The Allentown settlement

Portrait of Georges the Bearded

by Marc Masurovsky

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.

Sometimes It Takes a Village to Correct a Historical Wrong

Madonna and Child in a landscape

by Ori Z. Soltes

No two cases that deal with Nazi-plundered art are identical. There always seems to be some twist or turn to one situation that hasn't manifested itself in other situations. And what leads to rectification can be complicated and also sometimes surprising.

Back in 1999, HARP was made aware of a 1518 painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder that was at the time (and remains) in the collections of the North Carolina Museum of Art. It appeared that the painting, a small, beautiful Madonna and Child in a Landscape, had been plundered from the collections of Phillip von Gomperz, a successful Jewish businessman from Vienna, Austria. His surviving heirs were, at the time of its discovery in North Carolina, two grand-nieces in their 80s, Marianne and Cornelia Hainisch, who were not Jewish--a reminder that this issue is not by any means always a simple Nazi-Jewish matter, since the Nazis plundered from others as well, but also since the vagaries of life can and sometimes did lead Jews after the Holocaust to abandon the faith that was the primary object of Nazi hostility.

One of the founders of HARP and a key figure within it, Willi Korte, did the exhaustive research that showed unequivocally the provenance chain of the painting, from Gomperz’ acquisition of it to March 10, 1938 when the Nazis officially arrived into Austria (the Anschluss) and the Gomperz family was forced to flee (Gomperz himself would survive until 1948, dying in Switzerland); from the 1940 Nazi confiscation of the Gomperz collection, including Cranach’s Madonna and Child, which was then acquired by Baldur von Schirach, the Nazi Gauleiter of Vienna; to its appearance in the New York art market in the 1950s, where it was purchased by a California collector primarily of medieval German art, Marianne Khuner; to her passing on the painting to the North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMofA) in 1964 on a long-term loan that, through her will, became an outright gift in 1984, at the time of her death.

Baldur von Schirach

One can find a brief resume of this chronology if one goes to the site, ArtThemis, operated by the Art-Law Centre at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. There are, however, several things missing from what is presented as the official account. If one references Emily Yellin’s February 4, 2000, NY Times article, as the ArtThemis website does, there are, not surprising, the same omissions. One absence is the far greater chronological detail that Willi Korte had provided than what is presented on the website. This is fair enough: the website is presumably designed to give a thumbnail summary of the case and not an exhaustive history of it. A second absence, however, is the lack of any reference to Mr. Korte at all. Aside from writing him out of history these two omissions also contribute to what is a fairly widespread failure to realize how tedious and time-consuming the tracking down of such a provenance history often is—and in this case, certainly was.

Willi Korte

There is another matter that is lost if one reads an account as limited as that on the ArtThemis website, or the NY Times article, both of which merely jump in their chronology to 1999 and credit the Commission for Art Recovery with sending a letter to the Director of the NCMofA. The letter is simply credited in the website, without comment, with “detailing evidence of the painting’s history... it also indicated the names of the two sisters” who were the claimants; the ArtThemis entry and the article present the Museum as simply deciding to investigate the provenance claim and the following year restituting the painting to the sisters who agreed, in gratitude, to sell the painting back to the museum at well below its market value.

What is missing are a number of key details, key players and key complications—aside from the enormous lacuna of credit to Willi Korte. The fact is that Korte himself could certainly not have induced the Museum to restitute the painting on his own. He turned to the NY Holocaust Claims Processing Office (HCPO) and its then-Associate Director, Monica Dugot, who corroborated Willi’s research and spearheaded the initial attempt to ask the Museum to consider the claim, with the hope that, as a government institution, albeit from another state, the HCPO might carry weight that would be more substantially felt by the Museum and its Director. For the fact is that, faced with letters from both CAR and HCPO, the Museum was recalcitrant about even entering into a discussion about the matter.

By that point, the Holocaust Art Restitution Project (HARP) was also involved beyond Korte’s initial efforts. HARP wrote to the Museum Director, offering its expertise and assistance in coming to some resolution of this issue, and received a minimal response—that the matter was “being looked into” and that no help was needed. At that time HARP was also able to view correspondence between the North Carolina Governor and the Museum Director—for the Museum is, by definition, a state-governed institution. The governor made it clear that the Museum need not feel obliged to abide by the proposals taking shape in the American Association of Museums (AAM) and the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) and that had also been articulated by the so-called Washington Principles—these came out of a December 1998 conference sponsored by the State Department that HARP was instrumental in helping to organize—with respect to provenance in general, and specifically as it pertains to art concerning which there might be suspicion that it had been plundered by the Nazis due to provenance holes between about 1930 and 1945.

HARP was also aware of another chain of correspondence. The Museum had galvanized key members of the Jewish community of Raleigh-Durham to write letters to the Hainisch sisters, telling them how important the painting was for the museum and specifically how it could be an important instrument for Holocaust education, with an augmentation of its label and a series of programs built around it. (That campaign was apparently carried out with complete unawareness that the sisters were not Jewish!)

With the encouragement to the NCMofA to ignore the threefold—HCPO, CAR and HARP—request, together with its own strategic pushback against responding effectively to that request, the Museum remained far from forthcoming. But, in the end, it did come to the very sort of agreement suggested at the end of the ArtThemis chronology. How? Both because the Museum Curator (as opposed to the Museum Director) came to see the importance of facing the claim head-on, and because another member of the HARP team, Janine Benton, knew a very active and interested reporter in North Carolina, and spoke to him. He in turn wrote a serious and excoriating article about the matter in the local Press.

It was, more than anything, the embarrassment that the Museum experienced as a consequence of the media discussion—and criticism—that built on that initial article that pushed the Director finally both to “investigate the claim” and ultimately to reach out to the Hainisch sisters through Monica Dugot. They, in their graciousness and their gratitude that the situation had not come to a legal confrontation, agreed to the terms that are now part of the historical record—and in the end did set an example to the American Museum community with regard to non-legal discussion/negotiations in the face of this sort of claim . A far cry, however, from the ArtThemis summary that refers to “the swift friendly settlement of this case was possible thanks to the Museum’s refusal to rebuff the restitution claim”—which summary is also found in the NY Times article. The painting remains in North Carolina. Its label presumably tells some of the story of its ownership, plunder and wanderings until it arrived into the Museum, and one might suppose that there are indeed education programs that use it as a starting point for a discussion of a range of Holocaust-related subjects, particularly appropriate to a location that has a fairly long history of racial, if not religious oppression.

North Carolina Museum of Art

There is an epilogue to this narrative that arrives at its denouement through the power of the Press and in this case the ability of the Press to shame a public institution into righting a wrong in spite of itself. Currently, an elderly French woman struggles to regain possession of a small Pissarro painting, stolen from her father by the Nazis—that has, through a chain of sales and purchases similar to those of the Gomperz Cranach in which, at least in the 1950s, the gallery that was doing the selling ignored the obvious clues regarding its Nazi-era provenance, and misled or outright lied to the American purchaser who, perhaps, asked a few too few questions—that ended up two decades ago in the hands of the Fred Jones Museum of Art at the University of Oklahoma (OU) in Norman, Oklahoma. Its discovery there within the past two years by the claimant has led to an ugly battle. The President of OU apparently knows no shame, and even in the face of enormous adverse publicity, including vociferous excoriation on the part of state politicians, has refused to consider her claim.

What in the end will induce justice to arise in Oklahoma? That remains to be seen and is another story for another day with its own twists and turns. The outcome at this point is certainly not that of the outcome in North Carolina 15 years ago, in spite of the pressure of the Press—and in any case, no two of the many stories pertaining to Nazi-plundered art are identical.