(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Stills)
It’s a painting that immediately makes you smile; on the surface, there’s something warm and comical about Carl Spitzweg’s The Poor Poet. In the corner of a shabby attic is a man hunched over in bed with a quill in his mouth like a dog with a bone. His glasses are upside down, and he seems to be flicking something, a squashed fly? A bogey? It’s unclear. His air of dissatisfaction and slumped, bedridden body on a visible sunny day reminds me of a ghastly Sunday morning hangover.
In the little cove, stacked with books in which he’s perched, is an umbrella that seems to be magically hovering above him, bewilderingly resembling Mary Poppins defying gravity. But if you peer close enough, you’ll notice the umbrella is used to shield the man from a leak coming through the wooden beams of the ceiling. The water doesn’t seem to bother him, though, as he reads a manuscript intently.
On the other side of the painting is a dark stove in which more manuscript pages have been shoved in, fuel for that evening’s fire. The manuscripts cleverly read, “Operum meorum fasciculum III”, meaning “third bundle of his works” in Latin. The subject’s disappointment with his work, for it to land crumpled on the stove, might explain his frustrated expression. However, this seemingly pleasant painting has a dark history. Surprisingly, it was Adolf Hitler’s favourite painting. It was on display at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, but for obvious reasons, it became widely unpopular after the Second World War.
Enter Ulay, a German performance artist and longtime companion of Marina Abramovic. In 1976, Ulay, who was nowhere near as famous as his partner, walked into the museum and swiftly took The Poor Poet as if he was picking something off a shelf at the supermarket. Within a few minutes, with the painting wrapped in blankets, he was out, job done.
He drove the painting to Kreuzberg, a central district in the city, and took it to the house of a Turkish immigrant family, who had agreed to let him use their house for a film shoot. What they didn’t know was that this project included a stolen painting from one of Berlin’s most important museums, which was to be hung on their wall.
This rogue act of theft had both rhyme and reason. Ulay was trying to make a direct polemical critique of racism in Germany. His aim was “to bring this whole issue of Turkish discriminated foreign workers into the discussion. To bring into discussion the institute’s marginalisation of art.” The whole sequence of events was filmed for his documentary, Action in 14 Predetermined Sequences: There is a Criminal Touch to Art.
Ulay knew his work was a success when, the day after, the press reacted exactly as he wanted. Headlines such as “Radical leftist steals our most beautiful painting!” invaded the front pages of German tabloids like Das Bild. He had single-handedly drawn the nation’s eyes to the systemic abuse within Germany, holding a mirror up to society’s wrongdoings.
This seemingly quaint, classical, romantic painting exemplified everything bourgeois that Ulay wanted to actively defy. The choice to awkwardly place it in an immigrant family’s living room created a stark and jarring contrast that one can’t look away from. Ulay aimed to demonstrate how high culture prevents art from reaching the right audiences and provoking the necessary social changes because it is confined within the museum space.
After Ulay had ticked all his boxes and the performance was a success, he gave himself up to the police, who subsequently gave him the option of a fine or a custodial sentence. He managed to get off scot-free by leaving the country for good. And they all lived happily ever after… Actually, they didn’t because the painting, as if Ulay’s theft had been a prophetic fallacy, was stolen for real in 1989. It is still on the loose to this day.
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