Dr. Gachet: From confiscation to exile

[Editor's note: This is the third and last installment of a three-part series on The Portrait of Dr. Gachet produced by Angelina Giovani, which is inspired by Cynthia Salzman's masterful treatment of the history of van Gogh's masterpiece as it survived the Nazi era, crossed the Atlantic Ocean, only to find itself at the antipodes of the world, in Japan.]

by Angelina Giovani

Portrait of Dr. Gachet

Several years after the rise to power of Hitler in Germany, Josef Angerer, a decorative arts dealer whose main client was Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, paid a visit to Friedrich Krebs, the Nazi mayor of Frankfurt, to discuss the fate of the Portrait of Dr. Gachet by van Gogh. He claimed that his job was to make sure that there would no obstacles to the sale of the Portrait. Krebs, questioning Angerer’s authority, decided not to take action until Goering gave specific reasons as to why Gachet should be sold. Firstly, the Portrait's style and form were inconsistent with the newly imposed Nazi esthetics. Secondly, the Reich had every intention of de-accessioning such works, which meant  confiscation without compensation. Lastly, instead of destroying these works, it might be wiser to sell them on the international art market outside the borders of the Reich and, by so doing, generate badly-needed foreign exchange.

Krebs asked for assistance from Kremmers, his deputy, into looking into the circumstances of the donation to the Frankfurt Städtische Museum.  The Frankfurt City Council and the city attorney sought legal avenues by which to keep the picture in Frankfurt under the New Order.  Johanna Mössinger, the then owner, had donated the piece, on the condition that it be on permanent display. Should this condition not be upheld, the owner had the right to request the return of the painting.

Johanna

It became impossible to hold on to Gachet and other paintings from her collection for much longer. Goering ordered the seizure of the Portrait of Dr. Gachet along with two other paintings, Daubigny’s Garden by Van Gogh and A Quarry by Paul Cézanne. He sold the Portrait along with the two other works, to Franz Koenigs, a German collector and banker who lived in Amsterdam and whose collection of Old Master drawings was well-known among European collectors. He had studied law in Munich and worked at a Paris bank. He began to collect Old Master drawings in 1921 and by 1933 he had 2,671 works in his collection. With the proceeds from Gachet’s sale, Goering sought to expand his own art collection, mainly with tapestries and paintings.

Franz Koenigs

As soon as Koenigs received the paintings, he turned around and put them up for sale. He contacted Walter Feilchenfeldt, while he was still director of the Cassirer Gallery in Amsterdam. Outraged by Koenigs’ call, Feilchenfeldt said that he would not touch the paintings, which he considered to be stolen property. Despite objections, Koenings sent the pictures over, so that Siegfried Kramarsky, a German banker who lived in Holland, could view them. Kramarsky and Koenigs had had a business relationship since the 1920’s, and he hoped that Kramarsky would take the pictures.  The three paintings presumably arrived at the Cassirer gallery in May 1938.

Walter Feilchenfeldt

Siegfried Kramarsky was born in 1894, and started working at Lisser & Rosenkranz in 1917. With the help of Franz Lisser, his employer, he met and married Lola Popper, born into a middle class family. Her father was a coal broker. She was well-educated and well-grounded in art and literature. Soon after the wedding, Kramarsky and a colleague named Flörsheim bought the firm in 1922. In 1923, the couple moved to Amsterdam, and Koenings became a close family friend. Koenigs encouraged them to buy art, and since Lola preferred the Impressionists, she persuaded Siegfried to acquire them. 

On June 30, 1939 Theodor Fischer, a Swiss art dealer and auctioneer based in Lucerne, Switzerland, held a big sale of so-called “degenerate art” (modern works of art in violation of Nazi esthetics which had been confiscated and de-accessioned from German public collections) at the Grand Hotel National in Lucerne. By this time the Kramarskys had moved part of their collection from Amsterdam to New York via London. The Portrait of Dr. Gachet was among them. Soon thereafter, with the threat of war coming everyday closer, the Kramarskys packed lightly, and left for the United States. Flörsheim, Kramarsky’s banking partner, remained in Amsterdam to run the bank. After the German invasion of Holland, Alois Miedl, Goering’s private banker and art broker in the Netherlands, acquired 74% of Lisser and Rosencranz. Several months after the Nazis took control of Holland, Krebs realized that Gachet had been taken to the US under new ownership.

With the advent of a global war erupting in Europe, the international center for modern art gradually shifted away from Paris to New York, a transition that Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art, had almost single-handedly masterminded. French émigré dealers like Seligmann, Wildenstein, Rosenberg and others had resettled in New York, fleeing from the Nazi invasion of France. A plethora of modern artists, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, had fled the European continent through Portugal, with the help of Barr’s Emergency Rescue Committee under the valiant leadership of Varian Fry. Scholars and academics followed the rush to safety across the Atlantic Ocean, among them Georg Swarzenski, who obtained work as a research fellow in sculpture and medieval art at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston, Massachusetts. 

Once in the US, the provenance of Dr. Gachet, especially its pre-Nazi presence in the collection of the Städtische Galerie in Frankfurt, vanished from the official narrative of the painting’s ownership. George Wildenstein and Paul Rosenberg held van Gogh exhibitions in the early 1940s, which allowed the Portrait of Dr. Gachet to go on display more than once. In a show organized by Paul Rosenberg in January 1942, the provenance of Dr. Gachet mentioned all previous owners, except for the Städtische Galerie, from which it had been confiscated on Goering's orders.  From this point on the painting’s confiscation history was all but forgotten. When not on display it hung in the Kramarskys’ living room, in their apartment near Central Park. 

By the end of WWII, van Gogh had become a household name among the wealthy and cognoscenti in the United States. The Art Institute of Chicago held a van Gogh retrospective in 1949. Kramarsky lent the Portrait for the show. In 1951, a retrospective of his works took place at MoMA, followed by a van Gogh exhibit at Houston’s Contemporary Art Museum.  By the late 1950s, the Portrait of Dr. Gachet was valued at more than $200,000, twice its value in 1940. 

On December 25, 1961 Siegfried Kramarsky died of lung cancer leaving his widow Lola in a difficult financial situation and forcing her to sell certain art works. Dr. Gachet was not one of these pieces. Paul Rosenberg had made it clear to her that should she decide to sell the Portrait he would gladly find her a buyer.

Speculation that the painting might soon come to market reached Frankfurt. Ernst Holzinger, the new director of the Städtische, wrote to Kramarsky expressing his interest in the painting and in the fact that should there be any inclination in selling the Portrait the museum would be interested. In 1970, the New York-based art dealer Eric Stiebel appraised the painting for a million and a half dollars.

In July 1984, the painting left the Central Park residence and was placed on a long-term loan at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it remained until 1990. The Portrait stood at the heart of the Post-Impressionist collection together with other works by van Gogh. Still, after so many years, the painting’s provenance failed to include its confiscation history.

Meanwhile, new millionaires from the Far East and especially from Japan, were making a splash in the global art market with a ravenous appetite for expensive conversation pieces, trophies of sorts. The Japanese economy had turned into a bubble. The nouveaux riches busily acquired “status objects” considered to be masterpieces of Western Art. Picasso and van Gogh competed for the highest prices. Middlemen brokered these record-breaking transactions for Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works.

In 1984 Wynn Kramarsky had taken over the family’s financial affairs and claimed no emotional ties to the Portrait. He was well versed in the art world, with connections in the trade, and did not hesitate to denounce the hypocrisy of the art market. He recalled endless phone calls that he received from dealers and collectors expressing their interest in his collection, but mainly the Portrait of Dr. Gachet. Wynn was determined to sell it through Christie’s since his family had dealt with the auction house for many years.

Wynn Kramarsky

On February 1, 1990, Christopher Burge, the president of Christie’s, arrived at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and picked up the painting himself. He had estimated the painting at between 40 and 50 million dollars. The reserve price for the Kramarsky family was a minimum of $40 million for the Portrait.   Burge thought that it would be the greatest van Gogh piece to come to the market, its value anchored in its story, encounters and associations. It could easily match Irises by van Gogh which had sold at Sotheby’s for a record $53.9 million.

The Christie’s catalogue for the Gachet sale came out in April 1990, six weeks before the sale, and there, too, the confiscation history had been omitted. On May 15, right before the sale, the reserve for Kramarsky dropped to $35 million. 700 people showed up for the sale. Being the most important lot the painting was placed one third of the way into that day’s public sale. The bidding opened at $20 million. The price kept increasing in increments of 1 million. Once the Portrait had surpassed the $40 million mark, the race was on between Hideto Kobayashi who was in the room and Maria Reinshagen who was bidding from Zurich by telephone. At $75 million, Burge sold the painting to Kobayashi. The painting had broken the previously set record by Irises and since the time Alice Ruben had purchased the portrait in 1897, the price had increased 23.000 times. Soon it was revealed that Kobayashi had purchased the painting on behalf of Ryoei Saito who owned Japan’s second largest paper company. Three weeks after the sale the Portrait left for Tokyo. 

According to Japanese tradition, all precious possessions had to be hidden away.  Saito spent a few hours admiring his new acquisition and left, giving directions to put the picture into a climate-controlled, high security room. The Portrait languished on a shelf out of sight, out of mind.  In order to pay for the painting Saito had leveraged his real estate holdings. In November 1993, he was arrested for bribing a government official, and while serving his time under house arrest he received many offers for Dr. Gachet but rebuffed them all.

The Portrait of Dr. Gachet by Vincent van Gogh remains out of reach and out of view.

Happy birthday, Vincent van Gogh! Part Two

by Angelina Giovani

[Editor’s note: This is the second installment of the story of the “Portrait of Dr. Gachet” by Vincent van Gogh. The first part, entitled “Happy Birthday, Vincent van Gogh: Portrait of Dr. Gachet, a book review” was posted on March 30, 2015.] 

Paul Cassirer

In 1904 Paul Cassirer, born in 1871 to an upper middle class family, displayed van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet, at his Berlin Gallery, strategically situated next to other modern dealers such as Fritz Gurlitt, Keller & Reiner, and Schulte. Unlike other dealers, Cassirer had managed to establish a working connection with Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, mainly because he never argued with her high prices. Committed to introducing the French avant-garde in Germany, he had borrowed nineteen canvases from Johanna van Gogh-Bonger in 1901 and organized Germany’s first substantial van Gogh exhibition. Cassirer sold The Portrait of Dr. Gachet to Count Harry Kessler who also bought Maurice Denis’ Mother and Child which Ballin had consigned at the same time as Dr. Gachet. Kessler paid Cassirer 3,378 German marks for both works.

The arrival of the Portrait of Dr. Gachet coincided with a transition period during which Berlin was replacing Munich as a primary market for contemporary art in Germany. Unlike other places the Berlin bourgeoisie had a liberal taste for the modern, and proved to be a perfect audience for van Gogh’s work. At the time that Kessler bought Dr. Gachet, there were altogether seven paintings by van Gogh’s in German private collections: Karl Osthaus, Hugo von Tschudi and Julius Meier-Graefe. After the sale of Dr. Gachet to Kessler, the Stedelijk in Amsterdam and the Salon des Indépendants in Paris held van Gogh retrospectives. Sales picked up and, in 1905, Cassirer sold a total of twenty paintings by the Dutch master. Prices doubled in as many years, however, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger did not grant Cassirer the honor of being her ‘sole agent for Germany’. Up until the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Cassirer enjoyed continuous success. He signed a contract to publish van Gogh’s letters, and bought 151 works. Other collectors were also expanding their collections, such as Helene Kröller, a wealthy art history major from Essen, and an American-born pharmaceutical magnate, Alfred C. Barnes, the first American to own a van Gogh. 

Count Harry Kessler

Count Harry Kessler was born in Paris in 1868. He was the son of Adolf Kessler, a Hamburg banker, and Alice Blosse-Lynch, an Irish explorer’s daughter. He was educated in England and Germany, traveled a lot and wrote for Pan, an Art Nouveau journal, Pan. In 1903 he was appointed director of the Grossherzogliches Museum für Kunst un Kunstgewerbe in Weimar. He brought the Portrait of Dr. Gachet to his house in Cranachstrasse, Weimar, which was designed by Henry van de Velde. The house itself was impeccably conceived to entertain and display the Count’s collection, the perfect vehicle through which to introduce The Portrait of Dr. Gachet to critics, artists, writers, and other members of the intelligentsia. For many, it was their first encounter with a van Gogh. As director of the Grossherzogliches, Count Kessler strove to turn Weimar into a center of modern culture. He organized monthly public exhibitions of Impressionists and neo-Impressionists which eventually drew rebukes from Weimar’s conservative circles. 

Four years after acquiring the picture, Kessler consigned Dr. Gachet with Eugène Druet, in Paris. A specialist in Postimpressionists, Druet had started out as a photographer of Auguste Rodin’s sculptures and made significant purchases of van Gogh works. The Paris art market was in constant evolution. After Cézanne's death, Ambroise Vollard organized Matisse’s first one-man show, Picasso completed Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, while Georges Braque produced his first collage. Collectors from Europe and North America dominated the Paris art market, driving Impressionist prices higher than ever before. Duet exhibited Dr. Gachet in 1908 together with thirty-five other pictures, and although the exhibition ran for twelve days, he did not sell a single painting. Despite this, the Portrait of Dr. Gachet stayed with Druet until February 1910, when he purchased it himself, for 14.000 francs. Then he lent it to Roger Fry, the British art critic and a leading painter in the Bloomsbury circle. Just like with the French, the British were not ready for van Gogh. A critic with the Daily Express called van Gogh’s works "unintelligible". Seeing how "England had no use for Dr. Gachet" the portrait returned to France.

The following year, on February 20, 1911, Druet shipped the painting to Georg Swarzenski, the director of the Städelsches Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt since 1906, an institution renowned for its Old Master collection. Prior to acquiring the picture, Swarzenski had seen it in Kessler’s house in Weimar and also at Galerie Druet in Paris. This was the first postimpressionist canvas to enter the Städel. Swarzenski planned to transform the museum into a shrine for modern art.

Georg Swarzenski

Swarzenski was barely thirty years old when he became director of the museum. He was born in Dresden to a Jewish merchant, and was initially trained as a lawyer before switching to the study of art history. His goals were not only that the Städel should expand its collection, but also that it compete with other great museums of Europe. The only way to do this was to expand the collection with Impressionist works. As a result he removed all plaster copies of Roman and Greek art from the museum floor, and within 2 years he acquired over 350 pieces of sculpture both from Europe and Asia.

By 1911, the tendency to buy Impressionist works from France stirred a protest called “A protest of German Artists” fueled by 140 participants consisting of conservative artists, critics and museum directors.  Swarzenski asked Victor Mössinger, a businessman who later became his father-in-law, to purchase Dr.Gachet and donate it to the Städel.

On August 3, 1914 Germany declared war on France. Communication between art world figures in France and Germany became more complicated. The advent of war severed ties between Johanna van Gogh-Bonger and Paul Cassirer who was inducted into military duty as was Swarzenski. At war’s end in 1918, Swarzenski ordered that construction resume on the modern galleries, which were completed in 1923. By 1928, Swarzenski wore many hats in the Frankfurt art world, as head of the Städel and the Städtische Galerie but also of the Museum of History, and the Museum of Art and Crafts. Until the mid 1930, van Gogh and his works gave rise to new art historical writings as well as treatments in psychological and psychoanalytical literature.

In Spring 1933, months after Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany and, with him, the Nazi Party, Swarzenski removed Dr. Gachet from the walls of the Städel and locked it in a room under the museum’s roof together with a lot of Expressionist paintings. On March 12, the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda was established under Dr. Joseph Goebbels. His mission was to align German culture with the ideology of the Nazi party. In September 1933, he established the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture) which among other things imposed strict controls on the production of art in the Reich as well as on art exhibitions and the art market. Nazi ideology condemned modern art and labeled as ‘degenerate’ all forms of German and French Expressionism.

On March 13, 1933, Frankfurt’s Socialist mayor was replaced by Göring, and within weeks Swarzenski was suspended from his position as director at the Museum of History, the Museum of Arts and Crafts, the Städtische and his position as professor at the University of Frankfurt. Yet, Swarzenski managed to remain as director of the Städel, which was a private foundation and technically the Nazis had no jurisdiction. Still, he was summoned before a commission, and only managed to hold on to his position thanks to the Lord Mayor, Friedrich Krebs, who had been an early member of the Nazi party and oversaw the closing of over 500 Jewish-owned businesses in Frankfurt during the first year of the Third Reich. Krebs also belonged to Alfred Rosenberg’s Combat League for German Culture, a rival of Goebbels’ Ministry to promote Nazi-approved art and attack modernism. Krebs did not consider Swarzenski as a threat.

Friedrich Krebs

In 1935, Swarzenski met Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art of New York (MoMA), at the Parisian gallery of Paul Rosenberg.  At this meeting, Barr asked to borrow Dr. Gachet for a van Gogh retrospective that he was organizing at MoMA. Upon his return to Frankfurt, Swarzenski wrote to the "Ministry in Berlin" requesting permission to lend the painting. The Ministry denied the request. Alfred Wolters, the Nazi-designated successor of Swarzenski as director of the Städtische, dispatched a photograph of Dr. Gachet to Goebbels, at his request. Communication between Wolters and the Ministry focused on paintings in the museum’s collection that could be sold for a profit. Wolters, a close friend of Swarzenski, explained that selling Dr. Gachet would be a terrible loss for the city of Frankfurt. Moreover, it had not been acquired with city funds, but had been a gift of a private citizen, Victor Mössinger. Friedrich Krebs, a vocal opponent of modern art, also wrote to Berlin, asking that the Frankfurt collections should be spared. Dr. Gachet remained safe for the time being, while eleven paintings acquired by Swarzenski for the Städel were confiscated and taken to Munich and displayed at the Degenerate Art show which opened on July 19th, 1937.

On December 1st, 1937, Adolf Ziegler, one of the chief organizers of the Degenerate Art exhibit and a rabid anti-Semite, met Wolters and demanded five more paintings to be delivered to the Propaganda Ministry, including Dr. Gachet.  Stalling for time, Wolters asked the Ministry for an official written request. Wolters was able to buy only a few days. The Portrait of Dr. Gachet was taken out of storage.  It left the museum on December 8, 1937, a move reported in an article published by the Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung (FAZ). Johanna, Victor Mössinger ’s wife, read the article and inquired about the painting’s whereabouts. No one knew that the painting had ended up at a Berlin museum depot for "degenerate art" on Köpernickusstrasse, along with tens of thousands of other art works slated to be destroyed. The Portrait of Dr. Gachet by Vincent van Gogh was number 15,677.