Oprah and Adele II

by Marc Masurovsky

Warning:

This is an opinion piece and you—the reader—are always free to disagree with what you are about to read. Perhaps, after having spent two decades in the trenches of the art restitution movement, if there ever was such a thing,  my glasses have become tinted. Still, the inability and/or unwillingness of art market players, whether they be gallerists, auctioneers, private collectors, buyers, and brokers alike to be more forthcoming about publicizing the history of the objects with which they come into contact, remains to this day perplexing, in defiance of any reasonable argumentation, save for the old yarn that there is no law that compels one to disclose a full provenance for an art object, regardless of its origin.

In 1912, Gustav Klimt, the renowned master of the Austrian Secessionist movement, painted several portraits of a delicate, frail, wan, Jewish woman named Adele Bloch Bauer, the heiress to a sizeable fortune amassed by her husband, Ferdinand Bloch Bauer, one of the leading Jewish bankers of Vienna. Adele Bloch Bauer died in 1925.

The National Socialist German Reich absorbed Austria in an “Anschluss” in March 1938, a geopolitical act which served overnight as a suspended death sentence for the several hundred thousand Jews living in Austria at that time. The Nazification of Austria led to a systematic campaign of persecution targeting Austria’s Jewish community, punctuated by mass arrests, torture, evictions, expropriations, outright plunder of Jewish assets and later on, deportations, slave labor and extermination.

Those who could escape sought refuge in other parts of Europe and in the Americas; they managed to save themselves at great risk. Those who did not faced certain death. When the Holocaust and the Second World War ended in May 1945, three fourths of Austria’s Jews had been massacred and all of their property confiscated, either absorbed by non-Jews in Austria or dissipated, as art and other fungible assets, through domestic and international market outlets. Postwar efforts to recover expropriated property proved mostly futile for surviving Jewish family members. The Bloch Bauer paintings remained where they had been sequestered with the able assistance of pro-Nazi Austrian and German art historians and museum officials—in a Viennese museum. They hung on the walls of the Belvedere Museum for all to view and became associated with the rebirth of Austria, drawing tourists to Vienna from around the world. Gustav Klimt’s star rose until he earned a posthumous recognition as a world-class artist much like his younger colleague, Egon Schiele.

Decades later, Maria Altmann, a niece of the Bloch Bauer family who resided in California, filed a restitution claim to recover her family’s cultural property, including the two portraits of her aunt, Adele Bloch Bauer, commissioned from Gustav Klimt.

Her lawyer, E. Randol Schoenberg, fought a lengthy and protracted battle for her claim to even be heard in an American court. Her case went all the way to the US Supreme Court where Mr. Schoenberg prevailed in his bid to sue the current possessor of the paintings, the Republic of Austria, in an American court. In the end, the Austrian government was compelled to restitute five Klimt works to Maria Altmann. By 2005, the commercial value of the paintings had accrued to more than 300 million dollars, a staggering sum of money by anyone’s standards.

Once restituted, Ms. Altmann sold the paintings in November 2006 through the Christie’s auction house in New York. An anonymous buyer aggressively pursued by telephone the “Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer II” starting at 74 million dollars and pressing upwards until 87 million dollars capped the anonymous bidder’s quest to acquire Adele II.

In 2014, Adele II was on loan to the Museum of Modern Art in New York where it hung on the 5th floor.

The global art dealer, Larry Gagosian, spotted the painting.

One of his clients, a wealthy Chinese investor, offered 100 million dollars for the Klimt masterpiece. The anonymous owner countered with 150 million dollars. as an acceptable sales price.

The deal was consummated, thus doubling Adele II’s value in ten years. News of the transaction revealed that the anonymous buyer in 2006 was none other than Oprah Winfrey, global talk show maven, personality and role model.  Oprah Winfrey’s desire for anonymity is consistent with standard practices in the art world whereby it is considered to be no one’s business who buys what from whom. Unfortunately, such built-in opacity, disguised as a respectful quest for privacy, casts a lasting cloak of mystery over most art transactions which produces a shield that enables trafficking in illicitly acquired objects and trading in objects whose provenance is highly questionable.

Every private buyer, in an unregulated market such as the art market, has the right to treat his/her acquisitions of art, even high-priced art, as he/she sees fit.  Nevertheless, it would have been a historical moment had Ms. Winfrey announced that she had acquired the Bloch Bauer portrait in 2006.  Perhaps I am making the wrong assumption here, whereby the history of the painting moved her and fueled her quest to acquire this Klimt masterpiece, regardless of the cost. It may be that she merely viewed  "Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer II" as a beautiful art object for which she was determined to spend as much money as it took to make it hers and to profit from its resale a decade later in an astute business transaction involving a Chinese buyer. It could very well be that the painting’s history was not the motivating factor in her decision to acquire Adele II. However harsh that may sound, it is a real possibility. Her silence in this matter makes it difficult to weigh in on either side of this conundrum.

Looted works of art, regardless of their value, function as perennial esthetic symbols of and silent witnesses to a painful history tainted by genocide which engulfed millions of lives over a twelve-year period; the tragic destinies of the victims are forever intertwined with and embodied in these objects.

When these looted objects are traded on the international marketplace, sometimes for substantial sums of money, the sale itself becomes the event and supplants the history of the object, thus stripping it of its painful past. The plundered object loses its context, much like an antique piece illegally removed from its matrix. The sale works like an anesthetic; it deadens history, it whitewashes like cleanser the oftentimes twisted and tragic context through which the object evolved before reaching us.

It makes me wonder: why should I care so much about the history of these objects which, oftentimes, are reduced to---objects without a past, adornments, some more extraordinary than others?

Why teach history? Why share knowledge? why the urge to contextualize works and objects of art, to restore their history, their stories?

Will the Chinese buyer who has spent 150 million dollars to own the “Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer II” even care about the history of this object? Will it remind him, however remotely, of the millions of art objects which suffered a similar, if not worse fate, as they were plundered by Japanese Imperial forces on the Chinese mainland between 1931 and 1946? Does any of this matter?

A teachable moment has once again vanished like sand flowing between one’s fingers, sacrificed on the altar of money.

Rest assured, however, that 87 million dollars, 150 million dollars, do not, cannot and will not erase the taint of persecution and genocide from these looted objects. 

Ever.

Wild Weekend with Wally-Part Two

Close-up view of "Portrait of Wally"
Source: Google Images

Andrew Shea, Director
Source: Google Images

The making of a documentary film on the fate of the “Portrait of Wally” is a heady exercise. Its subject matter is a loving, dreamy and complicit portrait by Egon Schiele of his mistress, Walburga Neuzil. This was no art historical exercise here, though, especially coming from a legally-trained filmmaker, Andrew Shea, a veteran journalist, David D'Arcy, who straddles the fence between art and politics, and a well-seasoned film festival organizer, Barbara Morgan. “Wally” is all about the forensics of a racially-motivated theft in Nazi-absorbed Austria and the postwar attempts to recover title to an illegally acquired painting, “Portrait of Wally”, from an iconic figure of the Austrian art world, Rudolf Leopold, more interested in protecting ill-gotten treasures which were ripped from the bosoms of persecuted Jews in a nation that forgot to mete out justice against the culprits of Nazi collaboration.

Howard Spiegler, attorney for the Bondi Estate
Source: Google Images

The fight over Wally echoes the deep-seeded schisms that underlie the frail ties that bind Jews with non-Jews in nations implicated in different aspects of the Final Solution through intense, widespread collaboration at all levels of the society. By extension, it is about those who did nothing to help those who suffered for the fact that the others did nothing. An uneasy situation with which most European societies have yet to fully come to grips, albeit clumsily and unevenly, some countries behave better than others, although nowadays, anything is possible in the face of a massive rightward and chauvinistic shift in European politics.

David D'Arcy
Source: Google Images

False notions of venality have plagued the claimants of “Wally”—in this case, the Bondi heirs—through press reports (New York Times being no exception), statements made by museum and art world figures who are apparently more concerned with the value of an object and the inviolability of collections than with human justice.

The Wally case encapsulates all that is wrong with the way in which we relate to culture. Our ability to so eagerly disconnect an object from its history is disconcerting, much like when grave robbers violate the sanctity of a tomb and rip out from its matrix funerary objects meant to accompany their owners into the afterlife. De-contextualization makes it all the more easier to ignore the fact that an object has a human history, a social history, one that is organically connected to its previous owners, its jealous rivals, its covetous admirers, and its oglers. That is not to say that we should all weep and moan at the vagaries of history and the incessant and continual tragedies that sever ties between objects and owners—no, we are not comparing art objects to our favorite pets.

Andre Bondi, son of the late Henri Bondi
Source: Google Images

Left to Right.: Sharon Levin, Willi Korte, and Andrew Shea
Source: Google Images

In the case of Wally, we now have 20-20 hindsight—how convenient! Those who steadfastly opposed the Bondis’ claim to “Wally” and railed against Robert Morgenthau’s seizure of the painting are now gloating about their early involvement in the “Wally” case. The silent ones are those who produced the most damage—MoMA, and by extension, the New York art world, writ large; the Leopold Museum and, by extension, many in the Viennese cultural world, as well as members of select organizations traditionally devoted to the protection of the rights of Holocaust survivors and their heirs and to the greater good of the Jewish community at large.

 Is it so naïve to think that, if in late 1997 and early 1998--the crucial time frame for the Wally "Case"—MoMA, the Leopold Museum, the Federal Government, Jewish organizations, had reacted differently to the plight of the Bondi family, the Wally “case” might not have been a “case” at all? I am one of those who is that naïve to believe so. Woe on me! The seizure could have been so easily avoided. A dialogue between the parties, such as had been offered by HARP in late December 1997, might have spared all the parties thirteen long and tedious years which involved attorneys, judges, experts, researchers, historians, family members, government officials, on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. An enormous waste of time, energy, and priceless resources, if you ask me.

But such as it is, human nature can be vile in its inability to produce empathy, understanding as it steadfastly adheres as if life itself depended on it to confining, self-serving, self-satisfying legal and fiduciary frameworks and principles—who owns what when? Under what circumstances? I work in a museum, you don’t. Who are you anyway? I am a collector, you are not, etc., etc., etc. Should one even dare cross the Rubicon and wonder whether the underpinnings of those legalistic and defensive questions do not belie more sinister thought processes such as: why do those Jews always fret about what is theirs and what is not theirs? Haven’t they received enough? Is it because “Wally” is worth two million dollars (in 1997) that the Bondi family has asserted its rights of ownership? Is it greed disguised as justice that creates these complications? So many ugly thoughts and questions which pervaded the press and trade debate over Wally, ugly as could be, thus rendering any adult and civilized conversation about the ownership history of this painting by Egon Schiele nigh impossible, resulting in what we have come to know as the “Wally Case.”



End of Part Two

A bed in which Marie-Antoinette might have slept

In the early days of November 1952, a man walked into the showrooms of Seligmann & Cie., located at 23, Place Vendôme, in Paris. His name was Mr. Veil-Picard, heir to a very substantial collection of decorative objects and other cultural assets left behind by his father and which had been looted from their Paris apartment in spring of 1944 by elements of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR). As luck would have it, most of the crates containing Veil-Picard property (marked “WP”) were located in Germany and Austria and returned to France to be restituted to the Veil-Picard family.

WP 2003
Source: ERR Project via Bundesarchiv

One of the recovered items was a bed frame, the so-called “Marie-Antoinette” bed frame. It is one of those historical oddities that is more likely to turn into a conversation piece. Legend has it that this bed frame was one of many designed to accommodate the royal body of the “Austrian Queen” wherever she might end up—castle, manor, stately apartments. No matter, as long as there was a bed specifically designed to suit her particular tastes.

According to the ERR scholars of the Jeu de Paume, the bed frame, labeled WP 2003, actually hailed from the “Palais de Versailles” and was the masterful handiwork of Georges Jacob (1739-1814). However, the description on Veil-Picard’s own inventory is humbler; it simply refers to a Louis XVI bed with designs by Philippe de la Salle. Like many stolen cultural items from across Europe, the bed ended up at Lager Peter (Alt-Aussee), the main cultural plunder depot lodged in the Austrian mountains, and returned directly to France without going through Munich.

WP 2003
Source: ERR Project via NARA

WP 2003
Source: ERR Project via NARA

Veil-Picard recovered the item on April 16, 1946.

Six years later, Veil-Picard offered the ornately-decorated bed frame for sale to François-Gérard Seligmann, general manager of Seligmann & Cie. in Paris, whose own firm, co-owned in a very complex arrangement by his brothers and cousins in Paris and New York, had been completely fleeced during the German occupation of France, some say as payback for the Seligmann family's alleged mishandling of Hermann Goering on one of his pre-invasion shopping sprees in Paris.

Seligmann estimated the bed frame to be worth around four million francs (not more than 20,000 US dollars, 1952 value).

Although he did not really believe that the bed had been slept in by or been designed for Marie-Antoinette, Seligmann realized, however, that, as is so often the case, it made for a good story which could only enhance the value of an item that would otherwise be hard to sell, no matter how you looked at it.

All this to say that many claimants who recovered their stolen property sold it in the years that followed their restitution, some because they needed the income, others because the items no longer interested them, and for most, it was a stark reminder of a period that they just as soon would want to forget. For those who firmly believe that venality is the prime motive underlying a claimant's desire to sell restituted property, think again. And, to be frank, once the rightful owner recovers his or her property, its ultimate fate should not be anyone's concern except the owner's.