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Showing posts with label Nazi-era looted art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nazi-era looted art. Show all posts

November 15, 2013

Friday, November 15, 2013 - ,,, No comments

Gurlitt Art Collection: WSJ: 'Germany Plans to Publish List of Nazi-Looted Works in Art Trove'

Pierre Ciric, a lawyer in New York, just brought our attention to a story this afternoon in the Wall Street Journal: "BREAKING: GERMANY TO PUBLISH LIST OF 590 GURLITT ARTWORKS STARTING NEXT WEEK."

Mr. Ciric's law firm co-sponsored with Holocaust Art Restitution Project (HARP) the October Art Law CLE symposium "Due Diligence in Cultural Heritage Litigation: Is There A Minimum Threshold?"

According to the WSJ article reported by Mary M. Lane in Berlin, a German task force -- a six-person committee of German and international experts to be created to research the provenance of all 1,400 works -- will begin by publishing the 590 Nazi-era suspected looted artworks on the German government's Lost Art Internet Database (www.lostart.de).

November 7, 2013

Thursday, November 07, 2013 - , No comments

Gurlitt Art Collection: Excerpts from the 1945 Allied Interrogation via Lootedart.com

Dr. Hildebrant Gurlitt subjected his 208-piece art collection to scrutiny by the U.S. Army in 1945 and filed the necessary paperwork for its return five years later, according to information provided by The Central Registry of Information on Looted Cultural Property 1933-1945's Lootedart.com, "Hildebrand Gurlitt: Allied Interrogation June 1945; List of Artworks in his Collection Returned to him by the Allies in 1950 and the Related Documentation":
On 8-10 June 1945 Hildebrand Gurlitt was interrogated at Aschback by Lieutenant Dwight McKay of the US Third Army about his activities as a Nazi art dealer. The statement resulting from that interrogation, in which, inter alia, he denied ever handling seized art in France, and in which he lists some of the sources of acquisition of the works in the collection, is available here.
The "translation of sworn statement written by Dr. Hildebrand Gurlitt" -- declassified in 1977 -- includes a life history (his grandfather Louis Gurlitt was a landscape painter) and his military service (officer of infantry from 1914 to 18) and his job as director of the City Art Gallery in Zwickau 1925-1930 when he 'incurred the enmity of the Nazis and was dismissed'.
After my dismissal in Zwickau (1930) I gave lessons of history of art in the Academy of Applied Art in Dresden, published a book about Kathe Kollwitz (a then famous German woman-artist) public debates against Nazi-art and wrote articles for the Vossische and Frankfurter Zeitung. 
1931 I was called to Hamburg as director of the Kunstverein. I arranged exhibitions, lectures about modern art, unpopular with the Nazi movement. Made an exhibition of modern English art, one of modern German art in Sweden, made trips to England and Scandinavia. Was dismissed in 1933 on account of my Anti-Nazi feelings. Got denounced because I had the flagpole of the Gallery sawed off, in this way avoiding the showing of the swastica flag.
After Keunstverain Hamburg, Dr. Gurlitt opened an art gallery in 1934 where he 'went on trips for great German Museums. 1939 I was in Switzerland, then in Paris.' Dr. Gurlitt explains that he had to 'decide between the war or work for the museums.' He was 'called by Dr. Voss' (who had been 'appointed as successor to the directorship of the museum in Dresden and as commissioner for the Fuhrermuseum in Linz') 'to help him with the buying of paintings in Paris.' He explains the the 'purchases in Paris were perfectly normal':
I had given to me the photos of paintings and mostly Dr. Voss bought them wihtout having seen them, entirely on the strength of my descriptions. Any force whatsoever was not used. If Dr. Voss thought the pictures to (sic) expensive, he did not buy them.
He later says: 'I have never bought a picture, which was not offered voluntary to me. If paintings were pointed out to be as not for sale, I did not even ask for the price. I did not need to do so as I had enough offers.'
How it was with pictures from Jewish collections 
As I heard, the Jewish owned art treasures in France were seized by a law, but which I have never seen with my eyes. I know that the German Ambassador used a Baroque Writing desk which came from the Rothschild collection. I also saw marvellous Franch drawings from the 18th century in the rooms of the German Embassy, which were said to come from the same source. It was told to me, that there existed in paris a palace in which the Jewish art possessions were collected and where they were divided among the different officials. I never went to this building. They told me that a certain Mr. Lohse, who was acting for Goring, was the chief of this house. I avoided meeting this man and met him only once in an exhibition without my intention. I always avoided to meet high Nazi-Officials in Paris. I was only once to a large reception in the embassy together with hundreds of people. There was rumor that the Gestapo bought under pressure, paintings from private or dealers, which I heard very often, but I never could prove it or even get reliable information, as I otherwise should have gone after such an accusation and would have informed Prof. Voss privately. I did notice indeed that I was not shown many pictures, which were reserved for other dealers.
According to Dr. Gurlitt, he made 10 trips to Paris between the summer 1941 and June 1944: 'In total I acquired about 200 paintings in France and have given them to museums.' His 'income increased steadily, because I was very active and developed my business more and more.' As to his 'personal fortunes' he includes 'the safe deposit box of the Dresdner Bank' of 'silver and the paintings of my father and also the pictures of my deceased sister'. He denies having any paintings from the Dresden Museum in his possession: 'All pictures I brought with me from Saxonia are the personal property of my family or myself. I have never in the house pictures of other owners. '
I was told, that I was a poor man before the Nazis came and that I now have money and a whole truck-load of paintings. To that I have to reply, that I was well off as director of the Kunstverein Hamburg with a monthly salary of 600 R.M. and a commission on every picture sold. I had an apartment of 12 rooms, a very large library and a nice art collection. I had a good future ahead of me and would inherit one day the house of my mother in Dresden, with the library and collections of my father, his personal fortune and the contents of 14 rooms filled with antique furniture. Dismissed by the Nazis, I became an art dealer, very much against my purely scientific intentions.
In the list of 'Contents of opened boxes in Castle Aschback belonging to H. Gurlitt' it is written that he purchased a Courbet from Engel in Paris for 150,000 French francs; that a Liebermann was 'from the possession of my father who bought it in Rome'; a Picasso bought from the artist in Paris in 1942 for 60,000 French francs; a Chagall, 'old possession of my sister, who was a pupil of her'(?); a Dix from Berlin in 1934; and a Nolde, 'gift of the artist to me'.

Here's a link to the list of works returned to Gurlitt in 1950 (also published in The New York Times here).

Lootedart.com notes that 'on the list is the MaxBeckmann 'Lion Tamer' sold by Cornelius Gurlitt at Lempertz Cologne in 2011 (previously owned by Alfred Flechtheim with claims settled prior to the auction house sale). Patricia Cohen writes about this in The New York Times' "Documents Reveal How Looted Nazi Art Was Restored to Dealer".

On another note, Mail Online ran the story "Can the weirdo who hid £1bn of Nazi art solve the mystery of the Tsar's lost treasure trove" which includes statements from Cornelius Gurlitt's estranged cousin.

November 5, 2013

Tuesday, November 05, 2013 - No comments

Gurlitt Art Collection OpEd: Too many questions about the recent news of 'Nazi era looted' paintings hoarded by Gurlitt

by Lynda Albertson, ARCA CEO

Sunday afternoon at about 1PM GMT the Museum Security Network received an announcement of a breaking story in Focus, a weekly news magazine published in Munich and distributed widely throughout Germany.   As the nation’s third-largest weekly news magazine, their stories tend to be fact-checked well though they don’t often have breaking news in this sector of the art world.  Scanning the announcement, I had to reread the notice twice before it sunk in.  It seemed like an unbelievable fairytale. 

Customs police had discovered a cache of approximately1,500 once-believed destroyed works of art by many of the masters of classical modernism.   Stuffed in an dark apartment in Schwabing, a borough eleven minutes north of Munich, the investigators found works believed to be attributed to Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, Otto Dix, Albrecht Dürer, Emil Nolde, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Franz Marc, Max Beckmann, Max Liebermann, and Oskar Kokoschka:  artworks that disappeared off the art world’s radar screen during and shortly after the Second World War. 

During the war, many of these works were declared entartete Kunst (degenerate art) a derogatory term adopted by the Nazi regime that was used to describe much of what was the party classified as “modern art” though this label alone is misleading. The name also became the moniker of a Nazi exhibition in 1937, which featured 114 modernist artists’ works curated to show the work as deviant and without social value.  Interestingly, the exhibition was held in the very city where the cache of missing paintings were to be uncovered.

The "Entartete Kunst" exhibit ran from July 19th through November 30 1937 and presented 650 works by artists deemed to be contaminated by Jewish thought or ideology even if few of the artists who contributed to the modernist movement were actually of Jewish descent.  Branded as an enemy of the state, German painter Max Beckmann, long considered to be one of the towering figures of 20th-century art, is said to have fled to Amsterdam on its opening day.

From Cubism to Dada to expressionism to surrealism, the modernist art aesthetic didn’t fit with the Third Reich’s anti-Semitism, nor with Adolf Hitler's belief that classical Greece and the Middle Ages were the true sources of Aryan art.  Labeled as un-German or Jewish Bolshevist, the regime considered works of art from these genres subversive.  To purge the world of the influence of degenerate artists more than 5,000 works were given this label and confiscated or purchased under duress through forced means during Hitler’s reign.  Many of these works of art have never been seen again. 

Which brings us back to the present and Sunday’s breaking news.  Just how did reclusive octogenarian Cornelius Gurlitt come by his hoarded mother-load of missing art, nestled secretively amidst his stash of past their date of freshness nibbles? Schwabing may be a Bohemian quarter of Munich, but surely 1,500 works of art being moved into a building would have attracted someone’s attention. 

Those interested in art crime and Holocaust-era art losses began searching for more information as soon as the story broke in Germany.  Within 48 hours all the news wires were abuzz. 

What we do know now is that Gurlitt was the sole surviving son of the German-Jewish art dealer and historian Hildebrandt Gurlitt who traded in 'degenerate art'.   Stopped on a train during a routine control, officers searched the younger Gurlitt and him found him to be carrying a suspicious envelope containing 9,000 Euros in large denomination bills, an amount just shy of the legal limit for monetary instruments when traveling between two countries of the European Union. 

Many individuals commenting on this breaking news seem surprised that the German authorities have the legal right to conduct these types of searches on common citizens. In reality, in the age of revolving credit and plastic money,  large sums of undeclared cash would alarm virtually all police and custom border authorities, not just those in within the European Union.  Amounts of currency entering or exiting a country are monitored as a means of investigating tax evasion, drug dealing, terrorist financing and other criminal activities.

In Gurlitt’s case, tax authorities were routinely checking passengers traveling between Germany and Switzerland in an effort to ferret out tax evaders, many of whom have long taken advantage of Switzerland’s tax haven and secretive banking rules. 

As Europeans have seen the rules governing tax treaties begin to change, tax evaders have begun carrying their legal tender back home, presumably to stuff in mattresses.  Some pass over the border with below the limit installments so as to arouse less suspicion, carrying monthly allowances in unassuming envelopes like the one carried by Cornelius Gurlitt. Others bring back larger sums, strapped to their bodies or tucked inside corsets. Last September another German citizen was arrested when it was found that he was carrying 140,000 euros stuffed inside his adult diaper.

But even with his relatively thin envelope, Cornelius set off alarm bells.  He acted nervous and gave authorities an Austrian passport in the name of Rolf Nikolaus Cornelius Gurlitt, born December 28, 1933, in Hamburg - currently residing in Salzburg.   Becoming suspicious, Germany’s tax authorities located his residence in Germany not Austria and subsequently issued a search warrant in the Spring of 2011 seeking entrance to his apartment in Schwabing in hopes of implicating him in tax fraud and embezzlement.  

What they found instead was 1,500 pieces of history, each of which asks as many questions as they answer.   Strangely though, in the two years that have passed since the raid occurred and the artworks was seized, no single list has been made public identifying which works of art were squirreled away in Gurlitt’s hoarder’s heaven.  Forbes magazine listed an abstract figure of $1 billion but until a list is obtained that itemizes the pieces seized, this figure should only be considered speculation.

Berlin Free University has confirmed that Meike Hoffmann of its degenerate art research unit is helping identify these art works but no information has been given as to how long the art historian has been working with authorities on the process or why, given the number of pieces involved, other researchers familiar with modernist painters have not been brought on board. 

What the motive was for father and son to secretly stash away so many remarkable treasures is something we may never fully grasp.  Hildebrandt Gurlitt died in 1956 leaving his son holding the bag and the younger Gurlitt himself is reported to have tersely asked the police why they couldn’t couldn't have waited until he was dead, stating "They would have got their hands on the art anyway."

I for one would like to ask Cornelius how possessing something in secret, like the best of art thief clichés, was more fulfilling for him than being remembered as having returned these works to their public and private owners and undoing the pain and damage caused by his father’s lies and deceit.  From 1956 to today, the thought never crossed his mind to turn these objects over for the greater good?  Surely he realized that his family owed it to the artists, if not to their relatives, to inform the world that these works of art had not been lost after all.

One can speculate that the elder Gurlitt lied about the paintings due to some misconstrued belief that the artworks might be confiscated by the invading Russians when they entered Dresden during the war.  He could likewise have continued to keep them hidden long after the war fearing they would have been shipped outside Germany to one of Russia’s great museums when Germany was still divided.  Similarly, after his father’s death and before the fall of the Berlin wall, Cornelius too may have elected to remain silent.  But why not in the years following Germany’s unification? Why did this man chose to continue to facilitate his family’s deception, living as a recluse off of the random pieces he sold? 

While these questions hold historic curiosity for me personally, I may never know the answers.  Gurlitt’s neighbors in the modest residential building where he lives have not seen the octogenarian for more than a year, though his name is still on the bell.

More important to the art world and hopefully more easily answered is understanding why the Munich tax authorities chose to keep this remarkable find confidential, limiting access to the case to only a chosen cadre. Angela Merkel, herself stated yesterday that "The government were informed about this case a few months ago".

Realizing that who potentially owns these pieces may be a very tangled legal ball of thread to unravel, I also wonder how Focus came to know of the seizure and why they chose to break the story now while the investigation is ongoing.  Do they know something we don't?

Augsburg public prosecutor Reinhard Nemetz has implied that the information was kept secret to facilitate the ongoing investigation.  In a press meeting earlier today he stated that "the prosecution has not gone public. To this day it is - as I said - counterproductive for us to go with the case to the public. We did not save the images. The pictures should not be hung in my office."

Siegfried Klöble, the government director of the Munich customs investigation also added that the investigators are working on the assumption that there may be another cache of paintings in an undiscovered location.

In the meanwhile, all the government’s secrecy and limited number of resources working on the investigation has angered many in art community, myself included.

September 12, 2013

Thursday, September 12, 2013 - ,,,,,, No comments

HARP (The Holocaust Art Restitution Project) and HARP-Europe Sign A Collaboration Agreement Involving Research in Artworks Looted by the Nazis

Press Contacts:
For HARP Europe: Elizabeth Royer, 06 13 17 44 70 , elizabeth.royer@wanadoo.fr
For HARP: Marc Masurovsky, (00) 1 202 255 1602 , plunderedart@gmail.com

Paris, France - Washington, DC, USA - September 12, 2013 - The Holocaust Art Restitution Project ( HARP), based in Washington, DC, chaired by Ori Z. Soltes, and HARP-Europe, founded by Elizabeth Royer, both nonprofit organizations, announced today the signature of an exclusive collaboration agreement involving  research in artworks looted by the Nazi Regime.

For twelve years, Hitler’s Third Reich orchestrated a campaign of persecution, plunder and annihilation of millions of people, resulting in the seizure and expropriation of countless assets, including works of art. Due to the inertia from governments and the art market since 1945, and as Holocaust victims or their heirs continue to seek their stolen property, these artworks move freely around the world with impunity, and continue to be exhibited, exchanged or sold.

This is why HARP, based in Washington, DC, and chaired by Ori Z. Soltes, announced the signature of an exclusive collaboration agreement involving historical research of looted artworks, with HARP-Europe, a French association incorporated under French no-for-profit laws, and founded by Elizabeth Royer.  In fact, the identification and restitution of looted artworks require detailed research and analysis of public and private archives, either in Europe or North America.

HARP-Europe is a not-for-profit entity created and led by Elizabeth Royer, and headquartered in Paris. HARP is a US not-for-profit entity founded in 1997, which has worked for 16 years on the restitution of artworks looted by the Nazi regime. HARP was notably involved in the "Portrait of Wally" case, where a Schiele painting was seized by the U.S. Government, as well as in the restitution of an “Odalisque”, a painting by Henri Matisse, to the Rosenberg family. The purpose of both entities is to conduct archival research on artworks looted by the Nazi regime, to assist claimants in obtaining their restitution, to seek improvement of the legislative and political framework in favor of restitution of looted artworks, to develop and promote educational programs designed to facilitate historical research in property losses resulting from the Nazi regime.

HARP is advised and represented by the Ciric Law Firm Firm, PLLC in New York, USA, and Europe 

HARP is advised and represented by law firms Dauzier & Associés and Antoine Comte in Paris, France.

Elizabeth Royer, President                                                           
HARP-Europe, Paris, France

Ori Z. Soltes, President

HARP, Washington, DC, USA

September 1, 2013

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ARCA's Art & Cultural Heritage Conference 2013: Felicity Strong (University of Melbourne), Theodosia Latsi (Utrecht University) and Verity Algar (University College, London) presented in Panel 4

(Left to right): Kirsten Hower (moderator), Felicity Strong,
Theodosia Latsi, and Verity Algar
Sunday morning, June 23rd, Kirsten Hower, the academic program assistant for ARCA's summer certificate program, moderated a panel on art-related crimes with presentations by three students and/or recent graduates.

Felicity Strong, PhD Candidate at the University of Melbourne, spoke on "The mythology of the art forger":
In the twentieth century, there has been the rise of depiction of the art forger in non-fiction biographies and memoir. Distinct from scholarly research, these depictions of individual art forgers have developed a common mythology, which weaves through each story of the art forger. The art forger is mythologised as a hero; the failed artists rallying against a corrupt art market, dominated by greedy art dealers and scholars. In Australian and British culture, this mythology has its roots in the wider mythology of hero criminal, such as in the stories of Robin Hood or Ned Kelly. It also feeds into a broader anti-intellectualism and mistrust of the establishment, particularly in contrast to the depiction of art curators and connoisseurs in the depictions. This mythology is evident in a number of biographies of notable forgers, such as Han van Meegeren and Elmyr de Hory, which intersect with the sub-genre of memoir, in the personal accounts of Tom Keating, Eric Hebborn and Ken Peryani. These accounts fuel the ability of the forgers to create their own public persona and feed into the wider mythology of the art forger. Analysis of non-fictional depictions of the art forger may offer an insight into why it is not considered as serious as other crimes and worth of closer scrutiny by the broader community.
Ms. Strong is in her second year of research at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She has a Master of Art Curatorship and has worked in commercial galleries in Melbourne and London. Her PhD research is focused on discovering the extent to which perceptions of art forgery are influenced by depictions in cultural context, such as in literature, on screen and within an art museum environment.

Theodosia Latsi, MA in Global Criminology, Utrecht University, presented on "The Art of Stealing: the Case of Museum Thefts in the Netherlands". Ms. Latsi has studied Sociology in Panteion University of Athens, Greece and has recently graduated from the master of Criminology at Utrecht University. She is currently conducting research voluntarily for the Trafficking Culture Project and offers periodically assistance at CIROC (Centre for Information and Research on Organised Crime, Netherlands).

Verity Algar, art history student, University College London, presented on "Cultural memory and the restitution of cultural property: Comparing Nazi-looted art and Melanesian malanggan":
Using two disparate case studies -- claims for the restitution of artworks confiscated by the Nazis being lodged by Jewish families and concerns regarding the presence Melanesian malanggan in Western museum collections -- I will discuss the importance of collective, or cultural memory in the context of making decisions about whether to restitute objects. The two cases can be differentiated by the approach to social memory taken by the groups involved. Many Jewish people are keen to have their property returned to them, whereas the people of New Ireland do not want the malanggan, which they spent months carving, returned to them. I discuss the problems that arise when legal definitions of ownership clash with cultural notions of property and illustrate this using Marie Altmann's successful restitution of five Klimt paintings from the Australian government and the malanggan example. I draw on the language of restitution claims and the display of Nazi-looted art at Israel's Yad Vashem museum and will apply Appadurai's theory that objects have "social lives" to overcome the dichotomy between the cultural value and monetary value of an object. I conclude that cultural memory is a useful concept to apply to restitution claims. Its impact can vastly differ from case to case, as illustrated by the divergent attitudes to memory and cultural property in the Jewish and Melanesian case studies. Cultural memory needs to be defined on a cultural-specific basis. The concept of cultural memory allows cultural objects to be part of the collective cultural memory of one group of people, whilst being legally owned by an individual.
Ms. Algar is a second year B.A. History of Art student at University College London, where she minors in Anthropology. She is interested in the legal regulation of the art market and restitution cases, particularly those relating to wartime looting.

July 1, 2013

Monday, July 01, 2013 - ,,,,, No comments

From Inside Neolithic Walls: On Collaboration and Cooperation

Hong Kong police officer Toby Bull presents at
ARCA's International Art Crime Conference in Amelia.
(Photo by Illicit Cultural Property)
by Martin Terrazas, co-posting with plundered art

I have been asked about the quality of the program offered by the Association for Research into Crimes against Art, similarly, the Provenance Research Training Program. Why travel across the Atlantic Ocean despite such expense? Why attend postgraduate certificate-based programs in unfamiliar cultures and societies?

Daily moments of cross-cultural communication at Caffé Grande evoke inspiration: Understanding the tone of a buongiorno is essential. The relationship between customer and barista in implicit. Friendliness and attempts to become more Italian are rewarded with pleasantries. The morning caffeine jolt is more than a financial exchange; it requires mutual cooperation and collaboration.

Therein lies lessons for preventing art crime and conducting provenance research. There is little room for undue opposition and overly emotional outbursts as both are forensic exercises, in which, ultimately, the objective is to determine who has proper title to a stolen object. Research, investigation, analysis, and context are essential. The desire to jockey into position for fame and fortune is futile; ambition, in Amelia, Magdeburg, Zagreb, and future conference cities, is better focused on becoming a more refined, cooperative and ethical professional.

The existence of dishonorable participants in the art market is given; the larger question is whether these individuals define the art market or rather the art market defines them. Experience with “Cultural Plunder by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg: Database of Art Objects at the Jeu de Paume” and other databases allows me to realize that greed marks a loss of power and reputation. Rather than intrigue, the initials of Adolph Hitler and Hermann Göring on archival documents eternally evoke disgust and failure.

In saying benvenuto in the current “age of angst”, it is better to live in an environment of mutual cooperation.[1] Amelia and the think tank that settles into its crevices during the Mediterranean’s hottest months, similar to the periodic week-long efforts as a result of the 2009 Terezín Declaration on Holocaust Era Assets and Related Issues, empowers future generations to learn through discourse and discussion.

 [1] Joergen Oerstrom Moeller, “Welcome to the Age of Angst,” Singapore Management University, 12 August 2012.


Martin Terrazas is a student with the Association for Research into Crimes against Art. He is a contributor to the Holocaust Art Restitution Project. He assisted in the release and continues in the expansion of “Cultural Plunder by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg: Database of Art Objects” – a cooperation between the Looted Art and Cultural Property Initiative of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, World Jewish Restitution Organization, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, National Archives and Records Administration, Das Bundesarchiv, and Ministère des Affaires étrangère et européannes. He participated in the Provenance Research Training Program – a project of the European Shoah Legacy Institute – hosted at the Koordinierungsstelle Magdeburg.

April 13, 2013

Saturday, April 13, 2013 - ,,, No comments

German Government Agrees to Return Oskar Kokoschka's "Portrait of Tilla Durieux" to Flechtheim's Heirs

Oskar Kokoschka's "Portrait of Tilla Durieux" (1910)
Museum Ludwig/Marcus Stroetzel via Bloomberg
The ARCA Blog mentioned Alfred Flechtheim and a painting by Oskar Kokoschka in November 2010 when German forgers were suspected of using fraudulent stickers from the Dusseldorf art dealer's gallery to sell artworks falsely attributed to French and German Expressionist artists ("German Forgers May Have Used Catalogs of Jewish Art Dealer").

Alfred Flechtheim fled Nazi Germany when his business was confiscated in 1933 and died in London in 1937. Flechtheim's heirs have tried to recover more than 100 paintings by artists such as Picasso, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, and Vincent van Gogh from European and American museums.

Catherine Hickley reported for Bloomberg News on April 9 that the German government has agreed to return Oskar Kokoschka's "Portrait of Tilla Durieux" (1910) to Flechtheim's heirs:
“Portrait of Tilla Durieux” (1910) has been in the Museum Ludwig in Cologne since 1976. Flechtheim’s great-nephew Mike Hulton, a medical doctor based in California, filed a claim for the painting’s restitution in 2008, saying the dealer sold it under duress and didn’t get a fair price. The museum said Flechtheim was already in financial trouble before the Nazis came to power and sold the painting to pay off debts. 
“The view of the advisory commission is that this case cannot be exhaustively clarified,” the panel, led by former constitutional judge Jutta Limbach, said in a statement. “Because of an absence of concrete evidence, it is to be assumed that Alfred Flechtheim was forced to sell the disputed painting because he was persecuted.”

February 28, 2013

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Boston's MFA's Provenance Curator Victoria Reed Lecturing Tonight at The Getty Center "Tales from an Art Detective: The Eventful Lives of Art Objects"

Victoria Reed, Monica S. Adler Assistant Curator for Provenance at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is speaking tonight at the Getty Center in Los Angeles on her work examining the ownership history of objects and the art-museum's policy and practice today.

Ms. Reed has been featured on the ARCA Blog previously: here in April 2011 as a panelist at a World War II Provenance Research Seminar; here in June 2011 regarding the MFA's settlement to keep Eglon van der Neer's painting, Portrait of a Man and a Woman; and here last summer in a post by Virginia Curry regarding a lecture to students at the Stonehill Art Symposium.

October 22, 2012

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"Lady in Gold" author Anne-Marie O'Connor spoke of "an age of restitution" in Nazi-looted art disputes at Rutgers University


by Kirsten Hower, ARCA Correspondent

In the eventful weekend of the annual CHAPS Conference at Rutgers University, I could not help but be interested in the multitude of flyers posted in Voorhees Hall announcing upcoming talks and events.  Of particular interest was an announcement for a talk given by Anne-Marie O’Connor on her book The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt’s Masterpiece Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer.”  So after enjoying a weekend long conference, I made my way back to New Brunswick to hear O’Connor speak about her recounting of the history of Klimt’s painting.

Standing in a small classroom, Anne-Marie O’Connor gave a brief account of the history of The Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer and the restitution case concluded only a few years ago.  In an almost disarmingly candid manner, O’Connor told the tale that was “not just a restitution of art but a restitution of history,” sparking discussions of the issues surrounding restitution during the following question period.  The case of this particular painting opened the door on restitution of Nazi-era looted art, ushering in, as O’Connor dubbed it, “an age of restitution.”  An appropriate name since the Hague will be hosting an international symposium on “Fair and Just Solutions? Alternatives to litigation in Nazi looted art disputes, status quo and new developments” on November 27, 2012.  As more restitution cases come to light, more undiscovered histories, like those recounted in The Lady in Gold, are laid out for the world to discover.

If you have not read O’Connor’s book, please see Catherine Schofield Sezgin’s review of the book (in three parts) and hunt down a copy of the book to enjoy the complex and extraordinary tale of this painting.

Monday, October 22, 2012 - ,,,,,, No comments

The Journal of Art Crime, Fall 2012: Review of Anne-Marie O'Connor's "The Lady in Gold: Extraordinary Tale of the Klimt Paintings"

In the Fall 2012 issue of The Journal of Art Crime, Catherine Sezgin reviews Anne-Marie O'Connor's The Lady in Gold: Extraordinary Tale of the Klimt Paintings (Knopf, 2012):
In 1907, Gustav Klimt finished the portrait of 24-year-old Adele Bloch-Bauer, the wife of a wealthy art patron who lived across the square from Vienna's Fine Art Academy.  In the same year, that same art school would reject Adolf Hitler's application for admission because he failed the drawing exam.  More than three decades later, these two events collided when a Nazi stole this portrait from the home of Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, a Jew who had fled Europe's great cultural center when Austria united with Hitler's fascist regime.
In Lady in Gold, the Extraordinary Tale of the Klimt Paintings, journalist Anne-Marie O'Connor tells the story of Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, which would sell for $135 million to an American in 2007.  O'Connor first describes the relationship between Klimt, his Jewish art patrons, and the cultural environment in pre-Nazi Austria.  From the point of view of the Bloch-Bauer family we are told of the collaboration between Austria and the German Nazis to loot Jewish art collections.  The book concludes with the legal struggles of American attorney Randy Schoenberg to navigate the U. S. legal system and help Maria Altmann and the other surviving members of the Bloch-Bauer family to recovery four stolen Klimt paintings.  It's a story of how a legitimate government corrupted legislation to steal from, and murder, its own citizens.
Against the backdrop of the murder of 6 million Jews, restitution of stolen art may seem unimportant, especially as newspapers today sport headlines of Jewish families recovering and then selling artworks for millions of dollars.  Why is it so important that these paintings are returned to the families now? Weren't these issues of restitution settled decades ago when Allied forces discovered stolen art in the salt mines of Germany after the war? And why does the American legal system have to get involved in these cases, almost seven decades after armistice? Isn't this a metter for the government of Austria to decide? Lady in Gold answers these questions.
You may read this review by subscribing to The Journal of Art Crime through the ARCA website.

August 22, 2012

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Book Review: "Hare with the Amber Eyes" Part II

“The Hare with the Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance” By Edmund de Waal
Paperback: Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2010


Book Review by Catherine Sezgin, ARCA Blog Editor-in-Chief, Part II

In the prologue de Waal describes what he doesn’t want his book to be:
I know that my family were Jewish, of course, and I know they were staggeringly rich, but I really don’t want to get into the sepia saga business, writing up some elegiac Mitteleuropa narrative of loss…. And I’m not entitled to nostalgia about all that lost wealth and glamour from a century ago.
He does have a vision for his book:
I want to know what the relationship has been between this wooden object that I am rolling between my fingers – hard and tricky and Japanese – and where it has been. I want to be able to reach to the handle of the door and turn it and feel it open. I want to walk into each room where this object has lived, to feel the volume of the space, to know what pictures were on the walls, how the light fell from the windows. And I want to know whose hands it has been in, and what they felt about it and thought about it – if they thought about it. I want to know what it has witnessed.
De Waal expected his project to take six months not the six years his journey took him through archives and libraries from Tokyo to Odessa where his Russian family of grain-exporters originated. A piece of oral history links him from his grandmother to the purchaser of these objects, Charles Ephrussi, who lived on the rue de Monceau (slang for nouveau riche) in the Hôtel Ephrussi in Paris in the late 19th century. As a child, Elisabeth Ephrussi had met Charles at the family’s six storey stone Swiss chalet ‘on the edge of Lake Lucerne’. Elisabeth lived at the Palais Ephrussi on the Ringstrasse in Vienna (not too far from the Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer residence).

Mr. de Waal, one of four sons of a retired clergyman in England, starts with a slender cache of objects from his 80-year-old father then travels to libraries, archives, and to each relevant family residence to piece together this story of collecting. In Paris de Waal discovers that the Hôtel Ephrussi at 81 rue de Monceau is now ‘an office for medical insurance’. The Ephrussi family had branched into banking in Vienna, the capital city of the Hapsburg Empire, and had set up offices in the French capital. One of the Ephrussi men, Charles, was excused from the business of making money. Charles moved from Odessa to Vienna before settling in Paris to live as a bachelor art scholar and collector: ‘He is in the extraordinary position of being both ridiculously affluent and very self-directed.’ Charles traveled throughout Europe gathering information for a book on the German artist Albrecht Dürer: Charles ‘needs to find every drawing, every scribble in every archive, in order to do him justice’ (not unlike this journey of Edward de Waal).

Anti-Semitism haunts the family even in 19th century Paris. Mr. de Waal notes that the diarist Edmond de Goncourt claims Charles has ‘infested’ the salons of Paris as a Jew: ‘Charles, he (Goncourt) intimates, is ubiquitous, the trait of someone who does not know his place; he is hungry for contact, does not know when to shade eagerness and become invisible.’ In addition to Goncourt, Marcel Proust (with more charity) mentions Charles as attending artistic gatherings known as salons. Mr. de Waal reads all of Charles’ reviews published in the monthly Gazette des beaux-arts where Charles was a contributor, editor and an owner. In the 1870s, Charles, who also collected French Impressionist paintings today found in many public collections, purchased collected Japanese art, a rarity in Paris, with his married lover (and incredibly the mother of five children, da Waal notes). Charles purchased 264 netsuke from a dealer in Japanese art, Philippe Sichel. As described by Goncourt, the artists of the netsuke specialized and took their time in sculpting the small intimate carvings. Da Waal quotes an 1889 letter from Rudyard Kipling describing the novelist’s reaction to seeing netsuke when he traveled to Japan:
Unfortunately the merest scratch of Japanese character is the only clue to the artist’s name, so I am unable to say who conceived, and in creamy ivory executed, the hold man horribly embarrassed by a cuttle-fish; the priest who made the soldier pick up a deer for him and laughed to think that the brisket would be his and the burden his companions…
Mr. da Waal describes popular erotic netsuke: “These small things to handle and to be moved around – slightly, playfully, discerningly – were kept in vitrines. The chance to pass round a small and shocking object was too good to miss in the Paris of the 1870s.”

Here's a link to Part I of this review. Here's a link to Part III of this review.

August 20, 2012

Monday, August 20, 2012 - ,,, No comments

Book Review: "The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss", Part I

“The Hare with the Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance” By Edmund de Waal

Paperback: Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2010
Book Review by Catherine Sezgin, ARCA Blog Editor-in-Chief, Part I

My regular Wednesday tennis mate Barbara recommended a book that I heard as written by a famous ceramicist – a guy who makes pottery – about the history of the Japanese knick-knacks he inherited from his family.

Pottery. Japan. Knick-knacks. I was reading about Nazi-looted art (see Lady in Gold). A book with the odd title “The Hare with Amber Eyes” did not immediately send me to the bookstore. Barbara knew a little bit about the Jews in Europe during the first half of the 20th century – her mom, she had mentioned only once, had been in a concentration camp.

A few weeks later Barbara and I, over the net, were discussing the Klimt paintings and what the Bloch-Bauer family went through in Vienna – that the paintings hadn’t been donated to the museum by Adele Bloch-Bauer but stolen more than a decade after her death from her husband’s residence after Austria united with Nazi Germany.

“Did you read that book I recommended?” Barbara asked.

“What was the title?”

“Hare with the Amber Eyes,” she repeated. “The family was in Vienna when the Nazis came.”

A few hours later I had downloaded the book on my iPad and my iPhone, downloaded the audible book, and later ended up at our local bookstore in Pasadena where the Vroman’s employee told me I could find Edmund de Waal’s memoir under “Biography”.

Not since Jonathan Harr’s book, The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece, has a book so influenced me.

First of all, Edmund de Waal isn’t just a potter but an academic who has written on the subject in various journals and truly is recognizable in the art world (as confirmed by the first woman I recommended the book to).  Second, de Waal read English at Cambridge and brings an amazing literary talent to his tale.

I have recommended this book to any lovers of Proust and 19th century France (the Japanese netsuke were purchased there by an ancestor of de Waal who served as a model for the French novelist); anyone who wants to understand anti-Semitism in Europe and how that prejudice allowed the Nazis to rise to power; and to my teenage son who loves Japan (part of the narrative is placed in Japan after World War II). I would recommend this to anyone looking for “a good read” in any subject by a compassionate and intelligent human being. As for myself, this book changed the way I viewed decorative arts as stuff-to-dust to artifacts of the experiences of everyday life.

Edmund de Waal was studying porcelain pottery and visiting his great-uncle, Ignace “Iggie” Ephrussi, in Japan in 1991 where he first handled one of the 264 tiny Japanese wood and ivory carvings known as netsuke. He later writes:
I pick one up and turn it around in my fingers, weight it in the palm of my hand. If it is wood, chestnut or elm, it is even lighter than the ivory. You see the patina more easily on these wooden ones: there is a faint shine on the spine of the bridled wolf and on the tumbling acrobats locked in their embrace. The ivory ones come in shades of cream, every colour, in fact, but white. A few have inlaid eyes of amber or horn. Some of the older ones are slightly worn away: the haunch of the faun resting on leaves has lost its markings. There is a slight split, an almost imperceptible fault line on the cicada. Who dropped it? Where and when?
Mr. de Waal describes how one of the netsuke feels when he pockets it for a day:
Carry is not quite the right word for having a netsuke in a pocket. It sounds too purposeful. A netsuke is so light and so small that it migrates and almost disappears amongst your keys and change. You simply forget that it is there.
Then he describes why he wrote this book:
I realize how much I care about how this hard-and-soft, losable object has survived. I need to find a way of unraveling its story. Owning this netsuke – inheriting them all – means I have been handed a responsibility to them and to the people who have owned them. I am unclear and discomfited about where the parameters of this responsibility might lie. 
I know the bones of this journey from Iggie. I know that these netsuke were bought in Paris in the 1870s by a cousin of my great-grandfather called Charles Ephrussi. I know that he gave them as a wedding-present to my great-grandfather Victor von Ephrussi in Vienna at the turn of the century. I know the story of Anna, my great-grandmother’s maid, very well. And I know that they came with Iggie to Tokyo, of course, and were part of his life with Hiro.
This book review will be continued on Wednesday. Here are links to Part II and Part III.

June 19, 2012

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Book Review (Part III): Anne-Marie O'Connor's "Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Baur

by Catherine Schofield Sezgin, ARCA Blog Editor-in-Chief


In June, 1908, Klimt unveiled his gold portrait of the 26-year-old Adele, making her an ‘instant celebrity’ (O’Connor):

‘Klimt embedded Adele in a luminous field of real gold leaf, giving her the appearance of a religious icon, which art historians would compare to the mosaic portrait of Empress Theodora in Ravenna.’

Three years later, a syphilis-ridden Klimt visits the Bloch-Bauer castle in Czechloslovakia to work on a second portrait of Adele that he shows in 1912:

 ‘It was a very different work.  Her expression was mature, direct, and anything but seductive.  This was an older Adele, with world-weary eyes and cigarette-stained teeth, a painting some would call evidence of the end of the affair.’ (O’Connor)

Adele and her husband would also own four Klimt landscapes, including the 1912 “Apple Tree”.

In 1913, Hitler left Vienna.  The following year, an anarchist shot the Archduke Franz Ferdinand outside of his residence at the Belvedere Palace, a random act that would lead to The Great War, and the death of millions of young men.

Klimt dies of Spanish influenza in 1918 at the age of fifty-five, a few months before Armistice Day which reduces the Habsburg’s empire from 60 million to a tenth of that population and squeezed into a debt-ridden new state.

Until Adele’s death of meningitis in her early 40s, she lives a prominent cultural life filled with intellectuals, Viennese composers and artists.  In 1923, Adele wrote in a short will: “I ask my husband after his death, to leave my two portraits and the four landscapes by Gustav Klimt to the Austrian Gallery in Vienna.” (O’Connor) In another strange parallel, it is the same year Hitler writes “Mein Kampf (My Struggle)”, ‘the bestseller he wrote from prison after his failed uprising in 1923’ (O’Connor).

Within 15 years, when Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer flees Austria to his summer home in Czechloslovakia prior to the unification of Germany and Austria, the Vienna Adele knew is unrecognizable.  Members of the extended family are arrested, jailed and tortured until valuable assets are signed over to the Nazi government.  Relatives pay a “flight tax” to escape to Canada ahead of deportation to concentration camps.  Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer is accused of financial crimes, his assets are ‘illegally taxed in Vienna and his entire estate was confiscated’ as he will write in his will in 1942.  Ferdinand dies in November of 1945 in Zurich.  He was unable to recovery any of his property.  His estate is left to three of his nieces and nephews, including 25% to Maria Altmann who will lead the family’s fight for the legal return of the stolen Klimt paintings.

After the war, as some say, many Nazis exchanged their uniforms for suits and went to work to rebuilding Austria.  New legislation discouraged Jews from returning to reclaim stolen property.  Export licenses for ‘masterpieces’ were withheld, Jewish owners had to pay to get what was left of their businesses.  O’Connor describes how Nazis in plainclothes entered Maria Altmann’s home, took her valuables, and imprisoned her husband at the infamous concentration camp, Dachau, until the family completed the paperwork required to Aryanize their property and businesses.

Maria, her husband Fritz, and other family members escape the Nazis and rebuild their lives, frustrated that the Bloch-Bauer Klimt paintings hang at Belvedere Palace with no mention of their Jewish patronage.  Then the District Attorney of New York City impounds a painting borrowed for an exhibit at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from an Austrian Art Institution (see review of the film “Portrait of Wally”).  Maria Altmann, now a widow in her 80s and living in Los Angeles, contacts “Randy” the lawyer son of a family friend.  Randal Schoenberg spends years beating the odds with legal arguments, working his way into arbitration with the Austrian government who eventually agrees to return to the paintings to the family.  O’Connor explains why Schoenberg was successful, how Maria Altmann helped the case, and why the family ended up selling the paintings.  It’s a story that will hopefully encourage more Jewish families to pursue their own claims for looted art.

June 18, 2012

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Book Review (Part II): Anne-Marie O'Connor's "Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

by Catherine Schofield Sezgin, ARCA Blog Editor-in-Chief


In 1898, 17-year-old Adele, the daughter of Viennese banker Moritz Bauer, meets her future husband Ferdinand Bloch when her older sister Therese marries Ferdinand’s younger brother.  A few months later, an anarchist murders the free-spirited Empress Elisabeth, much admired by most of the Hapsburgs’ Austro-Hungarian Empire for her love of horses and her reluctance to participate in royal court politics.  An era of stability is ending.  A middle-aged Gustav Klimt, who is about to alienate his government sponsors, opens a ‘palace dedicated to Art Nouveau on the Ringstrasse’ for a group dubbed the Secessionists who wrote above the entrance “to every age its art; to art its freedom”.

A year later, Adele marries Ferdinand, a man twice her age but not the ladies’ man Klimt is reputed to be, at the same time Sigmund Freud publishes “The Interpretation of Dreams”, ‘his anatomy of the unconscious impulses driving individuals and society’ (O’Connor).

The next year Klimt, a favored court painter, shows the first of three ceiling murals for the University of Vienna, failing to please the authorities in the next few years with his decade portrayals on the themes of Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence.  ‘Jewish families were assimilating in Vienna through art and culture’, as characterized by writer Karl Kraus.  It was these Jewish patrons who financially support Klimt when the Ministry of Culture rejects Klimt for a professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts.

Although Klimt is not commissioned to paint Adele’s portrait until 1903, his 1901 portrait of Judith ‘bears an almost photographic resemblance to Adele’ (O’Connor), leading to support that Klimt may have known Adele earlier and may have had an intimate relationship with her.  Klimt’s Judith is one of the masterpieces highlighted at Austria’s national art collection at the Belvedere Palace.  ‘A Klimt commission at the time cost 4,000 crowns, a quarter of the price of a well-appointed country villa’ (O’Connor):

‘Klimt portrayed women as individuals, without the presence of a husband, father, or children to suggest their domestic role…. They soon gained the reputation of having an affair with the master who was so infamous with his amours.”

A few months after agreeing to the Bloch-Bauer portrait, Klimt traveled to Ravenna to study the sixth-century mosaics ‘the greatest legacies of the Byzantine art outside Constantinople’ (O’Connor), which include portraits of the childless and powerful Empress Theodora, courtesan and wife of Justinian.  The mosaics include the use of gold tiles, the material Klimt grew up studying at the workshop of his father, an engraver who worked on the city’s monuments.  Upon Klimt’s return to his studio in Vienna, he began sketching another childless woman, the restless, ambitious and intelligent Adele Bloch-Bauer.  Klimt’s reputation for seducing many women and Adele’s unromantic marriage had led to rumors of a sexual relationship between artist and subject, according to O’Connor’s interviews half a century later with Adele’s niece, Maria Altmann:

“So when Adele went to Klimt’s studio that winter, she faced the possibility of failure as a woman.  No one ever believed Adele was in love with Ferdinand.  But she was expected to feel lucky, or at least content.  Instead, she struggled with sobering disappointment.’ ‘Klimt made endless sketches of Adele.’ ‘He would make more than a hundred studies of Adele.’

Klimt painted Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I from 1904 to 1907.  He also painted Danae and The Kiss (both now at the Belvedere) in 1907, the same year struggling artist Adolf Hitler moves to Vienna and lives in a ‘hostel financed with large donations from Baron Nathaniel Rothschild and the Gutmanns’ (O’Connor).  While only a Jewish owner of a frame and window store, Samuel Morgenstern, purchased Hitler’s drawings and watercolors, the artist became ‘fascinated’ by ‘the anti-Semitic rhetoric of Karl Lueger [Vienna’s elected mayor] … who was able to focus popular discontent on the liberal Jewish intelligentsia’ (O’Connor).

Part Three continues tomorrow.

June 17, 2012

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Book Review (Part I): Anne-Marie O'Connor's "Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

By Catherine Schofield Sezgin, ARCA Blog Editor-in-Chief

In 1907 prosperous Vienna, the great cultural center of Europe, two events happened which would not collide for another three decades.  Gustav Klimt would fulfill a commission to paint the portrait of 24-year-old Adele Bloch-Bauer, who lived across the square from Vienna’s Fine Art Academy, the art school which would in that same year reject Adolf Hitler’s for admission because he failed the drawing exam.

In Lady in Gold, the Extraordinary Tale of the Klimt paintings, journalist Anne-Marie O’Connor tells the extraordinary story of The Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I which would sell for $135 million to an American in 2007.  O’Connor first describes the relationship between Klimt, his Jewish art patrons, and the cultural environment in pre-Nazi Austria. From the point of view of the Bloch-Bauer family is told of the collaboration between Austria and the German Nazis to loot Jewish art collections.  The book concludes with the legal struggles of American attorney Randy Schoenberg to navigate the U. S. legal system to help Maria Altmann and the other surviving members of the Bloch-Bauer family to recover four stolen Klimt paintings.  It’s a story of how a legitimate government corrupted legislation to steal from and murder its own citizens.

Within a decade, the Nazis succeeded in destroying the Jewish community Austrian-Hungarian Emperor Franz Josef (ruled from 1848-1916) created in Vienna by providing citizenship rights to European Jews in the 19th century – offering them a sanctuary from discrimination and persecution that stretched to the hinterlands of Russia.  The Jewish population in Vienna rapidly increased from 6,000 to more than 200,000 in less than 40 years, creating dissention in the anti-Semitic mostly Roman Catholic population.  Vienna, against the wishes of Franz Joseph, elected an anti-Semitic mayor for two decades who served in effect as a political mentor for Hitler.  After the Second World War, less Jews lived in Austria than had a century ago and they had no intention of returning to a country that treated them less favorably than its population of horses.

Against the backdrop of the murder of 6 million Jews, restitution of stolen art may seem unimportant, especially as newspapers today sport headlines of Jewish families recovering then selling artworks for millions of dollars.  Why is it so important that these paintings are returned to the families now? Weren’t these issues of restitution settled decades ago when Allied forces discovered stolen art in the salt mines of Germany after the war? And why does the American legal system have to get involved in these cases almost seven decades after armistice? Isn’t this a matter for the government of Austria to decide? Lady in Gold answers these questions.

Vienna at the turn of the 20th century was hedonistic.  In 1889, the Crown Prince shot his teenage mistress then himself in 1889.  The Emperor’s mistress was a stage actress.  In 1897, American writer Mark Twain publicly lectured about the virulent anti-Semitism palpable in the Vienna, the city rebuilding itself after successfully defeating Ottoman invaders a half century earlier.  The old fortress walls came down and the Ringstrasse, a series of boulevards encircling the center of Vienna arose, providing an opportunity for Vienna’s nuveau riche, many of them Jewish, to celebrate their financial and industrial wealth with monumental mansions and beautiful decorative arts.  Even statues fronting public buildings glisten with gold.

Part Two continues tomorrow.

November 3, 2011

Thursday, November 03, 2011 - ,, No comments

Marc Masurovsky provides perspective on Lawsuit regarding disputed Modigliani painting "Seated Man with Cane'

Modigliani's "Seated
 Man with Cane" (1918)
by Catherine Schofield Sezgin, ARCA Blog Editor-in-Chief

Most of my art crime news comes to my email box from Ton Cremer's Museum Security Network. As I suspect most of our readers on this blog also subscribe to MSN, I don't often repeat the news, but a particular article today intrigued me and I sent the link over to my mentor on Nazi-looted art restitution, Marc Masurovsky, co-founder of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project (HARP).

Journalist Bill Hoffman of the UK's Daily Mail reported online yesterday that "Billionaire art dealer refuses to return $25m Modigliani masterpiece stolen by Nazis from Jewish art dealer." Hoffman reports that the Nazis sold the 1918 painting, "Seated Man with Cane", at an auction in 1944 and that the grandson of the Parisian Jewish art dealer, Oscar Stettiner, alleges that the painting is at a gallery in New York City.  Hoffman quotes the lawsuit filed in the U. S. District Court of Manhattan that the family was unable to stop the sale during the war and unable to recover it afterward because the painting was then inaccurately labeled.

Masurovsky offers his professional perspective: 
"Due to the paucity of information released to the public, there is potentially conflicting reporting on the story of the allegedly illicit sale of the Stettiner Modigliani in 1944. Artinfo states that Oscar Stettiner placed the painting in the care of Marcel Philippon before he fled to the unoccupied zone of France. If that is so, why would other articles allege that the Nazis appointed him as the administrator of Stettiner's assets? That makes no sense. Vichy was responsible for appointing non-Jewish overseers of Jewish-owned property. Sometimes, it was for liquidation purposes, other times to facilitate the transfer of ownership of those assets to an Aryan. The real question becomes: did Stettiner leave instructions to Philippon to dispose of the property or did Vichy instruct Philippon to do so? I am curious to know why it took 3 years to sell the painting after it had been placed under Philippon's management. Once the full historical docket is released, we can make a more informed decision about who's right and who's wrong in this instance."

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