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| Portrait of Georges the Bearded |
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.
