Pots and pans

by Marc Masurovsky

Since the first Holocaust memorial was built in Europe, soon followed by dozens of others, the story line that these venerable institutions have conveyed to a global public has been exemplified by the Holocaust is not about property but about people.

Put another way, the vast majority of the six million Jewish men, women and children who lost their lives in the Holocaust were so downtrodden that all they owned were pots and pans and the clothes that they wore. Or so the conventional story goes. Those lucky enough to collect art were people of means who hailed for the most part from Central and Western Europe. The facts speak for themselves: 75 per cent of Jews lived in Eastern Europe; 90 per cent of them were murdered. In other words, the Holocaust is for the most part an Eastern European Ashkenazi story.

This stale stereotyping of Jews as living in substandard poverty across Europe has gone hand in hand with a stubborn refusal by Jewish communities worldwide to address the more complex question of property loss as one of the keystones of 20th century anti-Jewish behavior. If we follow this line of reasoning, there were only two classes of Jews-on top, the wealthy who had enough disposable income to collect fineries of all sorts including lavish furniture and expensive art, and the “shtetl” Jews, the peddlers, the pieceworkers who lived “on the other side of the tracks”, the inhabitants of the Jewish Pale in Eastern Europe. Forgotten or ignored are the lower middle class, artisans, skilled workers, cultural and intellectual workers, the midde class whom we find in every community, town, city, region of Europe. What of them? Do they fit in this story? They do but their property does not count. It’s not part of the Holocaust story. Or so we are told.

Fast forward to November 15, 2019, to the 20th anniversary celebration of the Paris-based CIVS—Commission for indemnification of Victims of Spoliation during WWII. Participants to that conference heard from some speakers that most Jews living in France were of “humble backgrounds” and did not collect any art. They were more about “pots and pans.” That did not stop the Vichy authorities and their Nazi friends In the Paris region alone, from confiscating and transferring to non-Jewish owners (a process known as “Aryanization”) the intangible and tangible property of 31000 owners. Moreover, close to 70000 residences where Jews lived were literally emptied during the so-called “M-Aktion” between March 1942 and the summer of 1944 in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. I doubt that those responsible for this wholesale campaign of ransacking Jewish dwellings would have committed so many resources and logistics if it were just about “pots and pans.” 

You do not have to be an “art collector” or “art dealer” to amass works and objects of art. There are multiple tiers of value in the art world and the art market whereby individuals can amass an impressive amount of esthetic objects of small value---paintings, works on paper, even sculpture, decorative objects, books, musical instruments, Judaica, produced by talented artists and craftsmen whose names are not Bellini, Tintoretto, Fragonard and Rembrandt.

In short, it is too convenient and shameful to oversimplify in order to deflect attention from the real problem:
-Culture is an integral part of the discussion on National Socialism, anti-Jewish policies and the Holocaust;
-Jewish culture was thriving in the interwar years;
-The Nazis and their local Fascist allies nearly extinguished it;
-Human beings—Jewish and non-Jewish alike—are attracted to objects that please them and, if they can, they acquire them so that they can live with them, appreciate them and share them with family, friends, acquaintances and complete strangers.

Thousands of artists, writers, poets, musicians, craftsmen from close to twenty nations lost their livelihood and their lives between 1933 and 1945, their property was seized, never to be seen again. The cumulative impact of those losses triggered a lessening, an impoverishment of the cultural heritage of Europe from which we have not fully recovered.

These losses were part of a well-orchestrated State-sponsored attempt (2/3 successful) by the Third Reich and its allies to erase all traces of Jewish life and activity across Europe—a continental form of “Aryanization” which witnessed a multi-billion dollar transfer of property from Jewish ownership into the hands of non-Jews and their businesses which powered the wartime and postwar economies of European countries.

So, no, it was not about “pots and pans.” It was about much more. To deny this fact is to deny and rewrite history.

The time is long overdue for these longstanding revisionist trends in the teaching of the Holocaust to come to an end.

It is not heirless unless we say it is

by Marc Masurovsky

In late January 2015, HASHAVA sponsored a visit to the kibbutz of Ein Harod and its museum of Jewish artists near Mount Gilboa. It turned into an opportunity to celebrate one painting in particular, The Beggar, by Eugeniusz Zak. Zak was a reknown Jewish artist who worked and died in interwar Paris. This magnificent, broody painting ended up at Ein Harod after following complicated paths by which hundreds if not thousands of works and objects of art displaced during the Holocaust had traveled to Israel from the site of their plunder. The uniqueness of this Zak painting lay in the visible and clear stamp on the back of its frame, indicating that it had been stolen during Mobel-Aktion in German-occupied Paris and catalogued at the Jeu de Paume Museum as MA-B 1330.

You can view the Zak painting under two different lenses: under one lens, it has no owner. It is heirless. It has a home in Israel where it is well cared for, as a living testament to the tragic events of the wartime occupation of France and to the physical disappearance of 76000 Jewish men, women, and children. Therefore, it serves a dual function: as a work of art and a memorial to lost lives.

Under another lens, the Zak painting’s provenance, its ownership history, is incomplete and requires further work in the hope of finding a pre-war owner with a view to returning it. All that was known about the painting’s history at the time of its discovery, aside from the name of its author and the painting’s characteristics, is that it was seized in the spring of 1944 in Paris, processed at the Jeu de Paume in June 1944 by Dr. Borchers, a senior ERR official. The painting was recovered by French resistance troops in late August 1944 and most likely sold by the French government on the postwar Paris art market.

The research involved in uncovering the rightful owner of this painting and therefore erase its “heirless” or ‘ownerless” label, involves, in part, the following steps:

1/ since there were few collectors in Paris who appreciated Zak’s works, it would be wise to draw up such a list because it might help us zoom in on a potential owner, especially if he/she was Jewish. Zak’s widow, Hedwige, would have been the more likely and near-exclusive source of Zak paintings in Paris. It would also be good to understand the Parisian market for such works. 

2/ Once the painting is located either at the scale of a city or of a neighborhood within a city, archival resources falling outside the narrow strictures of art history need to be consulted. In the case of the Zak painting, the research points us in the direction of Mobel-Aktion and its coordinator in wartime France, the Dienststelle Westen which was itself an offshoot of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), Alfred Rosenberg’s Europe-wide specialized plundering task force. The Dienststelle Westen oversaw the day-to-day operations of Mobel-Aktion from 1942 until 1944. That involved: identifying the location of Jewish “residences”, placing seals on the doors of those residences—a cheeky German way of telling the Vichy French that they had no jurisdiction over the contents of those apartments—sending one or more teams of specialists to those apartments to survey their contents and prepare them for crating and removal; transferring the contents onto one or more trucks which would deliver them to Lagers throughout Paris, where plundered Jewish property was sorted and processed by Jewish slave labor, drafted for that purpose from the transit camp of Drancy in the northern suburbs of the French capital. 

The fruits of Mobel-Aktion either went to Germany or remained in Paris to be further examined because of their perceived quality, workmanship, or value and importance. In other words, they were transferred to the Jeu de Paume where an additional selection took place. The Vichy French agency responsible for surveying Jewish residences in France, was the notorious anti-Jewish Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives, otherwise known as the General Commissariat for Jewish affairs. Its main task, from 1941 to 1944, was to oversee the material, economic expropriation of the Jews of France, seize and liquidate their property for the benefit of Vichy and Aryan non-Jewish owners. A working partnership tied the Commissariat to the Dienststelle Westen whereby French anti-Semitic agents would provide Dienststelle officers with names and addresses of Jews who had “abandoned” their apartments—either because they had fled or they had been arrested and interned, or worse, were already dead. The commissariat routinely published annotated lists of Jews with their last known addresses, sharing them with their Mobel-Aktion colleagues. Hence, from an archival standpoint, one should look for addresses and names of individuals whose apartments or houses had been fingered by Vichy agents and sealed off in late 1943 and early 1944. These records are located at the Memorial de la Shoah in Paris and at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. This would be one way of narrowing down the list of potential owners of the Zak painting. Then, one could take those names and look for postwar files submitted by individual victims or their heirs to the French government for purposes of restitution. These files are housed at the archives of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs at La Courneuve, north of Paris. Those archives have allowed us, so far, to link 10 to 15 per cent of the so-called heirless or ownerless objects collected under Mobel-Aktion with their rightful owners. Hence, identifiability is not just a concept, it is a highly probable outcome of meticulous international archival research.

In order to fold this type of non-art historical research into the portfolio of a museum professional, the institution as a whole must make an explicit commitment to promote such research, through adequate funding, resources, and training. Such an institution must committed to the outcome of such research, retracing the intricate paths of ownership through and time and space of an object, regardless of its outcome, be it restitution, repatriation, or maintenance in the collection as a result of a negotiated settlement with the identified owner to his/her satisfaction.

No object is heirless unless it is labeled as such. Every object begins with an owner who happens to be its maker or creator. Once the object leaves its original, primal owner and the place where it sat or hung, the path of the object will either be licit or illicit depending on the circumstances of its removal, transfers, and the transactions that it was subjected to and the larger historical context in which these movements or translocations took place. Those are the objective facts which surround the life of an object and its peregrination through time and space. That is what constitutes the provenance of an object. To put it simply, every object is connected at any given point, to a person, to a location and to a date.

In my view, the paradox is as follows: An object becomes heirless because it has been labeled as such for reasons having nothing to do with the object itself. On the other hand, an object always has an owner, whether identified or not.

If one looks at the so-called MNR works—Musées Nationaux Récupération-- which currently sit in dozens of cultural institutions scattered throughout France, one realizes how foolhardy it is to treat art objects as wholesale bulk commodities. These works include paintings, works on paper, furniture, decorative objects and the like. They were retrieved by specialized French units from German and Austrian collections after 1945 and repatriated to France whereupon they were placed in an odd limbo-like category as of the early 1950s. The French government considers itself the custodian of those objects, although it has behaved more like an owner. In the late 1990s, a number of organizations clamored for France to release the MNR works—over 2000—so that they could be sold for the benefit of the Jewish people. The reigning assumption being that these objects had all been looted from Jewish owners. Nothing could be further from the truth as demonstrated by the French government’s painstaking research into these objects Although the research is far from over, it is safe to say that many of the MNR objects were owned and sold by them to the German occupiers on the wartime French market between 1940 and 1944. Hence, a rush to judgment based on a misunderstanding of the history of looted objects motivated by political expediency leads to inevitable miscarriages of justice and incoherent decisions.

Public and private collections worldwide contain an unknown number of objects for which there is no provenance, no history, therefor no understanding of who owned these objects. Take the countries that were part of Yugoslavia until its breakup in the early 1990s and apply that knowledge to Eastern European nations in the wake of the Second World War, you will soon realize that the problem of unidentifiable cultural assets sitting in those collections may be significant. Recent research conducted by a EU-funded provenance research project, TransCultAA, confirms that many postwar museum collections in the former Yugoslavia were largely comprised of unidentifiable looted cultural assets. The same logic applies to other countries in Eastern Europe, subject to additional long-term research.

Our functioning premise is that every object has an owner. To be true to that axiom, research has to be conducted into the history of the objects for which nothing is known so that something is known. And if it means dusting off a skeleton or two that brings back to the forefront some of the ugliest moments of recent history, then so be it. Regardless of who was responsible for the thefts and murders, the Ustasha, the Milice, the Rexists, the Einsatzkommandos, local townspeople abetted by their notables and their religious leaders, regional and State officials, paramilitary forces, anyone who partook in the commission of a crime against humanity—physical elimination accompanied by wholesale plunder—we need to have the maturity and presence of mind to tell the stories of these so-called “heirless” objects which are in our collective custody; they command us to do so. Their stories are our stories, our past, and therefore our present. If we choose to ignore them and pretend that the stories did not occur, we are simply lying to ourselves. 

When a museum refuses to publish the provenance of an object in its care, regardless of its motivations not to do so, it is behaving unethically and denying our peers, our children, and grandchildren, the privilege of understanding where these objects came from, what they endured and how they ended up where they are today.

"Portrait of Mary Robinson," by Joshua Reynolds

by Angelina Giovani
edited by Marc Masurovsky

Mary Robinson was one of the most famous actresses of the 18th century, who left behind a large number of portraits. The culmination of Mary’s fame came after her performance as Perdita, in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, which captured the heart of George, Prince of Wales, who fell madly in love with her. Hence, the name Perdita became permanently linked to her own and she came to be known as Mary ‘Perdita” Robinson. Among the many artists who painted her portrait, the most notable is without a doubt Sir Joshua Reynolds. As his diary indicates, the artist made fourteen appointments for the actress to sit for him, resulting in at least five versions of the painting, all very similar to each other in both style and composition, the two main versions mirroring each other and seeming to differ only in the position of the hands or the feathers. The earliest version of the painting, which was purchased by Baroness Edmond de Rothschild, is the one now in the Waddesdon Collection.

A well-established Paris-based French art dealer and collector, René Gimpel, acquired one of Reynolds’ versions of “Portrait of Mary Robinson” and appears to have placed the work in a storage unit at Garde-Meubles Robinot Frères, 86, boulevard Garibaldi, in Paris. During the German occupation of France, after Gimpel had fled to the south of France before being denounced, arrested and deported to Sachsenhausen, the entire content of his “garde-meubles” was confiscated by agents of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), operating under the aegis of the Mobel-Aktion [M-Aktion] agency, responsible for emptying out Jewish-owned apartments and storage units in German-occupied France, Belgium and the Netherlands.

The second volume of the Algernon Graves and W. V. Cronin catalogue raisonné of the works of Joshua Reynolds lists five versions of the “Portrait of Mary Robinson” or Mrs. “Perdita” Robinson. Catalogue entry (nr. 832) might be Gimpel’s painting, since the other remaining versions produced by Reynolds can be traced to British and American collections with no noticeable provenance gaps.

Entry Nr. 832 reads:

“ROBINSON, Mrs. Mary; Half length, panel 29 1/2 x 24 1/2 in.; Nearly full faced; large black hat, white feather; dark dress; white lace scarf; red curtain background. Exhibited: Royal Academy, 1883, No. 274, by Colonel W. L. Grant.” The catalogue for the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1883 does not list the full name of Colonel Grant, the 1883 owner, hence it still remains unknown how he acquired it and when he sold it.

The above catalogue description mirrors the one published in the first edition of the Graves and Cronin catalogue raisonné in 1899. At some point between 1970 and 1973, the art historian Ellis Waterhouse, while serving as acting director of the “Paul Mellon Centre for British Studies” in London, edited the Graves & Cronin catalogue with extensive annotations. Waterhouse made comments and corrections to all of the versions of the Portrait of Mrs. Robinson.

Waterhouse noted that the panel “Portrait of Mrs. Robinson” was in the Collection of Pierre Bordeaux-Groult. In the revised edition of the catalogue raisonné which appeared in the late 1980s, entry (nr. 1530) has been corrected as follows:

“Robinson, Mary (1758-1800)
Untraced
On Wood(EKW/G&C)
Provenance: Pierre Bordeaux-Groult, Paris, 1967 (PMC: Waterhouse files); untraced since.”

A review of the Waterhouse files reveals that one of the copies of Mrs. Robinson, attributed to the Studio of Reynolds, was in the collection of E. C. Bacon, Thonak, in 1941. Below that, a note in pencil reads: “The original in Jean Groult Coll. Paris” and it is followed by a year. The file makes no reference to Pierre Bordeaux-Groult. Since the year has been transcribed to be 1967, we might assume that the authors believed it more likely for the work to be with Pierre Bordeaux-Groult, since Jean had passed away in 1951. But a closer examination of the numbers actually suggests that the date could very well be 1917, which makes better sense in relation to the Waterhouse original file.

How and when the painting, if it is the same one, went from Groult to Rene Gimpel is unknown. Meanwhile, Gimpel’s “Portrait of Mary Robinson” has never been found and his heirs still have not recovered it as a WWII Holocaust-related loss.

La "question juive" et le marché de l'art en France, 1940-1944

by Marc Masurovsky

[This paper was delivered in French at an international conference in Bonn, Germany, on November 30, 2017. The conference focused on plunder and art trafficking in wartime France, 1940-1944, and was sponsored by the Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste.]

J’ai choisi de vous parler de la « question juive » et du marché de l’art à Paris pendant l’occupation de la France par les troupes et services du Reich allemand, de mi-juin 1940 à la fin du mois d’août 1944.

Pourquoi un tel sujet ? 

Je me suis demandé, peut-être naïvement, s’il était utile d’associer la “question juive” au marchéde l’art en France sous Vichy et l’occupation allemande. Mon intention était de proposer la notion suivante : la campagne antijuive, antisémite, menée en tandem par la France de Vichy et par l’occupant allemand, a changéde manière radicale le comportement des gens en France en injectant la « question juive » dans leur quotidien, leur vécu, leurs échanges, leurs rapports personnels et professionnels. Avant juin-juillet 1940, on ne prenait pas de décisions dans un contexte juif/non-juif ou aryen. Mais pendant quatre longues années, cette dualitéjuive/aryenne ou juive/non juive fit partie de la vie quotidienne de ceux et celles qui vivaient en France et surtout dans les villes où on pouvait trouver une communauté juive.Mise en pratique dans le monde de l’art, dans le marchéde l’art, la question juive, àmes yeux, devient pertinente.

Que veut-on dire par la “question juive” ?

Cette expression suggère une remise en cause, la nécessitéde questionner ce qui est « juif », la qualité de « juif, » la spécificité« juive. » C’est une question qui se pose différemment selon que l’on soit juif, ou non juif.

Le débat sur la question juive a été lancé par des philosophes allemands dans la première moitié du 19ème siècle, dans un contexte tout autre, à savoir l’émancipation des juifs vivant dans les provinces allemandes.

En 1843, Karl Marx rédige une « Réflexion sur la question juive » qui prend à partie un pamphlet polémique « La question juive », rédigé la même année par un de ses anciens professeurs, Bruno Bauer. Ce dernier était opposé à l’émancipation des communautés juives implantés en terres allemandes. Dans sa réplique à Bauer, Marx associe indissolublement la qualité de juif à une activité économique. Autrement dit, on ne peut être juif sans être producteur de capital, de richesse économique. Si on suit le raisonnement de Marx, l’émancipation des juifs, le règlement de la question juive ne peut s’accomplir que si les juifs abandonnent délibérément leur qualité de juif telle qu’elle est supposée être conçue dans un contexte capitaliste. Cela reviendrait à dire qu’une communauté juive émancipée accepterait de perdre son essence juive, qui, elle, est liée à une activité spécifique de production de capital. Même si Marx pensait honnêtement que son projet était humaniste et séculier, ma vulgarisation de ses propos avancés en 1843, soit cent ans avant la Shoah, démontre comment un tel argument pouvait être complètement dénaturé un siècle plus tard par la montée des idéologies fondées sur l’inégalité des races et la supériorité de la race aryenne qui trouveront leur écho dans le national socialisme allemand et ses variantes antisémites dans l’extrême-droite française. Je ne suis pas ici pour faire le procès de Marx mais je voulais simplement retracer très brièvement la généalogie de cette expression néfaste.

La réflexion de Marx sur la « question juive » remet donc en cause l’essence de la judéité, la qualité de juif, sa substance spirituelle, culturelle, et existentielle. Parler de « question juive » équivaut à questionner la raison d’être « juif ». A partir de 1940, la solution de la question juive implique l’extirpation des juifs de la vie économique de la société civile en leur soutirant leurs richesses et leurs capacités de produire, de consommer, d’exister économiquement, socialement, religieusement et culturellement. Pour moi, la question juive comme notion antisémite s’inscrit dans une interprétation économique de la qualité de « juif. »

L’activité économique qui nous intéresse aujourd’hui est celle qui caractérise le marché de l’art, un organisme complexe, qui ressemble plutôt à un tissu de réseaux et de filaments liant entre eux à des degrés divers artistes, marchands, collectionneurs, courtiers, personnels de musées, de galeries, de maisons de vente, notaires, avocats, banquiers, experts, historiens de l’art dont les compétences aident à soutenir et maintenir ce que l’on appelle le marché de l’art. Ces filaments s’étendent à travers l’Europe—et même au-delà jusque dans les Amériques et l’Asie. Ce monde ne peut fonctionner sans opacité, un monde dominé par le secret d’affaires. Après 1940, tout change. Les marchands, les galéristes, les collectionneurs d’origine juive disparaissent du marché, tandis que leurs inventaires, leurs biens culturels et artistiques s’écoulent par les mêmes réseaux dont ils se servaient avant l’imposition de mesures discriminatoires les excluant de toute activité économique. Vu l’intimité des rapports qui existaient entre tous les différents acteurs du marché de l’art, il est impossible d’exclure la possibilité que les marchands non-juifs n’aient acheté et vendu des objets qui appartenaient à leurs homologues juifs, souvent rivaux et concurrents. Très vite, les réseaux du marché de l’art s’adaptent à la nouvelle réalité—ils se maintiennent et s’épanouissent sous couvert d’une force d’occupation militaire et policière nazie et un régime autoritaire de collaboration qui se déclare français et qui est, par sa nature même, antisémite.

De nouveaux clients se manifestent à Paris. En l’occurrence, des milliers de fonctionnaires civils et militaires qui travaillent pour l’administration allemande, les services de sécurité et les différents ministères du Reich implantés d’ores et déjà en France occupée. S’y ajoutent les effectifs des sociétés commerciales, financières et industrielles des pays de l’Axe en quête de nouveaux clients. Ces nouveaux-venus accroissent la demande pour des objets et œuvres d’art sur le marché parisien. Les reçus des marchands, les factures, les bons de transport, les échanges de correspondance constituent une partie des preuves matérielles qui confirment la multiplication des transactions entre acteurs du marché de l’art en France occupée et une importante clientèle provenant du Reich et de ses territoires annexes.

Si la politique antijuive de Vichy et de l’occupant allemand nécessite la mise en place d’une France ‘judenrein’—sans juifs, qu’ils soient nés en France ou venant d’un autre pays, un marchéde l’art déjudaïsérequiert l’anéantissement de sa composante juive, c’est-à-dire, des membres de l’école de Paris et de leurs œuvres ainsi que l’exclusion des marchands, collectionneurs et autres spécialistes et courtiers qui peuplent ce marchéet qui sont fichés comme appartenant àla communauté juive.

Qui sont ces artistes ?

Installés en France par centaines depuis le début du 20ème siècle, ils avaient quittéleurs foyers en Europe de l’Est et dans les Balkans en quête d’une inspiration artistique qu’ils étaient sûrs de trouver à l’Ouest et plus précisément en France. Ce sont les grands oubliés, les marginaux, pauvres, difficilement intégrés dans la société française, dans les milieux de l’art. Ils s’expriment en yiddisch, en russe, en d’autres langues slaves. Ils fréquentent certains cafés surtout ceux de Montparnasse comme le Dome et la Rotonde. Bien que les grands marchands juifs parisiens les ignorent, ils créent leurs propres réseaux, persévèrent, côtoient de grands artistes comme Chagall, Braque, Picasso, Modigliani et Soutine, ils attirent des collectionneurs et marchands séduits par leur romantisme et le lyrisme de leurs œuvres. La plupart sont des crève-la-faim. Mais ils persistent et arrivent à faire entrer leurs œuvres dans une multitude de salons et d’expositions. Leur présence pose un défi au goût officiel qui met en avant un art « français. » Si bien que lorsque la France tombe sous le joug nazi en 1940, une dualité entre art « français » et art « juif » prend forme. 

Si le goût officiel que prônent les milieux conservateurs plutôt aisés du monde de l’art se démarque de cet art produit par des personnes juives venant de l’Est, l’instauration d’un régime autoritaire et antisémite servira à réaffirmer que ces artistes « étrangers » ne reflètent aucunement les valeurs de la France qu’imaginent les vichyistes. Yvon Bizardel en profita pour définir Vichy en ces termes : c’est la revanche du goût contre les dérives esthétiques qui caractérisèrent l’entre-deux-guerres et le déclin de la troisième république. D’une certaine façon, l’imposition d’une esthétique bien « française » est à l’ordre du jour pendant ces années noires. Mais pour ce faire, il faut se débarrasser des « autres » et les remplacer par des artistes de mérite qui sont, par ailleurs, non juifs et français. En tout cas, c’est comme cela que je le ressens, en particulier, lors de l’annonce de la nouvelle école de Paris en 1941, suite à une série d’expositions regroupant des artistes français à tendance moderne, certains fortement abstraits, d’autres puissamment figuratifs et traditionnalistes dans les thèmes qu’ils explorent. Nouvelle école de Paris. Le choix des mots est particulièrement pervers, quand on sait quelle a été la destinée de la quasi-totalité des membres de l’école de Paris de l’entre-deux-guerres, juive et étrangère, en grande partie massacrée ou morte dans des conditions atroces produites par l’isolement, la terreur, et le manque.

Peut-on argumenter que le renouveau de l’art français sous Vichy constitue une étape nécessaire dans la déjudaïsation de la vie artistique en France?

Faut-il en déduire que l’épuration de l’Ecole de Paris cède la place à cet art « français » non juif sous Vichy et au-delà ?

L’activité commerciale artistique évolue dans un climat de plus en plus sévère. L’Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg de concert avec les services de sécurité du parti nazi lancent une campagne systématique visant à extirper de la société française tout ce qui est « juif. » L’ERR cible les collections d’œuvres et d’objets d’art appartenant à des propriétaires juifs--collectionneurs, marchands, et artistes confondus. Le musée du Jeu de Paume, sous la direction des spécialistes de l’ERR en poste à Paris, se transforme dès l’automne de 1940 en centre de triage, de sélection, de catalogage et de traitement de dizaines de milliers d’objets et d’œuvres d’art de toutes sortes, de qualité extrêmement variable, soutirés à des centaines de propriétaires d’origine juive tant dans la région parisienne que dans le Sud-ouest et éventuellement tout au long de la côte d’azur. Paris devient la plaque tournante d’un marché de l’art où pullulent une quantité impossible à chiffrer d’objets et d’œuvres d’art pillés, confisqués, aryanisés. Le Jeu de Paume regorge d’objets ; l’excédent est dispersé parmi une douzaine de dépôts auxiliaires aménagés pour la plupart dans les quartiers huppés de la capitale en particulier dans le 8ème, le 16ème et le 17èmearrondissement. Un réseau d’appartements et d’hôtels complète cette infrastructure de recel d’objets pillés. Tout ce qui n’est pas emballé et convoyé vers le Reich est recyclable sur le marché parisien et de temps à autre à destination de pays limitrophes—Belgique, Hollande, Suisse, Italie, Autriche, même vers le Gouvernement général dans ce qui fut la Pologne. Pouvons-nous parler d’une suroffre d’objets pillés? Il serait facile de dire que l’excédent d’objets pillés fut convoyé à destination des villes allemandes frappés par les bombardements alliés. Mais la situation est bien plus compliquée. Les documents d’époque et les dossiers de restitution d’après-guerre nous laissent croire que la majorité des objets volés chez les particuliers n’ont jamais été enregistrés par les fonctionnaires de l’ERR ou de la Dienststelle Westen. Et pourtant, ces objets ont bel et bien disparu. De nombreux foyers ont subi des actes de pillage répêtés, parfois trois, quatre, même cinq perquisitions, s’étendant sur plusieurs années. Une partie de ces objets seulement furent « traités » au Jeu de Paume. Qu’en est-il du reste ? Comme réponse possible : ils ont été écoulés par des antiquaires, des bouquinistes, des luthiers, des joaillers, des galeries d’art, des salles de ventes, par des ventes improvisées dans des lieux aussi insolites que des hôtels et des restaurants. Ce recyclage nécessita des milliers de personnes disposées à faciliter pour toutes sortes de raisons, la monétisation de la propriété juive. 

La M-Aktion agit comme courroie de transmission entre les agences de pillage et les points de vente ; le Jeu de Paume, comme centre de tri, opère des sélections d’objets à rendre à la M-Aktion pour être ensuite vendus sur le marché. La machine de pillage et de recyclage assure un débit important de produits pillés. Les marchands, en général bien renseignés sur de nouvelles sources d’objets à exploiter, devaient bien se douter que l’origine de tant d’objets en circulation était illicite, le fruit d’une confiscation, d’un prélèvement exécuté par des commandos à la solde de l’occupant ou de Vichy. Le marché noir qu’entretenait différents services allemands, regorgeait lui aussi de biens pillés et fournissait des filières de recyclage qui s’étendaient au-delà des frontières, en particulier vers l’Espagne et la Suisse, animées par la pègre corse, des collabos venant de pays alliés à l’Axe et de temps en temps par des mauvaises graines de la communauté juive, des opportunistes qui se retournèrent contre leurs compatriotes, motivés par l’appât du gain. Quoiqu’ils ne fussent pas très nombreux, leur existence est indéniable ainsi que leur participation au pillage économique et artistique de la communauté juive en France occupée.

Après quatre années de pillages, de confiscations, de saisies, dans le cadre d’une entreprise génocidaire, le marché de l’art en 1945 est totalement compromis, pollué, contaminé par une masse d’objets et d’œuvres, difficilement identifiables, mais qui proviennent de foyers exterminés, de vies brisées. Tous les recoins de ce qu’on appelle le monde de l’art, sont impliqués dans cette entreprise, y compris les fonctionnaires en poste qui officialisaient et rationnalisaient ces actes de pillages contre la communauté juive. Le comble voudrait que tout ce beau monde invoque après la guerre la bonne foi telle une incantation, afin de défendre leur comportement. Entretemps, six millions de vies humaines à travers l’Europe ont été effacées dans des circonstances on ne peut plus cruelles. 

Quand les forces alliées entrent dans Paris, le marché de l’art de l’après-guerre est privé de sa composante juive pour cause de génocide. Les marchands juifs rescapés sont ceux qui quittèrent la France à temps ou se terrèrent dans des villages isolés en attendant des jours meilleurs. Ils revinrent dans un Paris où seuls des fantômes bavardent en yiddish aux terrasses des cafés.

The duty to memory

by Marc Masurovsky

Which is simpler—recovery of looted cultural objects or memorializing the loss of cultural objects? The short answer is: both are fraught with complications. Let's focus for now on memory.

Remembering what was once “ours”.

When natural disasters strike communities, the survivors get together, mourn their losses, both individual and collective, give thanks for being alive, and remember what was once “theirs.” It is part of the grieving process. Shrines are erected to honor the dead, plaques are affixed to the walls of buildings where a traumatic event occurred, or steles are set up in public squares or at a crossroads, to honor and remember. These acts of remembering are the outward expression of a tacit, implicit accord that we have a duty of memory, our responsibility as an organized citizenry to pay homage, to remind ourselves that, despite events in our common pasts, anchored in mass violence and traumatic upheavals, our communities survived and, although scarred, rebuilt themselves.

Whether it be the “Holocaust,”, the mass murders and tortures in Cambodia, the fratricidal violence in countless countries, the near-total extermination of indigenous groups worldwide, there is a collective duty to remember what we, as humans, are capable of inflicting on our neighbors, our friends, our relatives, and on total strangers. The memory of our “bloodlust” serves as a reminder of what we have lost and what we have done unto others.

In the case of culture, this duty to memory takes an odd turn.

Plaques

Rare are the plaques that memorialize sites of plunder.

Jeu de Paume memorial in Paris

In France, it took the government nearly a half century before it felt that it could memorialize the depredations resulting from the Nazi-led cultural plunder of France. In 2005, a plaque was nailed to the side of the Jeu de Paume museum in the Tuilerie Gardens in Paris. It immortalizes the Jeu de Paume as a storage and transit center for art looted from Jewish victims of Nazi policies in occupied France and Rose Valland’s role in documenting those thefts. The plaque itself is sober. It also cites the number of works that Rose Valland is credited with recovering on behalf of the French State—45,000 in all—. One wonders whether all of those objects transited through the Jeu de Paume or if that figure represents the totality of works of art which the French government was able to repatriate from Germany and Austria after 1945.

In 1942, the Nazi government decided that it was time to expropriate all Jewish-owned property for the benefit of Germans living inside the Reich’s borders. The enforcement of the so-called “Mobel-Aktion” all across Western Europe resulted in the emptying out of tens of thousands of residences either rented or owned by persons of Jewish descent. Their goods were sorted, the most valuable were set aside, while the rest were put on trains to German cities damaged by Allied aerial bombing raids. In German-occupied Paris, a number of sites across the beleaguered capital were used to process expropriated Jewish household goods, a task performed by Jewish inmates from the transit camp of Drancy. One of those sites was called Levitan, once a furniture store at 85-87, rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin. A plaque was erected which honors the Jewish prisoners who worked there as slave laborers.  It also reminds the reader that Jewish goods were sorted at Levitan.  A good many of those goods were art objects which were inspected by Nazi agents and later sent to the Jeu de Paume for cataloguing and shipment to art depots in the Reich or for resale on the Paris art market.

Memorial at Levitan in Paris

Similarly in Germany, there are few memorial plaques reminding the public of Nazi crimes against culture.

Kopenickerstrasse depot memorial in Berlin

In Berlin, a printed text framed inside a clear waterproof casing is nailed to a wall at the former Kopenickerstrasse depot which encapsulated the destructive power of “Aktion Entartete Kunt”. In that depot, thousands of “degenerate” works of art were stored after being confiscated from individuals, galleries and cultural institutions across Germany. A good many were destroyed while the rest were put up for sale on the international art market.

One of the rare plaques honoring the work of an ardent critic of the corruption endemic to post-WWI German society marks the residence of Georg Grosz as one who stood against militarism and who satirized through his graphic work State-sanctioned corruption. Predictably, the Nazi authorities tagged Grosz’ works as “degenerate.” By 1933, Grosz had established himself in New York as a German exile.

Georg Grosz memorial plaque in Berlin, Germany

If we view the Jeu de Paume commemorative plaque as setting a precedent for memorializing sites of plunder, shouldn’t similar plaques be established at former ERR depots in Germany and Austria where loot from across Axis-occupied Europe was amassed?

Here is a brief list of these sites:

Neuschwanstein/Fussen/Hohenschwangau
Buxheim near Memmingen
Alt-Aussee
Kogl
Thurntal
Herrenchiemsee
Amstetten/Seissenegg
Nikolsburg in the Czech Republic.

The ERR depots in Paris should likewise be marked with similar plaques, used for processing Jewish-owned collections and for amassing loot seized during M-Aktion.

6, place des Etats-Unis
17, place des Etats-Unis
12, rue Dumont d’Urville
26, rue Dumont d’Urville
77 Avenue de la Grande-Armée, garage Talbot—sous-sol et 1er étage
23, rue Drouot
41, quai de la Gare d’Austerlitz
43, quai de la Gare d’Austerlitz
Faubourg Saint-Martin : garage Levitan
Rue Fresnel : Garage Fresnel
104, rue de Richelieu
45, rue Labruyère


Maybe plaques should also be placed outside of the Hotel Drouot in Paris, to remind art shoppers that this was an important recycler of looted Jewish-owned property. Is that inappropriate to even suggest a public link between a leading broker of art sales and its managers’ opportunistic behavior during the German occupation of Paris?

How far does one extend the work of memory through memorials without provoking volatile reactions from the public and from the government, starting with the arrondissement, the city and the national government?

Clearly, the complexities associated with remembrance activities, especially those that leave a permanent presence such as physical memorial structures, abound. This fear of offending one part of the public and of rattling old skeletons is nothing new but it plagues the public discourse on cultural plunder during the Nazi years.

At this rate, we can go from one country to the next where acts of plunder occurred and draw up lists of sites of memory.  The list is endless, perhaps because the memory of plunder has not yet been addressed properly.

Museum labels as “memory”

Inadequate labeling can create even more frustration than the absence of labeling associated with works of art on display. Several decades ago, there was widespread indignation at how the French government described the origin of specific works of art in State-owned museums.

Since then, there have been sporadic efforts in the United States to be more upfront about the troubled past of works in permanent collections. At the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston, MA, a project called “Art with a Past” invited viewers to read a text that did not exceed several hundred words on a large-size plaque next to the concerned work of art. The text detailed that the work had been plundered by the Nazis and had since been restituted to its rightful owners before entering the MFA’s collection. A unique experiment in the postwar annals of museum labeling, the “Art with a Past” project shows how a cultural institution can guide the viewing public to explore further the history of ownership of an object and serve as a reminder that history, even traumatic history, can intersect and interfere with the lives of an object’s owners.

Provenance as memory

The history of ownership of an object participates in the duty to memory. After all, museum leaders already encourage their staff to produce a particular telling of the story of the objects in their collections. But they are averse to construct a story of the object as an “object lesson” in how history and art interact and affect the destiny of works and objects of art. The decades-long feud over how provenance is researched and written goes to the core of this duty to remember traumatic events that shape and direct the paths taken by objects and their owners through the sinews of history, both in space and time.

An inability and unwillingness to write these stories constitutes a crime against memory, an appeal to institutional amnesia-"appreciate” art simply as object of worship and study. The art world’s refusal to acknowledge the complex history of art objects blindsides historical truth and cheats the viewing public of a unique chance to learn more about how objects circulate, often without their owners’ consent, as a result of turbulence in the unfolding of history. Governments should encourage cultural institutions to engage their public by using art as an opportunity to teach history. After all, what better way is there to use their tax-exempt status which is there for a reason--to educate their public?

MA-B 702

by Marc Masurovsky

MA-B 702 is the alphanumeric designator assigned to a watercolor by the American-born artist, Frank Myers Boggs, of a scenery in Honfleur which he painted most likely no later than in 1921. The English translation of the German title is roughly, “Sailor off the coast of Honfleur.”

The MA-B symbol stands for Moebel-Aktion Bilder, that section of the misnamed “Furniture Operation” which focused on the confiscation of works of art—paintings and works on paper--during WWII. The M-Aktion, as it is also known, which began in earnest in spring of 1942, was the brainchild of Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler’s minister of enlightenment who created the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), the largest State-run agency ever created whose sole mission was to confiscate and plunder mostly cultural property in conquered territories. M-Aktion operated in Western Europe. Its purpose was to empty out all residences where Jews once lived who either had emigrated, gone into hiding, or had been arrested, incarcerated, deported, and either murdered or enslaved during Nazi rule.

MA-B 702 was most likely removed from the place where it “lived” with its owner somewhere in the Paris region either in 1941 or 1942. It was stored in an auxiliary center run by the M-Aktion bureaucracy (affectionately referred to as a M-Aktion Lager) and brought to the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris which served as the central clearinghouse and sorting station for confiscated cultural objects and much more. There, it was inventoried on 9 March 1943 together with 45 other paintings and works on paper also confiscated under M-Aktion.

On the back of this Boggs watercolor is a dedicace to “Madame Daltroff.” It is dated 1921 and tagged at Honfleur, a quiet fishing village and beach resort on the Normandie coast.

All objects stolen during M-Aktion were inventoried without the name of the person from whose residence the object was confiscated. Hence they are “anonymous”, “without an owner,” and some might consider them to be “heirless.” The intent of the M-Aktion agents was not to waste time with detailed cataloguing operations that would link a confiscated object to an owner. It was wholesale plunder, not retail plunder during which confiscated objects are assigned to an identifiable owner, at least the one that the confiscating agents presume is the rightful owner.

If we want to know who owned the Boggs watercolor known as MA-B 702, our only starting point is the dedicace which provides us with a name—Madame Daltroff--a date—1921—and a place—Honfleur. We can quickly dismiss the date and the place because they do not appear to have any relationship to the ownership question. However Mrs. Daltroff retains our attention. Who was she?

A quick digital poke tells us that she was the business partner (and maybe more) of Ernest Daltroff, a perfume executive who lived in the Paris region up until the late 1930s. He acquired a small perfume manufacturing operation based on rue Rossini from Anne-Marie Caron. The new company became known as Maison Caron. Mrs. Daltroff was actually the pet name given to Félicie Wanpouille, described by various sources as the artistic director of Maison Caron, Mr. Daltroff’s muse, and a fashion and brand designer. Regardless, she became the soul of “Maison Caron” which released many popular fragrances in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s. The most popular was a fragrance for men called “Pour un homme” released in 1936. It affirmed Maison Caron as a respectable brand, not only in France but also in the United States, through its New York subsidiary.

With the drums of war beating at the doors of France, Ernest Daltroff, who was of Jewish descent, sought refuge in North America, some say in Canada, others in the United States, and died in 1941.

Ernest Daltroff

Back to our watercolor.

We can be more or less certain that "Madame Daltroff" aka Félicie Wanpouille owned or was somehow “involved” with the Boggs watercolor from 1921 to an unknown date and was obviously familiar enough with the artist for him to sign a dedicace to her.

The context of “Maison Caron” becomes important for two reasons: 1/ Ernest Daltroff, a Jewish businessman, escaped before France was overrun by German troops and 2/ Maison Caron was run by Félicie Wanpouille. Difficult to say whether or not Mr. Daltroff had transferred ownership to her or simply the control of the House.

Maison Caron

Enter from stage right, Michel Morsetti. Mr. Morsetti was the “nose” of “Maison Caron.” The one who could differentiate between hundreds of subtle olfactory hues and inflexions and create audacious, subtle, romantic, aggressive, subdued, perfumes both for men and women. Another individual in whom Ms. Wanpouille placed her trust, was Suzanne Saulnier, the authorized representative of Maison Caron who seemingly had wide latitude in the decision-making process.

Ms. Wanpouille married Jean Bergaud and, while still at the helm of Maison Caron, invested during the Vichy years in a very high-end women’s boutique at 10, place Vendome, one of the toniest addresses in Paris, then and now. She remained at Maison Caron throughout the German occupation of France, while Morsetti cranked out one perfume after another.

The postwar history of Maison Caron is of no concern to us since it will not tell us anything about MA-B 702.

So, what happened to the Boggs watercolor?

Several scenarios are conceivable, one as speculative as the other:

Who bought the watercolor? Let’s say that Mr. Daltroff acquired it and gave it to Ms. Wanpouille. A conceivable scenario judging by the closeness of their relationship.

The watercolor remained in Paris while Daltroff escaped. Was he still its owner? If it was a gift to Ms. Wanpouille, who does not appear to be of Jewish descent, why would the M-Aktion agents bother with it?

Let’s assume for a moment that she owned it. It is always plausible that she could have relegated the watercolor to the marketplace and sold it at auction or consigned it in a gallery. Boggs’ works were well-appreciated. They are not provocative works, they hang well and can be pleasing additions to well-appointed rooms in upper-middle class homes.

4/ for this work to become MA-B 702, there had to be a “Jewish” tie-in and the only one that we know of so far is Mr. Daltroff. It is conceivable that the painting hung in his apartment where he left it. If he owned his apartment, the Vichy regime would have placed seals on its doors after April 1941, an initial move signaling confiscation leading to liquidation and Aryanization. Maison Caron, if it remained under Jewish ownership—in Mr. Daltroff—would have been subject to Aryanization proceedings. The presence of a subsidiary in New York made it all the more attractive to the Vichy authorities and would have attracted notice from the German military administration. However, if Mr. Daltroff transferred ownership to Ms. Wanpouille with Ms. Saulnier and Mr. Morsetti firmly entrenched in the management and operation of the company, a successful one at that, all that was needed was to certify the Aryan status of the firm, free of “Jewish influence” and the liquidation/realization of any remaining shares in the hands of Mr. Daltroff.

The answers to some of the above questions can be found in the records of the Commissariat général aux questions juives. They are open and accessible to everyone either in Washington, DC, at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum or at the Shoah Memorial in Paris. One would also need to locate records which clarify the fate of Mr. Daltroff’s property as well as the legal status of Maison Caron from the time during the Vichy years. Perhaps, a search of trade registries in pre-1940 Paris might clarify the ownership question surrounding Maison Caron. There would be some records in the United States because of the presence of a subsidiary operating in New York. The US Department of the Treasury, its Foreign Funds Control division would have examined its operation as the American affiliate of an “enemy interest”.

Yes, I am assuming that Ernest Daltroff was the owner of the Boggs watercolor and that it remained in Paris for the ERR to seize as Jewish cultural property. But, as you know, anything is possible.

Happy hunting!

ERR database—MA-B section

by Marc Masurovsky
[updated on November 1, 2017]

The MA-B section of the ERR database consists of 1403 datasets (as of November 1, 2017) describing paintings and works on  paper stolen by the staff of the ERR from Jewish families during the so-called Mobel-Aktion that raged throughout German-occupied France, Belgium, and Holland from mid-1942 to the spring and summer of 1944.

Tens of thousands of apartments and residences were forced open, their contents ransacked, taken to triage centers, before being crated and shipped to the Reich.

When it came time to sort the works of art, the M-Aktion teams (personnel assigned to Mobel-Aktion) functioned as relays between the ERR and the local art market.  Hence, if any object seized during M-Aktion and taken to the Jeu de Paume for processing did not 'make the cut,' it was relegated to M-Aktion.  In other words, it could be made available to art dealers and collectors far and wide as long as they were willing to come to Paris and 'do business.'

My concern today was to enter descriptions of items that had been omitted during the initial round of data entry.  The reason for this is simple enough to me but not very obvious to anyone else, most probably.  The ERR staff produced close to 20,000 cards for all sorts of cultural items that they had confiscated and prepared for shipment to the Reich.  A large number of items were not carded.  Hence, when the ERR database was being produced, its contents were derived exclusively from these cards which were part of a microfilm collection designated as M1943 at the National Archives in College Park, MD.  Information on the missing MA-B items (the B stands for Bilder or pictures) could only be found on inventories that the ERR staff had drawn up month by month as their internal audit to document the inflow and outflow of confiscated objects.  These inventories contained a more complete listing of objects falling, in this instance, under the MA-B category.

Therefore, I had to go through all of the inventories for MA-B objects and identify those that had not been carded, and, therefore, were not in the database.  The most glaring gaps for objects included between MA-B 600 and 1000.

New photographs have also been added to MA-B datasets, some of which are wonderful representations of the artists' work, especially Marc Chagall, Louis Cabie, Jules Pascin, and many others.

Feel free to consult the database at www.errproject.org/jeudepaume.