"Portrait of Alfonso II d'Este and his secretary, Pistofilo," by Titian

Portrait of Alfonso II d'Este and his secretary, by Titian

by Marc Masurovsky

Josef Skvor was a Czech businessman born on 8 April 1888 in Chlistov (Czechoslovakia). On 10 January 1931, Skvor, who had an apartment in Paris on Boulevard Pereire, acquired a painting by Tiziano Vecello (Titian) under the title “Portrait of Alfonso I d’Este” from a Paris art dealer, Paul Jurschewitz. The painting had been in the collection of Marquis Franzoni until the latter sold it to a Mr. Bellini from whom Jurschewitz purchased it in 1930. At the outbreak of WWII in September 1939, Skvor was the director of Skoda Works in Prague. In 1940, he or his agents deposited the Titian in a safe #691 at a branch of the Crédit Lyonnais on Boulevard des Italiens in Paris. (In subsequent documents, the vault number is designated as #569 and #596). 

The German army began its occupation of France in June 1940 after roundly defeating the French army. In the months that followed, according to Skvor, German officials paid several visits to his bank ostensibly to view the contents of his safe since Czech citizens were considered to be enemies of the Reich. On 17 December 1940, Jurschewitz wrote to Skvor and his “authorized representative” Alexander Bagenoff to confirm the terms of the sale of the Titian which was finalized the following day, on 18 December 1940. According to Skvor, someone he called Mrs. Dittrich (Maria Almas-Dietrich of Munich) showed up at the Crédit Lyonnais in Paris flanked by two SS men and with a proxy which authorized a cash payment of 1,500,000 francs to Bagenoff, Skvor’s representative. The document in Almas-Dietrich’s hands bore the stamp of the Reichskanzlei in Berlin, whose boss was Martin Bormann, the “secretary” to Adolf Hitler. She then removed the painting. 

Maria Almas-Dietrich

Almas-Dietrich, a close friend of Adolf Hitler's, took the painting back to Munich where she lived and ran a thriving international art business. The painting was eventually transferred to Berchtesgaden, one of Hitler’s favorite residences. In 1945, Skvor petitioned the French Art Restitution Commission (CRA) for assistance in locating the painting. One year later, in November 1946, Almas-Dietrich delivered the receipt issued by the Reichskanzlei to the office of Capt. Edwin Rae, head of the MFA&A Section at OMG Bavaria in Munich. She denied that she had shown up at the Crédit Lyonnaiss with two SS men to seize the painting and that the transaction had been conducted “in orderly fashion.” She reiterated that the painting had already been offered numerous times on the art market before 1939. 

In December 1946, Hans Konrad Röthel (1909-1982), co-founder of the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte (ZIKG) in Munich and curator at the MCCP, echoed what Almas-Dietrich had told Capt. Rae regarding the Titian painting, namely that it had been available for sale on the market for quite some time. He also mentioned that Jurschewitz’s fiancée, Ms. Laesch, wondered if her husband-to-be may have had a financial interest in the Titian. Finally, he upheld the official American policy of repatriation of works back to their country of origin. In the Titian’s case, he felt that France should recover the painting, believing that it had been “legally sold… for 1.8 million francs (as opposed to 1.5 million francs, the oft-cited figure in this case.).

While the Americans supported the French claim on the painting, the Czech government stood by Jozef Skvor in his attempt to recover the Titian, arguing that he had been the victim of a “forced sale” to which he had not consented. His word against Maria Almas-Dietrich, a notorious Nazi art dealer, Dr. Hans Konrad Röthel of the ZIKG and the MCCP in Munich, Albert S. Henraux, president of the French Commission on Art Restitution (CRA), Elie Doubinsky, French representative to the MFA&A at the Munich Collecting Point and deputy to Rose Valland, chief restitution officer in the French Zone of Occupation. Paul Jurschewitz who had sold the Titian to Skvor and allegedly brokered the sale to Almas-Dietrich, was also the same individual who had advised the Germans on where to find famed art dealer Paul Rosenberg’s prized inventory after the latter had fled to New York. The postwar French authorities arrested Jurschewitz on suspicions of wartime trafficking in looted art.

MCCP card #8836 (front)

MCCP card #8836 (back)

The Titian painting sat at the Munich Central Collecting Point from 11 October 1945 to 21 January 1948. While awaiting its repatriation to France which Elie Doubinsky was pressing his American colleagues in Munich to hasten, pursuant to repatriation policies issued by the Four-Power Committee in Berlin, some MFA&A members were still under the impression in 1947 that the painting would eventually be returned to Czechoslovakia once the French and the Czechs had a chance to sit at a table and discuss the salient issues surrounding its ownership and the circumstances of its wartime sale. For their part, the French were unequivocal: since the painting was taken from France, it had to be returned to the country from which it was removed. Henraux insisted on the matter, betraying his excitement at the prospect of France acquiring a first-rate painting by a master such as Titian. Furthermore, their view was that the financial transaction of December 1940 canceled Skvor’s claims to ownership. The new MFA&A chief at OMG Bavaria, Richard Howard, backed the French position and reminded the Czechs of the Four-Power decision on repatriation.

Edwin Rae, MFA&A, and his staff

Amidst the brouhaha surrounding the legitimacy of the transaction between Maria Almas-Dietrich and Skvor’s representative, Mr. Alexander Bagenoff, neither the French nor the Americans gave any consideration to Skvor’s allegations that he had been subjected to a forced sale. Maria Almas-Dietrich who had “removed” from occupied France countless works of art for Hitler, Goering, Heinrich Hoffmann and herself, was more believable in their eyes than the purported Czech victim. There is no indication either as to the true nature of the relationship between Skvor and Bagenoff. Did the latter sell him out? Did the Germans pressure him? We will never know because he died during the war. Did Skvor actually collect the money as the French gratuitously asserted? No evidence suggests that he actually did.

Keep in mind also that the Cold War was in full swing while the fate of the Titian was under debate. From 1945 to 1948, relations between the US and Czechoslovakia deteriorated to a point of no-return due to Soviet aggression in that country which culminated in a hostile takeover of the country’s government in February 1948. The US had already frozen restitutions to “Soviet bloc” nations of Eastern Europe. These countries' claims for assets looted by the Germans and uncovered in the Western Zones of occupation in Germany and Austria were systematically rejected by the Western Powers. Could this state of affairs have influenced the MFA&A Section in its determination to deny the possibility of a restitution to Skvor which could only benefit America’s ally, France?

It's an odd story with colorations of early Cold War hysteria which benefited France’s museums desirous to enrich their cultural heritage at any cost. Sometimes, it’s not what you read that matters but what lies behind the curtain.

Technical specifications:

Author: Tiziano Vecello, known as Titian (1488/1490-1576)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Measurements: 102 x 116 cm
Titles given to the painting: Portrait of Alfonso d’Este; Portrait of Alfonso I d’Este; Double portrait of Alfonso I d’Este and his secretary; Portrait of Alfonso II d’Este and his secretary, Pistofilo

Sources:

Note from Paul Jurschewitz to Josef Skvor, 10 January 1932, RG 260 M1946 Roll 40 NARA.
Paul Jurschewitz to Skvor and Mr. Bagenoff, 17 December 1940, RG 260 M1949_Case C42 C6/36_Roll 11 NARA.
Skvor to the Director of the Commission de recuperation artistique, Paris, 5 November 1945. RG260 M1946 Roll 40 NARA
Josef Skvor undated application for the restitution of Czechoslovak Property # C6/2156 and 2157. [OMGUS number=C-42], RG260 M1949_Case C42 C6/36_Roll 11 NARA
Note from Edwin C. Rae, chief, MFA&A Section, Restitution Branch, OMG Bavaria, to Mr. Taper, OMGUS, Economics Division, Restitution Branch, 30 November 1946, RG 260 M1949_Case C42 C6/36_Roll 11 NARA.
Note from Dr. Hans Konrad Röthel to Samuel R. Rosenbaum regarding the “Portrait of Alfonso d’Este and his secretary”, 10 December 1946, RG260 M1949_Case C42 C6/36_Roll 11 NARA
Handwritten note, undated, Munich, Germany, ca. 1947 RG260 M1949_Case C42 C6/36_Roll 11 NARA
Richard Howard to OMGUS, 2 juin 1947, RG 260, M1946, Roll 40, NARA
Note from Richard Howard, Chief MFA&A Section, OMG Bavaria, to MFA& A Section, Restitution Branch, Economics Division, OMG Bavaria 20 June 1947, RG260 M1949_Case C42 C6/36_Roll 11 NARA
Captain Elie Doubinsky, French representative, MCCP, to Herbert Leonard, Chief MFA&A Section, Munich, 7 October 1947 RG 260 M1946 Roll 40 NARA.

Photos

Portrait of Alfonso II d'Este and his secretary, Pistofilo, courtesy of www.dhm.de
Edwin Rae with his staff courtesy of: https://www.artmagazin.hu/articles/archivum/1c6f0bb5a07c9f9ad66e8809213416c3

Maria Almas-Dietrich courtesy of https://agorha.inha.fr/detail/25

Theft at Dillingen an der Donau

by Marc Masurovsky

Map of Dillingen an der Donau

The final Allied military push against Nazi Germany unfolded in March 1945 when American troops crossed the Rhine river, which acts as a natural border with France and Belgium, pushing towards Berlin in a mad race to reach the German capital. Likewise, the British forces broke through further up north and the Soviets entered Germany from the East. The race was on to reach Berlin at all cost.

On Sunday 22 April 1945, an American Sanitary Unit reached Dillingen an der Donau and set up its quarters at the Lamm Brewery, owned by Mr. Probst. The brewery’s cellar contained 14 crates from the Historic Museum of Dillingen which had been left there for safekeeping against aerial bombings. The crates stored objects that had been extracted from an ancient Alemanic cemetery nearby. 

Seal of the Lamm Brewery in Dillingen

After the Americans left, Mr. Probst, the brewery’s owner, resumed control of his business and, upon inspection of the cellars, noticed that 6-8 crates from the Historic Museum had been broken into and their contents scattered about the cellar floor. He repacked the crates not knowing if anything had gone missing from them.

On 20 May 1946, Robert Roeren, a Bavarian official responsible for the protection of cultural monuments, went to Dillingen to survey the former cemetery of Schreitsheim [Schretzheim]. He observed the absence of numerous items and concluded that these items had been stolen. Furthermore, the looting of the Museum in Dillingen had threatened the integrity of archaeological digs which involved 640 graves at Schreitsheim [Schretzheim] and some 400 “Alemanic” burial sites uncovered near Dillingen an der Donau. Among the stolen objects were bronze pieces from the Roman era and precious incised silver objects. These losses included “valuable gold and silver objects” which had been extracted from 11 graves explored during archaeological expeditions in and around Dillingen for the benefit of the Historic Museum of Dillingen.

In June 1946, Mr. Probst recounted the incident in the cellar to a local high school headmaster named Menz. The headmaster recruited some of his students to inspect the crates, draw up an inventory and return them to the Historic Museum. Later in the summer, Mr. Roeren conducted his own audit of the losses to assess the damage inflicted to the cultural heritage of the area.

The only hope for recovering these items rested with the US army. But because of the massive departure of American military personnel returning to the United States who had participated in the March 1945 campaign against Germany, it was unlikely that any investigation into looting by American soldiers and officers would produce any tangible results.

 

Inventory of missing items

Sources:

Memo from OMGB Capt. Edwin Rae, Chief of MFA&A Section, Restitution Branch, 30 July 1946, RG 260 M1921 Roll 14, NARA (National Archives, College Park, MD, USA).

Major L. B. LaFarge, chief of MFA&A Section, OMGUS, to MFA&A Division of OMG Bavaria, 22 July 1946. RG 260, Educational Division, Box 236, 5347-1, NARA (National Archives, College Park, MD, USA).

Reports submitted by Captain Edwin C. Rae, chief, MFA&A Section of OMGB, regarding looting at Wittislingen, 30 July 1946 and 5 September 1946, RG 260, Educational Division, Box 236, 5347-1, NARA (National Archives, College Park, MD, USA).

Report by Dr. Friedrich Wagner, Munich, 3 août 1946, ‘Disappearance of items discovered during excavations of Alemanic graves in Schreitseim [Schretzheim], Dillingen district, owner: Historischer Verein Dillingen, RG 260, Educational Division, Box 236, 5347-1, NARA (National Archives, College Park, MD, USA).

RG 260 M1921 Roll 14, NARA (National Archives, College Park, MD, USA).

Photo of Lamm Brewery seal courtesy of https://www.ebay.com/itm/205638892105

Map courtesy of Google Maps.

Rose Valland mania

by Marc Masurovsky

Many books have been published about Rose Valland, the unsung French heroine of WWII in her quest to recover and protect France’s cultural heritage. One might ask if her idea of cultural heritage also included works produced on French territory by Jewish artists who elected to live and work in France before ending up in the crematoria and gas chambers of the Final Solution. The answer to that question lies in the copious notes she left behind.

Regardless of how she felt (the subject of another text), it might be instructive to give you a quick overview of the many volumes and visual productions that have created a "persona" for Rose Valland as a creature of the French museum world who rose above the fray to do the unimaginable in times of war—put her life on the line to document the plunder of art collections during the Nazi occupation of France (1940-1944). She was passionately devoted to a certain idea of the cultural heritage of her nation, ready to defend it at any cost, even if it meant sacrificing her own life. Truly admirable.

Here is a brief recap of monographs published in French and English since 1961 when the “Front de l’Art (Art Front)”, Rose Valland’s account of her wartime defense of French cultural heritage appeared in its original French edition at Editions Plon. There followed two updated French editions of the “Art Front” in 1997 and 2014. The first English-language edition of the “Art Front” came out in 2024.

Books

1961 

Le front de l’art, défense des collections françaises, 1939-1945 Rose Valland, Plon, 262 pages

1997 

 Le front de l’art, défense des collections françaises, 1939-1945 Rose Valland, RMN 262 pages

2008 

 Rose Valland : Résistante pour l’art, Frédéric Destremeau

2009 

Rose Valland, Capitaine Beaux Arts, Tome 1 Claire Bouilhac, Catel, Emmaneul Polack

2014 

 Le front de l’art, défense des collections françaises, 1939-1945 Rose Valland, RMN (update of the 1997 edition), 403 pages

2016 

Rose Valland, une résistante sauve des œuvres d’art, Mano Gentil

2019 

Rose Valland, une vie à l’œuvre, Ophélie Jouan

Les Carnets de Rose Valland: le pillage des collections privées d’œuvres d’art en France durant la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, Collectif

2023 

Le livre de Rose, Emmanuelle Favier (Editions les Pérégrines)

2024 

 L’espionne à l’œuvre, Jennifer Lesieur

2024 

The Art Front : The Defense of French Collections, 1939-1945, Rose Valland

Rose Valland’s notebooks are translated and annotated in an English-language version, courtesy of the Monuments Men and Women Foundation. 

2025 

Michelle Young, The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland,  

Erin McGuire, The Spy in the Museum: How Rose Valland saved art from the Nazis

Films featuring Rose Valland

1964 

The Train, John Frankenheimer

2014

 “The Monuments Men” starring George Clooney, Matt Damon, Cate Blanchett (in the role of Rose Valland).

2015 

Rose Valland, l’espionne aux tableaux (the Art Spy) by Brigitte Chevet. Aired on May 4, 2015, as an episode of La case de l’oncle Doc

Rose Valland mania spread to the French educational sector.

Schools and institutes named after Rose Valland

Collège Rose Valland, Saint-Etienne-de-Saint-Geoirs

Ecole élémentaire publique Rose Valland, Le Mans

Ecole Rose Valland

Institutes

Even a research institute bears her name in Berlin, Germany.

Rose Valland Institut, Berlin

Parting thoughts

We cannot cry over spilled milk. Strong-willed women (Evelyn Tucker, cultural advisor to the US zone of occupation in Austria, and Ardelia Hall, cultural officer in the US Department of State (1944-1961), Rose Valland, cultural officer in charge of recoveries of French cultural treasures) fought an uphill battle to implement Allied restitution policies so as to provide some measure of justice to the victims of National Socialism. 

Life is what it is. Words are one thing. Deeds are quite another.  Something that these three outstanding women found out and fought through in order to assert a policy that was quickly reneged by the very people who shaped them. Alea jacta est.

We haven't forgotten them and we honor them. Role models. We need them now more than ever.

Sources

Photo courtesy of "The Collector."

https://www.thecollector.com/rose-valland-art-historian-spy-nazi/

Opinion: Arranged marriage between SNCF and AAMD against art restitution claims

by Marc Masurovsky

In a news item published by“Tablet” on 21 October 2025, the American museum association (AAMD) gained an unusual ally in its fight against renewal of the HEAR Act—the French parastatal company, SNCF (Société nationale des chemins de fer). It gained notoriety a decade ago for its role during WWII in assisting in the deportation of Jews from German-occupied France to death camps in Eastern Europe. The crime was worsened by evidence that the company had been paid for each Jewish man, woman, and child that its cattle cars contained on their journey to death. The end result was a "global settlement" that the SNCF signed in 2014 to satisfy claims for reparations filed by Holocaust survivors and their heirs.

Why on earth would SNCF support the AAMD in its fight against renewal of the HEAR Act which is exclusively about art restitution claims filed against American museums? The HEAR Act has nothing to do with the deportation of human beings. Hence, the two should not mix and even be in the same room. Odd to say the least. 

Nicole Wizman, author of the Tablet article, suggests that SNCF fears that if the HEAR Act is renewed, its emphasis on the elimination of legal technical defenses (laches, statutes of limitations, etc.) might make it more vulnerable to lawsuits from the heirs of Holocaust victims that its trains had ferried to their death for the German genocidal machine. It argues that the settlement it signed in 2014 would be breached by the renewal of the HEAR Act and expose it to more lawsuits in US courts. The argument is somewhat lame.

Let’s venture a thought or two here. The SNCF ferried not just Nazi victims to their deaths but also commodities requisitioned by the Germans or, worse, that they stole en masse from Jewish households. Trains conveyed these stolen goods for Vichy and the Nazis on a routine basis from fall of 1940 to summer of 1944. What if, what if those lobbying for the renewal of the HEAR Act are contemplating another round of class action suits aimed at France for all the wrongs that the Vichy government aided and abetted during its four years of collaboration with the Nazis? SNCF and other entities are perfect targets, much like the German Railroads and German companies for their complicity in the genocide machine. Joel Greenberg, founder of the Art Ashes foundation who is spearheading the lobbying campaign to renew the HEAR Act, warned that: “Institutions must stand clearly on the side of memory and restitution, not on the side of obstruction or indifference. France needs to face its treatment of the Jewish people honestly—not turn away from it.”

Jewish groups have largely spared France in their decades-long campaign for reparations stemming from the genocide of the Jews of Europe to which France’s Vichy regime participated with glee. Is France’s time up? And is Joel Greenberg the one holding the spear that will skewer its institutions for their past malevolence? As they say, be careful for what you wish for because it might all backfire. Meanwhile, the AAMD should not order champagne crates just yet. The battle over the HEAR Act has just begun. There's still one more year before a vote up or down will be held in an extremely polarized Congress.

French masterpieces for sale in postwar Germany

by Marc Masurovsky

From a business standpoint, art dealers do not run charities. They buy, sell, trade works and objects of art to make money, and, hopefully, lots of it. The dealer’s instinct is—you guessed it—to look for opportunities, expand networks of informants and clients, make deals, and jump on them before the competition does. As a result, the oftentimes legendary rivalries that arise between art dealers shape and transform the art world as well as the business of art. Every now and then, their acquisitions and sales influence the taste of current and future generations. A thrilling wave to ride but one that comes with a heavy price.

For those dealers who are willing to go all the way, they may assign ethics and History to a backseat in order to unleash their thirst for acquiring unique, expensive and (maybe) transformative objects wherever they can be found hopefully at a low enough price. During the Nazi era (1933-1945), dealers made a pact with the Devil by ignoring the heinous nature of hate-based political systems rising across the European continent and elsewhere. They saw how the discriminatory policies unfurled by the New Nazi/Fascist Order could generate immense opportunities for them as a result of the involuntary disgorgement of valuable works of art on the art market by the victims of Nazi/Fascist violence and persecution.

The dealers, collectors, agents, cultural officials and brokers who invested themselves in acquiring and selling Nazi victims’ cultural property did so willingly, eyes open and focused on the prize. And it so happens that even dealers who fell victim to the rapacity of Nazis’ covetous seizure of their inventories between 1933 and 1945 also saw opportunities for themselves and their colleagues as the genocidal dust of the Nazi-driven Holocaust was barely settling across war-torn Europe. Even if their desire to acquire such works might have been guided by the best of intentions…as art dealers.

To wit, Paul Rosenberg, an iconic figure of the international art world in Europe and the United States, had a keen visionary eye for high-quality art. He exercised his skills with brilliance on both sides of the Atlantic. On December 12, 1946, Rosenberg penned a two-page proposal to the Foreign Division of the US Treasury Department in Washington, DC, regarding the disposition of works of art located in the US zone of occupation of Germany (viz., Bavaria) which belonged to impoverished collectors. Here are the relevant portions:

“There are, in Germany, many great art collections…which include internationally famous French paintings…there might be a possibility that the owners of these paintings, due to lack of funds, might be interested in selling their collections. [Some] are celebrated masterpieces…We, as art dealers, are interested in these pictures…If this is possible, many of these great masterpieces would be acquired..by American collectors and…be donated to American museums or artistic institutions, thereby adding to their greatness.”

The “we” refers to a group of art dealers and their galleries based in New York who shared Rosenberg’s feelings and agreed to contact the US government and encourage the US military occupation authorities in Germany to enact policies that would loosen up export restrictions from the former war zone and allow art dealers and collectors to resume business as usual. The desire to “liberate” heaps of cultural objects from the shackles of Allied military policy and (re)fuel the engine of the international art market appears to be the main motivator behind this proposal. It is unclear whether this proposal was accepted, but it would not have sat well with American cultural officials who were working around the clock in Washington and in liberated Europe to ensure that art collections and individual objects located in liberated areas would be prioritized for restitution and not be offered for sale.

 In June 1946, the celebrated Roberts Commission committed harakiri and put itself out of business, confident that, to a large extent (although the proof for this has always been elusive) its leaders opined that very little looted art had entered the United States.  Before doing so, almost to legitimize its own demise, the Roberts Commission had successfully revoked Treasury Directive TD 51072, a key instrument in the fight against illegal imports of looted property into the United States. The directive was issued on June 8, 1944, two days after D-Day, under sections 3(a) and 5(b) of the Trade with the Enemy Act. Its aim was to restrict the importation into the US of any art object with a value exceeding 5000 dollars or is of artistic, historic and scholarly interest irrespective of monetary value.” The method of restriction was sequestration of objects falling under the aegis of the Directive. The Roberts Commission's job was to review the documentation accompanying these sequestered objects and either approve or refuse their release under a license issued by Treasury.

It should come as no surprise that Paul Rosenberg's proposal came at a time when some parts of the US government were no longer focused on restituting victims' property but on returning to business as usual as quickly as possible even if it meant releasing art objects from Europe into the United States with no filters and no way of vetting imports for evidence of loot.

Source:

Paul Rosenberg to Foreign Department, US Treasury Department, Washington, DC, 12 December 1946, 2 pages, Enclosure III, Box 28, Lot 62D4 (Ardelia Hall files), RG59, NACP, College Park, MD.

“Enfants jouant à la table” by Edouard Vuillard

Édouard Vuillard, Enfants jouant à la table, 1922-1923, 

Christie’s New York, 13 May 2025

by Claudia Hofstee

A signed pastel drawing, Enfants jouant à la table (Children playing at a table) by the French artist Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940), dated 1922-1923, an unpublished work, was consigned at Christie’s New York to be sold on 13 May 2025. It shows two small children, a girl in a pink dress and a boy with a white shirt sporting a ruffled collar and a black one-piece suit, sitting around a table. 

Édouard Vuillard, Self-portrait, 1889, 
National Gallery of Art, 
Washington, DC

Identification of the children

The children depicted in the Christie’s pastel are those of the Jewish art collectors Juliette Weil née Schloss (1885-1976) and her husband, Prosper-Émile Weil (1873-1963). In 1922, Juliette Weil commissioned Edouard Vuillard to paint a portrait of her and her two children, Claudie (1917-?) and Alain (1918-2015), which Vuillard completed in 1923. There are remarkable similarities in the appearance of the children in the painting and the Christie’s pastel. They are also of a similar age. Mathias Chivot [CH1], co-author of the catalogue raisonné on Vuillard, confirmed the identification of the children in the Christie’s pastel as Claudie and Alain Weil. He also stated that the pastel was a preparatory drawing for the painting Madame Weil and Her Children (1922-1923).

The Weil Collection

Juliette Weil née Schloss was the daughter of Adolphe Schloss (1842-1910), a German-Jewish art collector. Several months after her father’s death in late December 1910, she married a Paris doctor, Prosper-Émile Weil, on 22 February 1911. Juliette and Prosper-Émile Weil were close friends of Vuillard and belonged to his intimate circle. The couple collected paintings and drawings by French modern artists like Édouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947), Ker-Xavier Roussel (1867-1944) and Odilon Redon (1840-1916). Before WWII broke out in 1939, their art collection (the ‘Weil Collection’ or ‘Collection’) consisted of 88 works of art. On 16 April 1943, the Weil Collection was confiscated by Vichy officials and German security agents from Château de Chambon, Laguenne (Corrèze), where it had been hidden for safekeeping. The Collection was confiscated together with the Adolphe Schloss Collection. Both collections were taken to Paris and stored at the Banque Dreyfus, where the Weil collection was inventoried on 11 August 1943 by art dealer André Schoeller (1881-1955). Schoeller was responsible for appraising many artworks confiscated by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) in Paris and served as an expert appraiser with Paris courts. 

The sale of the Weil Collection was organized by Jean-François Lefranc (1890-1950), the orchestrator of the mass confiscation at Laguenne. The Weil Collection in its entirety was placed with Schoeller’s at his Parisian gallery, 13 rue de Téhéran. The art dealer Raphaël Gérard (1886-1963) bought most of the Weil collection on 28 September 1943, for the sum of 2,428,100 FR. Throughout the war, Gérard traded in confiscated artworks, dealt with compromised art dealers, and made gifts to Nazi officials. At the end of the German occupation, without waiting for a court order, Gérard returned almost all the works to the Weil family. He even bought back some of the works that he had sold and, when the artworks were no longer accessible, he provided monetary compensation to Weil who waived all further claims against Gérard, although he did not recover all of the works from his collection.

The Banque Dreyfus inventory of the Weil Collection lists as inventory (Inv.) no. 5 a work entitled de Vuillard, pastel, représentant deux enfants autour d'une table (by Vuillard, depicting two children around a table). Other descriptions of pastels/sketches by Vuillard in the Weil Collection show that Juliette and Prosper-Emile Weil might have owned multiple preliminary drawings for Madame Weil and her Children. The painting Madame Weil and her Children (mentioned above) is listed as Inv. no. 77 de Vuillard, intitulé ‘Deux enfants et leur mère’ (toile) in the inventory.

 Edouard Vuillard, Madame Weil and her Children, Artnet

Provenance of Deux enfants autour d'une table until 1943

Artist's studio;

Private collection Dr. Prosper-Émile Weil (1873-1963) and Juliette Weil née Schloss (1885-1976), Paris;

 confiscated by Vichy officials and German security agents on16 April 1943;

Transferred to the CGQJ at Banque Dreyfus in Paris, 10 August 1943;

Transferred by Jean-François Lefranc to art dealer André Schoeller (1879-1955);
Sold to art dealer Raphaël Gérard (1886-1963), Paris, 28 September 1943-10 December 1943 (acquired from Schoeller, 25,000 FR, inv. nr. 22124);
Sold to art dealer Felix Mockers (d. 1944), Nice, 10 December 1943, (acquired from Gérard, 40,000 FR together with Dreyfus inv. no. 27/ Gérard inv. no. 22146, 40,000 FR)

On the day he purchased Inv. no. 5 of the Dreyfus inventory, Felix Mockers, also acquired another painting, Inv. no. 27 de Vuillard, intitulé L'enfant écrivant’ (pastel) (by Vuillard, entitled “Child writing”. Mockers went missing in Savoie around 1944, likely executed by the French Resistance. Gérard’s ledger indicates that he did not return nos. 5 and 27 of the Dreyfus inventory to the Weil family. It can be deduced that Gérard could not do so because he could not reach Mockers and buy them back. Consequently, inv. no. 5 of the Dreyfus inventory remained missing.

Provenance after 1944

According to Christie's, the painting was acquired by Galerie Aktuaryus in Zurich. Toni Aktuaryus (1893-1946), owner of Galerie Aktuaryus, was involved in selling Nazi looted artworks during WWII After 1945 certain artworks sold by Aktuaryus were subject to Jewish restitution claims for their losses under the Nazis. Galerie Aktuaryus closed after the death of Toni Aktuaryus on 28 March 1946. It was subsequently acquired by a private collector, although it remains unclear whether this provenance is contiguous. The pastel was then offered for sale at the Swiss auction house Klipstein & Kornfeld in Bern as lot no. 1053 on 17 and 18 June 1960. The auction entry provided no provenance information and did not name the consignor. We don’t know who acquired the pastel at the sale. Klipstein & Kornfeld have often been accused of negligent due diligence. For instance, Cornelius Gurlitt (1932-2014), the son of notorious pro-Nazi art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt (1895-1956), sold for decades artworks from his late father’s collection through Klipstein & Kornfeld.

The next entity in the Vuillard provenance is Galerie Hopkins in Paris, where the American art collector Julian Cohen (1924-2007) acquired it in May 2000. It is also unknown when and from whom the gallery acquired the object. These opaque provenances that highlight dealers compromised with the Nazi authorities and the Vichy regime further support the conclusion that Enfants jouant à la table, otherwise known as no. 5 of the Dreyfus inventory [Représentant deux enfants autour d'une table], is a looted work of art.

Klipstein & Kornfeld on 17 and 18 June 1960

Photo: Claudia Hofstee

The pastel was eventually withdrawn from the 13 May 2025 Christie’s sale for further research. The fate of the other missing pastel drawing [Dreyfus inv. no. 27/ [Gérard inv. no. 22146] remains unknown.

This article was edited by Marc Masurovsky.

Primary Sources

Archives Nationales-Pierrefitte, France

AN, Z/6/577, interrogation of Gabriel Mockers, report of 26 April 1947.
AN, F/12/9630, copie de la mainlevée de la saisie-revendication, 22 March 1945 (copy of the lifting of the seizure)
AP, 112W 14, letter from Jean-François Lefranc to Raphaël Gérard, 28 September 1943.
AP, 112W 14, offer to purchase from Raphaël Gérard to Jean-François Lefranc for the Weil collection, 26 September 1943. 

Archives du Ministère des Affairs Etrangéres, La Courneuve (AMAE) 

Dreyfus inventory, AMAE, MH 117, tableau no. 1- 81, pp. 35-38.

National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) via fold3.com

NARA, M1944, RG139, https://www.fold3.com/image/270257432/swiss-reports-page-199-eu-roberts-commission-protection-of- historical-monuments-1943-1946. Accessed 4 May 2025

Secondary accounts

Artdaily, “Galerie Kornfeld denies 'Nazi-looted' art claims insisting it only bought legitimate works”, https://artdaily.cc/news/66031/Galerie-Kornfeld-denies--Nazi-looted--art-claims-insisting-it-only-bought-legitimate-works#.YHGaqHtR02w. Accessed 4 May 2025.

“Gérard Raphael”, AGORHA, https://agorha.inha.fr/detail/180. Accessed 2 May 2025.

Gerber, Elisabeth Eggimann, Jüdische Kunsthändler und Galeristen, Eine Kulturgeschichte des Schweizer Kunsthandels mit einem Porträt der Galerie Aktuaryus in Zürich, 1924-46, 2022.

Gross, Raphael, Überprüfung der Provenienzforschung der S67ung Sammlung E. G. Bührle, 2024. https://www.lootedart.com/web_images/pdf2024/bericht-ueberpruefung-provenienzforschung-buehrle.pdf. Accessed 4 May 2025.

“Perdoux Yves", AGORHA, https://agorha.inha.fr/detail/86. Accessed 1 May 2025.

.Rosebrock, Tessa, Des Handels mit dem Feind beschuldigt. Akteure des Pariser Kunstmarkts vor der Commission nationale interprofessionnelle d’épuration und dem Cour de la Justice du département de la Seine, 2017, pp. 1-9.

Wasserman, Janet, Three hidden figures of Nazi art looting, 1940-1945: Santo Semo, Hugo Barcas, Rudolf Holzapfel, 2023, pp. 1-152.

Wildenstein Plattner Institute, Archives, Galerie Felix Gérard and Galerie Raphaël Gérard records, Stock books 1937-1945, Sales register, April 1941-July 1945; Purchases register March 1941- July 1945.

Correspondence

Email correspondence with Mathias Chivot, 1 May 2025.

Photos

Mutual art - courtesy of Christie’s
Artnet – courtesy of Christie’s
Photo by Claudia Hofstee

Acknowledgments

We are deeply grateful for the assistance given to the author by Mathias Chivot who wa kind enough to authenticate the history of the work by Edouard Vuillard and verify the identity of its subjects.

From Ashes to Rainbow: The Work of Alice Lok Cahana and Her Descendants (Part Two)

by Ori Z Soltes

The actual gate at Auschwitz

The very materials and techniques that Cahana used are metaphors for the reality they convey. The surfaces of her works are burned and scratched with blackened patterns, scarred and stained with blood-red pigments. Blurred fragments of texts are swallowed by images that are grafted, buried, partially eaten away, echoing the fate of human beings swallowed up in the camps. One sees this in No Return, from 1979–81 (this is Thomas Wolfe’s literary masterpiece You Can’t Go Home Again squeezed through a glass darkly!), with its torn central motif—suggesting a face in profile, with a gaping mouth—and flesh and blood colors against a devouring background of black darkness.

Arbeit Macht Frei: Concert in Auschwitz

A chronological sibling, Arbeit Macht Frei: Concert in Auschwitz (1979–81) is a diptych in which an array of prison-bar-like vertical stripes punctuated by a trio of black, blurry squares are contained by an arch that links the two parts of the image together. The phrase “Arbeit macht frei” (Work makes one free), which was inscribed at the entrance to that infernal camp, graces that arch, but in fragments, with the words almost blotted out. Across the upper part of the image, with its torn and singed holes, more vertical lines compete with a series of horizontals, among which one can discern some musical notes. This thus becomes a distorted musical stave, alluding to a particular aspect of Nazi perversity: forcing some inmates to play music to accompany the march of other inmates to the gas chambers.

The crucible of destruction is repeatedly symbolized by the arched form, whether open, like the gateway to Auschwitz, or closed, like the doorway to the ovens to which the nameless were consigned. In No Exit (ca. 1980), the arched oven-door form is trebled (no redemptive spiritual symbolism of Father-Son-Holy-Spirit is intended here, for redemption was not in evidence when those who prayed to a triune God gassed and cremated those who prayed to God the Father alone), and the thick blackness of the doors is an impenetrable black-hole-like darkness, sucking nearly all light into itself, and marked by

No Exit

pronounced passages of blood-red hue. It is punctuated, nonetheless, by shards of light and an infinity of numbers and letters insistently referencing those who passed through those arched openings.

Cahana was an abstractionist who survived hell. She was also a student of Jewish mysticism, aware of the Kabbalistic inquiry into how to understand the transmutation of matter into spirit—the aspiration to ascend to union with the singular God—embedded in an array of often dark, inscrutable (like her painting Kabbalah, from 1982) questions pertaining to the relationship between God and ourselves. Primary among them is how an intangible, invisible, and singular God created a universe that is tangible, visible, and endlessly multifarious. The Holocaust was the ultimate act of de-creation, in its dehumanization of its victims by their reduction to numbers and letters. Those rounded up were stamped on their arms with numbers and letters. Names, which typically connect humans to the essence of what we are, were eliminated, replaced by those narrativeless numbers and letters.

One of the noticeable features in many of Cahana’s works is the presence of numbers and letters—those from the tattooed arms of the dead, those from the calendar of counting the endless days which had lost their coherent cycle in the concentration camp, particularly when, as Alice observed, “every day . . . was an eternity!” The tortured structure of Days and Nights (1979) offers numbers arrayed as if on a calendar—as if one could count the time left till the end, with no foreknowledge of when the end might eventually arrive and what sort of end it might be—and puns on the transmutation of human names into numbers (the word “name” repeats in the lower left corner of the canvas): numbers with more meaning for the victimizers than cipher-humans in the meaningless technology of their destruction. There is irony in the rising and falling line across the middle of the canvas: it suggests the graph of some economic analysis, with its ups and downs, but going from right to left, as in Hebrew, the diagonals lead to the letter shin, suggesting a reference to Shaddai, God’s name as the ultimate source of power and protection.

In turning the numbers and letters imprinted on inmates’ arms into art and thus memorializing them, Cahana reverses the Hitlerian process of de-creation and dehumanization. In No Names (1985), railroad tracks plunge into a dark night overwhelmed not with stars but with letters and numbers (that railroad track is at the same time an ironic Jacob’s ladder connecting heaven and earth): the insistent, Kabbalistic repetitions will into memory those whom the Nazis sought to consign to oblivion.

No Names

Hovering toward the central upper part of the painting is a yellow-brown, bulbous cloud and above it the numbers 1 9 3 9. These mark the year when World War II began, sandwiched between the first six years of Hitler’s expanding, increasingly systematic prewar campaign of terror against the Jews and the following six years of an expanding, increasingly efficient Holocaust campaign embedded within the war, as German armies overran much of Europe and its diverse Jewish populations. (The end of that process is more difficult to discern on Cahana’s canvas: the numbers 1 9 4 5 hover less clearly, just to the right of 1 9 3 9.) This painting was acquired by the Vatican Museums’ Collection of Modern Religious Art, and when Pope Benedict XVI asked Cahana about the large, miasmic smudge in its middle, she responded, “Every night I wake up with the smell of Auschwitz in my nostrils. How do you paint an odor?”

There are, of course, many further works that demand our attention, but I will reference only one more in this brief discussion. Raoul Wallenberg—Schutz Pass (1981) offers a monumental polyptych, whose vertical sweep is dominated by the Swedish diplomat’s name, written along the left side of the top panel. An abstract dialogue between brightness and darkness rises from the conceptual ashes—photographic images of ordinary people sent to extraordinary deaths—toward the spiritual rainbow of the hero’s own photographic image. He serves as a commanding symbol of how one person’s efforts can and did make a difference, in contrast to the active and passive collaboration in the destruction detailed in the lower horizontal sweep of visuals.

Wallenberg’s face is the ultimate metaphor of transmutation: the would-be deaths that became, instead, lives saved by his hands, by way of the Schutzpasse, (letters of protection), that he issued—including Cahana’s own father; the rescuer who vanishes; the hero who fights against the silence, which then turns against him when people fail to ask, to press, to demand: Where? Why? And fail to remember well enough not to repeat the silences—from Cambodia to Uganda, by the time this mixed-media work was made (the list of countries has grown in the decades since). The imperative to speak against the silences, even if only in yearning and hope, impels Cahana’s artistic efforts.

What in a longer essay becomes their own substantial discussions must be limited here to a lengthy epilogue. The move to Houston that yielded an extended outburst of artistic creativity also yielded a family: Alice and Moshe began to have children: Ronnie, Michael, and Rina. They were engulfing Hitler’s annihilationist intentions in a brilliant, future-looking sea of reeds. One: that the last of their three children, Rina, who was born with Down syndrome and would therefore have been among the first consigned to his slaughter, was fiercely loved and nurtured by the family into adulthood. Two: both Ronnie and Michael became prominent rabbis, and Ronnie a noteworthy poet. His poetry often focuses on his parents, his wife, and his children—and achieved an even more unique voice after he suffered a brain-stem stroke in 2011 that left him initially completely paralyzed, and able to communicate only by moving his eyelids.

The Cahana family

Three: that all of their own children became artists in varied media or rabbis (or both). Kitra, the oldest—who initially organized the group of friends who painstakingly wrote down her father’s poetry communicated through eyelid movements, letter by letter—has already, in her thirties, achieved extensive recognition as a photographer and filmmaker. Four: that Kitra’s work reflects a strong influence from her grandmother in its unceasing social messaging—resonating, in part, as she has commented, from the sense of pressure to do something with her life and her art when, turning fifteen, she thought about where Alice had been at that age. Kitra’s daughter, born in late 2024, is named for Alice’s sister, Edith. Rainbows continue to emerge from the ashes of Alice’s teen-aged experience from one generation to generation.

(Author’s note: Much of this essay is extracted from the essay in Soltes’ exhibition catalogue/book, Survival and Intimations of Immortality: the Work of Alice Lok Cahana, Ronnie Cahana, and Kitra Cahana, published by the Fritz Ascher Society, NYC, in 2020. The exhibition is currently on view at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Studies)

From Ashes to Rainbow: The Work of Alice Lok Cahana and Her Descendants (Part One)

by Ori Z Soltes

The Cahana Family

Alice Lok Cahana (1929-2017) responded to the human quest for immortality by achieving it in a multi-layered manner, defeating Hitler in three ways: she survived his murderous efforts—three different Concentration and Death Camps through which she was moved as a teen-ager during Hungary’s embrace of Nazism in the last year of the war; she evolved as a visual artist who transmuted the ash greys and mud browns of her experience into the subtle but distinct colors of the rainbow, reshaping his destructive enterprise into profound creativity; and she overcame his exterminationist ambitions for the Jews by producing children who in turn produced grandchildren, many of whom themselves became artists in diverse media—and, as of this writing, one great-grandchild—so that Alice’s own corner of the Jewish world has continued not merely to survive but to flourish.

Cahana was born and raised in Sárvár and in the midst of her transit through those camps she swore to herself that if she survived she would one day become an artist who would effect just such a transformation of her experience on the canvas. It took her more than three decades to fulfill that promise to herself. By the late 1970s she had begun to produce a series of large, dynamic images—and words—that, as a totality, she called From Ashes to the Rainbow: A Tribute to Raoul Wallenberg. Her memoir, Empty Windows, offers a word-painting, in prose and poetry, of how her beloved sister, Edith (aged seventeen), her younger brothers, her mother, and she (aged fifteen)—and her grandfather, uncles, aunts, and cousins—were deported from Sárvár to Auschwitz in 1944, and how all the others, separated from Alice, disappeared soon after their arrival.

She writes about finding Edith and their managing, together, to survive an ineffably hellish reality—a tribute to the unique capacity of humans to shape a systematic art and science of torture and torment for other humans. She describes how Edith became very ill and how, after liberation, she was taken to a hospital—though Alice never saw her again or even found out what had happened to her: she could find no record of either her death or her survival.

Lamentation

Cahana’s Lamentation (ca 1980)—its fragment of Hebrew text surrounded by flowers and overrun by barbed wire; its yellow at once recalling the six-pointed stars attached to Jewish garments by Nazi decree and connoting sunlight, filling the entire window-like frame of the image—is biblical in conceptual size. The parchment-like text, flanked by black smudges—pillars of smoke, from both the tabernacle in the wilderness and the crematoria in a different wilderness—can be seen as a Jeremiah-like cry for Alice’s loss of Edith, for the loss of virtually her entire family, and for the loss of all those for whom no family survived who could lament their eradication.

Cahana left unwritten in Empty Windows the epilogue to all of that loss: the events of her life after the war: her reunion with her father, who had been away at work in Budapest when the deportation order came in Sárvár—a reunion that proved difficult given the divergence of their experiences. Her subsequent time recovering in Sweden and living in Budapest and then in Israel. Her meeting her future husband in Israel: a rabbi, Moshe Cahana, who made her feel beautiful after such intense ugliness. Their subsequent five years together in Sweden—he serving as a rabbi for a congregation composed largely of Holocaust survivors, and she as an educator. Their ultimate settling in the United States.

With their move to Houston, in 1959, Alice took up the formal study of art, and was influenced in particular by the transcendental, light-suffused color field paintings of Morris Louis. From her studies at the University of Houston and at Rice University, where color field painting was dominant, and from her interest in the work not only of Louis but of Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Noland—who were also color field painters and were collected by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston—she evolved a style based on pure abstraction, light, and pigment.

Developing as a colorist, she also emerged as a social observer in the tradition of Goya when she found herself on suddenly new ground, rather than expected familiar territory, more than a generation after the Holocaust. In 1978 she decided to visit Sárvár—where no memorial to its slaughtered Jews stood; where no recollection of her wiped-out, thousand-year-old community, or even of her communally active mother, was evinced by individuals with whom she spoke (including those residing in what had been her family home). The need for visualized memory, the artistic imperative to wrestle kosmos (order) out of chaos, and Alice’s self-imposed obligation to convey a transcendent positiveness in the context of overwhelming negative power. These elements combined to engender a new group of works: the abstractions and collages of dark, but often also pastel, coloration that, continuing through 1985, became From Ashes to the Rainbow. These works rise to meet the hope embodied by Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat responsible for the rescue of twenty thousand Hungarian Jews, which efforts cost him his own freedom and probably his life.

Wallenberg SchutzPass

As Barbara Rose noted (in her essay in the catalogue of Cahana’s 1986 From Ashes to the Rainbow... exhibit at the Skirball Museum in Lose Angeles), Cahana’s works bear comparison with Robert Rauschenberg’s 1958-60 illustrations of Dante’s Inferno. Unlike artists in earlier centuries whose illustrations of Dante were most often created only by power of imagination, Rauschenberg had access to literal images of the damned, in newspaper photographs. For all his incorporation of scraps of these images in his Inferno illustrations, however, his drawings are still second-hand, whereas Cahana embedded her canvases with memories of her personal experience in hell.

End of Part One

(Author's note: much of this essay is extracted from the essay in Soltes’ exhibition catalogue/book, Survival and Intimations of Immortality: the Work of Alice Lok Cahana, Ronnie Cahana, and Kitra Cahana, published by the Fritz Ascher Society, NYC, in 2020. The exhibition is currently on view at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Studies) 

The Allentown settlement

Portrait of Georges the Bearded

by Marc Masurovsky

In late August 2024, the Allentown Art Museum in Allentown, PA, announced that it had reached an agreement with Henry and Herthe Bromberg, heirs of Martin Bromberg, a Hamburg-based German Jewish businessman regarding a painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder and his workshop entitled “Portrait of Georges the Bearded, Duke of Saxony.” The museum’s leadership celebrated the agreement as a “just and fair solution…in the spirit of the Washington Principles on Nazi-confiscated art…”. The museum’s lawyer, Nicholas O’Donnell, suggested that this agreement was a “reminder that zero sum thinking in restitution cases does not have to be the only way…”(1)  “Zero sum thinking” according to a recent New York Times article, implies that “life is a battle over finite rewards where gains for one mean losses for another.”

The Bromberg family’s losses were beyond their control due to the virulent Nazi-led implementation of anti-Jewish policies sweeping Germany after 30 January 1933. According to Max Weintraub, president of the Allentown Art Museum, the Cranach had not been confiscated by the Nazis nor had it been the subject of “a forced sale,” The museum argued that the painting had changed hands in the context of “Flight Goods [fluchtgut] while the Brombergs were fleeing from persecution…” In other words, the museum’s stance was that the Brombergs most likely sold the painting after they had left Germany.  It concluded that the historical research was inconclusive on the issue of duress and a forced sale.

However, Artnet on 26 August 2024 reported that the Brombergs had sold the painting to the Paris-based Galerie F. Kleinberger in 1938. The Allentown Art Museum did not mention the 1938 sale to Kleinberger Gallery in Paris. On that same day, the Art Newspaper indicated that the painting had been at the Bromberg residence in Hamburg until at least 1935, that its whereabouts thereafter were uncertain until the Brombergs approached Galerie Kleinberger in Paris in December 1938 at which point it sold the “Bromberg Collection” to Allen Loebl, the Parisian gallery’s representative. Allegedly, the Cranach was part of that sale. The article’s author is formal on one point: “the context of the loss was escape from persecution,” which is the starting point for a fleeing Nazi victim’s experience of duress.

The historical evidence surrounding the sale of the “Bromberg Collection” in late 1938 to a Parisian art dealer surfaced when the French government agreed in 2016 to restitute a painting by Joos van Cleve to the Bromberg heirs which was also part of the “Bromberg Collection.” The French National Museum Directorate (Direction des Musées de France) characterized the sale of the Bromberg Collection as not fitting within the standard definition of a commercial transaction but should be viewed as a forced sale resulting from the duress experienced by the Bromberg family as they fled Nazi persecution. 

This interpretation of the circumstances surrounding the sale of the “Bromberg Collection” contrasts sharply with the “Fluchtgut” theory advanced by the Allentown Art Museum. Fluchtgut cases are traditionally viewed as a diluted version of a Nazi victim’s “persecution scenario” because the claimed works were sold outside the territory of Nazi Germany, thus in a superficial context of “Freedom.” It’s hard to know if the French would have restituted the van Cleve had they had found it to be a product of “fluchtgut.”

Archival documents point to a subsequent sale of the Bromberg Collection by Kleinberger to Hans Wendland, a German art dealer who was heavily involved in recycling looted and displaced Jewish-owned cultural goods during the Nazi era. Wendland may have sold some of the Bromberg works to New York art dealers with whom he had longstanding ties, thus giving additional texture to the transfer of some of the Bromberg works from Europe to the New York art market shortly before the Allied-enforced Atlantic blockade came into force.

The Allentown settlement challenges the restitution paradigm enshrined in the physical return of the contested object to the claimants. The injection of grey hues into this supposedly black/white approach to restitution suggests that we can consider watered down “readings” of the impact of Nazi persecution on Jews fleeing to safety thus allowing us to “sand down” the rough edges of the “Nazi persecution scenario” as it applies to hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing Nazi rule and leveraging their goods abroad in order to survive, thus once again pitting private property rights against the moral and ethical ramifications of genocide.

Brief recap of the Brombergs’ Lucas Cranach painting

30 January 1933: The Nazis come to power in Germany. It is the beginning of a vast and criminal anti-Jewish campaign sponsored by the Third Reich which will last until 8 May 1945 after the genocide of six million Jewish men, women and children.

Up to 1935: the Cranach is still at the Hamburg residence of the Bromberg family.

November-December 1938: sale to Allen Loebl of the Galerie F. Kleinberger Galerie in Paris. Hans Wendland was instrumental in dispersing the Bromberg collection including an unknown number to New York art dealers.

1939-1961: Bromberg paintings enter the New York art market, either across the Atlantic Ocean by boat, or by plane via Lisbon (The famous “Pan Am Clipper”) or via South and Central America (mostly Argentina, Mexico, Cuba and Venezuela) during WWII.

1961: the Allentown Art Museum acquires the Cranach painting from a New York gallery.

2016: A painting by Joos van Cleve is restituted to the Brombergs by the French Ministry of Culture under Audrey Azoulay’s impetus.

2022: The Allentown Art Museum receives a restitution claim from the Bromberg heirs for the painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder. The museum’s research points to a sale date which postdates the Brombergs’ exit from Nazi Germany, hence its insistence on categorizing the sale as “fluchtgut."

August 2024: the Allentown Art Museum enters into an agreement with the Bromberg heirs to sell the painting and share the proceeds thereof. Christie’s New York organizes the sale.

Notes

(1) comment excerpted from a statement by Nicholas O’Donnell on LinkedIn in February 2025.

Vollard Renoir in Tokyo

https://www.pubhist.com

by Marc Masurovsky

The Portrait of Ambroise Vollard dressed as a toreador was produced in 1917 by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919). Online research produced a fragmentary but tantalizing history of this iconic, but little known, portrait of Vollard painted in the last years of the First World War, as the Russian Tsarist Empire was on its last legs and the United States sent troops to the Western Front to accelerate the defeat of the German Empire.

Ambroise Vollard (3 July 1866-22 July 1939), a legendary 20th century French art dealer and collector, amassed a gargantuan collection of paintings and works on paper devoted mostly to artistic movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Western Europe. He befriended the biggest artistic talents, became their patron and is considered as one of the most important forces that shaped the modern art world. This portrait painting remained in his private collection until his untimely death on 22 July 1939.

Two months after Vollard was killed in a car crash, Nazi Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939 which marked the beginning of the Second World War. A year later in June 1940, Nazi Germany occupied the northern half of France. Shortly thereafter a collaborationist government led by Marshal Philippe Pétain governed the unoccupied portion of France as an antisemitic, nationalistic and authoritarian vassal State to Nazi Germany.

The fate of Jews living in France was sealed on 3 October 1940 when the Vichy government enacted its infamous definition of “Who is a Jew?”, the French version of the notorious September 1935 Nuremberg Laws enacted in Nazi Germany to systematize the marginalization, persecution and expropriation of Jews in Germany. The Vichy government launched a perverse competition with its Nazi overlords over who would absorb through Aryanization and plunder the economic, financial and cultural assets of Jews in France. With so much chaos serving as a backdrop, it became difficult to settle the Vollard estate in a tidy fashion owing to the cast of characters who became enmeshed in the fate of his thousands of works, many of which carried high values. Some of the personalities involved in this process were Lucien Vollard, Ambroise’s younger brother, Jeanne Vollard, Léontine Vollard, Etienne Bignou, Martin Fabiani, Robert de Galea, Edouard Jonas, Paul Cézanne, Jr.

What happened to Portrait of Ambroise Vollard as a toreador? It was mentioned in a document attesting to a co-ownership agreement dated 6 March 1940 between Lucien Vollard (1874-1952) and Martin Fabiani (1899-1989), a race track maven and erstwhile businessman cum art broker who made a fortune during WWII by collaborating with the German occupiers, buying and selling property looted from Jewish collectors, some of whom he had known before the war. He and another art dealer, Etienne Bignou (1891-1950), with a foothold in New York, became co-executors of one part of Vollard’s estate through their close association with Lucien Vollard, since Fabiani had served as a business advisor to Lucien.

While the public record is quiet on the wartime fate of this portrait painting, the archival world has elucidated its path in broad strokes. The painting never left Paris. It remained under the care of Lucien Vollard in agreement with Fabiani. After the Vichy government was overthrown in the summer of 1944 and the Nazis were defeated in 1945, Fabiani’s destiny lay in the hands of the postwar French authorities. Charged with collaboration with the enemy and illegal enrichment and illicit profiteering, Fabiani paid a very hefty fine to the French government and eventually resumed his business activities.

It took approximately seven years to resolve some of the knottier questions surrounding the distribution of the contents of the Vollard Estate to the various protagonists. On 22 April 1952, Lucien Vollard and Martin Fabiani were forced to abandon their co-ownership of works listed on 6 March 1940 to the benefit of Ambroise's sisters, Jeanne Vollard and Léontine Vollard. Edouard Jonas was their representative while they lived on the island of La Réunion, the Vollard family birthplace. This transfer of ownership included Portrait of Ambroise Vollard as a toreador.

Years later, Vollard’s portrait by Renoir showed up at an auction held by Sotheby’s in London on 7 July 1959. The American automobile tycoon Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.’s (1909-1988) had consigned the Renoir portrait of Vollard. It went under the hammer for 61,000 dollars (1959 value). When did Chrysler acquire the painting and from whom and for how much remains a mystery for now. It is safe to assume that Chrysler came into possession of the work after the 1952 transfer of ownership to Jeanne and Léontine. Logic would dictate that the painting remained in Paris and Jonas acted as their go-between with potential buyers like Chrysler.

After the 1959 sale, the painting disappeared again before resurfacing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of an exhibition devoted to Ambroise Vollard which was held in 2006. There, it was on loan from the Nippon Television Network Corporation in Tokyo, Japan, where it still resides. At what point did it enter that Japanese corporate collection? More importantly, from whom did Nippon acquire the Vollard portrait and for how much? All we know is that the painting was exhibited as part of the Nippon collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2006-7. Now that we have most of the pieces of the painting’s provenance, we can summarize its brief history which includes a pronounced gap after 1959:

Portrait of Ambroise Vollard dressed as a toreador (1917), by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Oil on canvas. 83.6 cm x 102.6 cm.

Provenance

Artist’s studio;
Ambroise Vollard, acquired from the artist;
July 1939-June 1940, Estate of Ambroise Vollard;
6 June 1940-22 April 1952, co-owned by Lucien Vollard and Martin Fabiani;
22-April 1952-?, co-ownership by Jeanne Vollard and Léontine Vollard, negotiated by Edouard Jonas.
?-7 July 1959, Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. collection;
7 July 1959, Sotheby’s London, sold for $61,000 to an unidentified buyer.
Private collection.
, ?-present, Nippon Television Network Corporation, Tokyo, Japan

Exhibitions

Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde, September 14, 2006-January 7, 2007. Loaned by Nippon Television Network Corporation, Tokyo, Japan.

Sources:

Wildenstein-Plattner Institute, NY. Ambroise Vollard Records,

Private archives, Washington, DC/Paris, France