EMPIRE OF LIGHT, EMPIRE OF LIES 

“Stand up for what you believe in even if you are standing alone.” 

- Sophie Scholl 

Catherine: “Just like Magritte, no?” 

“Yes, just like Magritte.” 

Catherine and I stood on the banks of a little pond. The mirror reflection of the two-story villa was indeed the spitting image of the painting, “Empire of Light,” by the Belgian surrealist artist Rene Magritte. Lightheaded from jet lag, I wondered if this could be the actual house depicted in his masterpiece. Of course it was possible, after all, I was standing next to one of Europe’s most celebrated museum directors, Catherine de Zegher. The home we were admiring had been in her family for generations. 

Fifteen minutes earlier she had given me a tour of the home’s interior, pointing at the marred floor, “Our home was conscripted by the Third Reich as a command post for the fascists when they invaded Belgium. This is where the Nazi invaders damaged the floor with their boots. They threw parties here!”

Now outside, we were contemplating Magritte when Catherine’s phone rang. Pulling it from her coat pocket, she gestured to me that she needed to take the call. We parted ways, and I decided to wander the property. The soft green moss that covered the ground had made its way up the trees and onto rocks. The orange light of the late afternoon Belgian sun filtered through the trees like watercolor on wet paper.

Fifteen years earlier, nearly to the month, I’d clicked my computer mouse and purchased a painting that appeared to be in the style of the great Russian avant-garde artist Alexandr Rodchenko. Today, five thousand miles from my Colorado home, I was the honored guest of an art world maven.

Catherine clutched the phone to her ear. I didn’t make any sort of attempt to overhear the conversation, but her muffled voice kept repeating, “No, really? No.” It was clear she needed privacy. I made my way to the house and went inside, taking a seat in the living room next to the fireplace and began to doze off.

About a half an hour later she appeared at the door that led to the garden. I sat up. She’d been crying. “Well Ron, they fired me, but I still retain my title of director. But I’m no longer a museum director; I’m officially the director of nothing! The cruelty of these people, the stupidity and the cruelty. My friend Anna just told me she’d read about my firing over the internet. Tomorrow it will be all over the front page!”

The terrible moment was interrupted by the sound of a car pulling onto the gravel driveway. I asked Catherine if it might be a good time for me to leave. “No, please stay. I need you to stay.” She disappeared into the hallway that led to the front door. I heard the sound of murmured voices, then foot-falls up the stairs, then the human cries of agony and loss through the home’s ancient walls.

When Catherine entered the dining room she was accompanied by her husband. Drying her eyes, she introduced me to Nicolas. “Nicolas is a lawyer,” she said, “He has unquestioning faith in the legal system. This whole event has caused him so much distress, to see this injustice against me.”

The believer in justice and the rule of law, Nicolas stood beside his wife Catherine. He seemed shocked and disappointed. If what appeared to be happening was actually true, then what followed was that the law could protect no one, not even his wife. Catherine saw what was happening, she knew, “The fascists are coming back. Who would have ever thought that in my lifetime I’d see the return of fascism? I feel like they’ve once again invaded my country and my home!”

The offense that had abruptly ended a distinguished forty-year career? Catherine, it was claimed, had the temerity to exhibit twenty-four Russian avant-garde masterpieces from the collection of Russian expatriate Igor Toporovsky.

Whoever had orchestrated the smear campaign against Catherine understood one thing clearly, the oft-repeated axiom by the social engineer of the far-right, Steve Bannon that, “politics is downstream from culture, so to change politics you need to change culture.” Taking down Catherine, a significant guardian of culture, a woman who drinks directly from the spring that is the source of Europe’s foundational humanistic values, did just that. As an outsider to Belgian politics, it seemed clear that what I was seeing was an attack on culture orchestrated from the outside, strategic warfare by other means, using the tactics of government infiltration and media disinformation. Someone much bigger was behind this. What they had done was score a direct hit on a high-value target, a progressive public intellectual at a significant cultural institution in the heart of Europe. Catherine, a celebrated humanist and advocate for overlooked and marginalized artists had been kicked to the curb.

Catherine was lucky, she had friends. In a letter testifying to her integrity, nearly one hundred museum directors, scholars, and artists signed in her defense. It made no difference. The letter that helped lead to her downfall was signed by eight minor figures, small-time art dealers, marginal scholars and grifters; one even made claims that the Russian avant-garde artist Kasimir Malevich speaks to her in her dreams. Standing in that room with Catherine, there was a palpable sense that there was a need to fight back, to strategize a way forward and fight the fascists, to defend against their stealth onslaught. I thought of a story I’d heard, that when Mussolini came to power he’d insisted all university professors sign an oath of loyalty. Out of eleven hundred professors, only ten refused to sign. The brave individuals who’d signed the petition defending Catherine offered genuine hope.

I knew who the perpetrators attacking her were, and why. I knew it when I saw the maniac who was now the U.S. president spew his vile, traitorous words during a presidential debate, “Russia if you’re listening…” I’d had my own experience dealing with these shysters who were attacking Catherine. Over the last fifteen years, I’d been trying to uncover the truth about the origins of my own collection of 181 Russian avant-garde artworks. That journey had taken me down some of the darkest corridors of the art world. There was the bizarre publicity-hungry museum director who required his head of facilities to dress in a ratty pink bunny suit while serving hors d’oeuvres at museum galas. There was the Marxist professor of Russian culture who taught at an elite private university, who sported a giant full-length image of Stalin on his office wall, proclaiming, “Doesn’t he look wonderful!” The same professor also told me that I was lucky to be alive, implying that there are some who’d kill me to stop my collection from ever becoming public. There was the curator from one of the country’s most prestigious museums who, after viewing a few of the more important works in the collection, told me, “You’d better have your passport ready in case you have to flee.” I’d met and crossed paths with grifters and hustlers in both professional and amateur guise, dealers, collectors, pickers, basically every manner of art world charlatan imaginable. There was even an art appraiser who convinced our paintings were genuine, valued 30 of the 181 paintings that I’d acquired at over fifty million dollars. Her plan was to sell the collection for a suitcase full of cash on a remote airport runway. And last, but not least, an FBI agent who asked me, via a lawyer, if I’d consider involving myself in a sting operation directed against the Russian Mafia if it turned out that the paintings were stolen loot.

So when I read the list of individuals on the petition attacking Catherine, I knew exactly who they were, by name. I also thought I knew why they were attacking her; I was only half right about that assumption.

In the book “The Phenomenon of the Ukrainian Avant-Garde, 1910-1935,” Myroslav Shkandrij (Winnipeg Art Gallery, March 2002) writes of Soviet-era storage vaults called “Spetsfonds,” a word which means special files. These “special files” were storage facilities created during Stalin’s purges of 1937 - 1939 to hold cultural material that was deemed contrary to the Soviet project of creating a society in which people were cogs in a machine. There was no room for individualistic spirit - the spirit that is so richly celebrated in these seemingly harmless and wonderful works. We have been told by some of the people who have contacted us that these storage facilities are where our paintings were once likely housed, and that when the former Soviet Union collapsed and Russia went into a prolonged state of social and economic turmoil, these works made their way out of dark storage and onto the black market - and eventually into my hands via the newly emerged global market, which in my case was accessed with the click of a mouse.

There is a second, more recent, and much more dominant narrative that’s used to explain the sudden appearance of these artworks; that they’re all forgeries. It didn’t take much investigating into the topic to discover accounts that attempt to explain the possible origins of the forged Russian avant-garde artworks. In the 2014 book titled, “Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, The Surreal Heart of the New Russia,” author Peter Pomerantsev makes the claim that “Much of the Russian avant-garde art on the market is fake.” In fact the press is peppered with articles that attempt to explain the appearance of these newly resurfaced works, placing blame on a diverse if not bizarre cast of suspects: Jewish Refuseniks, German forgers, Israeli forgers, French forgers, Russian mobsters, Russian art experts, Russian art students, art restorers, art historians, KGB agents, Western journalists, even Western diplomats. It was not surprising that the jackals who attacked Catherine were the exact people who propagated these ridiculous conspiracies. One chief bullhorn of the forgery narrative, John Helmer, went so far as to state, “I was informed by one high-profile source that the post-KGB forging industry continues, with practitioners based in ships off the Israeli coast (as well as Germany).” Helmer, the author of this particular conspiracy, was once an American citizen, that was until he was recruited by the KGB in the late 1980s. He now spends his time working as an access journalist in Moscow, propagating lies. His primary job seems to be to flood the press with bogus stories that are aimed at exonerating Russia from any responsibility for the 2014 downing of flight MH17 over Ukraine.

Above: The ghostly reconstruction of MH17 from fragments recovered at crash site.

During the entire existence of the now failed totalitarian Soviet State, avant-garde art was of such little value that pioneering collector of Russian avant-garde art, George Costakis, told a story of paying a visit to the home of a relative of the artist Liubov Popova. Popova was a seminal figure in the Russian avant-garde movement. Though she died at a young age, her contribution to the avant-garde movement was immense. Her works are rare and highly prized now, but when Costakis paid a visit to her family’s home in the 1960s, he was shocked to see one of her paintings on plywood being used to board up a broken window. The price he paid - a new piece of plywood. 

“It’s all about money,” said Igor Toporovsky, Russia’s former diplomatic liaison to Europe under Russian presidents Gorbachov and Yeltsin. His arms folded tightly to his chest, he fixed his gaze on Catherine’s friend Anna. It was clear he wasn’t particularly excited to have me there. This introductory meeting between two collectors had been arranged by Catherine. Igor, Anna and I had rendezvoused at an obscure location in residential Brussels. Igor, it was assumed, was being surveilled. Catherine wasn’t able to attend, as the case involving her and Igor was still under investigation, and a court order prohibited the two from speaking with each other. It was works from Igor’s collection that Catherine had exhibited one year earlier that had created the current mess. Courage or naiveté, it didn’t really matter at this point, her decision to exhibit the twenty-four works by Russian avant-garde masters was the feather that triggered the legal avalanche.

Igor made the case that with a single Malevich painting bringing eighty-million dollars at auction, it would follow that a couple of dozen newly resurfaced works would have a negative impact on the value of the accepted works. Scarcity, after all, is one of the cardinal tenets of market ideology. What Igor was implying was that there is a cartel, or a conspiracy, managed by individuals who are intent on never letting these works see the light of day. His assertion was that the individuals who’d attacked Igor and Catherine were nothing more than lackeys, sent by the collector of Russian avant-garde art, the oligarch Pyotr Aven the same man whose name appeared five times in Christopher Steel’s infamous “Trump Dossier.” Pyotr Aven, the man who was intent on controlling works like those in both of our collections, with his claims that the quantity of fakes in the Russian avant-garde art market is “colossal.”

I’d arrived in Brussels from Colorado the day before, and now was learning what Igor and Catherine had suffered through. The exhibit of Igor’s Russian artworks had been abruptly taken off of the museum walls and seized as evidence. Igor and his wife had been arrested and each had spent a couple of nights in jail, a deeply traumatic experience, especially for Igor’s wife. The judge had brutally separated the couple from their two children and threatened to put them in a foster home. All this because of a single letter published in a Russian-owned art periodical, The Art Newspaper, that questioned the authenticity of their artworks? “Kafkaesque,” I said, reactively covering my face with my hands, then peeling my fingers away slowly, making sure that this wasn’t a dream.

“You know,” I said, “I feel kind of lucky. When we exhibited my collection at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, eight years ago, absolutely nothing happened. Most people in Denver didn’t even know what they were looking at. I’ve always felt insulated living relatively isolated in Colorado.” I must have sounded like the typical naive American, because Igor, who for the most part had been ignoring me, suddenly shifted his gaze directly at me, “You think that you are not part of this?” His face contorted into a devilish grin, “Oh,” he said, “You’re at the center of this.”

Catherine’s home may have looked like a palatial 18th-century villa from the outside, but inside it seemed cozy and intimate. Nestled in corners and in front of windows were collections of shells, dried flowers, Chinese snuff bottles, and toy horses, shrines to innocence. Curtains spilled down the walls and gathered on the floor, as the warm filtered sun of the late European winter bathed everything in a soft warm light.

During our meeting in Brussels, Catherine’s friend, Anna, described her to me;

“Catherine is the princess of another world, the world of what art should mean to people, with great ideas and empathy. She is a hero, her faith, her judgment, and her determination, she is a visionary.”

“Let’s have a fire and talk,” Catherine said, walking into the room with a basket of firewood. Lighting a cardboard box and some newspaper, within moments there was a blazing fire.

Two chairs sat facing each other in front of the fireplace and Catherine and I began to tell each other our stories of how we each had come to this place. Catherine’s story was initially simple. She was working as a museum director at one of Belgium’s major museums, when a city official approached her and told her about a Russian man named Igor Toporovsky, a Russian emigre who, the official said, had a large collection of Russian avant-garde art. Igor, he said, wanted to create a museum in Brussels to house his collection. Apparently, he’d already purchased a building for that purpose. The official asked Catherine if she could have a look at his collection, and suggested that she might even be interested in exhibiting some of the works in her museum. “This is normal stuff,” Catherine said, “As a museum director, one’s often approached by collectors. It’s how the system works.”

When Catherine visited Igor’s home, she said she was shocked. She’d visited dozens of collections in her forty-year career, but this was one of the best. She told me how much she’d always loved the Russian avant-garde, what a special period in art history it was. “It was so influential, and yet there are so few of these works in the world, so much of it was thought lost because of Stalin.”

“I know,” I said, “That’s exactly what I thought when I stumbled onto the works in my collection,” I explained that one of the most significant aspects of the works that I’d acquired was that they appeared to be some sort of debris, dirty from years of neglect and careless storage, maintained rather than loved.

“Yes,” Catherine said. “It all makes sense when you understand the history. This work needs to be seen, especially now.”

I thought to myself, this woman with whom I’m privileged to be sitting, next to a crackling fire, and lost in conversation with, is someone very special indeed. My journey had been so lonely. How many times I’d found myself talking to some curator or museum official only to become aware of the empty soul behind the advanced degree. So often, people who are drawn to such positions are nothing more than spineless sinecures or aspirational social climbers. Art museums are political institutions as much as they are cultural beacons. Sitting next to the seat of power at the center of every great city is its art museum. So it’s no wonder that when despots come to power, high culture is often first on their list of targets. I thought, what a loss it was for the citizens who were served by Catherine, losing the benefit of her deep experience and visionary intellect. Then I thought about the idiot who had led the attack, Simon Crestmoor. A man who had, according to his own resume, spent most of his adult life working as an intermediate-level cricket coach. Lucky for him that he’d been taken under the wing of one of Russia’s most powerful men, to be nurtured and groomed into a media-savvy hit-man.

The following day I was to meet with and be chaperoned by a Russian art scholar, who’d come from England to attend a meeting between Igor and myself at Igor’s home in Brussels. What I was to see and experience within the next two days would cause me to question everything that I had come to take at face value up to this point.

Igor lived in a historic Art Nouveau row house near central Brussels. From the nearly treeless gray street, we entered Igor’s house. To say that I was an unwelcomed guest would not be an understatement. From our first meeting, Igor had been covertly hostile, dominating handshakes, lack of eye contact, and closed body language, told me that. I’d been warned about what to expect to see on my visit to his house. Catherine had told me, “He’s brought Moscow to Brussels!”

The interior of the house was at once physically enormous, dark, and psychologically claustrophobic. The first-floor parlor, which doubled as an art gallery and gathering space, was packed with priceless antique art glass, ceramics, and museum-quality furniture. High on the walls, hung like safari trophies, were some of the most important, beautiful, and valuable Russian artworks of the 20th century: Kandinsky, Larionov, Popova, Malevich, Jawlensky, Goncharova, all their best works! I realized that what I was seeing were masterpieces of the highest order, the type of art that is typically only owned by nation-states - it was clear, these were Russian national treasures.

In Igor’s dark séance inspiring house, the works took on a new light. I saw these works for the first time in their native physical environment - his home transported me to the early 20th century and the era that gave birth to this incredible art movement, an art movement that was deeply rooted in occult mysticism. In the white walls of a modern museum, these paintings can lose their edge and become tame. The Freudian interior space of Igor’s home was a much more conducive atmosphere in which to experience these remarkable artworks. With the dark, ornate, Art Nouveau interior backdrop, itself a kind of spectacle, these remarkable artworks became psychic explosions, experimental and raw, vibrating with spiritual energy. At that moment, being there, in that room, I was experiencing one of the most powerful moments of my life. I’d seen why Catherine insisted that I visit Igor, she was taking me on her journey. I was seeing the world through her eyes. Of course, she absolutely had to exhibit these works, as an obligation to her life calling.

My chaperone, the scholar, like Igor, didn’t appear to be particularly delighted at my presence either. On the drive into Brussels, she’d pointedly told me that she was no fan of the United States. An American by birth, she made the point very clear that she’d live the rest of her life more happily if she never returned. She also took the time to rant about her ex-husband, another Russian art scholar, whom she claimed was a cold as ice former KGB agent. Not surprisingly, during the meeting at Igor’s, they spoke French about seventy percent of the time, leaving me to contemplate what I’d gotten myself into.

After leaving Igor’s and dropping the scholar off at the train station, I called Catherine. “Wow, Catherine, you warned me. That was one of the most incredible experiences of my entire life!”

“Isn’t it amazing Ron?” Catherine said laughing, “You know what’s even more amazing? His best works are in the basement of the museum, being held as evidence.”

I told Catherine how uncomfortable the experience was, and that I seemed like an uninvited guest. “Oh Ron,” Catherine laughed, “I should have told you, Igor is convinced that you’re CIA!”

Catherine had given me an itinerary, which I faithfully followed. The next day I was to meet with her lawyer, “He’s the best in Brussels,” Catherine told me.

Catherine’s lawyer was teaching a class at the city university, so I met with his assistant, a strikingly beautiful woman with a kind yet opaque personality. It was clear that she revered Catherine. She went down a list of questions. I answered the best I could, and she took notes. She pulled out an essay that I’d written four years earlier, that I’d posted on my website for all to read. In it, I’d laid out the chronology of events from my initial acquisition to more or less where I was now. In the essay, I’d hypothesized as to the possible rationale for Russia’s outright hostility towards these artworks, and the western market forces that share a common interest with certain Russians in keeping these artworks marginalized. I also described the specific players and their tactics of subterfuge and obfuscation.

“It’s all in there,” I said, “I still stand by everything I said in that essay.” “There is one thing that’s not in the essay, that I recently discovered, that I think may be really important.”

“What’s that?” she said.

“Simon Crestmoor, the main attack dog who’s going after Catherine, has a very close association with John Helmer, another guy who calls himself a journalist and writes articles about fakes in the Russian avant-garde art market. “John Helmer is or was a spy,” I said. “He was once an American citizen, that was until the KGB recruited him in the late 1980s. There’s a whole book about him called, “Washington Station,” written by Yuri Shvets, the Russian agent who recruited him.”

“You know,” I said to the lawyer, “This is a network of liars who are attacking Catherine. Helmer has written a list of articles as long as my arm attempting to spread false information and exonerate the Russian government for their role in the downing of flight MH17. If you look into Simon Crestmoor and his connection to Helmer, I think you’ll find that the lies surrounding the downing of that passenger plane and stories of fake Russian avant-garde art have a lot in common.”

As she took notes, I hoped that I was giving useful information for Catherine’s defense.

“We’re almost done,” she said, “I have one more question: Do you think that Igor Toporovsky knew what Catherine was walking into?” 

The question seemed to be more than just a question, it may well have been an answer in disguise.

“I can’t speak for Igor, but if Catherine had come to me two years ago, when she was planning the exhibit, I could have told her exactly what would have happened.”

“Ron,” Catherine said, moments after she heard the news that she’d been fired as the museum director for her home city, “The fascists are coming back, though this time they are not firing guns and wearing jackboots, this time they’re flying from Moscow and Saint Petersburg to London and Brussels in private jets. They buy newspapers to control the press, they pay-off officials and politicians so that they can control governments, and now they’re taking over the art museums, and taking control of our culture.”

I thought again about the destroyer, Steve Bannon, leader of the alt-right who just happened to be in Europe at the same time I was, spreading his messianic message of hate. I remembered his favorite cynical yet true intellectual mantra, that politics is downstream from culture, and that in order to change politics one needs to change the culture. Now I wondered more than ever if Catherine’s ousting was, in fact, the result of a larger, long-term strategy.

I called Catherine from the airport. I thanked her for being so open, honest and thoughtful. I told her that I completely understood what she meant when she sounded the alarm regarding the rise of authoritarianism. What she had done was guide me through her world, to experience what she had experienced. At the end of the trip, I could see the world through her eyes, and it was alarming.

“I know what you’re saying about the rise of authoritarianism. Of course, I know that it’s being beta tested in America with Trump, but here in Europe, that really terrifies me.”

“Ron,” Catherine said, “I just spoke with a fellow museum director in Flanders. Apparently, there’s a stupid fabricated art movement that the far-right is promoting. It’s pure propaganda, absolute trash. My friend was approached by some powerful person and was told that he had to show this terrible work. He said that if he refuses, he’d be fired, just like I was.”

Three months earlier Catherine explained her situation and her position in an editorial:

“I am no Joan of Arc, a woman ready to be burnt at the stake, but an Amazon on the side of history and art history. I learned that a person wrote to one newspaper: “You are doing with Catherine de Zegher what Stalin did with Malevich! Stop it! You are on the wrong side of history!” Yes, I believe in art’s profound meanings that sometimes make demands of us. I have fought all my life, in my work, for beauty that is denied, I have fought for those whose work has been eclipsed or marginalized, for women’s art that our societies too often ignored or suppressed, and for the art of communities and cultures that were thought to be outside the mainstream of the Western canon. What I have done with the Russian avant-garde works is no different from what I have done to assert the true meanings of these other artworks. I have unearthed and uncovered, and tried to bring from the shadow into the light here, as always before, work and truth that is similarly denied and dismissed.”

The soft mechanical thud of the plane’s retracting landing gears, from my window seat I could see that we were passing over the English Channel. A perfect grid of white windmills off the coast reminded me of the white marble tombstones of a military cemetery. It wasn’t an ironic or insightful thought, it didn’t feel profound, it simply helped to remind me of the continent I was leaving.

“People have forgotten all that was lost during the wars, so much was lost,” Catherine said in her lilting Belgian voice. She was calling late in the evening, shortly after my arrival at the airport micro-hotel. Her voice, that beautiful ancient voice, the voice of the goddess Europa, with all her history, culture and humanity, tragedy and loss. “We cannot let them win, I want to fight, I will fight them for the rest of my life if I need to.” “Ron,” she said, “Will you fight with me? “Yes,” I said, “We will fight them together.”

The plane banked slightly, as the magnitude of the events of the last seven days began to sink in. I discreetly reached into my carry-on bag and lifted out a pair of sunglasses. I hurriedly put them on and turned to the window, then in an uncontrollable spasm, I began to cry. A crush of emotions helped bury me into the seat as the banking, accelerating plane began to climb.

©Ron Pollard, 2019