A brief overview of the art trade between New York and Latin America between 1940-1945

by Marc Masurovsky

The United States entered the Second World War after the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on the morning of 7 December 1941. Up to that point, it had remained ostensibly neutral, American companies continued to operate through their subsidiaries in Axis-occupied Europe and Nazi Germany.

When the US first entered the global conflict in late 1941, its primary focus was on Japan and its military campaigns against the Pacific Islands and the Asian mainland, with China taking the brunt of its assault in what appeared to be a systematic attempt to eradicate the local Chinese population and deprive it of its cultural heritage.

The art market has demonstrated time and time again how impervious it is to mass unrest, domestic and international conflicts, including all-out war. Trade between the Western Hemisphere was effectively hampered with the European continent and the US’ closest ally, the United Kingdom. A naval blockade was established in the north Atlantic, whose purpose was to screen maritime shipping lanes in order to prevent the Axis from engaging in economic and commercial ventures as well as exporting agents and military assets.

How did this affect the New York art trade? It must have put a crimp in its style, of that there is no doubt. But one of the hallmarks of a successful art business is to continually expand and strengthen its rolodex of clients, regardless of where they might be based.

Based on US postal censorship intercepts which have been publicly available for decades at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, one can paint a clearer picture of how New York art galleries benefited from the new conditions brought about by global war.

In short, New York galleries and collectors were in regular contact throughout the war, from 1940 to 1945 and beyond with galleries, collectors and dealers in 12 Latin American countries and two island nations (Curaçao and Cuba). The Latin American countries included from north to south:

Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil.

While New York galleries and collectors had a very difficult time doing business directly with their contacts on the European continent, those Latin American countries and islands served as transit areas and willing intermediaries for their transactions. And so, Cuba, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela and Mexico were the chosen transit points for works and objects of art streaming out of Europe to be traded locally and/or shipped to the United States for display and sale.

It is impossible to assess the total volume of objects that flowed out of Europe into Latin America and from there to the United States, but some gallerists like the Koenigsbergs who were based in Buenos Aires (Argentina) and Mexico City (Mexico) did a bustling business, with shipments of hundreds of objects arriving into Mexico City at a time. Local auction houses were more than happy to disperse these European objects as there was a willing clientele avid to purchase them.

Business as usual

by Marc Masurovsky

The twenty-year old discussion about Nazi looted art and restitution tends to skirt a fundamental point: how was it able to happen? And most importantly, how were its fruits internationalized and monetized on a global scale?

In the interwar years, many paths led to New York, the emerging global center of attraction for artists, bankers, industrialists and intellectuals, including those who were anxious to start a new life away from the Nazi madding crowd.

If one looks at art as a business, then one can understand that the rise to power of Hitler on January 30, 1933, did not put an abrupt end to business relations between Germans and their counterparts outside the nascent Third Reich. In fact, it was business as usual. Many scholars have already covered this ground, but have been shy to point out that the Nazi plan against its perceived enemies, especially the Jewish community of the Reich and ultimately of continental Europe, was grounded in economic motivations as much as it was rooted in age-old anti-Semitic stereotypes and myths of alleged Jewish evil and malfeasance towards civil society and its institutions, even going as far as accusing Jews of holding the Zeitgeist of the nation hostage to their supposed base needs.

That said, the art world continued to function as before January 1933, except for the inevitable casualties of business under the Nazis, who enforced interdictions against artists and intellectuals and their supporters in the cultural and financial spheres. The attack against so-called degenerate art, objectionable forms of expression, forced the disgorgement of thousands of works and objects onto the private art market, followed by the purging of such banned pieces from German state museums and their sale inside and outside the Reich. The international community responded with its checkbook and began acquiring at bargain basement prices, works which had not been so easily available during the Weimar period.

The Nazis understood the financial power of art as a pendant to their attack on Kultur which eventually extended across Europe.

Let’s take a look at the economic infrastructure through which art flows—companies, banks, middlemen—because art is also an investment. Dealers and collectors alike are intrinsically connected to the financial and commercial interests of a nation, as well as its civil servants who rationalize and organize policy to enable economic growth, trade and financial investments both inside the Reich and abroad. Germany is a net exporting country as a consequence of the Versailles Treaty, forced to rely on foreign subsidiaries to generate markets so as to ensure its survival. The interwar era of global cartels brought financiers and industrialists of all major countries together at the table, as well as institutions such as the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), whose members were instrumental in reshaping the financial map of the world, and helping to seal the fate of countries like Czechoslovakia. Should it come as no surprise that art travels with these businessmen, becomes a source of investment, serves as collateral, money is borrowed to acquire art as much as assets are leveraged to ensure transactions which have nothing to do with art.

In sum, the domestic plunder of German citizens and their art collections finds natural outlets in and through networks of affiliation long ago established and strengthened across the international corporate community. The appeal of specific styles by conservative elites—from antiquities to medieval and old masters all the way to the 18thand early 19thcenturies—act as a pump for art dealers with ready access to those works being funneled into the market by desperate people seeking quick cash to subsist and/or to fund emergency trips into exile and to safe havens.

The evidence is compelling that, from the first forced sales of summer 1933 in Berlin, buyers were in attendance from neighboring countries and far-flung ones—Great Britain and even the United States. The incidental business tourists who happened to find themselves in Nazi Germany with some disposable cash frequented auction houses where Jewish-owned property was being sold. These items in turn were repatriated back to their native countries to be included into their places of business and residence.

Hence, from the mid-1930s, looted cultural property is flowing outward following long-established networks of trade and kinship ties between foreign clients and their German dealers and middlemen.

The same scenario is repeated even more brutally following the March 1938 Anschluss of Austria with American investment banks like Goldman Sachs advising its clients to buy up devalued property ensnared in Aryanization procedures. Let’s not be naïve, as there are hundreds of Allied companies operating subsidiaries in the Greater German Reich with which they are not yet at war. Normal business relations continue unimpeded, these subsidiaries allow their boards to be aryanized by transferring out their Jewish cadres in order to appease the New Order.

These accommodations with authoritarian governments began long before Hitler came to power. Indeed, since 1922, Benito Mussolini ruled Italy with an iron fist, which appealed to many foreign businessmen who preferred to have some sense of order that would maintain social peace in their Italian subsidiaries. Moreover, European and American dealers traveled to and from Italy every year throughout the 1920s and 1930s to conduct business, exchange or acquire works of art, organize and borrow exhibits for display in their homelands. Hence, Fascism and later on Nazism did not create moral and ethical qualms for Europeans and American citizens as they pursued business opportunities with authoritarian, racist, racialist governments.

So, when we discuss how on earth did objects looted during the early years of the Third Reich ever manage to enter Western European and American collections, one should not look too far and too deep for an answer to that question. The same reasoning applied to the sale and exchange of other commodities. For instance, the Leipzig Trade fair attracted American buyers up until the late 1930s, even though trade associations in the United States expressed some concerns over the probity of maintaining commercial relations with companies in the Reich that discriminated against their Jewish employees and which had absorbed Jewish businesses through aryanizations, selling the aryanized property to foreign buyers.

Also, the international gold trade had been mired in some controversy after the Anschluss and the invasion of Czechoslovakia with the blessings of France and Great Britain, the gold reserves of both countries having been absorbed by the Reich, and their contents used on international markets to acquire badly needed foreign currencies. The US Treasury became aware of these movements of gold but were unable to prevent those bars from entering the US gold reserves on account of a fundamentalist approach to the international gold market. Nothing should be done to disrupt the inflow and outflow of gold because the dollar’s value was pegged to a fixed value of gold. Hence, any political disruption of the international gold matket rooted in discrimination against gold provided by the Reich as collateral to purchase foreign currencies was prohibited, unless the US wanted to destabilize the dollar’s value and therefore endanger the economic recovery of the US in the years following the Great Depression.

The international art trade mirrored closely the way in which international business relations were conducted between the future Allied and Axis countries. Provenance of goods and services was never held to account as a prerequisite for conducting business. Hence, the desire to question the origin of the goods and services was rarely raised and even when it was, could not be invoked as a reason not to conduct business with a German or Italian entity or individual. One would have to wait for a state of war to exist between the US, Great Britain and the Axis powers to restrict trade relations, including the international movement of art objects.

But, as we all know, where there’s a will, there’s a way.