Anthony van Dyck and The Music Man

Portrait of Paulus Pontius,  Anthony van Dyck

by Marc Masurovsky

Adolphe Schloss spent the last thirty years of his life painstakingly assembling a collection of Old Master paintings—Dutch, Flemish, German, Italian, Spanish and French. When he died on New Year’s Eve of 1910-1911, Adolphe Schloss had collected more than 330 paintings. His widow and children took care of the collection until it was time to send it to safety at the approach of war in August 1939. Four years later, a commando of French and German agents stormed the site where the paintings were hidden at the Château de Chambon in Laguenne, Corrèze. They seized all the paintings and brought them to Paris for “processing.”

After they reached their destination on 10 August 1943, representatives of the Vichy government, senior officials from the Louvre, and German officials proceeded with the dismemberment of the confiscated collection. The Louvre snatched 49 paintings for its permanent collection while 262 paintings were sold manu militari to Hitler’s Linz Museum project, and 22 paintings served as a “finder’s fee” for the person who denounced the collection’s whereabouts, Jean-François Lefranc. The 262 paintings were shipped to Munich for storage at the Führerbau from which they were stolen between 29 April and 2 May 1945, under the very noses of American troops. One of those paintings was the Portrait of a gentleman-Paulus Pontius by Anthony van Dyck.

Before Adolphe Schloss acquired the work by 1896, Paulus Pontius had changed hands numerous times and travelled throughout Western Europe and the United Kingdom. Its earliest recorded owner was Cardinal Silvio Valenti Gonzaga (1690-1756), who held the painting until his death in 1756. Then it conveyed to Cardinal Luigi Valenti Gonzaga (1725-1808), Rome, until 1763 when an art dealer, Hendrick de Leth (1703-1766) acquired it. From there, the painting crossed the Channel and ended up at Peper Harow in Surrey, England with the Midleton Family (we think). It remained in Surrey until 1851 after which time it migrated to London into the hands of Wynn Ellis (1790-1875). By 1896, London-based P. & D. Colnaghi sold Paulus Pontius to Charles Sedelmeyer in Paris (cat. 1896, no. 11, ill.). Sedelmeyer was one of Adolphe Schloss’ main art advisors. Naturally, Schloss snapped up the van Dyck portrait that same year and it remained with him and the Schloss family until its confiscation in 1943.

Munich 1945

MCCP card #46622

The massive unprecedented and largely unsolved art theft at the Führerbau (29 April-2 May 1945) netted over 1100 paintings. While American troops were completing the liberation of Munich and ridding the embattled city of its most fanatical armed Nazi resisters, Munich citizens were busily robbing Hitler’s administrative office building in search of food, alcohol, and anything fungible with which to survive in war-torn Munich.

Like most of the plundered paintings removed from the Führerbau, Paulus Pontius went quickly underground. It took three years for Americans to catch wind of its possible location. Until then, its whereabouts had remained unknown to American and French investigators connected with the Munich Central Collecting Point (MCCP), a central processing station for all objects recovered by Allied troops in Bavaria and processed for repatriation to their countries of origin.

Wolfgang von Dallwitz

The efforts to locate the missing painting took an unusual turn in February 1948 when Wolfgang von Dallwitz, of Biedersteinstrasse 21 (Munich) told Edgar Breitenbach that he had seen the painting in mid-November 1947 at “the apartment of a friend in Munich” together with two other paintings from the Schloss collection (a painting by Ludolf Backhuyzen /Schloss 3, a painting by Abraham van Beijeren /Schloss 8). A Dr. Irwin Sieger had allegedly shipped them from a railroad depot in Göttingen. [Breitenbach to Leonard, “Information concerning stolen Schloss paintings,” 25 February 1948, www.fold3.com], a fact he denied vigorously when questioned by Breitenbach.

Irwin (or Erwin) Sieger

Allied investigators were unsure of Sieger’s identity since they had received conflicting reports about the activities of a man bearing that name actively engaged in concealing and dispersing art looted during WWII and stolen from the Führerbau. Under questioning, Dr. Erwin Sieger lived at Olgastrasse 98 in Munich who was known as an “unscrupulous businessman” and a self-described “art amateur”, pledged to assist US authorities with their investigations into the whereabouts of the Schloss paintings and others. [Breitenbach to Leonard, “Information concerning stolen Schloss paintings,” 25 February 1948, www.fold3.com].

Lt. Hugoboom

The music man

In early 1947, while serving as a MFAA officer in Munich, Lt. Ray W. [Wayne] Hugoboom received Portrait of Paulus Pontius as “turned-in loot from the Führerbau” which Hugoboom characterized as a “gift” from the Oberbürgermeister (Lord Mayor) of Munich. However, instead of returning it to the MCCP as he should have, Hugoboom asked Franz Söker in Neu-Gilching if he could restore the damaged painting. It took him about two weeks. 

Once ready, Hugoboom hung the painting in his office. He even mentioned to his former secretary, Miss Koslowski, that he had bought it on the black market in Munich and not to tell his superior officer, Captain Rae of the MFAA. Lt. Hugoboom had a black crate made with metal sidings in which to house the painting, ostensibly for shipment. When confronted by Edgar Breitenbach, Lt. Hugoboom contradicted Koslowski’s assertion in a letter dated 3 June 1948. He delivered a contrite apology about his errant ways in the handling of the van Dyck. [Ray W. Hugoboom, School of Music, Indiana Unversity, Bloomington, IN, to Edgar Breitenbach, MFAA, OMGBavaria, 3 June 1948; Breitenbach to Hugoboom, 26 May 1948, www.fold3.com].

The recovery

On 6 April 1948, Edgar Breitenbach recovered Anthony van Dyck’s Portrait of Paulus Pontius at the studio of Alfred Koch on Holbeinstrasse 5 (or 43), Munich. According to Breitenbach, the van Dyck painting was the third most important painting from the Schloss collection. As part of his investigation into the circumstances surrounding the van Dyck painting, Breitenbach summoned for questioning Franz Söker to the MCCP on 14 April 1948. [Herbert Leonard, OMGB, to Franz Söker, 14 April 1948, RG 260 M 1946 Reel 137 NARA. www.fold3.com].

Ray Wayne Hugoboom’s defense

After Lt. Hugoboom left Munich in mid-1947 and returned to the United States, he received a promotion to become Assistant Professor of Choral Practice at the School of Music at Indiana University, Bloomington, IN. Hugoboom retold his saga with the van Dyck and declared that “the painting was located in an alley rapped [sic] up in old papers, thoroughly soaked and quite badly damaged.” He largely corroborated his official story—restoration, hanging in his room “for a short time before leaving” and leaving the painting with Alfred Koch “momentarily.” He was so busy with plans for his departure that he forgot to “arrange for [the] return” of the painting to the MCCP. [Wayne Hugoboom to Edgar Breitenbach, 10 May 1948, RG 260 M 1946 Reel 137 NARA].

Breitenbach sets the record straight

In his reply to “dear Hugoboom,” Breitenbach informed him that his letter of 10 May 1948 had caused “considerable embarrassment” at the MFAA. His recounting of the facts did not tally with the MFAA’s investigation.

Firstly, the mayor of Munich did not show him the van Dyck painting and three other paintings. It is Alfred Koch who advised him on the selection. Koch remembered the other paintings very well: two Breughel-like landscapes and a Dutch interior with woman and child. Koch did recall your hesitancy in accepting the gift but that you decided to take it, nevertheless, hoping to donate it “at a later date to some museum.”

Secondly, the story of the gift from the Mayor’s office may have been a hoax. Did Hugoboom partake in it? Unsure. But Alfred Koch and an accomplice by the name of Gillman were certainly in on it. Breitenbach noted that an apology to the Oberbürgermeister was in order. Gillman was also involved as a bit player in the mishandling of another painting from the Schloss collection, Portrait of a Lady, by Bartholomeus van der Helst.

The MFAA ultimately laid the responsibility for the van Dyck affair at Hugoboom’s feet and suggested that the only way to fix it was for him to “make a clean breast” to the MFAA staff. [Edgar Breitenbach to Hugoboom, 26 May 1948, RG 260 M 1946 Reel 137 NARA].  On 3 June 1948, Hugoboom formally apologized to “Mr. Breitenbach.” [Wayne Hugoboom to Mr. Breitenbach, 3 June 1948, RG 260 M 1946 Reel 137 NARA].

Final destination

Portrait of Paulus Pontius, Israel Museum, Jerusalem

The van Dyck painting was repatriated to Paris on 3 June 1948 and restituted to the family of Adolphe Schloss on 6 July 1948. It was sold at Galerie Charpentier on 25 May 1949 (lot no. 17). Madeleine and Joseph R. Nash, an Australian couple living in Paris, acquired the painting. They died on 15 August 1977. Two years later, in keeping with their history of donations to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the painting was bequeathed anonymously to the Israel Museum.

Sources

RG 260 M 1947 Reel 137 NARA through www.fold3.com

ERR database

www.errproject.org

The Jewish Digital Cultural Recovery Project (JDCRP) Pilot Project

https://pilot-demo.jdcrp.org/

The Monuments Men and Women Foundation

https://www.monumentsmenandwomenfnd.org/hugoboom-lt-r-wayne

Reviewed and edited by Saida S. Hasanagic

Orphans

by Marc Masurovsky

Historian Lisa Leff pointed out in her recent book, “The Archive Thief,” how, in the late 1940s, the leadership of the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction (JCR) compared identifiable books recovered in former Nazi-held territories in the aftermath of WWII to “kidnapped children.” According to Rabbi Bernard Heller, the “theoretical” restitution” of these “kidnapped children” would be akin to reuniting them with their “overjoyed parents”. For those cultural assets that could not be matched with an identifiable owner, these “stunned waifs” would be placed in “foster homes” run by “loving foster parents.” As it turns out, these “abductees” ended up in a complex network of “foster homes” happy as pie to become the new “[foster] parents.” These new “homes” consist of museums, libraries, and other cultural institutions, State-controlled and/or private, Jewish and non-Jewish around the world.

The JCR was tasked with redistributing among Jewish communities worldwide (mostly in the United States, Europe and Palestine/Israel) those cultural objects bearing no obvious markings that might tie them to an owner. In their zeal, even objects that could have been reunited with rightful owners were treated as “waifs.”

Decades later, European governments explained how they treated Jewish-owned assets in the post-Holocaust world and if they had made any effort to return them or make them available to their owners or next of kin. For example, the Swedish authorities issued a report in 1997 on “orphaned” assets located in Swedish financial and other institutions. To them “orphaned” meant that assets had remained “unclaimed” for decades following the end of the Holocaust.  In Greece, “orphaned” property was transferred to an organization responsible for aiding needy survivors, most likely with the proceeds from liquidating such “orphaned” assets.  The same scenario also unfolded in countries like Austria and France with greater or lesser success.

In 2008, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem staged an exhibit called “Orphaned Art: Looted Art from the Holocaust at the Israel Museum.” More than 1200 “orphaned” items are catalogued at the Israel Museum. The Jewish Restitution Successor Organization (JRSO) was the main collector of these cultural “orphans”. It operated in post-WWII Germany and Austria to locate, identify and disperse objects tagged as Jewish-owned, mostly without an identifiable owner to whom to return the found objects. The JCR was its redistribution arm.

Marilyn Henry, who wrote a regular column for the Jerusalem Post before her untimely death in  2011, argued that these “orphans” should be transferred to European Jewish cultural institutions since they came from European nations subjected to Nazi rule and terror. She mentioned how Benjamin Ferencz, the noted former chief prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal of Nuremberg, described recipients of “orphaned” assets as their new owners, rather than their trustees or custodians.
In other words, the new “parents” held clear title to these cultural “orphans.” Ferencz’s comment could be interpreted as a clear rebuke to any attempt by claimants, relatives of the unfortunate “parents”, to obtain restitution of these “objects”, in other words, reuniting them with their “families.”

Throughout the post-1945 era, museums, libraries and other cultural institutions have been transformed into massive “foster” homes for “orphaned” objects. In line with Ferencz’s comment, one can understand more clearly how Jewish museums around the world have been reluctant, remiss and even hostile to the idea of restituting any of the “orphans” that they lovingly curate and nurture as “foster parents.” Even the US Library of Congress played dumb in the late 1990s when faced with the evidence that they held at least a thousand valuable books spanning three centuries of noted Jewish authorship which it had obtained after WWII.

The London-based European Commission on Looted Art (ECLA) has described “orphaned” works as having no prior ownership history. If we adapt that line of thought liberally and argue that any cultural object is an “orphan” whose previous ownership history is non-existent, the vast majority of cultural objects currently sitting in cultural institutions worldwide or being offered for sale by auction houses across the globe should be dubbed as “orphans” in want of their “parents” due to the sheer absence of a provenance that describes their history. Surely, we cannot accuse the art world of being so cruel and insensitive, can we?

Incidentally, and this might be completely irrelevant, the US Senate considered a bill in 2008 referred to as the “Orphan Art Bill” which would regulate how copyrighted images can be used whose owners cannot be located. A law addressing similar issues was passed in the United Kingdom in 2013. Without getting in too deep into a legal swamp, users of copyrighted orphan works would not be penalized in their use and reuse of such images as long as they had been diligent in seeking out the purported owners of the images.  However, the US Copyright office noted recently that “the ownership status of orphan works does not serve the objectives of the copyright system. For good faith users, orphan works are a frustration, a liability risk, and a major cause of gridlock in the digital marketplace.”

Can the same reasoning be applied to cultural objects “orphaned” as a result of genocidal policies? Should we view cultural “orphans” as a liability risk? Not if we accept the Ferencz verdict of clear title to these objects.

And yet…

If we do generously apply that reasoning to cultural assets “orphaned” as a result of the violence that cost the lives of six million individuals of Jewish descent, we would have to question the level of diligence exerted by new “owners” (according to Ferencz) of “orphaned” cultural assets. In most cases, such diligence has not even been a consideration simply because the reigning assumption amongst the new “foster parents” was that the rightful owners had perished and not left any relatives who could become the new “parents” of these “orphaned” assets.

These poor “orphans” are routinely sold and resold through bookstores, antique shops, galleries, auction houses, Jewish and not, thus bouncing from one “loving foster parent” to another. If Rabbi Heller’s analogy holds, the treatment of these “orphans” constitutes systemic abuse and grievous neglect under the guise of providing a “good home” to those “waifs”.

Let’s face it, no systematic effort has been made in the past 80 years to find the “parents.”

You do know that objects are not people, something that, ironically, officials of Holocaust memorial institutions and even Jewish groups explain when they justify why they do not focus on cultural claims or include acts of plunder and misappropriation in their exhibits and educational programs. Isn’t it twisted irony that those responsible for the relocation and redistribution of “orphaned” objects grounded their arguments in anthropomorphic language to emphasize the humanitarian and profoundly sensitive motivations underlying their mission—to find new homes for the cultural wreckage of the Holocaust? Little did we know that these metaphors eliminated any possibility of viewing restitution as a viable solution to the fate of our “waifs”.

Angelus Novus, Angel of History, by Paul Klee

by Marc Masurovsky

Paul Klee
Source: Wikipedia

Interesting destiny for the watercolor, “Angelus Novus”, a critical early work by Swiss artist Paul Klee.

Angelus Novus, Paul Klee, 1920
Source: Wikipedia

The “Angelus” is also known as the “Angel of History.” Klee painted it in 1920. The Jewish mystical writer, Gerschom Scholem, bought it shortly thereafter and hung it in his apartment in Munich, Germany. Scholem’s close friend, the cultural philosopher Walter Benjamin, viewed it in a major exhibit of Klee’s work at the Galerie Goltz in Munich and acquired it without hesitation. Goltz brokered the sale between the two close friends.

Walter Benjamin
Source: Wikipedia

Benjamin’s relationship to the Angelus Novus was nothing short of profound and deeply rooted in his own existential angst about civilization, the absence of happiness in society, his vision of a humanity bereft of humanity, and yet, in Klee’s angel, he might have gleaned his own angel, a metaphysical creature on whose wings History could be carried aloft. Hope springs eternal, doesn’t it?

Some have written that the Angel’s eyes bear witness to the horrors of history since the dawn of ages and into an unknown future. But they are compassionate and empathetic. For Benjamin, the “Angel” was his angel and Klee’s work took on proportions greater than life, overwhelming Benjamin’s psyche. It was as if this Angel was his redemption, his life buoy. In moments of despair, he would leave it in trust with his friends, including Scholem, and would pick it up again when passing through. Even when Benjamin was destitute to the point of not eating, he would hold back from selling his Angel of History. True, he tried several times. A year or so before his untimely death at Port Bou in the French Pyrenées, Benjamin considered selling the Angel to arts patron Ernest Morgenroth whose son, Ernest Gustav Morgenroth, he knew well—later he became known as Stephen Lackner, a well-known patron of the arts in the United States.

September 26, 1940: Walter Benjamin commits suicide at Port Bou, convinced that he will face impending arrest at the hands of the Vichy authorities who will then turn him over to the German authorities and ultimate doom. Before killing himself, Benjamin secured his papers, manuscripts and the Angel with the renown French writer, Georges Bataille, who then worked at the National Library (Bibliothèque Nationale) in Paris. Bataille hid Benjamin’s belongings in a corner of the Library where they remained throughout the entire period of German occupation. A miracle! Bataille left the National Library and hid Benjamin’s cultural treasures at his apartment. After the end of the Second World War, another friend of Benjamin’s, the author Pierre Bonasse, took over the burden of caring for Benjamin’s items and made every effort to find Benjamin’s sister, Dora, and the German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, to whom he had entrusted the manuscripts and the Angelus. Adorno had since moved to the United States. It took another several years before the handover was successful, thanks in part to an employee of the US Embassy in Paris who acted as a courier for the “Benjamin estate.”

Gerschom Scholem
Source: Wikipedia

Available sources are not clear about the last detail, which is how the Angelus fell back into the hands of Gerschom Scholem. But it did, thanks to Adorno. Was this “gift” specified in Benjamin’s will? Did Benjamin have a written will? Safe to say, though, that Scholem, as first purchaser of the Angelus Novus, became again its owner, owing to the unfortunate premature demise of his best friend, Walter Benjamin. After Scholem’s death in 1982, the Angelus Novus was donated to the Israel Museum in 1987 by Scholem’s widow, Fania, with the help of the Herring Brothers, famed art dealers in New York, and Mr. and Mrs. Ronald Lauder.

One fact is puzzling, though: when reading the information about “Angelus Novus” on the Israel Museum website, it indicates that Scholem “inherited” it. What kind of inheritance can this be between two very close friends whose trust in one another was sealed in part by an “Angel of History”?

Sources: Kerber, Armin, “Lost Paradise: The Angel’s Gaze,” Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland, 2008; Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, “The Complete Correspondence, 1928-1940,” Harvard University Press, 2001.