A recapitulation of Jeu de Paume articles (2011-2020)

by Marc Masurovsky

The “plundered art” blog has given extensive coverage to different aspects of the so-called ERR database, or “Jeu de Paume” database, since its release to the public in October 2010. The database is still available for anyone to consult and conduct searches on looted objects, their owners and their displacement during and after WWII. The main reason for this is selfish: I designed this database and managed it for close to 15 years. It is the ideal case study with which to understand the inner workings of what we refer to as “cultural plunder.” Not the kind that is random and unorganized, but the kind that is premeditated, scientifically executed, methodically prepared and carried out in the context of a genocidal undertaking.

The second half of October 2024 will be devoted to a series of articles that drill deep inside the inner workings of the Jeu de Paume from its reconversion in the fall of 1940 as a processing center for confiscated Jewish cultural property to its closure in early August 1944, two weeks before the Paris insurrection led by French resistance elements on August 19, 1944. Hopefully, it will give me an opportunity to ask (or re-ask) some uncomfortable questions which require at some point answers from scholars and researchers.

At the end of this exercise, I hope that you, the reader, will realize that the people responsible for the management of the Jeu de Paume and the processing of tens of thousands of looted objects through its galleries and storage areas were rather ordinary, many of them well-educated, and if you met them today, you would not suspect in the least that they participated in a massive four-year long criminal enterprise. They are just like you and me, they do their job and go home. They may even enjoy what they do. Like well-trained museum employees, art historians and experts, cataloguers, craters, appraisers, they apply themselves to their tasks with the professionalism that is expected of them, despite the fact that their superiors were ideological architects of the plunder whose fruits they handled on a daily basis.

Here are the highlights of the 2011-2020 "plundered art" coverage of the Jeu de Paume's activities and operations between 1940-1944:

-the building of the ERR database, its inner workings and the process of building the ERR database

-case studies of collections like those of Georges Bernheim, Diane Esmond (mistakenly tagged by the ERR as her father’s, Edouard Esmond) and a follow-up look at the collection’s fate, Raoul Meyer, Alexandra Pregel also known as Avxente or Auxente, Robert Schuhmann, Jacques Seligmann and Co., Hugo Simon, Frederic Unger, Georges Voronoff,

-certain classifications of objects dictated by the ERR’s experts like MA-B (or Möbel-Aktion Bilder), UNB (Unbekannt)

-particular artists and their creations whose stories were compelling or raised larger questions about Nazi cultural policy:

Jean-Baptiste Corot’s “Mrs. Stumpf”, a dessus-de-porte by Marie Laurencin, a bronze casting by Aristide Maillol, Gabriel Metsu, Caspar Netscher’s “Lady with a Parrot”, Pablo Picasso, Camille Pissarro’s “View of the Pont-Neuf from the Seine” , a self-portrait by Vincent van Gogh, Edouard Vuillard, Philip Wouwermans, “Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berri » 

the Nazi fascination with Netsuke objects, Valencia ceramics, MA-B 702, Schloss 91, a painting by Bartholomeus van der Helst and the various attempts to recover it. and a 13th dynasty Egyptian antiquity.

-certain depots managed by the ERR in various parts of occupied Europe to store and dispose of looted cultural objects like the Nikolsburg depot in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and the fate of its contents in 1945.

-the treatment of ideological issues through art like the “Jewish question”, race, “Degenerate Art” and its hypothetical destruction.

Future installments on the Jeu de Paume will focus on the photographing of confiscated works and objects, the implementation of Nazi cultural policy on the treatment of confiscated works and objects, the esthetic preferences of Jewish collectors and dealers whose collections were processed through the Jeu de Paume, and a reconstruction of the actual chronology of the confiscations of Jewish collections in the Paris region.

Silver linings

by Marc Masurovsky

You know how this old saying goes: Every cloud has a silver lining.

In this case, the silver lining has a cloud around it, if you can visualize it.

In April 2011, the plundered art blog publicized the presence of a painting by Caspar Netscher “Dame mit Papagei/Lady with a Parrot” at the Von der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal, Germany.

Von der Heide Museum, Wuppertal

Lady with a Parrot

This painting had been the rightful property of Hugo and Elizabeth Andriesse, a family in the banking business in pre-WWII Brussels, who, because of their appurtenance to the Jewish faith, were forced to flee from the invading German armies in 1940.

Seeking refuge in New York, they never looked back. Mr. Andriesse died during WWII and his widow lived until the 1960s. She pursued claims for the return of the family property, but gave up when ordered to by the Belgian government in the 1950s because many of her cultural assets could not be located.

Having no children, the Andriesse heirs named as their heirs local charities in New York City. To this day, some of these charities receive a monthly check for at least 700 dollars as ordered by the application of Mrs. Andriesse’s will.

In February 2015, the plundered art blog cited as an exception to the current German mindset of opposing restitution of Nazi looted art to rightful owners, the stance taken by the leadership of the Wuppertal Museum to return the Caspar Netscher painting to the heirs of the Andriesse family.

To be perfectly frank, I had undertaken in 2013 a series of discussions first indirectly then directly with that museum to find a way of doing the honorable thing—restitution. I was struck by the museum’s desire to be ethical and part ways with a gorgeous example of Netscher’s work in order to uphold the highest standards when it comes to resolving complex restitution issues that involve objects in the permanent collection of a museum.  

In January 2014, I broached the matter with restitution officials in New York in hopes of convincing them to intercede as an impartial third party. Their research confirmed that the heirs to the painting were not individuals but local charities. It did not take too many phone calls to discover that a law firm based in New York and Berlin had put an end to all of these informal discussions, as representatives of the Andriesse heirs, namely four charities serving the New York metropolitan area. In effect, we were all locked out of any process to find a creative solution to this restitution problem.

Frankly I was dismayed. Several months later, the painting was restituted and in June 2014 was sold at auction at Christie’s New York for at least five million dollars. The charities received their fair share and the lawyers received their contingency fee for not doing much of anything. All the hard work had already been done, the ground plowed, the information about the painting publicized, and, just as important, the museum leadership alerted, and the Wuppertal city council aligned with the museum's stance to restitute the painting.

In April 2015, a regular contributor to the plundered art blog reported on the TEFAF Maastrict Art Fair, an annual event bringing together the elite of the international art world. She noted the presence of the Caspar Netscher painting being offered for sale at a price higher than that fetched at Christie's in June 2014,  with very little indication of the painting’s troubled and exciting history.

Are there lessons to be drawn from this event?

On the plus side, the painting was identified, located, and restituted to the rightful heirs as designated in the Andriesse will. Much of this would not have happened without the benevolent research made public both on the ERR/Jeu de Paume database (since mid-October 2010!), on the plundered art blog and the intervention of a senior German museum official who helped bring to the von der Heydt Museum news about their painting being stolen property.

The down side of this story is the risk associated with making public information that might end up enriching unscrupulous members of the legal profession and others who make it their specialty to hunt for “treasure” disguised as art objects-expensive art objects-very expensive art objects which still need to be restituted and for which a claimant has been identified and the location of the unrestituted, claimable object revealed on public websites.

It’s an unfortunate trade off that I/we have agreed to in order to educate the public and make information about cultural plunder available to the masses as well as to a specialized audience.

The risk is that we provide the opportunity for some people with means and resources to make a significant amount of money for little to show for it at the expense of exploring more creative solutions to restitution which can benefit the great many of us. In the case of the Netscher painting, one scenario was for the painting to be placed on permanent loan at the museum by the fortunate buyer who had acquired it at auction. Instead the painting has been flipped and has become another prize for speculation on the international art market, at the expense of the public.

There is no real solution to this problem, unfortunately. One alternative would be to opt for the lockdown of all data concerning looted cultural assets inside proprietary, confidential, password-protected databases, hidden from public view, in order to shield the objects from unwanted publicity that attract financial predators uninterested in history, culture and education and ethics, and solely looking for a good payday.There are several databases that fulfill this requirement already--the Art Loss Register and Art Claim, part of Art Recovery Group, both in London.

Since the 1990s, there have been no attempts to establish clear, ethical mechanisms by which to facilitate the return of looted cultural property to rightful owners. No government, no international organization has desired to create such mechanisms and, by exerting such cowardice, have allowed the market and its legal practitioners to take over the process of restitution at the expense of the public good.

The Holocaust should not be the subject of treasure hunts and opportunities for enrichment, in the name of restitution. The process of locating, identifying, and restituting a looted object should provide unique opportunities to educate and to raise awareness and to allow these objects to benefit the public through on-going displays in cultural institutions, which can be accompanied by well-conceived explanatory texts and further opportunities to enrich the public’s understanding of a most heinous crime committed in the context of mass conflicts and atrocities.

Provenance was optional at 2015 TEFAF in Maastricht

by Angelina Giovani

The 28th edition of the European Fine Arts Fair, TEFAF, closed its doors on March 22, 2015, in Maastricht. It welcomed 75,000 visitors and collectors from 65 countries. It took place at Maastricht’s main convention venue, the MECC, which was splendidly decorated with floral assemblages, bringing together a total of 136,000 flowers. For those of you who have never been to a fair of this magnitude or never had a similar experience, it felt like fragments of history on parade.

TEFAF is where you go to view the finest works of art outside of museums. It offers you the possibility to walk away with a Picasso, a Rembrandt, or whatever you can afford. Almost all prices are available upon request and cannot be found on tags accompanying the images. One definitely needs more than just a day of wandering through the fair to get a feel for what really goes on. It is overwhelming and fascinating at the same time.

In most cases very little information accompanies the works of art, such as the name of the artist and the date of creation. In the instance where either of the above is missing, they are replaced with school and approximate date.

Provenance information is lacking in most of the 109 fine arts stands, including those in the paintings section color-coded in green and the Modern section in purple. Antiquities, marked in blue, are not included in the statistics below. A cursory study into the kind and amount of provenance included in the 59 stands of the Paintings area highlighted five categories in which to fit provenance information:

provenance on the wall,
provenance in the catalogue,
provenance in the gallery book,
partial provenance and
no provenance.

33 of the 59 painting stands included provenance information on the wall, next to the relevant work of art.

Out of the remaining 26 stands, 11 had no provenance information whatsoever, neither on display, nor in the catalogues.

Not every stand had catalogues. Most of those that did have one handed them out for free. Others were available for purchase at an average price of 20-25 euros.

10 stands offered partial provenance, meaning that there was ownership history only for part of the collection.

4 out of 59 stands confined their provenance information exclusively to the exhibition catalogue and only 1 of them was limited to the gallery book, which is not for sale.

The Modern section, in purple, is a different story. The provenance issue here is less acute because of the nature of the art. Although there were works by Ernst, Kokoschka, Kirchner, Klee, and an overwhelming number of works by Picasso and Matisse, most of the art was created in the post-1945 period, making the lack of provenance information barely justifiable.

Out of 50 modern stands only 6 had provenances on the wall and only 2 included partial provenance information. One of the dealers at the fair explained that the choice of what goes on the tag, is driven by aesthetics. “We like to keep our space clean and minimal, without a lot of text to distract the visitors from the actual pictures”. The Art Loss Register apparently vets all the works on display at each TEFAF but if history is any indicator, we should not hold our breath. The effort to document the ownership history of objects on display should be institutional and individual.

I looked for Caspar Netscher’s “Woman Feeding a Parrot” [Frau mit Papagei, or Lady with a Parrot] having become familiar with it during ESLI’s Provenance Research Training Program (PRTP) in Vilnius. I felt a sense of relief upon spotting it. 

"Lady with a Parrot" at Maastricht

HA 9-Frau mit Papagei

This painting had once been the property of a Belgian Jewish family, Hugo and Elizabeth Andriesse, who had to flee Belgium before the German invasion of April-May 1940. Recently restituted, the heirs—several American charities—decided to sell the painting through Christie’s in New York. Barely a year went by and the new owner, in an apparent attempt to cash in on the market highs, offered it for sale at Maastricht. Hope springs eternal, especially where millions of euros are involved.

There is something about standing in front of a work of art you know a lot about. But then I looked at the wall. The label accompanying the painting only contained basic information, even though unlike most works, it included the price, at € 6,700,000. But it somehow felt ‘naked’, without a story attached to it. The full provenance, sure enough, was included in the catalogue, which you had to ask for, since it was not on display. The painting is nr. 13 on the catalogue and the text retraced the Andriesse painting’s journey from Brussels, the ERR’s seizure of the work, its transfer to the Jeu de Paume in Paris, before going to Goering, the Bunker Kurfürst and leading up to the Wuppertal museum until it agreed to restitute it to the Andriesse heirs, without putting up as much as a whimper in 2014. Strangely, the work is not included in the fair’s sold highlights: did it actually sell?

This being said, melancholy sets in when one stands in front of a work of art that you admire, and the thought hits you that it could be the last time you will ever see it up close, before it ends up in someone’s private collection, probably in some faraway land.

Are German museums in favor of restitution?

by Marc Masurovsky

By the looks of it, the answer is a qualified NO.

Let’s take a quick run-through at the track record of German institutions through the glare of the media since 2006. If some cases have fallen off the wagon, just blame the author. No one else.

Generally speaking, collections owned by noted art dealers and collectors like Alfred Flechtheim have continued to plague and embarrass German museums because many items illegally removed from those Jewish owners have entered these public collections.

In 2006, German museums complained that restitution procedures were too easy and that anyway most claims centered on auction house sales. What does that have to do with anything?

According to the LA Times, German museums asked the German government for help in funding provenance research because they had no money for such purposes and their staff seemingly could not be tasked to perform such duties.

Oh yes! museum directors asked that the discussion about restitution be more “businesslike.” Somehow, they felt inconvenienced by the emotional tone underlying claims for restitution. It’s hard to imagine why since claimants are heirs to victims of a genocide perpetrated by German state institutions against their families during the National Socialist period.

In 2007, the grumbling by German museums persisted over restitution rules.

In 2008, Culture Minister Bernd Neumann convened a meeting in Berlin with representatives of German museums, art experts, and individuals concerned with questions of restitution. Once again, museums requested more money for provenance research. However, some museum researchers spoke up and complained that they worked in isolation, were overwhelmed by the dizzying amount of work to do for institutions that were understaffed and underfunded.

In January 2009, an international Conference took place at the Jewish Museum of Berlin which focused the spotlight on the state of affairs both in Germany and elsewhere regarding restitution matters.

We are skipping through history here. In November 2013, the Gurlitt case exploded onto the international scene, taking by surprise everyone remotely interested in issues pertaining to looted art, to restitution, to Gemany's handling of its past.

Some commentators have gone as far as saying that the “handling of this Nazi legacy (entartete kunst) is a moral disaster.”

During that time, a restitution claim filed by the Montreal-based Max Stern Restitution Project, landed on the desk of the leadership of the City Museum of Dusseldorf over a painting by Wilhelm von Schadow which belonged to the late Max Stern. Contrary to most German museums, the leadership of the city Museum proved to be sympathetic to the request for restitution and endeavored to work closely with the Max Stern Project in order to resolve the claim favorably. An odd moment when one considers the general hostility that permeates the German museum world regarding restitution claims.

It could be that the Montreal-based restitution project which is housed at Concordia University, relies heavily on international law enforcement agencies to facilitate its requests for restitution. An interesting model to keep in mind.

While German museums were giving short shrift to Holocaust-era claimants, the German government appeared to encourage the repatriation of looted antiquities to Greece and Iraq. The same could not be said for African countries like Nigeria, Chad and Gabon. Neo-colonialist double-standard or geopolitics gone awry?

If you think we are being too harsh on the German government and its cultural institutions, they should not feel singled-out since a similar negative assessment appeared in the New York Times accusing American museums of rolling back the clock on restitution: stalling, balking, and disengaging from the restitution discussion. Fair or unfair?

2014 let in a bright light of hope when the museum of art of Wuppertal decided of its own accord with the support of the local city council to do the right thing and restitute a gorgeous painting by Caspar Netscher entitled “Lady with the Parrot—Dame mit Papagei”, an exceptional moment in the annals of restitution in Germany, a moment that should have heaped kudos on the director of the Wuppertal Museum, Gerhard Finckh, for his willingness to keep an open mind even if it meant losing one of the museum’s prized possessions. A gesture that was largely ignored by German and foreign journalists, commentators, restitution officials, and the like. So, we take this opportunity to applaud Mr. Finkh’s decision to restitute the Caspar Netscher painting to the heirs of a Belgian Jewish family, as a shining example of what can be done if one wills it to be done.

Note that the world did not come to an end and that the art market is still in operation.

However, the restitution enthusiasm was short-lived, the window closed and the room went dark. In August 2014, the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen rejected a restitution claim for a painting by Jacob Octhervelt.

In the midst of the Gurlitt mess, 2015 has not gotten off on a positive footing. Indeed, the so-called Guelph treasure has been the subject of a restitution claim whereby the German institution holding the so-called treasure which is worth quite a bit of money has refused to return it on grounds that there is no proof of a spoliation, let alone duress. The family has turned around and filed a lawsuit.

In the minds of restitution lawyers both in Germany and the United States, the Guelph treasure case puts the lie to German pledges to do what is needed to facilitate restitution to claimants.

As a result of the constantly evolving Cornelius Gurlitt scandal, in death as in life, German promises of passing laws eliminating statutes of limitations have not come to fruition.

In response to the savagery displayed in Syria and Irak against people and property, especially cultural property, Germany woke up to the fact that its territory is used as a major turnstile for the reselling of looted antiquities originating in that conflict. Monika Gruetters proposed that provenances be required for all cultural items entering or leaving Germany which apparently come from the Mideast. A great idea that is not favored by the German art market. Let’s see.

Will there be more funding for provenance research in Germany? A new center requested by Monika Gruetters has reorganized and expanded the provenance bureaucracy in Germany, the largest of its kind in the world, but it does not appear to be the ideal way of addressing the problem that plagues cultural institutions in Germany. As a model, the world is taking note, but wonders whether this is what we should NOT be doing when addressing the question of research and due diligence in museum collections.

Nevertheless, it is easy to criticize the German government when the rest of the world is not doing a bloody thing to move forward on questions of research, due diligence, improved conditions for filing and resolving claims and so forth and so on.

We are therefore duty bound to acknowledge that, in its particularly clumsy way, Germany has been trying to improve the climate regarding research into histories of ownership of objects that might have been looted and which are present in German state collections. An improvement that does not allay the underlying problem: how willing are German museums to restitute objects once conclusive or convincing proof has established the illicit nature of the object in a German public collection?

The answer to our initial question is still NO. Unless proven otherwise, the vast majority of German museums are still not inclined to restitute.

As they say in the United States, proof is in the pudding.

Wanted: A Lady with a Parrot

Lady with a Parrot
Source: Von der Heydt Museum

Although born in Heidelberg in 1639, Caspar Netscher established himself as a Dutch painter, who mastered the art of depicting the lushness and sensuality of textiles and their embroidered surfaces. The “Lady with the Parrot” (Frau mit Papagei or Dame am Fenster), by Caspar Netscher is a wonderful example of how Netscher commands detail while conveying intimacy and a subtle dose of exotic levity in his subject.

Hugo Daniel Andriesse, a wealthy Belgian financier and industrialist, owned the Netscher painting until it was forcibly removed from Brussels, Belgium, by elements of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) together with the rest of his collection and promptly shipped to the Jeu de Paume in Paris where it was ‘processed’ in March 1942 as HA 9.

Hermann Goering demanded the painting as well as others from Andriesse’s collection and the item was shipped to the Reich.

Nothing more was heard of it until….several years ago when it was exhibited at the Von der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal, Germany, as part of its permanent collection.

Von der Heydt, it should be said, has an extremely long rap sheet as an international man of intrigue and with very deep pockets who exchanged favors with the most unsavory characters bred and nurtured by the Third Reich, including, but not limited to, acquiring, hoarding and dispensing of looted cultural property and other forms of assets pilfered from Jews during the Second World War.

If Andriesse did not recover the painting, it has to be restituted to his family. Why hasn’t anyone done anything about this?

Lady with a Parrot
Source: Bundesarchiv via ERR Project