Some frequently asked questions

by Marc Masurovsky

a/ What is the total number of art objects claimed?

One should place the ultimate answer to this question in its proper context. By May 1945, somewhere between 15 and 20 million art objects of all sorts, from masterpieces to portraits of your favorite saints and relatives, had been misplaced due to civil unrest, persecution, war, genocide, and theft.

Of those misplaced cultural objects, a small number fit the moniker of “culturally-significant” or “national treasure” or both, depending on who is defining those two very odd expressions. For the sake of the argument, let’s just say 1 to 5 per cent of the misplaced objects fit those categories, or 100,000 (lowest number) to 1 million (highest number). The rest fell into the general bucket of culturally not so significant or insignificant, again, depending on who is expounding on this odd categorization.

Postwar Allied restitution policy ended up focusing on the 1 to 5 percent of objects lost or missing due to State-sponsored mischief between 1933 and 1945. For the rest, compensation schemes were foisted onto shell-shocked survivors and their kin due to an institutional absence of interest amongst postwar governments to aid those victims in locating and recovering their missing cultural property for reasons mentioned above. Many of the culturally significant objects and those earning the label of “national treasure” came from State collections plundered by the Axis or from private collections owned by rather wealthy individuals with close ties to State museums in countries dominated by the Axis. Those items received favored treatment in the eyes of the Allies and their representatives, referred to as “Monuments Men”.

The Allied powers’ prime directive was the rehabilitation of Europe (read that part of Europe not occupied or influenced by the Soviet Army and its government) especially as the incipient Cold War became a full-fledged game of geopolitical antipathy between former wartime allies.

As a consequence of the aforementioned factors and those tied to the inevitable human condition—people over property—most survivors did not file claims in the immediate postwar period and only did so after deadlines had passed and the only chance of recovering anything was close to 0.

By 1956, the US State Department had estimated that approximately several hundred thousand cultural objects of all kinds and shapes and value were still being claimed through its good offices by individuals from more than 30 nations.

From the mid-1990s to today, since there is no concerted international effort to tally the total number of claimed objects that are registered as such with national governments, we can only guess that, perhaps, the figure is close to or in excess of the number declared by the State Department in 1956, since most of the claims were never satisfied.

Nations that are signatory to international compacts known as the Washington conference of 1998 and the Terezin Declaration of June 2009 should conduct a census of all outstanding cultural claims registered as of now in their care and publish those results for public consumption.

b/ what is the total number of art objects restituted?

Historically, we only have repatriation figures from various postwar governments and official statistics regarding actual physical restitutions up to the early 1950s. Since then, there is very little public information that can be found about how many art objects were returned until the late 1990s.

Those nations that have established restitution committees (the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Austria) have compiled figures regarding the number of objects that have been claimed through their auspices. But no statistics are tallied pertaining to the number of objects returned through direct negotiations with museums, auction houses, institutions, corporations, and private individuals.

c/ what is the total value of art objects sold after restitution?

The only indication of value comes from press reports about items being auctioned after restitution. It can safely be assumed that the objects with an Austrian provenance—mostly oil paintings by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele—have fetched the highest prices at auction following their restitution, mostly due to the infatuation by the upper tiers of the global art market for such works, regardless of their inherent and implicit esthetic value. Those works alone have fetched in toto more than half a billion dollars. It might be safe to conservatively estimate the total value of restituted objects at slightly more than a billion dollars since the late 1990s. But that figure needs to be carefully verified through an elaborate survey of the field of art restitution.

d/ what is the total value of so-called “art restitution litigation?

This question is unfair and unjust but it does capture the collective imagination that impugns all sorts of evil motives to lawyers who seek opportunities wherever they can. We can only surmise how costly litigation efforts can be once we fuse the fees earned from seeking restitution and preventing restitution. Usually, fairly well-heeled law firms are recruited as outside counsel by museums in order to safeguard the integrity of their collections and rebuff attempts by claimants to assert their claims to title. On the plaintiffs’ side, there is an odd mix of solo practitioners and small and large firms involved in art restitution. All told, there are not more than 100 or so attorneys—yes, you read it!—who work on art restitution cases as an integral part of their legal practice if we combined North America, Europe and Israel. Since most plaintiffs cases are adopted on a contingency fee basis, usually 30 per cent, you should take the estimated value of restituted objects and divide that figure by three in order to get an idea on the estimated value of the litigation for plaintiffs’ lawyers. Likewise, for those lawyers defending their clients against outside claims, the fees can easily rise into the millions of dollars for each claimed object. Most of the claimed objects that are subject to intense years-long litigation hold values in excess of 1 million dollars.

Where does all of this leave the bewildered field of provenance research? You guessed it. The two main incentives underlying provenance research are to 1/ safeguard art objects which are part of a museum’s collection or that of an individual collector or 2/ obtain the restitution of such an art object.

What does this mean in terms of the objective and empirical integrity of the research being conducted on the history of an object? How do these legal undertakings affect the very nature of provenance research as distinct from its initial intent as an art-historical practice?

What is the future of provenance research and can it be salvaged as an objective, scientific field of inquiry?

The economics of restitution battles

by Marc Masurovsky

In an ideal world, the cost of seeking restitution of a Nazi-looted art object should not be a hindrance to achieving justice. The government, writ large, a State agency, a non-profit organization, domestic or international, would take on the burden of recovery of a looted cultural object, from the first notification to the current possessor that she holds title to property stolen during the Nazi era, to the final act of recovery, the physical transfer of the object to the rightful owner’s heirs complete with a transfer of title.

In the real world, the aforementioned scenario simply does not exist, and, if it does, it is as rare as the Hope Diamond.

There are no public or charitable organizations which have the resources to manage the restitution of a looted object from a to z, soup to nuts, from identification to recovery or settlement. However, there are many consultants both in the Americas and in Europe who are available to assist you in the recovery process, for a fee and not an insignificant one at that.

The Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets of December 1998 failed to put in motion the procedures by which to assist claimants in their bid to recover their looted cultural assets at little or no cost. There was no political will amongst the participants at the conference to go beyond speeches and do the heavy lifting, as we call it, to convince their kinsmen back home to pass laws that would establish the appropriate mechanisms for expeditious and systematic restitution of looted assets. It never really happened. Austria might be an exception since it did pass a restitution law in 1999, partly as a reaction to the physical seizure of two paintings by Egon Schiele on display at the Museum of Modern Art of New York. Their possessor at the time was the Leopold Foundation, based in Vienna.

With no structure, no organization to fall back on, claimants have had few places to turn to. The Holocaust Claims Processing Office in New York is the only viable State-level agency (not Federal, a big difference!) which facilitates the claims process for Holocaust victims and their families.

The restitution process is a tedious and laborious affair fraught with emotions and riddled with obstacles. Hence the tendency among lawyers to recommend financial settlements that, in their view, at least address the moral dimension of the claim while leaving the object and title to the claimed object in the hands of the current possessor whose sole defense rests on arguing that she acted in good faith when purchasing the claimed object. In today’s parlance, this approach to the resolution of a cultural claim for Holocaust-era thefts and all of its variants is referred to as a “just and fair” solution, something that presumably should work for everyone but really does not.

In a world where most attorneys command high fees, there is little chance that, at those rates, a claimant can receive a modicum of legal advice unless the value of the object(s) that she wants returned exceed the hundreds of thousands or even reach millions of dollars or euros. And if she does recover, she needs to sell the object in order to settle her debts for legal representation predicated on a contingency fee arrangement, which usually runs at about one third of the market value of the claimed object.

The failure of the public sector to create effective, credible, and humane legal and administrative mechanisms to provide a forum for some form of justice for victims of cultural plunder, has relegated the resolution of these claims to the market place.

Technically, there is nothing wrong with that concept, except that the price tag is steep and out of reach for most people seeking restitution. The most popular works earning legal representation in restitution proceedings through private firms are works by Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt which were at the bottom of the art world’s food chain until the 1970s and those produced by German Expressionists (Kirschner, Grosz), Impressionists and their progeny (from Monet and Pissarro to Cézanne and van Gogh), and, yes, Cubists (Pablo Picasso and Braque, most notably) and its variants (Fernand Léger). There is some room, of course, for top-flight Old Masters. When it comes to value, why discriminate?

The absence of political solutions to restitution claims—in the form of laws passed by national legislatures aimed at simplifying and/or fast-tracking claims for looted cultural objects, eliminating technical defenses (latches, statutes of limitations) used by possessors not to return claimed objects, thus driving legal expenses through the roof—has helped drive up the cost of justice, hence, the price of restitution of an object stolen during the commission of an act of genocide.

If the value of the claimed object falls below several hundred thousand dollars or euros, it complicates a lawyer’s commitment to achieve restitution (yes, this is an unfair statement but it is close to the reality that many claimants encounter) since mounting legal fees will quickly surpass the value of the object and thus drive into the negative the cost-benefit of restitution. Thus, if your family lost works and other objects now scattered across the globe, whose individual value may not rise past 50,000 to 100,000 dollars or euros, you might not be able to find a top-ranked lawyer to represent you. If your family lost a substantial collection of more than 50 or so “secondary” works produced in 17th century Europe, a lawyer might consider representing you to obtain restitution for those objects—they would be viewed as a “lot”-- that have been identified in present-day collections. Hence, we fall into the same logic—cost and benefit. Rightfully, a lawyer must ask: what’s in this for me besides the ephemeral headlines tied to “doing the right thing”? She runs a business, not a charity, so the saying goes. Mouths to feed, people to pay, rent, insurance and other costs add up. Time is also a factor: these cases tend to take an average of three to ten years to resolve, some stretching out over several decades, others ending miraculously quickly, as in two years or less.

Since the vast majority of objects stolen during the Nazi years were not “treasures” worth hundreds of thousands or millions in today’s currencies, the vast majority of the victims have not obtained restitution of their objects. As the years and decades go by, their stolen object are sold at auctions, displayed in galleries or museums, or, worst of all, hanging in a stranger’s living room.

The postwar restitution machinery was never designed to help the average victim. It was designed to recover treasures and high-end cultural objects thus restoring a country’s “greatness” from which those “treasures” were forcibly removed while offering substantial returns to their possessors and handlers. Is it mere coincidence why so much emphasis has been placed on the recovery of paintings by Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Camille Pissarro, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Antonio Canale, Caspar Netscher, Romanino, Amedeo Modigliani, Max Liebermann, Georg Grosz, Ernst Wilhelm Kirchner, etc., etc.?

The press, incidentally, is partly to blame for this state of affairs because it is so quick to respond to restitution claims involving big name artists fetching hefty price tags on the global art market. If you peruse the few public looted art databases that are currently available for consultation, such as lostart.de and www.errproject.org, you will note that there are thousands of artists whose works have been stolen and yet the world only focuses on a handful.

The chances of recovering 90 per cent of the world’s stolen art are close to zero because the world in which we live rewards only the “great ones,” those who produce “masterpieces” which become a nation’s “cultural treasures” coveted by those who can afford them. The rest?

Our collective loss, someone’s private gain.

Thorough research drives restitution of looted art and yet….

by Marc Masurovsky

It is absolutely fair and just to ask why, in the past two decades, there have been no systematic efforts deployed to make funds available to advance research on missing art collections and other aspects of the cultural plunder that was visited upon civilians, Jewish and other, between 1933 and 1945. Some of those funds could have come from the sales of multi-million dollar works that had been restituted in past years. A conservative estimate puts at nearly 600 million dollars the total value of paintings restituted to claimants, mostly in North America, a large part of those works having come from losses suffered by members of the Austrian Jewish community, including works signed by Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt, darlings of the over-hyped global art market.

It is true that there have been no publicized indications that historical research played a critical role in documenting the fate of the looted cultural objects that were restituted to claimants since the 1990s. And yet, good research produces good outcomes, an admission made even by the legal counsel to the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD). Perhaps lawyers are to be faulted for that state of affairs. Hard to tell. It is not so much their clever swordsmanship that has enabled the return of claimed works but the meticulous documentary trail that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that looted art works did belong to their clients at the time of their confiscation and ensuing misappropriation and that they had been illegally removed from their hands for reasons having nothing to do with their legal ownership of the works, but because of their belonging to a culture reviled by their persecutors.

Nevertheless, people are what they are and we should be thankful that the claimed objects have been returned to the rightful owners who are free to do what they bloody want with them.

As for the chronic absence of funding for research that could shed more light on the murky and dark corners of economic collaboration during the Nazi years, the unsavory role played by art dealers, collectors, museum officials, their friends in government, industry and finance, and many others, it will take brave, courageous, and selfless souls to open their checkbooks and fund such research efforts.

Ideas about establishing foundations, consortia, research-driven higher education programs, and public-private partnerships could fill volumes of idle chatter. Idle because they have led nowhere. Truth be told, where there’s a will, there usually is a way. And, in the case of historical research on cultural plunder during the Nazi era, the will does not rise beyond the threshold of cocktail discussions and “bons mots” exchanged during international conferences on Nazi looted art.

At present, institutional self-serving indifference and opportunism prevail among governments on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean and cloud any reasonable discussion on how to fund historical research into cultural plunder during the Nazi years and the impact of the destruction of Jewish cultural assets on the postwar world. Those who bear the brunt of this state of affairs are the diplomats and politicians who have mastered the rhetoric of restitution only to suppress any effort to fund research.

The exceptions: groups like the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany and the Commission for Art Recovery are members of a rarefied club that have supported such research. The Claims Conference has supported for 10 years now the building and maintenance of the Jeu de Paume database of art objects looted in German-occupied France and the Commission for Art Recovery has fueled research efforts in part to assist in its international art recovery litigations. In a minor way, proprietary databases like the Art Loss Register and both leading auction houses, Christie's and Sotheby's, provided small but symbolic sums of money to jump-start such research in the late 1990s.

On a more hopeful note:

Recent progress in the understanding of cultural plunder in the past two decades must be acknowledged, although the work of many historians, researchers and scholars has not been translated into languages which could help reach a wider audience. Hence their findings are reaching a limited audience, namely in the German-speaking world and other linguistic micro-communities:

the Zentral Institut für Kunstgeschichte (ZIKG) in Munich, whose researchers are making a clear imprint on our understanding of the mechanisms of plunder in Nazi Germany and beyond,

the French Ministry of Culture on the works stuck in the purgatory of the Musées Nationaux Récupération (MNR), the CIVS and the Institut National de l'Histoire de l'Art (INHA) in Paris*,

the Dutch Restitution Committee which has amassed significant historical research to drive its decisions, regardless of how one agrees or disagrees with them*,

a research cell in Brussels focusing on M-Aktion staffed by an interdisciplinary trio of young scholars,

the Commission for Provenance Research in Vienna*

efforts conducted by British museums a decade ago which remain one of the best examples of how museums should publicize the results of their findings on individual objects,

a growing group of individual scholars and researchers who have made important contributions to the emerging field of cultural plunder. These scholars can be found in the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Portugal, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, the Ukraine, the Russian Federation, Greece, Finland, Israel, the United States and Canada.

This disparate international cacophony of research must be coordinated and given a cohesiveness to become truly useful for the generations to come. International symposia are not a panacea nor are a solution. International research centers must be established to coordinate such research, archives focused on plunder and its aftermath must be created to centralize key documents from a plethora of archival repositories found in dozens of countries, and graduate programs should be designed and offered to focus in an interdisciplinary framework on the complex question of plunder and its implications for civil society during and after the Nazi era.

* Last but not least, the five standing commissions on restitution--United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria--should adopt more "transparent" practices relative to the historical research that they use to reach their decisions--for or against the claimants--and make such research publicly accessible to benefit international scholarship.

Work in progress….

The most expensive works of art in the world and their histories (or lack thereof)-Part Three

by Marc Masurovsky

7. The Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer II, 1912, by Gustav Klimt sold for 87 million dollars at Christie’s on November 8, 2006.

Adele Bloch Bauer II, 1912, Gustav Klimt

8. The Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer I (The Lady in Gold) by Gustav Klimt, 1907, sold for 135 million dollars at the same sale.

Adele Bloch Bauer I, 1907, Gustav Klimt

These two portraits of Adele Bloch Bauer were painted by Gustav Klimt on the eve of the First World War. Klimt was a favorite of Viennese Jewish aristocrats. The portraits are lush and exuberant, yet Adele is unreachable and cold. Adele died at a young age in 1925. The Anschluss of March 10, 1938 resulted in the Nazi annexation of Austria into the Greater German Reich and in the wholesale dispossession of Jewish-owned wealth and property followed by the persecution and deportation of tens of thousands of Viennese Jews to concentration camps “nach dem Osten.” The Bloch Bauer family, one of the most financially endowed of Vienna, lost all of its property. Avid collectors of Klimt and other members of the Austrian Secession, the Nazis confiscated all of the family’s works of art which ended up in government depots in Vienna. Decades later, the Nazis gone, the paintings remained in Austria hanging at the Belvedere while the remnants of the family had resettled in exile including Adele’s niece, Marie Altmann. She consulted with Randol Schoenberg, an attorney in Los Angeles and grandson of the composer, Arnold Schoenberg. Randy (as he is known) took her case and spent the greater part of eight years trying to wrest the Bloch Bauer Klimts from the clutches of the Austrian government. He eventually took the Austrian government to the Supreme Court (Altmann v. the Repubic of Austria) and was able to establish “jurisdiction”, a legal maneuver that enabled Marie Altmann to sue the Austrian government in American Federal courts. That verdict tipped the scales against Austria. One possible outcome of the case would have been for Austria to buy back the paintings. But at fair market value, the Austrian government would have spent upwards of 300 million dollars for the paintings including the two portraits of Adele Bloch Bauer. It was unwilling to do so. Marie Altmann won the right to recover her family’s cultural inheritance. Upon restitution, Adele Bloch Bauer I and II went on the auction block.

9. Boy with pipe, 1905, by Pablo Picasso sold for 104 million dollars on May 5, 2004 at Sotheby’s.

Boy with a Pipe, 1905, Pablo Picasso

According to the Sotheby’s catalogue, this painting once belonged to the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy family which sold it to the Swiss art dealer, Walter Feilchenfeldt, who headed the Cassirer gallery. Despite of and because of their wealth and status in Germany’s elite, the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy family suffered racial persecutions much like the rest of the Jewish community of Germany. Many of their cultural and artistic possessions were sold under duress in the 1930s.

John Hay Whitney purchased “Boy with a pipe” in 1950. After Whitney’s death, the painting passed to his widow, Betsey. She died in 1998 and a family foundation established by Betsey took control of the Whitney family’s art. The foundation sold the Picasso and other works in 2004.

10. Nude, Green leaves and Bust (1932) by Pablo Picasso sold for 106 million dollars on April 30, 2010 at Christie’s. 

Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, 1932, Pablo Picasso

 This complex still life by Picasso was once owned by the fabled French Jewish art dealer, Paul Rosenberg. Fearing for his safety following the German invasion of Poland, Paul Rosenberg fled to New York leaving most of his property behind in Paris and several storage sites in central and southwestern France, including his world-renown stock of Impressionist and Cubist works. He stored some of them in a storage shed in Tours under the name of one of his employees, which apparently shielded those works from Nazi seizure. Paul and his brother, Edmond, recovered all of the art stored in Tours after France was liberated.

11. The Scream, 1895 by Edvard Munch sold for 119 million dollars at Sotheby’s on May 2, 2012. The seller was Petter Olsen, whose father, Thomas, had been a neighbor of Edvard Munch.

The Scream, 1895, by Edvard Munch

The reporting on the painting echoed other similar journalistic fawning over the staggering cost of a work of art. Usually, those paeans to the Everest of the art world tend to overshadow the actual history of the objects fetching such ridiculous sums. As it turns out, Munch’s acknowledged masterpiece of angst and despair, The Scream, had passed through many hands. According to the Los Angeles Times, the painting had a clear provenance, starting with Arthur von Franquet who sold it to Hugo Simon who sold it through an art dealer to Thomas Olsen in 1937 and thence by descent to Pette Olsen.

A posting on the ARCAblog which came on the heels of the fabled sale of the Munch painting summarized the history of the Scream as provided by the Sotheby’s auction house. There we learn that Hugo Simon purchased the painting in 1926 and consigned it to the Kunsthaus in Zurich, nearly 10 years later in December 1936. One month later, the painting presumably found its way to Stockholm where Thomas Olsen, the father of the seller, acquired the painting at M. Molvidson, Konst & Antikvitetshandel.

Meanwhile, one of the Hugo Simon heirs contacted the Holocaust Art Restitution Project (HARP) and expressed his concern that the painting had been sold by his great-grandfather under duress. Thus it was a forced sale, and Sotheby’s refused to acknowledge that fact. This additional element cast a pall on the entire sale. However, it was clear that nothing would stop this juggernaut of the auction market from doing anything to prevent the sale, especially because it represented such a hefty pay day for the auction house.

Five months after the sale, the Museum of Modern Art of New York announced that “The Scream” will be on temporary display as of mid-October 2012, thanks to one of MoMA’s trustees, Leon Black, who happened to be the lucky purchaser of the famed painting.

At this point, the local New York press took seriously charges made by Raphael Cardoso, Hugo Simon’s great-grand-son, that Hugo Simon had been forced to sell the Scream as well as most of his art collection as a direct result of his persecution as a Jew in Nazi Germany. He fled to Paris then to Brazil. The Nazis confiscated all of his assets in Germany, then, after the invasion of France, did the same with his few possessions in Paris, including his apartment and the art and furniture that it contained.
The Jewish Forward cited the October 14, 2012, article by Isabel Vincent and essentially reprinted Raphael Cardoso’s concerns. It is the only article that called into question the provenance of “The Scream,” by Edvard Munch.  Shortly afterwards, the online art world blog, Artinfo, titled an article: Is the Scream Nazi loot?  The Jewish Journal echoed the Simon heirs’ demand that, at the very least, MoMA accompany the Scream with an explanatory piece that echoed the context in which the painting changed hands once Hugo Simon tried to sell it in the mid-1930s. 

Finally, another blog, City Review, disclosed the fact that Pette Olsen, then owner of “The Scream”, had offered 250,000 dollars to the family that it could donate to whatever cause it desired. What the article did not mention is that Sotheby’s brokered this offer. The family turned it down on grounds that “it was insulting.”

In sum, a story that should have riled the art world became a “Jewish” story as only the Jewish and Israeli press took heed of the claim made by the Simon heirs that the iconographic painting of anxiety and despair portrayed so emphatically by Munch, could have been the subject of a forced sale.
If anything, the Munch painting’s travails echo once again the difficulty inherent in defining what a forced sale is, what duress really means, when faced with a claim for restitution seventy years later.

11. The dream, 24 January 1932 by Pablo Picasso sold for 155 million dollars on March 26, 2013, in a private sale between the casino billionaire, Steve Wynn, and the stockbroker billionaire, Steve Cohen, who was then under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Dream, 1932, Pablo Picasso

Victor and Sally Gancz had acquired the painting in New York for 7,000 dollars in 1941 and kept it in their possession until November 11, 1997 There is no information about who might have sold it to them and when the painting actually crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Apparently, Gancz sold The Dream to an Austrian-born financier, Wolfgang Flöttl, whose name also appeared on the provenance of van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet.

Flöttl sold The Dream to Steve Wynn in 2001. In an unfortunate incident that made the news globally, Wynn tripped and tore the painting with his elbow. Following its successful restoration for which he spared no expense (as good as new if not better!), he offered it to Steve Cohen who had already expressed in it and would have acquired it earlier had it not been for the rip.

12. Les joueurs de cartes, early 1890s, by Paul Cézanne, sold for 259 million dollars in 2011 to a member of the Qatar royal family. The seller was a Greek billionaire, George Embiricos, who amassed an impressive art collection. 

Les joueurs de cartes, early 1890s, Paul Cezanne

The history of the painting is unknown, save for the fact that Embiricos “owned it for many years”,
Two leading lights of the global art world, Bill Acquavella and Larry Gagosian had presumably offered 220 million dollars for the painting. No deal.

Here we have one of the finest examples of Cézanne’s oeuvre, the second most expensive painting in the world, whose origins are unknown. All that we do know is that Paul Cézanne painted it in the early 1890s.  It left France at a certain point, ending up in Greece at a certain point where it stayed “for many years” before leaving for the Persian Gulf States. So much for “transparency.”

13. "Nafea Faa Ipoipo-When Will You Marry?", 1892, by Paul Gauguin sold in a private sale to the Qatar Royal Family for approximately 300 million dollars in February 2015.

When will you marry? 1892, Paul Gauguin

The seller is the Rudolph Staechelin Family Trust in Basel, Switzerland, which is run by Ruedi Staechelin, Rudolph’s grandson. The painting was on loan to the Kunstmuseum Basel. The loan period ends in June 2015. Rudolph Staechelin amassed his collection during the interwar years and befriended most of the artists whose works he had purchased. His grandson, Ruedi Staechelin, a former auction house executive, has taken a strong position against the UNIDROIT convention which he views as “an enormous danger to public and private collecting”. UNIDROIT was put into place in the mid-1990s to remind the international community of the legal, financial, and ethical risks involved in trading and displaying stolen art. Staechelin proudly announced that Swiss museums, collectors and even the Swiss Art Trade Association, supported his stance against the international convention on trafficking of looted art. Now you know why Switzerland does not return, does not restitute, and does not repatriate looted cultural assets unless under threat of subpoenas, seizures and arrests. 

What a way to do business!

See the article by Julia Voss on the Gauguin sale that appeared earlier in February 2015 in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Belated open letter to the "New Republic"

Leon Wieseltier, Literary Editor of The New Republic, Source: Brandeis University

by Marc J. Masurovsky

Why did it take so long for the "New Republic" to write about cultural plunder and restitution of looted art? Is it really because of the incongruous convergence of the so-called “Gurlitt Affair” and the global release of that “trashy and supercilious film”—the Monuments Men? Or put differently, why the silence for so many decades despite the fact that “restitution [is] as much as the next child of the dispossessed”? There are probably no easy answers to those questions and perhaps they are best left alone. Still...

“The obsession with restitution” is an obsession with justice, as exemplified by restitution of lost cultural assets, those items, those objects, those artifacts, regardless of value or museum worthiness, those parts of ourselves that serve as our extensions and our means of expressing non-verbally our deepest sentiments, longings, loves, and aspirations.

It is not just about Fragonard, Bellini, Tintoretto, van Dyck, Rembrandt, Leonardo and countless other “masters”. It is not just about the finest silver and the finest gold and the finest stones set in the finest settings. It is not about those rarest of rarest of books and incunabulae, or textiles carefully woven with the most precious fabrics for that most precious person. Actually, we are talking about something that makes you and I and our friends, our children, our relatives, and those around us whom we do not know, it is what makes us human, it is about culture. And culture is what Hitler and his henchmen and collaborators across Europe sought to uproot wherever it was deemed to be “Jewish” and “degenerate”, in order to substitute something clean, tasteful, that was Judenrein.

A crime against humanity.

In order to proceed with the uprooting of culture and the mass of objects encapsulated under that moniker, Hitler’s henchmen and collaborators across Europe committed an act of genocide. That makes Hildebrand Gurlitt, Cornelius Gurlitt’s father, an accessory to genocide, together with all other art dealers, collectors, museum officials and curators, art historians, auctioneers, and appraisers who found opportunity in State-sanctioned mass displacement of property that accompanied the slaughter of millions.

The dispossessed lost their homes, their property, their sense of self, the beauty around them was extinguished and they were only left to wonder why such horrors had befallen them.

There exists a significant emotional and spiritual linkage between people of all ages and backgrounds and ethnicities and creeds and the objects that surround them, that populate their lives. It could be a candelabra, it could be an incense burner, it could also be a small drawing by Edgar Degas, or a satirical piece by Georg Grosz or even a surrealistic painting by Felix Nussbaum, or a ditty scrawled on a napkin. It doesn’t matter what it is; it is the meaning that it embodies which is precious to us all. The crime consists in rending that object from our bosom, as if part of our soul had been ripped to shreds, and for what? For being Jewish, for being “different”? for being “unacceptable”? “undesirable”?

We certainly do not place objects above people. We place objects in the constellation of people, much like satellites circling planets. And when the satellite leaves its orbit, all hell breaks loose and we are released into the wilderness of space, aimless.

Fighting for restitution does not weaken our loss, it acts as a vital reminder of the world that was consumed in flames and gas, not completely, but almost. Obtaining restitution is but a small step to establish the cardinal principle that justice does exist and that with resolve and perseverance and belief in ourselves and in our kin and in higher principles, even if the outcome is hopeless much like it was for those young fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto, my personal heroes, we can assert the value of justice and reaffirm our right to exist while honoring the loss of those who came before us and cannot be with us due to a crime against humanity.

For myself, I am the single child of two artists, two artists who sought out the famed “School of Paris” and bought a one-way boat ticket from New York to experience it all in the City of Lights, poor as could be, rich as could be. Miserable but filled with the soul and spirit of what they embraced and lived—art and culture. Breathing it, in and out, every day, as pure as the driven snow, which drove them into the ground, because, as you know, the art market is unforgiving, cruel, and indifferent to human plight. By the way, Lincoln Kirstein and his ilk are part and parcel of that market, that cultured elite which enjoys driving artists into the ground in the name of Kultur. I make no apologies for being so fiendish and cynical but that is the cold reality that artists must endure. By extension, the “Monuments Men” would not have given the time of day to most artists incinerated in the Nazi apocalypse. Sad but true.

Where are we now? Most people think that the excitement today is about money. It always has been. People are what they are. A cheap headline always includes money. Journalists do not write about a restituted collection if the word “million” is not included in the header. That state of affairs comes from ignorance and intellectual opportunism, the flip side of “pornographic journalism.” It is no different today than it was in the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s. Yes, it is true that high-priced restitutions are good for the art market. There is a certain twisted logic in the way that the press, comforted by today’s elites, creates a perverse and distorted linkage between the restitution of looted art and the staggering values derived from those objects that have been returned to rightful owners. As if the only objects that were stolen by the Nazis were of museum quality and affordable only to the 1 per cent. Let's not forget that the 99 per cent are ignored by the press and whose clamor for justice is never heeded? Why then claimants to give up and simply “remember"?

Once again, it is not just about Gustav Klimt or Egon Schiele. It is about those thousands of artistic minds and creative spirits from dozens of nations who produced all kinds of works, in all sorts of media, as extensions of their spirit. It is up to us to appreciate them or ignore them, but their sum constitutes our cultural and artistic patrimony, like it or not. As to your quip about rescuing a piece by Damien Hirst, he occupies a space in our culture, even if we do agree here that his work might not be worth saving. But, if I did not save Hirst, why should anyone save my parents’ works? Who am I to judge what is worth saving and what is worth abandoning to a hellfire? Such flawed reasoning puts us square in the lap of the Monuments Men whose mission was to rescue the “cultural treasures” of Western civilization, worshipped in countless museum studies programs, institutes of art, and revered temples of culture, at the expense of the lesser-known, the lower tiers of cultural and artistic output. Cost-benefit analysis correlates with the rarefied air of high-priced recoveries and restitution of stolen art.

Nazi looted art conference at Lafayette College, October 26-28, 2011: a debriefing (I)

From left to right: Rachel Davidson, Diane Ahl, Radu Pribic

Courtesy: Lafayette College

It has now been close to two weeks since Lafayette College in quaint Easton, PA, hosted a first-ever conference on Nazi looted art. Starting from scratch, the organizers of the conference, Professors Diane Ahl and Radu Pribic, brought together a group of speakers who represented different perspectives on the issue of looted art and art restitution.

Day 1: October 26, 2011

The conference opened on a screening of “The Rape of Europa”, a freewheeling adaptation of Lynn Nicholas’ landmark work of same name which detailed the Nazi-orchestrated plunder of works and objects of art across Europe, while focusing most of its attention on the Allied—read American—civilian and mostly military response to those exactions and the means taken to repair the damage caused by Nazi thefts.

This was my third viewing of “The Rape of Europa” The first time was on television, the second time was at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, during a Jewish Film Festival. That screening was memorable only because I ran into Lynn Nicholas looking a bit lost in the line of viewers waiting to see the film being shown in the East Wing. When I asked her what she was doing there, she said simply that she wanted to be there in case anyone had questions about the movie. What? You mean you weren’t invited to speak at your own movie? No, was the answer. The third screening was in Easton. At the second screening, I noticed three things:

1. someone intimately involved with production and scriptwriting decided to go for the schmaltz factor by inserting several high points of art restitution in the United States—the return of Marie Altmann’s famed paintings by Gustav Klimt, and the recovery of a painting by François Boucher from a Utah museum which had belonged to a member of the Paris-based heavily splintered Seligmann family. The true schmaltz occurred when a German citizen was featured as self-anointed rescuer of Judaica from his small town, the name of which escapes me completely. Not having anything to do with the “Rape of Europa,” it did, however, take on a life of its own by injecting the personal into the political, thus illustrating how a complex topic such as cultural plunder can transform daily lives into a quest for justice and, for others, redemption.
    
2. the Russians were very emotional and steadfast about their desire to equate their policy of no-return of so-called ‘trophy art’ and the humanitarian catastrophe wrought upon them by the Wehrmacht, the SS, and the Luftwaffe against the former Soviet Union, especially during the years-long siege of Leningrad. Interestingly, and memorably, one of the hard-line ministers of culture who was interviewed in what is now Saint-Petersburg dropped a portentous hint, indicating that his countrymen would be willing to discuss the return of trophy art in 20 years or so. Since the movie was produced in the late 1990s, that would place a potential return date… within six to eight years. Now, that’s a sign of hope!
    
3. the “Rape of Europa” spends an unnecessarily long, long time on the siege of Monte Cassino in Italy. That accursed monastery drew hellfire for weeks without harming German defenses, but managing to erase a major cultural monument and killing close to a thousand civilians huddled for safety in what they had rightfully viewed as a ‘sanctuary’ from the horrors of war. Needless to say, I cannot blame your average GI Joe for wondering why ten thousand men had to die for that rock.

The third screening reaffirmed what I had long suspected, that the subject of art looting per se was given short shrift throughout this award-winning documentary. Although well-illustrated in its broadest possible strokes, the “Rape of Europa” goes very light on the very complex and very heavy on the not-so-clear. To wit: the actual plunder of collections in occupied Europe was a complicated affair brought about by conflicting interests within the Nazi hierarchy (Goering, Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Rosenberg, von Ribbentrop, to name a few) and the plethora of local opportunists that the Nazis encountered in countries that they occupied, who were only too willing to provide their assistance, support and expertise in exchange for a cut of the booty. Too heavy on the not-so-clear is evidenced by the French episode on the Jeu de Paume and Rose Valland, the iconic heroine of art restitution in France on the verge of attaining sainthood should anyone pay close attention to the myths that have been designed around her career as an unwitting curator of the Musée du Jeu de Paume in downtown Paris during the period of German occupation and as the lead postwar restitution officer for a succession of failed French governments up until the early 1960s. 


Myth #1: Rose Valland volunteered for her mission to spy on the Germans at the Jeu de Paume; myth number two: she risked her life every day while taking copious notes on the ins and outs of looted works entering and leaving the Jeu de Paume; myth number three: no one knew that she spoke German. These are some of the many details that have filtered out into postwar revisionist history of cultural plunder in France.

Producers of "Rape of Europa": Richard Berge, Nicole Newnham, and Bonni Cohen
Source: Rape of Europa

On the plus side, I was delighted to finally meet up and converse with Nicole Newnham, one of the producers of the “Rape of Europa” who spoke candidly of her experiences making this beautifully-filmed and edited documentary on a subject that resonates even more today than it did a decade ago and which, for some corny reason, brought me close to tears, more so because we are still so far away from reaching a far-reaching solution to the long-term effects of the continental-wide plunder of cultural items during the Third Reich and the postwar occupation of Germany and Austria by Allied forces. It’s not so much the Rape of Europa as it is the rape of the cultural heritage of the victims of Nazism and Fascism, writ large.

'Human Rights and Cultural Heritage: from the Holocaust to the Haitian Earthquake'

Brookdale Center, Cardozo Law School
Source: Wikipedia

This one-day symposium took place on March 31, 2011, at Cardozo Law School in downtown Manhattan.

It featured, among other things, a panel on "Nazi-Era Looted Art: Research and Restitution."  The speakers included one person from the art trade, Lucian Simmons, a vice president at Sotheby's; Larry Kaye, of the law firm of Herrick Feinstein who co-chairs its art law group; Inge van der Vlies, who is a senior official of the Dutch Restitution Committee in Amsterdam; Lucille Roussin, co-organizer of the conference and head of the Holocaust Restitution Claims Practicum at Cardozo Law School.... and myself, as co-founder of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project and the only non-lawyer and historian in the assembly.

Lucian Simmons
Source: Sotheby's

Larry Kaye spoke about the events surrounding the seizure of the 'Portrait of Walli' by Egon Schiele and the involvement of his firm in the settlement of the case with the Leopold Foundation in Vienna, Austria.  He also addressed some sensitive issues governing the plunder of the Goudstikker collection in Amsterdam and the postwar role of the Dutch government in not facilitating the restitution of many items in that collection.

Howard Speigler, left, and Lawrence Kaye
Source: The New York Times via Fred R. Conrad

Lucian Simmons described how Sotheby's is leading the charge on art restitutions, careful, though, not to intrude on the rights of the consignors and the good faith purchasers, and reminding all of us that there are two victims in this game--the historical victim who lost the work or object and the good faith purchaser who--god forbid!--was caught with it, thinking it was perfectly fine. He did address an early incident involving a painting by Jakob van Ruysdael which had been withdrawn from a sale at Sotheby's London, in October 1997 on account of its shady provenance--which indicated that it had been acquired for Hitler's Linz Museum project.

Inge van der Vlies
Source: Raad Voor Cultuur

Inge van der Vlies gave us a painstaking description of the processes involved in assessing art claims in Holland through her restitution committee, reminding us all that, had the Dutch government adhered strictly to the rule of law, no returns would have been possible to claimants because of statutory and other considerations governing ownership of works of art.  Hence, its munificence in 'doing the right thing' governs the debate on restitution.  Larry Kaye took exception to the Dutch government's interpretation of what constitutes legally binding decisions in art restitution cases.  Nothing further needs to be said here about this.

Being the historian of the group, my task was to give context to the issue of restitution. I opened up the subject writ large, going back to the Hague conventions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries which sought to define protections for civilians and their property while armies duked it out near their fields.  My point, which is not popular, is that plunder of works and objects of art motivated by ideological, political, racial, and ethnic considerations are characteristic of the first half of the 20th century, starting with Armenia, going through the muddle of the First World War, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, the Anschluss, the establishment of a Nazi protectorate in then-Czecholovakia, the disappearance of Poland, the Nazi invasion of Western and Northern Europe, and the subsequent onslaught against the Soviet Union and southeastern Europe.  Not much time left to discuss the fundaments of restitution except to indicate that market considerations reigned supreme in the immediate postwar which compelled the US government in 1946 to liberalize the art trade by quickly eliminating wartime restrictions on the imports of cultural objects into the US, without knowing what objects might be of illicit origin.  The US and its allies shut down art claims in and around 1948 in their respective zones of occupation in Germany and Austria, thereby shifting the claims process to national governments in Europe and the Americas.

Howard Spiegler, Larry Kaye's alter ego at the Art Law Group of Herrick Feinstein, delivered a genuinely entertaining lecture over lunch where he took on the critics of art restitution litigation, especially aimed at high-revenue firms such as his and Larry's.  Point well taken.  Someone has to do the work.  The problem since 1945? There is still no national and/or international mechanism by which claimants who cannot afford to pay legal fees can be guaranteed a satisfactory procedure through which to articulate their losses and seek redress.  It's now been 66 years since the end of the Second World War and chances are that nothing will ever happen.

The main disappointment in an otherwise productive conference was the inability of the conveners to make a link between Holocaust-era losses and cultural property disputes in the postwar era, and also to address the confusion and complications arising out of the distinction between cultural property and other types of art objects and works of art.  Currently countries such as Italy are deliberately placing Holocaust- and World War II-era losses under the roof of cultural property and cultural patrimony, thus treating a painting by Claude Monet on the same basis as an antique urn.  The end result? the likelihood that the object, even if restituted, cannot leave Italian territory without special permits.  Something akin to what takes place in Austria with works by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, and in France, with any masterpiece produced on French territory.

Hopefully, at some future forum, someone will take the brave step and challenge these artificial barriers that separate antiquities from the rest of artistic production.