Please Provide Provenance

Following World War I, and the collapse Austro-Hungarian Empire, the country of Hungary went through a couple of years of chaos as the Hungarian people searched for a stable form of government.  Since the Empire had been on the losing side of World War I, this is not really surprising.

What is surprising is that an Empire ruled over by the Hapsburgs—a royal family far more noted for its enthusiastic inbreeding than for any exhibition of brains—lasted so long.  While Austria exiled the Hapsburgs, Hungary didn’t have to as even Charles I of Hungary realized he had become redundant and needed to leave.. 

Note.  To be fair, Charles I of Hungary (also known as Charles IV in Austria) was not nearly as inbred as his relative, Charles II of Spain.  The inbreeding coefficient of Chuck I/IV was only 0.03125 (3%)—a level definitely high enough to significantly increase the risk of certain conditions like congenital anomalies, developmental problems, and even medical vulnerabilities.  The population on non-royal people generally have a coefficient around .02 or 1% Charles II, on the other hand, had an inbreeding coefficient of 0.254 or 25%, meaning he was more inbred than if his parents had only been brother and sister.  That level of inbreeding produces congressmen, university administrators, and TSA agents.

Hungary struggled to set up a stable government—establishing a brief republic that fell after only a few months to an equally brief communist regime that was so radical that Romanian troops crossed the border and set up a rather strange monarchy.  For a little over a year, there was a monarchy that lacked a king, but had an authoritarian regent.  By November 1920, the regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy, dropped all pretense and just ruled as a dictator, remaining in power until the Soviet occupation at the end of World War II.

Naturally, all the political upheaval had a profound effect on the established art world of Hungary.  Royal patronage was dead and even the national identity was in question.  Societal upheaval and disillusionment with pre-war ideals fueled the rise of avant-garde movements like Expressionism and Activism in Hungary.  These artists challenged traditional aesthetics and embraced social commentary in their works, often criticizing the post-war political and economic situation.

One group of Hungarian artists is of particular interest:  The Eight, who were a group of avant-garde artists whose inspiration was derived primarily from French painters and art movements, including Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Fauvism.  (To oversimplify, the Fauvists were impressionists who used strong, bright color.  Matisse’s Woman With a Hat, at right, is a perfect example.)

The members of The Eight, Róbert Berény, Dezső Czigány, Béla Czóbel, Károly Kernstok, Ödön Márffy, Dezső Orbán, Bertalan Pór and Lajos Tihanyi, were (besides being desperately in need of buying a few vowels) all going to suffer during the next twenty years leading up to second world war.  Of the eight, all but one had to flee Hungary sometime between 1918 and 1939 for political reasons.  The one artist who didn’t emigrate, Dezső Czigány, suffered severe depression that eventually led to a psychotic break and the artist’s committing suicide after murdering his family.

Róbert Berény was actually part of the government during the brief Hungarian Democratic Republic, so he naturally had to flee the country as the communists took over.  Settling in Berlin, Berény continued to work and achieved international recognition.  In 1926, just as the Nazi Party was becoming increasingly visible in Germany, Berény and his wife returned to Budapest.

By this time, Berény was painting in the Cubist style and experimenting with the Art Deco.  In 1927-28, he produced a painting of his wife, Eta.  She was wearing a blue dress and reclining next to a table upon which was set a black vase.  Generally considered to be one of his best works, the painting, Sleeping Lady with Black Vase, was sold to a Jewish patron.  

With the start of the war, exactly what happened to the Jewish patron and the painting are unknown.  It is possible that the buyer fled the country taking the painting with him, that he sold the painting to raise funds for the trip, or that the painting was seized by the Nazis when they occupied Hungary.  Since Berény’s studio was destroyed during the war, it was even considered possible that Berény had reacquired the painting and had stored it in his studio.  Whatever the circumstances, it vanished.  The last time the painting was seen in public was at an art show in 1928.

Berény remained in Hungary for the rest of his life.  Under the communist regime that took over Hungary after the war, he was an art teacher at the Hungarian University of Fine Art and passed away in 1953.

Fifty-six years after his death, Gergely Barki, an art historian at the Hungarian National Gallery, was forced by his three-year-old daughter to watch the 1999 Sony movie, Stuart Little.  If you are unfamiliar with this work, in the tale, a successful urban family, the Littles (played by Hugh Laurie and Geena Davis), go to an orphanage to adopt a child and for reasons that are never quite explained, adopt a talking mouse named Stuart.  

Several scenes in the movie take place in the living room of the Little home.  Barki thought he recognized the painting hanging over the Littles’ fireplace.  Now, since the Berény painting had been relatively unknown, it was unlikely that this was a copy or a print.  In fact, in Barki’s opinion, it had to be the original, long-lost painting.  Barki had no method of pausing the movie or of obtaining a print from it, so he sent an email to the production company.

Actually, over a period of two years, Barki sent off dozens of emails to the production company and various cast members hoping that someone would pay attention to him.  Finally, after years of effort, a set designer met with Barki in a Washington DC park to examine the painting.  Using a screwdriver borrowed from a hotdog vendor to remove the frame, Barki was able to verify that the painting was indeed the long-lost Berény original.

Trying to piece together the provenance of the painting during the missing years has proven a little difficult.  The painting sold at a charity auction for $40 to an art collector in the mid 1990’s.  He, in turn, sold it to an antique store for $400, who then sold it to a Sony set designer for $500 who thought it would look perfect in a house where a mouse lived.  When the movie was over, she bought the painting back from Sony for $500 and hung it in her bedroom.

The painting was eventually returned to Hungary, where it was sold at auction in 2014 to an unnamed Hungarian collector for $285,700.  

Baldwin is Lying

A grand jury in Northern New Mexico has decided to indict Alec Baldwin for the death two years ago of a co-worker, cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins.  The death was a result of the careless handling of a firearm on the Rust movie set.  Despite the vociferous claims of Baldwin that he was not responsible (specifically, that he “never pulled the trigger”), Baldwin will likely stand trial for involuntary manslaughter.

 

I have a few thoughts I’d like to share about what has incorrectly been called an “accident”.

 

Baldwin has long been publicly contemptuous of gun owners and the organizations that support gun safety.  Accordingly, the people on the set charged with ensuring the safety of the actors and crew had relatively little experience and the customary safety protocols on movie sets were largely ignored.  Even after several members of the crew quit after complaining about the lax attitude about gun safety on the set, no action was taken.  Baldwin, in his capacity as the film’s producer, was negligent for failing to take action.

 

According to the testimony of some of the crew, the firearms used on the set were also used for occasional target practice by the actors and crew.  No movie set should allow live ammunition to be present on the movie set for any reason.  If the actors need training in the proper use of a firearm, that training should take place at a supervised range—never on the movie set.

 

Whenever possible, rubber guns should be used instead of real firearms.  When real firearms are needed for action sequences or closeup shots, those firearms should never be aimed at another person.  In addition, an actor should never touch the trigger until that actor intends the weapon to fire.  

 

On the day of the shooting, several horrendous mistakes were made sequentially.  Inexcusably, someone loaded live ammunition into the firearm.  There are commonly three types of ammunition on movie sets.  First, there are blanks, a type of ammunition that, while it has no projectile, is still so dangerous that the safe handling of blank ammunition would take more space than this blog allows.  Sadly, while blanks were not responsible for the death on the Rust set, actors are still frequently injured or killed by the improper use of blank ammunition. 

 

When filming scenes in which actors load or unload a firearm, special dummy rounds are used that contain no powder or primer necessary to fire.  Some movie sets even take the extra precaution of using non-firing replica guns for such scenes.  There are also dummy cartridges that have holes drilled through the side of the cartridge to indicate they are non-firing.  Such cartridges occasionally are filled with large metal balls so that they rattle when handled.

 

The person charged with insuring firearm safety on the Rust set was inexperienced and she failed to ensure that the firearm used that day was unloaded.  When the pistol was handed to Baldwin, he failed to check that the gun was unloaded, as well.  Both failures are enough to justify each being charged with criminal negligence criminal or manslaughter.  Then, Baldwin aimed the gun at a coworker and cocked the hammer…And the firearm fired.

 

Baldwin maintains that he “never touched the trigger”.  Not that it matters, but let’s look at that claim in detail.

 

The pistol used by Baldwin was a single action revolver, meaning that the hammer must be manually cocked before every shot.  Using your thumb to pull the hammer fully to the rear rotates the cylinder, bringing a cartridge in line with the revolver.  The hammer is held back by the sear portion of the trigger until the trigger is pulled, disengaging the sear and allowing the hammer to fall, firing the cartridge.

Can the hammer fall without the trigger being pulled?  Yes, there are three situations in which the gun can fire without the trigger being pulled.  First, if the hammer is down, with the firing pin resting on the primer of a loaded cartridge—a condition that is inherently unsafe in that model Colt revolver—a sharp blow to the back of the hammer (such as might happen if the pistol were dropped) can fire the cartridge.  That did not happen on the Rust set.

 

Secondly, the hammer has been wired back so that the sear cannot engage, so that releasing the hammer causes the gun to fire immediately.  Though very rare, there are a few “slip shooters” who prefer to fire that pistol that way.  Unless you are a very experienced marksman, this is almost a guaranteed way to miss your target.  I had an uncle who preferred to shoot in this bizarre manner, and even he didn’t recommend the method.  The Italian replica of the Colt revolver that Baldwin held when the shooting took place had not been modified.

 

The only other way for the pistol to fire without the trigger being pulled is for the sear to be defective or worn down and fail to hold the hammer in the rearmost position.  This is probably what Baldwin is trying to claim happened to the pistol he was handed.  The problem with this defense is that it requires the sear to be badly and visibly damaged.  Baldwin’s gun has been analyzed by experts, including the experts at the FBI laboratory, and the sear was documented to be not damaged.

 

Baldwin is criminally negligent because he hired an incompetent and inexperienced “expert” (whose hiring was a combination of nepotism and equity hiring) to oversee safety on the set.  Baldwin is criminally negligent because, even after experienced crew members complained about the lack of safety protocols on the set, he failed to establish appropriate safety protocols.  (Some crew members felt so strongly about this that they resigned rather than continue working in what they considered unsafe conditions.).  Baldwin is criminally negligent because, when handed a deadly weapon, he did not personally check to see if the pistol was loaded.  Baldwin is criminally negligent because he pointed a deadly weapon at a person and cocked it.  And lastly, Baldwin is criminally negligent because he absolutely pulled the trigger, shooting that poor woman.  There is absolutely, positively no other possible, credible explanation for the gun’s firing.

 

Baldwin is lying.

Everything Has a Precedent If You Search For It

Recently we had an extraordinary lapse of national security.  Our Secretary of Defense went into the hospital, evidently without notifying anyone either above or below him in the chain of command of his planned absence.   If what we read in the papers is to be believed (admittedly a rather large caveat), neither the White House nor the Secretary of State noticed his absence for several days.

Secretary of Defense Austin is a retired 4-star general, so there is no doubt that he is an expert on the chain of command, so I’m inclined to believe this was an inadvertent accident like the numerous times previous presidents have misplaced the launch codes or accidentally driven off without the military officer carrying the nuclear football.  Every administration is made up of people and we all know how unreliable people are.

Naturally, there was only one possible reaction to the news:  Has something like this ever happened before?  Of course, it has.

In 1897, after being elected president, William McKinley started assembling his cabinet.  The Republican Party had two competing factions, a group led by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge—who favored more military expansion and American involvement in world affairs—and a rival group, led by Governor John Davis Long, that pushed for a more modest, slower military expansion, believing that large militaries encourage countries to engage in war (and in the process bankrupt their economies).  Each of the two rival factions had its own favorite candidate for the position of Secretary of the Navy.

Few Americans can name the Secretary of the Navy today, but at the end of the 19th century, the civilian head of the American Navy was much more important than it is today.  The ever so much politically correctly named Department of Defense was not created until 1949, so the military was divided into two main branches.  The army was led by the Secretary of War and the navy was headed by the Secretary of the Navy.  

Since President McKinley was a close friend of John Davis Long, Long became the new Secretary of the Navy while Lodge’s choice, a young Theodore Roosevelt was picked to be the Assistant Secretary of the Navy.  Since Roosevelt was the number two man, in a much less glamorous position, he should have become a minor footnote in history.

While Long wanted to modernize the navy, he wanted a small scale program of gradual growth and slow replacement of the aging ships.  His deputy, Roosevelt, wanted….well, everything and wanted it done yesterday.  Long let most of the established departments run themselves, Teddy on the other hand stuck his nose into everything and everywhere, constantly asking questions and making suggestions.  Think of it this way, an elderly Mother Superior was in charge and her deputy was Miley Cyrus on crack.

Luckily for future historians, both men were compulsive writers, and each wrote numerous letters, kept journals, and would later wrote conflicting books on the history of the US Navy.  In Long’s book, The New American Navy, he described his energetic subordinate.

He worked indefatigably, frequently incorporating his views in memoranda which he would place every morning on my desk.  Most of his suggestions had, however, so far as applicable, been already adopted by the various bureaus, the chiefs of which were straining every nerve and leaving nothing not done. . . . He was heart and soul in his work.  His typewriters had no rest.  

Roosevelt, on the other hand wrote about how only a strong navy could uphold the honor of a country, that a strong navy was the best possible guarantee of safety for a nation and that if you didn’t understand that, you probably had to sit down to pee.  (That’s loosely paraphrased.)  All of Roosevelt’s plans probably would have come to naught if Henry Long had not been absent from the office so often.

Whether Long was truly sick or was just a raging hypochondriac is a matter of debate among naval historians.  What we are sure about is that  Long was frequently absent from the office, traveling for his or his daughter’s health to distant health spas, thus leaving the Navy in the hands of Roosevelt (and his rabid typewriter).  

As war with Spain over the independence of Cuba grew closer, Roosevelt began to make frantic plans.  Wanting to strengthen the US fleet on the east coast, Roosevelt took advantage of Long’s absence to order the USS Oregon to sail from San Francisco to Florida around the tip of South America—a journey of 14,000 nautical miles.  The entire nation eagerly read newspaper accounts of the perilous 66-day voyage.  Years later, Roosevelt would use that long delay as a reason for seizing Panama and building the Panama Canal.

While the Oregon sailed, Roosevelt continued to make plans.  He ordered Admiral Dewey to resupply his fleet in the far East and move closer to the Spanish-held Philippines.  Having prepared the navy for war, Roosevelt then resigned his post and began organizing a volunteer force, commonly called the Rough Riders.  

Secretary of the Navy Long thought this last move was foolish.  As Long recorded in his daily journal:

He has lost his head to this unutterable folly of deserting the post where he is of most service and running off to ride a horse and, probably, brush mosquitoes from his neck on the Florida sands.  His heart is right, and he means well, but it is one of those cases of aberration-desertion-vain-glory; of which he is utterly unaware.... Everyone of his friends advises him, he is acting like a fool. And, yet, how absurd all this will sound if, by some turn of fortune, he should accomplish some great thing and strike a very high mark. 

Well, as we all know, Roosevelt led his men up Kettle Hill, across the connecting saddle to San Juan Hill—site of the last land battle for Cuba—and became a public hero, eventually being honored with the Medal of Honor.  His success in battle had one other memorable result.

In 1899, Vice-President Garrett Hobart died of a heart attack, leaving the country without a vice-president until the next election.  Once again, each of the two camps of Republican leadership had a candidate they urged President McKinley to select.  The traditional Republicans wanted John Davis Long, while Senator Lodge urged McKinley to pick the newly-elected governor of New York, Theodore Roosevelt.  Obviously, McKinley chose Roosevelt as his new vice-president and after just a few months in office, Roosevelt became our 26th president when McKinley was assassinated.  

Long, somewhat bitter, resigned his post as the Secretary of the Navy and Roosevelt replaced him with someone more to his liking, sending the new secretary a letter of warning about the men in the department.

You will have to struggle against the men who believe in the old system of quiet and rest; of ships that never wear out by work but only by rust, and of respectable men who live long and never do anything wrong because they never do anything at all.  

Once retired, Long wrote his history of the Modern Navy, carefully explaining that Roosevelt had been wrong about everything and anything good in the navy was due to his careful leadership.  Roosevelt, as Commander in Chief, ordered that no copy of Long’s book be allowed aboard any ship of the navy.

Actually, Roosevelt never found the right man to head the Navy during his time as President:  by the time he left office, four different men had attempted to run the Navy to his standards.  (One of those short-term appointees was Charles Bonaparte, the grandnephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, but I promised not to mention the Corsican anymore.)

It is interesting to think what might have happened if Long had stayed in the office more instead of running to various mountains and springs for his health.  Would we have even fought in the Spanish American War?  Would the Panama Canal ever have been built?  Would the United States have had a large enough navy during World War I?  Would Theodore’s cousin have followed in his footsteps and served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and eventually become our 32nd President?

One last point.  The USS Oregon did arrive in Florida in time to fight in the war.  The last and culminating battle of the war occurred on July 3, 1898 when the Spanish fleet attempted to break the American blockade outside the harbor of Santiago de Cuba.  The Spanish Fleet was old and was no match for the American Navy, led by the USS Oregon.  One by one, the Spanish ships were either destroyed or forced to beach themselves to avoid the larger American ships.  The last ship to run aground and be scuttled by its Spanish crew was the Cristobal Colon.

The Spanish Empire in the New World began with Christopher Columbus and ended 406 years later with the scuttling of a ship named after Columbus.  There’s a pleasing symmetry in that.

Salmon and Gluckstein

One of the great benefits in being retired is that I no longer feel obligated to re-read the books that I assigned to my students and I don’t have to read the newest publications in any field…. In short, I don’t have to read anything I don’t want to.  Having said this, I still read just about anything put in front of me, but I no longer feel guilty about it.

The wonderful people at Penzler Publishers (the publishing company started by Otto Penzler and the Mysterious Bookshop) have been reprinting quality hardbacks of great mysteries long out of print.  Unfortunately, this series does NOT include any of the works of Rex Stout, one of my favorite authors, because Bantam Books holds the rights to all of the author’s works and stubbornly refuses to reprint any of them except in cheap paperback editions.  Otto Penzler once assured me that if Bantam ever relinquishes the rights, he will reprint the entire Nero Wolfe series.

One of the books currently being offered by Penzler Press is Vincent Starrett’s Murder on “B” Deck, a book that has been out of print for almost a century.  Starrett was a prolific American writer who might be better known for having been one of the foremost authorities on all matters related to Sherlock Holmes as well being known as a newspaperman who wrote a weekly column on books for a Chicago newspaper for over 25 years.  Since Starrett was born in an apartment over a bookstore, perhaps his occupation was in his DNA.  When he passed away in 1974, his Chicago gravestone was carved in the shape of an open book.

While I regularly purchase “new” Penzler books, I also found a first edition of Murder on “B” Deck from a London bookseller at a reasonable price.  (I receive a lot of books from England and occasionally one arrives in a distinctive bag bearing the imprint of the Royal Mail Service, something my postman enjoys as much as I do.).  The book arrived in good condition, but the book’s flyleaves bear an interesting inscription:

This book is the property of 
SALMON & GLUCKSTEIN LTD,
And is loaned at the rate of twopence
Per period of seven days or part
Thereof counting from date of issue.
If lost, will finder kindly return it to
any S. & G. BRANCH
BRANCHES EVERYWHERE

Salmon Gluckstein sounds like a like a Kosher brand of lox.  And if they have branches everywhere, why have I never heard of them?  And a tuppence a week sounds like a bargain to rent a book.  Obviously, I needed to do a little more research.

The story starts with Samuel Gluckstein, a cigar maker who left Prussia and moved to London sometime in 1841.  By 1855, he had opened his own company that made and sold cigars, helped by his four sons.   In 1873, the company was incorporated as Salmon and Gluckstein after Samuel took in Barnett Salmon, who had married one of Gluckstein’s seven daughters.  Over the next century, the company would change, spin off new companies, and branch out in ways never imagined by the founder, but would remain a family business with leadership remaining with either a Salmon or a Gluckstein.

The two families established an unusual form of partnership wherein every member received the same salary, a home, and (eventually) a car, but the rest of the profits were plowed back into the company, enabling a remarkable amount of growth.  Almost immediately, the company expanded its production from cigars to cigarettes and other forms of tobacco, as well as producing its own line of briar pipes.  Eventually, there were over 120 S. & G. tobacco stores across England.  If you are wondering about the picture, Navy Cut refers to a specific cut of tobacco used by the British Royal Navy where instead of an entire leaf of tobacco being cut, the leaves were pressed into blocks that were then cut across the grain into chips, making tobacco that was easier to pack and store in humid environments.  The lifeboat image was to inspire confidence.  

Shortly after the turn of the century, the stores added a lending library service, providing books for patrons to read for a fee so small that it is obvious that the books themselves were not a source of profit and someone in the business understood human nature.  While a burning cigar smells to everyone but the person smoking it like it was not hand rolled by a skilled tobacconist, but collected from the fetid field of grazing sheep, the aroma of a fully stocked cigar store is all but heavenly.  I don’t smoke, but whenever I visit a good tobacco shop, I am tempted to start.  Obviously, the customer who rented and later returned this book bought enough cigars to make the whole program profitable.  

Even as S. & G. tobacco shops merged with other companies, merged again, and then shut down the little shops as they expanded their sales worldwide, the Salmon and Gluckstein families spun off another “small” business, the J. Lyon tea shops and cafeterias, that spread across England roughly around the turn of the century.  One of the things that made the tea shops so popular was that the waitresses, called “Nippies”, wore distinctive uniforms and acted as chaperones to the fashionable young ladies of High Street who met there.  

By the middle of the twentieth century, there were over 200 such tea shops and the company had branched out into making cakes, teas, and various sweets.  By the early 1950’s, the company was selling the first business computers and had a large string of restaurants under a variety of names and franchises.  The company eventually sold its computer division to Fujitsu.  While the tobacco shops and little tea shops have all closed, the company continues on.  I wonder what Samuel Gluckstein would think of it all.

So, I can now sit down and enjoy Murder on “B” Deck without worrying to whom I should pay my tuppence.  I really wish I could know more about the people who read this book before me.  Most likely most of the readers were men, since—though it might just be my imagination—my book smells ever so faintly of cigars.