By: Camilla Brunazzo Chiavegato

Museum curators play a key role in legitimising looted or stolen artefacts. They act not only as individuals, but also as professional representatives of the museums to which they are legally, ethically and deontologically tied. But while their actions and  activities are not usually considered criminal, apart from when it involves insider theft, museum representatives are worth examining through the lens of criminological theories. 

As a means of example, the Grosz v. Museum of Modern Art  (2009 - 2011) case and the Nazi-era provenance of the three works involved – Self-Portrait with a Model   (1928), Republican Automations (Republikansche Automaten) (1920) and The Poet Max Hermann-Neisse  (1927) by George Grosz [Fig. 1] – allow us to reflect on the problematic collection practices of the founding director (1929-1943) and then director of collections (1947-1968) of the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred H. Barr Jr.  

Figure 1. Transfers of property of the three works of art by George Grosz (Self-Portrait with a Model, 1928; Republican Automations, 1920; Poet Max Hermann-Neisse, 1927) protagonist of the legal case Grosz v. MoMA

Barr: Was he a‘Good Faith’ or a ‘Bad Faith’ Purchaser?

In the context of Nazi-era spoliations, US lawyer Raymond Dowd has defined ‘bad faith’ purchasers as “thieves, accomplices of thieves and receivers of stolen property [that] have received massive financial benefits at the expense of a murdered population despoiled not only of their property, but of their culture as embodied in the artworks torn from them.” 

Figure 2. Nazi propaganda against Jewish Bolshevism and on the dangers posed by the 'untermenschen'. Alfred Flechtheim’s face was used as the quintessential example of the regime’s enemy, undated (Robert Hunt Library).

At the trial of Grosz v. MoMA, the plaintiff avoided defining Barr outright as a buyer acting in bad faith, despite the fact, as we will illustrate below, that this museum director was well aware of the opportunities (and controversies) occurring on the global art market during his tenure at the museum. And yet he still chose to authorise the purchase of suspect artworks for the New York museum, previously classified by the Nazi Party as “Degenerate Art.” 

In this case, the source who first circulated German artist George Grosz’s “degenerate” works of French modernism and German expressionism was a Jewish art dealer named Alfred Flechtheim, who was forced to liquidate his galleries in Berlin and Düsseldorf “under duress” – a factor that is legally difficult to prove. What is known is that Flechtheim was refused the compulsory membership of the Reichskammer der bildenden Künste because of his Jewish background, which amounted to a ban on his business after Adolf Hitler was appointed as chancellor on 30 January 1933. He was also subjected to a stream of anti-Semitic propaganda against the dangers brought about “Jewish Bolshevism.” [Fig. 2] as well as the later the Nazi-organized traveling exhibition of so-called “degenerate” art in 1937.

Figure 3. Klein-er Portrait Max Hermann (mit cognac flasche) by George Grosz on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

For the purposes of this article, we will focus on the most problematic of MoMA’s three acquisitions: The Poet Max Hermann-Neisse (1927). In 1928, Grosz consigned the portrait of his close friend from his 1920s period in Berlin to Alfred Flechtheim as “Klein-er Portrait Max Hermann (mit cognac flasche),” following an agreement that recognised the Jewish dealer as his exclusive sales representative. [Fig. 3].  It is insufficiently clear if this painting had been consigned to the dealer solely for sale, or if the proceeds for the sale of said painting, had Flechtheim sold the work, been earmarked for the repayment of the debt the artist had with his dealer. 

How did The Poet Max Hermann-Neisse make its way into the Museum of Modern Art’s collection?

To follow the circulation of Grosz’s painting it is useful to read correspondence between Barr and the emigrated German art dealers Charlotte Weidler and Curt Valentin, both of whom were conduits established in the US that helped peddle purged “degenerate” artworks in America.  Letters exchanged between Weidler and Barr, and Barr's correspondence with Valentin and other colleagues, provide us with unique insights into these individuals actions when it comes to the sale and purchase of suspect works. 

Figure 4. Charlotte Weidler’s passport photo from 1931.

As one of the first institutions in the US (founded in 1929) solely dedicated to the exhibition of modern art, the MoMA was rapidly expanding, and Barr maintained a relationship with Weidler. She was a German art historian and critic of North European contemporary art, who since 1924, had served as an advisor to Homer Saint-Gaudens, the director of the Carnegie Museum regarding German artists whose work might be selected for its annual international exhibitions.  [Fig. 4]. In addition to this Weidler is documented as having profited from the sale of artworks entrusted to her during the Nazi era, including pieces belonging to the Jewish art historian Paul Westheim, who fled Germany under persecution. After Westheim’s exile, Weidler claimed to have safeguarded his collection but instead sold works without his consent,  pocketing the proceeds. 

While Weidler played a pivotal role in introducing major works of German Expressionism to the United States, her professional dealings remain deeply controversial. Archival evidence shows that she profited from the displacement and loss suffered by others in the art world, particularly émigré collectors and dealers forced into exile from Germany. Her involvement with some of these collections has drawn scrutiny as emblematic of both wartime and postwar exploitation. Yet, her picture remains complicated: some scholars who have studied her correspondence describe her as a fervent anti-Nazi, highlighting the tension between her personal views and her self-serving actions and transactions.

On 5 February 1950, writing to Barr, on stationery from the Carnegie Institute, Weidler discussed her plans to travel to Europe to visit artists’ studios, hoping to acquire works that might appeal to the museum director. In this same letter, she informed Barr that “I have been lucky that some of my collection in Germany for instance an oil painting by Klee, works by Barlach, Nolde, Kokoschka, a strong, early George Grosz which once has belonged to the Kronprinzen Palais and has been ousted by Hitler [Grosz’s Poet], and drawings by Lehmbruck could be saved and have partly arrived in New York already.”

Figure 5. Curt Valentin in Berlin, 1936 (photo by Alfred Hentzen)

After Barr’s initial refusal, on 10 April 1952, the art dealer Curt Valentin later wrote to Weidler that he had managed to sell her painting, The Poet Max Hermann-Neisse to Barr for the New York museum for $850, despite the painting being damaged and requiring conservation treatment.  [Fig. 5].  

In that correspondence, Valentin writes:

“Dear Charlotte: 

We sold the painting “Portrait of Max Hermann-Neisse” by George Grosz for $850 to the Museum of Modern Art. However it seems the picture is in a very bad condition, and Mr. Barr told me the repairing cost would amount to $75, which he would like to deduct from the cost price.  I agreed to this, and I hope you will still let me have $100 profit, in which case I shall credit your account with $675. ”

At the time of the painting’s acquisition by MoMA, Alfred Barr made no effort to investigate its prior ownership or trace its path through the art market. Nor did he attempt to reach out to the work’s original creator, George Grosz, who had fled Nazi Germany for New York in 1933 and was in a position to clarify its provenance. Grosz could have confirmed the painting’s original consignment to dealer Alfred Flechtheim, or even overseen the restoration work referenced in Barr’s correspondence with Curt Valentin. Instead, Barr bypassed both avenues, opting to proceed with the purchase without further inquiry or explanation, leaving critical questions of provenance unaddressed.

Valentin, Not your run of the mill New York gallerist.  

Fig. 6. Curt Valentin’s Nazi Reich Chamber of Fine Arts Sales Authorisation.

On 14 November 1936 the Nazi Reich Chamber of Fine Arts gave a written authorisation to Curt Valentin, Alfred Flechtheim’s former assistant, to:

"… make use of your connections with the German art circle and thereby establish supplementary export opportunities, if [this is done] outside Germany. Once you are in a foreign country, you are free to purchase works by German artists in Germany and make use of them in America.” [translated from original]. 

This authorisation effectively made Valentin an out of country agent of the Nazi government during his time in New York. [Fig. 6].  Likewise, the sale of The Poet Max Hermann-Neisse (1927) by George Grosz was not his only sales transaction with the MoMA, nor the singular controversial one.

Fig. 7. Cover of the Gallery Fischer Auction Catalogue (June 30, 1939).

Valentin was a sales intermediary for the MoMA on 30 June 1939, when the Theodor Fischer Gallery in Lucerne, Switzerland organised an auction entitled “Paintings and Sculptures by Modern Masters from German Museums” during which 125 major confiscated works were put up for sale the proceeds from which were to be paid into a foreign currency account in London, available for the ‘German Reich’. [Fig. 7]. 

While many dealers boycotted this sale of appropriated works, refusing to finance the Nazi war machine, Valentin was less restrained.  He attended the auction purchasing on behalf of the Buchholz Gallery in New York and at the behest of Alfred Barr, to bid on paintings to be purchased with funds from donors of the museum.

Valentin bid on works of art that the Nazis had purged from German public museums under the 1938 law on “degenerate” art, and obtained the winning bid on five works: Andre Derain’s “Valley of the Lot at Vers,” stolen from the Cologne Museum; E. L. Kirchner’s “Street Scene” and Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s “Kneeling Woman,” both taken from the Berlin National Gallery; Paul Klee’s “Around the Fish,” pilfered from the Dresden Gallery, and Henri Matisse’s “Blue Window,” seized from the Essen Museum.

Figure 8. Cover of the catalogue for the MoMA exhibition “Art in Our Time”, 1939.

Two days after the extremely distasteful event, Barr’s correspondence from Paris, addressed to the museum’s executive director, Thomas Dabney Mabry, demonstrates that both museum employees were fully aware of the problematic consignor of the artworks being sold in Switzerland.  Barr himself, cowardly writes his colleague saying: “I am just as glad not to have the museum’s name or my own associated with the auction” while suggesting that the staff at the MoMA should frame their new acquisitions as distanced from the Lucerne auction: “state that they have been purchased from the Buchholz Gallery, New York.” The outcome, all five purchased works were exhibited in MoMA’s 1939 summer “Art in Our Time” exhibition, with no mention to their problematic circulation. Instead the works were credited to Valentin’s New York gallery and listed as anonymous loans.  [Fig. 8] 

The bridge between Weidler and museum director Barr was thus Curt Valentin who worked first for Galerie Flechtheim and later for Karl Buchholz. 

Buchholz was one of the four German dealers authorised by the Nazi Party's Reichskammer der bildenden kunste to sell “degenerate” art abroad to finance the regime. From 1937 to 1951, Valentin represented the Buchholz Gallery in its US venue in New York, where he sold art authorised by the German government for disposal. Valentin was also one of the preferred channels for acquiring avant-garde masterpieces for the fledgling MoMA and Barr recommended Valentin when he asked for the U.S. citizenship in 1942. 

Barr’s Ethical and Legal Constraints 

Barr’s unsavory purchase activities, made possible by his position of authority, can be analysed in terms of the professional standards of the time. The only ethical guidelines available during his tenure were contained in the vague Code of Ethics for Museum Workers, published by the American Association of Museums in 1925.

In the spirit of the American society of the 1920s, that document aimed to instil ethical behaviour and relations in workers at different levels of the museum’s hierarchy (staff-director, director-board of trustees). It is worth emphasising that the stated function of museums at this point in history was to hold their collections in trust “for mankind” and at the service of human life, based on the “three-fold ethical basis” of devotion, faith, and honour. 

The section “Business Dealings” deplored embezzlement by employees and highlighted the role of directors who, in the name of their responsibility and authority, should balance trustees, employees, and the public image of the institution while, somehow contradictorily, amassing a “representative collection.” However, “representative collections” should guarantee an interpretive context for individual objects in the museum setting, typical of colonial universal museums. 

Regarding the legal handling of Nazi-looted property on an international horizon, the Inter-Allied Declaration Against Acts of Dispossession Committed in Territories Under Enemy Occupation or Control (London Declaration, 1943) was issued to “combat and defeat the plundering by the enemy Powers of the territories which have been overrun or brought under enemy control” and nullify and reverse the property expropriated by Germans in occupied territories. The signers (the Allies and the French National Committee) appealed to the citizens of neutral countries to fight against the seemingly legal methods of expropriation that was being perpetrated by the Axis powers (Germany, Italy, Japan). 

In addition, specifically in the United States, works classified as stolen property would have also fallen under the National Stolen Property Act (NSPA, 1948), Sec. 2315 Sale or receipt of stolen goods, securities, moneys, or fraudulent State tax stamps. 

Figure 9. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Pablo Picasso, Jacqueline Roque, and Margaret Scolari Barr at Picasso’s home, “La Californie,” in Cannes, France, July 1956 (Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, 12.II.M. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Photo: James Thrall Soby).

Image Credit: Guardia Civil

Arrested in a complex multinational police action code-named Operación Nongreta one of three gun runners arrested in Spain at the end of December has been found to have maintained a "museum" of Nazi-themed objects, alongside a substantial arsenal of weapons and ammunition.

Within the framework of the year-long Nongreta operation, involving the Information Office (UCE3) of Spain's Civil Guard, with the support of the Bundeskriminalamt, (the German Federal Criminal Police Office, BKA), the Andalusian Area Information Section, the USECIC and the GEDEX of the Málaga Command, and members of the GAR and the Servicio Cinológico, law enforcement successfully dismantled an arms trafficking group known to be dealing with drug trafficking cells working the Costa del Sol and Campo de Gibraltar regions in the south of Spain.   

The operation, born out of a noticeable uptick in murders carried out during drug-related crimes committed on the Costa del Sol in the final stretch of 2019 using modified assault rifles, resulted in the arrested of three key actors - two German citizens and one British, who have each been charged with participation in an organized crime group, storing and trafficking of arms and ammunition, drug trafficking, and use of forged documents.  The arms traffickers are believed to have been in operation for at least three years, operating a sophisticated scheme which funnelled weaponry obtained from Eastern Europian countries, with access to the old Soviet arsenals, to drug traffickers in need of weaponry active in southern Spain. 

In breaking up the ring, investigators focused their attention on a seventy-year-old German citizen, a former gunsmith living in Coín on the pretext of being a simple foreign retiree. Through exchanges of information with Germany's Bundeskriminalamt, Spanish authorities were informed that the suspect had spent four years in prison for the illegal modification of weapons and also had a current outstanding European Arrest Warrant (EAW), after an arsenal was tied to him in a Hannover case in 2019.  In that case, a family member has already been sentenced to prison for their involvement.

In a subsequent search of this suspect's home in Coín, the Civil Guard, with the assistance of a firearm-sniffing K-9, found a sophisticated hidden workshop, complete with complex machinery, which tapped into the city's electrical grid in order to operate a milling lathe, column drills, a hydraulic press and a blueing oven, the latter used after erasing the serial numbers to restore the barrels of the weapons to almost mint condition.  This would make the weapons almost untraceable, and therefore a perfect weapon of choice in the clandestine arms market.

It was here that the suspect would modify weapons such as the Zastava M70, (Застава М70), a standard-issue domestic folding-stock Kalashnikov variant once used by the Yugoslav People's Army in 1970.  Short and easily concealable under a coat or loose jacket, the weapons are perfect for drug factions engaged in quick hits when fighting over competing turf.  The weapons had been purchased from collectors in Eastern Europe disassembled and were modified in the Spain workshop for resale. The second suspect, also a German citizen, is believed to have been responsible for the storage and concealment of the weapons in a rented warehouse. 

Image Credit: Guardia Civil

The Third Reich memorabilia was identified in a second suspect's home in Alhaurín el Grandes, a town located in the province of Málaga on the north side of the Sierra de Mijas.  There, the police found tables, shelves and display cases jammed with Nazi memorabilia including a portrait bust of Adolf Hitler, SS Uniforms, helmets, stick pins, insignias, medals, flags, and armbands of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, many of which were emblazoned in some way with a swastika or the Nazi eagle.

After a search of the suspect's home, officers moved on to a safe house he rented on the outskirts of the municipality.  It is in that rented warehouse where authorities uncovered an arsenal ready for sale.  There, law enforcement seized 160 firearms made up of 121 short weapons, 22 assault rifles and 8 submachine guns.  Along with the arms, officers recovered 9,967 rounds of ammunition of different calibres, eight silencers, 273 magazines, a grenade, and a kilo and a half of military explosives. 

Spanish newspapers have identified the holder of the Nazi memorabilia and the warehouse as a 54-year-old German named Tilo Kränzler, who publically claimed to be "the grandson of the real driver of the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler" during an interview which can be found on the Radio Platja d'Aro program "Enigma Report." He is also known to have saught connections with a Spanish far-right group.

In addition to his involvement with arms selling, the Kränzler sold olive oil on eBay, and operated a stall which sold military and Nazi paraphernalia as well as T-shirts with the face of the Swedish activist and environmentalist Greta Thunberg with the label “persona Non Greta.” It was this play on words that became the code name for the UCE 3 of the Civil Guard's Operación Nongreta.

The third lead suspect is a British national who also resided in Coín, who acted as the group's intermediary in the sale between the arms dealers, taking a cut of the profits for the arms sold to drug traffickers working the Costa del Sol and Campo de Gibraltar.  Previously arrested for drug trafficking, this UK individual also using fake passports to hide his identity, several of which were recovered by law enforcement during the operation.

At the search of the British suspect's home, the Civil Guard recovered a pistol with its serial number erased and more than 1,200 rounds of ammunition. 

For now, the Court of Instruction of Coín has ordered that the three remain in custody pending trial while the hashish drug traffickers who operate in the Campo de Gibraltar area and to a large part of the mafias that have faced each other for years in Málaga's Costa del Sol will have a bit of difficulty stocking up on their firearms.

Image Credit: Guardia Civil