Weekend Words: Plunder
This week we learned that the family of legendary gallery owner Paul Rosenberg, who was the exclusive representative of Matisse, Picasso and Braque, has claimed ownership of a Matisse that has been in the collection of Norway's Henie Onstad Arts Center for decades.
This week we learned that the family of legendary gallery owner Paul Rosenberg, who was the exclusive representative of Matisse, Picasso and Braque, has claimed ownership of a Matisse that has been in the collection of Norway’s Henie Onstad Arts Center for decades.
Hundreds of works owned by Rosenberg were stolen when the Nazis invaded France, and the family has been relentless in tracking them down. “We are not willing to forget, or let it go,” said Marianne Rosenberg, Paul’s granddaughter, told The New York Times.
Weekend Words ponders plunder:
“All has been looted, betrayed, sold; black death’s wing flashed ahead.”
—Anna Akhmatova, “All has been looted”
“Alliance: In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in one another’s pocket that they cannot separately plunder a third.”
—Ambrose Bierce, The Cynics Word Book
“The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”
—Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Sophisms
“To tax the community for the advantage of a class is not protection: it is plunder.”
—Benjamin Disraeli
“The time is fast approaching when to call a man a patriot will be the deepest insult you can offer him. Patriotism now means advocating plunder in the interest of the privileged classes of the particular State system into which we have happened to be born.”
—Leo Tolstoy
