In 2005, Egon Schiele’s 1914 painting “Wilted Sunflowers (Autumn Sun II),” which had been apprehended by the Nazis and lost for nearly 70 years, was unexpectedly rediscovered in an apartment outside the French town of Mulhouse, near the German border. The residents had no idea of the work’s significance, and the two Christie’s specialists who’d come to evaluate it expected it to be a replica. “Wilted Sunflowers” was repatriated to the descendants of Karl Grünwald, Schiele’s friend, who owned the painting before it was stolen, and put up for auction the following year, where it was purchased by the New York gallery Eykyn Maclean for £11.7 million (~$22 million at the time). This story is the basis of the new film Auction, which layers an awful lot of melodramatic meat on the skeleton of the facts to create its vision of the art world.
Some of the invented characterization and subplots feel like parodies of the tropes of genteel middlebrow French cinema. What if, for instance, the two art experts who came to appraise the painting were divorced but still working together amicably? What if one of them was secretly romantically entangled with the lawyer representing the factory worker who currently owns the painting? What if the other’s intern was — and this is a significant part of the plot — embroiled in family drama, as the debt-addled man who raised her has learned he may not be her biological father? You may wonder what any of this has to do with the ethics around looted art. The answer is nothing, but Auction uses these storylines as a jumping-off point for a dryly sardonic portrayal of art auctioneers as less concerned with beauty and justice than with their own images and making a solid percentage. Which is fully accurate, of course, but hardly a novel observation.
Still from Auction (2024)
There are by now enough films about the Nazis’ pillaging of art and its fallout —The Rape of Europa (2006), Portrait of Wally (2012, also concerning a Schiele work), The Monuments Men (2014), and Woman in Gold (2015), among others — to constitute a minor genre. Pretty much everyone (except perhaps the representatives of certain individuals and/or institutions reluctant to let go of ill-gotten gains) can agree that recovered works should go to their proper owners. Even the cynical leads of Auction don’t dispute this, although they of course stand to profit greatly from the sale of the work. This film’s focus differs from its peers in that it follows characters who are mostly disconnected from any emotional investment in the artwork in question. The art world insiders don’t care much about the history of “Wilted Sunflowers,” tangled with the ugly memory of World War II and the taint of French collaboration. But the everyday guy who owns the house immediately renounces all claim to the painting, assessing that any fee he’d get for it would be “blood money.” When the painting is removed from the house it was found in, it leaves a blank patch on the wall — an unsubtle symbol of the lingering scars of war.
The fact that half of this history is fictionalized, since the Grünwalds are replaced with analogues, only confuses what precisely viewers should take away from this. Why apply this treatment to a real painting with a real story that’s interesting on its own merits? The art world is ridiculous enough on its own without dolloping unrelated paternity questions into the mix.
Auction opens in theaters starting October 29th.
