- Art is everywhere.

It might be a photograph on the wall or a mural on the school across the street.

It might be a show you caught last night or a song you'll write tomorrow.

It might be the glass in your hand or the coffee table where you just sat it down because art is incorporated into almost everything, and we're excited to explore that everything with you.

Welcome to "Art Inc." In this episode, we're taking you around the world and home again.

(screen crackling) - [Announcer] If you want to know what's going on.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) (screen crackling) - What could possibly tie Frederick Douglass, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Louisa May Alcott to Renaissance Italy?

Take a little trip with us and find out.

(upbeat music) (upbeat rhythmic music) - The mission of The Providence Athenaeum is to enrich the mind, inspire the spirit, and elevate the public discourse.

It's a gathering place.

(bright music) Hi, my name is Kate Woodhouse.

I'm the Director of Collections and Library Services at the Providence Athenaeum.

An athenaeum is a library or cultural center that's dedicated to the diffusion of knowledge.

Athena is the patron goddess of wisdom.

The athenaeum predates the public library movement and art museums as we know it today by about 50 years.

So this was a place for the whole community to come, not only to educate themselves, but also to see artworks that they wouldn't otherwise be able to have access to.

The library first got some gifts of artwork just after it opened its doors.

The first item was an enormous portrait of George Washington that greets people as they walk down the stairs here today.

(bright music) Just after that we received 10 busts, illustrious personages, ancient and modern.

Additional busts have been donated through the 19th century.

They had something in common.

All of the busts that were here were white men.

Not unusual, obviously, especially for the time period.

The Bust Project started several years ago with a very generous, transformative gift from members.

The impetus behind this project was to bring in some diverse voices.

They had to be writers.

They had to resonate today.

We wanted their works to be held in the institution and possibly have a connection to Rhode Island as well.

So the three figures that we decided on were Frederick Douglass, Louisa May Alcott, and Mary Wollstonecraft.

(bright music) Frederick Douglass, I felt that he should be here.

He was actually the first person we decided on.

So one of the other things I discovered is that he had come to Rhode Island numerous times to lecture, and he was friends with some of the members of the Athenaeum.

The first woman that we decided on was actually Louisa May Alcott.

We have a first edition of "Little Women."

We wanted to honor Louisa May Alcott for her contributions to literature but also her personal views on social reform.

Mary Wollstonecraft, she's a protofeminist.

She wrote" The Vindication of the Rights of Woman," and we have a very early edition from 1794.

We've got busts of Byron, Keats, and Milton, and we thought that she should be honored like her male counterparts from the same period.

(bright piano music) Robert Shure is the first person that I called to ask questions and to determine what would be possible.

(bright piano music) So the first time I walked into Skylight Studios to meet Robert, I was just struck.

It feels like a 19th century artist studio, with works of art and sculpture everywhere.

(bright piano music) Robert typically is sitting doing his work underneath a massive skylight, and you're just surrounded by sculpture.

- My name is Robert Shure, and I'm the owner of Skylight Studios.

There's not a lot of studios like this left in the country, and most people say, "Oh, we think we're in Italy."

The studio is actually over 100 years old, and it originated in Boston and it went back a good three generations before myself.

I was accepted at the Museum School in Boston for graduate school in sculpture.

And while I was studying there I happened to meet, quite by coincidence, two world famous sculptors who had a studio in Boston, and they were Arcangelo Cascieri and Adio di Biccari.

When I walked into their studio in five seconds I knew that's what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

As they got older and couldn't work anymore, they kind of informally handed the torch over to me, and I took over the studio.

(bright piano music) - Caproni Galleries opened up the possibility of doing something in a very traditional manner, as we have already here in the library.

(bright piano music) - Pietro Caproni was from Italy, and he was a master craftsman.

He made copies of all the great sculptures and busts from history, in which you'd never get commissioned nowadays to do.

He was esteemed as the highest quality plaster craftsman in the world.

This is all hand work, done much the same as it was in the Renaissance.

(bright piano music) - Downstairs is where all of the action and the work takes place behind the scene.

These amazingly talented artisans just at work on their craft.

And he walked me through the process of how the sculptures are made.

(gentle music) - Plaster is mixed by hand.

(gentle music) And then it's applied in the mold by hand.

(bright piano music) We use burlap, which is a natural fiber, to reinforce the inside of the plaster.

It is very much similar to putting a cast on somebody's arm.

So the plaster's the boss, really, more than the craftsman.

It is the plaster tells you what you need to do.

(gentle music) And you're using your fingers, really, to feel the form of the mold, because you don't wanna miss any places or get any voids.

The fingers are the most important tool, even more than the eyes.

(gentle music) Once the cast is done, we need to wait a little while and be patient, 'cause the plaster has to become hard enough not to be damaged when the mold is stripped off.

(gentle music) Gotta have a good back for this job, for sure.

That's why they're doin' it, and I'm not.

Then you get a cast, and hopefully it's perfect, because you did a perfect casting job.

You can pick it up very easily and it might weigh, oh, maybe 20 pounds.

(bright music) So I'm very fortunate to be working with my daughter, Lisa, who I will be handing the torch over to, just like it was handed over to me.

- Robert is incredibly humble and gracious, so easy to work with.

I'm really glad the way that the project evolved.

I like the harmony of these new sculptures done in the traditional method, and here on display with their brothers.

(gentle music) (bright music) - What is provenance?

Am I even saying it right?

And why is it so important when it comes to art?

We're going to learn about a painting Hitler was desperate to steal, and how it made its way from a European salt mine all the way to the MFA in Boston.

(bright music) (mysterious music) So, I know this is serious business here at the MFA, but first things first.

Are you a curator of provenance or are you a curator of provenance?

- I think either one is acceptable.

I tend to say provenance because my first job as a provenance researcher my supervisor said it that way in like the French way, so that's how I tend to say it.

But either one is, okay.

(mysterious music) - So what does provenance mean and why is it important?

- So provenance is the history of ownership of a work of art from the time it was created until the present.

It's like a work of art's biography.

- It's such an interesting job.

You're like an art historian, but they're called cases.

So you're kind of a detective.

- Yeah, there's a little bit of detective work when we are trying to uncover clues to an object's past.

But it's also really important that we do this research before we bring new acquisitions into the collection.

We need to make sure that we are looking at the history of ownership now and making sure that we're not bringing something into the collection that we can't take legal title to or hold legally or ethically.

(beach music) We are looking at a 17th century portrait of a man.

We don't know who the sitter is.

It's by Frans Hals.

Hals was a renowned portraitist.

His works were collected even at the time that he was painting.

We know that this belonged to Dr. Leon Lilienfeld and his wife Antonie.

They lived in Vienna.

Dr. Lilienfeld was Jewish.

His wife was of Czech origin.

- [Announcer] On March the 12th, 1938, without warning, the German armies marched over the Austrian border.

- At the time of the Anschluss, at the time that Nazi Germany annexed Austria in March of 1938, the Lilienfelds fled, and they went first to Italy, and Dr. Lilienfeld died of natural causes on there flight.

And Mrs. Lilienfeld continued and made her way to Winchester, Massachusetts, which is where she settled.

(beach music) So Mrs. Lilienfeld leaves, she settles in Winchester, Massachusetts.

Her paintings are left in Vienna, left within the borders of the Third Reich.

So in December of 1940 (indistinct) one of really the leading figures in Nazi art looting, writes to Martin Bormann, who's Hitler's personal secretary, "When the Führer was in Vienna "I showed him a painting by Frans Hals "from the confiscated Lilienfeld Collections, "which interested him."

So they really wanted this painting.

So what I thought was really interesting when I was researching this is why did they have so much interest in this particular painting?

Hals was really a renowned portraitist.

This is his late style.

This is what he did at the very end of his life, and it's much freer brushwork than he did at the beginning of his career.

And art historians began to embrace this kind of painterly style of his.

And if you think about why, it was about this time that we're seeing beginnings of impressionism.

Manet did not paint fingernails, because Frans Hals did not paint them.

Apparently Degas said that.

I don't know if it's a real quote, but it is attributed to him.

In other words, people started looking to Hals as inspiration.

So if you think about who was advising Hitler in the 1930s, they would've been art historians that were trained at the beginning of the century and would've understood the value in Hals' late style.

If provenance is like a work of art's biography, the back of a painting is like its passport.

On the back of this painting there are still Nazi era stamps, labels, inscriptions.

So what happens?

In 1944, basically all works of art of high value are evacuated by Nazi forces out to the salt mines and other depositories out in the countryside.

Mrs. Lilienfeld is here in the United States.

She has no idea what's happened to her paintings.

So she comes to the MFA, and she approaches our curator, WG Constable, and she's like, "Can you help me get my paintings back?

"I have no idea what happened to them."

And WG Constable says, "Yes, in fact, a former student of mine "is stationed in Vienna.

"His name is Andrew Ritchie."

And Andrew Richie was actually one of the Monuments Men stationed in Vienna.

Eventually they are located, and they are shipped to Mrs. Lilienfeld here at the MFA.

She gave us the Hals in 1966 in memory of her husband on the occasion of our centennial.

- [Speaker] All right, why don't we just do this one, and then- - (snapping) Yeah.

- The history of this painting helps us to understand Nazi looting and restitution, but it also shows how the art object itself, in other words, the attribution, the style, sort of art historical qualities of the painting determine the path that it takes.

You really can't extricate the history of the object from the object itself as art object.

And that's, I think, this is a perfect illustration of that, I think.

(bright music) - The Ayacucho region of Peru is home to a unique form of folk art.

You might be familiar with retablos, but you might not know that it all starts with a bowl of mashed potatoes.

(bright music) (gentle music) - My name is Zuly Palomino Jimenez.

I'm the the third generation making retablo art.

Retablo has a lot of history behind.

It's like when the priest, like Catholic priest used to come to Indigenous people to teach the Catholic religion.

(gentle music) Usually was like a little Catholic saint inside the retablo.

Like a little church.

We kept that tradition.

Not (indistinct) Catholic religion also, but also we have different themes like festivals, carnivals from different part, from different part of Peru.

We have here La Bodega.

They have, it's just in one room, and they have different brand, like a cookies, sodas, like just one room.

They have everything there.

(bright music) (indistinct) People in every festival.

They have also a lot of drinks.

Has to be together, like a music and drinks and dance.

(bright music) Masks, this is a, has huge meaning, different meanings to as well.

Like a mask, it depends like celebration, festivals.

But also it's like you hiding something behind, like about politician, what's happening.

(singing in Spanish) My mom was the first woman from Peru to make this art, retablos.

She learned from her father, and my grandfather was (speaking in Spanish).

This art is reflection of the life, on the pastime, what happened before, and what's happening now.

So my grandfather, in his work, he shows a lot of like politic themes.

A lot of troubles over there.

Really was very sad also because was a lot of people who disappeared.

(gentle Spanish music) And the mother or the families going to the police looking for them.

And in the newspapers they say a lot of, like 100 bodies appears in this place.

So, they going to this place to look and they found these bodies.

Yes, no, also the faces, just also maybe something like the toes or something.

(gentle music) (singing in Spanish) (bright music) (Eleudora speaking in Spanish) (Fidel speaking in Spanish) - My mother said it's beautiful to work with the art and family.

And my father said, no, it's good, because this art give you, too, you can travel to the different countries with the art.

Yeah.

(bright music) The principal material we use for this art is potato.

We have like 4,000 kind of potato in Peru.

And the process of making the the dough is we boil the potato, and we start to mash it, like making mashed potato.

We start to mix with plaster of Paris, and you can start doing the figures, each piece by piece.

We let dryer by the sun, and they get stronger maybe in three days, two day.

You can see, if it depends the weather.

And after that we start painting.

We use a cedar.

We make the boxes.

Now this is (indistinct) the design, also change the designs of each retablo.

So, have been more innovating.

(bright music) My grandfather, he has different styles.

When he paint the the flowers, he paints also like a different primary colors, too.

My mother's also as well, she paints different flowers.

I do different flowers.

(laughing) Well, I love animals a lot, really.

So I decided to choose the animals, and not the people sometimes, because I think you can learn more than that to the animals from the people sometimes.

(gentle music) - We're all done.

(people laughing) (indistinct) - We got big potatoes over here.

- [Zuly] I would love to share this art with our community.

- [Speaker] You can really see the animals in some of them.

- Yeah.

We do workshops in Providence.

And I saw my grandfather, he was a master in Peru, and I saw him in the workshop to making a lot of, he used to wake up very, on the midnight, 3 a.m., and started making this art.

People seem to enjoy this art and work with this art.

(intense music) I'm born in this art family and also is in my blood.

So I love making this art.

I'm really enjoying making this art.

My mom, she's making this art.

She teach me this art.

So I keep this tradition with me, like an an old (indistinct) in me.

Yeah.

(bright music) - Sometimes it's a plaster bust at a library or a painting hanging in a museum.

Sometimes it's a family tradition or the singing that happens around a table.

But wherever we find ourselves, we'll find art.

Thanks for joining us, and we'll catch you next time on "Art Inc." (screen crackling) - if you wanna know what's going on.

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