Barefaced cheek: Rubens nudes fall foul of Facebook censors

Flanders tourist board chides firm for removing ads featuring the Flemish master’s works

Daniel Boffey in Brussels

Rubens nudes have entranced those visiting the world’s great art galleries for some 400 years. Contemporaries on whom the Flemish master is said to have had a profound impact include Van Dyck and Rembrandt … but none of this has passed muster with Facebook’s censors.

In a move that has prompted a semi-playful complaint to the company’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, it has taken down a series of promotions on social media for the Belgian region of Flanders because they feature works by the artist famous for his Baroque paintings of voluptuous women and cherubs.

Advertisements containing sexually oriented content, including artistic or educational nudes, apart from statues, are prohibited on the site.

In an open letter signed by most of the museums in Flanders, the Flemish tourist board, Toerisme Vlaanderen, has written to Zuckerberg to ask for a rethink. “Breasts, buttocks and Peter Paul Rubens’ cherubs are all considered indecent”, the letter says. “Not by us, but by you … Even though we secretly have to laugh about it, your cultural censorship is making life rather difficult for us.”

Posts removed have even included an advert featuring Rubens’ The Descent from the Cross, in which Jesus is naked in his loincloth.

The Flemish tourist board has pushed its point by releasing a short video in which the “nude police” drag away visitors at the Rubens House in Antwerp to stop them from gazing at the implicated paintings.

The tourist office is currently running a two-year programme promoting the Flemish masters Rubens, Pieter Bruegel and Jan van Eyck.

The office’s chief executive, Peter De Wilde, said: “Unfortunately, promoting our unique cultural heritage on the world’s most popular social network is impossible right now.”

Facebook said it had accepted an offer from the tourist office to talk about the issue, and insisted that the paintings would not be prohibited in normal posts, but only in advertisements.

The German government recently condemned Facebook after Zuckerberg announced that it would not remove posts containing Holocaust denial, on the basis that his customers had a right to free expression.

Paintings worth millions found after $15K storage sale in N.J.

By Anthony G. Attrino

tattrino@njadvancemedia.com,

NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

When a  N.J. elementary school teacher offered David Killen a chance to buy 200 paintings she had in storage, the Manhattan art dealer thought they'd make great filler items at his next auction.

"I thought it was a bunch of junk," Killen said Monday. "I saw good, bad and ugly. Overall, I thought it was garbage, but I'm always looking for filler."

He offered $75 a painting - a total of $15,000.

When he loaded the boxes of artwork onto his truck, he began to realize he'd stumbled onto an unbelievable find that could fetch millions.

"The more I looked at them, the more I realized - these are real de Koonigs,"

Willem de Kooning was a Dutch abstract expressionist artist who died in 1997. His paintings have sold worldwide for tens of millions.

Two experts say the paintings Killen has are authentic.

Originally, the 200 pieces of art were gathered in New York City, in a world-famous art restoration studio run by conservator Orrin Riley.

When Riley died in 1986, his girlfriend Susanne Schnitzer took possession of the paintings and held onto them for years, according to Killen.

In 2009, Schnitzer was hit by a car and died.

Her trusted friends - a group from New Jersey serving as executors that included the teacher - took the paintings, along with many other of Schnitzer's possessions and stored them in Ho-Ho-Kus.

"They tried to do the right thing and return everything to its original owner," Killen said.

But there were a bunch of paintings whose owners they could not track down. Killen surmises the pieces were given up by their owners, who collected insurance money on them based on claims of damages.

"If you look at them closely, you can see there are slight tears and holes here and there," he said. "I believe they were given to Orrin to be restored after the owners collected insurance."

After several years, the group from New Jersey contacted the New York State Attorney General's Office asking what they should do with the paintings, Killen said.

The AG's office told them they were now considered abandoned property and they could do whatever they wanted - including sell them.

"I didn't hear back for a year, then they called and said, 'Do you still want it?'" Killen said. "I said, 'Sure.'"

Killen declined to name the teacher or her friends, saying he did not have permission to identify them.

He says he plans to place the paintings up for auction in the fall and will advertise the sales on his website.

"I've been in this business for many years," he said. "I sell buy and sell paintings all the time. Never in a million years would I dream of finding original works like this."

If you hear a voice

“If you hear a voice within you say "you cannot paint,” then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.“ - Vincent Van Gogh

Sir John Everett Millais

Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Baronet, was an English painter and illustrator who was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He was a child prodigy who, aged eleven, became the youngest student to enter the Royal Academy Schools. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded at his family home in London, at 83 Gower Street (now number 7). Millais became the most famous exponent of the style, his painting Christ in the House of His Parents (1850) generating considerable controversy, and painting perhaps the embodiment of the school, Ophelia, in 1851.

By the mid-1850s Millais was moving away from the Pre-Raphaelite style to develop a new form of realism in his art. His later works were enormously successful, making Millais one of the wealthiest artists of his day, but some former admirers including William Morris saw this as a sell-out (Millais notoriously allowed one of his paintings to be used for a sentimental soap advertisement). While these and early 20th-century critics, reading art through the lens of Modernism, viewed much of his later production as wanting, this perspective has changed in recent decades, as his later works have come to be seen in the context of wider changes and advanced tendencies in the broader late nineteenth-century art world.

Millais's personal life has also played a significant role in his reputation. His wife Effie was formerly married to the critic John Ruskin, who had supported Millais's early work. The annulment of the marriage and her wedding to Millais have sometimes been linked to his change of style, but she became a powerful promoter of his work and they worked in concert to secure commissions and expand their social and intellectual circles.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (later known as the Pre-Raphaelites) was a group of English painters, poets, and critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

 The three founders were joined by William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens and Thomas Woolner to form the seven-member "brotherhood". Their principles were shared by other artists, including Ford Madox Brown, Arthur Hughes and Marie Spartali Stillman.

A later, medievalising strain inspired by Rossetti included Edward Burne-Jones and extended into the twentieth century with artists such as John William Waterhouse.

The group's intention was to reform art by rejecting what it considered the mechanistic approach first adopted by Mannerist artists who succeeded Raphael and Michelangelo. Its members believed the Classical poses and elegant compositions of Raphael in particular had been a corrupting influence on the academic teaching of art, hence the name "Pre-Raphaelite".

In particular, the group objected to the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds, founder of the English Royal Academy of Arts, whom they called "Sir Sloshua". To the Pre-Raphaelites, according to William Michael Rossetti, "sloshy" meant "anything lax or scamped in the process of painting ... and hence ... anything or person of a commonplace or conventional kind".

 The brotherhood sought a return to the abundant detail, intense colors and complex compositions of Quattrocento Italian art. The group associated their work with John Ruskin, an English critic whose influences were driven by his religious background.

The group continued to accept the concepts of history painting and mimesis, imitation of nature, as central to the purpose of art. The Pre-Raphaelites defined themselves as a reform movement, created a distinct name for their form of art, and published a periodical, The Germ, to promote their ideas. The group's debates were recorded in the Pre-Raphaelite Journal.

  

Dead aim