The Allentown settlement

Portrait of Georges the Bearded

by Marc Masurovsky

In late August 2024, the Allentown Art Museum in Allentown, PA, announced that it had reached an agreement with Henry and Herthe Bromberg, heirs of Martin Bromberg, a Hamburg-based German Jewish businessman regarding a painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder and his workshop entitled “Portrait of Georges the Bearded, Duke of Saxony.” The museum’s leadership celebrated the agreement as a “just and fair solution…in the spirit of the Washington Principles on Nazi-confiscated art…”. The museum’s lawyer, Nicholas O’Donnell, suggested that this agreement was a “reminder that zero sum thinking in restitution cases does not have to be the only way…”(1)  “Zero sum thinking” according to a recent New York Times article, implies that “life is a battle over finite rewards where gains for one mean losses for another.”

The Bromberg family’s losses were beyond their control due to the virulent Nazi-led implementation of anti-Jewish policies sweeping Germany after 30 January 1933. According to Max Weintraub, president of the Allentown Art Museum, the Cranach had not been confiscated by the Nazis nor had it been the subject of “a forced sale,” The museum argued that the painting had changed hands in the context of “Flight Goods [fluchtgut] while the Brombergs were fleeing from persecution…” In other words, the museum’s stance was that the Brombergs most likely sold the painting after they had left Germany.  It concluded that the historical research was inconclusive on the issue of duress and a forced sale.

However, Artnet on 26 August 2024 reported that the Brombergs had sold the painting to the Paris-based Galerie F. Kleinberger in 1938. The Allentown Art Museum did not mention the 1938 sale to Kleinberger Gallery in Paris. On that same day, the Art Newspaper indicated that the painting had been at the Bromberg residence in Hamburg until at least 1935, that its whereabouts thereafter were uncertain until the Brombergs approached Galerie Kleinberger in Paris in December 1938 at which point it sold the “Bromberg Collection” to Allen Loebl, the Parisian gallery’s representative. Allegedly, the Cranach was part of that sale. The article’s author is formal on one point: “the context of the loss was escape from persecution,” which is the starting point for a fleeing Nazi victim’s experience of duress.

The historical evidence surrounding the sale of the “Bromberg Collection” in late 1938 to a Parisian art dealer surfaced when the French government agreed in 2016 to restitute a painting by Joos van Cleve to the Bromberg heirs which was also part of the “Bromberg Collection.” The French National Museum Directorate (Direction des Musées de France) characterized the sale of the Bromberg Collection as not fitting within the standard definition of a commercial transaction but should be viewed as a forced sale resulting from the duress experienced by the Bromberg family as they fled Nazi persecution. 

This interpretation of the circumstances surrounding the sale of the “Bromberg Collection” contrasts sharply with the “Fluchtgut” theory advanced by the Allentown Art Museum. Fluchtgut cases are traditionally viewed as a diluted version of a Nazi victim’s “persecution scenario” because the claimed works were sold outside the territory of Nazi Germany, thus in a superficial context of “Freedom.” It’s hard to know if the French would have restituted the van Cleve had they had found it to be a product of “fluchtgut.”

Archival documents point to a subsequent sale of the Bromberg Collection by Kleinberger to Hans Wendland, a German art dealer who was heavily involved in recycling looted and displaced Jewish-owned cultural goods during the Nazi era. Wendland may have sold some of the Bromberg works to New York art dealers with whom he had longstanding ties, thus giving additional texture to the transfer of some of the Bromberg works from Europe to the New York art market shortly before the Allied-enforced Atlantic blockade came into force.

The Allentown settlement challenges the restitution paradigm enshrined in the physical return of the contested object to the claimants. The injection of grey hues into this supposedly black/white approach to restitution suggests that we can consider watered down “readings” of the impact of Nazi persecution on Jews fleeing to safety thus allowing us to “sand down” the rough edges of the “Nazi persecution scenario” as it applies to hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing Nazi rule and leveraging their goods abroad in order to survive, thus once again pitting private property rights against the moral and ethical ramifications of genocide.

Brief recap of the Brombergs’ Lucas Cranach painting

30 January 1933: The Nazis come to power in Germany. It is the beginning of a vast and criminal anti-Jewish campaign sponsored by the Third Reich which will last until 8 May 1945 after the genocide of six million Jewish men, women and children.

Up to 1935: the Cranach is still at the Hamburg residence of the Bromberg family.

November-December 1938: sale to Allen Loebl of the Galerie F. Kleinberger Galerie in Paris. Hans Wendland was instrumental in dispersing the Bromberg collection including an unknown number to New York art dealers.

1939-1961: Bromberg paintings enter the New York art market, either across the Atlantic Ocean by boat, or by plane via Lisbon (The famous “Pan Am Clipper”) or via South and Central America (mostly Argentina, Mexico, Cuba and Venezuela) during WWII.

1961: the Allentown Art Museum acquires the Cranach painting from a New York gallery.

2016: A painting by Joos van Cleve is restituted to the Brombergs by the French Ministry of Culture under Audrey Azoulay’s impetus.

2022: The Allentown Art Museum receives a restitution claim from the Bromberg heirs for the painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder. The museum’s research points to a sale date which postdates the Brombergs’ exit from Nazi Germany, hence its insistence on categorizing the sale as “fluchtgut."

August 2024: the Allentown Art Museum enters into an agreement with the Bromberg heirs to sell the painting and share the proceeds thereof. Christie’s New York organizes the sale.

Notes

(1) comment excerpted from a statement by Nicholas O’Donnell on LinkedIn in February 2025.

The strange odyssey of Mme. Stumpf and her daughter

Madame Stumpf and Her Daughter
Source: NGA

The National Gallery of Washington in Washington, DC, holds more than a dozen paintings that were once looted by the Germans during World War II and have since been restituted to their rightful owners. One of those paintings is “Mme. Stumpf and her Daughter”, by Jean-Baptiste Corot, stolen from the Paris art dealer, Paul Rosenberg. The painting appears in his Floirac inventory as “Portrait de Mme. Stumph née Elisa Monet et sa fille” and bears his inventory number No. 623 and was painted in 1872.

According to Paul Rosenberg, he had stashed away this painting together with many others at a small château in a southwestern French town called Floirac-la Souys, in the district of the Gironde.

In his own words: “On September 18, 1940, a group of German gendarmes and policemen, accompanied by an expert from Paris, whose name I do not known, took possession of the paintings packed at Castel Floirac and loaded them in motor trucks.” The German gentlemen were part of so-called Geheime Feldpolizei units (GFP) working under orders of the German Embassy in Paris. In November 1940, the German Embassy was forced to cede to the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) all of the art objects that it had forcibly removed from Jewish owners who had fled France. The works were deposited at the Louvre and from there at the Jeu de Paume.

The ERR staff at the Jeu de Paume inventoried a segment of the Paul Rosenberg collection in three lots—Floirac (P.R.), Bordeaux (Rosenberg-Bernstein Bordeaux), and Paris (Rosenberg Paris). But, being the disorganized lot that they could be, the ERR staff comingled some of the works, not that it ultimately mattered. Hence, Mme. Stumpf ended up as Rosenberg-Bernstein Bordeaux Nr. 27 (“Mutter und Kind”), although the painting had not been seized in Bordeaux. Interestingly, the inventory was drawn up in 1942, a year after the painting had already been recycled on the Paris art market.

Rosenberg Bernstein-Bordeaux 27 Öl auf Leinwand
Source: NARA via ERR Project

“Mme. Stumpf and her daughter” was the subject of the first exchange of paintings between Hermann Goering and dealers such as Rochlitz who obtained it from Goering on 3 March 1941 as part of a lot of 11 Impressionist paintings. Rochlitz provided Goering with two Old Masters—one by Jan Weenix and another from Northern Italy. He turned around and provided it to a man named Zachariah Birtchansky. Together with his brother, Birtchansky operated from several addresses in Paris, including the rue Royale. Although of Jewish descent, the pair had established itself as art brokers on the Paris art scene for many years prior to the Second World War and had cultivated shady relationships with a number of unsavory pro-Nazi art dealers, especially Gustav Rochlitz, Hans Wendland, and Karl Haberstock.

Hans Wendland, characterized as the most prolific art dealing operator working for the Nazi government in Western Europe, paid a visit to Birtchansky in 1941 and left with Rosenberg’s Corot painting. He consigned the painting with several others from the Paul Rosenberg collection at a Swiss gallery named Fischer, whose owner was Theodor Fischer, and was based in Lucerne, Switzerland. Fischer, too willing to transact in works of dubious provenance, sold the painting to Dr. Raeber of Basel, another recipient of looted works from France.

The Corot painting was found, repatriated to France, and restituted to Paul Rosenberg.

Decades later, in 1965, Madame Stumpf and her daughter was in the hands of Alexandre Rosenberg, son of Paul Rosenberg, who had his own gallery in New York City not too far from East 79th Street and Madison Avenue. Alexandre’s claim to fame was to have been part of the French resistance unit that intercepted the infamous train of looted art that had left Paris on 1 August 1944, heading for Nikolsburg. To his great surprise, he discovered a great number of his father’s paintings on that train. Back to New York…

Eugene Thaw, the New York art expert, bought the painting from Rosenberg who sold it to Rudolf Heinemann, international man of mystery, close partner of Knoedler’s, and the brains behind the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection. Heinemann turned around and sold part interests in the painting to a number of collectors including Sir Geoffrey Agnew. Within months, Agnew had sold the painting to Ailsa Mellon Bruce for $275,000. Ironically, the transaction to Bruce had been the brainchild of John Walker, then director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, where the Corot masterpiece eventually ended up.