The Auerbach Case: Part Two-Cabal of art dealers

by Marc Masurovsky

Rose Valland, c/o Ministère de la Culture

On 10 November 1949, Rose Valland, France’s point person on repatriation and restitution issues, wrote to Stefan Munsing, then Chief of the CCCP, to inform him on the activities of a recently naturalized American citizen of Jewish extraction living in Paris. His name was Heinz Berggruen. “He flaunts his privileged access to American museums. However, the US Embassy in Paris does not like him. Our suspicions about him grew when we compared his project with the one promoted by Auerbach and Wildenstein.” According to Valland, Berggruen was organizing a sale of paintings in Bavaria in which Georges Wildenstein held an interest. The works being sold had been consigned by Berlin dealers who knew that American clients would be congregating in Munich for that purpose. One of the dealers, a Mr. Buren, apparently consigned two French paintings, one by Corneille de Lyon and the other by Nattier. Valland notified Munsing that France reserved the right to assert its jurisdiction over those paintings and any others offered on the art market. She asked him to take the necessary measures to warn American museums not to deal with these “gangsters” whose behavior is unacceptable. 

Munsing’s investigations into Berggruen produced meager results. Berggruen was mostly dealing in rare books on his frequent visits to Bavaria. He also flaunted his contacts in high French circles as well as his familiarity with French customs who “never opened my bags.”

 

Theodore Heinrich

On 13 February 1951, Theodore Heinrich wrote to one of his former MFAA colleagues, Lane Faison. He warned him about his concerns regarding notables (Jewish and non-Jewish) of the art market who might be involved in postwar shady transactions. He was once the director of the Wiesbaden Central Collecting Point in the US zone of occupation in Germany, while serving with the Monuments Fine Arts and Archives (MFAA) administration. The MFAA had established the Munich Central Collecting Point (MCCP) in central Munich in May 1945 in order to process and dispose of cultural assets stolen from Nazi victims across Europe. In application of international law, their mission was to identify the place where these assets had been stolen and return them to those countries from which they would then be restituted to the rightful owners. At least in theory… Heinrich suspected that something ominous was brewing in the postwar art market with respect to the fate of “undistributed holdings at MCCP.”

The cast of characters included:

Karl Haberstock

- Karl Haberstock, Nazi art historian and art dealer who carried out the plans of Nazi dignitaries to acquire thousands of works of art for Hitler’s Linzmuseum project and, in so doing, partook in the spoliation of Jewish collections across Western and Central Europe.

Georges Wildenstein

- Georges Wildenstein, a legendary art dealer based in Paris, London and New York who was in a business partnership with Karl Haberstock before and—some allege-during WWII. His relationship with Haberstock apparently survived the war years.
                                                                                                                                                            
- Heinz Berggruen, a German Jewish refugee who settled in San Francisco in the 1930s, returned to Europe with the US Army and established what became one of the most famous art businesses of the postwar era, starting in liberated Paris.

Heinz Berggruen

- Dr. Philip Auerbach, a Bavarian official who worked closely with Jewish organizations on the question of unclaimed Jewish cultural assets located in the US zone of Occupation of Germany where he worked.

- Grace Morley, a native of Berkeley (CA) and a UNESCO official who headed its Museums division (innocent bystander)

Grace Morley

It is unclear when and how Theodore Heinrich discovered the “sub-rosa” relationship between Karl Haberstock and Georges Wildenstein. He nevertheless accused Berggruen (Paris), of acting as a go-between between Wildenstein (New York), and Haberstock (Bavaria).

Lane Faison (director of the Munich CCP) was aware of the fact that « many dealers had come to Munich in fall and winter (1950-1) to meet with Auerbach and other officials about Goering’s assets. These dealers believed that some of the Goering treasure would be made available to the art market. Faison condemned this behavior saying that it was antithetical to the spirit of restitution. He made it known that the US would never tolerate such a strategy.

                                                                                                                                    to be continued...

Teaching provenance research at the Free University of Berlin

Free University, Berlin
Source: Wikipedia

Last April, the Free University of Berlin announced that it had initiated the first academic program in Germany on cultural plunder. Classes would be taught at the undergraduate level towards completion of a Bachelors of Art. However, no details were forthcoming about the actual nature of the program, the number of classes offered, the length of the program, the inter-disciplinary nature of the curriculum, and the scope of the content being offered to students.

As it turns out, the program itself, new as it is, is far from being that ambitious. In fact, it is a provenance research program. The novelty of teaching provenance research in an undergraduate setting is duly noted, but the fanfare surrounding the creation of the program might have been a bit over the top.

Nevertheless, let’s take a closer look at what is actually being taught and by whom. The program addresses a number of broad themes: the historical background, the impact of National Socialist cultural policy; reparations and compensation (hopefully, restitution figures here as well); case studies of provenance research conducted for auction houses, museums, private collections and claimants; Art and the Law; Sources and Documentation. Students are expected to produce research papers and present their findings at the end of the course.

There is one lecture per week. A different specialist presents a specific topic at each lecture. The program is broken down into two segments; coursework in the first semester and independent archival research in the second semester.

Although the Third Reich orchestrated institutional acts of cultural plunder in every country that it occupied, the historical locus of the program remains Nazi Germany with some considerations given to collections stolen in other parts of Europe and to the methods of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR).

As to the types of looted cultural objects being covered in the case studies, emphasis, as usual, is on paintings and works on paper, but other categories are also being addressed like furniture, accessories, and Judaica.

Subsequent to the program, the Free University of Berlin has organized three month internships for the students with institutions in Berlin, Leipzig and London. The lecture “Cultural and museum policies and the art market during the Nazi era”  was taught by Meike Hoffmann together with Andreas Hüneke. Together with Uwe Hartmann, she also taught the lecture “Galleries, private collections, dealers and collectors (Aryanization, confiscation and duress sales)” while visiting the exhibition “Gute Geschäfte. Kunsthandel in Berlin 1933-45 (A Good Business: The Art Trade in Berlin 1933-45)” which was on display at the Centrum Judaicum in Berlin, 10 April-31 July 2011.

The following is a summary of the courses offered and a brief description:

Historical Background

"Looting during the Napoleonic wars and gaps in the historical record prior to the 20th century" Uwe Hartmann (AfP)

Presentation topics:

• The effect of secularization (1803) on the art trade and the development of private and public collections.
• Napoleon’s donations

"Cultural and museum policies and the art market during the Nazi era" Andreas Hüneke (Degenerate Art Research Centre, FU Berlin)

Presentation topics:

• The law to re-establish the civil service (7.04.1933) and its impact on museum directors.
• Auction houses and galleries during the Third Reich
• Consequences of Nazi Cultural Policy

"'Degenerate Art' – seizure, confiscation and exploitation of modern art" Andreas Hüneke and Meike Hoffmann (Degenerate Art Research Centre, FU Berlin)

Presentation topics:

• Confiscation of “degenerate art” at the museum of fine arts and applied arts in Halle in 1937.
• The exploitation of “degenerate art” through the art dealer Bernhard A. Böhmer.

"Galleries, private collections, dealers and collectors (Aryanization, confiscation and duress sales)" Uwe Hartmann (AfP)

Presentation topics:

• The art dealer Karl Haberstock (1878-1956) – Hitler's art dealer
• The Aryanization of the Heinemann Gallery

"Looted art and the art trade in occupied territory" Dr. Stephanie Tasch (Christie's)

Presentation topics:

• “Sonderauftrag Linz” (Special commission Linz) and the confiscation of the Adolphe Schloss collection
• Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg and the confiscation of the Salomon Flavian collection.

Reparations and Compensation

"Public collections in Germany dealing with the burdened inheritance from1945 to the present (CCP – TVK – BADV)" Dr. Angelika Enderlein (BADV)

Presentation topic:

• The work of the American Allies in the Munich Central Collecting Point (MCCP)

"Provenance research as a political task and moral responsibility (“Washington Principles”, “Joint declaration”, current debates)" Peter Müller (BKM - Federal Government for Culture and Media)

Presentation topics:

• The dispute about the Sachs poster collection in the German Historical Museum
• The dispute about “Sumpflegende” by Paul Klee 

"Sumpflegende", Paul Klee
Source: Bloomberg

Case Studies

"Provenance research in the art trade" Isabel von Klitzing (Sotheby’s)

Presentation topics:

• The collection Henry and Emma Budge, Hamburg
• Lovis Corinth „Römische Campagna“, 1914, from the collection Curt Glaser, Berlin

"Provenance research at the Berlin State Museums" Dr. Jörn Grabowski, Dr. Petra Winter (ZA SMB - Central Archive of the Berlin State Museums)

Presentation topics:

"Der Watzmann", Caspar David Friedrich
Source: Amazon.com

• Caspar David Friedrich „Der Watzmann“ (1824/25). Acquired by the National Gallery in 1937 from Martin Brunn (Berlin)
• Johann Erdmann Hummel „Bildnis Frau Luise Mila“ (around 1815). Acquired by the National Gallery from a private collection in 1937

"Provenance research for collectors or claimants" Nina Senger (Jacques Goudstikker collection)

Jacques Goudstikker
Source: Jüdisches Museum, Berlin

Presentation topics:

• Hermann Göring and the confiscation of the Goudstikker collection
• Just and Fair Solutions: Restitution of confiscated Jewish collections in Holland using the example of the Goudstikker collection

Art & Law

"Results of provenance research as a basis for court decisions or out-of-court settlements" Carola Thielecke (HV SPK)

Sources & Documentation

"Archival material, databases and further electronic resources in use for provenance research" Dr. Andrea Baresel-Brand (Koordinierungsstelle Magdeburg) 


According to the 13 April 2011 press release accouncing the program, for more information, please contact:

Dr. Meike Hoffman
Freie Universität Berlin, Kunsthistoisches Institut, Forschungsstelle Entartete Kunst
Telefon: 030 / 838-54523
E-Mail: meikeh@zedat.fu-berlin.de

The Wildenstein reality check

by Marc Masurovsky

[This article was updated on May 25, 2018.]

Guy Wildenstein sur France 24 pour Sarko by ump

Guy Wildenstein found himself in a sticky situation pertaining to various matters involving art, money, and power.  In 2017, Wildenstein was cleared of tax fraud, but in March 2018, the French government, on appeal, requested four years of prison, with two suspended, and a punitive payment of 250 million euros.  The Wildensteins have asked that the charges be dropped. Why should all of this matter?

Aside from the fact that the Wildenstein name alone is synonymous with everything that is gigantic and disproportionate in the way that art is traded in today’s world, so it has been for the past six or so decades.

The Wildenstein family can only be matched in its zest for influence with the eponymous “robber barons” of US industry. With equal doses of verve, recklessness, swashbuckling ways and bravado, with not so subtle shades of arrogance, the Wildenstein dynasty has imposed itself upon the global art market as one of its kingmakers, with traditional spheres of influence centered in Western Europe and North America.

Why the hullabaloo? For many, it is more like a sporting game to go after the powerful and mighty of any industry, and especially nowadays those in the art industry which provide much grist for the mill. Yes, industry, as opposed to taste. Or taste in the pursuit of profit. No matter.

Georges Wildenstein was the true scion of the family, the man who made Daniel, his late son, and Daniel thence made his sons, Guy and Alec (he died in 2008), in the dynastic family mold, for better or for worse.  The flagship of his business was in Paris with branches in London, New York, and even Buenos Aires. Georges knew everyone there was to know, much like his archrival, Paul Rosenberg. Although keenly interested in 19th and 20th century artists, he definitely expressed a marked preference for the 18th century and its creators, stylists, and decorators. In fact, that’s where he excelled. Old Masters? Of course. Medieval pieces? Why not?

The Wildenstein clientele is powerful, both in private as well as in State circles. Georges was well introduced among curators and directors of museums across Europe and the Americas; a well-heeled man with his frivolities, paranoid moments, and phobias.

Georges fled to the south of France before the German Army entered Paris in June 1940, leaving his Parisian business in the managerial care of Roger Dequoy, who had run his London office.

Georges ended up in New York via Lisbon, a preferred route for most exiles at that time who crossed the Atlantic either by Pan Am clipper or by boat, depending on means and resources.

The Wildenstein interests in Paris were quickly subjected to the gluttony of the Nazis’ culture vultures. Competing German plundering units raided at least five sites owned or controlled by Georges Wildenstein, including two bank vaults, his gallery in Paris, and three residences with two in the French countryside.  The gallery’s stock, Georges’ privately-owned inventory in half-a-dozen locations across France, as well as a handful of bank vaults, fell into the hands of the Nazis by the second half of 1941. His library attracted many interested buyers including a close friend of René de Chambrun who intrigued with the pro-Nazi industrial group in Vichy France, aspiring for the new France to be the Aryan vassal of the New Germany. The Gazette des Beaux-Arts, which Wildenstein had run for decades, together with the rest of his assets, were subjected to Aryanization proceedings under the aegis of the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives (CGQJ). Certain German interests represented by Karl Haberstock, a senior Nazi cultural agent operating in occupied territories, sought to derail Vichy’s absorption of Wildenstein’s assets in order to channel them under Nazi control. Regardless, Georges was a bona fide victim of Nazi aggression and cultural plunder.

The plot thickens... and this is where Hector Feliciano, author of “The Lost Museum”, got himself in a legal hornet’s nest with Georges Wildenstein’s heirs. Although the Wildenstein suit against Feliciano was eventually dismissed, it nearly ruined Mr. Feliciano.  Haberstock and Wildenstein were old friends and business partners. Together, they had acquired and sold paintings for at least a decade prior to 1940. Feliciano implied that Georges and Karl had struck a deal whereby Georges’ cultural assets would fall under Nazi protection and he could continue to do business as he liked in German-occupied France under the stewardship of Karl Haberstock, using Dequoy as a go-between. A hefty charge which requires flawless historical documentation. Incidentally, the Foreign Funds Control Division of the US Treasury Department under Henry Morgenthau suspected as much and monitored Georges Wildenstein's cable traffic throughout 1941.

Dequoy’s wartime management of the Wildenstein House in German-occupied Paris proved to be a financial bonanza for him as he had engineered the Aryanization of the gallery, which Vichy and the Germans had suspected of being a sham to cloak Georges Wildenstein’s assets. Nevertheless, Dequoy survived the war unscathed and a rich man. Wildenstein continued to rely on his managerial experience with the firm in the postwar years.

Wildenstein’s wartime cultural losses are well-documented, most notably in the publicly accessible and fully searchable ERR database where more than 500 objects owned by Georges Wildenstein are listed as having been looted by the Nazis. Many works are still missing. There are also concerns that looted objects belonging to other victims of Nazi plunder might have been erroneously transferred to Georges Wildenstein by French restitution authorities after the war. If that is true, his case would be no different than those of many other victims of Nazi plunder since these flawed returns contaminated many postwar restitutions, a perverse way for postwar European governments of applying the law of in-kind restitution: if it looks like your object, why don’t you take it anyway?

Only a detailed and comparative forensic analysis of postwar restitution files can resolve these knotty questions. They have direct relevance to the controversy over the so-called Kann manuscripts—stunning medieval books which were looted from Alphonse Kann’s house in Saint-Germain-en-Laye between summer 1940 and spring of 1941. A number of them were still missing in 1945. At least one had fallen, according to the Kann heirs, into the hands of Georges Wildenstein who, truth be told, had lost similar manuscripts as well. A lengthy legal battle ensued in an American court which pitted the Kann heirs against the Wildenstein interests. Despite the fact that an art historian close to the Wildensteins could not certify that Wildenstein had ever owned the claimed manuscripts, the Kanns lost on technical grounds, not on historical substance.  From a forensic and historical standpoint, the case remains open for renewed investigation.  However, it is unlikely that it will be reopened, despite the fact that the historical evidence mitigated in favor of the Kann family.

Restitution and ‘restitution’: Some thoughts on the MNR problem in France

by Marc Masurovsky
edited and updated on 5 July 2025

Restitution involves the act of returning a stolen object to the owner who was the victim of the theft.

However, if a gallery sells a painting to a citizen of the German Reich who then takes it home across the Rhine, does that constitute theft, especially if the object itself is proven not to have been stolen in the first place?

When the French claims agency, the Office des Biens et Intérêts Privés (OBIP) transferred a painting to the Selection Committee (Commission de choix) of the Louvre in December 1951, it implied that the Selection Committee and/or the Louvre had lost the painting in the first place and justice was being served by incorporating the painting into French State collections. In this particular instance, the painting, Vénus, Bacchus, Cérès, amours et saphirs, by Frans Floris, had been sold in 1941 to a leading German agent—Karl Haberstock--through a gallery owned by Hugo Engel in German-occupied France. Although the item had not been stolen prior to sale, the postwar French government nevertheless treated the work as a stolen object. One year after the liberation of North Africa by Anglo-American troops and contingents of the French Resistance in November 1942, the French National Liberation Committee had declared that all transactions on French territory since June 1940 were deemed null and void, an act which paved the way for a complex and lopsided campaign of restitution and compensation in the years following the Liberation of France in the second half of 1944. For all intents and purposes, the act of declaring a transaction null and void conferred on the transacted object the taint of illegality.

Let’s pretend for a second that France had not been invaded by Nazi Germany. Hugo Engel still would have offered the Fioris painting to Karl Haberstock, a Nazi cultural agent, who then returned to the Reich with it, acting on behalf of his superiors in the Nazi hierarchy. The French government would not have objected to the sale and departure of this object from French territory. But all of that changed with the German invasion of France and the subsequent wholesale requisitions, acts of plunder and spoliation that befell those living within its now truncated borders. The Floris painting was no longer just another painting being offered for sale in a Paris gallery. It was now treated as if it belonged to France, in other words, its acquisition and transfer to Reich territory was tantamount to a forcible removal of the painting from the bosom of that organic national entity known as France. In sum, a war of aggression and conquest against France waged by Nazi Germany had transformed the privately-owned Fioris painting into a State-controlled object that earned it the full protection and consideration of the French State. A curious turn of alchemy which afforded France to lay claims in the postwar to a significant haul of art that had emanated from its private art market and been acquired by individuals who had transported their cultural purchases outside its borders into the Reich.

The Allies countenanced this conversion of private commercial transactions under Nazi rule into illicit acts of property transfers, thus equating them with actual acts of plunder and misappropriation. Regardless of how one judges this policy, it has produced, among other things, an awkward category of objects known as the MNRs—Musées Nationaux Récupération. Many of the MNRs fall into the category of the Fioris painting—acquired in the open private art market during the German occupation and removed from French territory by the purchaser. There is no evidence that the Floris painting was, in fact, incorporated into the MNR category since it is absent from the French government's website devoted to those objects.

The question now becomes: should the MNR’s even exist since they are as close to war booty as one can get, save for those which are, beyond a shadow of a doubt, plundered objects? The maintenance of this ambiguity forces us to consider that all objects acquired in France—fair and square—during the period of Vichy rule and German occupation—from June 1940 to the fall of 1944—should be considered as illicit transfers of property until otherwise stated. One can’t have one’s cake and eat it too, but it appears that, for the past eighty years, that is precisely what has occurred, thus casting an inexorable taint of wartime theft and illegality on an unimaginable number of cultural objects that have since made it into countless collections on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

Update on 5 July 2025

Since this article was written in 2011, the French government has changed its tune regarding the so-called MNR works and objects of which they are the custodians until the rightful owner(s) state their claims for their restitution, historical evidence in hand. Close to 50 objects have been returned since 2011, a small number but a significant leap forward when compared to the prior 60 years since the MNRs became a "thing."

The French government is still unwilling to admit that most of the works that fall under that label are not Jewish losses. They are simply works and objects that changed hands under the pseudo-legality established by the Vichy regime under German military occupation. Neighboring countries under the Nazi yoke also saw their art markets fructify and grow as if nothing untoward had happened. Another way of saying that the art market is impervious to the vagaries of history. As long as someone has something to sell, there will be a buyer willing to plunk down the requisite sum of money to acquire it in good faith.

Looking back, I speculate that the decision by the French Resistance to declare all transactions null and void may have been a principled, although ill-thought out declaration not realizing how potentially sweeping and destructive its literal enforcement would have been in the postwar years. It foreshadows to some extent Law 59 which was passed in the US Zone of Occupation in Germany in order to hold accountable current possessors of objects acquired during the Third Reich. There is nothing wrong with making the last owner/possessor accountable as an enforcement to establish the circumstances of an acquisition during the commission of an act of genocide.