Fifteen Eighty Four

‘What about looting? Was there looting during the First World War?’ – I smile at the question from the young man who eagerly awaits confirmation of his supposition.  There’s some habit in my answer because after a quickly interjected ‘how interesting!’, this is the standard question I get whenever I mention that I wrote a book on the European art market during the First World War.

In the public mind, the history of the European art market is synonymous with the war crimes, looting and predation associated with the Second World War. There is glance of surprise in my interlocutor’s eyes when I tell him ‘Yes, there was’ and then immediately add ‘but my book is not just about looting.’ ‘The European Art Market and the First World War: Art, Capital, and the Decline of the Collecting Class’ takes the lens of art as the crucible of capital and property and studies how the war changed this sector of trade. It is a book about the art market as much as it is about modern warfare. It shows how Europe’s fin-de-siècle ‘collecting classes’ collapsed and how the mechanisms of finance entered the trade. It also analyses how legislation cemented the post-1918 order and nationalised different trade spheres. Fundamentally, this is a book about art, money, and capitalism, as well as about how the war reshaped the way in which heritage was treated and traded.

A French 1917 caricature showing Monsieur Nouveauriche’s (Mister Newrich) art plans, from L’Intransigeant: Mr. Newrich says to a bystander: ‘I will put up a statue of the war in gilded silver ….. as big as this’ – ‘You really owe it to her,’ answers the bystander.

This book is populated by millionaires and orphans, expropriated Nobel-prize winning authors and ruthless financiers, rich art dealers, panicked critics, and privileged painters. It talks about the unusual lives of art and the encounters they facilitated, while also examining art consumption in a climate of societal struggle, and sacrifice. The despair, hate, scrutiny, envy, hopes, and fears of those who witnessed history unfold in the marketplace inform this volume.

I had not anticipated that I would write a book about the First World War. Originally, I had formulated a research proposal on collecting in the late nineteenth century, but everything changed, when, on my quest for sources, I stumbled upon a German auction newspaper published during the war. There were so many desperate remarks about the development of the market, the bad behaviour of bidding ‘profiteers’, the distorting effect of inflation on art prices. I wanted to know more. I realised that while there was plenty of research on the Second World War, the art trade during the First World War, as defined by sale platforms like auctions, had not been the subject of historical studies. Surely, scholars had talked about the art world during the war, but while this field clearly intersects with trade, it is, in fact, quite distinct from the commercial side. There were brilliant studies on the history of collecting, but the majority ended in 1914 only to start again in 1918, while individual studies on dealers could not offer a comprehensive understanding of what had happened. It was as if the First World years were a black hole: mysterious, all-absorbing, and untouched. I started writing this book believing that the war years could offer a transformative picture for the historical understanding of the art trade in the twentieth century. I leave the reader to form their own judgment on their importance.