Outtakes from Ronald Lauder's Interview on "Charlie Rose"

While mostly a paean to Adele, Charlie Rose's television interview of Ronald Lauder on PBS Monday had a few provocative moments.

Charlie asked the $135-million-dollar question, but never pressed for a full, coherent answer:

ROSE: You have been involved in restitution, this whole effort to bring [Nazi-looted] art back. You also were chairman of the board of the Museum of Modern Art. You created this museum [the Neue Galerie]. I mean, you are a collector. Does any of this collide? Is there any conflict here?
LAUDER: Well, there could be a conflict of interest between restitution. I call these paintings, all the paintings that were stolen and not yet returned, the last prisoners of World War II. There are still hundreds of millions, maybe billions of dollars worth of art out there that was stolen from Jewish homes and are now throughout the world in collections and museums and places like that. I have been involved in restitution since the 1980s. And to me, I put no connection between my own collecting. As a matter of course, any piece that I`m ever involved in, I will never myself be buying directly.

What he meant by "never buying directly" or "no connection between my own collecting" was never clarified. Lauder later spoke further, although again unclearly, about Nazi-era provenance of works in the Neue Galerie, many of which are from his personal collection:

LAUDER: Before we even opened, we did an entire provenance check on all the art here. And any of the pieces that we had questions about, we looked deeper into. We found what was there and what was not.

Yet, despite assurances to me from the Neue Galerie's deputy director, Scott Gutterman, that the Nazi-era provenance of works owned by the Neue Galerie would be posted on its website by Sept. 1, the website's provenance section (under "General Information") still says only that "the museum is currently in the process of compiling all relevant provenance information and posting it on this website."

That still awaited provenance-posting was to include only works owned by the Neue Galerie itself, not the works from the Serge Sabarsky Collection or from Lauder's personal collection, which together constitute approximately 90 percent of the works at the Neue Galerie.

As for his question of whether Lauder's multiple roles---collector, MoMA trustee, Neue Galerie president---create a "conflict," Rose got an indirect answer later in the show, as he stood with Lauder before Klimt's "Adele Bloch-Bauer I":

ROSE: If you had not had the Neue Galerie, you would not have been able to get that painting. They [the Bloch-Bauer heirs] would not have sold it into a private collection.
LAUDER: No, but I think that had I not had the Neue Galerie, I probably would have ...
ROSE: Created it.
LAUDER: No, no, I probably would have had this a shared piece with the Museum of Modern Art or something like that....
ROSE: You would use MoMA as your vehicle to get that piece.
LAUDER: Yes, exactly.

And MoMA then would have had had that celebrated Klimt painting in its galleries, thanks to the generosity of its longtime trustee.