"Le premier jour de printemps à Moret", by Alfred Sisley--Part Two

by Marc Masurovsky

“Frühlingslandschaft”

The Impressionist painter, Alfred Sisley, produced “Le premier jour de printemps à Moret” in 1889, an oil on canvas measuring 46,2 x 56 cm, signed and dated “Sisley. 89” on the lower left of the painting. The first name which appears on the provenance of the painting in the Christie’s sale listing for November 6, 2008, is “Camentron” with no date of acquisition.  There was a “Galerie Martin Camentron” in Paris in the 1890s which acquired a number of Sisley paintings. There was also a “collection Camentron” in which one could find a number of paintings by Sisley. 

The famed “Galerie Durand-Ruel” acquired “Le premier jour de printemps à Moret” in 1892 from Camentron, one of several that the gallery acquired, as attested by the provenance of a Sisley painting at the Musée d’Orsay.

Thirty years elapsed before Mr. Perdoux allegedly acquired the Sisley painting. There is nothing to indicate that he bought it from Durand-Ruel. This could be the same Perdoux as Yves Perdoux, a notorious Parisian art dealer who collaborated with the Nazis during the German occupation of France and denounced the locations of a number of Jewish-owned art collections, including that of Paul Rosenberg.

The Lindon family name does not appear in the Christie's provenance of this painting. At some point, the Wildenstein gallery in Paris came into possession of the painting. If one did not know that Lindon was associated with the Sisley painting, it would be impossible to deduce exactly when Wildenstein bought the painting—before, during or after WWII. On or about 1972, “the present owner” of the painting purchased “Le premier jour de printemps à Moret” and brought it to market at Christie’s on November 6, 2008 where Alain Dreyfus acquired it for 338,500 dollars.

So, what happened between Perdoux and Wildenstein?

The theft

Months after the German invasion of France in June 1940, the Lindenbaum/Lindon collection was confiscated and sent to the Jeu de Paume on December 10, 1940.   It included five paintings by Sisley which had been stored in a vault at the Chase Safe Deposit Company at 41, rue Cambon in Paris, until their removal by the German financial police agents with the Devisenschutzkommando (DSK) on December 5, 1940. The inventory drawn up by the DSK agents indicated a painting by Sisley 

excerpt from the DSK inventory

entitled “Frühling in Moret”. The initial inventory drawn up when the Lindenbaum collection first entered the Jeu de Paume in December 1940 showed a painting by Sisley with the following title: “Frühlingslandschaft mit blühenden Ostbäumen”, with a lower left signature and the date “89”. 

The ERR personnel at the Jeu de Paume gave the Sisley painting the title of “Frühlingslandschaft” (Spring landscape) and the number "Li 56"; it described the painting as a “View into a meadow landscape with still bare fruit trees, poplars and bushes. In the background a human figure”.

ERR card for Li 56

In early January 1943, a new inventory of the Lindenbaum collection was drawn up under the supervision of Dr. Schiedlausky, who was the principal manager of the ERR depot of Neuschwanstein in Bavaria near the town of Hohenschwangau close to Fussen. However a number of Impressionist and other modern works from the Lindenbaum collection remained at the Jeu de Paume in German-occupied Paris and were inventoried there on July 17, 1942 by Dr. Tomforde, one of the main art historians and cataloguers of confiscated collections working for the ERR in Paris. In May 1944, Dr. von Ingram working with Schiedlausky completed the Lindenbaum inventory at Neuschwanstein, including three Sisley paintings slated to be exchanged by the German dealer and agent, Gustav Rochlitz, on Goering’s initiative. Those paintings had been swapped in Paris for a painting by Titian, entitled “Portrait of a young lady” on July 9, 1941. Li 56, “Frühlingslandschaft” remained with Gustav Rochlitz who shipped it to his storage facility in Mühlhofen near Meersburg in southern Bavaria along the shores of Lake Constanz. A handwritten note from a postwar Bavarian official confirmed this possibility.

On September 25, 1945, Alfred Lindon submitted a “final list” of works of art plundered from the vault he had rented at the Chase Safe Deposit Company at 41, rue Cambon before the Germans’ arrival in the French capital. Incidentally, he named the Sisley painting “Sous-bois/printemps rose” and Mr. Lindon indicated that it had been acquired at Durand-Ruel.  Hence, when filling out the provenance advertised by Christie’s in November 2008, one could postulate the following:

Camentron, Paris
Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paris (acquired from the above in April 1892)
Alfred Lindon?

Where does that put Mr. Perdoux (acquired from the above, November 1923)?

Could the 1923 Perdoux reference be a falsehood? If, as Mr. Lindon indicates on his inventory of works lost as a result of looting of the family vault at Chase Safe Deposit Company, he had bought the Sisley from Durand-Ruel, this would throw into question the mention of Perdoux in the provenance supplied to Christie’s. This would not be the first time that a provenance contained fictitious or misleading information. One possibility is that Alfred Lindon acquired the Sisley painting in November 1923 and that Yves Perdoux, if it is him, may have been involved in the recycling of the painting during WWII. He worked with various collaborationist art dealers, in particular Raphael Gérard, to whom he had sold numerous looted objects between 1940 and 1944. Anything is possible…

As a result of an exchange policy approved by the ERR and Hermann Goering, modern paintings confiscated from Jewish collectors were offered to French, Swiss, Belgian, Dutch, Italian, and German art dealers in exchange for Old Masters which could grace the collections of Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering. Under exchange (Tausch) No. 10 of July 9, 1941, a number of Lindenbaum paintings, including the Sisley painting in question were offered to Gustav Rochlitz in exchange for a Titian painting. According to Rochlitz’s testimony to the Allies after WWII, he shipped the Sisley and many other paintings he had obtained on the Paris art market, to a storage place that he managed at Mühlhofen near Meesburg in southern Bavaria, along the northern shore of Lake Constanz. Rochlitz misrepresented many of his transactions to Allied interrogators. Therefore, it would not be surprising if the Sisley in question had remained in Paris and been sold or consigned for sale with collaborationists like Yves Perdoux or Raphael Gérard.

In sum, the chain of ownership for the Sisley painting was broken on December 5, 1940. Its post-confiscation disappearance on the Paris art market made it impossible for French and Allied officials to recover the painting and return it to the Lindon family. Knowledge of these illicit market activities was not well-known in the postwar years, except by those who engaged in them, those who benefited from them, and some of the victims who investigated the fate of their lost cultural assets. 

The postwar French directory of looted cultural assets  known as Répertoire des biens spoliés (RBS) includes several paintings by Sisley which include the word “printemps” (spring/Frühling), one of the titles ascribed to the painting by Alfred Lindon, which point to two owners, the estate of Mrs. Berthe Propper and Mr. Lindon. A handwritten annotation in the 1947 RBS catalogue points to the fact that the French government’s investigative file on the whereabouts of the painting was closed on August 5, 1961, an administrative procedure indicating that the French government no longer considered the location of the painting as feasible. In these instances, government officials would tell claimants that they should accept instead a compensatory package from the German government for their losses, 16 years after the end of WWII. Whether or not the Lindon family continued to search for the painting is a question that needs an answer.

crossed-out mention of "Le Printemps" in RBS

Works by Alfred Sisley in lost art databases

www.lootedart.com

The database of the Commission for Looted Art in Europe (CLAE) includes three paintings by Sisley with the word “Spring”, none of which are ascribed to Alfred Lindon.

Lostart.de

The database of looted cultural assets which is managed by the German Lost Art Foundation contains 22 paintings by Alfred Sisley, none of which correspond to the Alfred Lindon painting.

Art Loss Register (ALR)

It’s impossible to know what information on the Sisley the London-based Art Loss Register holds since it is a proprietary database. In general, auction houses and art dealers routinely submit to ALR information on objects on consignment for sale in order to identify any potential problems with title. 

Tentative conclusion

Once Alfred Lindon became dispossessed of the painting on December 5, 1940, the painting became a looted work of art subject to restitution which required it to be returned to its rightful owner. Since it was not located at the end of WWII or thereafter, the painting’s postwar itinerary is illegal. Any transfer of title from one possessor  to the next since 1940 was illegal and amounted to resale and possession of stolen property.  Wildenstein & Cie, one-time owner of the Sisley painting, has contributed to the postwar problem surrounding this painting.

An art dealer's responsibility compels him/her to do systematic due diligence on every object which he/she acquires, sells, or borrows. It does not matter if the object is being offered for sale by an auction house or a gallery or a museum or another art dealer or a private individual. That is his/her professional and ethical responsibility. To treat auction houses differently from other market actors is frankly puzzling and illogical.

It is my frank opinion that if Mondex succeeds in bringing Christie's to heel over the Sisley painting, it will not only undermine one of the more successful restitution experiments in the private art market but also raise serious concerns about the actual meaning of restitution of works and objects of art plundered during the Nazi years by reducing it to a mercenary hunt for cash at whatever the cost. That, frankly, is unethical.  I honestly hope that all parties come to their senses and seek some other form of solution which will benefit the Lindon family, first and foremost.

Additional notes

Titles

“Le premier jour de printemps à Moret” by Alfred Sisley, painted in 1889, ended up in the possession of Alfred Lindenbaum/Lindon. The painting, before and after its racially-motivated confiscation, has had different titles prior to its purchase in 2008 by Alain Dreyfus:

“Printemps”
“Sous-bois/printemps rose”
“Frühlingslandschaft”
“Frühlingslandschaft mit blühenden Ostbäumen”
“Frühling in Moret”

Markings

Usually, the ERR staff wrote or stenciled on the back of works it confiscated, especially paintings, the alpha-numeric code that they assigned to the items they catalogued at the Jeu de Paume. Those markings would have been the obvious tip-off that the painting had been stolen during the German occupation of Paris. Was the painting restretched, reframed? Were the markings erased?  If so, who would have stripped the painting down of obvious markings left by the ERR?

Sources:

Bundesarchiv, B323/277 Koblenz, Germany

209SUP 2, 209SUP 603, French Foreign Affairs Ministry Archives, La Courneuve, France

RG 260 M1943 Reel 12, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD

Happy birthday, Vincent van Gogh! Portrait of Dr. Gachet, a book review

by Angelina Giovani 

Portrait of Dr. Gachet, van Gogh (1890) First version

[Editors' note: One way to celebrate Vincent van Gogh's birthday is to reminisce about one of this most important works of art, Portrait of Dr. Gachet. Angelina Giovani reviews Cynthia Saltzman's captivating history of a painting executed by van Gogh shortly before his untimely death in mid-1890.]

The Portrait of Dr. Gachet, by Cynthia Saltzman, came out in 1998. This unusual book traces the provenance history of a portrait that Vincent van Gogh painted of his doctor in 1890, shortly before he took his own life. Saltzman provides us with the context and circumstances of the portrait’s creation, focusing on the first of two versions which van Gogh painted, the profiles of the people involved in the many transactions that marked its history and the state of the art market in Western Europe at the beginning of the 20th century.

The story begins when Vincent van Gogh is 37 years old and had already created a large body of work, amounting to over 600 paintings and drawings. Even though he had not made any profit from his paintings, his brother Theo received his works, while he was based in Paris, acting as Vincent’s dealer. Their close relationship comes out clearly in the letters that Vincent and Theo exchanged during the years, which also shed light on other close relationships that van Gogh had built with other artists of his time, such as Gauguin, Signac, Pissarro, etc. Pissarro recommended that Dr. Gachet look after Vincent’s health which had deteriorated. There are still many theories on van Gogh’s diagnosis. Although we will probably never know exactly what he suffered from, the more plausible theories center on acute mania with hallucinations, depression and melancholia. He met Dr. Gachet on May 20, 1890 and immediately realized that Gachet could not help him; at times Vincent was concerned that the doctor might be more ill than he was. Nevertheless, by June 3, van Gogh had started painting his portrait. Art historical analysis and research into the iconography and history of styles tells us that the portrait is not a simple objective portrait of the doctor. Van Gogh drew his inspiration for this work from two sources. The first one was Delacroix’s Tasso in the Hospital of St. Anna, Ferrara (1839) and the other was Puvis de Chavannes’s Portrait of Eugène Benon (1882). Ever since its conception, the painting has never been viewed as just a portrait. It embodies the artist’s philosophy regarding his work. The general consensus is that it should be read on a symbolic level.

Vincent van Gogh

The period from January to July 1890 was a troubled time for Van Gogh. His condition worsened in the days that led up to July 28th when he shot himself with a revolver. Van Gogh died the next day, soon after Theo had reached Auvers-sur-Oise, a small town north of Paris. Theo inherited approximately 600 works produced by his brother, from which about 70 were produced during his time in Auvers. The Portrait of Dr. Gachet was among them. Theo moved the Auvers paintings to Paris, together with the 600 paintings and 350 drawings already in his possession. Theo struggled between trying to sell his brother’s works and trying to get him the recognition he believed he deserved while keeping his own health. Paul Durand-Ruel refused to help Theo sell any paintings, so Theo’s only option was to hang the works in hi

s apartment at 54, Rue Lepic. With the help of Emile Bernard, Theo managed to hang 350 paintings. A list of the works was compiled by Theo’s brother in law, Andries Bonger. As the story goes, Theo did not live to see these paintings sold, as he passed away, six months after his brother’s death on January 25, 1891.

Theo van Gogh

Johanna van Gogh-Bonger

After Theo’s death, his wife Johanna van Gogh-Bonger inherited all of Van Gogh’s works. Troubled and uncertain about what would come next, she decided to leave Paris and together with her son, Vincent Willem van Gogh, moved to the Netherlands. In the span of a few months she managed to bring most of the paintings with her. She was convinced that the paintings would find a broader audience and that the local art scene would embrace van Gogh ‘as a painter in the Dutch tradition’. Her instinct proved right, since by February 1890, Van Gogh’s work had already seeped into the Dutch art market. Ten paintings were on display at Buffa Galleries in Amsterdam and another twenty at the Oldenzeel Gallery in Rotterdam. A few months later in 1892, a retrospective of forty-five paintings was organized at the Hague and in 1893 an even larger show took place at the Kunstzaal Panorama, in Amsterdam. Finding a market for the paintings was an immense undertaking, but it came second to Johanna’s most major undertaking which was collecting and transcribing Theo’s and Vincent’s correspondence, which amounted to over 600 letters. She put the letters in chronological order and organized them in an edition which she completed on July 28th 1914 a few days before the outbreak of World War I, 24 years after van Gogh had shot himself. Johanna’s edition was published initially in French and Dutch, then in German. She worked on an English version until the end of her life in 1925. That edition was published in 1928. The letters played an important role in how the world would come to view van Gogh. The letters and her careful selection of what to reveal to the world helped create a myth around van Gogh, which romanticized his condition and depicted him as the tortured genius misunderstood by the society of his time.

In 1893, the first request to exhibit the Portrait of Dr. Gachet came from a Danish group called Free Exhibition (Den Frie Udstilling) founded in 1891 and headed by Johan Rohde. He considered van Gogh to be 'the greatest Dutch painter of the century’. The portrait was selected along with twenty other paintings and was singled out by critics who interpreted it as symbolic rather than an accurate description of the sitter. The choice to include works from van Gogh and Gauguin in the exhibition in Copenhagen, was not only a testimony of growing interest in these artists, but also of a rising appreciation for the French avant-garde throughout northern Europe. Most of the works on display were for sale, but The Portrait of Dr. Gachet was not one of them.

Durand-Ruel could not or did not want to sell van Gogh paintings. Even when he agreed to take some works on consignment from Johanna, he ended up returning all of them. The only other person in Paris selling van Goghs was the Tanguy family who owned a paint shop and to whom Theo had consigned works which they ended up keeping, since there was no full inventory of these works. But in the French art market, these works were fetching less than half the price of their equivalents in the Dutch art market. At a Hôtel Druout sale organized to benefit Julien Tanguy's widow, two van Gogh paintings came up for sale and Ambroise Vollard bought one of them. At that time, Vollard had barely entered the Paris art market. His gallery space was tiny but strategically placed among the more important galleries, close to Durand-Ruel and Benheim-Jeune. Soon Vollard contacted Johanna and asked her for some paintings with the intentions of exhibiting them. He sold one of these paintings, Salle de Restaurant. A larger exhibition was organized in November 1896, and included the Portrait of Dr. Gachet, which hadn’t been seen in Paris since it hung in Theo’s apartment before his death. Vollard bought the portrait along with 5 other paintings and 10 drawings for 2000 francs. The sale of these paintings market the end of Johanna’s dealings with Vollard. That being said, Vollard kept selling van Gogh’s that he was acquiring from other sources, filling the gap left in the market by Theo’s death.

Alice Ruben was an artist and occasional member of Copenhagen’s Free Exhibition Group when she first came across van Gogh’s work. Upon a visit to Paris, Alice Ruben saw the portrait in Vollard’s new gallery in 1897 and bought it. Vollard’s sparse records indicate at least one payment of 200 francs on April 30, 1897 but there are no further records concerning the finalization of the transaction. Alice and her husband brought the picture back to Denmark. Her family’s upper-middle-class roots gave her financial stability that allowed her to collect contemporary art. She spoke a number of languages and had multiple connections in the art world. She knew Johan Rohde and many avant-garde Danish artists. It still is not known to us why Alice chose the Portrait of Dr. Gachet in particular, but she certainly appreciated it a great deal. The photograph below depicts Alice lying in bed. Resting on her night stand is the Portrait of Dr. Gachet along with a painting of mother and child by Maurice Denis.

Alice Ruben in bed next to Dr. Gachet

Mogens Ballin and his wife, by Felix Vallotton

Both paintings in the picture were transferred before 1904 to Mogens Ballin (1871-1914). Like Alice, Mogens was also an artist and collector. He also came from a well-established Jewish family in Copenhagen. Curiously, Mogens had been one of the few people interested in van Gogh’s oeuvre right after his passing, and had visited the apartment where Theo displayed Vincent’s works. Mogens considered bringing the portrait back to Paris to sell it. Aware that there still was little interest in van Gogh’s work and that Gachet might end up in storage, he decided to take it to Berlin.

(to be contined)...

Three Impressionist paintings, three (or rather two) destinies

On March 1, 1941, the Paris art dealership of Durand-Ruel ships to its German client, Mr. Wolfgang Krüger, three high-priced paintings by noted French Impressionists:

1/ “Les Meules, le matin” by Claude Pissarro, painted in 1899

Les meules, le matin, Claude Pissarro
Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art

2/ “Promenade sous bois”, by Auguste Renoir, painted in 1910

Promenade, sous-bois, Auguste Renoir
Source: Culture France

3/ “Noyers, plaine de Veneux-Madon,” by Alfred Sisley.

Noyers, plaine de Veneux-Madon, Alfred Sisley
Source: Culture France

While in Paris during the German occupation of France, Mr. Krüger, a Berlin-based businessman and avid art collector, enjoyed his stays at the Hotel Saint-James & Albany. He paid 385,000 Francs for the three Impressionist works.

Fate would have it that the Pissarro painting ends up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, courtesy of a bequest in the name of an American scion and philanthropist, Douglas Dillon. The odd thing about the provenance of the Pissarro is the name of the person who ostensibly owned it prior to Durand-Ruel, to whom that person had sold it in early 1941. Funny time to sell Impressionist works of art. But, let’s not think the worst of this work. The Met should be innocent until proven otherwise. The name of that previous owner is Braunthed, who lived in Neuilly sur Seine, a very wealthy suburb of Paris, home, in the 1930s, to some of the wealthiest members of the Jewish community and especially to German Jewish refugees who had settled there after Hitler had come to power in Germany.
Until someone can clear up who “Braunthed” is, the mystery remains as to the circumstances under which “Braunthed” sold the Pissarro painting to Durand-Ruel eight months after the Nazis began to plunder Jewish collections in the Paris region. Moreover, no one has asked Durand-Ruel why it made it a habit of selling wonderful works of art to German industrialists, bankers, and aristocrats, during World War II. Perhaps, their client relationship dated back to the roaring twenties. Still, that's no excuse, is it?

The two other works suffered a less glamorous fate, despite the fact that they were purchased from Durand-Ruel by the same individual, Wolfgang Krüger, at the same time. Allied troops "captured" or "liberated" the one by Renoir and the other by Sisley, after the fall of the Third Reich.  Before being repatriated to France as of "unknown origin," they allegedly went through the Munich Central Collecting Point (MCCP).  At least, the Renoir painting--Promenade, sous-bois-- did, according to the French Ministry of Culture.  If so, there is no trace of it in the MCCP database produced by the Deutsches Historisches Museum (DHM) under the supervision of Angelika Enderlein.  The so-called Munich number--7519--does not correspond to a painting by Renoir, but rather to a work by Panini.  Back to square one. 

 "Promenade, sous-bois" ended up at the Renoir House (Maison Renoir) in Cagnes-sur-Mer as MNR 207 where it keeps company to another ill-fated MNR painting by Renoir, “la Femme au puits”, also known as MNR 579, while the Sisley adorns the walls of a municipal museum in the birthplace of the "damned poet" Arthur Rimbaud, Charleville-Mézières.  Why on earth did that small town receive the painting by Sisley? Political favor? Enriching local collections with stolen property? Who knows? In any event, the Sisley painting that once belonged to Mr. Krüger is now branded as MNR 209.

And so it goes.

Three paintings purchased from the same art dealership in Paris during Year Two (or Year 1.5, depending on how you count) of the Nazi occupation of France, ending up in two different nations, one ostensibly unfettered by the shackles of war while the two others remain in that purgatory called MNR. Why did the Pissarro not end up in the French Museum system as a MNR painting? According to the Metropolitan Museum's website, the first post-1945 owner of the Pissarro was Robert F. Woolworth, who then consigned the painting to the now-defunct Knoedler Gallery in New York.  Where did Mr. Woolworth obtain the Pissarro? From Mr. Wolfgang Krüger? or from yet someone else?

What made the Renoir and Sisley works fit that category despite the fact that they shared a common wartime fate? If anything, the Pissarro is far more suspect than the Renoir and the Sisley.

Mystery…