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

A Chirico imbroglio

Helly Nahmad Gallery, NY

"Zwei Griechinnen", 1941

Sotheby's 1990

By Marc Masurovsky 

When it comes to confiscated Jewish cultural assets, we are certainly not responsible for errors committed by Nazi agents at the time that they inventoried their confiscations. Those German bureaucrats, many of whom hailed from German cultural institutions, were known for their efficient plundering of Jewish assets which they dutifully catalogued, inventoried, sorted, packed, unpacked, repacked, and shipped to other repositories only to be unpacked again, catalogued, inventoried, etc… When the Allies discovered many of these looted objects, they transferred them to their own repositories where they unpacked these recovered objects, catalogued, inventoried, carded and repacked them, before repatriating them to the countries from which they were stolen in the first place. The years-long cycle of plunder, recovery, repatriation. Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat. 

Record of seizure at Arnold's home, 1941

In the case of a painting by Giorgio de Chirico, referred to as “Two Greek Muses” (“Zwei Griechinnen”), painted either in 1926 or 1927, as part of a series of similar vertical works, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) removed “The Two Muses” from a Parisian residence and transferred the painting to the Jeu de Paume in central Paris in early March 1941. At that point, two confiscated Jewish collections entered the Jeu de Paume—Hans Arnhold’s largely Old Master collection on 7 March 1941 and the modernist collection of Michel Georges-Michel which arrived on 10 March 1941. And that’s where our little problem begins: at the registration process. 

The staff responsible for processing confiscated objects were ill-equipped to process thousands of objects diligently. A mountain of looted works had to be described, measured, assigned labels, and in some cases photographed, before being stored while deciding their ultimate fate—go to Germany or Austria, or be handed over to local dealers, or…. The ERR bureaucrats in charge of sorting confiscated works and objects upon arrival labeled the “Two Muses” as “ARN 2” and belonging to Hans Arnhold. The painting actually belonged to Michel Georges-Michel (M.G.M.). This imbroglio continued through to the end of the war and…until 2015. 

ARN 2, as recorded at Jeu de Paume, March 1941

Consistent with Nazi cultural policy, the Two Muses (now titled “Zwei Griechinnen”) were marginalized as a “degenerate” work. Like many similar works—by Dali, Ernst, Masson, Picasso, Braque, Chagall, and countless others—which the ERR did not know what to do with, it was segregated in a remote part of the Jeu de Paume, then crated in early July 1944 and loaded onto the last train commandeered by the ERR from Paris on 1 August 1944 and whose final destination was a Moravian castle at Nikolsburg (present-day Mikulov). Had the train reached Nikolsburg, the Two Muses would have likely been incinerated during a week-long confrontation between last-ditch German defenders and the Soviet Red Army and Air Force in late April 1945. 

Rose Valland's inventory of recovered works, 1944

The Nikolsburg train broke down outside of Aulnay-sous-bois east of Paris (and was later immortalized in an entertaining film with Burt Lancaster called “The Train.”) The “Two Muses” and hundreds of other modern works were spared from oblivion and returned to Paris where they should have been restituted to their respective owners. “Two Muses” was restituted to Michel Georges-Michel in 19467. However, solely based on the ERR catalogue, it would be difficult for a researcher today to know that it had actually belonged to Georges-Michel and so it was recorded as an unrestituted Arnhold painting. The work never appeared in Hans Arnhold’s restitution records which signaled a definite problem with the records. Furthermore, the Chirico painting stood out like a sore thumb in Arnhold’s conservative collection of fine Old Master paintings. A dissonant esthetic anachronism. 

The pieces finally come together 

In late fall 2015, the Helly Nahmad Gallery on Madison Avenue, NY, staged an exhibit with Phoenix Art Galleries that highlighted the Muse of Memory, Mnemosyne, partly through Giorgio de Chirico’s works on muses, juxtaposed with Greek antiquities supplied by Phoenix. A New York-based art historian spotted de Chirico’s Two Muses at the Nahmad Gallery and rang the alarm bells. It definitely looked and felt like the one documented as ARN 2. 

In early 2016, a separate on-site visit confirmed the match with the confiscated work. Upon inquiring about the provenance of the work, a gallery employee came out empty-handed. At that point, it still was not clear whether the painting had been restituted since it had been erroneously assigned to Hans Arnhold by the Nazi plunderers. Still thinking that the painting had not been restituted, a frantic month ensued with specialists in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the US, scouring archives and art historical sources only to confirm what the gallery had refused to share: the painting had belonged to Michel Georges-Michel, an interwar art critic and artist in his own right. And, most importantly, it had been restituted. Thanks to the cooperation of French cultural officials, German art historians, and restitution specialists on both sides of the Atlantic, a silly imbroglio produced by sloppy and overworked plunderers had not degenerated into a full-blown a transatlantic feud between the heirs of two Jewish victims of Nazi plunder. 

Lessons? 

1/ Thieves make mistakes. Be prepared to correct them when you realize, based on fresh evidence, that your data are wrong. It’s not you, it’s them. But it’s your duty to fix these mistakes and to inform your public of what you did in an explanatory note, to the extent that you can. 

2/ international collegiality and collaboration prevent unnecessary bad blood and complex legal entanglements while promoting higher ethical standards and due diligence in the global art market and among scholars and museum personnel. The search for historical truth is paramount in establishing the bona fides of cultural objects and ascertaining their legal status. 

Here is a partial provenance history of “Two Muses” by Giorgio de Chirico, signed and dated 1926, 130 x 70,5 cm. Oil on canvas. 

Provenance

Galerie Léonce Rosenberg, acquired from the artist; 

Michel Georges-Michel Collection, acquired from Galerie Léonce Rosenberg, Paris.

Confiscated by ERR agents, Paris, in early March 1941; 

Transfer to Jeu de Paume, 10 March 1941 where it is recorded as ARN 2. 

Set aside by ERR staff to be sold or exchanged in 1942. 

Packed in crate “Modernes 34” on 6 July 1944 at Jeu de Paume (BARCH B323/303/27, Koblenz, Germany) 

Transferred to Nikolsburg as ARN 2, 1 August 1944. 

Recovered by French forces at Aulnay-sous-Bois in late August 1944 and catalogued by Rose Valland as ‘Arnold. Chirico. Deux statues antiques, 133 x70 cm.” 

Restituted as “Les deux muses” to Michel Georges-Michel in 1947. 

Present whereabouts unknown. 

Sales 

Rameau auction, Versailles, 15 March 1970 

Sotheby’s Monaco, 25 June 1984, Lot 3409, sold as “Les muses du foyer”. 

New York, Impressionist and Modern Paintings and Sculpture, Part I, Sotheby’s, 17 May 1990, Lot 60, not sold. 

Exhibitions 

London, Arthur Tooth & Sons. First exhibition in England of works by Giorgio di Chirico as “Les Muses du foyer” (1926), no. 4, 1928 

Maybe exhibit at Galerie Flechtheim, Düsseldorf/Berlin,1930, as Zwei Frauen 

Helly Nahmad Gallery, 970 Madison Avenue, NY, late 2015-January 2016.

Select sources:

Database of Art Objects at the Jeu de Paume, www.errproject.org

Bundesarchiv, Koblenz

Archives du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères (AMAE), La Courneuve, France