A collection of Dutch Golden Age art stolen from a small museum in the Netherlands more than 10 years ago has been traced to a nationalist militia in Ukraine, according to the museum’s website. The Westfries Museum in Hoorn, just north of Amsterdam, said on Monday it believes that Ukrainian “art criminals with contacts… at the highest political level” are involved in an effort to sell the plundered works.
The museum’s public announcement is an attempt to deter potential collectors from buying. “The artworks now risk disappearing from view once more, and we are sounding the alarm,” the museum said in the statement. In January 2005, the 24 works — by masters like Jan Rietschoof, Matthias Withoos, Jacob Waben, and Jan van Goyen, and at the heart of the museum’s 17th- and 18th-century art collection — as well as 70 pieces of silverware were taken from the institution.
The museum reports that it has known about the paintings’ presence in Ukraine since July, when members of a defense group confronted to the Dutch embassy in Kiev. At that time, the men who claimed to represent the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists said they would return the works for $5.4 million. The museum, however, claimed that the works’ value is not that high; they estimate the worth of the 24 paintings to be $540,000.
The UK’s Turner Prize for 2015 has been won by Assemble, a collective group of architects that has restored derelict houses.
The Turner is the leading award in British contemporary art, and arguably Europe’s most prestigious contemporary visual art prize, and Assemble is its first winner from the architecture and design field.
London-based Assemble, formed by about 18 “activist architects” in their twenties, recently renovated a shabby housing estate in the Toxteth district of Liverpool, a city in northern England.
The winner of this year’s Tate-presented Turner Prize is the artists’ group Assemble. The London-based group is best known for working with communities to realize a ground up approach to regeneration, city planning, and development in opposition to corporate gentrification.
“We have no hierarchy. We’re all founders, directors and workers and laborers and everything across the scale,” members of Assemble told Artforum.com’s Agnieszka Gratza. Speaking to Gratza upon receiving their prize, they said, “Sometimes we are plumbers. Or campaigners. This is the more glamorous version of our existence.” (For more on the collective’s work, see Esther Choi’s essay in the November issue of Artforum.)
The prize comes with about $37,600 and was given out this year in Scotland for the first time ever at the Tramway in Glasgow. The jury for this edition consisted of Alistair Hudson, director of the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art; Kyla McDonald, artistic director at Glasgow Sculpture Studios; Joanna Mytkowska, the director at the Museum Sztuki Nowoczesnej; Jan Verwoert, critic and curator; and was chaired by Alex Farquharson, director at Tate Britain.
According to Gratza, Hudson explained, “There are a whole range of collective operations, of activism, politically and socially motivated art practices that ... can actually only be achieved through collective working.” He noted, “That social way of art working is perhaps something that’s not been recognized by the Turner Prize historically. And if you’re looking around, [and] the projects ... are really having effect in the world, then we should take note of something like this.”
The exhibition of all nominees shortlisted for the prize continues at Tramway through January 17, 2016.
Charlotte Rampling landed her first film role in 1965 as a water skier in Richard Lester’s “The Knack ... and How to Get It,” starring Ray Brooks (far left).
Céline jumpsuit, $3,250, (212) 535-3703.Credit Photograph by Paolo Roversi. Styled by Jonathan Kaye
For more than 50 years, the actress has seduced men and women alike with her cool, distant beauty. But what if all that time we were wrong?
Charlotte Rampling’s reputation doesn’t entirely make sense. She is an actress of extraordinary intelligence and sensitivity, with a rare, charismatic beauty and sexual force that has lasted well into her 60s. Her career began at 17, when she was spotted in a secretarial pool by an ad man who worked upstairs; she went with enchanted speed from a bit actor in a Cadbury commercial to full-on celebrity in 1966 with the modish hit ‘‘Georgy Girl.’’ Over the last half-century, she has made more than a hundred films and TV shows, a career now crowned by Andrew Haigh’s ‘‘45 Years,’’ an emotional tour de force reminiscent of James Joyce’s ‘‘The Dead’’ (the story, not the Huston film) in its quiet, quotidian pace and evocation of the past’s devastating romantic power. Rampling has been rightly celebrated for her remarkable body of work, but she’s also been labeled as ‘‘cold,’’ ‘‘imperious,’’ ‘‘detached,’’ ‘‘watchful,’’ ‘‘hard to get close to,’’ ‘‘mysterious’’ and ‘‘aloof.’’ In the countless interviews she’s done, reporters have described her with a mixture of awe and anxiety, sometimes casting her as a bit of a mental case as they unknowingly behave like mental cases themselves.
‘‘When I first sit down across from her, I can’t help but worry that Rampling is not coping with anything at all very well,’’ a journalist wrote in 2001, right before going on to express his exasperation at Rampling for being ‘‘stoic’’ about her ex-husband Jean-Michel Jarre’s infidelity. In 2014, a different journalist wondered at how ‘‘closed-off’’ Rampling has ‘‘always been as an actress,’’ speculating that this trait might be connected with having kept her sister’s suicide a secret for 20 years.
Of course, it is now normal for celebrities to share the most private details of their lives with the press, and Rampling’s has been the kind of wild, coruscating blur of high glamour and success that makes journalists vibrate. The daughter of a manufacturing heiress and an Olympic gold medalist, Rampling, who was born in 1946 in Sturmer, England, was educated at a posh nearby private school called St. Hilda’s and later at Jeanne d’Arc Academie pour Jeunes Filles in Versailles. Her adult life has been marked by loss, most cruelly of her sister, but also of two husbands: She left her first marriage, of four years, to Bryan Southcombe when she met the French electronic music composer Jean-Michel Jarre at a party in St. Tropez in ’76. She had a luxurious life with Jarre in a mansion in Versailles, but suffered from depression that descended into a breakdown in 1988, and didn’t recover until the mid-’90s — around the time she learned of Jarre’s affair from a tabloid. Through all of this she kept working, and in 2000 she became a star again when the young director François Ozon sought her out as the lead in his death-haunted drama ‘‘Under the Sand.’’ At 54, Rampling was once again in the spotlight, this time with the full force of her maturity behind her, still beautiful, still potent.
The British actress in 1972, two years before her breakout role as a sadomasochist in “The Night Porter.”Credit Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images
Hers, in other words, is the story of a real-life heroine. But the more I read the repeated interrogations of her marriages, the breakdowns, the triumphs, the secret held and finally revealed, the smoldering sexuality, the more annoyed I grew to see this artist’s life turned into a media soap opera which, even if factually presented, I suspected had little to do with the actual woman.
My response was not to find out who the ‘‘actual’’ woman was, but to let her be. I decided that during our interview, I would ask her no personal questions at all — well, maybe one or two, if we were really getting along. Then I learned that her partner of 20 years, the French businessman Jean-Noël Tassez, had died roughly three weeks before our meeting, at which point I, too, became a mental-case journalist. How could I say anything about the situation? How could I not say anything about the situation? What if she wanted to talk about it? Should we meet at all?
I walked into the bar of the Hôtel Costes in Paris on an October afternoon rendered awkward by the intensity of my desire to relate to her in an appropriate way — that is, not to intrude on her grief. She was there when I arrived, so I didn’t get to see her entrance, but she did not seem like the kind of person who ‘‘makes an entrance.’’ She looked like a quiet, self-possessed older lady with either excellent posture or very erect inner turgor or both. I sat down and said something sincere and clumsy about how I knew she was going through a hard time and that I was concerned about blundering into things I shouldn’t touch. ‘‘If you do that, I will stop you,’’ she replied. ‘‘If you ask anything I don’t like, I’ll step around it and go on. I can take care of myself.’’
A Helmut Newton photograph of Rampling in 1973.Credit Helmut Newton “Charlotte Rampling, Hotel Nord-Pinus, Arles, 1973,” The Helmut Newton Estate/Maconochie Photography
When I repeated this to an acquaintance he said, ‘‘There’s the coldness.’’ But that’s not how it felt. Her words had the reassuring quality of clear communication. They put me at ease. I asked her general questions and although she couldn’t always answer them, she always engaged them. (One thing to be said for nosy personal questions: They can actually be answered.) We talked about her persona: ‘‘I’ve always, since the beginning, had my antenna out, like, ‘You can’t get me.’ It makes you more interesting when people know they can’t get you.’’ We talked about the creative relationship strength has with weakness: ‘‘The strong part is careful not to take over. It needs to hold itself in check because I want the weaker, fragile part to have the same form of expression.’’ We talked about some of her many standout roles: as a woman nearly unhinged by grief in Ozon’s ‘‘Under the Sand’’; as the cynical queen-bee of a Haitian beach resort catering to middle-aged female sexual tourists in Laurent Cantet’s 2005 film ‘‘Heading South’’; as a young concentration camp prisoner trapped in an S-and-M arrangement with a sadistic guard in Liliana Cavani’s 1974 film ‘‘The Night Porter.’’
This movie, still her most notorious and defining role, was critically excoriated when it was released in America; Roger Ebert, Pauline Kael and Susan Sontag were all disgusted to the point of contempt. Even Rampling’s admirers have dismissed it as sensationalism. Yet Rampling still considers it one of her most powerful performances, and I agree. While the characters as written can be summed up as pornographic clichés, the way Rampling and her co-star Dirk Bogarde played them was almost weirdly nuanced. During their first encounter, as Bogarde is pulling a pale chemise over her head, Rampling gazes at him with stunned fear and passivity; there is also a hint of perverse bonding and understanding, as well as something more intense: the look of a trapped animal showing a submissive face while it prepares its next move. Throughout the film, Rampling bodily expressed these myriad shades of feeling, from terror to arousal to rage to pure survival instinct, happening so closely together that the girl herself doesn’t seem to know what she feels — and neither do we, even as we react. Thus Rampling amplified what was to critics the most offensive theme of the movie: the joining of beauty and cruelty, the communication between ungiving power and the soft, dumb knowledge of the body.
Rampling’s trajectory from her early films to the movies she made in her late 50s has been characterized as a transition from merely playing her cold sexy self to learning to act — or being taught how, as one writer absurdly suggested, by the much less experienced Ozon. But Rampling has consistently shown her ability to subtly dramatize strong, sometimes contradictory inner states. In her later films, she can command the viewer’s interest simply by walking down a street or lying alone in a bed — but she has possessed this command from the start.
Some reviewers attribute this ability to her mysterious, preternatural charisma and abiding beauty, and that is part of it. But it is also her actively focused talent for the natural representation of real people. We don’t notice how expressive ordinary people are unless we love them enough (or are frightened enough by them) to pay real attention. But everyone is uniquely expressive, even in the smallest gestures. We are so immersed in the parade of character in daily life that we don’t typically see this unless it startles us; we don’t have time to notice all the things that people are telling us. When we see this ordinary expressiveness through a camera’s lens, however, it is amazing, even if what is being conveyed is pure realism heightened just slightly through disciplined art. ‘‘45 Years,’’ for instance, is made of small movements and gestures that reflect big emotional shifts, the kind that alter lives. Rampling plays a retired teacher named Kate Mercer who, in the opening scene, returns home with a letter for her husband, Geoff (Tom Courtenay), that has arrived from Switzerland. He reads it aloud and says, ‘‘They found her.’’ ‘‘Found who?’’ she asks. ‘‘They found Katya ... my Katya,’’ a girl with whom he climbed a mountain before he met his wife of nearly half a century, a girl who fell to her death and who has just now been discovered preserved in ice.
Because its core meaning pivots on a small revelation so quick not everyone will see it, I don’t want to describe the story further. But I feel compelled to say that Kate’s final gesture at the end is a wonderful stroke of direction that Rampling executes unerringly, saying more by jerking down her arm than most actors can reveal in an entire scene. The movie’s themes are subtle and subjective; for Rampling they can be described as the consequence of unfinished business. ‘‘There are things Kate has compromised on, and that’s fine — that’s what people do, because they don’t want to rock the boat. A lot of women are like that,’’ she said. ‘‘Then this thing happens, it all comes up to the surface, and she doesn’t want to face it. She doesn’t even know what she’s got to face.’’ In other words, Rampling isn’t being mysterious as much as she is revealing the mystery of us all.
Rampling photographed by Peter Lindbergh in 1987.Credit Peter Lindbergh
‘‘Creative expression comes from places we don’t know,’’ she continued. ‘‘When I started out early in films, people said, ‘Oh my gosh, you can do this.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I can.’ I don’t know why, but I knew I could. I can’t explain what it is and how you get there, but it’s not anything to do with the intellect. I wanted to get to the being state of a character. Just watching someone being, living.’’
Maybe that is when she looked directly at me for the first time; I’m not sure. I probably don’t remember, because even when she didn’t meet my gaze, she felt more present than most people. Eyes up or down, she smiled easily, especially when I mentioned one of her more obscure films, ‘‘Max Mon Amour,’’ in which she plays a diplomat’s wife having an affair with a chimpanzee. The story is a delightful evocation of blunt, innocent feeling up against the hard norms of human society. It’s something like the anti-‘‘King Kong,’’ for although attempts are made on Max’s life, in the end he’s riding through Paris on the top of the family car, being cheered by crowds.
Such a goofy story seems out of keeping, except when you remember that Rampling’s persona is very ‘‘you can’t get me.’’ ‘‘Max’’ is like a prank, someone pulling a face, but it is also very much in line with a thematic current that connects her characters. You almost can’t imagine what is beneath the pleasant social exterior of the wife in ‘‘Under the Sand’’ until her husband’s disappearance, which foregrounds her vulnerable inner world so profoundly that her public self suddenly seems revealed as a shell. Similarly, Kate, the heroine of ‘‘45 Years,’’ faced with a disruption from the past which feels seismic, tries to hold it in check by putting on the uniform of her social role with the same sad rigor that the former camp guard puts on his literal uniform at the end of ‘‘The Night Porter.’’
Bally coat, $2,395, (212) 751-9082.Credit Photograph by Paolo Roversi. Styled by Jonathan Kaye
Kate’s anger, the surprising depth of it, reminded me of Meredith, the scornful and selfish character that Rampling plays in ‘‘Georgy Girl.’’ I could almost see Kate as a grown-up Meredith, which Rampling was willing to entertain. ‘‘I was very like that,’’ she said, ‘‘although not as radical as Meredith.’’ I added that it was great how she portrayed Meredith’s near-rage — it’s amazing how young people know so much that they can’t verbalize, they just do.
‘‘As you get older, it’s then that you process things. And if you don’t, I think the trouble begins,’’ she said. ‘‘You were asking about ‘The Night Porter.’ I’m still processing it all through — ’’ here she put her hands on her midsection — ‘‘it’s still as alive and important as if I’d done it last year. It’s with me all the time, like all the things I’ve done.’’
Play Video00:54On Set | Charlotte Rampling
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On the set of T’s cover shoot, the photographer Paolo Roversi captured Charlotte Rampling in a silent film.
Publish Date December 4, 2015.
I wondered aloud if one reason that she is so moving for people, as an older actress, is that they can see the continuum. Not that she plays the same characters, but there are similar elements that take very different forms as they by necessity age and grow, and the story comes out in a different, more developed way. ‘‘That’s what I always wanted to do,’’ she said. ‘‘I wanted to make my life, not a work of art — I didn’t think of it that way — but I wanted to create a visible continuity in what I did. I wanted there to be a thread I could follow and other people could follow. We all go through different things. But every now and then we will connect up again. And the person they’re connecting up with is a person they recognize. The face is changed, I’m getting older. But it’s recognizable.’’
Hair by Julien d’Ys. Makeup by Mary Greenwell at Premier Hair and Make-up using Chanel Les Beiges. Production: Prodn Paris. Executive producer: Jill Caytan. Producer: Miren Lasa. Manicurist: Typhaine Kersual at Jed Root. Digital operator: Antonio Pizzichino at Dtouch. Photographer’s assistants: Mélanie Rey and Arthur Ancelot. Stylist’s assistant: Max Ortega Govela. Tailor: Carole Savaton. Hair assistant: Ilker Akyol
In Cuba, an Abundance of Love but a Lack of Babies
A pregnant woman waiting outside a hospital in Havana. In an effort to spur birthrates, the government has begun encouraging young couples to have children.Credit Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times
HAVANA — A magnetic energy courses between Claudia Rodriguez and Alejandro Padilla, binding the couple in clichés of intimacy: the tendency to finish each other’s sentences; hands that naturally gravitate toward one another; a shared laughter that forms the soundtrack of their romance.
What their love will not bear, for the moment, is a family. Though they plan to marry and have children, they will wait — until they are no longer sharing a small apartment with a half-dozen others, or perhaps until obtaining diapers and formula is no longer a gamble.
In short, they will be waiting a long time.
“You have to take into consideration the world we live in,” said Ms. Rodriguez, 24, who says she has had two abortions to avoid having children too soon. Clutching Mr. Padilla’s hand, she said, “It would be so much harder with a child.”
By almost any metric, Cuba’s demographics are in dire straits. Since the 1970s, the birthrate has been in free fall, tilting population figures into decline, a problem much more common in rich, industrialized nations, not poor ones.
Claudia Rodriguez and Alejandro Padilla are planning to marry, but they are not certain when they will be able to afford to raise a child. Ms. Rodriguez, 24, said she has had two abortions to avoid having children too soon.Credit Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times
Cuba already has the oldest population in all of Latin America. Experts predict that 50 years from now, Cuba’s population will have fallen by a third. More than 40 percent of the country will be older than 60.
The demographic crisis is both an economic and a political one. The aging population will require a vast health care system, the likes of which the state cannot afford. And without a viable work force, the cycle of flight and wariness about Cuba’s future is even harder to break, despite the country’s halting steps to open itself up to the outside world.
“We are all so excited about the trade and travel that we have overlooked the demographics problem,” said Hazel Denton, a former World Bank economist who has studied Cuban demographics. “This is a significant issue.”
Young people are fleeing the island in big numbers, fearful that warming relations with America will signal the end of a policy that allows Cubans who make it to the United States to naturalize. Until recently, a law prohibited Cubans from taking children out of the country, further discouraging many from having children to avoid the painful choice of leaving them behind.
Those who remain in Cuba say they are also reluctant to have children, citing the strain of raising an infant in a country where the average state salary is just $20 a month.
“At the end of the day, we don’t want to make things more difficult for ourselves,” said Laura Rivera Gonzalez, an architecture student, standing with her husband in central Havana. “Just graduating doesn’t mean that things are resolved. That won’t sustain us.”
Ms. Gonzalez embodies a common feature of the Cuban demographic crisis: As the government educated its people after the revolution, achieving one of the highest literacy rates in the world, its citizens became more cautious about bearing children. Scant job opportunities, a shortage of available goods and a dearth of sufficient housing encouraged Cubans to wait to start a family, sometimes indefinitely.
“Education for women is the button you press when you want to change fertility preferences in developing countries,” said Dr. Denton, who now teaches at Georgetown University. “You educate the woman, then she has choices — she stays longer in school, marries at an older age, has the number of children she wants and uses contraception in a more healthy manner.”
There is another factor that alters the equation in Cuba: Abortion is legal, free and commonly practiced. There is no stigma attached to the procedure, helping to make Cuba’s reported abortion rates among the highest in the world. In many respects, abortion is viewed as another manner of birth control.
In Cuba, women are free to choose as they wish, another legacy of the revolution, which prioritized women’s rights. They speak openly about abortions, and lines at clinics often wrap around the building.
By the numbers, the country exhibits a rate of nearly 30 abortions for every 1,000 women of childbearing age, according to 2010 data compiled by the United Nations. Among countries that permit abortion, only Russia had a higher rate. In the United States, 2011 figures show a rate of about 17.
But experts caution that the liberal abortion policy is not responsible for the declining population. Rather, it is a symptom of a larger issue. Generally speaking, many Cubans simply believe they cannot afford a child.
“I’ve had two abortions, one of them with Jorge,” said Claudia Aguilar San Juan, a 27-year-old restaurant worker, referring to her boyfriend of two years, Jorge Antonio Nazco. “At the time, we didn’t think we were ready to have kids, and we continue to think that it’s still not the time.”
Mr. Nazco added: “We need to be able to afford basic things for ourselves, and we’re also not going to be living three people in one room. I just want to give my kids a comfortable life, a better life than what I had.”
That is the case with Elisabeth Dominguez and Eddy Marrero. Together, the couple earn about $70 a month for her work as a psychologist and his as a pediatric nurse, a relatively high income by Cuban standards.
The standard, however, is the problem. “It’s barely enough for the two of us,” said Ms. Dominguez, 29, shaking her head. “How could we afford a kid?”
Recognizing the problem, the government has begun to circulate pro-pregnancy pamphlets and fliers to encourage young couples to keep their children. Some women said that in recent months, government doctors had discouraged them from having abortions, while others have noticed sudden shortages of condoms and birth control pills.
While those assertions could not be verified, most experts say it hardly matters. Cuba will not be able to procreate its way out of the current crisis anytime soon.
Few tactics work to increase a nation’s fertility rate, despite efforts in countries like Japan to pay families to have children.
What some suggest could help is if the government could manage to encourage the vast Cuban expatriate population to come home. There, too, the government has shown some willingness to adjust its stance, including easing the return of islanders living or traveling abroad.
Walking in Old Havana. Cuba has the oldest population in Latin America, a demographic crisis that appears to be worsening.Credit Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times
But surmounting the longstanding bitterness of many families toward the government, which still holds a tight grip on the country, poses challenges of its own. And the returning Cubans will need to be interested in more than an extended vacation or investment opportunity.
“Already there is more flow,” said Ted Piccone, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies Cuba, referring to the return of Cubans abroad in their 20s, 30s and 40s. “But is it going to be a matter of ‘I want my vacation home there,’ or will they put down roots?”
Separated families are a fact of life for most Cubans, another element straining the state of the Cuban family. With millions abroad, and a domestic population of just over 11 million, few families are left untouched by the schism that followed the country’s revolution.
Ms. Rodriguez and Mr. Padilla both have relatives living in the United States, some of whom they have not seen for years. Some do not want to return, having disconnected from the rhythm of life on the island. Others return and appear changed, no longer the cousins and nephews from years before.
In many respects, their relationship represents the challenges facing the government as it confronts an industrialized world problem with a developing world economy.
In their minds, there is no doubt they will get married. As a jeweler, Mr. Padilla, 29, plans to design the ring himself and propose once he saves enough to buy a diamond.
Even then, they say, they are not certain they can afford the burden of a child. Earlier this year, the pair aborted a pregnancy, a decision for which they both express a degree of sadness. Still, it is not so uncommon in their families. Their mothers have had four abortions each, the two say, seated on the back porch of Ms. Rodriguez’s mother’s home, where the couple live.
Mr. Padilla, smirking, blurted out that Ms. Rodriguez’s aunt had undergone 10 procedures, prompting his partner to laugh.
“Quiet,” she whispered sharply, slapping his arm. “She has a degree in French and is inside right now.”
He giggled quietly and looped his arm through hers. Ultimately, he said, they do want a family. The when of the matter would come in the not-too-distant future, he hoped.
“We don’t want to pressure ourselves,” Mr. Padilla said. “We want to live our lives, day by day, each day in its own time.”
