Sa Bassa Blanca. Arriving on the island with the bohemian wave of the 1960s, Ben Jakober and Yannick Vu have built a classical art museum often visited by Michael Douglas and Yoko Ono
The idea to turn his house in the bay of Alcudia into a museum arose in 1994. But the origins lie earlier. It goes back to the time when young bohemians from Europe and North America were drawn to an island where writers like Briton Robert Graves, the author of “I, Claudio,” who hosted his friends like Ava Gardner, had settled. Mallorca offered tranquility and beauty, mountains and sea views, an undiscovered area conducive to building private paradises.
Yannick Vu (Montfort-L’Amaury, France, 1942) and Ben Yakober (Vienna, 1930) materialized their, open to the public since 2006 as the Sa Bassa Blanca Museum, with a unique collection of classical art, specializing in depictions of children and works by contemporary creators such as Louise Bourgeois, James Turrell, Meret Oppenheim and Miquel Barceló, as well as his own sculptures.
In the early 1960s, she arrived on the island of Vu with her husband, the artist Massimiliano Gnoli. In 1965 they bought S’Estaca, the house they sold years later to their friend, the actor Michael Douglas. Yakober lived in London, the city where his family had arrived fleeing the Holocaust. He worked at the Rothschild investment bank and knew Gnoli because he designed the sets for The Old Vic, London’s legendary theatre.
In 1968 he left finances and went to live in Mallorca. Gnoli died of cancer in 1970, at the age of 36, and Vu and Jakober traveled to Niger to shoot a film. The former banker contracted malaria and she nursed him back to health.
Two years later they married and started their collection with ‘Portrait of a Girl with a Cherry’, which Vu had fallen in love with when he saw it in a haberdashery in Palma. The owner wouldn’t part with the painting, but Yakober got it through an antique dealer he knew. It was his wedding gift and the first canvas in a collection of children’s paintings, including works by Antonio Carnicero, Juan Carreño de Miranda and Frans Pourbus El Joven, among many other artists.
It is eleven o’clock in the morning and the first visitors to Sa Massa Blanca begin to appear in the reception area. Yakober greets them while sitting on the terrace of Café La Paloma, where they also serve meals, such as salads with products from the museum garden.
He defines himself as a “gatherer to death or even ruin” and insists that his foundation, of a private nature, “has no family purposes” and that when they “are not there” the board of trustees will take charge, which now consists of Majorcan businessmen such as Sebastián Escarrer, one of the owners of Sol Meliá Hotels, or the poet and art critic Enrique Juncosa. They are 35% self-financed for tickets and shop, and the rest comes from donations and commissions for sculptures to Jakober and Vu, artists themselves, who participated in the 1993 Venice Biennale.
Under normal circumstances, about 20,000 visitors come to the museum every year. 65% are German, 20% Mallorcan, 5% from the rest of Spain and about the remaining 10% from other nationalities. They believe that they have the potential to reach up to 50,000 and that the possibilities of the increase depend on the Spanish getting to know this museum that promotes multicultural dialogue through art, with an amazing collection of contemporary artists from Morocco -Jakober en Vu living in Marrakech was once part of the year – and with a rose garden with as many as a hundred varieties of roses on a huge estate that includes the house they bought in the first half of the 1970s and that Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy (1900 -1989) enlarged and reinterpreted with Moorish airs.
Fathy was known for his design of the village of New Gourna, built with traditional and sustainable techniques near Luxor, which he popularized in his book ‘Architecture for the Poor’. Sa Bassa Blanca was rebuilt using similar methods and with old doors salvaged from northern Spain.
«I called the magazine ‘Architecture Aujourd’hui’ to get in touch and just then Hassan was there for a visit. They gave him the phone and that’s where our partnership began,” Jakober recalls, just before offering to guide the museum aboard a golf cart.
The first stop is at the Cistern, an old underground oil tank that has been converted into a gallery where a selection of more than 160 children’s paintings from the 16th to 19th centuries are displayed and hung on walls painted with natural pigments, following the directions of the set designer Robert Carsen, and mainly belonging to European royal families,
“The paintings were sent to each other for weddings,” explains Jakober. The links were intended to traverse dynasties and extend the power radius. Because they were unknown, the portraits served as presentation photos. Margarita María de Austria appears in an oil painting by Francisco Ignacio Ruiz de la Iglesia, who included her cousin Diego de Velázquez in ‘Las meninas’. A short distance away hangs Juan Carreño de Miranda’s portrait of his brother, the former king named Carlos II ‘The Bewitched’. “Nobody wanted it at auction because it was so ugly,” recalls Jakober.
“They were children who were destined to rule,” says Vu. “And in this collection, although they do not appear, there is the memory of their mothers, reproducing the divine right with which babies were clothed, and who despised their husbands, favored their lovers,” he explains.
Once outside the Aljibe, the visit continues through the large sculpture garden, where you can find ‘The Wishing Tree’ by Yoko Ono, the artist of the Fluxus movement and widow of John Lennon, a close friend of the couple. During the tour, sculptures by Vu and Jakobsen of an Egyptian cat, a Persian elephant and Chinese dogs appear, a sign of the intersection of nature and cultures.
The path leads to the vegetable garden where Yannik Vu has planted beans, tomatoes, aubergines, courgettes and chard, and to the rose garden. Nearby is the Sokatres Room, also underground, with a selection of contemporary art collections with a curtain woven with 10,000 Svarovski crystals, a family that also frequents Sa Bassa Blanca. A little further on, a fossilized skeleton of a Pleistocene rhinoceros has been found in Siberia.
Jakober proudly displays the painting ‘The painter in front of his canvas’ by the Majorcan by Felanitx Miquel Barceló, alongside a small portrait of Francis Bacon. In Sokatres, the names any art collector would want are the daring Maurizio Cattelan, Louise Bourgeois, Michelangelo Pistoletto and James Turrell with one of his surprising works made with light, as well as the German Rebecca Horn, a native of Pollença.
There are other artists from other regions whose work they bought long ago and which are now being revalued, such as the Australian aborigine Sally Gabori (1924-2015), who will soon have a retrospective at the Cartier Foundation in Paris.
The works of African artists made with metal scouring pads, toothbrushes and plastic caps, denouncing global warming. A warning that paradises like Sa Massa Blanca are also under threat.
The visit continues through the rooms of the whitewashed building of Hassan Fathy, with its divans and Moroccan pillows; also with large format paintings, with expressionistic shapes and bright colours. «They are artists who are not professionalized and who do it with a very strong passion. A few months ago, Jay Jopling (gallery owner of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, among others) was there and he asked me for one of the painters to sign him. Unfortunately, he’s already dead,” said Ben Yakober.
Adding to the perspective of dialogue between cultures in the collection is the couple’s own experience, who now live part of the year in Marrakech and continue their collecting activity there. Besides Morocco, Senegal, Mozambique and Equatorial Guinea are some of the countries represented in the house, which also keeps a shaman costume from Mali. Surrealists like André Breton and Picasso loved African art.
The building has an elevator to communicate between the different floors. In one of the large halls are examples of chairs that have left their mark on the history of design, such as the red and blue by Gerrit T. Rietveld in 1918 that is still being manufactured, or the cardboard Wiggle by Frank O. Gehry .
One of the most emotional angles showcases the work of Vu Cao Dam, one of the most important artists of modern Vietnam and Yannick’s father. He went to Paris on a scholarship in the 1930s and never returned to his country. Yannick was hesitant to go to Vietnam until her husband convinced her she needed to know her origins. I do not like him. Very little – if any – freedom for those who had lived the bohemian life of Mallorca since their 20s.
Source: La Verdad
I’m Wayne Wickman, a professional journalist and author for Today Times Live. My specialty is covering global news and current events, offering readers a unique perspective on the world’s most pressing issues. I’m passionate about storytelling and helping people stay informed on the goings-on of our planet.
