Cornelius "Kor" Postma (Part One)

by Claudia Hofstee

Note: This is a two-part essay by Claudia Hofstee. Part One addresses Postma’s life story and Part Two is a detailed look at his involvement with looted art, especially with the Adolphe Schloss Collection.

Cornelis "Kor" Johannes Postma (1903-1977) was a Dutch surrealist painter who participated in the valuation and sale of Nazi-looted art during the German occupation in Paris. During WWII, he served as an expert for the German and French authorities. His involvement is well known with the valuation of the Adolphe Schloss Collection that he performed for the German and French authorities. The full extent of his wartime role in acquiring and selling looted artworks from French collections to German clients is still not clear.

Cornelis Postma was the son of Gerardhus Postma and Joanna van Doorn. He grew up in Hilversum (Netherlands). In 1923, Postma taught himself how to paint close to his hometown, in Laren. Later on, he received art lessons from the Flemish expressionist painters from Joseph Coutré and Gustaaf De Smet (1877-1943). The latter lived in the Netherlands from 1914-1922, He was also a pupil of Dutch artist Willy Schoonhoven van Beurden (1883-1963).

On 21 April 1926, Postma married a Jewish theater actress, Betsy Booleman (1901-1997). The wedding was held in Amsterdam.  A daughter, Heddy Ly Postma (1929-2017), was born three years later. While in Amsterdam, Postma worked for art dealer Pieter de Boer. In the 1930s, he collaborated in group shows with artists like Carel Willink (1900-1983) and Pycke Koch (1901-1991). However, due to disappointments in his career, Postma moved to Paris in 1939 where he worked as an artist until the onset of the German occupation in June 1940.

During WWII, Postma lived in a small family guesthouse at the Hôtel de Nice at 4bis, rue des Beaux-Arts (Paris). The street was known for its many galleries, bookstores, publishers and artists' homes. Postma changed gears and participated in the booming wartime Parisian art market. He befriended some notorious individuals such as art dealer Jean-François Lefranc, responsible for aryanizing Jewish-owned galleries and businesses in and around Paris. Lefranc was a close advisor to Louis Darquier de Pellepoix (1897-1980), Commissioner General for Jewish Affairs under the Vichy regime (1942-1944). Lefranc introduced him to Dr. Bruno Lohse (1911-2007), a Nazi art historian who served as deputy director of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) in France and coordinated anti-Jewish plunder for the ERR. He also met Kurt von Behr (1890-1945), Lohse’s superior at the ERR who supervised the ransacking of Jewish residences from 1942 to 1944 (M-Aktion). Postma’s knowledge of Dutch art and the Dutch art market made him an asset in Lohse’s network of French, German and other informants who persecuted Jewish collectors and dealers.  

Postma’s clients included art dealers like Munich-based Maria Almas-Dietrich (1892-1971) and Berlin-based Hans W. Lange (1904-1945)  to whom he sold a number of looted works. Lange used Postma to facilitate the export of paintings from France to Germany.  In July 1944, Postma exported three paintings; a landscape by the 17th century Dutch artist Jan van Kessel and two pictures by French artist Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702-789), Still life with pitcher and glasses (whose attribution was questioned) and Still life: Tea Set, which is part of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. 

Still Life: Tea Set, by Jean-Etienne Liotard

Still life: Tea Set was consigned to multiple French galleries for which Postma acted as a go-between with the actual seller. Michel Martin (1905-2003) curator at the Musée du Louvre, denied Postma his application for an export license for the Liotard painting mostly because the Louvre was keen on acquiring an important Liotard painting. This rejection of the export license illustrates one way by which French museums exercised their pre-emption right in the 1940s – a right granted to them by the Export Law of 1941. Despite Martin’s opposition, the painting left France in July 1944. Furthermore, Postma dealt occasionally with German art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt (1895-1956), well-known art expert who had acquired thousands of works of art in occupied territories of Western Europe, mostly in France. 

After the war, Postma remained in Paris where he married his second wife, the Dutch artist Pieternella Wilhelmina (Lili) Bosman van Leer (1905-1966). Her first husband (1941-1949) was Oscar van Leer (1914-1996), a successful entrepreneur. Postma may have met Bosman through Oscar van Leer since Postma was acquainted with van Leer since the 1930s. This connection proved beneficial to Postma's postwar career especially since Van Leer had developed social ties with Princess Beatrix (1938-), crown princess of the Netherlands, and her husband Prince Claus (1926-2002), while organizing gatherings for artist and writers at their estate of Castle Drakensteyn. In the 1970s, Postma gave drawing lessons to Princess Beatrix's children: Willem-Alexander (1967-), Friso (1968-2013) and Constantijn (1969-).

Postma and Lili Bosman regularly had opportunities to hold joint exhibits in Paris as with Galerie Kleinberger in 1951. Postma also enjoyed solo shows at Galerie Vendôme in 1957 and 1958.

Sources

Fold3:

NARA RG 239 M1782 roll M1782_10F1
NARA RG 239 M1944 rolls 22, 44, 47, 52, 95
NARA RG 260 M1941 roll 19
NARA RG 260 M1949 roll 6

Archives Nationales (AN), Pierrefitte, France
AN, 20144657/6, 06 July 1944, n. fol.
Z/NL 381, 8841 (C), 379, Postma

Archives du Ministère de l’Europe et des affaires étrangères (AMAE), La Courneuve, France
Séries 370-555 Série P: archives de provenance diverse
209SUP/406: Cornelius Postma
209SUP406p48: Cornelius Postma
209SUP/482 P166 : Cornelius Postma
209SUP/482 P167: Interrogatoire Hermann Voss

Stadsarchief Amsterdam, 30561: Archief van Oscar van Leer 1920 – 2003

Noord-Hollands Archief, 358.6 burgerlijke stand van de gemeente Amsterdam, inv. nr. 2858, aktenr. Reg. 2A fol. 50v; inv. nr. 3105, aktenr. Reg. 1B fol. 46v

Published sources:

Elisabeth Furtwängler and Mattes Lammert, Kunst und Profit: Museen und der französische Kunstmarkt im Zweiten Weltkrieg, 2022

Vanessa von Kolpinski, ‘Art Transfers from France During and After the Occupation: On Export Regulation as a Protective Measure and Resulting Source Material’, Arts et politiques, 2022: 138-155]

-self-taught Postma

P.M. J. E. Jacobs, Beeldend Benelux: Biografisch handboek, vol. 4, Tilburg 2000, p. 668.

Jean-Étienne Liotard, Still-life: Tea Set, c. 1781-83, Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, inv. no 84.PA57. 

Links:

-Cornelius “Kor” Postma
https://www.simonis-buunk.nl/kunstenaar/kor/kunstwerken-te-koop/3615/
https://scheen.co/kunstenaars/postma-0
https://pilot-demo.jdcrp.org/event/1943-08-21-postma-submitted-appraisal/
https://www.geni.com/people/Hedda-Ly-Postma/6000000147318664826 
https://www.geni.com/people/Cornelis-Johannes-Postma/6000000043596644134 
https://www.openarch.nl/nha:6b728df6-17dc-4f40-89f3-8621f498defb/nl

-Betsy Booleman’s relatives who perished at Auschwitz
https://www.joodsmonument.nl/nl/page/161309/c%C3%A9lina-booleman-coronel
https://www.joodsmonument.nl/nl/page/161310/alexander-booleman

The J. Paul Getty Museum, inv. nr. 84.PA57
https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/103RG0#full-artwork-details

The fate of the collection of Alexandra Pregel, aka Avxente

Alexandra Pregel. 
http://www.bnphoto.org/pregel/home.htm

by Marc Masurovsky

[This is the third installment of the series on the alleged destruction of works of art at the Jeu de Paume in wartime Paris by agents of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR).]

The Auxente/Pregel collection (tagged as AUX by the ERR) consisted largely of works of art produced by a Finnish-born Jewish artist named Alexandra Pregel whose parents were Russian and lived in Helsinki. Ms. Pregel and her parents moved to Paris to feel from Czarist Russia. There, she studied art and began to show her works as of 1932-3, according to Dr. Gauchman, one of the leading experts on Alexandra Pregel’s work. She worked with such luminaries of the exiled Russian avant-garde community as Natalia Gontcharova. Her father had been a minister in the short-lived Kerensky government in 1917-1918. In his honor, she signed her works as Avxente, a contracted form of her patronymic surname, Avkensetev. The Nazis mis-transcribed her name as Auxente, which explains why her confiscated works are inventoried under that name. She took the Pregel name after marrying Boris Pregel in 1937 in Paris. He was a scientist interested in radio-activity. After her marriage, she signed her watercolors and paintings as Pregel.

The Pregels fled to New York in 1940 in advance of the German invasion of Western Europe. Their apartment which also served as Alexandra’s studio at 18, rue Auguste Vacquerie, in the tony 16th arrondissement of Paris. At some point on or before April 2, 1942, the Pregel residence was visited by Nazi agents belonging to the Dienststelle Westen (DW), under Kurt von Behr’s leadership, an off-shoot of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), the main plundering agency in territories occupied by the Nazis. The DW had been established in early 1942 for the specific purpose of emptying out Jewish-owned or controlled residences in the Paris region, and, subsidiarily, in Belgian cities, under the aegis of the so-called Möbel-Aktion.

After its seizure, the Auxente/Alexandra Pregel collection was brought to a Dienststelle Westen locale somewhere in Paris. 12 days later, on April 14, 1942, the collection was brought to the Jeu de Paume by two individuals, Mssrs. Mader and Fleischer. As far as we can tell, Herr Mader was the deputy chief of operations for the ERR in Belgium, while Herr Fleischer was the right- hand man and aide-de-camp of Bruno Lohse at the Jeu de Paume in German-occupied Paris. Mader’s involvement with the Auxente collection transfer from the Dienststelle Westen to the Jeu de Paume cannot be readily explained since his main theater of operations was occupied Belgium. But it attests to the intimate links between the French and Belgian operations of the ERR. However, Fleischer’s presence speaks to Bruno Lohse’s interest in the seizure of Pregel’s works, most probably because of her and her husband’s intimate ties to the Russian emigré avant-garde circles, Jewish and non-Jewish, in Paris.

Six months later, on September 14, 1942, Frau Tomforde, one of two ERR staff members assigned to the inventorying of so-called “objectionable” or “degenerate” works stockpiled at the Jeu de Paume/Louvre complex [see Destruction of works of art, Parts one and two], signed off on the inventory of the Auxente collection. Judging by the paucity and dearth of descriptive information for more than 300 works confiscated by Ms. Pregel—ostensibly, the entire content of her studio--, Ms. Tomforde spent very little time rummaging through the dozens of portfolios containing Pregel’s watercolors and other works on paper. All works by Pregel earned the “vernichtet” label. In other words, all were condemned to be destroyed. Considering the brief titles given by Tomforde to Pregel’s works—still life, woman in red, landscape, etc.--, the decision to purge Pregel’s oeuvre smacks of pure ideological dogma, rather than esthetic considerations. If anything, Pregel was a figurative artist. Her only sin was to be born Jewish with Russian roots.

First page of ERR inventory for AUX.
Source: Bundesarchiv, B323/266

All told, the Auxente collection consisted of close to 370 objects—paintings, including stacks of rolled-up paintings that apparently were not even looked at during the inventorying process, watercolors and other works on paper. Thematically, we can deduce, based on the very terse one or two word descriptions, that they consisted largely of landscapes, portraits, interiors and still lives. Of the 370, 40 were relegated to the art market, leaving 330 condemned to the trash heap.

In sum, the purge of the Auxente/Pregel collection was near-total (90% of Pregel's pre-war production). Oddly enough, the one work not signed by Pregel/Avxente/Auxente was a portrait of noted pacifist author, Blaise Cendrars, attributed to Modigliani (Aux 267). Why was it condemned? Not so much because a Jewish artist painted it but perhaps because of Cendrars’ politics.

To add insult to injury, not a single work was photographed.

The Destruction of works of art in wartime Paris-Part Two

by Marc Masurovsky

[Continuation of “The Destruction of works of art in wartime Paris-Part One”]

Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) staff members at the Jeu de Paume/Louvre complex inventoried from July 1942 to March 1943 625 paintings, 48 works on paper, 2 sculptures and one object of unknown media which they deemed objectionable, in that they did not comply with the new standards of Nazi cultural policy, esthetically and thematically, defined by the unholy ideological trinity of the Third Reich—Adolf Hitler, Alfred Rosenberg and Joseph Goebbels. 

Inventories of these “objectionable” works were drawn up in four different periods: 

July 17-30, 1942, 

September 7-14, 1942, 

November 9-17, 1942, 

February-March 12, 1943. 

After the inventories were drawn up, the 676 “condemned” objects were re-crated and transferred to the Louvre storage area (Séquestre du Louvre) to await their fate. On July 21, 1943, they were allegedly lacerated and/or burned to a crisp in a day-long bonfire.

Two ERR staff members were in charge of this reclassification process: Ms. Helga Eggemann and Dr. Tomforde. It is not clear whether they also were charged with attributing the “vernichtet” [to be destroyed] label to these works or if that decision was made at a higher echelon of the ERR administration. Still, the two never saw eye to eye and were bitter rivals. The former was closely aligned with Bruno Lohse, deputy commander of the ERR at the Jeu de Paume/Louvre complex, while Dr. Tomforde had thrown her lot with her married lover, Dr. von Ingram, chief of operations at the Jeu de Paume who eventually left his first wife to marry Ms. Tomforde, which earned him a quick transfer to the Bavarian ERR depot of Füssen.

As a general reminder, 21 (8.17%) out of 257 Jewish collections officially “processed” by the ERR at the Jeu de Paume/Louvre complex contained one or more objects deemed objectionable by ERR staff. Those collections most severely affected by Nazi cultural prohibitions were those of four Jewish artists: 

Fedor Loewenstein (100%), 

Alexandra Pregel (83%), 

Michel Georges-Michel (76.5%), 

Diana Esmond-ESM (55%).

This particular phase of execution of Nazi cultural standards at the Jeu de Paume/Louvre complex affected as a whole the works of 74 artists distributed among four distinct groups (Gruppe(n)). Since there are no policy documents produced by the ERR staff to explain this desire to reclassify the works of “objectionable” artists, I will do my best to present it to you.

Gruppe I

Gruppe I was exclusively concerned with artists who worked in France throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries; none of their works were targeted for destruction. All told, 307 works produced by 87 artists ranging from Delacroix to Ziem and Cross, were consigned to Gruppe I. One third were confiscated during the massive sweeps through Jewish residences under the guise of M-Aktion starting in early 1942, half of which were eventually relegated to the Parisian art market. 60% of the Gruppe I works were shipped to the ERR depot of Nikolsburg in present-day Mikulov, Czech Republic. Only 30 returned to France after 1945.

Gruppe II
Gruppe II was sub-divided into four sub-groups: IIa, IIb, IIc, IId.

Gruppe IIa
470 objects were classified as “Gruppe IIa”. 20 were condemned which came out of the following collections: ESM [Esmond], MA-B, KAP (Kapferer), Loewell (Pierre Loewell), KA (Alphonse Kann), Unb (Unbekannt-Unknown owners) Ros Bern (Rosenberg-Bernstein-Bordeaux), R (Rothschild family). Artists in Gruppe IIa whose works were condemned included: R Dufy, De la Fresnaye, Foujita, Laprade, Larimov/Larionov, Marie Laurencin, Pablo Picasso, Suzanne Valadon, van Dongen.

Gruppe IIb
510 objects were classified as “Gruppe IIb.” 306 (60%) were condemned which came out of the following collections: MGM (Michel Georges-Michel), PE (Hugo Perls), Reichenbach (Bernard and François Reichenbach), ESM (Esmond), Rosenberg Paris (Paul Rosenberg-Paris), Loewell (Pierre Loewell), Spiro (Eugen Spiro), DW (David David-Weill). Artists in Gruppe IIb whose works were condemned included: Charbonnier, Sandi da Salo, Michel Georges-Michel, Girieud, Hummel, Levy, Loewell, Jacqueline Marval, Massis?, HM [maybe Henri Matisse], Mizerour/Mzerow, Hélène Perdriat, Francis Picabia, Retat.

Gruppe Iic
70 objects were classified as “Gruppe IIc.” Three were condemned which came out of the following collections: MA-B, Watson (Peter Watson), KAP (Kapferer). Artists in Gruppe IIc whose works were condemned included: André Masson, Philippe Pereire, Pablo Picasso.

Gruppe IId
70 objects were classified as “Gruppe IId.” 48 were condemned which came out of the following collections: KA (Alphonse Kann), Rosenberg Paris (Paul Rosenberg-Paris), R (Rothschild family), HS (Hugo Simon), Unb (Unbekannt-Unknown owners), Watson (Peter Watson). Artists in Gruppe IId was heavily slanted towards abstractionists and surrealists; it included: Hans Arp, Beaudin, Borès, Charlot, Dali, Derain, Emil?, Max Ernst, Brion Gysin, Paul Klee, Fernand Léger, André Masson, Juan Miro, Papazov, Pablo Picasso, E. Ronny, Yves Tanguy.

Gruppe III
36 objects were classified as “Gruppe III.” 18 were condemned which came out of the following collections: KA (Alphonse Kann), MA-B, HS (Hugo Simon), R (Rothschild family), Watson (Peter Watson). Artists in Gruppe III whose works were condemned belonged almost exclusively to a German expressionist club and included: Ernst Barlach, Willy Jaeckel, Erich Heckel, Paul Klee, Larimov/Larionov, Ludwig Meidner, Max Pechstein, Oscar Peters, Christian Rohlfs

Gruppe IV
29 objects were classified as “Gruppe IV.” All 29 were condemned which came out of the following collections: Loewell (Pierre Loewell), Lowenstein (Fedor Lowenstein), KA (Alphonse Kann), R (Rothschild family), Unb (Unbekannt-Unknown owners). Artists in Gruppe IV whose works were condemned consisted of Surrealists, Cubists, Symbolists and Jewish artists: Salvador Dali, J.M.Fenier, Gassier, Lehmann, Loewell, Fedor Lowenstein, Pruna, Prunière, Odilon Redon, Sem.

Several artists like Salvador Dali, André Masson, Pablo Picasso and others ended up in several groups, which might indicate that the ERR staff responsible for this classification system relied more on the content and esthetic mechanics of the works themselves than on the identity and label of the artist whose works were impugned. Put another way, Jewish identity was not enough to have your work “condemned.” Other factors were considered when deciding what to “destroy” and what to spare.

In Part three, I will address specific collections and try to grasp the logic behind the “purge.”

Sources: Bundesarchiv, B323 series at Koblenz; ERR Jeu de Paume database

Sunflower oil for paintings

by Marc Masurovsky

Art is a commodity which can be traded like widgets. On January 17, 1944, a French company called “Compensex” [Compagnie commerciale d’exportation et de compensation] had the bright idea of proposing to the Vichy government an exchange of commodities to benefit Vichy France and the French export economy. Compensex was a subsidiary of the Banque Worms whose intricate intertwining financial and commercial interests with the French wartime economy and outlying investments in Axis-occupied Europe have been well-documented. [See in particular "Industriels et banquiers francais sous l'Occupation, by Annie Lacroix-Riz, Armand-Colin]

The exchange involved 200 tons of Hungarian sunflower oil worth about 12 million francs (1944 value) for an equivalent amount of paintings allegedly owned by the Galerie Charpentier in Paris, known for its intensive commercial activity during the German occupation of France. The works would be exported to Switzerland. They included paintings by Albert Lebourg, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro and other well-known modernists. The French ministry responsible for supplies and agriculture [ravitaillement et agriculture] notified the Ministry of Finance of its support for the proposed importation of the sunflower oil. The question remained whether the 50 or so paintings would be allowed to leave France.

On January 28, 1944, the French Fine Arts Administration gave its conditional support to the project as long as it could review the list of paintings offered for export.

It is not known, pending further research, whether the exchange actually took place. But it is worth noting that Switzerland was the favored destination for the paintings, thus guaranteeing their absorption in the Swiss market.

At the exact same time, Bruno Lohse, deputy director of the ERR in France and Martin Fabiani, leading collaborationist art dealer in wartime Paris, had hatched an elaborate plot to sell 54 paintings, mostly executed by 19th and 20th century artists officially reviled by Nazi doctrine, which had been confiscated from Jewish collections in and around Paris. Those paintings allegedly were removed from the Jeu de Paume where they had been stored for further disposition.  The plot fell apart in February 1944 when Robert Scholz, administrative overseer of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) operations in occupied countries, personally intervened by traveling from Berlin to Paris to put a stop to what he perceived to be a barely disguised attempt by local officials to profit from confiscated Jewish cultural assets with the help of a notorious art dealer already implicated in the recycling of such property in France and abroad.

The moral of this story is that, once high-value cultural items are available for disposal following their misappropriation by State agents, their dispersal might be facilitated by the commercial and economic interests of the occupation forces and their local vassals, in this instance the German military administration as an extension of the Third Reich in France and the Vichy government and its complex relationship with financial institutions like the Banque Worms.

It is not clear whether Galerie Charpentier’s owners were aware of the Fabiani-Lohse arrangement, but their capacity to participate in complex commercial transactions with Vichy, the Germans and the so-called neutral countries is duly noted.

The top 10 plundered art articles

by Marc Masurovsky

The plundered art blog was born without anyone noticing it in May 2010.  As so many of these ventures go, nothing much was done in the first six months until December 23, 2010, when two brief pieces appeared which summarized the birth of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project (HARP) and events leading up to its establishment in September 1997.  On Christmas Eve 2010, perhaps on a lark, I wrote a review of “The Night of The Generals”, a campy film about anti-Hitler stirrings amongst the German general staff. My way of dipping my pinky toe in the murky waters of blogging.

2011 is when the juices began to flow and HARPs’ blog, plundered art, started to take shape.  For those of you who operate blogs on your own time, ad-free, with no staff other than yourselves, you know how much emotional and physical energy is required to keep such an adventure from becoming cybernetic driftwood and another digital artifact floating across the Internet ether.

Fast forward to October 29, 2017.

Time to take stock of the past six years, 307 articles later, all devoted in some fashion or form, directly, indirectly, to the broad topic of cultural plunder in the context of genocide, the challenges implicit in the identification and recovery of looted objects found in public and private collections on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.  Many articles were written out of spite, despair, impatience, irritation, annoyance, and also out of a genuine desire to inform and to share some knowledge about events that transpired more than 75 years ago and continue to haunt us today, should you ever be paying attention to them.

Politics permeate the way that we view art, and in particular art with problematic histories. This is where provenance enters into the discussion; a word that I never paid attention to until the Schiele scandalof late 1997, early 1998, grabbed headlines in New York and Vienna, shaking the art world because New York city policemen dared enter the temple of art and money that is the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), to remove from it two paintings executed by the bad boy of Vienna, Egon Schiele, that were suspected of having been plundered in the aftermath of the March 1938 Anschluss from two Jewish owners, victimized by the Nazis.

Politics inform the stories underlying countless numbers of works and objects of art, because history has a nasty way of interfering with their peregrinations through time and space, from the moment they exit the artist’s studio to the moment that they adorn the wall of a living room, dining room, bedroom or languish as ripening investments in freeport bunkers located in “neutral” territories like Switzerland, Singapore, and god knows where else, out of reach, out of mind, lost to the world.

Enough of this rhetoric.

It is my pleasure to present to you the top 10 articles which have graced the virtual pages of the “plundered art” blog. In honor of David Letterman, we will count them down in reverse order from 10 to 1.

[drum roll]

10.

Deconstructing Aphrodite, published on January 28, 2012

9.

The five Schiele drawing of Karl Maylander, published on June 16, 2011

8.

ERR database-Georges Bernheim, published on April 2011

7.

Franz Marc's "The large blue horses," published on January 5, 2012

6.

Van Gogh’s 1889 depiction of his mutilated ear smoking apipe, published  on June 5, 2011

5.

Nazi plunderer Bruno Lohse gets a posthumous rewrite, published on July 29, 2011

4.

The US Department of State is structurally unable to perform appropriate provenance research, published on December 5 2016

Interestingly enough, the three top articles published by plundered art each pertain to a work of art, produced by Franz Marc, Jacopo Zucchi, and Paul Klee.

Let's hear it for.....

3.

“The red horses”, by Franz Marc, published on January 3, 2012

2.

Jacopo Zucchi, “the bath of Bathsheba”, published on August 2, 2011

And the all-time winner which has outpaced its rivals in no uncertain terms like a steed racing across the finish line at a race track of your choosing...

[extra drum rolls]

1.

Angelus Novus, Angel of History, by Paul Klee, published on February 26, 2013

Last thoughts before calling it a day:

It gives me hope, in these times of grave uncertainties where the word “ethics” appears to have been gutted of any meaning, where it apparently is still ok to steal thy neighbor’s property because you are likely not to get caught—plunder, once again, is the only crime against humanity that pays for itself— that a savant blend of art, history, politics, war, justice, and ethics, still arouses interest and even passion amongst you out there, yes, you who are spread out across the seven seas and every continent, encompassing more than 60 countries—yes, that is the breadth of our readership, however impossible it is to verify whether you are mere digital echoes resulting from spam assaults or unsuccessful hacks (as in the Russian case), or men and women of all ages (yes, we do have readers who are in high school) who have expressed an interest in the fate of art objects misappropriated during acts of mass conflict and genocide, and which the art market and privately owned as well as government-run museums refuse to return to their rightful owners for a variety of inexplicable reasons. It is for you, the reader, that this blog exists.

Deconstructing the Jeu de Paume

by Marc Masurovsky

The process of understanding what exactly unfolded at the Jeu de Paume museum in German-occupied Paris between late 1940 and July 1944 has been in the works for close to a decade.

Jeu de Paume in 1861

Why?

The Jeu de Paume museum, emptied of its contents because of the impending German entrance into Paris in 1940, became the  most important processing center for art objects looted by German and French agents from Jewish owners, mainly in the Paris area but also from sites throughout German-occupied France, and to a lesser extent from Belgium and the Netherlands. The collections seized in Belgium and the Netherlands represent but a fraction of what was removed from France and processed through the Jeu de Paume.

For four years the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) staff managed that processing center to which thousands of objects were brought in crates provided by Parisian moving companies.

Typical truck and crate operation at the Louvre

ERR staffers unpacked them, assessed their appearance, condition and importance. Based on their recommendations, these objects were catalogued, inventoried, carded, and either shipped to the Reich or handed over to other German agencies for sale through the Paris art market.

Many post-WWII art restitution cases filed in Europe and in the United States are rooted in the events that transpired at the Jeu de Paume.

What is involved in the deconstruction of the Jeu de Paume?

The bulk of the reconstruction relies almost exclusively on a close examination of primary source documents which attest to the confiscation, transfer, stockpiling, inventorying, cataloguing, carding, and shipment of art objects which were forcibly removed from their Jewish owners.

These documents include, but are not limited to:

-Cards designed and filled out by ERR staffers describing the objects processed at the Jeu de Paume. These cards were also completed in other ERR centers

—in Brussels (Belgium), Fussen/Neuschwanstein (Bavaria, Germany), the Louvre (Paris, France). and Kogl (Austria).

ERR card describing a Rothschild item

-Inventories were produced by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) art specialists in Belgium, France, Germany, and Austria;

-the typewritten version of the handwritten notebooks compiled at great risk by Rose Valland, curator at the Jeu de Paume whose hierarchy asked her in effect to spy for them and document the hemorrhaging of “French cultural treasures” from their Jewish owners to various sites in Germany and Austria;

-restitution claims filed by surviving victims whose property was plundered by German agents between 1940 and 1944;

-wartime and postwar correspondence regarding the thefts authored by victims, perpetrators and witnesses;

-reports compiled by Allied intelligence agencies documenting acts of cultural plunder, including investigations into the actions of specific officials like Hermann Goering, Bruno Lohse, Robert Scholz;

-French police reports detailing their raids on Jewish-owned businesses and residences in close cooperation with German agents;

-records of French anti-Jewish agencies (Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives) responsible (and competing against the ERR) for confiscating Jewish-owned property and facilitating the Aryanization of their businesses.

The ERR staff photographed a number of the confiscated objects. Not all of the objects carded and inventoried were photographed. These photographs are scattered about in various archives throughout Europe—Belgium, France, and Germany. Our task is to reunite them with the corresponding datasets. Their quality varies significantly based on the circumstances under which the photos were taken.

One set of photographs was taken rather crudely in 1940 and 1941. 

Marais aux songes, Max Ernst

 The objects were placed on an easel, a handwritten label identified the alphanumeric code assigned to the object by the ERR, and the object was photographed together with the easel. In other words, the first photographs were produced amateurishly and did not reflect a coordinated policy of treatment of the confiscated objects. Once the Jeu de Paume operation was rationalized and structured under the guidance of Bruno Lohse and other art specialists of the ERR, the photographs took on a more professional quality, often printed on high-end photographic paper.

The official tally reported by French and Germany officials of the number of objects processed at the Jeu de Paume is slightly above 21000. This figure, which I rounded off, has been oft-repeated since 1945 and comes from the official records of the ERR itself and was confirmed by Rose Valland and other French officials after 1945.

The deconstruction of the Jeu de Paume has managed to challenge that official figure upwards and, by so doing, to clarify its meaning.

The 21000 or so objects that were “carded” by the ERR staff in its various depots throughout Europewere objects that the staff considered more from an esthetic viewpoint than an ideological viewpoint. After all, if Nazi ideology had dominated the judgment of the ERR staff, thousands of objects would not have been inventoried or carded because of their “unworthiness” and, therefore, the official figure would have been much lower.

The number itself is low and does not reflect accurately the true extent of the thefts of Jewish-owned cultural assets and the proportion of those assets which entered and left the Jeu de Paume.

Of note are the crates which contained confiscated items. The crates are the most important forensic measure of the actual number of objects which entered the Jeu de Paume from late 1940 to late July 1944. Crates were often assembled in the places of confiscation by the Parisian movers, they contained the fruits of the plunder. They were transported as such in trucks supplied by Parisian moving and storage companies to the Louvre and Jeu de Paume.

Their contents are not always provided in the available documentation. Hence, the Jeu de Paume database can only list the crates, the time at which they entered the Jeu de Paume and exited therefrom.

As of now, there are more than 33,000 datasets in the ERR database, each containing information on at least one object. Several thousand datasets pertain exclusively to crates and their contents, exclusive of the individual objects listed in the database. In other words, these crates contained objects that the ERR did not bother to inventory and/or card for reasons that are not yet clear.

The close examination of Rose Valland’s notes on the contents of crates passing through the Jeu de Paume is the closest that we will ever get to grasping the full extent of the Jeu de Paume operation, the number of collections that were processed there, and the fate of the objects contained therein both during and after WWII.

Crate inventory (partial)

In order of magnitude, the cards, when tabulated,  bring the total number of objects at the Jeu de Paume close to 21000. The inventories of the various collections processed at the Jeu de Paume provide a more accurate but not complete snapshot of the number of objects confiscated from individual Jewish owners. The total number of objects listed in the inventories brings us closer to 30,000 objects. If we add the crates with objects not tabulated in the cards or the inventories, the total number of objects could far exceed 40,000. And finally, the inventories of losses submitted by victims of Nazi and Vichy-sponsored plunder, when confronted with the German inventories, more often than not, contain far more objects than the German inventories. Hence, if we factor in the objects listed on victim inventories which were not carded or inventoried or listed in the description of crate contents, we must ask: where did those objects go since the apartments, mansions, estates, galleries and other sites containing those objects were virtually gutted of all their contents.

Once we reach the end of this exercise, we will be able to provide a more accurate picture of the scope and detail of the cultural plunder of Jewish victims of Nazi occupation and Vichy rule in France.

The process is long and painstaking, but it fulfills a vital mission: to understand the crime of cultural plunder, to document the confiscations, understand the path taken by the various objects during and after the war, and to paint a more complex picture of Nazi cultural policy in occupied territories, the impact of that policy on the art market, and the postwar fate of the objects removed by force from their owners’ possession.

This project is currently funded by the New York-based Conference of Jewish Material Claims against Germany (better known as the Claims Conference) as a joint project with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

The information on the Jeu de Paume can be found at www.errproject.org.

A Gurlitt painting waiting to be restituted: View of the Seine from the Pont-Neuf, by Camille Pissarro

by Marc Masurovsky

One of the paintings found in the infamous Salzburg Depot in Western Austria which were part of the art collection of the late Cornelius Gurlitt is a view of the Seine from the Pont-Neuf by Camille Pissarro. It turns out that this painting had been stolen from a safe deposit box owned by the late Max Heilbronn and his family after they had fled Paris. The painting turned out to be a perfect match with the one listed in documents illustrating the plundering ways of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg in France between the fall of 1940 and the summer of 1944.

The painting can also be found on page 257 of the Répertoire des biens spoliés en France as still missing.

Please find some of the relevant documents concerning this painting so that you can appreciate how the historical evidence comes together to demonstrate that a theft took place and restitution becomes the order of the day.

The ERR inventory list tells us that the late Max Heilbronn had an apartment at 1, Place de l'Alma and a safe deposit box at the Crédit commercial de France in Mont-de-Marsan, in southwestern France. The Devisenschutzkommando (DSK) sent agents down to the CCF to remove the Heilbronn collection from its safe and transferred it to the ERR in Paris. The removal took place before February 13, 1941.

The  ERR assigned to the painting the title of "Ansicht auf Paris, 1902" under the moniker of "Heilbronn 7."  A card was then created for this painting confirming that it had been officially processed and indexed at the Jeu de Paume, in Paris, a central sorting, cataloguing, displaying, and shipping point for cultural and artistic objects plundered in Paris, the neighboring regions and selected parts of France (Bordeaux region in particular and Nice). You can find more details on the ERR database.

The painting was placed on an easel and photographed.  The use of the easel is most closely identified with the Louvre annex where most objects were stored and which served as a glorified warehouse for the ERR art historians from which they would retrieve objects, bring them to the Jeu de Paume for processing and then return them to the Louvre where they awaited their fate.

Mrs. Tomforde completed the Heilbronn inventory in July 1942.  On October 31, 1942, the Pissaro view of Paris from the Pont-Neuf was subject to the 23rd exchange (Tausch) engineered by Bruno Lohse, deputy commander of the ERR plundering unit in Paris and Gustav Rochlitz, a German dealer based in the rue de Rivoli in Paris who came up with the concept of the exchanges and proposed them to Lohse as an efficient way of unloading "modernist" works in exchange for Old Masters more coveted by the Nazi hierarchy in Berlin.

At this point, the painting vanishes.  Since we know that Hildebrand Gurlitt, father of Cornelius Gurlitt, obtained the painting and that he traveled frequently to Paris, one should presume that Gurlitt acquired the Pissarro work in Paris either directly from Rochlitz or through a mutual acquaintance.

After the war ended, the Heilbronn heirs filed a claim with the French government and reported their cultural losses to the Commission de recuperation artistique (CRA) set up to investigate cultural losses and facilitate restitutions to rightful owners.

The painting only resurfaced in the spring of 2014 upon the discovery of the Salzburg Depot.

To view the work go to the website of the Kunstmuseum Bern and download the list for Salzburg.

Sources: Bundesarchiv Koblenz, B323; Ministere des affaires étrangères, La Courneuve, France, Fonds RA

Nazi looted art conference at Lafayette College, Easton, PA: a debriefing (II)

Day 2: October 27, 2011

Lafayette College
Source: Lafayette College via Flickr

Lafayette College is a small architectural jewel nestled in a set of rolling hills not too far from Allentown. Every building on its tightly designed campus does not conform to any cookie-cutter design. In some sense, a student of architecture would have a genuine ‘field day’ at Lafayette College.

Tiffany Windows
Source: Lafayette College Art Collection

The college is home to several cultural institutions which are always enjoyable to visit because their contents give the visitor an insight into the tastes, proclivities and priorities of the curators, the art historians and the administration. One of the biggest surprises can be found at the College Library in the form of two large-size Tiffany stained glass windows that adorn different parts of the library and project at different times of the day a strange array of hues onto those who read and loll in their midst.

It is also in the Library where some of the lectures were staged on Day Two of the Conference. The room where the talks occurred was framed in a glass-encased corner of the Library which gave the proceedings a natural openness filled with the filtered light of a typical October day, not enough to compete with artificial lighting, not enough to prevent you from viewing projected Powerpoint slides.

The room was full of undergraduate students, faculty, staff, and out-of-town visitors, which lent the presentations a well-earned level of attention that one can only find on college campuses. This is a good time to take a break and muse on this intriguing phenomenon. Why do so many people who have never heard of “looted art,” “cultural plunder”, “degenerate art”, “restitution”, “Washington Principles,” “provenance research,” flock to these events? Granted, interested professors flog their flock into attending these presentations on pain of reprisals at exam time (joke!). However, the phenomenon is widespread and unexplainable when contrasted by the sheer indifference displayed by policymakers, so-called art experts, even historians themselves. It’s as if one senses a thirst to know more, to learn, to find out the details, to search for meaning, a thirst that is left unquenched by the strictures and preconceptions of academicians and professionals alike. So much for the soap box.

The presentations went well. Victoria Reed of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts provided a well-thought out description of how the MFA has treated claims for works and objects in its collections in recent years. A major cultural institution better known for its irascible refusal to restitute anything, especially antiquities, the MFA has gradually adapted to the complexities of art restitution and the circumstances under which objects might have changed hands illegally owing to racial and other forms of persecutions against their rightful owners.  Although there is a long way to go still, the MFA has demonstrated that, when called upon to make the difficult choice to restitute a claimed object, thereby de-accessioning it, the benefit of the doubt is being given to the claimant, thereby reversing a decades-old tradition of invoking traditional legal defenses to forestall restitution.

"Portrait of a Man And Woman In An Interior" by Eglon van der Neer
Source: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The two keynote lectures of Day Two were scheduled for the evening in a large amphitheater-like room where the “Rape of Europa” had been screened the previous evening. The first keynote was delivered by Jonathan Petropoulos, who teaches at Claremont-McKenna College in California, followed by Lucian Simmons, who heads up global restitution efforts at Sotheby’s in New York.

Jonathan Petropoulos, Phd
Source: Claremont McKenna College

The two presentations were remarkable for one reason only: they were both anchored in personal experience. Jonathan Petropoulos chose to regale the audience on how his interest in Nazi cultural policy morphed into a lifelong quest to come to grips with Nazi looted art and to “do the right thing” for claimants. On the other hand, Simmons unapologetically built on the fact that he was at Sotheby’s to optimize returns for “the house”—it is a for-profit operation after all!—and if art restitution can serve the interests of his employers while doing some good along the way, so much the better for it. Sure!

For those who love redemption stories, Petropoulos’ presentation was a case in point. Charming, articulate, deeply versed in his field, entertaining at times, the tall, soft-spoken professor from Claremont McKenna put forth the image of an honest do-gooder who, in the course of his crusade to get to the bottom of the looted art problematic, got in way over his head at times, risking his professional career, his reputation and, god forbid, even the safety of his family! No comment…well, yes, there will be comments, but not what you might expect.

Aside from being well-published, Jonathan Petropoulos came to prominence in the budding world of restitution of Nazi loot when, in the late 1990s, he stumbled on evidence that a painting by Claude Monet on loan at a museum in Boston had been pilfered in Paris by local agents of Nazi Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. That particular painting once belonged to the legendary Parisian Jewish art dealer, Paul Rosenberg. The painting was returned to the Rosenberg heirs, all was well and Jonathan was now a player in the art restitution field.Le Quai Malaquais, Printemps (1903)

We bumped into each other while serving as directors of research at the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust-Era Assets (PCHA) in 1999 and 2000. While I focused on looted gold, Petropoulos took on the charge of investigating looted art. The final report of the PCHA speaks volumes (a thin one, to be honest) on its overall accomplishments. I will leave it at that.

"Le Quai Malaquais, Printemps (1903)" by Camille Pissarro
Source: Artinfo

Years later, Petropoulos’ name and fortunes became indelibly linked, by his own making, to a notorious Nazi war criminal, master plunderer SS Captain Bruno Lohse, deputy commander of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) operation in German-occupied Paris, and, for a short time, actual head and master coordinator of anti-Jewish cultural plunder in German-occupied France, before his retreat to Germany in the summer of 1944, his brief incarceration, trial and conviction by a French military court (very light sentence), before becoming a very successful art dealer in … you guessed it!.... “degenerate art” and Impressionists from his luxury apartment in Munich. His business operations extended mainly to Switzerland and Lichtenstein. In short, Petropoulos had befriended Lohse and maintained a decade-long relationship with the former war criminal until Lohse’s death in 2007. The public perception of Petropoulos and Lohse centered on a complicated attempt at restituting a famed painting by Claude Pissarro (Quai Malaquais), the property of the Bermann-Fischer publishing fortune and the subject of a forced sale in Vienna before ending up in Lohse’s private collection. The claims and counterclaims are ugly and should be the subject of a separate article. Suffice it to say that the painting was finally sold at Christie’s in 2009.

Petropoulos came out of his keynote speech as a selfless crusader for the cause of claimants seeking to recover looted art. Someone in the audience asked him: “Why do you do it?” He replied that this is his life’s work and he must. Sigh!

Lucian Simmons
Source: Sotheby's

Lucian Simmons is a character. Witty, refreshingly light on his feet, impeccably-dressed, he cuts a very appealing figure while describing in a most understated way (oh! So British!!) his daily schedule busy brokering restitutions, recoveries, sales of recovered items, fending off Russian pseudo-mafiosi-like characters, while babysitting elderly women in upstate New York, all in a heartbeat, seven days a week. And, of course, in the midst of all of this, his Christmas days are routinely disrupted by restitution crises. Oy gevalt! Who would have known?! The trouble is that Lucian does very well for the house with the trade in recovered stolen cultural property. Trouble, I say? Well, yes, it is troublesome to think that one can earn so much money off of historically-centered cultural larceny with genocide and persecution as its moral backdrop, layered by failed and flawed recoveries in the postwar world, complicated by supposedly bona fide acquisitions which would transform current possessors into victims on par with Nazi victims! Well, yes, I have a problem with this, but that’s just me.

Restitution? How does one broker a restitution while working at Sotheby’s? More often than not, it is the result of a complex discussion between the consigner, the claimant, and “the house.” The goal is the sale. The outcome: who will profit from it? This is referred to as restitution. I call it a financial settlement that upholds the rights of the current possessor. And Lucian is a master at this craft. Not to fault him for it, but one must admit that it is a skewed vision of the overall framework that informs the global debate on cultural plunder and its legal and ethical consequences at the point of sale.

Nevertheless, after a hard day at the office, Simmons finds a way of trumpeting the positives of his heady job, emphasizing that good things come of these intersections with history.

Needless to say, one can take only so much from self-scripted redemption to unabashed optimization in the same evening. So much for the current state of affairs as pertains to Nazi looted art and current efforts at restituting plundered items to their rightful owners.