Review: Pauline Baer de Pérignon: The Vanished Collection

by Ori Z. Soltes 

Every time one might be inclined to suppose that the last page has been turned on the vast narrative of the Holocaust—and certainly of that chapter that deals with the Nazi plunder of cultural property—another book, and not merely another page, appears that adds another nuance or issue. 

One of the truisms of the multi-aspected genocide engineered by the Nazis is its complexity and its internal paradoxes, which magnified the characteristic of paradox that is endemic to humanity. The Nazis offered inherent contradictions between the mud-and-excrement chaos of the pre-death world that they prepared for their victims and both the carefully ordered manner in which that world operated and the spit-polish cleanliness that obsessed Hitler and his inner circle who shaped and governed it. 

One paradox resonates from the manner in which the population designated for extermination was defined—from whom property and particularly cultural artifacts were confiscated directly (for they had ceased to possess the right to own anything, according to the laws articulated in and beyond Nuremberg in 1935) or indirectly (by forced sales of art and other possessions at a fraction of their value). The same Alfred Rosenberg who would be put in charge of defining racial categories and their features (eyes, hair, nose, lips, intellect, emotion, and the like) in order to decided who would suffer which particular fate, when, and why, was subsequently charged with organizing an effective and far-reaching system of art plunder. Among the racial determinants for Jews was the clear conclusion that having a single Jewish grandparent was sufficient for one’s polluted bloodline to yield a one-way ticket to Auschwitz. 

Yet apparently—paradoxically—the Fuehrer might make exceptions if it served his needs: so the most successful art plunderer on Hitler’s behalf, Hildebrandt Gurlitt, in spite of his paternal grandmother’s having been Jewish, flourished. Hitler also gave a survival pass to his Jewish barber (who never took the opportunities he must have had to slit his master’s throat). And on the other hand, while the most concerted Nazi efforts directed toward cultural appropriation were aimed at Jews and Slavic states, survivors or their offspring and descendants (some of whom become claimants of cultural property) are sometimes not Jewish.

Pauline Baer de Perignon grew up in France as a Catholic. The engrossing book authored by this journalist, film-script writer and writing instructor began by happenstance: a passing comment from a cousin engaged in the art world, whom she hadn’t seen in years, followed by a piece of paper on which he had written down the names of a handful of works by great masters that had once belonged to her great-grandfather, and which—her cousin rather casually noted—had probably been stolen from him.

The narrative that unfolds interweaves two main issues. One is the story itself that begins to take shape: yet another case of a French collector—in this case, Jules Strauss was particularly well-known for his generous contributions to the Louvre of exquisite and suitable frames for a good number of its masterpieces—dispossessed of his cultural property; and how easily and conveniently that datum and its accompanying details were obliterated from the communal memory of the French art and culture world in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust.

The other is the process through which, inch by inch, the author scaled the double territory of trying to understand what had happened to her great-grandfather’s collections—how to begin and deepen and broaden her research—and came to a deeper understanding of her own family identity and heritage.

Jules Strauss, we learn, while he directed pointed if quantitatively modest efforts to building his own art collection, devoted unique amounts of energy to providing the Louvre with frames more consistent with the paintings hung within them than had previously been the case: he innovated both the very idea of taking the framing of a painting seriously and directing serious efforts to providing the right one for a given work, subtly enhancing its appearance. Yet (to repeat) Strauss also possessed some interesting and valuable works of art—such as a small drawing by Tiepolo that ended up in the collections of the Louvre and an intriguing painting by Largillière, a Portrait of a Lady as Pomona, which ended up in the Dresden Gemaeldegalerie Alte Meister (Old Masters Picture Gallery) in former East Germany.

These works emerge in Baer de Pérignon’s narrative as a focus within what also evolves: a realization that they had not made the journey from Jules Strauss’s walls to the storage facilities of these museums along a legitimate path, but as part of the often obscure and unstraightforward process of cultural-artifact depradations in which the Nazis were so particularly skilled. Among the ironic—or galling—aspects of the Jules Strauss story was that his home, 60 Avenue Foch, also confiscated by the regime, was requisitioned by senior members of the SS specialized in black market operations and the seizure of Jewish property.

Pauline Baer de Pérignon’s own journey includes a number of interesting turns and twists as she also evolves, to become a knowledgeable and comfortable denizen of the archives in which she would eventually uncover the documentary proof that these works did not leave her great-grandfather’s possession simply because—as the director of the Dresden museum would cynically ask her during the first round of her attempts to regain that piece of her family patrimony—“perhaps Herr Strauss was happy to have sold his painting for a decent price?”

Differently—but equally important in stature and intangibility to her quest to reclaim these tangible connections to Jules and her family past—is her arrival to a point of wondering how, exactly, and why, precisely, her father and two of his first cousins converted, in 1940, to Catholicism. A whole other aspect of the world of Nazi confiscations emerged for her, regarding layered and interwoven aspects of her family—and her own—religious identity.

This last extended detail is ultimately shaped around the peculiar and willful amnesia of which, she comes to recognize, her family has been suffering during the two generations since the Holocaust had come, uprooted and destroyed so much, and gone, like a devastating typhoon. That amnesia set in, more specifically, after Jules’ widow, Pauline de Baer Pérignon’s great-grandmother, had filed several claims with her government—the French government—regarding the works of art that that government and its museum bureaucracy refused to acknowledge as having come into their possession along the illegitimate path of Nazi spoliation.

The amnesia that set in for the family, which involves its own heritage, both cultural and spiritual, and the amnesia of the French government and museum world, are part of the larger amnesia from which those who struggle in the trenches of art restitution are trying to help the Western world recover, as the decades since the Holocaust spread out and we continue, as a species, to repeat the sorts of actions that bought such grief to so many in such a range of different ways over 75 years ago. That is why this book—aside from its flowing style, compelling storyline and intriguing twists and turns—adds such an important chapter to the Holocaust narrative and its culture-centered subset. Its ultimate theme is really about restituting memory—that most significant of characteristics that makes humans human. 

An "heirless" journey

by Marc Masurovsky

How has the discussion on "heirless" cultural assets evolved between 2011 and 2018, as reflected in various entries in the "plundered art" blog?

Overall, the debate goes nowhere, primarily because the "heirless" status of a looted object is, by nature, political and administrative. From a research standpoint, it represents one final assessment whereby no concrete links could be drawn between that object and one or more individuals acting as its owner at a particular point in time. It is--and should be--the outcome of a lengthy and methodical research effort undertaken in various archives.

The future lies in breaking the stalemate over the "heirless" object: does it really boil down to selling these objects off or can there be a genuine commitment on the part of the holders of these objects to do their best to find an "owner", thereby establish a clear, even if incomplete, provenance of the object sufficient to allow us to tell its story, or a story about its trajectory.

April 9, 2011

How best to handle so-called heirless or unidentifiable property? In today’s mercenary, hyper-materialistic and insensitive world, one approach is to share the proceeds of sales of heirless property along carefully delineated lines. It’s just an idea, but the issue of looted cultural property from the Second World War will never, and I mean never, go away without some form of global political and financial settlement of those stolen works that have been left in netherland.

Perhaps, it’s time to think about creating an international entity responsible for disposing of so-called heirless objects in a manner that is of ultimate benefit to the families of victims, and which underwrites and promotes further research into the fate of such objects.

June 25, 2011

Washington Principle IX spells out the following: “If the pre-War owners of art that is found to have been confiscated by the Nazis, or their heirs, can not be identified, steps should be taken expeditiously to achieve a just and fair solution.”

Principle IX is diplomatic hogwash at its best. Let’s use the phraseology that best suits the Principle: heirless property. These two words put together offer a lethal mixture to Jewish organizations and postwar governments alike. No one knows what to do with heirless property. They don’t. How long has it been since the end of World War II? How long has it been since the Washington Principles were enacted? We are still at level one of the discussion.

Principle IX should simply be re-written completely and the words “heirless property” injected into a new paragraph that rethinks the fate of heirless property.

July 3, 2011

Ever since the end of the Second World War, politicians, diplomats, officials and bureaucrats in leading international Jewish organizations, non-governmental organizations, scholars, and historians alike have butted heads on what to do with so-called “heirless” property, or property for which no rightful owner can be found because, for the most part, the family line was extinguished by genocide and war.

There still is no resolution as to how to treat this problem that spreads discomfort and awkwardness across continents, especially among cultural institutions that are the custodians or owners of objects that can be described as “heirless.” What to do? Do we leave them where they are in display cases or on shelves in museum or gallery warehouses as mute witnesses to the horrors of a recent genocidal past? What if they can be connected to a specific geographic location? Do we then return them to the place from which they might have been collected before their owners were wiped off the face of the earth?

August 21, 2011

Nazi authorities did not bother to associate the works with their victims which renders these cultural assets, a direct result of “internal” looting or plunder, as “heirless” or “unidentifiable”, until someone recognizes them and claims them on behalf of their family.

February 14, 2015

Principle 9: If the pre-War owners of art that is found to have been confiscated by the Nazis, or their heirs, cannot be identified, steps should be taken expeditiously to achieve a just and fair solution.

A number of international Jewish organizations and other interested parties have come forward and made numerous suggestions about how to dispose of the ‘heirless’ component of the Gurlitt commission. This initial determination of “heirless” is contingent on the research and the ability to fill gaps and ambiguities in the history of the objects in the Gurlitt collection. According to the agreement signed by the German government with the estate of the late Cornelius Gurlitt and the Kunstmuseum Bern, 2020 is the deadline at which a final determination will be made about the status of the objects being researched under the aegis of the Gurlitt Task Force and by the Kunstmuseum Bern. Some have suggested that the “heirless” items be sent to Israel. Others have asked that they be sold and the proceeds distributed among needy Holocaust survivors and their families. The German government has tentatively endorsed the idea that the “heirless” items should be housed and displayed in a German museum “for a while” once the last ‘clean’ items are transferred to the Kunstmuseum Bern and the “identifiable” items have been returned to their rightful owners. A fair and just solution? So far it’s been unfair and unjust. Therefore, we must cast an interim NO until further notice.

January 13, 2017

What does one do with objects deemed heirless? Remember that heirless property is simply unclaimed property for which no owners have been found ---yet. Since there are no well-funded research organizations or institutions in the business of searching for these objects’ rightful owners, they remain to a large extent heirless, deprived of their history, their context and their identity.

For instance, Jewish museums are stocked with heirless objects, coming from communities that have been systematically erased from the face of the earth. But not all displaced objects in Jewish museums are heirless. The mission of Jewish museums is to safeguard these objects, not necessarily restitute them. Hence, when faced with a restitution claim, a Jewish museum is more likely to behave like most art museums by opposing the act of restitution which would require de-accessioning the claimed object from its collection.

In an ideal world, the most logical way to address the question of researching and documenting the complete history of cultural plunder between 1933 and 1945 is to orchestrate a massive inflow of research monies and establish an international research and documentation infrastructure. Only in this way can one address systematically the full scope of looted cultural heritage (outside of Judaica which has attracted significant attention over the past decades) of the Jewish people, identify the location of plundered objects, figure out which ones have still not been restituted, match them with their rightful owners. If there are none, then the question of heirless property comes into the picture.

A vast international, even transcontinental, network or infrastructure of research institutions facilitated and nurtured by a mix of government agencies, independent organizations, and academic centers across the Americas and Europe should coordinate this effort. This is not a one-or three-person job. In order to get a handle on what was stolen, where, when, by whom, sold and resold to whom and where and when, one needs a small army of intelligent, motivated, educated, trained, PAID, worker bees.

There is a strong likelihood that “heirless” objects having once belonged to Jewish owners before the Holocaust era ended up in the permanent collections of museums, be they State-controlled or privately owned.

How does one persuade these cultural institutions to de-accession heirless objects which they argue were acquired in good faith and have no owner?

October 8, 2018

No object is heirless unless it is labeled as such. Every object begins with an owner who happens to be its maker or creator. Once the object leaves its original, primal owner and the place where it sat or hung, the path of the object will either be licit or illicit depending on the circumstances of its removal, transfers, and the transactions that it was subjected to and the larger historical context in which these movements or translocations took place. Those are the objective facts surrounding the life of an object and its peregrination through time and space. That is what constitutes the provenance of an object. To put it simply, every object is connected at any given point, to a person, to a location and to a date.

In my view, the paradox is as follows: An object becomes heirless because it has been labeled as such for reasons having nothing to do with the object itself. On the other hand, an object always has an owner, whether identified or not.

A 1902 painting by Paul Signac

by Marc Masurovsky

Auxerre, le Canal, Juin 1902, by Paul Signac
reproduced by Artcurial

On December 2, 2013, a painting by Paul Signac, “Auxerre, le Canal, Juin 1902,” was auctioned at Artcurial in Paris, France. It fetched more than 600,000 euros.

Nothing special about this sale.

The provenance of the painting indicates that it had been offered for sale in Weimar in 1903, hence a year after it was painted. Then it remained in a “private collection” until it resurfaced nearly 100 years later at a sale at Artcurial Briest in 2002.

A gap in the history of a post-impressionist work stretching over one hundred years is always something to behold. It’s impossible to know where it went during all that time, but one thing is certain. This Signac work was produced in France, left for Weimar, remained in Germany for an unknown period of time, two world wars ensued before it reemerged in 2002. It fell completely out of sight since its exhibition history echoes this centennial gap.

And then, one finds the most innocuous information in far away archives that may or may not illuminate the history of a work. In this case, a document buried in an archive at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada, amongst the papers of Theodore Heinrich, a Canadian-born American citizen trained as an art historian who became one of several hundred cultural advisors to the American army in the years following the liberation of Nazi-occupied Europe in 1944-1945. He went on to run the Wiesbaden Central Collecting Point in Bavaria, the temporary home for thousands of works of art belonging to German State museums, and to an even more spectacular number of Jewish ritual objects as well as a host of German private collections including a portion of the collection of Hildebrand Gurlitt.

Heinrich was a consummate art collector. In fact, no sooner had he arrived in liberated Paris on the heels of the US invading force that he began to amass what became a significant collection of works on paper spanning three hundred years from the 17th century to the 20th century. He fancied French, Italian, and German masters and cultivated relationships with booksellers and art dealers across Western Europe. During his five year stay as a US Army cultural advisor (so-called “Monuments Man”), Heinrich acquired several hundred works from private dealers in France, Belgium, Germany, and Italy, regardless of the origin of the works, oblivious to their provenance in the aftermath of one of the worst acts of cultural plunder perpetrated by one nation-Nazi Germany--over those it conquered, annexed, occupied or was allied to.  Those works and many other items were auctioned off after his death in the early 1980s.

On July 25, 1949, Galerie Bremer, based in Berlin, Wilmersdorf, wrote to “Dr. Heinrichs”,  thinking that Theodore Heinrich was familiar with an “American committee” operating in the US Zone of occupation consisting of art dealers and museum officials from the United States who were interesting in “buying valuable paintings for American museums.”  No proof exists that such a committee ever existed, but there is ample evidence that representatives of the American art trade were busy trolling for business opportunities in liberated Germany.

One of the paintings offered by Galerie Bremer was signed by Paul Signac, and entitled “Kanal bei Auxerre, 1902”. That painting's measurements—46 x 57 cm—are very similar to those of the Signac sold at Artcurial in 2013—46 x 55 cm. If it is the same painting, we can deduce that it was consigned to a Berlin gallery in the immediate post-1945 period. How it got there, how long it remained in Germany, remains a mystery. The Signac catalogue raisonné apparently does not enhance our knowledge of this work's past history since it is cited in the 2013 Artcurial sale.

Are German museums in favor of restitution?

by Marc Masurovsky

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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