A Chirico imbroglio

Helly Nahmad Gallery, NY

"Zwei Griechinnen", 1941

Sotheby's 1990

By Marc Masurovsky 

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

Record of seizure at Arnold's home, 1941

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

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

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

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

Rose Valland's inventory of recovered works, 1944

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

The pieces finally come together 

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

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

Lessons? 

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

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

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

Provenance

Galerie Léonce Rosenberg, acquired from the artist; 

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

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

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

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

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

Transferred to Nikolsburg as ARN 2, 1 August 1944. 

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

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

Present whereabouts unknown. 

Sales 

Rameau auction, Versailles, 15 March 1970 

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

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

Exhibitions 

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

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

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

Select sources:

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

Bundesarchiv, Koblenz

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

"Premier jour de printemps à Moret" by Alfred Sisley--Part One

by Marc Masurovsky

Premier jour de printemps à Moret, by Alfed Sisley
courtesy of Le Monde

On May 25, 2018, a story broke in “L’Alsace”, a regional French newspaper, regarding a notable from Mulhouse, Alain Dreyfus, well-known art dealer and collector who plies his trade across the border in Basel, Switzerland.  According to the Alsatian newspaper, Mr. Dreyfus is all up in arms over a painting by Alfred Sisley, “Premier jour de printemps à Moret,” which the Impressionist artist produced in 1889. Dreyfus acquired it at Christie’s in New York on November 6, 2008, without giving it much thought since, in his own words, “when you go to an auction sale, you don’t check anything because you assume that everything has been checked.” So much for due diligence.

At some point in 2016, according to Mr. Dreyfus as reported in “L’Alsace”, a Toronto-based company, Mondex, contacted him to let him know that the Sisley in question was a looted painting which had once belonged to a French Jewish family by the name of Lindenbaum or Lindon, and that the Nazis had stolen the painting during the German occupation of France. Although dismayed at the news, he informed the Canadians that he would restitute the painting as long as Christie’s reimbursed him for the money spent in 2008 at the New York sale. Through his lawyers, Dreyfus laid out his position: either Christie’s indemnifies the family and he keeps the painting, or he restitutes the painting and Christie’s pays him back.

In 2017, one of the Lindon family heirs contacted Mr. Dreyfus by mail to confirm that he still had the painting. Then, he found out that the Lindon heir turned around and sued Christie’s. Meanwhile, the Swiss police has sequestered the painting until the issue is resolved. Dreyfus has since sent an invoice to the Christie’s office in Zurich for 700,000 euros, although he paid 338,500 dollars for the painting in 2008. His excuse for asking double the price of the painting? Christie’s allegedly pocketed 694 million euros from a recent Rockefeller sale. Hence, his bill represents  the equivalent of pocket change.  Mr. Dreyfus is clearly incensed and fuming, in a way that few art dealers are when faced with a restitution claim resulting from an auction sale.

According to a May 28, 2018, article which appeared in “Le Monde,” the main critique leveled at Christie’s is that it could not have ignored the looted history of the painting since it has an internal section focused on looted art. That critique was leveled by Denis Lindon, 91 year old grandson of the plundered victim, Alfred Lindon.

In a May 31, 2018, article, artnet.com quoted James Palmer of Mondex, who confirmed that the Sisley painting had been confiscated by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) “and passed through the hands of Hermann Goering.” As supporting evidence, a document produced by the ERR was reproduced in the artnet piece; that document came from the Database of Art objects that transited through the Jeu de Paume (better known as the ERR database). One might speculate that the information contained in that database validated Mondex’s claim of an act of plunder perpetrated against the Lindenbaum/Lindon family for the painting in question.  Incidentally, the ERR database was not publicly accessible in 2008. Hence, Christie’s could not have consulted it. The few art looting databases in existence at the time would have been short on specifics regarding the Lindon losses or were proprietary databases whose content is impossible to verify for accuracy and reliability.

Mr. Palmer stepped up his attack against Christie’s by stating that “buying from auction houses presents significant risks” going as far as asserting that the “auction house should indemnify” the buyer “if a claim is ever made in the future,” that is to say, if the evidence of theft escaped the research efforts of the auction house prior to sale.  In other words, the behavior of Mr. Dreyfus appears to echo the Mondex stance against Christie’s and, more generally, against all auction houses.

However, Nicholas O’Donnell, an art restitution attorney based in Boston, Massachusetts, countered that there was no indication of any suspicion regarding the painting on the face of the provenance that Christie’s was given for the Sisley work, a view that James Palmer, of Mondex, contests. According to a New York Times report dated June 3, 2018, Palmer notified Monica Dugot, director of restitution at Christie’s that a review of a “directory of looted items published in France in 1947” would have yielded several looted Sisley works with the word “spring” in their title.  The "directory" which Mr. Palmer has alluded to is the "Répertoire des biens spoliés” which can be downloaded from a French government website.

In sum, the fight over the Lindon Sisley painting has turned into an unfortunate mess with an auction house, Christie’s, caught between a determined “art recovery business”, Mondex, an incensed art dealer, Mr. Alain Dreyfus, and a claimant, Mr. Denis Lindon, all convinced that Christie’s did not exercise sufficient due diligence to identify a looted work of art belonging to the Lindon family.

The fact that all guns are pointed at Christie’s in a very complex game of who should have known what and when regarding the flawed ownership history of “Premier jour de printemps à Moret,” by Alfred Sisley, begs for clarification and a more sober examination of the facts.

As the old saw goes, “the facts, nothing but the facts.” In Part II, let’s take a look at the hard facts and ask another set of questions which might put this entire kerfuffle into perspective. Indeed, there is a looted painting that needs to be restituted to the Lindon family. But where did the problem originate and who stands to benefit from this international three-ring circus?

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.

About multi-source due diligence

by Marc Masurovsky

Twenty years ago, an attorney in Washington, DC, Lloyd Goldenberg, ran a company called TransArt International, whose purpose was to establish the principle of multi-source due diligence in the art market and among those professionals who worked with the art trade or in the art trade—insurance executives, bankers, lawyers, appraisers, tax experts, civil servants, diplomats, to name a few.

Mr. Goldenberg knew what he was talking about. The idea that you can consult a single source and declare to the world that you did your due diligence by checking a single source was, is and will always be poppycock, illogical, and cannot withstand the most basic scrutiny. And yet, the art world and especially its litigious side have been governed by the idea that one source is all you need to ascertain that you hold good title to an art object. And that unique source in the 1990s ended up being….. the Art Loss Register (ALR), a London-based, commercial outfit organized around a database of stolen art objects to which auction houses, insurance companies and a handful of top tier museums pay an annual subscription fee in exchange for having their objects vetted for sale or for display.

Mr. Goldenberg is still right about multi-source due diligence.

Twenty years later, there are at least two proprietary, commercial databases of stolen art that one can solicit for assistance about lost objects, for a fee—The Art Loss Register and ArtClaim, run by the Art Recovery Group. And there are also databases that one can consult on the Internet without having to pay anything. lostart.de and the ERR database are two of the principal free, searchable databases available for consultation online. All of these databases play a role in the quest for information about an art object that was stolen or misappropriated and needs to be returned to a rightful owner, if unrecovered.

The two proprietary databases are located in London. The two public databases focused on losses at the hands of the Nazis are located in Magdeburg, Germany (lostart.de) and in Washington, DC (the ERR database).

Since the end of the 20th century, the Internet has exploded in scope and depth, providing significant additions and opportunities to our ability to exercise “due diligence.” The sheer proliferation of digital archives, which can be consulted either for no money or for a fee, complement these databases. But we all know how complex art transactions can be and how opaque the identities of owners are and the paths borrowed by these works. Despite the sheer number of online sources to consult, you can still be stumped in your quest for information about the history of an object even when it has been produced by a “master.”

Nevertheless, Mr. Goldenberg’s world of multi-source due diligence is closer to becoming a reality than it was twenty years ago. The dirty little secret is that it already did exist in 1995. However, the problem lies in the fact that very few people in the art world or involved with questions of ownership, of provenance, of title ever bothered to systematically consult many sources because they did not feel that they had to. Only one was recognized officially and legally as THE SOURCE, the Art Loss Register. But now, we live in a different world. A world in which we still struggle to assert the fact that multi-source due diligence is a necessity to validate that one has good title to an art object whether it is being offered for sale or it is exhibited in a commercial gallery or a museum, whether public or private. Even today, no legal or political authority has bothered to establish a rule by which multi-source due diligence should be a requirement, a sine qua non condition for handling art objects.

For more information, you can go to the following sites:

The Art Loss Register

ArtClaim

lostart.de

the ERR database