A recapitulation of Jeu de Paume articles (2011-2020)

by Marc Masurovsky

The “plundered art” blog has given extensive coverage to different aspects of the so-called ERR database, or “Jeu de Paume” database, since its release to the public in October 2010. The database is still available for anyone to consult and conduct searches on looted objects, their owners and their displacement during and after WWII. The main reason for this is selfish: I designed this database and managed it for close to 15 years. It is the ideal case study with which to understand the inner workings of what we refer to as “cultural plunder.” Not the kind that is random and unorganized, but the kind that is premeditated, scientifically executed, methodically prepared and carried out in the context of a genocidal undertaking.

The second half of October 2024 will be devoted to a series of articles that drill deep inside the inner workings of the Jeu de Paume from its reconversion in the fall of 1940 as a processing center for confiscated Jewish cultural property to its closure in early August 1944, two weeks before the Paris insurrection led by French resistance elements on August 19, 1944. Hopefully, it will give me an opportunity to ask (or re-ask) some uncomfortable questions which require at some point answers from scholars and researchers.

At the end of this exercise, I hope that you, the reader, will realize that the people responsible for the management of the Jeu de Paume and the processing of tens of thousands of looted objects through its galleries and storage areas were rather ordinary, many of them well-educated, and if you met them today, you would not suspect in the least that they participated in a massive four-year long criminal enterprise. They are just like you and me, they do their job and go home. They may even enjoy what they do. Like well-trained museum employees, art historians and experts, cataloguers, craters, appraisers, they apply themselves to their tasks with the professionalism that is expected of them, despite the fact that their superiors were ideological architects of the plunder whose fruits they handled on a daily basis.

Here are the highlights of the 2011-2020 "plundered art" coverage of the Jeu de Paume's activities and operations between 1940-1944:

-the building of the ERR database, its inner workings and the process of building the ERR database

-case studies of collections like those of Georges Bernheim, Diane Esmond (mistakenly tagged by the ERR as her father’s, Edouard Esmond) and a follow-up look at the collection’s fate, Raoul Meyer, Alexandra Pregel also known as Avxente or Auxente, Robert Schuhmann, Jacques Seligmann and Co., Hugo Simon, Frederic Unger, Georges Voronoff,

-certain classifications of objects dictated by the ERR’s experts like MA-B (or Möbel-Aktion Bilder), UNB (Unbekannt)

-particular artists and their creations whose stories were compelling or raised larger questions about Nazi cultural policy:

Jean-Baptiste Corot’s “Mrs. Stumpf”, a dessus-de-porte by Marie Laurencin, a bronze casting by Aristide Maillol, Gabriel Metsu, Caspar Netscher’s “Lady with a Parrot”, Pablo Picasso, Camille Pissarro’s “View of the Pont-Neuf from the Seine” , a self-portrait by Vincent van Gogh, Edouard Vuillard, Philip Wouwermans, “Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berri » 

the Nazi fascination with Netsuke objects, Valencia ceramics, MA-B 702, Schloss 91, a painting by Bartholomeus van der Helst and the various attempts to recover it. and a 13th dynasty Egyptian antiquity.

-certain depots managed by the ERR in various parts of occupied Europe to store and dispose of looted cultural objects like the Nikolsburg depot in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and the fate of its contents in 1945.

-the treatment of ideological issues through art like the “Jewish question”, race, “Degenerate Art” and its hypothetical destruction.

Future installments on the Jeu de Paume will focus on the photographing of confiscated works and objects, the implementation of Nazi cultural policy on the treatment of confiscated works and objects, the esthetic preferences of Jewish collectors and dealers whose collections were processed through the Jeu de Paume, and a reconstruction of the actual chronology of the confiscations of Jewish collections in the Paris region.

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.