Teaching plunder to children Part One

by Marc Masurovsky

Here are some images developed for a presentation given to young children in a Jewish middle school, ages 9 to 13. Feel free to use them!

To be continued...

The duty to memory

by Marc Masurovsky

Which is simpler—recovery of looted cultural objects or memorializing the loss of cultural objects? The short answer is: both are fraught with complications. Let's focus for now on memory.

Remembering what was once “ours”.

When natural disasters strike communities, the survivors get together, mourn their losses, both individual and collective, give thanks for being alive, and remember what was once “theirs.” It is part of the grieving process. Shrines are erected to honor the dead, plaques are affixed to the walls of buildings where a traumatic event occurred, or steles are set up in public squares or at a crossroads, to honor and remember. These acts of remembering are the outward expression of a tacit, implicit accord that we have a duty of memory, our responsibility as an organized citizenry to pay homage, to remind ourselves that, despite events in our common pasts, anchored in mass violence and traumatic upheavals, our communities survived and, although scarred, rebuilt themselves.

Whether it be the “Holocaust,”, the mass murders and tortures in Cambodia, the fratricidal violence in countless countries, the near-total extermination of indigenous groups worldwide, there is a collective duty to remember what we, as humans, are capable of inflicting on our neighbors, our friends, our relatives, and on total strangers. The memory of our “bloodlust” serves as a reminder of what we have lost and what we have done unto others.

In the case of culture, this duty to memory takes an odd turn.

Plaques

Rare are the plaques that memorialize sites of plunder.

Jeu de Paume memorial in Paris

In France, it took the government nearly a half century before it felt that it could memorialize the depredations resulting from the Nazi-led cultural plunder of France. In 2005, a plaque was nailed to the side of the Jeu de Paume museum in the Tuilerie Gardens in Paris. It immortalizes the Jeu de Paume as a storage and transit center for art looted from Jewish victims of Nazi policies in occupied France and Rose Valland’s role in documenting those thefts. The plaque itself is sober. It also cites the number of works that Rose Valland is credited with recovering on behalf of the French State—45,000 in all—. One wonders whether all of those objects transited through the Jeu de Paume or if that figure represents the totality of works of art which the French government was able to repatriate from Germany and Austria after 1945.

In 1942, the Nazi government decided that it was time to expropriate all Jewish-owned property for the benefit of Germans living inside the Reich’s borders. The enforcement of the so-called “Mobel-Aktion” all across Western Europe resulted in the emptying out of tens of thousands of residences either rented or owned by persons of Jewish descent. Their goods were sorted, the most valuable were set aside, while the rest were put on trains to German cities damaged by Allied aerial bombing raids. In German-occupied Paris, a number of sites across the beleaguered capital were used to process expropriated Jewish household goods, a task performed by Jewish inmates from the transit camp of Drancy. One of those sites was called Levitan, once a furniture store at 85-87, rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin. A plaque was erected which honors the Jewish prisoners who worked there as slave laborers.  It also reminds the reader that Jewish goods were sorted at Levitan.  A good many of those goods were art objects which were inspected by Nazi agents and later sent to the Jeu de Paume for cataloguing and shipment to art depots in the Reich or for resale on the Paris art market.

Memorial at Levitan in Paris

Similarly in Germany, there are few memorial plaques reminding the public of Nazi crimes against culture.

Kopenickerstrasse depot memorial in Berlin

In Berlin, a printed text framed inside a clear waterproof casing is nailed to a wall at the former Kopenickerstrasse depot which encapsulated the destructive power of “Aktion Entartete Kunt”. In that depot, thousands of “degenerate” works of art were stored after being confiscated from individuals, galleries and cultural institutions across Germany. A good many were destroyed while the rest were put up for sale on the international art market.

One of the rare plaques honoring the work of an ardent critic of the corruption endemic to post-WWI German society marks the residence of Georg Grosz as one who stood against militarism and who satirized through his graphic work State-sanctioned corruption. Predictably, the Nazi authorities tagged Grosz’ works as “degenerate.” By 1933, Grosz had established himself in New York as a German exile.

Georg Grosz memorial plaque in Berlin, Germany

If we view the Jeu de Paume commemorative plaque as setting a precedent for memorializing sites of plunder, shouldn’t similar plaques be established at former ERR depots in Germany and Austria where loot from across Axis-occupied Europe was amassed?

Here is a brief list of these sites:

Neuschwanstein/Fussen/Hohenschwangau
Buxheim near Memmingen
Alt-Aussee
Kogl
Thurntal
Herrenchiemsee
Amstetten/Seissenegg
Nikolsburg in the Czech Republic.

The ERR depots in Paris should likewise be marked with similar plaques, used for processing Jewish-owned collections and for amassing loot seized during M-Aktion.

6, place des Etats-Unis
17, place des Etats-Unis
12, rue Dumont d’Urville
26, rue Dumont d’Urville
77 Avenue de la Grande-Armée, garage Talbot—sous-sol et 1er étage
23, rue Drouot
41, quai de la Gare d’Austerlitz
43, quai de la Gare d’Austerlitz
Faubourg Saint-Martin : garage Levitan
Rue Fresnel : Garage Fresnel
104, rue de Richelieu
45, rue Labruyère


Maybe plaques should also be placed outside of the Hotel Drouot in Paris, to remind art shoppers that this was an important recycler of looted Jewish-owned property. Is that inappropriate to even suggest a public link between a leading broker of art sales and its managers’ opportunistic behavior during the German occupation of Paris?

How far does one extend the work of memory through memorials without provoking volatile reactions from the public and from the government, starting with the arrondissement, the city and the national government?

Clearly, the complexities associated with remembrance activities, especially those that leave a permanent presence such as physical memorial structures, abound. This fear of offending one part of the public and of rattling old skeletons is nothing new but it plagues the public discourse on cultural plunder during the Nazi years.

At this rate, we can go from one country to the next where acts of plunder occurred and draw up lists of sites of memory.  The list is endless, perhaps because the memory of plunder has not yet been addressed properly.

Museum labels as “memory”

Inadequate labeling can create even more frustration than the absence of labeling associated with works of art on display. Several decades ago, there was widespread indignation at how the French government described the origin of specific works of art in State-owned museums.

Since then, there have been sporadic efforts in the United States to be more upfront about the troubled past of works in permanent collections. At the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston, MA, a project called “Art with a Past” invited viewers to read a text that did not exceed several hundred words on a large-size plaque next to the concerned work of art. The text detailed that the work had been plundered by the Nazis and had since been restituted to its rightful owners before entering the MFA’s collection. A unique experiment in the postwar annals of museum labeling, the “Art with a Past” project shows how a cultural institution can guide the viewing public to explore further the history of ownership of an object and serve as a reminder that history, even traumatic history, can intersect and interfere with the lives of an object’s owners.

Provenance as memory

The history of ownership of an object participates in the duty to memory. After all, museum leaders already encourage their staff to produce a particular telling of the story of the objects in their collections. But they are averse to construct a story of the object as an “object lesson” in how history and art interact and affect the destiny of works and objects of art. The decades-long feud over how provenance is researched and written goes to the core of this duty to remember traumatic events that shape and direct the paths taken by objects and their owners through the sinews of history, both in space and time.

An inability and unwillingness to write these stories constitutes a crime against memory, an appeal to institutional amnesia-"appreciate” art simply as object of worship and study. The art world’s refusal to acknowledge the complex history of art objects blindsides historical truth and cheats the viewing public of a unique chance to learn more about how objects circulate, often without their owners’ consent, as a result of turbulence in the unfolding of history. Governments should encourage cultural institutions to engage their public by using art as an opportunity to teach history. After all, what better way is there to use their tax-exempt status which is there for a reason--to educate their public?

"Portrait of Greta Moll," by Henri Matisse

Portrait of Greta Moll

by Marc Masurovsky

[Editor's note and caveat: this article brings together the major articles which appeared in the international press concerning the restitution claim filed against the National Gallery of London by the heirs of Greta Moll.  If there are any misrepresentations of the facts, I assume full responsibility for them. The purpose of this article is to understand and raise questions about the itinerary of the painting before it reached the United States in 1949.  Some of the questions may seem self-evident or unnecessary but they are designed to flesh out possible explanations for the various twists and turns that the story of this Matisse painting borrowed especially between 1945 and 1949.]

In September 2016, the heirs of Oskar and Margarete "Greta" Moll, two German artists who had been persecuted by the Nazis, filed a lawsuit demanding the restitution of a “Portrait of Greta Moll,” which Henri Matisse had painted in 1908. The Molls had owned one of the most important German collections of paintings by Henri Matisse in the years preceding Nazi rule.  

The defendant in this case is the National Gallery of London. Greta’s husband, Oskar Moll, had been one of the early victims of Nazi purges in the academic, cultural and artistic world. The Nazi regime viewed their work as “degenerate” and Greta Moll’s sculptures were included in the now infamous 1937 Munich exhibit, the sole purpose of which was to debase the work of countless modern artists, Jewish and not. 

In 1944, after their house was destroyed,  the Molls sought refuge in the suburbs of Berlin so as to avoid the punishing air raids conducted by Allied bombers.

After the unconditional surrender of the Third Reich on May 8, 1945, the Molls found themselves in the Soviet sector of Berlin. Soviet “cultural policy” in liberated Berlin included the forced removal of whatever cultural and artistic objects and transferring to the Soviet Union, manu militari. Soviet military officials also conducted their own version of purges of “degenerate” art. The so-called Trophy Brigades helped implement this removal policy. Red Army troops “liberated” thousands of objects belonging to Berlin museums and to private collectors from storage facilities in the areas of Berlin that they had overrun. They organized the transfer of those objects to Soviet-run depots deep inside their zone of occupation for ultimate transport to the Soviet Union.

Oskar Moll, courtesy of artnet

In 1947, the Moll family decided to move out of the Soviet sector of Berlin while they still had a chance to. Their designated destination: Wales, where one of their daughters resided. Meanwhile, Oskar Moll died on 14 August 1947 in Berlin. Greta became the designated heiress to the portrait that Matisse had produced of her decades before. Some reports have characterized the painting as the “family’s only remaining asset.” The same reports portrayed Greta as living in fear of an export ban, which could only have been imposed by the Soviet military authorities. To forestall such an eventuality, she recruited Gertrud Djamarani, one of her husband’s former students, to “smuggle the painting" to Zurich and drop it off for safekeeping with a local art dealer, Heidi Vollmöller, the daughter of a wealthy textile executive. She ran a gallery and an auction house in Zurich.  The gallery has had a strong presence on the antiquities market.

"Greta" and Oskar Moll

Another report suggests that, for whatever reasons Greta might have conjured, “the painting was in danger.” This fear might have been prompted by prevailing Soviet cultural edicts severely restricting in their zone the ability of destitute individuals trapped in their zone to raise money or transfer their assets out of the Soviet sector. Artforum goes even further and argues that Greta Moll feared thefts and misdeeds by Allied troops, although if she was in the Soviet sector, she only had the Red Army or Soviet officials to fear, not the Western Allies.

Heidi Vollmoller

There is no sense in speculating why Greta Moll recruited Ms. Djamarani as the temporary custodian of the Matisse portrait. In any event, Ms. Djamarani made her way out of the Soviet Zone of Occupation with the Matisse painting and was able to cross the German-Swiss border with it. Impressive!

The story of the Matisse painting becomes a bit messy once the painting and its custodian enter Switzerland.

Reminder: The Second World War ended in May 1945 in the European Theater and in August 1945 in the Asian theater. Europe was officially liberated. There were no more Axis-sanctioned acts of plunder, no more confiscations by Nazi authorities. If there were seizures and confiscations, they were driven by other considerations at the hands of post-war authorities. The “Portrait of Greta Moll” was not confiscated by the Nazis. The Moll family was able to protect it throughout the entire National Socialist era, no small feat. Two years elapsed between the unconditional surrender of the Third Reich and Greta Moll’s transfer for safekeeping of the painting to Gertrud Djamarani and ultimately to the care of an art dealer, Heidi Vollmöller. Was the latter aware of Frau Moll’s intentions? Did she expect delivery of the painting with Gertrud Djamarani acting basically as a courier? Unclear.

Most press accounts confirm that Ms. Djamarani ran out of money in Switzerland. It’s not clear either how long or how quickly it took her to become destitute, how badly she needed money to begin with. Switzerland has always been and remains even today an expensive place in which to survive, especially in an opulent city like Zurich. Oskar Moll’s former student hung on to the painting long enough to perceive it as a valuable asset from which she could derive some badly needed funds. A highly unethical and, yes, criminal posture to adopt, but in the disastrous follow-up to WWII, millions of men, women, and children found themselves pauperized, doing anything to earn a living. Theft and other crimes as well were common occurrences across war-devastated Europe. Black markets operated on high octane, especially in cities like Munich and Berlin. Everything was available for a price as long as someone had money to pay for what you offered. Swiss art dealers benefited exponentially from such financial and societal distress, eager to buy low and sell high. That, however, does not excuse Ms. Djamarani’s behavior because it was plainly illegal.

Gertrud Djamarani used the Matisse painting which belonged to Greta Moll in order to obtain financial assistance from Heidi Vollmöller. . In doing so, did she pass herself off as the owner of the Matisse painting? Unclear. This also tells us that Ms. Vollmöller.  ight not have known that the painting’s true owner was Greta Moll and if she did, she became party to the crime. Moreover, she did not question the fact that an impoverished student coming from Berlin would be the proud owner of a well-executed portrait of a woman by Henri Matisse. There were plenty of dealers and collectors in Switzerland who would have given Ms. Djamarani good money for the painting and, more importantly, who would not have raised the origin of the painting as a precondition for a transaction. So, why did Ms. Djamarani focus solely on Ms. Vollmöller to obtain assistance? We don’t know. One other detail is worth considering at least for historical reasons. By 1947, after having been pummeled by the Western Allies since 1944 over their handling of looted assets belonging to Jewish victims, the Swiss authorities were especially vigilant to seize movable assets like the Matisse portrait in Ms. Djamarani’s possession which might enter Swiss territory by plane, train, road, or even on foot. How did Ms. Djamarani make it across the German-Swiss border without a detailed inspection of her belongings? If I had been her, I would have been sweating buckets.

We can all agree that Gertrud Djamarani’s behavior upon her arrival in Switzerland, was nothing short of problematic as well as that of the Zurich art dealer to whom she was supposed to entrust the painting. She used it as a vehicle to raise money for herself which probably financed her exit out of Switzerland.

Gertrud Djamarani ended up somewhere in the Near East, not the most peaceful region of the post-1945 world to relocate in especially as French and British colonial dominions were cracking at the seams amid generalized unrest fueled by rising pan-arab nationalistic fervor and Jewish desires to control their own territory and carve out a nation out of Palestine.

Heidi Vollmöller sold the painting without the consent of its rightful owner, Greta Moll. In 1949, the Matisse portrait reached the New York art market and ended up at the Knoedler gallery. From there it entered the collection of a Texan oil baron, then returned to Switzerland and finally ended up in London with Lefebvre which sold it to the National Gallery in 1979, two years after the death of Greta Moll.

In 2011, we learn that The National Gallery first became aware of the Moll heirs’ “interest in the painting” through an exchange of letters involving legal representatives.

We agree with Greta Moll’s heirs “that [the painting] was sold without permission after [Greta Moll] sent it to Switzerland for safekeeping.“ But the facts as they have been presented in the international press do not lead anyone to deduce that this case can even be considered as a “World War II art restitution case”.

David Rowland, a New York attorney involved in many Nazi-looted art cases and who represents the interests of the Moll heirs declared:

"We think that it is improper for public museums to hold misappropriated/stolen artworks in their collections and that there is both an ethical and legal obligation to return misappropriated/stolen art to its original owners and their heirs. The same principle of course applies even more so to art lost in the Nazi era and its immediate aftermath, as is the case here.”

Note: 

The photo of Greta and Oskar Moll comes from the following website:

http://www.silesiancollections.eu/Kolekcje/Moll-Margarete-1884-1977-Moll-Oskar-1875-1947-Breslau

The image of Heidi Vollmöller is a portrait produced by Hans Purrmann. According to the website "the athenaeum-org", only the thumbnail can be reproduced. For more information, see

http://www.the-athenaeum.org/art/detail.php?ID=233742

Provenance research: what to do?

by Marc Masurovsky

The fault lines around contrasting views and understandings of provenance research resurfaced during the international conference on looted art that took place on February 20 and 21, 2015, at Columbia University entitled “Ghosts of the Past: Nazi looted art and its legacies”.

The fissures are brought about as a result of the legal implications of provenance research.

In my view, a provenance is a document that outlines the history of ownership or possession of an object from the time of its creation to the present. The older the object, the more likely it will be difficult to account for every movement and place where the object was situated once it left the studio of its maker. But as you all well know, even so-called modern works can have elusive provenances such as “private collection, Zurich”.

The contrast in approach, in my view, stems from the fact that one school, mostly articulated by museum professionals, which we will refer to as “traditional” is not necessarily interested in injecting economic, political and social history into the documentation of the fate of an object, especially as it pertains to the 1933-1945 period. For some strange reason, that entire period remains a taboo subject, difficult to express even in the literature that museums and galleries develop around the objects that they display. This same school also argues that one will never know exactly what happened to an object, maintaining that there is no concrete evidence that something “bad” happened to the owner of the object and, even it did, it might not have affected the legal title to that object. After all, the object might have been sold “legally” and we just don’t know about it. Hence we can never ascertain that the object was in fact misappropriated for racial or political reasons, and therefore should not be restituted to its purportedly rightful owner. This view remains the favorite weapon of individuals who work for those who are best described as the “current possessors” of the object being claimed, namely cultural institutions—public and private.

The other school to which this writer belongs argues that context plays a very important role in determining the fate of an object. One might call it the “organic” school, for lack of a better word. It argues that the object, the place where it is and the person in whose possession it is, represent the three cardinal points around which the history of the object is articulated against the matrix of history which evolves over time and space. Put simply, an object that changes hands in Munich, Germany, and which belonged to a person of the Jewish faith may be moving around for reasons compelled by the change of regime in Germany on January 30, 1933, thus signaling a potentially violent and illegal transfer of ownership after Hitler’s rise to power.

A research training program takes on vastly different features if it follows the “organic” school or the “traditional” school that warrants that the actual fate of an object will never be exactly known, raising the possibility that there could be a document out there that could prove that nothing untoward occurred and the object changed hands legally even in the context of racial and political persecution and genocide.

You would be surprised, but this “traditional” school of thought has led to negative outcomes for claimants more often than not, most notably in the Grosz v. MoMA case and in the case opposing the heirs of Martha Nathan to the Toledo Art Museum and the Detroit Institute of Art. 

When we think about establishing provenance research training programs in colleges and universities, we realize that some schools might adopt one or the other approach. A balanced program would offer both approaches to future practitioners, advising them of the pitfalls and benefits inherent to either approach.

Some participants and speakers at the Columbia Conference (see above) were very adamant about promoting their own views of how provenance research should be conducted, whether “traditional” or “organic” which is a good thing because it gave those in attendance an opportunity to weigh both in their own minds.

Any museum-guided provenance research training program will likely promote the “traditional” view that provenance research is first and foremost about documenting the itinerary of an object from creation to the present day, with history being relegated to a back seat.

Any provenance research training program guided by the notion that it is essential for the provenance to document who the actual owner of the object is promotes the “organic” view and will assign greater weight to history and the environment in which the object evolved, beyond the narrow confines of conventional art history.

These contrasting views have become an integral part of the landscape of provenance research, influenced and skewed by decades of litigation and legal wrangling between current possessors—in most cases, museums and galleries—and claimants.

The geography of “traditional” vs. “organic”

Where do we find “traditional” views as opposed to “organic” views of provenance research?

The “traditional” approach is mostly upheld in the hallowed halls of cultural institutions of a certain size located in large metropolitan centers. It can also be found among those who teach in museum studies programs and art history programs. One can even argue that the “traditional” view suffuses the curriculum of these academic programs that train future curators, art historians and other cultural professionals.

The “organic” view, strangely enough, finds its strongest advocates among archaeologists and cultural heritage specialists who take seriously the matrix from which objects are extracted. They are joined by those who research the fate and history of objects lost by claimants and their families. Some government officials, mostly in Europe, have eased their way into an “organic” view of provenance research, especially in the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria.

The future of provenance research

There is no game plan right now. The most important next step is to institute formalized academic offerings in colleges and universities that introduce students to both methodologies—“traditional” and “organic”—as well as in specialized workshops organized by non-profit organizations.

The European Shoah Legacy Institute (ESLI) offered a Provenance Research Training Program (PRTP) from 2012 to 2015 through a series of five workshops staged in five different cities—Magdeburg, Germany; Zagreb, Croatia; Vilnius, Lithuania; Athens, Greece; and Rome, Italy. Both approaches were offered to participants although most workshops tended to lean towards an “organic” view of provenance.

By contrast, the Washington-based American Alliance of Museums (AAM) and the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) have offered half-day and day-long seminars characterized as workshops in which they introduced curators, librarians, archivists and art historians to the mechanics of working with objects and documenting their history. These programs fit into the “traditional” mold and will likely continue. Likewise, the Smithsonian Museums appear to be thinking about developing some kind of “traditional” provenance research training program of their own.

Proposals abound about how to produce a more structured approach to training. Some efforts are taking shape in France. Provenance research is now being introduced to universities in select cities.  The Free University of Berlin continues to offer a curriculum on “degenerate art” which tends to steer away from controversy and thus finds comfort in a more “traditional” approach to provenance research. This is perhaps due to the fact that funding comes from the government. On the other hand, in Munich, the Zentral Institut für Kunstgeschichte (Central Institute for Art History) promotes through its research projects a more “organic” vision of provenance research that gives extra weight to the mechanics of the Third Reich, the relationships of power and interest between various groups in the art world, into the understanding of an object’s pathway through the 1933-1945 period. These relationships and “interests” , it is argued, shape the fate of the object.

There is talk about asking the European Union to establish a Europe-wide entity with EU funds that would coordinate research into the history of objects under review for possible taint of looting or misappropriation. The idea makes eminent sense since national governments have skirted the issue rather successfully for the past 70 years. It might just require such a supranational effort to compel provenance research and training of practitioners. For such an effort to even get off the ground, entities and individuals with an “interest” in these matters of restitution, looted art, provenance research, will have to work together, coalesce their strengths and assets in order to lobby successfully for the creation of a funded unit at the EU level.

And still others argue that the only way to provide training is through some sort of international association of provenance researchers. According to this position, this association (which does not yet exist) will be responsible for coordinating at the national and international level all activities pertaining to provenance research and training. For this to happen, national chapters have to be established and more importantly, a clear definition of provenance research has to be adopted. If we follow this duality of “traditional” vs. “organic”, will the association try and reconcile these two approaches or will it favor one over the other? Who will make that determination? Without a clear understanding of what provenance research is, how can such an association see the light of day?

Maybe several associations are required if the two approaches cannot be reconciled. That might not be the worst thing to do. The only organization of provenance researchers that exist today is in Germany, the Arbeitsstelle für provenienzforschung (AfP) and includes mostly German researchers who are for the most part working for municipal, regional or federal museums and cultural institutions. Expand this idea and we are talking about fundamental different outcomes and approaches shaped by the employer. In most of Europe, the employer is the government. In the United States, the main employer is a private non-profit or profit-making cultural institutions, with the exception of municipal, State and Federal museums. Hence, an international association would become a cacophony of conflicting interests, because some researchers would be government civil servants, others would be working for the private art market, while others would be working for claimants and advocacy groups.

Define your terms

Before anything concrete can happen to transform provenance research into an internationally-recognized profession with its requirements, methods and approaches, licensure or certification procedures, we all must be clear about exactly what provenance research really is, and how it is practiced. Failing that, there is nothing to talk about. Instead of an association and its bureaucratic pitfalls, let us for now establish a strong global network of individuals and entities interested in the history of ownership of artistic, cultural and ritual objects, a network that would be inclusive and not exclusive, one with a maximalist understanding of the idea of research. That approach might help shape the contours of a generic definition of provenance research on which everyone could agree without feeling as if they betrayed their principles and ideals.

Franz Marc’s “The Large Blue Horses”

Die grossen blauen Pferden, Franz Mac
Source: Walker Art Center

Franz Marc’s “The Large Blue Horses” [Die grossen blauen Pferden], which he painted in 1911, have adorned the walls of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN, since late 1941 when Mrs. Gilbert Walker acquired the painting from the Karl Nierendorf Gallery in New York.

This German Expressionist work had been touring a select number of museums across the United States as part of a group of works dubbed “Twentieth Century Banned German Art”, itself a sub-set of a major exhibit of nearly 150 works of art banned by the Nazi Party that had taken place in London in 1938. That exhibit, a direct rebuke to the notorious July 1937 “Entartete Kunst” exhibit in Munich, Germany, was labeled as “Twentieth Century Banned German Art”, organized by the New Burlington Galleries.

The 1938 London Exhibit was organized by an unusual assemblage of individuals, including, but not limited to, Herbert Read, a noted British poet and art historian, and Edouard Léon Théodore Mesens, an idiosyncratic Belgian art critic, gallerist, dealer, and remnant of a splinter group within the Dadaist movement, living in Brussels. While Read was the titular chair of the Organizing Committee for the Exhibit, Mesens was one of its logistical and operational cogs. In addition to Mesens, there were two Swiss modern artists, Irmgard Burchard and Richard Paul Lohse, briefly married to one another, who contributed to the organization of the  London Exhbit of "banned German art" which ran from July 8, 1938, to August 27, 1938.

Meanwhile, where was Franz Marc’s painting before the 1938 London Exhibit? According to the Walker Art Center’s fairly careful research, there were two to three owners before the Walker acquired "The Large Blue Horses": two Swiss men from Zurich, J.E. Wolfensberger and F.J. Weck; and possibly, one German owner based in Berlin, Curt Glaser. Glaser appears as a likely owner because of circumstantial evidence that he might have been the person who sold the Marc painting to Wolfensberger before the First World War. In any event, Weck was the proud owner of “The Blue Horses” by 1919. The Walker’s research points out that Weck owned the painting at least through 1925. However, it assumes that he was the one who lent it to the 1938 London Exhibit. Although that is a plausible theory, it is not necessarily convincing. There was a vibrant market before and after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 which affected German Expressionist artists. There is always a likelihood that the Marc painting might have returned to Germany into the hands of another owner.

That is not to say that anything reprehensible took place which affects the past ownership of this particular painting. But the thirteen year gap in the provenance, when viewed within the context of the period—a dynamic effervescence in the dissemination and collecting of German Expressionist works, the growing internationalization of the market for such works, the dramatic shifts in ownership and control over such works resulting from the change in government in Germany, the ensuing exodus of these unwanted, condemned works to foreign countries—one has to be careful not to assume that Weck had continual possession of the painting “at least up to the time it is known to have left Switzerland in 1938.” By the same token, the Walker research acknowledges that Karl Nierendorf had a gallery in Berlin, before opening his new outpost in New York in 1936. More work needs to be done on this painting for the period between 1925 and 1938.

In a tidbit of trivial history, the Walker research mentions Blanche A. Byerley as the organizer of the 1939-1940 American tour of “Twentieth Century Banned German Art”. It indicates that “little is known” about her. After poking around a bit, the following can now be said about Blanche:

She hailed from Westport, Connecticut. At some point before the mid-1930s, she married a well-connected naval officer by the name of Charles Felton Pousland, who held the rank of Lieutenant-Commander in the US Navy. Pousland had been a graduate of Harvard University and of the US Naval Academy in Annapolis. His father, Charles, a banker and investment broker, had died in 1917. His older sister, Elizabeth Cutting, was a graduate of Radcliffe College. Although Blanche became Mrs. Pousland, she maintained her maiden name when she opened a Lecture Bureau in New York City, the “Blanche A. Byerley Lecture Bureau” which, among other activities, specialized in tours of art exhibits. She apparently left that career behind in 1941 when she and her husband moved to a tony suburb in Wilton, CT. Blanche Byerley Pousland definitely had a yen for modern European art as well as for African-American women artists since she was responsible for organizing exhibits featuring the works of American women artists of color such as Lois Mailou Jones, Selma Burke, Laura Warine, and Katherine Gardner. Finally, Blanche raised money in 1942 for the Russian War Relief, a true believer in the Allied war effort.

Back to the 1938 London exhibit. Most of the 150 or so works on display at the New Burlington Galleries "Banned German Art" exhibit were lent without the consent of the artists or the owners. Most, if not all, of the works were shown to be sold, which raised the specter of sales proceeds being sent back to Germany and, thereby, voiding the anti-Nazi mission of the exhibit in the first place. If not to Germany, then where and to whom, especially if the works had been exhibited without prior consent? There has never been a proper accounting of these “banned” works, those that were returned unsold to the sources which lent them, those works which were then shipped to the United States or other destinations, like the Franz Marc painting which Nierendorf’s New York gallery received to be sold on behalf of the owner. Which one, though?

How to profit from State-sanctioned plunder: the Entartete Kunst case

The Nazi government enacted on May 31, 1938, the ”Act on Confiscations of Degenerate Art“ (“Gesetz über Einziehung von Erzeugnissen entarteter Kunst“) in order to legitimize its domestic purge of all works of art not deemed suitable in the New National Socialist Aryan Germany. By 1942, according to an inventory compiled by the Reich Ministry for Cultural Enlightenment and Religion (Joseph Goebbels' purview) at least 16,000 so-called “degenerate”works of art were accounted for in museums and cultural institutions controlled by the Nazi government.

The Nazi government selected a handful of art dealers—Ferdinand Möller, Bernhard Böhmer, Karl Buchholz and Hildebrand Gurlitt—to do their bidding and get rid of these works on the art market—read, the international art market—in order to raise cash and cleanse the German cultural landscape once and for all.

Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum
Source: Wikipedia

Institutions like the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid have touted these gentlemen as “saviors” of Germany’s modernist art treasures, probably because the Museum owns a number of German Expressionist works that were "saved" by Gurlitt and Buchholz. Interesting. A rare instance where thieves and their acolytes are treated as heroes. Obviously, there’s room for everyone in the pantheon of Aat.

As one can readily imagine, the Nazi-ordered global recycling of "degenerate" art was the biggest cultural fire sale orchestrated by any standing government, legitimate or other, for which there could only be one word—opportunity! And, indeed, opportunity struck high throughout the ensuing decades, even after the fall of the Third Reich in early May 1945.

Alfred H. Barr, Jr.
Source: The Art Story

Fast forward to 1964—an unusual year in the international auction market because a large number of these ‘degenerate’ works are put up for sale and snatched up by private collectors and museums, including American institutions. This is not to say that American museums did not seize earlier opportunities to absorb at prices not even fit for a flea market, priceless works of art by 19th and 20th century masters. The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) under the enlightened leadership of Alfred Barr cashed in on various spectacular sales of ‘degenerate’ works such as the 1939 Lucerne, Switzerland, sale at Theodore Fischer’s gallery, and many subsequent transactions through third parties which allowed Barr to absorb an untold number of those works into the collections of MOMA.

In 1964, two works by Wassily Kandinsky come up for sale at Sotheby’s London—“Zweierlei Rot” which Dr. Gurlitt had ‘acquired’ for not even 100 dollars and “Ruhe” which was handled by Moeller. Both works hailed from the Berlin Nationalgalerie. “Zweierlei Rot” ended up in a private collection, giving the previous owner a handsome profit, while “Ruhe” was picked up by the Guggenheim Foundation together with dozens of other works by Kandinsky, an event that earned a small outcry in the German-language press.

While the Allied powers had denounced all transactions and laws entered into and decreed by the Nazi government between 1933 and 1945 to be null and void, thus illegal, the Allied Control Council (ACC) which ruled over the zones of occupation in Germany decreed by 1948 that the purging of German State cultural institutions had constitued a legitimate State-sanctioned act. One has to scratch one’s head in wonder at this ruling, justified by the Council by the fact that the Nazi government had not engaged in an overt act of discriminatory policy. Or could it be that, in order to avoid a wholesale purge and overhaul of the art market, it was best to let bygones be bygones? After all, if the ACC had declared the Nazi war against “degenerate” art to be illegal and consistent with its racial, anti-Semitic, xenophobic ideology, the acquisition of more than 16,000 works of art by institutions and individuals worldwide would have been subject to a massive “recall” and German state institutions placed in the awkward position of having to reclaim what they had cleansed, willingly or unwillingly.

The winners? 

According to museums and art world denizens, the general public is the winner. In the view of those who strive for ethical behavior in the global art market, there can be only one winner―the art market.