'En-tout-cas' is a limited edition of 30 customized golf umbrellas created by artist Michael Rakowitz exclusively to benefit the International Studio & Curatorial Program.
Under the umbrella's white canopy, Rakowitz’s black printed handwriting appears. The artist recounts the story of MoMA's founding director Alfred Barr's smuggling of the abstract painting Suprematist Composition: White on White, by artist Kazimir Malevich, from Nazi Germany.
The title is a French term for an umbrella to be used in the sun, rain or snow. It also means "In any case" implies preparation for any event, or colloquially to make reference to whatever may have happened or will happen.
Narrative text of 'En-tout-cas,' handwritten by Michael Rakowitz:
In 1935, Alfred Barr, the director of MoMA met with Alexander Dorner, director of the Provinzialmuseum in Hannover, Germany. Dorner showed Barr a group of drawings, paintings, and charts by Polish-Ukrainian painter Kazimir Malevich who died earlier that same year, and whose works were being hidden in the basement of the Provinzialmuseum to keep them safe from the Nazis who had declared such work of abstraction as “degenerate art.”
The works had traveled with Malevich from the USSR to Germany in 1927 for an exhibition in Berlin. By this time, his art had been condemned in the Soviet Union as being “anti-proletarian” and once his exhibition closed, he decided to leave his works in Germany as they were likely to be destroyed if they were returned to the USSR.
Dorner sold several of Malevich’s works to Barr for MoMA’s collection, including a painting of a white square on a white field titled 'Suprematist Composition: White on White.' Barr rolled up the painting inside his umbrella and smuggled it out of Germany, safely hidden from Nazi authorities who would have surely confiscated and destroyed the work. Barr carried the drawings and charts in a suitcase which he described as “study materials” to the German border guards.
