The Auerbach Case: Part Two-Cabal of art dealers

by Marc Masurovsky

Rose Valland, c/o Ministère de la Culture

On 10 November 1949, Rose Valland, France’s point person on repatriation and restitution issues, wrote to Stefan Munsing, then Chief of the CCCP, to inform him on the activities of a recently naturalized American citizen of Jewish extraction living in Paris. His name was Heinz Berggruen. “He flaunts his privileged access to American museums. However, the US Embassy in Paris does not like him. Our suspicions about him grew when we compared his project with the one promoted by Auerbach and Wildenstein.” According to Valland, Berggruen was organizing a sale of paintings in Bavaria in which Georges Wildenstein held an interest. The works being sold had been consigned by Berlin dealers who knew that American clients would be congregating in Munich for that purpose. One of the dealers, a Mr. Buren, apparently consigned two French paintings, one by Corneille de Lyon and the other by Nattier. Valland notified Munsing that France reserved the right to assert its jurisdiction over those paintings and any others offered on the art market. She asked him to take the necessary measures to warn American museums not to deal with these “gangsters” whose behavior is unacceptable. 

Munsing’s investigations into Berggruen produced meager results. Berggruen was mostly dealing in rare books on his frequent visits to Bavaria. He also flaunted his contacts in high French circles as well as his familiarity with French customs who “never opened my bags.”

 

Theodore Heinrich

On 13 February 1951, Theodore Heinrich wrote to one of his former MFAA colleagues, Lane Faison. He warned him about his concerns regarding notables (Jewish and non-Jewish) of the art market who might be involved in postwar shady transactions. He was once the director of the Wiesbaden Central Collecting Point in the US zone of occupation in Germany, while serving with the Monuments Fine Arts and Archives (MFAA) administration. The MFAA had established the Munich Central Collecting Point (MCCP) in central Munich in May 1945 in order to process and dispose of cultural assets stolen from Nazi victims across Europe. In application of international law, their mission was to identify the place where these assets had been stolen and return them to those countries from which they would then be restituted to the rightful owners. At least in theory… Heinrich suspected that something ominous was brewing in the postwar art market with respect to the fate of “undistributed holdings at MCCP.”

The cast of characters included:

Karl Haberstock

- Karl Haberstock, Nazi art historian and art dealer who carried out the plans of Nazi dignitaries to acquire thousands of works of art for Hitler’s Linzmuseum project and, in so doing, partook in the spoliation of Jewish collections across Western and Central Europe.

Georges Wildenstein

- Georges Wildenstein, a legendary art dealer based in Paris, London and New York who was in a business partnership with Karl Haberstock before and—some allege-during WWII. His relationship with Haberstock apparently survived the war years.
                                                                                                                                                            
- Heinz Berggruen, a German Jewish refugee who settled in San Francisco in the 1930s, returned to Europe with the US Army and established what became one of the most famous art businesses of the postwar era, starting in liberated Paris.

Heinz Berggruen

- Dr. Philip Auerbach, a Bavarian official who worked closely with Jewish organizations on the question of unclaimed Jewish cultural assets located in the US zone of Occupation of Germany where he worked.

- Grace Morley, a native of Berkeley (CA) and a UNESCO official who headed its Museums division (innocent bystander)

Grace Morley

It is unclear when and how Theodore Heinrich discovered the “sub-rosa” relationship between Karl Haberstock and Georges Wildenstein. He nevertheless accused Berggruen (Paris), of acting as a go-between between Wildenstein (New York), and Haberstock (Bavaria).

Lane Faison (director of the Munich CCP) was aware of the fact that « many dealers had come to Munich in fall and winter (1950-1) to meet with Auerbach and other officials about Goering’s assets. These dealers believed that some of the Goering treasure would be made available to the art market. Faison condemned this behavior saying that it was antithetical to the spirit of restitution. He made it known that the US would never tolerate such a strategy.

                                                                                                                                    to be continued...

What happened to Raphael's "Portrait of a Young Man"?

by Marc Masurovsky

Portrait of a Young Man

What happened to Raphael Santi's “Portrait of a Young Man” which belongs to the world-renown collection of the Cracow-based Czartoryski princely family? The now-iconic painting remains the poster child for WWII plundered “treasures.” Its handlers pulled off a world-class vanishing act in the early days of May 1945 as US troops were closing in on the South Bavarian compound of Hans Frank, by then former governor-general of German-occupied Poland--the last known location of the Raphael.

In the coming weeks, the plunderedart blog will devote a series of informative pieces on various aspects of the disappearance of the Raphael painting and the global search for it.

We will highlight:

-two individuals who were “that close” to the painting up to the days before its disappearance—Eduard Kneisel and Wilhelm Ernst von Palézieux;

-Hans Frank who was governor-general of German-occupied Poland;

Hans Frank awaiting trial

-the US army units that raided Hans Frank’s compound at Neustadt am Schliersee in early May 1945;

-Ardelia Hall, who served as “Fine Arts and Monuments Adviser to the Office of International 

Ardelia Hall

Information and Cultural Affairs of the US Department of State , from 1946 to 1964, and who never 

stopped searching for the Raphael;

-Geoges Wildenstein, owner of the internationally-known Wildenstein & Co., Inc.;

Georges Wildenstein

-the Czartoryski family, rightful owner of the Raphael;

-the leadership of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, including former "Monuments Men"--James J. Rorimer, Theodore Rousseau and James Plaut.

And we will pick apart the sequence of events leading to the disappearance of the painting and the post-1945 search for it.

It is a story for the ages. It attests to how easy it is for an imposing work of art like the “Portrait of A Young Man” to  be there one instant and gone the next.  It has remained out of sight since May 4, 1945, the estimated date of its disappearance.

Sources and photo credits:

Ardelia Hall
http://illicitculturalproperty.com/victoria-reed-on-monuments-woman-ardelia-hall/

Georges Wildenstein
https://www.wildenstein.com/history/

Hans Frank
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/hans-frank
https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1005017

Monuments Men and Women Foundation
https://www.monumentsmenandwomenfnd.org/hall-ardelia-r

Reviewed and edited by Saida S. Hasanagic

Revisiting the Martha Nathan loss of a Gauguin painting

by Marc Masurovsky

Martha Nathan was the wife of a prominent German Jewish collector, Hugo Nathan. He died in 1922. After inheriting his wealth and his art collection, Martha Nathan continued to live in Germany. She eventually fled to France in 1937 settling down in Paris, much like Hugo Perls and countless other German Jews had done before her. Meanwhile, she had shipped for safekeeping some of the works that she owned to Basel, Switzerland. Mrs. Nathan sold one of those paintings, “Street scene in Tahiti,” by Paul Gauguin, to three Jewish art dealers, Justin Thannhauser, Alexander Ball and Georges Wildenstein. These three dealers were later plundered when the Nazis invaded France in May 1940, one of the ironies of Nazi-sponsored cultural plunder.

'Street scene in Tahiti, by Paul Gauguin

The Toledo Museum of Art (TMA) acquired the Gauguin painting in May 1939 where it remains to this day.

When the Nathan heirs asked for the restitution of the painting in 2004, the TMA demurred and fought back. The TMA’s lawyer went on the offensive, accusing the Nathan family of not having pursued a claim for restitution of the Gauguin painting after 1945 and maintained that she had not been forced to sell it under Nazi pressure. In 2006. the TMA “quieted” the Nathan claim in an unusually aggressive blowback strategy. In a move that would have made Clausewitz proud, the best defense being an offense, the TMA had filed its own lawsuit against the Nathan heirs, contending it held legitimate title to the painting. The Detroit Institute of Art joined the lawsuit, arguing that a van Gogh painting, which also had belonged to Martha Nathan, was its legitimate property.

In hindsight, the Nathan claim was the first claim to reach an American museum for the restitution of a “flight asset.” In the years following the Washington Conference of December 1998, no one had developed a clear notion of what “flight assets” were and especially whether or not they amounted to a restitutable loss as a result of Nazi persecution. Neither historians of the period nor Jewish officials involved in restitution matters nor, for that matter, politicians and civil servants had ever considered the possibility that “flight assets” could occupy the same space as “forced sales” or “looted assets”. The Washington Principles did not address them, a key element of the defense put forth by the Toledo Museum of Art to oppose restitution.

In the eyes of the TMA’s lawyers, the Gauguin painting did not smack of persecution, there was no evidence of force exerted upon Martha Nathan; in their view, she had not lost control of the painting at the time of its sale. Moreover, they restated the fact that the sale had occurred outside of Germany, involved Jewish art dealers, had not been instigated by the Nazi regime, nor did the Nazis profit from the sale. At stake in the Nathan complaint against the Toledo Museum of Art was Martha Nathan’s status as Jewish victim of Nazi persecution, inside and outside the Third Reich. In other words, as long as Martha Nathan had property and other interests left in Nazi Germany, she remained a target of Nazi persecution, regardless of where she lived.

Was the Gauguin painting a “flight asset”?

“Flight assets” were fungible assets whose short-term realization helped the assets’ owners to survive in their chosen country of exile after fleeing from Nazi Germany.

Our litmus test for validating the “flight asset” label involves asking the following questions:

Would Martha Nathan have sold the painting in the first place had she not been forced to flee first to France and then to Switzerland where she died in 1958?

Would she have fled to France or Switzerland, had there been no immediate threat to her person?

Did she need to sell the Gauguin painting in order to survive in exile?

The Toledo Museum of Art contended that Martha Nathan had obtained a fair price for her Gauguin painting at the time of the sale, consistent with what the market could bear in Western Europe in the late 1930s.

Once again, the price that a Jewish victim of Nazi persecution obtains for a work of art is of no consequence and should not be relevant to determining duress and persecution. It is the circumstance under which the sale takes place which matters the most and the reasons driving it.

It is disheartening to see how a Jewish victim of Nazi persecution is not allowed to obtain fair price for an asset and claim duress. In the minds of those who currently possess such works, fair price is a telltale sign of being free and unencumbered by any form of persecution or harassment. This mischaracterization of “duress” and “forced sale” continues to poison the historical narrative of Jewish plight in the face of Nazi persecution, even in exile, an issue that no one has bothered to clear up definitively through scholarly writing and forceful policy statements.

The acceptable standard trope for a Jewish victim is for her to live under an unremitting regime of terror and intimidation. There is a general reluctance to accept that persecution can be “experienced” outside the borders of the territory in which it originated. This contention has all the hallmarks of a double standard since it is widely accepted nowadays that victims of persecution, torture, rape and other forms of human debasement, continue to live in fear and display behavior akin to being persecuted even in exile, far away from the scene of the crime. It is called “trauma.”

The Toledo Museum of Art refused to acknowledge that Martha Nathan’s decisions to sell works of art during the Nazi years were guided and influenced by Nazi racial policies and their impact on her corporate presence in Nazi Germany (real estate, and other assets). US courts and museum lawyers have had wide license to pontificate as to when one is persecuted and one is not, especially if the victim’s property came to them as a direct result of an act of Nazi persecution. Why should lawyers and judges take on the charge of (re)writing certain aspects of Holocaust history?

Plaintiffs’ lawyers bear a huge responsibility when they propound facile arguments that would lead us to believe that an item was plundered when, in fact, it might not have been thus allowing the current possessors’ lawyers to tear asunder historical facts tied to cultural plunder. Historians have a professional and ethical duty to set the record straight on these matters.

Silences that are Hardly Golden

by Ori Z Soltes

edited by Marc Masurovsky

With the untimely passing of Elie Wiesel, my mind wanders back to issues that, over the years, I discussed with him, and things that I wrote about him. A consistent subject of both processes was the kind of responsibility Jews have to make the world a better, more justice-ridden place—in general, given the rabbinic and particularly Lurianic mystical imperative of tikkun olam (“repairing the world”), and in particular given what we as a group endured during the Holocaust. I confess that I confessed to him my disappointments at times in the failure of the Israeli or American Jewish communities to do this or that where they might have responded more positively or aggressively to a given situation. 

In one conversation with Mr. Wiesel I mused over what it is that too often prevented Jews from doing what I thought was the right thing. On the other hand, in one article that I was asked to write on “Who Speaks for the Jews?”—in which one of the figures I discussed was Elie Wiesel—the assertion that I offered was that there is nobody, per se, who plays that role in the Jewish world—there is no Pope or universally embraced political leader. One of the things that has historically prevented Jews from engaging in religious or political wars with each other on anything approaching the scale of the Crusades or the age of Religious Wars in Europe was the widespread diaspora—a thirteenth-century Jew in Germany would have been unlikely to know much about the gastronomy on Passover of Jews in Morocco, and therefore to have objected to it, much less spilled blood over it.

We remain a fractious community of communities today. Depending upon whom you ask and his/her spiritual and/or political affiliations, a given Jew may see his rabbi or his rebbe or the Prime Minister of Israel or the President of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) or the American Jewish Congress (AJC) —or a charismatic speaker, writer and Nobel Prize winner like Elie Wiesel—as the most appropriate figure to whom to turn for guidance regarding how to think, speak and act as a Jew. Non-Jews might think it’s the President of B’nai B’rith where few Jews are likely to think so. So it would be a surprise if we all agreed on what constitutes the “right thing” in a given situation.

There is some irony that one of Elie Wiesel’s first divergences, (following his memoir, Night), from writing novels, was his work—a personal journalistic reportage—regarding the plight of Soviet Jewry, called “The Jews of Silence.” Published in 1966, it was one of those important literary sources for inspiring Jews in America to speak up and speak out, because their oppressed co-religionists in the USSR could not. American Jews have not always been afraid to speak up, it seems.

The questions of contemporary Jewish silence in the face of injustice reminds me of another signal instance, more than fifteen years ago, when the same queries might be proffered. I refer to the attempt by the then District Attorney of Manhattan, Robert Morgenthau, to hold back two Egon Schiele paintings—“Dead City III” and “Portrait of Wally”—that had been on display at MOMA as part of a loan exhibition from the Leopold Museum in Vienna. Morgenthau sought to keep them from immediately heading back out of New York with the rest of the collection when the exhibit ended so that the claims put in by two Jewish families that these two paintings had been plundered from them by the Nazis—and that Dr. Kurt Leopold had acquired them with full knowledge of that fact—could be explored and adjudicated.

The museum community was up in arms: amicus briefs, both formal and informal flew fast and furiously. The museums challenged the validity of government interference in cultural matters. They argued the threat that the economic base of New York City would be deleteriously affected by this: that base, the assertion went, was heavily dependent on culture, specifically large-scale tourist visitation to New York’s art museums, and if the government was successful at holding back these two works, museums across the world would cease and desist from lending objects to New York museums, causing a dynamic shrinkage in loan exhibition quantity and quality, and thus of museum visitation and thus of the New York City economy.

All the museums joined this doleful chorus. My colleagues, Willi Korte and Marc Masurovsky and I, who had joined together to create the Holocaust Art Restitution Project (HARP) in September 1997, were on the other side of the fence. Willi had done and continued to do an enormous amount of research to validate the two families’ claims. Marc and I met with Robert Morgenthau to explain it—and to argue that the very assertion of the museum community was the proof of its fallaciousness: that art is big business, and that, unless one is pretty certain that one’s painting or sculpture is an ill-gotten good, one will not to hesitate to lend it to the Met or MOMA or the Guggenheim, knowing that art that has been on display in such places will exponentially increase in value.

All of the museums joined the chorus, including, of course, the doyenne of Jewish museums, the Jewish Museum of New York. Moreover, nobody among the “leadership” of the New York Jewish cultural and political communities spoke up on behalf of the claimants. The WJC really couldn’t, since its then vice-president—who in establishing the Committee on Art Recovery, announced that they would be “taking paintings off museum walls,” and might have been expected to speak up but could not—was the vice-president of MOMA’s Board and had put half a million of his own dollars into the project of bringing the Leopold Museum exhibition to MOMA. His quadruple conflict of interest—his role at MOMA vs his role at CAR vs his role in the WJC vs his earlier ambassadorship to Austria, shortened by the Austrians’ objections to his purchasing and carrying away the likes of Schiele paintings that they considered part of the Austrian patrimony, by diplomatic pouch—certainly explains his silence.

But why the Jewish Museum? What of the rest of the Jewish world? It was clear that, having spent so many decades trying to define itself as both a museum of Jewish history and culture and of art, and closer than ever since the 1960s to being accepted as part of the art museum world without alienating the Jewish world (in the 1960s it had managed the first but not the second), the Jewish Museum did not want to oppose that art world and re-isolate itself—two paintings and two Jewish family claimants seemed a small price to pay for amicus brief acquiescence. (I am not even going to raise the question of provenance in the museum’s own collections).

And the Jewish community in general?

A pundit well over a century once observed—as Emancipation was gradually breaking down ghetto walls throughout Western and Central Europe and Jews found themselves more welcome into the mainstream of culture, socio-economics and even, almost, politics, between 1780 or so and World War I—that “you can take the Jew out of the ghetto, but you cannot take the ghetto out of the Jew.”

He meant the extreme care with which a Jew feels he must operate, in words and actions, not because a riot might sweep through the now-gone ghetto, but because full acceptance into the larger community and all of the advantages of being mainstream might be denied or retracted. Is that what the Jewish “leaders” of New York City were and still are afraid of, in an America whose principles of eschewing anti-Christian sentiment have always been under assault from some quarters? Where Jews could not run for political office in some places (the state of New Hampshire) until late into the nineteenth century? Are we still faced with fear of what the non-Jews will think about us—or has it resurfaced after a period, in the 1960s and 1970s when Jews marched in Selma, Alabama on behalf of Blacks and marched in New York City on behalf of Soviet Jews?

The question is not who speaks for the Jews these days, but how many and which Jews speak up when the situation is potentially awkward but when silence is acquiescence to the miscarriage of justice. We have justifiably become fond of pointing out—it was one of Elie Wiesel’s important contributions to our thinking about the Holocaust, and the specific subject of his third novel, The Town Beyond the Wall—that silent acquiescence is a form of passive collaboration. There is a particular irony when this issue falls into the context of Nazi-plundered art, when one considers the disturbing datum that Jewish dealers like Georges Wildenstein were often more than willing to see harm done to other Jewish dealers, like Paul Rosenberg, if it served art-dealing business needs—or that perhaps the key dealer on behalf of Hitler, Hildebrandt Gurlitt, was half-Jewish.

If the Jewish role in history and art history is a complex one, and if the role of art within the context of the Holocaust was complex (another long story for another time), then the failure of Jews to speak now, so many decades later, in too many contexts where the matter of restituting Nazi-plundered art to victims’ heirs is also complex, perhaps. Or perhaps simple: fear. Whatever the reasons, that failure would have rabbis like Isaac Luria—and no doubt Elie Wiesel—rolling in their graves.

Overview of the first year of activity on the “plundered art” blog

In order to know who you, the readers of “plundered art”, are, Google provides a potent tool—Google Analytics—which provides a glimpse of the readership of a blog or a website. In the case of “plundered art”, the following can be said:

You, the readers of “plundered art”, are mostly women, followed closely by men. More than one third of you are at least 35 years old.

Your favorite posts were, in descending order of popularity:

1. Van Gogh's 1889 depiction of his mutilated self smoking a pipe—PR 144
2. The five Schiele drawings of Karl Maylander
3. Jacopo Zucchi, "The Bath of Bathseba": or how pieces of a story build a new story about the same story ex post facto
4. Nazi looted art conference at Lafayette College, Easton, PA: a debriefing (II)
5. Nazi looted art conference at Lafayette College, October 26-28, 2011: a debriefing (I)
6. In search of a triptych "Purificato Mariae" by Marco d'Oggione
7. MNR (Musées Nationaux Récupération) Notes—R 6 P « Femme au turban, » by Marie Laurencin
8. The Hemer case or how a claimant does not want to be a claimant
9. The Wildenstein reality check
10. French loot in Poland

You live in more than 1000 cities and towns located in 90 countries across 5 continents.

Many of you speak at least one of the following languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Hebrew, Czech, Hungarian.

You work in global auction houses, multinational companies, national and supranational government agencies like the European Commission, the “Ministère des Affaires étrangères et européennes” in Paris, the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC, the United Nations, UNESCO, the US Department of Justice and the US Department of State.

On the academic front, you hail from universities, academies, and institutes in the Americas, the West Indies, Europe, and Asia.

You also work for international news agencies, libraries and archives, as well as world-renown art museums and galleries.

WOW!

The Wildenstein reality check

by Marc Masurovsky

[This article was updated on May 25, 2018.]

Guy Wildenstein sur France 24 pour Sarko by ump

Guy Wildenstein found himself in a sticky situation pertaining to various matters involving art, money, and power.  In 2017, Wildenstein was cleared of tax fraud, but in March 2018, the French government, on appeal, requested four years of prison, with two suspended, and a punitive payment of 250 million euros.  The Wildensteins have asked that the charges be dropped. Why should all of this matter?

Aside from the fact that the Wildenstein name alone is synonymous with everything that is gigantic and disproportionate in the way that art is traded in today’s world, so it has been for the past six or so decades.

The Wildenstein family can only be matched in its zest for influence with the eponymous “robber barons” of US industry. With equal doses of verve, recklessness, swashbuckling ways and bravado, with not so subtle shades of arrogance, the Wildenstein dynasty has imposed itself upon the global art market as one of its kingmakers, with traditional spheres of influence centered in Western Europe and North America.

Why the hullabaloo? For many, it is more like a sporting game to go after the powerful and mighty of any industry, and especially nowadays those in the art industry which provide much grist for the mill. Yes, industry, as opposed to taste. Or taste in the pursuit of profit. No matter.

Georges Wildenstein was the true scion of the family, the man who made Daniel, his late son, and Daniel thence made his sons, Guy and Alec (he died in 2008), in the dynastic family mold, for better or for worse.  The flagship of his business was in Paris with branches in London, New York, and even Buenos Aires. Georges knew everyone there was to know, much like his archrival, Paul Rosenberg. Although keenly interested in 19th and 20th century artists, he definitely expressed a marked preference for the 18th century and its creators, stylists, and decorators. In fact, that’s where he excelled. Old Masters? Of course. Medieval pieces? Why not?

The Wildenstein clientele is powerful, both in private as well as in State circles. Georges was well introduced among curators and directors of museums across Europe and the Americas; a well-heeled man with his frivolities, paranoid moments, and phobias.

Georges fled to the south of France before the German Army entered Paris in June 1940, leaving his Parisian business in the managerial care of Roger Dequoy, who had run his London office.

Georges ended up in New York via Lisbon, a preferred route for most exiles at that time who crossed the Atlantic either by Pan Am clipper or by boat, depending on means and resources.

The Wildenstein interests in Paris were quickly subjected to the gluttony of the Nazis’ culture vultures. Competing German plundering units raided at least five sites owned or controlled by Georges Wildenstein, including two bank vaults, his gallery in Paris, and three residences with two in the French countryside.  The gallery’s stock, Georges’ privately-owned inventory in half-a-dozen locations across France, as well as a handful of bank vaults, fell into the hands of the Nazis by the second half of 1941. His library attracted many interested buyers including a close friend of René de Chambrun who intrigued with the pro-Nazi industrial group in Vichy France, aspiring for the new France to be the Aryan vassal of the New Germany. The Gazette des Beaux-Arts, which Wildenstein had run for decades, together with the rest of his assets, were subjected to Aryanization proceedings under the aegis of the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives (CGQJ). Certain German interests represented by Karl Haberstock, a senior Nazi cultural agent operating in occupied territories, sought to derail Vichy’s absorption of Wildenstein’s assets in order to channel them under Nazi control. Regardless, Georges was a bona fide victim of Nazi aggression and cultural plunder.

The plot thickens... and this is where Hector Feliciano, author of “The Lost Museum”, got himself in a legal hornet’s nest with Georges Wildenstein’s heirs. Although the Wildenstein suit against Feliciano was eventually dismissed, it nearly ruined Mr. Feliciano.  Haberstock and Wildenstein were old friends and business partners. Together, they had acquired and sold paintings for at least a decade prior to 1940. Feliciano implied that Georges and Karl had struck a deal whereby Georges’ cultural assets would fall under Nazi protection and he could continue to do business as he liked in German-occupied France under the stewardship of Karl Haberstock, using Dequoy as a go-between. A hefty charge which requires flawless historical documentation. Incidentally, the Foreign Funds Control Division of the US Treasury Department under Henry Morgenthau suspected as much and monitored Georges Wildenstein's cable traffic throughout 1941.

Dequoy’s wartime management of the Wildenstein House in German-occupied Paris proved to be a financial bonanza for him as he had engineered the Aryanization of the gallery, which Vichy and the Germans had suspected of being a sham to cloak Georges Wildenstein’s assets. Nevertheless, Dequoy survived the war unscathed and a rich man. Wildenstein continued to rely on his managerial experience with the firm in the postwar years.

Wildenstein’s wartime cultural losses are well-documented, most notably in the publicly accessible and fully searchable ERR database where more than 500 objects owned by Georges Wildenstein are listed as having been looted by the Nazis. Many works are still missing. There are also concerns that looted objects belonging to other victims of Nazi plunder might have been erroneously transferred to Georges Wildenstein by French restitution authorities after the war. If that is true, his case would be no different than those of many other victims of Nazi plunder since these flawed returns contaminated many postwar restitutions, a perverse way for postwar European governments of applying the law of in-kind restitution: if it looks like your object, why don’t you take it anyway?

Only a detailed and comparative forensic analysis of postwar restitution files can resolve these knotty questions. They have direct relevance to the controversy over the so-called Kann manuscripts—stunning medieval books which were looted from Alphonse Kann’s house in Saint-Germain-en-Laye between summer 1940 and spring of 1941. A number of them were still missing in 1945. At least one had fallen, according to the Kann heirs, into the hands of Georges Wildenstein who, truth be told, had lost similar manuscripts as well. A lengthy legal battle ensued in an American court which pitted the Kann heirs against the Wildenstein interests. Despite the fact that an art historian close to the Wildensteins could not certify that Wildenstein had ever owned the claimed manuscripts, the Kanns lost on technical grounds, not on historical substance.  From a forensic and historical standpoint, the case remains open for renewed investigation.  However, it is unlikely that it will be reopened, despite the fact that the historical evidence mitigated in favor of the Kann family.