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Did the Russians Take His Family’s Tintoretto? He’s Intent on Finding Out.
John Barry says that in the last days of World War II, his great-grandfather, a prominent German art historian, lost a massive painting of the 16th-century sea battle at Lepanto.
In the annals of history painting, few topics have captivated artists more than the Battle of Lepanto, an epic 16th-century naval contest in which massive fleets of Christian and Ottoman galleys clashed off the coast of Greece.
Among the numerous depictions of the scene is an enormous, 10-foot-wide version of the engagement created soon after it took place in 1571 that has been attributed to Tintoretto.
That work, “The Battle of Lepanto,” was sold in Venice in 1908 to a German archaeologist and art historian, Friedrich Sarre, the first director of the Museum for Islamic Art in Berlin.
The painting hung in that city for a time just before World War II. But then, as was the case with tens of thousands of works of art, its trail grew murky in the chaos of the times. The work was not listed as having been exhibited again in a public setting until the 1980s.
Now members of Sarre’s family have come forward to say they believe they know what happened to the painting. John Barry, a great-grandson of Sarre, said it is likely the work was looted from the archaeologist’s spacious villa outside Berlin in 1945 when Russian forces advanced to occupy the home and much of that area, based on family writings from that time.
Those documents, the family acknowledges, do not discuss the painting’s whereabouts then or during the war. But Barry said they represent a good start and that his efforts to further track the work have been stymied by Sotheby’s, the auction house, which sold the painting in 2016.
Sotheby’s has a team that focuses on the provenance of artworks that could have been lost as a result of persecution in World War II. It has publicized its success in settling multiple restitution claims. But Barry said that for more than two years, Sotheby’s has stonewalled his efforts to learn more about “Lepanto” beyond what appeared in its sale catalog.
That catalog, as Barry points out, referred to a 1910 exhibition in which his great-grandfather had been listed as the work’s owner. Yet when Barry pressed Sotheby’s for help in tracking the painting, he said an auction house representative questioned whether the painting it had sold was even the same one.
“There are many extant oil paintings of the Battle of Lepanto — it is in fact one of the most painted sea battles of the 16th and 17th Centuries — and I am struggling to connect the dots,” Lucian Simmons, the worldwide head of restitution at Sotheby’s wrote to Barry, according to email records Barry provided.
In fact, Barry said, the Sotheby’s catalog cited another connection to his great-grandfather —— an article he had written about the painting in 1938.
Barry, a lawyer who formerly served in the U.S. Justice Department, said he is disappointed that Sotheby’s stopped responding to his queries more than a year ago.
“A firm like Sotheby’s cannot take the public-facing position that a painting’s looted provenance matters greatly from the point-of-view of ethics, integrity, and market value, and then selectively ignore those concerns and refuse to come clean when it is confronted with uncomfortable facts,” he wrote in an email message to The New York Times.
Sotheby’s said it has treated Barry’s inquiries appropriately and that it has made every reasonable effort to evaluate his claims and engage in an open exchange. In a statement, Sotheby’s referred to Barry’s great-grandfather as a “pioneering scholar” and expressed sympathy for the family’s loss of the villa and its treatment by the Russians. But it said it has seen no evidence to clearly indicate Sarre owned the painting after 1910 and found no indication that it had been looted.
“Sotheby’s remains amenable,” the statement said, “to facilitating an amicable solution with the Sarre family in the event that WWII-era evidence of ownership and loss comes to light.”
So many works were looted in Europe during the war that museums and the art market have committed to analyzing the history of paintings like the Lepanto battle image that have significant gaps in their wartime histories. Most of those works were lost by Jews at the hands of the Nazis. The Sarre case is different in that he was from a Huguenot background and the work, at least according to the family’s thesis, would have been lost to the Russians, who the U.S. State Department has said carted away major amounts of art and archives from Germany at the end of the war.
There is no evidence, though, that this painting ever left Germany. The most recent research by the Sarre family indicates that by 1957 it was in the possession of a German scientist whose heirs held onto it for more than a decade.
Complicating any transport of the painting would have been its immense size, which was perhaps viewed as necessary by the artist to capture the scope of a battle that featured hundreds of vessels and left thousands on either side dead or wounded. Giorgio Vasari, Paolo Veronese and Titian were among the other artists who depicted the battle, in which a coalition of forces from Spain, Venice and other states, assembled at the urging of the Pope Pius V, defeated a fleet from the Ottoman Empire.
One expert, Frederick Ilchman, chairman of European art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, said he is not convinced “Lepanto” is by Tintoretto, given differences he noted with other battle scenes by the artist.
“Tintoretto tends to present particular moments of drama in the foregrounds of his compositions, adding anecdotal interest to the story,” said Ilchman, who co-curated a major 2019 exhibition on the painter at the National Gallery of Art. “That is absent here.”
But, even so, he said he found the monumental depiction of one of the top naval conflicts of all time “automatically interesting.”
Sotheby’s characterized the Lepanto painting in its catalog as “attributed” to Tintoretto, a term it uses to indicate there are serious grounds to believe a work is by a particular artist. In the auction house’s protocol it is one step in certainty below saying a work is “by” an artist.
Soon after acquiring “Lepanto” in Venice, Sarre lent the painting to the 1910 Munich exhibition where a catalog identified its owner as Fr. Sarre. It was displayed again in Berlin in 1936 and two years later Sarre discussed the importance of the painting in the article he wrote. He said it had been in a private collection in Berlin for 30 years, but he did not mention that the collection was his own.
The whereabouts of the painting during the war remain unclear, but Barry has collected documents that indicate Sarre’s home in an area outside Berlin was occupied by the Red Army in June 1945. One of Sarre’s sons wrote in a diary entry that on June 4, 1945, the Russians gave his family an hour to leave their home. Barry said Sarre’s wife, Maria, wrote in a 1954 memoir that she departed with only a dress, a coat and a blanket, adding that her family had lost “art treasures.”
The Barry family said it had determined that by 1957 the painting was in the possession of Arthur Scheunert, a scientist whose image later appeared on an East German postage stamp. Scheunert’s family attempted in the 1970s to sell the work to the State Museums of Berlin, which includes the Museum for Islamic Art. But the sale did not go through, according to a 1986 letter from the museum to Sarre’s daughter, Maria Louise Sarre
Sotheby’s catalog for the 2016 auction of “Lepanto” did not include information about the whereabouts of the painting for the decades after 1936, saying only that it had been acquired before 1980 by Alfred Lefmann, a German collector. The auction house said that the provenance provided in the 2016 catalog was the most complete available at that time, and that the painting was never listed in databases of lost artworks.
It was exhibited in Germany in the 1980s, on loan from Lefmann, according to Sotheby’s and was subsequently held by at least one other collector before being sold at auction in Paris in 2016 for $352,000.
Barry began reaching out to Sotheby’s for information about the painting in 2021 when family members first noticed it had been sold at auction. Simmons, the Sotheby’s executive, responded promptly, the email records show, and discussed the work with Barry by email and over the phone. At one point, he sent Barry a 1994 story mentioning “Lepanto” from the German newspaper Die Zeit that said there was evidence that it was in Sarre’s villa in 1945. The article noted that the home “was confiscated by the Russians.”
But Simmons later wondered whether the work that Sarre had owned was the same one Sotheby’s sold, which led Barry to send pictures of “Lepanto” from the 1910 Munich exhibition catalog and from the 2016 Sotheby’s catalog. The images look identical, though the painting, once roughly 6-by-13 feet suffered damage and is now just over 10 feet wide.
“There is no doubt that the painting Sotheby’s sold in 2016 was owned by Friedrich and Maria Sarre,” Barry wrote to Simmons in August 2021.
The two men communicated several times after that, Barry said, including in an hourlong video call in which Simmons listened to him make his case. In an email from May 2022, Simmons wrote: “I wanted to let you know that I haven’t forgotten about you.” He then wrote, according to copies of that correspondence from Barry, “I’m briefing both buyer and seller in the Paris auction and will let you know when I have any news.”
Barry said that since then, Sotheby’s has stopped responding to his phone calls and correspondence, but he has no plans to drop the matter. He said he does not expect that anyone will simply hand over “Lepanto” to his family, but that he would like Sotheby’s to acknowledge the work’s provenance had been incomplete and to explore what solution might be fair to all parties involved.
“My family has a strong connection to this painting,” Barry said. “I feel an obligation to them.”
Artist Tulu Bayar: Shifting from Traditional to Digital Photography
Artists are often at the forefront of new ideas, and their work can offer new ways to see the world: where it has been and where it is going. In conjunction with her current solo show at Amos Eno Gallery in Brooklyn, Turkish-born U.S.-based multi-media artist Tulu Bayar speaks about how the shift from traditional film to digital media impacted her artistic process that investigates materiality, medium, and social constructs of religion and gender.
At a time when relations in the Middle East are tense, we revisit one of her works about water shortage in the region. We also speak about her long career as a professor in art and how students approach their work-life balance in new ways that pay more attention to their mental health.
You were trained in film and photography in the 90s, which means you have experienced great shifts in how to work with the medium — from wet film to digital and the revolution of editing and retouching digitally. How was this shift for you?
Tulu Bayar: The shift from traditional film to digital media in the 90s had a transformative impact on my artistic process. Digital technology provided me with the freedom to experiment in ways that were previously impossible with traditional film. The instant review, editing, and manipulation of images on a computer screen opened up new creative possibilities for me. From digital photography, I moved to video editing and digital sound design. These skills all helped me create multi-sensory installations.
Rather than seeing this transition as a strict shift, I view it as a natural flow in my artistic journey. I consider myself an artist unbound by specific media, positioning myself on the borderline of two languages and cultures. This perspective reflects my sensitivity to flux and transition. My work embodies a hybrid language, allowing for cross-border examination and the incorporation of otherness. It’s characterized by fluidity and multifaceted expressions.
The flexibility gained from working with digital and analog mediums, combined with conceptual approaches, enables me to seamlessly navigate between the two. For example, in my latest work, “Twine,” I employed both analog and digital processes extensively. Source photographs were digitally created and printed from my photographic archive in both Turkey and the USA. Subsequently, inkjet prints were employed to produce Citra Transfer Prints on cotton paper, which is a very hands-on process.
The final touch involved treating the prints with a liquid paste derived from soil, sand, water, and vegetation gathered from various geographical regions of the USA and Turkey. The resulting coloration, such as red, brown, and gray brushstrokes, varied due to the differing ratios and materials used in creating the paste. This entire process represents an environmentally safe hybrid between analog and digital methods.
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In your exhibition “Traces,” the wet film itself becomes the subject installed in circular sculptures. What did it mean to show this material in this way in 2021?
Tulu Bayar: “Traces” draws upon my decade-long exploration of drawing with photographic film and employs meditative repetition to communicate the idea of oneness: all binary concepts share and are connected to one source. I first started to use photographic film as a sculptural form in the early 2010s.
In contrast to an examination of the physical, my work focuses on the spiritual essence of wholeness and mysticism that is deeply rooted in Rumi’s teachings. “Traces” is composed of several mixed-media works meticulously created from photographic film, ink, and resin. Each exhibits an exploration of calligraphic abstraction, performance, drawing, and ebru. Ebru is a traditional Turkish marbling art that is made with special ink on water.
Many believe there is another major shift in photography and image-making with AI. Software like Midjourney comes to mind, and the actors strike over rights to their images if they should be used to create new content. What are your thoughts? Have you started working with AI, or does that not interest you?
Tulu Bayar: While my work is currently focused on being tactile, multi-sensory, and detail-oriented, with a preference for handmade elements, I acknowledge the pragmatic aspects of digital technology. I find value in what technology offers both in my studio and in general. As of now, I haven’t ventured into using AI, but that doesn’t rule out the possibility in the future. It’s too early for me to make a definitive judgment on incorporating AI into my artistic process.
In today’s rapidly advancing technological landscape, dismissing any technological advancements is inevitable. It’s essential to experiment with technology and find responsible ways to engage with it, taking charge of how it will impact our work. Analog photographers were initially skeptical of digital technologies, but over time, discussions about their legitimacy have faded. Photography, by its nature and history, has always embraced new technological advancements, inheriting and evolving with each wave of innovation.
Dimensions: 10” X 10” X 3” each. Courtesy of the artist.
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Much of your work advocates for Muslim women in different ways, both by educating audiences to understand that the Muslim faith is not monocultural and varies but also by expressing some of the difficulties individual women face, as with your installation “20 Letters” (2016). You were in the U.S. during the 9/11 attacks, and currently, you live in Pennsylvania. How has islamophobia changed? You have also spent a lot of time in Turkey. How have women as a group fared there, and how do you follow the developments?
Tulu Bayar: My installation “20 Letters” served as a response to conversations where religion is manipulated as a pragmatic political tool and becomes a focal point of identity politics. This work consists of 20 small mixed-media boards created from photographic film, maple board, and resin, exploring text and calligraphic abstraction.
Each board represents what is interwoven and concealed in the daily lives of Muslim women, offering a visual manifestation of short essays written by 20 women about the hardships they face due to their Muslim identity in the West.
The progressive voices of gay, straight, black, white, and brown Muslim women from the United States contribute to this work. Their stories were first photographed on black and white photographic film, arranged on maple boards in patterns reminiscent of Ebru, the Turkish marbling technique. The scrolled films both hide and reveal these women’s stories, keeping them anonymous and echoing their state of mind between confrontation and silence.
I am not a religious person, but I have found myself consistently categorized as “Muslim” in the United States due to my national origin, especially during and shortly after the 9/11 attacks. This categorization was imposed on me from both the right and the left. Despite living in the U.S., I approach religion similarly to how I did in Turkey. I have never worn a hijab, and I freely wear a bikini to the beach. My stance on religion remains unchanged, and I react when forced into a narrow categorization that promotes monoculturalism.
Turkey has a multifaceted representation of Islam, with a growing number of practicing Muslims. In my upbringing, Turkey was more secular, with religion being more spiritual and less political. However, the landscape has shifted, and religion has become more political and less spiritual over time.
Your video work “Settlement” (2004) features a Jewish and a Muslim woman who both live in the same area in the Middle East, in a place where water is scarce, sharing a jug of water. With the current political climate, it seems apt to revisit it now. Can you tell me more about this work to highlight the complexities in the region further?
Tulu Bayar: “Settlement” is a multi-channel video projection that delves into the intricate dynamics of water scarcity in the Middle East, particularly among Jewish and Muslim communities sharing the same land. It is from the early 2000s. The project features two women, one Jewish and one Muslim, engaging in spiritual cleansing rituals unique to their respective faiths, all while peacefully sharing a jug of water.
The essence of the work lies in its exploration of the profound connection between water, land, and the political complexities of the Middle East. Growing up in an environment where water scarcity was a persistent issue, I aimed to shed light on this often overlooked and under-discussed problem with this work. While acknowledging that water scarcity is not the sole challenge faced by the region, I wanted to emphasize its symbolic and historic significance, making compromise and agreement challenging for both communities.
“Settlement” is meant to serve as a commentary on the silent but impactful role of water in the political landscape of the Middle East. By highlighting the shared spiritual importance of water in both Jewish and Muslim faiths, I intended to shift the focus towards the peaceful coexistence that water could symbolize, rather than being a source of conflict. In doing so, I hope that the work invites viewers to reflect on the broader issues at play and encourages a deeper understanding of the complexities within the region’s socio-political climate.
Date: 2004
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What do you teach at Bucknell? How has the student body, and their interests changed over the time you have been there?
Tulu Bayar: I teach visual arts at Bucknell, focusing specifically on photography, video, and occasionally installation courses. Additionally, I oversee independent studies with advanced students who pursue individual projects. Teaching provides me with instant gratification, witnessing the significant progress students make from the beginning to the end of the semester.
Since I first started teaching years ago, I have noticed shifts in the student body and their interests. As each generation comes through, their priorities and interests evolve. Currently, there is an observable trend where students prefer spending less time in the studio and more time on self-care and rest. The impact of COVID-19 has brought mental health issues to the forefront, along with heightened awareness of social, political, medical, and monetary injustices. Students now demonstrate increased sensitivity to these issues, and this is reflected in their artwork and their approach to class assignments and readings.
What artists inspire you and how do you build community with other artists?
Tulu Bayar: I draw inspiration from various aspects of life, and my artistic influences come from diverse sources. Notably, my students excite me, and visiting other artists’ studios is a source of inspiration. Attending open studios and participating in well-regarded artist residencies also play a crucial role in shaping my identity as an artist.
In terms of building community with other artists, I am affiliated with several professional organizations. Additionally, due to my academic connections, I often receive invitations to serve on review committees and jury exhibitions. Participating in these panels has not only allowed me to establish lasting relationships with fellow artists and art professionals but has also provided insights into the concerns and interests of other artists. Learning about the materials and media they use is an integral part of this process.
I prioritize forming long-term and genuine connections over engaging with multiple communities that offer transactional relations. My interest lies in fostering deep relationships, and I find fulfillment in being part of small, intimate, and authentic communities.
Congratulations on your solo show in Brooklyn, Twine, at Amos Eno Gallery. What’s next?
Tulu Bayar: Thank you! Following the de-installation of the exhibition at Amos Eno Gallery, my next focus will be on handling the logistics for my upcoming exhibition at Ferda Art Platform in Istanbul, scheduled for winter 2024.
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Alexandra Israel is a contributor to Grit Daily, a freelance arts writer and publicist. A museum aficionado since her introduction to Jean Dominque Ingres’ portraits as a small child, she enjoys spending her free time at museums and finding off-the-beaten-track gallery shows. She is a regular contributor to the art publication Cultbytes. With her finger on the pulse, Alexandra has been working in PR for over seven years, primarily within book publishing and in the art world. She has held positions at Penguin Book Group, Aperture Foundation, and Third Eye. Alexandra graduated from Bates College in 2010.
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