The “plundered art” blog has given extensive coverage to different aspects of the so-called ERR database, or “Jeu de Paume” database, since its release to the public in October 2010. The database is still available for anyone to consult and conduct searches on looted objects, their owners and their displacement during and after WWII. The main reason for this is selfish: I designed this database and managed it for close to 15 years. It is the ideal case study with which to understand the inner workings of what we refer to as “cultural plunder.” Not the kind that is random and unorganized, but the kind that is premeditated, scientifically executed, methodically prepared and carried out in the context of a genocidal undertaking.
The second half of October 2024 will be devoted to a series of articles that drill deep inside the inner workings of the Jeu de Paume from its reconversion in the fall of 1940 as a processing center for confiscated Jewish cultural property to its closure in early August 1944, two weeks before the Paris insurrection led by French resistance elements on August 19, 1944. Hopefully, it will give me an opportunity to ask (or re-ask) some uncomfortable questions which require at some point answers from scholars and researchers.
At the end of this exercise, I hope that you, the reader, will realize that the people responsible for the management of the Jeu de Paume and the processing of tens of thousands of looted objects through its galleries and storage areas were rather ordinary, many of them well-educated, and if you met them today, you would not suspect in the least that they participated in a massive four-year long criminal enterprise. They are just like you and me, they do their job and go home. They may even enjoy what they do. Like well-trained museum employees, art historians and experts, cataloguers, craters, appraisers, they apply themselves to their tasks with the professionalism that is expected of them, despite the fact that their superiors were ideological architects of the plunder whose fruits they handled on a daily basis.
Here are the highlights of the 2011-2020 "plundered art" coverage of the Jeu de Paume's activities and operations between 1940-1944:
-the building of the ERR database, its inner workings and the process of building the ERR database
-case studies of collections like those of Georges Bernheim, Diane Esmond (mistakenly tagged by the ERR as her father’s, Edouard Esmond) and a follow-up look at the collection’s fate, Raoul Meyer, Alexandra Pregel also known as Avxente or Auxente, Robert Schuhmann, Jacques Seligmann and Co., Hugo Simon, Frederic Unger, Georges Voronoff,
-certain classifications of objects dictated by the ERR’s experts like MA-B (or Möbel-Aktion Bilder), UNB (Unbekannt)
-particular artists and their creations whose stories were compelling or raised larger questions about Nazi cultural policy:
Jean-Baptiste Corot’s “Mrs. Stumpf”, a dessus-de-porte by Marie Laurencin, a bronze casting by Aristide Maillol, Gabriel Metsu, Caspar Netscher’s “Lady with a Parrot”, Pablo Picasso, Camille Pissarro’s “View of the Pont-Neuf from the Seine” , a self-portrait by Vincent van Gogh, Edouard Vuillard, Philip Wouwermans, “Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berri »
-particular artists and their creations whose stories were compelling or raised larger questions about Nazi cultural policy:
Jean-Baptiste Corot’s “Mrs. Stumpf”, a dessus-de-porte by Marie Laurencin, a bronze casting by Aristide Maillol, Gabriel Metsu, Caspar Netscher’s “Lady with a Parrot”, Pablo Picasso, Camille Pissarro’s “View of the Pont-Neuf from the Seine” , a self-portrait by Vincent van Gogh, Edouard Vuillard, Philip Wouwermans, “Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berri »
the Nazi fascination with Netsuke objects, Valencia ceramics, MA-B 702, Schloss 91, a painting by Bartholomeus van der Helst and the various attempts to recover it. and a 13th dynasty Egyptian antiquity.
-certain depots managed by the ERR in various parts of occupied Europe to store and dispose of looted cultural objects like the Nikolsburg depot in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and the fate of its contents in 1945.
-the treatment of ideological issues through art like the “Jewish question”, race, “Degenerate Art” and its hypothetical destruction.
Future installments on the Jeu de Paume will focus on the photographing of confiscated works and objects, the implementation of Nazi cultural policy on the treatment of confiscated works and objects, the esthetic preferences of Jewish collectors and dealers whose collections were processed through the Jeu de Paume, and a reconstruction of the actual chronology of the confiscations of Jewish collections in the Paris region.
