The air in the church hung heavy with incense and wax, pressing down upon the congregants as fatigue does upon an eyelid. Through this fog, the disparate small flames of the candles, stuck into pedestaled candle holders filled with sand, united in a diffuse glow that warmed the gold leaf of the altar, the robes of the priests, the deacons, and the altar boys, the hands of the choirmaster, and the faces of the babushkas, framed by the cloth of their headscarves, as they fulfilled the duties of praying or fussing about.

Many Wednesday and Friday evenings and every Sunday of my adolescence were spent standing there for two hours at a time, next to my mother, collecting myself into something that resembled introspection, concealing the profound boredom that would take over me. In this boredom, I would look at the images surrounding me: the frescoes of saints Vera, Nadezhda, Lyubov—Faith, Hope, and Love—on one wall, the seven deadly sins on another, angels and biblical motifs on the domed ceilings. The church, built on the bank of the Moskva in 1769 by Count Alexey Grigorievich Razumovsky, a cossack who slept his way to the top, ascending through the ranks as the lover of Empress Elizaveta Petrovna, is named after its central icon, Знамение, Our Lady of the Sign, depicting the Annunciation at the moment of Christ’s conception. The Virgin’s hands raised are to the heavens, the child in an aureole upon her chest. What I remember best about this icon was the time I was reprimanded by one of the fussing babushkas who had seen me find my reflection in the glass of its frame and fix my own headscarf. Vanity.

The prayers I had known by heart have long disintegrated into incidental shards of Old Slavonic. Instead, I remember the stories of the relics I have encountered in my years of coerced piety: the icon, also of the Virgin Mary, that churchgoers at the Vvedensky Monastery in Kyiv discovered had embossed itself on the glass before it one morning; years prior the icon had cried, real, salty tears supposedly streaming down the cheeks of the image, a fairly common type of miracle. Shortly after the embossing was discovered, it was said to have cured a pregnant woman from hepatitis.

Or an older example, one of which I had only seen derivative versions—the Panagia Portaitissa, held on Mount Athos since 999 A.D., where she is the only representative of the female sex; the icon was said to have been stabbed and dropped in the sea by Byzantine iconoclasts and recovered on the island by Gabriel the Iberian, a monk on the island, who had received the instructions for its retrieval from the Virgin herself when she came to him in a dream, he was to walk over water until he found it. The icon was placed in the main church of the monastery, only to go missing again the next morning. It appeared atop the entry gate, where it had “chosen” to protect the cloister and its men. There it has stayed, albeit now enclosed in a chapel.

There is Our Lady of Kazan, which, since being brought from Constantinople to the Russes in the fifteenth century, had a habit of going missing for a century at a time, appearing in dreams, being recovered from ashes, and later, through police investigations. Its habitual disappearances came to be interpreted in the Orthodox church as a sign of historic cataclysms to come. It is unclear if the original icon still exists.

Convoluted as they are, these narratives imbue their subjects and the sites that house them with greater value on the market of religious veneration—they become the end-point of pilgrimages; believers in their wonders leave behind jewelry and photographs of loved ones, notes, and other keepsakes. It was always in religion’s favor that when it comes to these objects, provenance is most often a matter of faith. 

***

In a period of itinerancy that has brought upon me a state of clattering lonesomeness, in every city I find myself drawn to its museums to find some sort of center, or balance, or God, or myself, or peace, or whatever it is that the spiritually-inclined look for in the places they designate for worship. I mostly think of it as silence, a reprieve from the clatter. The itinerancy, a result of world-historical events beyond the confines of my life, feels counteracted in being surrounded by objects that function as conduits of time, its concentration mounting until it overwhelms my lifespan and those of everyone else in the galleries with me. But what isn’t the product of historical events beyond itself? The fact that the paintings I was looking at were on these walls and the paths they had taken to end up there were in themselves confirmation of this.

Always historicize. And so, at the Musée d’Orsay, in a gallery near the end of an enfilade, where people move like schools of fish around a coral reef, I stand before the parquet planers—Les Raboteurs de parquet, completed by Gustave Caillebotte in 1875. It is a painting of a room, illuminated with a cool light through its window, guarded with decorative wrought iron. Three men kneel, their bare torsos bent towards the floor, doing what they are announced to be doing in the painting’s title. Two of them with their heads turned slightly towards each other, as if mid-conversation, the kind that is inconclusive, constructed of remarks, quickly absorbed by the activity that kindled it. The wood shavings lay on the floor in delicate curls, which one can imagine dancing from under the workers’ tools. The rest of the floor possesses a dull gleam, like tarnished gold. In the corner, there is a bottle of red wine, a tumbler, half-full, next to it.

Like most of Caillebotte’s work, the painting possesses a photographic dynamism, reveling in the continuous present that it transmits; the composition slightly askew, the lines of the room pulling into its corner, the cropped frame in which the room is contained, offering voyeuristic intimacy. The painting’s theme was novel at the time—while depictions of those laboring in pastoral settings had long become common, the urban proletariat was new to the canvas. As these things went with the Impressionists when it was presented at the 1875 Paris Salon, the jury was shocked by the painting’s “crude realism,” the critics made accusations of torture, perspective its alleged victim, the artist grew ever more resistant to the orthodoxies of the academy. The painting was shown again the following year at the Second Impressionist Exhibition.

It went on to a rather sheltered journey through time, from one state institution to the next: in 1877, it was part of an auction at the Hôtel Drouot organized by Renoir, his own works among the 45 paintings, as well as those of Caillebotte, Pissarro, and Sisley. The paintings at the auction did poorly, fetching an average of 169 Francs; it appears the Caillebotte had bought back his floor planers, who had been offered at 655 Francs. It remained in the artist’s personal collection until his death in 1894, upon which it was bequeathed to the French Government, along with the rest of Caillebotte’s collection of 68 paintings, including the work of his friends—Pissarro, Renoir, Monet, Manet, Sisley, Degas, Cézanne, and, of course, his own. The bequest stipulated that the works should be displayed at the Musée du Luxembourg, and it took Renoir, who was the executor of the will, some negotiating for the collection to enter that of the museum. This was the first presentation of the Impressionists in an official venue. It remained there until it was moved to the Louvre in 1929. In 1947, it was moved to the Jeu de Paume, with a brief detour to the Élysée Palace between 1977 and 1978, where it was called in by President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who was undoing the modernist redecoration of his predecessor, Georges Pompidou; Giscard d’Estaing’s tastes skewed in the direction of what, by then, was considered more traditional. In 1986, the Raboteurs made their way to the Museé d’Orsay, where now listless viewers like myself can admire it for idiosyncratic amounts of time.

The list of hands and institutions through which the painting has passed can be read as a linear accounting for the origins of a museum item; it exists as such on the museum’s website and betrays little of what it carries with it. For one, it is the story of how Impressionism went from being an outcast art movement to an establishment darling—about the friendships and alliances that were at the movements basis, about the fact that, by the time the painting was moved from the Musée du Luxembourg, which then showed only the work of living artists, those who were represented in the donated collection were no longer such; it is the story of the strategic foresight Caillebotte exercised not only as an artist but also as a collector, having known, that the works in his possession he regarded to be future art-historical treasures would otherwise languish in attics and on unwitting living room walls, would he, as a dead man, not insist that the French state not only accept them but display them; it is the story of the institutions themselves. It poses the question of what constitutes a movement, the painting discussed by far not the most representative of Impressionism and, if anything, more occupied with furthering the realist tradition. Does it add value? In simple market terms, probably. Though what does that matter when a painting is not for sale? It certainly adds heft to the painting’s presence on the museum’s walls, and even if all who come to look at it, with purpose or by happenstance, might not be aware of it, on some intuitive level, it makes itself known; it being, most likely, what Walter Benjamin meant by aura.

Though of course, if you really want to talk about provenance and how arresting it can be, you just need to travel a few floors down and step into one of the side galleries, where museumgoers never pass by Courbet’s L’Origine du monde with indifference.

***

At the Albertina in Vienna, I stood, once again, before a painting, barely able to keep in laughter. It was Paul Klee’s 1927 The Fool, in which, against a stormy brown background, a pink-faced man in a flared jester’s robe is mid-dance. The position of his legs encased in stockings suggests a wiggling lightness; his arms are splayed outwards, fingers fanned in jazz-hands fashion. Flying about this figure are the bells attached to its robe, which are oversized and look eerily like a swarm of flat-mouthed emoji, unamused, which was doubtfully the intent in 1927. Yet the meme-infested mind can not quiet itself. Stifling juvenile giggles, I thought, "What if THIS was the Angel of History?” It was hung in a hallway-like space between galleries; nobody else seemed to share my response, they just walked by. I shall spare us all the spoof version of the ninth thesis in On the Concept of History that began its vague dance in my mind; if I were to resort back to the language of religion, this was certainly a case of being befallen by temptation. I took a picture, which I would later post to my Instagram stories with a goofy caption, and moved on too.

Nobody comes to look at art with a pure mind, not with the reference libraries most carry in their heads, even if they are of varying sizes, even if the junk that intermixes with the masterworks is different in each one. Perhaps the marker of a good education is the ability to unpack this library, but what is left for the rest of us? For our perception to be interrupted by involuntary eruptions of humor that function like a memetic jack-in-the-box, falling limp as soon as it jumps out, that is what appears to be left. And so, Walter Benjamin sits next to emoji and basic meme formats—me when I… that feeling when…—signaling that I hold a university degree in liberal arts or something like it and am part of a particular generational cohort that has spent a lot of time online, my own thinking characterizing me in the most facile terms possible. What it also does is reduce Benjamin’s Theses to empty form, husk-like, along with my own personhood. Just like the memes. Sacrilege.

Even when pushed further, this has its obvious limitations: I did, in earnest, start working on a spoof version of the most famous of Benjamin’s theses, only to understand that much of the text’s magic is its baggage—the provenance of its subject, Paul Klee’s, Angelus Novus (1920). Benjamin bought the painting from the artist, a friend, in 1921, setting off the chain that would become the work’s fate. Like the collector he had once described, the fragment sees him, its narrator, turning into the earnest “physiognomist of the world of objects,” ascribing the image its meaning, telling us that the angel’s face is turned towards the past, that all of history, to him, is a single catastrophe, that a storm from Paradise gets caught in his wings, and propels him, violently, into the future; “this storm is what we call progress,” he concludes.

Where has the catastrophe or progress—the two sometimes swirling together into a tornado of circumstance—taken the Angel? In the ’30s, it led an itinerant life along with its owner, roaming Europe, their final resting stop together at a disused furniture factory in Vernuche, France, that functioned as an internment camp for German Jews. Before departing on his final, fatal journey to Spain, Benjamin left the Angel, along with his papers, to Georges Bataille; after the war, the Angel, along with the philosopher’s other possessions, traveled to New York, into the custody of Theodor Adorno. From Adorno’s hands, the Angel wandered to Jerusalem, into those of Walter Benjamin’s close friend, the man who became the custodian of his legacy, Gershom Scholem, whose widow later gave the painting to the Israel Museum in 1987. Its paper now fragile, the painting is rarely exhibited, but it seems bitterly providential that the Angel now observes the catastrophe of history from what was, during Benjamin’s life, Palestine.

There is little I can say about the fate of The Fool, other than that it was lent to the Albertina for the long term by the son of a German TV baron, who followed in his father's footsteps, or that Klee had painted it during his Bauhaus days. But I cannot look at it without thinking about the emoji or Angelus Novus, though, if anything, it is perhaps affirmative of the disjunction between the lyrical thrust of Benjamin’s thesis and Klee’s naive, silly manner of figuration of Benjamin’s peculiar sense of humor.

“The only exact knowledge there is,” said Anatole France, as quoted by Benjamin in the essay Unpacking my Library, “is the knowledge of the date of publication and the format of the books.” And so, perhaps, it is too with anything else. Everything else is the fantasies and historiographical projections we read into it, the physiognomies we, as unwitting collectors of images, interpret.

***

A fifteen-minute walk away, past the Staatsoper and the Burggarten, into the hallway of the Museumsquartier’s courtyards, at the Leopold Museum, I wandered through an exhibition dedicated to German New Objectivity. Titled Splendor and Misery, the exhibition was curated to capture the interwar period and the strange transitional state of its licentious decadence as it sobers up and sees the harsh light cast upon the world. Things as they are.

The centerpiece of this exhibition, as the museum identified it in their ads across the city, was Christian Schad’s Self-Portrait with Model. Made in Vienna in 1927, the picture depicts the artist glancing sideways from the painting, a probing furrow in his brows, his lips pressed together firmly, hair slicked back. He wears a diaphanous absinthe-green shirt, his torso still bare under this futile veil of fabric, which gathers like a shadow in the folds of his body, the patch of hair on his chest flattened by the tasseled strings binding the shirt’s neckline. Behind him is a woman, the model from the painting’s title, sitting in profile, her hair in a sharp black bob that echoes her aquiline nose, her face made up according to the fashion of the time, lips parted slightly, and a scar on her cheek like the ones the artist had seen on the faces of women in Naples—marks left by men on their lovers, an assertion of ownership. She is nude, besides a black ribbon tied in a bow on her wrist and a sliver of a red stocking that the viewer is otherwise left to imagine. A white narcissus protrudes from behind her shoulder. In the window, a transparent curtain reveals the rooftops of what looks like Paris in the twilight. A symbolic (as stated by the artist himself) exploration of narcissism and identity (as determined by art historians), the painting possesses a piercing coldness; there’s a seductive cruelty in the artist’s indictment of himself and his contemporaries, whether it is out of judgment or nihilistic embrace of its soul-sickness. The liminal quality of the painting—the clothed nakedness, the not-quite-night state of the sky, the composite character that is the model—captures the suspension of the historical moment; post-war is pre-war. Its details are excruciating.

While avoiding conscription during WWI, waiting it out in Switzerland, Schad was a participant witness to the founding of Cabaret Voltaire and the emergence of Dada, beginning his artistic career during this time. In the 1920s, carting through Naples, then Vienna, then settling in Berlin, he went on to become one of the prominent Post-Expressionists. In the 1930s, he was said to have withdrawn from art due to financial issues; he returned to painting in the 1940s, working obscurely but comfortably in the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg until his death in 1982. Many of his contemporaries, friends, those in the company of whose works his self-portrait will hang in Vienna until the end of this month—Otto Dix, George Grosz, Max Beckmann, Käthe Kollwitz, Karl Hofer—were decried by the Nazis as “insulting German feeling,” their work and featured in the 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition in Münich, and their career prospects slashed. Schad, however, had been spared this fate; in fact, his work was featured in Great German Art exhibition of the same year, whether it was because his symbolism hid behind a style more palatable to the nazis, even if it did sometimes depict men kissing or women masturbating, or the fact that he had been a member of the NSDAP between 1933 and 1943—unclear. Likely, both.

The bare facts of the painting’s comings and goings, beyond it being loaned to the Leopold Museum by the Tate, where it has been on a long-term loan from a private collection since 1994, are likely to be found among the Tate's documents. I don't have access to them now, and that doesn't really matter.

The list of dates, places, and names that constitute the painting’s provenance would probably not yield much in the way of narrative offerings. We are accustomed to looking for stories of artistic abandon at heroic scales, perseverance in the face of challenging circumstances, spectacular eccentricity, tragedy, and, if nothing else, evil genius; often, however, the art we admire carries with it the unremarkable. Perhaps it is a man who makes a moral compromise to continue doing the work he loves. Perhaps, it is not much of a moral compromise that he has made—when questioned under the denazification program of the Allied Forces, Schad would say that he was entirely disinterested in politics and point out his collection of occult books as proof of his misalignment with nazi ideology. Should this diminish the “value” of the work, the impact it has on the viewer? “The chronicler, who recounts events without distinguishing between the great and small, thereby accounts for the truth, that nothing which has ever happened is to be given as lost to history.” Benjamin, once again.

***

During a two-day layover in Zürich last summer, I went to the Kunsthaus. It was near perfect: I bought my ticket as the museum opened and, with two hours before I had to get to my computer to start working, I made my way through its galleries, mostly empty of other visitors, starting from its 1976 annexe by Erwin Müller to the original 1925 corpus by Karl Moser, through the 1958 extension by the Pfister brothers, into its latest, Chipperfield-designed, addition, each space exemplary of its time. I gave in easily to the delight and wonder of discovering works with which I had not been familiar prior, becoming infatuated with them; I was particularly overcome by this feeling in the small gallery of works by Félix Vallotton. At the risk of sounding overly sincere, I’ll admit to having found life-affirming comfort in the fact that there is so much of which I am not aware, to which only circumstance will lead me—an easy kind of luck.

This feeling filled the gallery spaces, clashing with the neutral grandiosity with which they were designed. But by the time I got to the Chipperfield building, this feeling was punctured. It may have been the newness of these walls, the abundance of brass that evoked a recent-datedness, or the Cathedral-like proportions of the windows, which offer an amount of light unnecessary for a museum, or it may have been the plaque near one of the 28 replicas of Degas’ Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, who stood there freely, not encased in glass, with her cotton tutu and a ribbon tying her bronze braid. The plaque informed visitors that the works in this part of the museum belong to the collection of the German-born Swiss arms manufacturer Emil Bührle, which was being investigated on account of provenance issues—much of Bührle’s collection was acquired in Nazi-occupied Paris—and that the museum was in the process of finding “just and fair solutions” to these issues with the heirs of the works’ former owners.

Not much time was left, and I felt saturated, so I headed out to walk around in the old town of Zürich. Having spent much of my childhood in the neighboring canton of Zug, I had once known this tangle of cobbled streets well. I walked them every Sunday after service; one of Switzerland’s few Orthodox churches was nearby. It was strange to be a tourist in a place that was once so familiar.

It was a breezy day for August, and the streets were mostly empty. I observed the tableaux of prosperity that the shop windows formed: at the luthier’s, the violins hung lined up by size, their lacquered spruce and rosewood bodies catching the light in their curves; the pharmacy displayed vitamins and fancy sunscreen, insoles for every kind of shoe and a large selection of elegant hair clips with tortoiseshell and malachite patterns; at the stationary store the Caran d'Ache pens and pencils and leather-bound notebooks beckoned suggestively with diligence and productivity. For a while, I stopped in front of an antique store. It was closed, but in the display’s lights gleamed a neoclassical mantel clock, with the bronze figure of a woman in luxuriant recline on a base of white stone; before it, the shop window bore the signs of attempted theft. Webs of cracked glass obstructed my view of the clock. The scene felt apt for a place designed to enchant, concealing the sinister in its neat, gold-threaded seams. I was not immune to its charms.

To observe it is one thing; to live with it is another. Most major museums across Europe and the United States disclaim one thing or another, acknowledging the injustice, inequality, or violence from which it has benefitted. Provenance is often at the center of these reckonings, as things of narrative potency are bound to be—it is where the mysteries to be solved and the controversies to be inflamed live. The Leopold Museum has had its fair share of Nazi loot and restitution controversies, and so has the Albertina. At the Musée d’Orsay, Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde had long been the subject of speculation, until 2018, when every riddle to do with the work, from who had commissioned it to, centrally, the identity of its sitter, was resolved by the historian Claude Schopp. The Kunsthaus in Zürich continues to account for the French art that it houses, returning paintings now and then. Just this summer, five paintings were removed from its collection, and a settlement was reached on the subject of another—and renewing its provenance research commitments and strategies.

A few months after my visit, in November, an exhibition titled A Future for The Past opened at the museum, which contextualizes the Bührle collection, bringing in the biographies of the former owners of individual works, “whose sale took place under questionable circumstances,” stating elsewhere in the materials for the exhibition that “the Kunsthaus wants to talk about these issues.” It is not the only museum that does: in recent years, museums across the west, from Brussels to Chicago, have put on exhibitions addressing the question of how the artifacts before the public’s eyes have ended up there. Museums are expanding and fortifying their provenance research departments, and new hires in this area make headlines, providing museums with opportunities to publicize these efforts in restitution and redemption. Provenance has become a useful tool in these attempts to redraw their legacies, entrenched in the histories of power in the nations that bore them, be they of the imperial, colonial, or financial sort. What else is an institution to do in the age of transparency?

In more abstract terms, I’d like to return to the collection, where provenance forms and turns into the fate of a work. Will it be moved unlawfully? Will it be moved because of a war? Will it be sold? What is the estimate and what is its realized prize? Will it end up on the walls of a sprawling private property? Of a corporate lobby? Of a museum? Or will it while away decades in a freeport? Another distillation: the owners of the world collecting its fate. It will inevitably outlive them, absorbing their collectors into history—and such, perhaps, is their purpose. Sometimes it is harder to account for where you have come from and where you have been than it is to let objects speak for you. On long-term loan.