Utopian thoughts on a lazy, snowy Friday

by Marc Masurovsky

Museums
Acquisitions of objects are limited to those objects with no taint whatsoever on title. Under-provenanced objects with significant gaps and riddled with uncertainties as to past ownerships and locations must not enter a museum.

The museum’s research budget allows for a team of full-time researchers whose sole purpose is to keep the museum “honest.” 

Louvre, Paris

If problems emerge in the ownership history of objects in the permanent collection, all measures must be taken to clear title by submitting the object to a detailed, forensic analysis. If additional research reveals illicit activity that might have resulted in an illegal transfer of ownership, the museum will right the past wrong, seek out the heirs of the rightful owners and work out a proper solution to fix the historical wrong as long as it reflects the wishes of the aggrieved parties (those who suffered the loss of the objects).

As a matter of course, the museum will make available to the general public all information about the history of each object in its permanent collection without judgment or preconceived notions. That information will be freely and readily accessible.

When a museum possesses a large inventory of objects obtained from indigenous communities, former colonies, and conflict zones, it will:

Humboldt Forum, Berlin

         

1/ identify the rightful owners of these objects, whomever they may be;

2/ take the necessary steps to contact their representatives and consult them as to how to treat these objects;

3/ if repatriation is in order, the museum will abide by this decision and return the objects;

4/ if other solutions are envisioned, they too shall be respected and implemented as long as they reflect the wishes of the aggrieved parties (those who suffered the loss of the objects).

Auction houses

Recognizing the fact that there are thousands of auction houses worldwide, it is almost impossible to regulate their activities without imposing severe constraints on the global art market. Still, auction houses are the main purveyors of looted and otherwise stolen cultural property.

To stanch the in- and out-flows of stolen cultural goods, governments will establish oversight bodies whose sole purpose is to ensure that auction houses comply with rules and standards that will rid the market of unprovenanced, under-provenanced goods whose origin cannot be explained either by the consignor or the seller. If this is unreasonable, at the very least, auction houses will post “buyer beware” notices for un-and under-provenanced objects that they offer for sale. The goal is to inform consumers much like government agencies issuing product alerts. If art objects are commodities, they should be regulated in the same way that pharmaceutical, cosmetics, food and other products are.

Christie's

Hôtel Drouot

Collectors, dealers, and brokers

Private handlers of cultural goods are an important cog in the global machinery of recycling and dissipation of looted and otherwise stolen cultural objects around the world.

Without them, looters, plunderers and thieves find it challenging to “fence” their loot and to make quick money off of it, thus increasing their risk and disincentivizing the act of plunder and theft.

These handlers must be prohibited from offering any object which is un-or under-provenanced or whose past history shows clear signs of dislocation and illicit transfers of title. If they do, criminal penalties must be imposed on them and their accomplices.

Can privateers be deterred from acquiring objects with dubious provenance information that casts a cloud on title? They will, no matter what any government says or does. Realistically, their activity cannot be completely deterred but their quest to sell these objects on the open market must be interdicted.

Does this open the door to the creation of a parallel art market which operates under the radar? That market already exists and probably always will. Wars, conflicts, crises, laissez-faire governments and regimes enable its existence an allow it to thrive under their very noses and, to some extent, with their complicit assent. The fact that national and international elites sustain its existence complicates the task of any regulator to restrict its expanse and depth. Any attempt to clamp down on the parallel market is politically dangerous for those in positions of power and influence.

Good faith defense

Civil law and common law countries will rethink how good faith serves as an almost-impenetrable defense against relinquishing looted objects to claimants. One possibility is to create exceptions to the good faith defense which remove that protection from those who acquire and sell stolen or plundered goods, even if they were unaware of the true origin of the objects which they acquired. This measure will allow restitution claims to proceed without claimants worrying that the current possessor will resort to good faith as a reason not to restitute their property.  Ignorance is not a defense. Those who dabble in the art market must exercise proper due diligence before acquiring, selling, displaying, donating, loaning cultural goods. Failure to do so must have legal consequences.

Ethical collecting

Can people build an ethical collection of art objects, viz., a collection of objects whose history is not tainted by ambiguous claims to ownership as a result of civil unrest, war, and genocide?

They can and they do. The thrill of seeking out beautiful objects whose acquisition becomes controversial because of the circumstanced surrounding the object (coercion, illegal extraction, outright theft, etc.) is the ultimate drug that fuels thrill-based acquisitions. If you’re skeptical, read about Thomas Hoving, Douglas Latchford, and many others in the museum and art worlds who took pride in their reckless manners and methods to secure “beautiful and unique” objects.



Photos:

Christie's-courtesy of Artisera.com

Hôtel Drouot--courtesy of Drouot.

Franz Fühmann's "The Car with the Yellow Star"

by Marc Masurovsky

In order to understand how antisemitism works, it’s often wise to hear it from the proverbial horse’s mouth. In this instance, Franz Fühmann’s autobiographical novel, “The car with the Yellow Star” is a good starting point. Although understated in its treatment of the Jews, it remains nevertheless a sobering account of a Nazi antisemite who eventually “saw the light” and closed the door on a decades-long love affair with National Socialism and Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.

Fūhmann was raised in a highly nationalistic pro-German village in the Sudetenland region of interwar Czechoslovakia. He was raised as a blindly loyal Nazi, swearing allegiance to his hero Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. 

The Sudetenland region

From SA member, he joined the Wehrmacht and ended up on the Eastern Front as a Private First Class, fighting the Soviets in the Ukraine. On his retreat back to central Europe, he was captured by Soviet troops while making his way to the American front lines. He spent four years in a Soviet prisoner of war camp doing hard labor. He was eventually set free and settled down in the newly-minted German Democratic Republic (East Germany) where he spent the rest of his life, asserting himself as a prominent poet and writer. 

If you can set aside the fact that he lived in East Germany and was published by an East German publishing house, I highly recommend this short book which has the benefit of giving us a snapshot of the Third Reich as experienced by an unquestioning follower. Up to us to decide how sincere Fühmann is. I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. If there is a propagandistic aspect to his self-reflective novel, you can glimpse it at the very end and it does not detract from the historical value of his testimonial.

Sources:

The map of the Sudetenland comes from the following website:

https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/10188/where-exactly-was-the-sudetenland

The cover for Fühmann's novel comes from AbeBooks.

What happened during WWII at the Musée du Jeu de Paume in Paris?

Musée du Jeu de Paume, Paris courtesy of wikipedia

by Marc Masurovsky

I have to admit that historians are a strange lot, especially in the choices they make on what to research and write about. Whether they are aware of this or not, their choices, once published and commented on, shape our popular understanding of history and their omissions (what they are not interested in) deprive us of a fuller understanding of historical events, large and small. 

Take the Museum of the Jeu de Paume in central Paris. It is a typical example of this. Aside from the work of Emmanuelle Polack, there is not a single book that has been exclusively devoted to the history of the Jeu de Paume during the years of German occupation (1940-1944) of France. But there are at least 12 non-fiction books solely devoted to Rose Valland’s heroism and work as a French spy and a cultural property recovery officer for the French government.

The outside world may have experienced the historical Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris’ Jardin des Tuileries through the eyes of Rose Valland’s hagiographers. If you are a movie buff, you may catch a glimpse of it in “The Train” by John Frankenheimer, a paean to French railroad workers during WWII who tried their utmost to prevent France’s cultural treasures from being removed to Nazi Germany in the closing months of the German occupation of France. 

The rooms of the Jeu de Paume have been a regular feature on the French Ministry of Culture’s website for over a decade, illustrating its many rooms through contemporaneous black and white photographs made interactive so that you can discover the looted objects displayed there for Hermann Goering’s pleasure.

Do you really know what happened at the Jeu de Paume from Fall 1940 when it opened as a depot and processing station for confiscated Jewish cultural property to early August 1944 when it ceased to function as such? Do you know who worked there, what their jobs were, what objects they handled, how decisions were made day-to-day, why they chose certain objects and not others, their likes and dislikes, who hated who, who slept with who, the internal cliques? This is "perpetrator history" and it should not be ignored. Otherwise, you, we, end up knowing little about a fundamental cog in the machinery of cultural plunder devised by a perpetrator in the 20th century. History tends to repeat itself like an old cliché.

The Jeu de Paume was a laboratory of cultural plunder created by the perpetrators—the German occupying power and a Nazi plundering agency, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), its employees, experts and agents. It is therefore logical to dissect its internal mechanisms so that we can understand how looted, confiscated, misappropriated cultural assets are “handled” by those who carry out these crimes.

Alfred Rosenberg, founder of the ERR

To this day, the Jeu de Paume and the four-year long campaign of confiscation, processing, and dispersal of Jewish-owned cultural property reflects the dark side of the museum world and its cultural workers. Your involvement in the arts and cultural activities, whether as a producer or consumer, does not shield you from engaging in heinous acts as a deliberate cog in a machinery of racially-motivated exploitation, grand theft, and persecution. These people are your typical “collaborators”, persons who intentionally cast their lot with the new sheriff in town—in this case, the Nazis and their local Fascist supporters (in this case, partisans of the collaborationist Vichy government).

PS: The only "depot" of cultural objects that has received proper scholarly treatment is the postwar Munich Central Collecting Point (MCCP) which supplanted Hitler's Führerbau as of May 11, 1945, as a central processing station for recovered looted objects. American cultural officials referred to in pop culture as the "Monuments Men and Women” managed the site. Dr. Iris Lauterbach of the Munich-based Zentral Institut für Kunstgeschichte is the author of that study.

The next article will be devoted to inventories, basic didactic instruments that document cultural plunder.

For more on WWII films with some mention of cultural plunder, check out:

https://plundered-art.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-challenges-of-making-historically.html

For more on Rose Valland, see:

https://plundered-art.blogspot.com/2012/01/three-graces-of-art-restitution.html

For more on the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, see:

https://plundered-art.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-destruction-of-works-of-art-in.html

https://plundered-art.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-destruction-of-works-of-art-in_5.html