. Brace yourself for a plunge into a rabbit hole of storytelling.

Cotton Under My Feet presents a new series of artworks along with a set of modified collection catalogs and other annotated publications, which together offer an obtuse road map into this historiographical labyrinth. These altered archival records contain means and tools for testing and falsifying the artist’s claims: images and documents that can be revisited, details and comparisons that can be verified or contested. Cotton Under My Feet thus embodies a series of tensions—its research is rigorous yet also fictive, it is historical and anticipatory, and it stirs up response and reflection. It puts Raad’s hypotheses on the potential legacy of the Thyssen-Bornemisza collections and their relation to Western and non-Western art history in a circuitous story, detailed in great length in the artist’s walkthrough performances, held at different times throughout the exhibition.

— Daniela Zyman, curator

In 2018, I was invited by TBA21 to propose an exhibition in the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza. Until that point, I’d known almost nothing about him, his family, personal life, businesses, and art collection. My main links to him were his daughter, Francesca, and an Oriental carpet he owned that had fascinated me for years. Before I had time to reflect on this invitation, I found myself deep in a number of Thyssen-Bornemisza tunnels.

These 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. Along the way, I also found myself face to face with Abraham Lincoln, slavery, and the American Civil War; Jalal Toufic and his writings on the undead; a Rembrandt-collecting Middle East–meddling silver tycoon; the Cold War and the fictional art restorer Lamia Antonova; and Samuel Morse, telegraphy, and meteorology.

This exhibition and its accompanying walkthrough document my free fall through this museum’s collection, 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- or early seventeenth-century Persian carpet called the Béhague Sanguszko. It is world renowned and one of the most expensive carpets 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 twenty-one kilograms is not unusual for its size. But everyone who has tried to lift it will tell you that there is no way this carpet weighs only twenty-one kilograms, because it feels like it weighs a ton or more. And it remains unclear to this day, after dozens of technical studies, 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, and had no idea that it actually was with Francesca, Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza’s only daughter.

As soon as I found out that she had it, I started to harass Francesca to let me spend time with it. But Francesca did not need much harassment, and about four years ago, I was allowed to spend as much time as I wanted with 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 to look at what’s underneath. And that’s how I found myself in a very deep tunnel, one that started with Francesca and the carpet, and then it just kept going and going and going.

Epilogue II: The Constables

I discovered these seven photographs in the museum’s basement. When I asked the staff about them, I was told that seven of the museum’s 775 paintings had back-paintings of clouds. I was also informed that these were discovered in 1983 when this collection was still in Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza’s Swiss villa. They were discovered by Lamia Antonova, the best art restorer of her generation.

When she discovered these back paintings, Antonova immediately showed them to the baron, thinking he would know what this is about. But the baron had no idea the clouds were even there because up till then, the backs were covered by wooden panels. Antonova discovered them when she X-rayed the artworks. Ever since he was shown the backs, the baron has forbidden anyone from looking at the fronts. Moreover, in his negotiations with the Spanish state, the baron insisted that these seven paintings travel to Madrid with the rest of the collection, but he never told 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 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. And so, between 1820 and 1822, he made over 100 beautiful sketches of clouds. But as far as we know, he painted on the backs of other paintings only once and that painting is in the Tate. 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 the 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. And believe me, I checked many times. Angels are mentioned 108 times in the Old Testament and 177 times in the New Testament.

Antonova then said and did something that the baron never forgot. She told him: “Angels in paintings should never be restored when damaged. Never. Because angels can self-repair,” she said. “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 rust-colored walls, a checkered floor, and three angels in black on top. And then Antonova 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.

Frontispiece IIIa: The Peaces

I emigrated from Lebanon on September 1, 1983. On that day, and on the other side of my world, Soviet pilots shoot down a Korean civilian plane, KAL 007. 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. Two-hundred and ninety-six people died immediately. As I was leaving Lebanon, and at the same moment that the Soviets shot down the Korean plane, Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza was flying to Moscow for an exhibition of his paintings at the Pushkin Museum. This was 1983, the Cold War was in full swing, and any East-West exchange was a big deal. But the baron landed in Moscow at this tense moment in East-West relations, with the shooting of the Korean plane, and he did not keep his mouth shut about this.

And lastly, let me say something about Spain in 1992. 1992 was a very big year for Spain, and not because this museum opened that year. 1992 had been on the Spanish calendar since 1986, when Barcelona was selected to host the 1992 Summer Olympics. But the selection of Barcelona was made in a pre-1989 world, pre–Berlin Wall. By 1992, the world had changed dramatically: Germany was reunited. “Post-apartheid” South Africa was back in the Olympics. Yugoslavia? Gone. The Soviet Union? Gone. The world had just gone through the First Gulf War, and after the war, Arabs and Israelis came here to the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference. And a month after the opening of this museum, Russia handed over the black box of the Korean plane they shot in 1983 to South Korea and the US. In other words, it seemed that the Cold War was over.

Frontispiece IV: The Hangs

I really don’t know what is going on in this room. I think the museum is reinstalling part of its collection of nineteenth-century American art. But if you look at the rack, you will notice a painting, and for decades the man in the painting was thought to be Hercules Posey, George Washington’s enslaved cook. Washington is said to have owned 317 enslaved people. The American President loved Hercules’s cooking, but Hercules did not love Washington as much as he loved his freedom. So Hercules ran away in 1797, and for years, Washington tried to find and bring him back to his estate. What fascinates me here is that three years ago, it was discovered that the man in the painting is not Hercules Posey. We don’t actually know who this person is. And I have no idea what’s going on with the hanging system here. This room has been like this for quite some time now.

Frontispiece V: The Spines

Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza had a beautiful collection of books, many of which came with his paintings to this museum. One book from the collection affected me more than any other: 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 natural, historical world, and we have another body that dwells in the undeath realm. The version of us that dwells in the undeath world is always calling the version of us that lives in this world. But most of us have a hard time hearing these calls. We ignore them. Why? Because the calls that originate from the undeath realm are strange, and their strangeness is a consequence of the undeath world itself being a labyrinth, not a maze. A labyrinth has no entry and no exit. No up. No down. No right. No left. No past. No present. No future. As such, the version of us that lives in the undeath world lives in a very strange place where it sees abnormal images, hears abnormal sounds, words, and stories, and this is what it sends to the version of us that lives in this world.

As an artist, and during the past three years as I explored several artifacts in this museum, I found myself wondering time and again whether the artworks and stories I created came from this world or from another.

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 Rubens and Caravaggio would all of sudden, in the 1970s, start buying nineteenth-century American art. I’ve lived in America for more than thirty 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 actually 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 actually a form of hunting in America called hunting by drowning.

The baron bought this painting in 1980 from a man named Andrew Crispo. In fact, Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza spent millions buying art from 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 he ended up being involved in killing of one of his sex partners, Eigil Dag Vesti. Crispo was jailed, 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 much darker, as became clear to me when I saw the two paintings of the following page.

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. But then sometime in 1871 and 1875, and completely out of the blue, he 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 also can’t tell if the gremlins are happy or upset by the fact that the water from the ground above is 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. Keep in mind these two paintings, I will come back to them in a bit.

Frontispiece VI: The Spreads (Morse)

This painting is not in the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection but should or could have been, and as such, I am adding it. The painter is Samuel Morse, inventor of the Morse code. 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 in order to visit the Louvre and to paint the painting that he hoped would make him rich and famous. Morse lands in France in 1831 when Europe was in the middle of one of the worst Cholera outbreaks, a pandemic that killed 18,000 people in Paris alone. 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 thirty-eight old masters as Morse imagined them on the walls of a room in the Louvre. And the closer I looked at the large canvas, one painting kept sticking out. I zoomed in on it, and discovered that it was a Rembrandt painting titled The Angel Leaving the Family of Tobias, one of the most beautiful paintings of an angel’s back. 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. As you can imagine, I had to ask if this angel was ever damaged, and after months of trying to get an answer, the Louvre finally replied that the angel was damaged during World War II. Moreover, the Louvre confirmed that the angel was repaired in the 1970s by a restorer in the Soviet Union. I am guessing Antonova, and her flat corner.

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 unpacking his paintings was talking to herself. He approached her and realized that she was not talking to herself but to the paintings. He watched her do this for some time, and then asked: “What are you doing? Why are you talking to the paintings?” The woman was surprised and embarrassed, but she gathered herself enough to say that she was not talking to the paintings. She was talking and listening to the frames. She told the baron that she was checking whether the frames were in good health, and added that she was trained to detect not only physical, material damage on frames but also to check for a kind of an immaterial damage. 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 pathologies.

The baron was blown away by her diagnostic method, so much so that he immediately invited her to Switzerland to examine his entire collection, his other frames. A year later, she traveled to Villa Favorita, examined the collection, and produced these reports. And from the looks of it, the Swiss frames were quite ill. They had multiple “disorders,” that ranged from “Global Developmental Delay,” to “Catatonia,” “Gender Dysphoria,” and “Voyeurism and Exhibitionism,” among others. By the way, the woman’s name: Lamia Antonova. That’s how she ended up working for the baron for the next seventeen years.

Epilogue IV: The X-Rays

A few months after her move to Switzerland, Lamia Antonova reread her condition reports. But this time, she completely freaked out because she realized that it was just a matter of time before the frames would contaminate the paintings they house. Antonova also had the feeling that the images could sense the forthcoming pathologies, and that they are likely to deploy defensive measures. And the counter-measure she feared the most was that the paintings would decide to run away, to flee. She immediately tried to warn her Swiss colleagues, but the only thing they said was: “Come on Lamia. This is Switzerland, not Russia. Stop it with your superstitions.” But Antonova was so agitated and furious, and just to shut her up, her Swiss colleagues decided that the number of staples and nails will be tripled and quadrupled. You can see their handiwork here, how they really went overboard with the nails and staples. One painting ended up with sixty-seven additional nails; another one, seven massive screws; another, eighteen more. Did it work? Did it prevent the images from running away? So far, yes. But Antonova’s feeling remains that, should the images decide to walk away, a million nails and staples would not prevent them from fleeing.

Epilogue VI: The Curtains

This is a photo album of the interiors of his villa in Switzerland that Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza had had custom-made in 1985. The baron made four copies of the album, one for each of his heirs. Needless to say, 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 their father was convinced that one of his children has or will have “tunnel vision.” Three 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 this 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.

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

These photographs were taken by Lamia Antonova in the early 1980s. As you can see, each object is surrounded by an arthropod. One object has flies, and only flies. Another object has spiders, and only spiders. And so on. Antonova discovered that ten cups in Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza’s gold and silver collection attracted only one kind 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, bees, slugs, and spiders seem to come out nowhere. Actually, they don’t seem to come out nowhere.

They literally came 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.

Epilogue IX: The Gremlins

Two paintings inherited by Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza were painted on top of other paintings. On the top layers are typical Martin Johnson Heade marsh scenes. But when the top layers are peeled, the paintings underneath turn out to be Heade’s Gremlin in the Studio I and Gremlin in the Studio II. He spoke about the gremlins only once. In 1890, Heade stated that one day he was working on his marsh paintings, and that he looked away from the canvas to admire the sunset. When he looked back at his paintings, the gremlins were there. “I don’t know where they came from,” he said. “They came out of nowhere.” Came out of nowhere? Just like the spiders and flies on the gold and silver cups?

Most people would read Heade’s “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 and clouds irrupt out of the blue; 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. Not Heade, nor Constable, Morse, the baron, Francesca, and certainly not me. No one.

Photo: Moritz Bernoully