Iconic Art and Wealth
I am sitting in my hotel room in Bilbao, Spain, looking out our window directly at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. We arrived here after a short, but magnificent ride along the northern coast of the Basque Country, starting in Donostia – San Sebastian. That ride is a mere 160 kms., but it bounced along the Cantabrian Sea, which is the southern part of the Bay of Biscay bounded by the north of the Iberian Peninsula and the western curve of France, from Bordeaux up the Cherbourg. The coastline is a mix of beaches and craggy cliffs and the small, well-maintained road that hugs those cliffs is made for motorcycling…and bicycling, especially on a sunny Saturday morning, which seems to bring out all the Spanish cyclists en masse. We made our way and took an inland turn to Gernika, or as the Basques insist on calling it, Guernica. We stopped for lunch in Guernica to see a famous Basque town that was memorialized by Pablo Picasso in his 1937 painting, called Guernica, which is an abstract on the subject of the horror of war. The painting, which hangs in the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, is considered the most significant anti-war painting ever produced. It was painted by Pablo Picasso, considered by some as the most influential contemporary painter of the Twentieth Century and the leader of the Cubist Movement in art. While Picasso was not of Basque origin, he empathized with the Basques when, in 1937, the city of Guernica was bombed and largely destroyed by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in a show of support for the nationalist movement led by General Francisco Franco.
It is interesting that we should visit the Picasso mural of Guernica in Guernica as we headed towards Bilbao and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. That museum is, or course a museum of contemporary art as is the domain of its sponsoring Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. The Foundation was, coincidentally, set up by Solomon R. Guggenheim in 1937 and it has built the Guggenheim Museum in New York (A Frank Lloyd Wright iconic building), the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy and then this magnificent structure by Frank Gehry in Bilbao. The confluence of these two important places has made this day a day to consider the intersection of iconic art and iconic wealth.
The subject of the use of eleemosynary efforts is a subject of great interest to me and has been ever since I ran a global private bank in the 1990s. We had a program for our clients called Wealth With Responsibility and one of its central themes was how wealthy people can and should structure their eleemosynary efforts. There are two issues which always seem to come up when discussing philanthropy. The first is whether the arts deserve the attention they get (or to some, any attention at all) given the extreme poverty and hunger around the world. The two points of view are rather stark in their differing perspectives. On the one hand, Maslow would suggest that humans need to take care of fundamental and basic needs of life before elevating their concerns to self-actualization activities like the arts. On the other hand, poverty and basic need gaps have always existed and may always exist. The arts are one of things that separates man from the animals and the only chance civilization has is to raise itself up culturally even while it strives for filling more basic needs. There is no answer to this quandary and there may never be one.
The other issue is whether it is better to establish an endowment that paces the donations over time to insure that funds are available to do good (whether regarding basic needs or for the arts). The classic examples of such endowments include The Rockefeller and Ford Foundations and can certainly extend to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. The benefactors clearly had a vision that they wanted to have their legacy keep doing good (as they chose to define it) over many decades or longer. The contrary view is that perpetuating an administration with all its incumbent administrative cost is a waste of precious resources and the needs of the world are pressing enough to demand more immediate use of the resources. In general, those endowments established for funding the arts are less likely to be impacted by this concern of timeliness since it is hard to suggest that the arts and immediacy are necessarily connected.
I found the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the nearby Guernica memorial to Picasso’s great anti-war installation an interesting bridging of these two issues in a way I hadn’t previously considered. My thinking goes like this. Were it not for organizations like the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and its support for modern and contemporary art, there might not be support for new movements in art such as what Picasso benefited from. While his painting of Guernica is not on display at Guggenheim Bilbao, the next Picasso might well be inspired to continue forward with his or her art and produce the next great anti-war artwork or perhaps anti-hunger or anti-poverty artwork. Dealing with mega issues like world hunger, world poverty or world peace can only happen if awareness is heightened among the general population and to the extent that can happen through the arts (of any type), that has a potentially dramatic impact on the efforts to combat those ills.
So, today we paid homage to Pablo Picasso and his 85-year-old anti-war painting. Meanwhile we ate a light lunch in Guernica where there was a festival underway. I’m not sure what that festival was (with some apparent lumberjack contests underway), but these fervent and earnest Basque people (men, women and children) were dancing and singing in the street, clad in traditional Basque garb and playing traditional instruments like concertinas. Even those not performing were wearing red bandanas with their community’s symbols and mottos and traditional black berets. It was all very festive and, based on the highlighting of the pictures of their destroyed town 85 years ago, it was a celebration of life after near death for the village. I’m sure somewhere along the way, they were paying their own homage to Pablo Picasso for telling the world through his art of the town’s hardship and need for assistance.
From there, we went to San Juan de Gaztelugatxe, which is an island connected to the mainland by a long 261-step staircase up to the Ermita de San Juan de Gaztelugatxe (a monastery). It was a bit of a zoo on a sunny Saturday and none of us made it out there, but at least we know its there and that it is an impressive sight. Speaking of impressive sights, as we rolled down the hill from Bakio to Bilbao, we had to cross the Nervion River that flows through Bilbao. Puente la Salve crosses the river with a red set of stanchions and there, on the other side sits the impressive Gehry structure of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Whether you like Gehry or contemporary art for that matter, it is hard not to be impressed by the dramatic presentation that structure makes as one enters the center of this city. And just think, we get to admire this iconic art and benefit from this iconic wealth all on the same day.