The Auerbach Case: Part One-Incongruous relationships

by Marc Masurovsky

Dr. Philipp Auerbach

[Editor's note: This is the first of a four-part series on Dr. Philipp Auerbach and his efforts to resolve the problem of unclaimed Jewish cultural assets using controversial methods which ultimately caused his demise. Some recent published monographs were not available for consultation. Therefore the views expressed herein are guided by available primary and secondary sources.]

As the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) rose from the ashes of the Third Reich in 1949, there remained thousands of cultural objects including paintings, works on paper, furniture and decorative objects for which the US authorities which oversaw the Munich CCP could not establish an accurate point of origin. Since 1946, Jewish organizations had been designated as legitimate “successors” and were entitled to receive unclaimed objects from the Allied authorities and dispose of them as they saw fit in order to support the rehabilitation and relocation of Holocaust survivors stranded in refugee and displaced persons camps.

Munich was the nerve center of this activity as Jewish groups tangled with local authorities and Allied military and civilian officials to gain control of these unclaimed assets for the benefit of Jewish survivors.

Once word filtered out beyond Germany’s borders and reached the ears of American art dealers and collectors, the opportunity to gain access to these assets and sell them on the US market was too good to pass. American dealers became frequent visitors to Munich where they sought to strike some kind of arrangement by which they could gain access to these assets, convince the US authorities with the assistance of Jewish organizations and sell them on the US market, in New York mostly.

An unusual alliance took shape between Bavarian officials, representatives of Jewish successor and relief organizations and art dealers from the US, France and Germany, some with close ties to American museums. The goal of this alliance was to monetize unclaimed works of art as quickly as possible.

Dealers needed allies on the ground. Dr. Philipp Auerbach (1906-1952) proved to be the main ally of the art market, as the Bavarian official responsible for restitutions and compensation to Holocaust survivors. Auerbach was a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. He had lost most of his relatives in the Holocaust.

In 1946, Auerbach was appointed head of the Bavarian Office for reparations and restitution for persecuted people. In that capacity, Auerbach was responsible for overseeing this process on behalf of the Bavarian Finance Department. Hence, Auerbach found himself playing a central role in deciding the fate of unclaimed assets.

Auerbach, with a new sense of power, began to wield it. In one instance, he went to court to impose denazification proceedings against Johannes Müller, a philosopher and theologian with an ambiguous attitude towards Hitler, whom he had accused of glorifying Nazism. Müller owned a castle, Schloss Elmau, which had been used as a Nazi military vacation camp then as a military field hospital. In a show of petulance, Auerbach used his official position to take control of the castle without obtaining legal title to it. He then converted it into a sanatorium for Holocaust survivors and displaced people which operated from 1947 to 1951. Eventually, Auerbach lost control of the castle due to his brash and unorthodox business practices.

Auerbach’s cozy relationship with Jewish organizations involved in relief and rehabilitation in Munich laid the framework for a possible solution to the question of what to do with hundreds of millions of dollars of unclaimed cultural Jewish assets. Since Auerbach was the point man in the Bavarian administration for anything having to do with restitution matters, he wielded enormous influence on local administrative and judicial decisions affecting the status and disposition of these assets.
                                                                    

                                                                                                                                to be continued...

Walther Bernt, authenticator of looted paintings

"Merry company making music," by Jost van Geel

by Claudia Hofstee

Many art historians who were caught up in the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust threw their lot with the Nazis only to turn their coats and cooperate with the victorious Allies after 1945, providing them with the same skills and expertise that they had to their Nazi overseers. One of them was Walther Bernt who was active in Czechoslovakia and Germany.

On 30 January, 1976, the German art historian Walther Bernt (1900-1980) produced a certificate of authenticity for a painting by Joost van Geel, Merry company making Music, which the Cologne-based Lempertz auction house is scheduled to sell on 19 November 2022 (lot no. 1569). This painting was stolen from the collection of the late Adolphe Schloss and has not been restituted to his heirs. Bernt was familiar with the Schloss Collection­–one of the best-known collections of Old Masters in Western Europe at the time. His failure to report the existence of this unrestituted painting to the French authorities illustrates his complicity in the post-1945 dispersal of Nazi looted art. He became the “go-to guy” for these certificates and because of his reputation in the art world, nobody questioned the provenance of the works he authenticated. Who was Walther Bernt?

Walther Bernt is famous for authoring a four-volume monograph entitled “17th century Dutch painters” (Niederländischen Maler des 17. Jahrhunderts (1948-1962)”. He and his wife Ellen (1913-2002) became international experts on 17th century Dutch and Flemish painters. However, a dark shadow hangs over Bernt’s legacy. Born in Krumau (Český Krumlov, Czechoslovakia), he became an art consultant and dealer in the 1930s and from at least 1937 he worked as an editor of auction catalogs. He advised the prominent Jewish industrialist Frank Petschek of Aussig for whom he acquired a number of works of art. After the German takeover of Czechoslovakia and the imposition of a Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Bernt served as an appraiser for the Gestapo in Prague for art collections confiscated from Czech Jews before they were sent to death camps. Bernt also offered his services to Hans Posse (1879-1942) in October 1940 as he was building up a massive art collection to be housed in Hitler's Führermuseum.

Not long after, Bernt turned up as a cataloguer for the Nazi art dealer Hans W. Lange (1904-1945) at Alois Miedl's (1903-1970) Berlin auction on 3-4 December 1940 which was selling works of art seized from the Dutch art dealer Jacques Goudstikker (1897-1940). Bernt continued to advise private collectors like Hans-Werner Habig (1921-1954) from Oelde for whom he bought a painting by Joost de Momper, Stretch landscape with corn crop. [the painting now hangs at the Museum Abtei Liesborn des Kreises Warendorf (Germany) and is listed on the German Lost Art Database. The painting was previously in a private collection in Aussig in 1938.] 

After the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany in May 1945, Bernt collaborated with Allied officials by identifying looted works of art recovered by Allied forces. Although he did not disclose his wartime involvement in looting activities, postwar documents suggest that the Allied forces had an inkling of Bernt’s work with the Gestapo in Prague. The Bernt family lived in Munich where he produced numerous certificates of authenticity for art dealers and auction houses until his death in 1980, after which his widow Ellen continued his work. As looted art flooded the postwar art market, many experts and dealers issued certificates to manufacture or hide provenance information, such as removing labels from the backs of paintings. The certificate conveyed a certain sense of legality and value to the works. Anyone looking closely at the certificates provided by Walther Bernt can see that oftentimes they do not mention any provenance and mask the dubious origin of the works.

Führerbau, Munich, site of theft of van Geel painting, 1945

During WWII, the Nazis valued art historians and used their services to legitimize their art seizures and appraise them. André Schoeller (1879-1955) is a good example of this; he was an art dealer and appraiser for Hôtel Drouot, he appraised confiscated paintings for the ERR in Paris and sold pictures to several German museums and worked closely with Nazi dealers (e.g., Hildebrand Gurlitt, 1895-1956). Besides the connoisseurship, art historians’ knowledge of collectors and their collections made it possible for Nazis to acquire many artworks. Some of the better-known art historians who were involved with the Nazis during the war were Max. J. Friendländer (1867-1958), Vitale Bloch (1900-1975) and Eduard Plietzsch (1886-1961). Like Bernt, many of these art historians hardly suffered any consequences for their wartime collaboration with Nazi officials.

More research is required about Bernt and his post-war activities and his network. Evidence can in all probability be found at the “Walther and Ellen Bernt collection”, which contains (exhibition) catalogs, card catalogs, and photographs of works of art (published and unpublished). Who knows what else we will find?

A note about the author

Claudia Hofstee MA, studied art history and graduated from Utrecht University in 2018. Specialized in 16th- and 17th century Dutch and Flemish paintings. Worked as a provenance researcher for the JDCRP: The Pilot Project-The Fate of the Adolphe Schloss Collection. Working currently as an independent provenance researcher for the Mauritshuis in The Hague and is working on a collection catalogue for a private collection.

Hans Posse

Alois Miedl

Printed and Digital Sources:

www.fold3.com: RG 260 M1946 roll 10, NARA; RG 260 M1946 roll 121, NARA; RG 260 M149 roll 5, NARA; RG 260 M1946 roll 49, NARA; RG 260 M1947 roll 49, NARA; RG 260 M1946 roll 135.

Bernt, Walther. Die Niederländischen Maler des 17. Jahrhunderts, 3 vol. Munich, 1948-1962.

Flick, Caroline. Verwertungskampagne. Beobachtungen zur niederländischen Kunsthandlung Goudstikker-Miedl, Verwertungskampagne (March 2022).
https://carolineflick.de/publikationen/verwertungskampagne.pdf

Führmeister, Christian and Hopp, Meike. Rethinking Provenance Research, Getty Research Journal, vol. 11, issue 1 (2019), pp. 213-231.

Oosterlinck, Kim. Gustave Cramer, Max. J. Friedländer, and the value of Expertise in the Arts, Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics, Vol. 3 Nr. 1 (2022), pp. 19-56.

https://www.archivportal-d.de/item/ZO3W5LFDX74LDMHJIQONJI2ARWNP5ZYZ?isThumbnailFiltered=false&rows=20&offset=0&viewType=list&hitNumber=8

https://www.archivportal-d.de/item/JH4TDJ2XWWLXFJ5VB6NIJISZWAJQRTSV?isThumbnailFiltered=false&rows=20&offset=0&viewType=list&hitNumber=3

https://editionhansposse.gnm.de/wisski/navigate/9165/view

Commission for Looted Art in Europe (CLAE), London, UK

Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

Jewish Digital Cultural Recovery Project (JDCRP) Foundation, Berlin, Germany

Digital art market and art history sources

Auction.fr
Bonham's, London, UK
Christie's, Inc.

Dorotheum, Vienna, Austria
Invaluable, Inc.
Koller Auction House, Zurich, Switzerland

Lempertz, Köln, Germany
Neumeister, Munich, Germany

Open Art Data
RKD, Den Haag, Nederland

Washington Principle #6: A Critique

by Marc Masurovsky

[Editor's note: Due to the momentous nature of the upcoming international conference in Berlin, Germany, entitled "20 years Washington Principles: Roadmap for the Future," it would be worthwhile to revisit these Principles and to put them through a linguistic, methodological and substantive meat grinder, and see what comes out of this critique. There will be eleven articles, each one devoted to one of the Principles enacted in a non-binding fashion in Washington, DC, on December 3, 1998.]

Principle #6
VI. Efforts should be made to establish a central registry of such information.

“a central registry”:

The best way to kill an idea is to promote it and then abandon it. Ever since the “art restitution” movement kicked up some dust, there was talk of creating a central database of all art losses suffered by Jewish owners between 1933 and 1945. As the saying goes, talk is cheap while money talks. In the heady days of the late 1990s, much like the frightening realities which have set in worldwide as of 2016, it was easy to discuss the creation of a central database—a digital registry—of all cultural losses because no one had done it and, to accomplish this minor feat, one needed access to documents and lots of them (Principle #2), as well as a heap of resources and personnel (Principle #3). Since neither were forthcoming, then and now, twenty years later, the proposal put forth by the framers of the Principles is somewhat disingenuous.

After all, do they understand what effort it takes to undertake a central registry of all art
“confiscated” and displaced by the Nazis and their allies? It is a massive undertaking, which requires international cooperation, international partners, staff at multiple sites, a rugged online database, even more rugged servers, and teams of data extractors and data entry specialists. In 2018 dollars, a multi-million dollar affair. In 1998 dollars, it would have been much cheaper to accomplish.

The arguments around a central registry are legendary and date back to the aftermath of WWII when some of the Allied cultural advisers working in Munich, Germany, were bemoaning the fact that there was no central card index of art losses available for them to use as a reference source.

That discussion of a central registry died miserably especially when it became obvious that large postwar NGOs like the recently-established UNESCO did not succeed in taking over from the Allied powers the mantle of documenting and researching art losses suffered by victims of Nazism and Fascism.

In the 1990s, the idea has been repeatedly pooh-poohed as too expensive, impossible to undertake, and so forth. Meanwhile, as the arguments linger on from year to year, nothing gets done, which seems to be the point, no? So, proposing a central registry of art losses is tantamount to crying: The King is dead! Long live the King!—Substitute queen for king if that is your preference. In other words, it will not get done by the signatories of the Washington Principles because they have no interest in such a project. Why did they agree to it? Why sign off? Because it was easier to sign off than to challenge the idea, a hint that the intention to transform the principles into “hard law” never existed.

In June 2011, we noted that, based on the evidence, “Principle #6 is hereby decreed to be an unadulterated sham.” We still believe it today.

Principle #6 could be rewritten and broadened as follows:

Efforts shall be made to establish a central, fully searchable and interactive digital repository of artistic, cultural and ritual objects confiscated, misappropriated, sold under duress and/or forced sales, subjected to other forms of illicit acts of dispossession by the Nazis, their supporters, profiteers and their Fascist allies across Europe between 1933 and 1945.

The Gurlitt Affair: A canary in the coal mine?

by Ori Z Soltes

Surrounded by all kinds of interesting and problematic details, there are three large issues that stand out in the now-notorious case of Cornelius Gurlitt and his extraordinary hoard of paintings. One is that, having stumbled on this cache, between September, 2010—when Cornelius Gurlitt came back over the border from Switzerland, loaded with the residual of the cash that he had earned by selling yet another one of those paintings left to him by his late father, Hildebrand; suspicious of the volume of cash, the German authorities obtained a warrant to enter his apartment in Munich and found it piled high with some 1379 works—and its seizure in March, 2012 with the dubious provenance questions that more than 500 of these raised, (given, in particular, the fact that Gurlitt's father, Hildebrand, had been a major art buyer for Hitler's LinzMuseum project, in spite of having a Jewish grandmother), it took the Germans another eight months to let the world know that the cache existed.

The second is that, having done so, the Germans announced that a committee would be organized to examine the paintings, since they obviously do present Holocaust-era plunder questions--however they both remained secretive as to who would be on this committee, excluded some of the most skilled and experienced provenance researchers whom I at least know, and their politicians tied the hands of those on the committee, to the extent that key members of it threatened to quit. The third issue is that, sometime after this process began—after this mysterious process with its various legal and moral sides and aspects began its plod, and after, in the course of it all, the 84-year-old Gurlitt died (in May, 2014)—it emerged that there was a second cache of more than 260 paintings and drawings that had been kept in Gurlitt's farmhouse outside Salzburg, Austria that first came to light in February, 2014, and that the entire hoard had been left, in his will, to the Kunstmuseum (Museum of Fine Arts) in Bern, Switzerland.

This third issue presents at least one question and one serious practical problem. The question is how it came about in the first place that the Bern Museum—rather than, say, some Museum in Germany, where Gurlitt lived and died—received such a substantial inheritance. How was the relationship that led to this outcome forged? What, for example, might have been the role of the museum in who knows how many transactions in the previous half-century and more, during which Gurlitt never held a job, but lived by periodically selling paintings from his collection—in Switzerland?

If this question may never be answered, the practical problem is at least as troubling. In accordance with the arrangements outlined in the will, the Bern Museum will use its own staff resources exclusively to explore the provenance histories of all of these paintings—in 90 days—and its opinions/decisions will be final. Those of us who have worked in the provenance-research trenches are all too aware of how slow the process can be and therefore of how unlikely it is that honest and forthright, definitive conclusions can be drawn so quickly about so many works by so small a group of potential researchers (of relatively limited experience in this matter) in such a short period of time. HARP’s letters to the Museum Director have not yielded anything resembling a satisfactory response.

But the question is: why should anyone care about these three issues? The answer in broad, emotional terms is that all three of them pull at the meta-issue of justice, and whether it will be—or can be—done. More specifically, they pull at justice as it pertains to the enormous matter of the Holocaust and the specific subset of that matter that focuses on the plunder of cultural property—and what that act of plunder, and the failure to see property that was plundered restituted to those from whom it was forcibly taken (or to their surviving heirs), signifies about justice and/or the lack of justice in a post-Holocaust world.

There are more specific historical concerns that these three issues raise, however. If, as Martin Luther King, Jr. once famously observed, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice," the arc of the specific history of Germany, Austria and Switzerland as it pertains to Holocaust-related justice has been an instructive one. In general, as everyone knows, the Holocaust was an event that in the immediate aftermath of the war provoked some outrage and a desire to punish the perpetrators and some of the major figures, like Hermann Goering and Joachim von Ribbentrop were sentenced to death. But that first period past quickly, and the Holocaust was shortly all but ignored between the time of the Nurnberg Trials and the Trial of Adolph Eichmann in 1961.

The latter event, coupled six years later with the outbreak of the Six-Day War of June, 1967, between Israel and multiple Arab nations—just prior to which it appeared more than possible that Israel, with its 2.5 million Jews, would be annihilated; a few million Jews massacred while the world stood by and shrugged its shoulders, which possibility dredged up historical memory barely two decades old—began the process of bringing the Holocaust to the surface of particularly European and American Jewish and non-Jewish consciousness. This is the time-frame in which Yad VaShem came into existence in Jerusalem and within a decade of the June War the US Holocaust Memorial Museum was being planned in Washington.

Where Germany in particular is concerned, members of the Taetergeneration ("Perpetrator Generation"), who carried out the war, including thousands of former Nazis, after the first burst of show-trial sentencings had been carried out—by American, British, French and Russian judges, not by the Germans themselves—found plenty of jobs during the post-Nurnberg period in the civil service and even in the government, including some 25 Cabinet members and a President. This is what the journalist Ralph Giordano called Germany's zweite Schuld: "second guilt." Nobody was interested in the Nazi past; it was only in 1958 that West Germany established a central office for investigating war crimes--and with little real power, at that. The German judiciary did little with regard to former Nazis—how could it, since it was itself studded with former Nazis? The legal terms under which individuals might be found guilty of war crimes were narrow enough that very few could or would end up serving time for them. Of perhaps 6,500 members of the SS to survive the war, fewer than 100 were tried in German courts and only 50 were convicted.

All of this began slowly to change in the world at large as well as in (West) Germany by the 1970s, when the wartime pasts of a growing number of former Nazis living comfortably in the United States were uncovered. The culmination of change arrived to Germany with the trials of John (Ivan) Demjanjuk, an autoworker living and working outside Cleveland. After being deported from the United States, being tried and convicted in Israel for crimes allegedly committed in Treblinka and having his sentence overturned by an appeal to Israel’s Supreme Court, Demjanjuk was sent back to the US but with his citizenship revoked and ended up sent to Germany, where he was eventually found guilty of crimes committed at Sobibor.

The point is this: he had originally been accused and found guilty of being someone who in the end he was said not to have been—“Ivan the Terrible,” a brutal guard at Treblinka—but, by virtue of having been a guard at Sobibor, regardless of particular actions that he did or did not commit, he was found guilty of having been part of the “extermination machinery.” Although John Demjanjuk died (he was 89, by then) while awaiting the outcome of an appeal, the German authorities and media largely regarded this as a turning point in German legal history, since it suddenly opened up new possibilities with regard to punishing former Nazis. One might say the process begun in Israel with the Eichmann trial culminated in Germany with the Demjanjuk trial.

The further point is this: that although in the matter of such legal proceedings, the turning point came only early in the new millennium, the psychological groundwork was being laid for thirty years, evidenced by the explosion of Holocaust memorials, large and small throughout Germany, the renaming of streets in cities like Berlin to draw attention to prominent Jews whom the Nazi regime had destroyed, and by laws making it illegal to deny the Holocaust. Where Nazi-plunder art and cultural property is concerned, by the late 1990s and the beginning of the new millennium the Germans were ahead of the curve of most of the rest of the world in how broadly the term “plunder” was defined by them and in their willingness, indeed apparent desire, to address victims and their heirs who put in claims for restitution in an equitable manner.

At around the same time—from the mid-1990s to the end of the first decade of the new millennium, changes might also be felt elsewhere, as, for instance, in Austria and Switzerland. For half a century the Austrians had claimed that, in the Anschluss they were the Nazis’ first victims; by the end of the 1990s they were officially acknowledging how enthusiastically they had embraced the Nazis and how eagerly they had followed and even exceeded Nazi prescriptions for dealing with their Jewish neighbors. The Swiss had claimed to have remained successfully neutral due to the German fears of engaging their brave soldiers in the treacherous Alps. By the end of the millennium they were acknowledging that their role—particularly in the realm of plundered art, with regard to its sale and trade on the open market—had been essential for the Nazis, and that this had facilitated their unmolested neutrality. Swiss banks that had refused to turn over accounts to the heirs of Nazi victims (“Can you show me proof of your father’s death—perhaps his death certificate?” “They did not hand out death certificates at Auschwitz!”) were beginning to make the process of claiming such accounts more reasonable, in part under pressure from the US.

One of the concomitants of all of this was that, in general terms, anti-Semitism seemed to be on the wane; gradually from the 1970s through the new millennium’s first decade, it at least became increasingly unfashionable to make anti-Semitic statements or to engage in acts that could be called anti-Semitic—in general and particularly in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and other countries that had actively assisted the Nazi extermination of Jews.

So why are the three large issues associated with the Gurlitt affair so significant? Why, aside from the meta-issue of justice and whether or not it gets carried out, in general terms or in the specific terms of the Holocaust, its perpetrators and victims—or in the sub-specific matter of cultural property, provenance, theft and restitution? Because these issues suggest a disturbing pattern wherein the arc of history is curving back upon itself.

During the last several years—the years when the Germans remained silent for 8 months regarding Gurlitt; and when they opted for an obscure and unforthright path with respect to researching his collection’s provenance history; and when the museum in Bern has seen fit to violate legal/moral assertions championed in 1998 in the so-called Washington Principles as well as the principles regarding provenance research and its concomitants heralded by ICOM (of which august international museum organization the Bern Museum is a member)—there has been a precipitous rise in anti-Semitism. What was unsayable a decade ago can be heard with ever-growing frequency. What cannot be directly said is said by proxy in some quarters—most often by condemning Israel for behavioral patterns that are exhibited in many places across the planet but ignored by those same Israel critics.

As troubling as the Gurlitt affair is in its own capacity, what it signifies with regard to the turning back of Germany—and Switzerland—toward a very dark place from which they both seemed to have emerged not that long ago is very disturbing indeed. Placed against the backdrop of a large look at the world and what appears to be an unshakably negative attitude towards Jews and Judaism to which far too many individuals resort whenever socio-economic or political conditions become difficult or complicated, the Gurlitt affair feels like a canary in the coal mine, whose quiet death warns us and asks the question: when will the breathable air run out?

Angelus Novus, Angel of History, by Paul Klee

by Marc Masurovsky

Paul Klee
Source: Wikipedia

Interesting destiny for the watercolor, “Angelus Novus”, a critical early work by Swiss artist Paul Klee.

Angelus Novus, Paul Klee, 1920
Source: Wikipedia

The “Angelus” is also known as the “Angel of History.” Klee painted it in 1920. The Jewish mystical writer, Gerschom Scholem, bought it shortly thereafter and hung it in his apartment in Munich, Germany. Scholem’s close friend, the cultural philosopher Walter Benjamin, viewed it in a major exhibit of Klee’s work at the Galerie Goltz in Munich and acquired it without hesitation. Goltz brokered the sale between the two close friends.

Walter Benjamin
Source: Wikipedia

Benjamin’s relationship to the Angelus Novus was nothing short of profound and deeply rooted in his own existential angst about civilization, the absence of happiness in society, his vision of a humanity bereft of humanity, and yet, in Klee’s angel, he might have gleaned his own angel, a metaphysical creature on whose wings History could be carried aloft. Hope springs eternal, doesn’t it?

Some have written that the Angel’s eyes bear witness to the horrors of history since the dawn of ages and into an unknown future. But they are compassionate and empathetic. For Benjamin, the “Angel” was his angel and Klee’s work took on proportions greater than life, overwhelming Benjamin’s psyche. It was as if this Angel was his redemption, his life buoy. In moments of despair, he would leave it in trust with his friends, including Scholem, and would pick it up again when passing through. Even when Benjamin was destitute to the point of not eating, he would hold back from selling his Angel of History. True, he tried several times. A year or so before his untimely death at Port Bou in the French Pyrenées, Benjamin considered selling the Angel to arts patron Ernest Morgenroth whose son, Ernest Gustav Morgenroth, he knew well—later he became known as Stephen Lackner, a well-known patron of the arts in the United States.

September 26, 1940: Walter Benjamin commits suicide at Port Bou, convinced that he will face impending arrest at the hands of the Vichy authorities who will then turn him over to the German authorities and ultimate doom. Before killing himself, Benjamin secured his papers, manuscripts and the Angel with the renown French writer, Georges Bataille, who then worked at the National Library (Bibliothèque Nationale) in Paris. Bataille hid Benjamin’s belongings in a corner of the Library where they remained throughout the entire period of German occupation. A miracle! Bataille left the National Library and hid Benjamin’s cultural treasures at his apartment. After the end of the Second World War, another friend of Benjamin’s, the author Pierre Bonasse, took over the burden of caring for Benjamin’s items and made every effort to find Benjamin’s sister, Dora, and the German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, to whom he had entrusted the manuscripts and the Angelus. Adorno had since moved to the United States. It took another several years before the handover was successful, thanks in part to an employee of the US Embassy in Paris who acted as a courier for the “Benjamin estate.”

Gerschom Scholem
Source: Wikipedia

Available sources are not clear about the last detail, which is how the Angelus fell back into the hands of Gerschom Scholem. But it did, thanks to Adorno. Was this “gift” specified in Benjamin’s will? Did Benjamin have a written will? Safe to say, though, that Scholem, as first purchaser of the Angelus Novus, became again its owner, owing to the unfortunate premature demise of his best friend, Walter Benjamin. After Scholem’s death in 1982, the Angelus Novus was donated to the Israel Museum in 1987 by Scholem’s widow, Fania, with the help of the Herring Brothers, famed art dealers in New York, and Mr. and Mrs. Ronald Lauder.

One fact is puzzling, though: when reading the information about “Angelus Novus” on the Israel Museum website, it indicates that Scholem “inherited” it. What kind of inheritance can this be between two very close friends whose trust in one another was sealed in part by an “Angel of History”?

Sources: Kerber, Armin, “Lost Paradise: The Angel’s Gaze,” Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland, 2008; Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, “The Complete Correspondence, 1928-1940,” Harvard University Press, 2001.

Lessons of the May 6-7, 2011, World War II Provenance Research Seminar

An event such as this one does not happen very often, especially not in Washington, DC.

Co-sponsored by the National Archives and the two leading museum associations in the United States, partially underwritten by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, this seminar promised to deliver a hefty dose of knowledge and information culled from the provenance research experience of American museums.

Who came?

In attendance were representatives from over 50 American museums, including Hawaii and Puerto Rico, and one museum from Zurich, Switzerland. The two global leaders of the auction market were on hand, Christie’s and Sotheby’s, as well as a handful of American restitution lawyers, representatives of claimants’ organizations, the New York-based Holocaust Claims Processing Office (HCPO), the Holocaust Art Restitution Project (HARP) and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany (Claims Conference).

The director of the archives at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs decided to show the flag for France, one can only presume that it was a last-minute decision but a good one at that. Only one claimant was in attendance: the heirs of Paul Rosenberg whose archive is being offered for research via the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A number of independent researchers were in the room, from Canada, France, the United States, Austria, and the United Kingdom. The US Department of State sent a delegation as well, perforce.

However, no scholars of the Second World War and the Nazi era were invited, except for yours truly, a strange feeling since the Holocaust is, well, a historical event that engulfed tens of millions of individuals on a continental scale for 12 long and painful years.

What’s new?

The field of provenance research has not evolved in substance, only in numbers. The training programs are seriously flawed since they are not equipped to provide contextual and forensic content to those who are not familiar with this line of research.

The emphasis of the conference has been heavily weighted, almost untenably so, towards resources in Germany and Holland. Not a bad thing in and of itself, in fact, those resources are extraordinary and growing by leaps and bounds, but they are solely and exclusively focused on market disruptions within the former Reich and German-occupied Holland. There is no novelty here, simply additional layering of information. And, yet, as was pointed out by several individuals, not many, the thefts of art plagued 19 countries. Should sought objects have entered the Netherlands and Germany, one can only be so lucky, resources are available to garner information about them, assuming, of course, that these objects fit within a specific art-historical mold.

Discrimination through art history

Not to make a big deal about this, but…

The bias of art historians and museum experts remains as pronounced today as it has always been ever since the issue of looted art entered into popular consciousness. From the forlorn days of recovery in the post-1945 world to the present, research remains limited to the great masters of Western culture who have entered the pantheon of US museums. There still is no room for the thousands of artists whose works were the subject of misappropriation but the appreciation of which never extended into the collecting habits of Tier One and Tier Two museums in the United States as well as objects produced by other cultures, three-dimensional objects and decorative pieces. As one curator indicated from the Harvard Museums, provenance research is limited to works in their collections. Ergo…

What is to be done?

Unbeknownst to the organizers of this two-day provenance fiesta, or if they do know, they simply cast it aside, many attendees moped about the crying need for international coordination of research into looted art, including some of our colleagues from Germany. They request federated or unified resources on-line and human in order to strengthen and broaden research talent and resources. Training is sorely lacking as most acknowledge that they are overwhelmed by the level of complexity inherent to conducting research into the whereabouts of works that changed hands illicitly over decades. And yet, there is no recognizable effort by the Museum associations to promote the kind of training that is essential if one is to harness the complexities of art thefts that occurred within a genocidal context over 60 years ago.

What can be the answer to such striking levels of inaction and institutionalized passivity? Independent efforts that lie outside the museum community are our only hope, fueled by organizations, foundations, and perhaps even research institutes in Europe and the Americas whose interest lies in providing utmost transparency in the revelation of the myriad ways in which art works and objects have been mishandled until today. For instance, there is a glimmer of hope in Prague where the European Shoah Legacies Institute (ESLI) is finally coming together and may in fact one day find ways of encouraging and promoting what precisely the US museum community is loath to do—training and contextualized historical research into the wartime and postwar fate of looted objects of art. Also, in Munich, the Central Institute for Art History possesses over 8000 photographs of objects that include many which were forcibly removed from France and Belgium. The Institute appears to be willing to promote such international exchanges of ideas and resources and its invitation is most welcome.

Last but not least…

For once, US museum officials have acknowledged that their attention has been too focused on Old Masters and Impressionists and must extend to three-dimensional objects from Asia. This is good since the Freer Gallery in Washington, DC, appears to be leading the charge, albeit modestly.

A parting shot

The future lies in full transparency of resources and the revamping of thousands of so-called provenances so that they reflect accurately the sinews of ownership that go along with objects that are hundreds of years old or even simply seventy years old. Museums must promote the accurate labeling of those histories so as to inform their public of the extraordinary journeys that those objects have taken in order to reach their walls. Until such time, opacity will reign supreme, intellectual dishonesty will veil the truth behind the histories of those objects and the ensuing lapses in ethical behavior will dominate a field that ought to be celebrating its resources and contributions to world knowledge about art.

Found: Martin Bormann loot near Biarritz, France

In a wee article published on 10 March 1951, “Le Monde” reported the discovery of crates at Ilbarritz, near Biarritz, labeled “Martin Bormann, Reichsleiter, München.” Joke, right? Wrong.

Incredible, but true.

As far as can be ascertained, on or about 8 March 1951, eighteen crates were found in bushes alongside a beach at Ilbarritz, just south of Biarritz, in Basque country, a hop and a skip away from the Franco-Spanish border and from the town of San Sebastian. The crates were turned over to local police who called in Customs who, in turn, summoned Pierre Labrouche, director of the Musée Bonnat in Bayonne, to inspect the crates and give his professional assessment as to quality, value, and origin. Mr. Labrouche would only comment on the sixteen paintings that were housed in two large crates, some of which were of fairly decent quality. The rest of the items, he professed, fell outside his area of expertise since they were mostly decorative objects, like clocks, porcelain and other objets d’art.

Upon closer examination, one of the paintings yielded a clue as to the origin of the crates. An oil by a German artist, Boettger, it had been exhibited in Munich in 1942. Another indication on the back of the painting pointed to the Obersalzberg at Berchtesgaden.

In April and May 1945, American troops had liberated Berchtesgaden and Münich, stumbling upon troves of looted art. The French Foreign Affairs Ministry’s art recovery specialists, and, in particular, Ms. Rose Valland, speculated that the painting and the other items had been plundered from the main Nazi loot depots in and around Munich, and that some of the items had belonged to Martin Bormann. According to Ms. Valland, there had been significant acts of plunder committed by local laborers at the Führerbau in Munich and in Berchtesgaden before the arrival of American troops there. It could be that some of the thieves made off with the loot, crated it, and planned on crossing into Spain with it. 

Why those 18 crates ended up in bushes overlooking a white sand beach south of Biarritz will never be known.   As to the owners of the plundered items in those crates, the mystery will endure since no inventory of Martin Bormann's collection survived the war, assuming that one even did exist.

The crates were shipped to Paris for ‘further disposition.’