"The Actor," by Pablo Picaso

by Marc Masurovsky

The Actor, by Pablo Picasso.

Saturday morning, 1 October 2016, brought news of a restitution claim filed by the Leffmann family heirs against the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a painting by Pablo Picasso, “The Actor”, which is estimated to be worth 100 million dollars. According to Graham Bowley, writing for the New York Times, the Leffmann family left Cologne in 1937 and sought refuge in Italy, paying for their exit in part with the sale of the Picasso painting. The Leffmanns ended up in their new land of refuge, Brazil, not unlike other Jewish families plundered by the Nazis, like Hugo Simon.

The Leffmanns sold the painting to the Perls Gallery and Paul Rosenberg, both in Paris. At the time of the Leffmann sale, Hugo Perls  lived in Paris where he had emigrated in 1931, fearful of the inevitable rise to power of the Nazi movement in Germany. The Kaete Perls Gallery moved from Berlin to Paris. Hugo and his wife, Kaete, separated.  According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Kaethe Perls Gallery acted as an agent in the sale of the Leffmann Picasso in 1937. It indicates Hugo Perls, her estranged husband, and Paul Rosenberg, a renown Paris art dealer and collector, as jointly investing in the painting. 

Hugo and Kaete Perls, by Edvard Munch

Thelma Chrysler Foy

According to the New York Daily News, Cesar Monge de Hauke paid 12,000 dollars for “The Actor” but the journalist, Victoria Bekiempis, does not explain to whom de Hauke paid the sum and for whom he allegedly acquired the Picasso painting. One might assume that he had acted as a go-between for Knoedlers. At the time of the transaction, de Hauke was associated with Germain Seligmann, who operated a successful art gallery in New York. In the summer of 1940, de Hauke decided to strike gold on the wartime Paris art market by packing up his belongings in New York and moving to German-occupied Paris. However, this fact has no relevance on the bearings of the Leffmann claim.  The Metropolitan Museum's provenance of "The Actor" does not mention de Hauke.

In another odd journalistic claim regarding the history of the Leffmann family's escape to freedom, Reuters reported that the sale of the painting was to flee Benito Mussolini's Fascist Italy in June 1938! No kidding.. Should that be true, it would be odd since the racial anti-Jewish laws were not enacted until November 1938. Odd how history can get rewritten so quickly and in such a fangled manner!

Thelma Chrysler Foy, a daughter of Walter Chrysler, acquired “The Actor” through Knoedlers in 1941 and donated the Picasso work to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1952.

Of interest to us is the involvement of Perls and Rosenberg in the joint acquisition of the Leffmann painting in Paris. Whatever assets Hugo Perls had left behind in Germany, the Nazi government confiscated them. Paul Rosenberg, on the other hand, suffered the same fate two years later, fleeing the German blitzkrieg against Western Europe and seeking refuge in New York where many European Jewish collectors and dealers had also resumed their lives. His entire art collection was seized and many of its contents redistributed with glee among art dealers, brokers and collectors in the Paris art market.

One has to wonder in retrospect and with twenty-twenty hindsight—maybe unfairly—how much Rosenberg and Perls knew of the duress sales in Nazi Germany, how they viewed the acquisition of assets owned by persecuted Jews—ethical or unethical?—or did they simply look at the acquisition of “The Actor” by Pablo Picasso as just another business opportunity?

The post-WWII era inaugurated historic claims for restitution by men and women of Jewish descent, many of whom owned art collections, major or minor, who had been persecuted and plundered during the commission of an act of genocide. The claims were unprecedented in modern history but so was the crime which provoked them. It turns out that a number of post-war Jewish claimants acquired, wittingly or unwittingly, on the German art market, in Switzerland, or in the post-1945 era works and objects of art confiscated from other Jews or sold under duress to finance their escapes by paying excessive levies demanded by the Nazi government as toll fees to allow Jews to leave the Reich.

As is the case today, provenance seemed to have not counted for much in the decision to acquire plundered or confiscated objects. Ironies of history or simply standard operating procedure in the art market, regardless of who and what you are?

The emphasis placed on Perls and Rosenberg in the post-duress sale ownership history of the Leffmann Picasso is to underscore the fact that the art market and those involved in it often set history aside in order to acquire what they covet as part of their overall business activities. This was especially true in the inter-war period, the wartime years, and the decades following the end of WWII and the Holocaust.

This behavior is similar to what we experience nowadays with Native American artifacts looted from religious and sacred sites throughout North America and the acquisition of antiquities known to emerge from conflict zones in the Mideast and elsewhere.

No one is immune to such behavior, not even those who were persecuted.

The New York law firm of Herrick Feinstein is representing the Leffmann family in its bid to recover the Picasso painting from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"La culture, c'est moi!"

by Marc Masurovsky

The British are not the only ones who display imperial superiority when it comes to “art” and “culture.” France prizes itself for being one of the most cultured, cultivated, nations in the world. But it is also the country that produced “L’Etat, c’est moi.” I am the State in the person of the King, in this regard, Louis XIV, the Sun-King.

Louis XIV

Now, it is up to Ministers of Culture, Prime Ministers and Presidents and their designated representatives in the person of museum directors and curators to take over that mantle of burdensome responsibility: determining the precise role of culture in the society over which they rule.

No more explicit is such oversight than in their refusal to allow works of art to leave the French territory or in the act of seizure of objects entering the country for whatever reason. Here are some examples:

courtesy of bbc.com

In 2011, the French government ordered a painting seized which had been loaned by a London gallery for display in Paris, arguing that the painting was “stolen property.” And when was the painting stolen? In 1818, not 1918, not 1998, but 1818. The French government alleged that the painting had disappeared from the Louvre. An audit of the Louvre records showed that the painting was no longer on their books as of 1818. Hence it must have been stolen three years after Napoleon I’s defeat and exile, three years into the reign of Louis XVIII whose notable contributions to French history was the establishment of a modern police force, whose power was vested in large part in a network of informants and “délateurs.” The London gallery challenged the seizure but quickly realized that a painting, once coveted by the French government, never leaves France. An odd twist on “inaliénabilité”.

When does the clock start which renders a stolen work of art still retrievable by the French government? Is there a statute of limitations on stolen art recovery? Apparently, it is left up to the whimsy of the French government to make that determination. And yet, the French government tries as much as possible to deflect responsibility for works of art stolen during acts of genocide as during the Vichy years (1940-1944). Historical irony: this particular painting had been confiscated as aristocratic property during the French Revolution.

In 2015, the French government seized a painting by Pablo Picasso owned by a Spanish billionaire, which the Spanish government has also claimed for itself as a “national treasure.”Curators at the Prado cannot wait to hang it on their walls.

In a rather hilarious, “cocasse”, exchange between two competing governments drooling over the same “masterpiece” (not everything painted, drawn, or sculpted by Picasso is a masterpiece!), Spanish curators argued that the painting was produced on Spanish territory, while the Picasso heirs demonstrated quite convincingly that it had been painted much farther north on French territory. Ironically, the painting was sold at Sotheby’s London in the 1980s, with no apparent claims by either the French nor the Spanish. What happened in the intervening two decades to provoke such fits of cultural nationalism? It would seem as if cultural imperialism and haughtiness over works of art is a waxing and waning phenomenon much like the cycles of the moon. Who knows what happens when the moon is full? Lock up your paintings!

Then-Culture Minister Fleur Pellerin prevented royal objects from being exported for sale through Sotheby’s. It’s bad enough to confiscate aristocratic items in a fit of revolutionary fervor. It’s quite another to prevent said objects from being sold off to someone who might want them even if they might just turn out to be expensive baubles. But no! Here again “France” decided, or rather, Fleur Pellerin, the minister of culture who no longer is, decided in the name of the good citizens of France that items produced for the pleasure of its aristocracy must remain in France. So decreed!

Fleur Pellerin

"Misfortune" in the British Isles

by Marc Masurovsky

Most cultural institutions around the world are controlled or owned by governments. In political terms, the State oversees and controls culture, sometimes intimately, most often at a distance. There are ministries, departments, specifically tasked with the management of culture, at all levels of society.

The State allocates funds to thousands of projects, large and small, as long as it thinks that it can afford them. But it also abuses its discretion to decree what works of art remain within its territory or what works should be incorporated into its collections, forever.

To wit:

Here are some examples of such State intervention in the United Kingdom

The so-called Waverley criteria are invoked to determine the validity of an export ban. Based on the Waverley criteria, the British government deems what work or object is too important to be exported. Its loss has to be construed as a “misfortune”. That sounds a bit tepid. A misfortune? How about a loss to the nation? People experience misfortunes. How does the disappearance of a work of art constitute a “misfortune”? And yet…

In 2011,  Culture Minister Ed Vaizey prevented a portrait signed Edouard Manet from leaving Brish territory.

In 2012, a Picasso painting, "Child with a Dove," was banned from leaving the British Isles because the government wants it to remain within its borders.

Child with a Dove

Jane Austen's ring (left) and Kelly Clarkson (right)

 In 2013, the British ministry of culture bans Jane Austen’s ring from leaving the UK, to Kelly Clarkson’s dismay who had bought it fair and square. She had to give it up.

Femme, by Alberto Giacometti

In February 2016, that would be this month, the United Kingdom prevented a Giacometti sculpture from leaving British territory.

With no Government rule book that spells out what would cause “misfortune” to the British nation if an object left the British Isles to adorn someone else’s living room, display wall, or mantle, it is frankly hypocritical on the part of British officials and especially its bureaucrats who are responsible for defining what constitutes a “misfortune” for remaining deliberately vague until they decide to strike. Ask Kelly Clarkson how she felt.

The most expensive works of art in the world and their histories (or lack thereof)-Part Three

by Marc Masurovsky

7. The Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer II, 1912, by Gustav Klimt sold for 87 million dollars at Christie’s on November 8, 2006.

Adele Bloch Bauer II, 1912, Gustav Klimt

8. The Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer I (The Lady in Gold) by Gustav Klimt, 1907, sold for 135 million dollars at the same sale.

Adele Bloch Bauer I, 1907, Gustav Klimt

These two portraits of Adele Bloch Bauer were painted by Gustav Klimt on the eve of the First World War. Klimt was a favorite of Viennese Jewish aristocrats. The portraits are lush and exuberant, yet Adele is unreachable and cold. Adele died at a young age in 1925. The Anschluss of March 10, 1938 resulted in the Nazi annexation of Austria into the Greater German Reich and in the wholesale dispossession of Jewish-owned wealth and property followed by the persecution and deportation of tens of thousands of Viennese Jews to concentration camps “nach dem Osten.” The Bloch Bauer family, one of the most financially endowed of Vienna, lost all of its property. Avid collectors of Klimt and other members of the Austrian Secession, the Nazis confiscated all of the family’s works of art which ended up in government depots in Vienna. Decades later, the Nazis gone, the paintings remained in Austria hanging at the Belvedere while the remnants of the family had resettled in exile including Adele’s niece, Marie Altmann. She consulted with Randol Schoenberg, an attorney in Los Angeles and grandson of the composer, Arnold Schoenberg. Randy (as he is known) took her case and spent the greater part of eight years trying to wrest the Bloch Bauer Klimts from the clutches of the Austrian government. He eventually took the Austrian government to the Supreme Court (Altmann v. the Repubic of Austria) and was able to establish “jurisdiction”, a legal maneuver that enabled Marie Altmann to sue the Austrian government in American Federal courts. That verdict tipped the scales against Austria. One possible outcome of the case would have been for Austria to buy back the paintings. But at fair market value, the Austrian government would have spent upwards of 300 million dollars for the paintings including the two portraits of Adele Bloch Bauer. It was unwilling to do so. Marie Altmann won the right to recover her family’s cultural inheritance. Upon restitution, Adele Bloch Bauer I and II went on the auction block.

9. Boy with pipe, 1905, by Pablo Picasso sold for 104 million dollars on May 5, 2004 at Sotheby’s.

Boy with a Pipe, 1905, Pablo Picasso

According to the Sotheby’s catalogue, this painting once belonged to the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy family which sold it to the Swiss art dealer, Walter Feilchenfeldt, who headed the Cassirer gallery. Despite of and because of their wealth and status in Germany’s elite, the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy family suffered racial persecutions much like the rest of the Jewish community of Germany. Many of their cultural and artistic possessions were sold under duress in the 1930s.

John Hay Whitney purchased “Boy with a pipe” in 1950. After Whitney’s death, the painting passed to his widow, Betsey. She died in 1998 and a family foundation established by Betsey took control of the Whitney family’s art. The foundation sold the Picasso and other works in 2004.

10. Nude, Green leaves and Bust (1932) by Pablo Picasso sold for 106 million dollars on April 30, 2010 at Christie’s. 

Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, 1932, Pablo Picasso

 This complex still life by Picasso was once owned by the fabled French Jewish art dealer, Paul Rosenberg. Fearing for his safety following the German invasion of Poland, Paul Rosenberg fled to New York leaving most of his property behind in Paris and several storage sites in central and southwestern France, including his world-renown stock of Impressionist and Cubist works. He stored some of them in a storage shed in Tours under the name of one of his employees, which apparently shielded those works from Nazi seizure. Paul and his brother, Edmond, recovered all of the art stored in Tours after France was liberated.

11. The Scream, 1895 by Edvard Munch sold for 119 million dollars at Sotheby’s on May 2, 2012. The seller was Petter Olsen, whose father, Thomas, had been a neighbor of Edvard Munch.

The Scream, 1895, by Edvard Munch

The reporting on the painting echoed other similar journalistic fawning over the staggering cost of a work of art. Usually, those paeans to the Everest of the art world tend to overshadow the actual history of the objects fetching such ridiculous sums. As it turns out, Munch’s acknowledged masterpiece of angst and despair, The Scream, had passed through many hands. According to the Los Angeles Times, the painting had a clear provenance, starting with Arthur von Franquet who sold it to Hugo Simon who sold it through an art dealer to Thomas Olsen in 1937 and thence by descent to Pette Olsen.

A posting on the ARCAblog which came on the heels of the fabled sale of the Munch painting summarized the history of the Scream as provided by the Sotheby’s auction house. There we learn that Hugo Simon purchased the painting in 1926 and consigned it to the Kunsthaus in Zurich, nearly 10 years later in December 1936. One month later, the painting presumably found its way to Stockholm where Thomas Olsen, the father of the seller, acquired the painting at M. Molvidson, Konst & Antikvitetshandel.

Meanwhile, one of the Hugo Simon heirs contacted the Holocaust Art Restitution Project (HARP) and expressed his concern that the painting had been sold by his great-grandfather under duress. Thus it was a forced sale, and Sotheby’s refused to acknowledge that fact. This additional element cast a pall on the entire sale. However, it was clear that nothing would stop this juggernaut of the auction market from doing anything to prevent the sale, especially because it represented such a hefty pay day for the auction house.

Five months after the sale, the Museum of Modern Art of New York announced that “The Scream” will be on temporary display as of mid-October 2012, thanks to one of MoMA’s trustees, Leon Black, who happened to be the lucky purchaser of the famed painting.

At this point, the local New York press took seriously charges made by Raphael Cardoso, Hugo Simon’s great-grand-son, that Hugo Simon had been forced to sell the Scream as well as most of his art collection as a direct result of his persecution as a Jew in Nazi Germany. He fled to Paris then to Brazil. The Nazis confiscated all of his assets in Germany, then, after the invasion of France, did the same with his few possessions in Paris, including his apartment and the art and furniture that it contained.
The Jewish Forward cited the October 14, 2012, article by Isabel Vincent and essentially reprinted Raphael Cardoso’s concerns. It is the only article that called into question the provenance of “The Scream,” by Edvard Munch.  Shortly afterwards, the online art world blog, Artinfo, titled an article: Is the Scream Nazi loot?  The Jewish Journal echoed the Simon heirs’ demand that, at the very least, MoMA accompany the Scream with an explanatory piece that echoed the context in which the painting changed hands once Hugo Simon tried to sell it in the mid-1930s. 

Finally, another blog, City Review, disclosed the fact that Pette Olsen, then owner of “The Scream”, had offered 250,000 dollars to the family that it could donate to whatever cause it desired. What the article did not mention is that Sotheby’s brokered this offer. The family turned it down on grounds that “it was insulting.”

In sum, a story that should have riled the art world became a “Jewish” story as only the Jewish and Israeli press took heed of the claim made by the Simon heirs that the iconographic painting of anxiety and despair portrayed so emphatically by Munch, could have been the subject of a forced sale.
If anything, the Munch painting’s travails echo once again the difficulty inherent in defining what a forced sale is, what duress really means, when faced with a claim for restitution seventy years later.

11. The dream, 24 January 1932 by Pablo Picasso sold for 155 million dollars on March 26, 2013, in a private sale between the casino billionaire, Steve Wynn, and the stockbroker billionaire, Steve Cohen, who was then under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Dream, 1932, Pablo Picasso

Victor and Sally Gancz had acquired the painting in New York for 7,000 dollars in 1941 and kept it in their possession until November 11, 1997 There is no information about who might have sold it to them and when the painting actually crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Apparently, Gancz sold The Dream to an Austrian-born financier, Wolfgang Flöttl, whose name also appeared on the provenance of van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet.

Flöttl sold The Dream to Steve Wynn in 2001. In an unfortunate incident that made the news globally, Wynn tripped and tore the painting with his elbow. Following its successful restoration for which he spared no expense (as good as new if not better!), he offered it to Steve Cohen who had already expressed in it and would have acquired it earlier had it not been for the rip.

12. Les joueurs de cartes, early 1890s, by Paul Cézanne, sold for 259 million dollars in 2011 to a member of the Qatar royal family. The seller was a Greek billionaire, George Embiricos, who amassed an impressive art collection. 

Les joueurs de cartes, early 1890s, Paul Cezanne

The history of the painting is unknown, save for the fact that Embiricos “owned it for many years”,
Two leading lights of the global art world, Bill Acquavella and Larry Gagosian had presumably offered 220 million dollars for the painting. No deal.

Here we have one of the finest examples of Cézanne’s oeuvre, the second most expensive painting in the world, whose origins are unknown. All that we do know is that Paul Cézanne painted it in the early 1890s.  It left France at a certain point, ending up in Greece at a certain point where it stayed “for many years” before leaving for the Persian Gulf States. So much for “transparency.”

13. "Nafea Faa Ipoipo-When Will You Marry?", 1892, by Paul Gauguin sold in a private sale to the Qatar Royal Family for approximately 300 million dollars in February 2015.

When will you marry? 1892, Paul Gauguin

The seller is the Rudolph Staechelin Family Trust in Basel, Switzerland, which is run by Ruedi Staechelin, Rudolph’s grandson. The painting was on loan to the Kunstmuseum Basel. The loan period ends in June 2015. Rudolph Staechelin amassed his collection during the interwar years and befriended most of the artists whose works he had purchased. His grandson, Ruedi Staechelin, a former auction house executive, has taken a strong position against the UNIDROIT convention which he views as “an enormous danger to public and private collecting”. UNIDROIT was put into place in the mid-1990s to remind the international community of the legal, financial, and ethical risks involved in trading and displaying stolen art. Staechelin proudly announced that Swiss museums, collectors and even the Swiss Art Trade Association, supported his stance against the international convention on trafficking of looted art. Now you know why Switzerland does not return, does not restitute, and does not repatriate looted cultural assets unless under threat of subpoenas, seizures and arrests. 

What a way to do business!

See the article by Julia Voss on the Gauguin sale that appeared earlier in February 2015 in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

The most expensive works of art in the world and their histories (or lack thereof)-Part Two

by Marc Masurovsky

(Note: Absent are works of art that post-date 1945: Alberto Giacometti, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and the ubiquitous Pablo Picasso.)

5. Dora Maar au chat, 1941, by Pablo Picasso sold for more than 95 million dollars in May 2006 at Sotheby’s. Picasso painted several portraits of his Croatian girlfriend who held no particular love for the Jews. The Germans had taken over Paris in mid-June 1940. Since his return from the port city of Royan to Paris on August 24, 1940, Picasso’s relationship with a number of German officers and officials had evolved, especially young officers from the Propagandastaffel who cultivated ties with intellectuals and artists in the capital. He also knew a number of art dealers who had chosen to feather their beds with the German occupiers, including Martin Fabiani and Paul Pétridès.

According to the Sotheby’s catalogue entry, Pierre Colle, a Paris art dealer and collector and specialist of Surrealist art, held the painting “as of 1946.” During the years of German occupation, Colle had been in business with another art dealer, Maurice Renou.  Together they recycled a number of modern works, signed by Salvador Dali and Max Ernst, which German agencies had seized from British nationals and Jewish owners. It is not clear when Mr. Colle acquired the Dora Maar portrait, assuming that we are speaking of an acquisition. The painting could have been left with him on consignment. Furthermore, Mr. Colle and Mr. Picasso had an on-and-off relationship which dated back to the pre-war years.

Dora Maar

Pablo Picasso

Dora Maar au chat, 1941, Pablo Picasso

Several hypotheses come to mind about the early years of ownership of the painting.

a/ it could have remained in Pablo Picasso’s studio on rue des Grands-Augustins in the 6th arrondissement of Paris until he was ready to part with it after the Liberation of Paris in late August 1944.

b/ Picasso might have sold it to Mr. or Ms. X before 1946. Hopefully that X person was not of Jewish descent because that might have affected the fate of the painting should Mr. or Ms. X be arrested by the Germans or their French collaborators of whom there were many in the German-occupied French capital.

Pierre Colle apparently sold Dora Maar au Chat to Leigh and Mary Block of Chicago and hung on to it until 1963. Then, the Gidwitz Family, also from Chicago, bought the painting through Berggruen and Cie which acted as “agents for the Blocks.” They ended up selling it in early May 2006 to a “mysterious buyer” dressed in jeans and “appearing to be in his mid-40s” according to Carol Vogel of the New York Times.


6. A Chinese 18th century Qianlong porcelain vase sold for 85 million dollars on November 12, 2010 at Bainbridges, a small British auction house. The family who sold it had discovered the vase quite by accident in the attic of their parents’ house.

Qianlong vase, 18th c.

Experts said it probably once belonged to Chinese royalty but was most likely taken out of China at the end of the Second Opium War in 1860 when imperial palaces were ransacked.

In a bizarre twist to this already unusual story, the buyer, after making an initial deposit on the vase to secure it, never followed up on paying the rest of the hefty sum to Bainbridges and the sellers. Apparently, that led to a breach of contract and, two years later, Bonhams sold the vase again for less than 83 million dollars to a Hong Kong dealer.

Pearls from Brazil

São Paulo, Brazil, boasts one of the finest art museums in the Southern Hemisphere, something to make its friends in Buenos Aires squirm.

MASP - Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo
Source: Flickr via Fernando Stankuns

Seal of Sao Paulo
Source: Wikipedia

Founded in 1947, or two years after the end of the Second World War, the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), acquired works by Old and New Masters alike until it can now brag that it holds more than 8000 objects in its collection.

Currently on display at MASP are portraits and self-portraits by the likes of Goya, Manet, van Gogh, Modigliani, Renoir and others of equal esthetic caliber.

Any desire to know more about these works—their history, their previous owners, past exhibitions, publications in which they appeared—leads to … nothing. Anyone curious to find out additional information must undertake the research using available tools… like the Internet.

Let’s see what we get:

Le Gamin au Képi, Vincent Van Gogh, 1888
Source: ArtFinder

On May 1, 1995, Christie’s in New York sold a painting entitled “Jeune homme à la casquette,” produced in November-December 1888, by Vincent van Gogh, for $13,202,500 as “the property of a European gentleman.” The provenance is fairly well fleshed out. It tells us that K. Neumann, from Barmen, acquired the painting from Justin Tannhauser on July 17, 1923. The next owner is Dr. Fritz Nathan, of Zurich, Switzerland, a leading art expert, appraiser and collector in his own right. He bought it in 1947 from K. Neumann. The K. Neumann most likely refers to Karl Neumann who, at the time, had owned another painting by van Gogh entitled, Landscape near Arles, which is now at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, in Indianapolis, IN. Neumann had sold this painting to Tannhauser between 1918 and 1927. This Mr. Neumann lived in a town called Barmen, outside of Wuppertal in Western Germany. The neighboring city of Wuppertal absorbed Barmen in 1930.

The only question to ask here is: how did Karl Neumann hang on to a van Gogh painting for the entire period of the Third Reich? We do know that the Nazi regime investigated all transactions by Jewish dealers, especially as regards to objectionable works like those by Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, and Expressionists.

Portrait of Suzanne Block, Pablo Picasso, 1904
Source: Wikipedia

Although the provenance is impeccable, the history of the painting is worth a short documentary. “Suzanne Bloch” was one of the first works to be acquired by the MASP in 1947, with financial assistance from Walter Moreira Salles, the founder of Unibanco. Sixty years later, on December 20, 2007, thieves made off with the painting. The Sao Paulo police recovered the painting undamaged one month later.

Walther Moreira Salles
Source: Instituto Moreira Salles

Custodian of plundered Jewish collections: the Landesmuseum in Mainz, Germany

Landesmuseum, Mainz
Source: Wikipedia

Like many museums in Germany, the Landesmuseum in Mainz holds in its collection hundreds of items that once belonged to German-born and foreign-born Jews alike living in and around Mainz.

These works ended up at the Landesmuseum Mainz in part as a result of confiscations orchestrated by Nazi fiscal authorities, especially the “Staatl. Finanzamt Mainz”, in 1941 and 1942 and the transfer of those confiscated cultural objects to the museum.  

Nazi authorities did not bother to associate the works with their victims which renders these cultural assets, a direct result of “internal” looting or plunder, as “heirless” or “unidentifiable”, until someone recognizes them and claims them on behalf of their family. Therefore, they are labeled as “Jüdischer Besitz” (Jewish collection). One can find a listing of these items in the Lost Art Internet Database overseen by the Koordinierungsstelle Magdeburg.

For the record, the vast majority of the Jewish population of Mainz was deported "nach dem Osten" by October 1942.

These orphaned works represent a wide range of topics and artistic styles. They consist largely of oil paintings, etchings, aquatints, and drawings.

Here are some of the artists’ names whose works were owned by these unknown Jewish owners, victims of Nazi persecution:

• Mera Cohn-Handel
• Lovis Corinth
• Clara Epstein
• Max Klinger
• Alfred Kubin
• Felix Meseck
• Johanna Metzner
• Carl Müller-Tenckhoff
• Jakob Nussbaum
• Alfred Russo
• Max Thedy
• Hans Thoma
• Erich Wolfsfeld

Last but not least: one oddity that is featured on the website of the Landesmuseum Mainz—a 1908 gouache on paper by Pablo Picasso (Frauenkopf/Tête de femme/Head of a woman). In and of itself, it is not an anomaly, but the partial history behind its entry into the Mainz Museum’s collection begs for additional research. It was a gift made by Raymond Schmittlein, former director of educational programs and culture in the French zone of Occupation of Germany, in 1952. A detailed provenance of the work might clarify how Schmittlein came into possession of the object so that one need not worry about its status.

Head of a woman, Pablo Picasso
Source: Landesmuseum, Mainz

Plaidoyer pour les artistes et intellectuels juifs disparus

Palais des Études, École Nationale Superieur des Beaux-Arts, Paris
Source: Wikipedia

Il faut se poser la question, même s’il est injuste de la poser : enfin de compte, les juifs étrangers, mal nourris, mal logés, mal élevés, de l’Ecole de Paris et des autres écoles de création artistique à travers l’Europe, ces juifs-là, qui gênaient les bien-pensants, purement et simplement, ont-ils été abandonnés à leur propre sort, en raison de ce qu’ils représentaient ?


Difficile à dire. Mais on ne peut pas sombrer dans une martyrologie sentimentaliste en ce qui les concerne. On n’est pas enclin non plus à croire en la munificence de l’homme face au désastre ; les comportements crapuleux existent bel et bien. Nous sommes dans l’obligation de rectifier le tir et de dire ce qu’il en est, d’après les documents, de démystifier le comportement des marchands, des courtiers, et de tous ceux dans le monde de l’art qui savaient pertinemment bien que ‘ces messieurs’ étaient bel et bien leurs clients, que les objets dont ils disposaient provenaient de collections spoliées, un point, c’est tout. Si, par contre, on prend au pied de la lettre tous les mémoires d’après-guerre produits par ces mêmes marchands et collectionneurs, il n’y a plus rien à dire, tout le monde il est beau, tout le monde il est gentil. C’est dommage, beaucoup de gens ont été exterminés, pour rien, pour ce qu’ils étaient, et c’est bien malheureux, et on passe à autre chose. Glorifier les marchands et les collectionneurs dans un combat héroïque contre le Golgotha nazi, ça, non, il faut bien tirer un trait quelque part. Il faut que l’on tire et que l’on tire juste.

Par exemple, est-ce qu’on laisse Matisse tranquille ou non ? Que savait-il ? Pourquoi ne disait-il rien ? S’il existe des documents qui attestent de sa connaissance des rafles, des aryanisations, et des spoliations de ses propres œuvres—quelqu’un a dû lui dire ce qui se passait à Paris—quelles ont été ses réactions? Peut-être qu’il s’en balançait éperdument, lui aussi ? Un tableau, un dessin, ben, c’est un tableau, un dessin. Si je les perds, j’en refais d’autres. Il se peut que ceux qui se sentent les plus concernés par ces pertes sont les consommateurs de ses œuvres, ceux qui en profitent. Peut-être que les artistes sont indifférents au fait que leurs œuvres soient pillées. Mais, s’ils ne disent rien, que pouvons-nous dire ? Avons-nous le droit de nous prononcer sur la question ? Puisque l’on ne peut pas anticiper leur réaction, il faut au moins que l’on puisse créer un contexte, un cadre dans lequel se situe l’action. Pendant que Matisse peignait et dessinait à Nice, des centaines de collectionneurs d’origine juive se faisaient spolier, parmi les objets qu’ils ont perdus figuraient des œuvres créées par Matisse. Le régime auquel il a prêté son nom s’adonnait au pillage de ses œuvres. Purement et simplement. La même logique s’applique à Picasso, Braque, et d’autres artistes de renom, y compris le fasciste Vlaminck, les opportunistes comme Van Dongen, Derain, Dufy, et Dunoyer de Segonzac.

Il faut arriver à restituer aux artistes leurs parcours et leur persécution, de souligner les pertes physiques et intellectuelles, de rappeler à tous que les écrits des historiens continuent de passer sous silence l’anéantissement de toute une classe d’artistes et d’intellectuels, peut-être par ignorance, peut-être parce qu’ils pensent qu’en parlant des victimes de la déportation, ils se sont acquittés de toute responsabilité d’entrer dans les détails. Mais, cet oubli accidentel constitue en soi un déni inacceptable de la contribution de ces artistes et intellectuels juifs au patrimoine culturel et intellectuel non seulement de la France mais de l’Europe toute entière. Il faut le redire une fois pour toute : la libération des pays occupés par les Nazis fut une belle victoire, mais l’absence des retrouvailles aux terrasses des cafés qui avaient servi in extenso de salons et de salles à manger pour ces artistes en manque de tout, sauf d’inspiration et de cœur, résonne comme un écho dans un abîme dont la profondeur ne peut être mesurée.

Leur absence nous bouleverse et laisse un trou béant dans notre existence. C’est toute une mouvance artistique et intellectuelle qui a disparu de la planète. Et c’est une marque du succès du programme national-socialiste et de celui de ses alliés antisémites, bon ton bon goût. Oui, le goût a eu sa revanche, mais à quel prix !

Henri Matisse in Vichy France

by Marc Masurovsky

As in the case of Pablo Picasso and many other eminent artists plying their creative streak in France, Henri Matisse chose to remain rather than leave his native country in the face of the German onslaught of spring 1940 against Western Europe.

Let's engage in a perfunctory review of Matisse's journey in wartime France:

October 1939: Matisse goes to Paris after a stay near Rambouillet. While in Paris, he places for safekeeping all of his works of art and those of other artists which he owns, in a vault at the Banque de France. His son, Pierre, has already left for the United States, while his other son, Jacques, is in the French Army. His grandson, Claude, is in a boarding school near Vichy. His daughter, Marguerite, is with his wife in the town of Beauzelle. Apparently, Mr. and Mrs. Matisse have not been living together since March 1939.

Mid-October 1939: Henri Matisse heads back to Nice where he has an apartment at the Hotel Regina from which he works. While Henri goes to Nice, his wife and daughter return to Paris to an apartment on rue de Miromesnil.

November 1939: Henri Matisse renews a contract with the dealer, Paul Rosenberg, who is one of his most regular buyers.

January 1940: Pierre Matisse, now settled in New York, announces to a variety of family friends that his parents are splitting up.

May 1940: While the German armies are running roughshod over French troops in eastern France and heading towards Paris, Henri Matisse returns to the beleaguered capital, dodging refugee traffic, in order to finalize his legal separation from his wife.

June 1940: Matisse and everyone else who can manage it hightails it out of Paris and heads south-southwest. He ends up in late June 1940 at Ciboure near Saint-Jean-de-Luz in the Basque country. He remains in that part of the world, not too far from where German troops are stationed, but far enough, until he finds a train to take him back to Nice in August.

August 1940: Matisse reaches Carcassonne then Marseilles. In Marseilles, he draws a series of portraits of his grandson, Claude Duthuit. On August 29, Matisse finally makes it back to the Hotel Regina in Nice, shortly after Picasso returns to his studio in Paris on the rue des Grands Augustins.

Fall 1940: Varian Fry, of the Emergency Rescue Committee, funded in part by Alfred Barr, the director of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, tries in vain to convince Matisse to escape to the United States. Matisse refuses. Matisse is Fry's idol.

Winter 1940-1941: Matisse is plagued by intestinal problems and has difficulty working.

January 1941: A cancerous growth is removed from Matisse's abdomen.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to him, while he is holed up in Nice, dozens of his paintings and works on paper are being forcibly removed from Jewish collections and brought to the Jeu de Paume or recycled on the local art market. His works fetch upwards of 300,000 Francs in Paris auctions which is a significant amount for those rationed days.

August 1941: Matisse is among many "French" artists who exhibit their works on paper at the "Salon du Dessin" in Paris, one of the first major artistic events in the German-occupied capital that excludes Jews from its walls. That same month, Matisse allows Varian Fry to take a series of photographic portraits of him at the Hotel Regina in Nice. How surreal!

November 1941: Matisse has an exhibit at the Galerie Louis Carré in Paris.

January-February 1942: Matisse grants several interviews to the Vichy government's official radio station.

Matisse spends the rest of the year in Nice, convalescing from additional gastro-intestinal troubles but continuing to work as best as he can for one of his dealers, Martin Fabiani, who makes a fortune collaborating with the Germans during the war. Ironically, Fabiani sells on the side stolen paintings by leading artists such as .... Henri Matisse, which the Germans have exchanged with him against more classical works.

January 1943: Vichy's leading cultural rag, Comoedia, publishes an interview with Henri Matisse, predicated on his creation of 50 drawings illustrating Pierre Ronsard's poems. The article by Marguerite Bouvier is an ode to Matisse, who is now 72 years old.

June 1943: Finally, Matisse is forced to flee Nice and seeks refuge in Vence, due to a constant threat of aerial bombardments.

September-October 1943: Matisse and Braque are prominently displayed at the Salon de l'Automne, an annual fixture of the French (read Paris) art scene. Strangely, while their works are shown to everyone's delight including that of the German occupier, the ERR is busy figuring what to do with Matisse and Braque works under their jurisdiction not too far away at the Jeu de Paume.

Spring 1944: the estranged Mrs. Matisse and her daughter are arrested for engaging in acts of resistance against the Vichy government and the German occupation. Mrs. Matisse gets six months of prison while her daughter is jailed until the Liberation.

Picasso and the Germans

Picasso: Creator and Destroyer
Source: The Atlantic

Fleeing the German advance on Paris in May 1940, Picasso flees the French capital together with hundreds of thousands of panicked residents. The idea is to go south, as far as south as possible. Picasso settles for the sleepy coastal town of Royan in the southwest of France and, there, rents an apartment overlooking the town's harbor where he resumes his work.

No luck... The German army occupies Royan on its way down to Bordeaux, and the Franco-Spanish border.

What to do. What to do? Paint, draw, enjoy the sun, as much as one can of course under the circumstances.

Not to make light of a dire situation, but one wonders what was going through the Catalan master's mind. After all, he is Pablo Picasso, one of the iconic artists of his time, outranked perhaps in those days by Henri Matisse, and the first school of Paris.

Should he head for Spain and duck under Franco's iron fist? Should he stay put in Royan?

Nothing of the sort. Paris beckons, Paris beguiles. And so it is that Pablo packs up his easels, pens, paints, paper, canvas and inks, and heads back to Paris once the new masters from across the Rhine feel well settled in.

Off to the rue des Grands-Augustins where he has his studio.

Arianna Stassinopoulis Huffington
Source: Wikipedia

Arianna Stasinopoulos Huffington---yes, THE Arianna Huffington, who recently merged with AOL--had penned in 1988 a fun, biting biography of Picasso entitled "Picasso: Creator and Destroyer". In it, she describes how Picasso was summoned to a bank by what we can only presume were the agents of the Devisenschutzkommando or DSK whose job it was to open up all vaults and safes and boxes in financial institutions under German occupation where they searched for securities, precious metals, and other valuables belonging to the enemies of the Reich. Most of the time, those items were confiscated and re-directed to the Reich's coffers.

Here's how Arianna Huffington couches the incident which occurred at some point in the fall of 1940. No footnotes of course, which makes us wonder how apocryphal the story might be:

A German officer holds up one of his paintings. The officer "turned to him in amazement: 'It's you who have painted that? And why do you paint like this?' Picasso replied that he didn't know. He had painted the picture because it had amused him. Suddenly the Nazi officer was struck by an enlightening realization. 'Ah!' he cried. 'It's a fantasy!' The officers left his works alone and departed from the bank's vaults." (Arianna Stassinopoulos, 'Picasso: Creator and Destroyer', 1988, p. 255)

Needless to say, Picasso returns to his apartment, more interested in making sure that his various mistresses remain within earshot of his residence.

My question is: why did he stay in Paris during the ENTIRE period of the German occupation?

Picasso at the Jeu de Paume

At least 86 works by Pablo Picasso fell into the hands of the Nazis' plundering units headed by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) and were taken to the Jeu de Paume for 'processing.'

Most of those Picasso paintings and works on paper came from the private collections of Alphonse Kann who lived in Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Paul Rosenberg whose gallery was on the rue de la Boetie. He had shipped hundreds of paintings for safekeeping to various storage units in southwestern France where the Germans inevitably found them as a result of denunciations and returned them to Paris.

You would think that Nazi doctrine pertaining to art and especially to 'degenerate' artists such as Picasso would have condemned the production of Guernica's master to the trash heap. Absolutely not! Only 5 of Picasso's works were 'slated for destruction' by the ERR's zealous staffers. No evidence that they were in fact destroyed... The rest? Some were incorporated into Goering's collection while a fair number were recycled into the art market through exchanges and the rest languished at the Jeu de Paume.

So much for Nazi Germany's Kulturkampf against 'degenerate' art!

For more details, go to www.errproject.org/jeudepaume. Type in Picasso and see what you get...