Two Schloss paintings

Portrait of Adrianus Tegularius, by Frans Hals

by Saida S. Hasanagic

The recovery of unrestituted paintings looted during the Holocaust that appear at international auctions with dubious provenances are examined in examples of Portrait of Adrianus Tegularius by Frans Hals (1582-1666) and Le Duo (Merry Company Making Music) by Joost Van Geel (1631-1698) which is featured in the upcoming Lempertz sale on 19 November 2022.

It is therefore important to begin with the Portrait of Adrianus Tegularius, previously part of the Adolphe Schloss Collection. Its provenance reads like a classic thriller and had led to a landmark criminal case in France involving Adam Williams, over the course of eleven years. Williams, a British-born New York-based Old Master dealer, learnt his trade at the Richard Green Gallery in London in the 1970s before relocating to the USA and eventually taking over the directorship of the Newhouse Galleries in New York City before setting up his eponymous dealership in 1998. However, to tell this story we have to start from the beginning.

The earliest recorded date in the provenance chain starts in Amsterdam in 1812 with the collector Jeronimo de Bosch IV when it was sold by Philippus van der Schley. In 1818, the painting was sold by Cornelis Sebille Roos as the property of J. Kerkhoven. In 1848, it was auctioned anonymously and acquired by the Amsterdam dealer / auctioneer Jeronimo de Vries. The Portrait of Tegularius then relocated to Germany and was recorded (undated) as the property of M. Unger in Berlin, then Richard Freiherr von Friesen in Dresden, until 1884, followed by Werner Dahl of Düsseldorf until 1901, when it was sold to Adolphe Schloss. The painting remained with the Schloss family after Adolphe’s death in 1910. It passed on to his wife Lucy Haas Schloss until her death in 1938 when it was inherited by their children.

On 16 April 1943, the Schloss collection, including the Hals, which comprised 333 paintings, was confiscated by Vichy officials and German security agents at the Château de Chambon in Laguenne (Corrèze). It was subsequently sold on 1 November 1943 as part of a group of 262 paintings from the confiscated Schloss collection to Hitler’s Führermuseum (or Linz Museum) Project. These 262 paintings were then transferred to the Führerbau, Hitler’s ad

Château de Chambon, Laguenne

ministrative office in Munich, on 24 November 1943 where they remained until unknown individuals broke into it on 29-30 April 1945 and emptied it of its contents, including the paintings, one of which was Hals’ Portrait of Tegularius.

It resurfaced in a private collection in Frankfurt am Main in 1952. The trail went cold until 1967 when it was offered in New York at the Parke-Bernet auction as lot no. 32, part of a deceased princess’ estate. It sold for US$ 32,500. The painting was offered for sale at Christie's in London on 24 March 1972 (lot no. 83) as part of the Ludvig G. Braathen Collection, where it was ‘bought in’ following French official efforts to halt the sale. On 28 March 1979, it sold at Sotheby's, London as lot no. 15 for £21,000. In 1982, it was reported to have been in a Dutch private collection located in West Germany. On 21 April 1989, the Hals changed hands again without an indication of its theft in the Christie’s catalogue  (lot no. 26) when it was bought for £110,000 by Adam Williams for the Newhouse Galleries in New York.

In September 1990, the painting was displayed at the Newhouse Galleries stand during the Biennale des Antiquaires at Grand Palais in Paris. It was recognised by Jean Demartini, one of the Schloss heirs, who immediately informed the Paris prosecutor’s office. The prosecutor started a criminal inquiry which led to Williams’ indictment and the painting’s seizure by French authorities. The investigating magistrate (Juge d’Instruction) closed the criminal case based on the lack of bad faith on the part of Williams. The Schloss heirs appealed the decision and the Court (Chambre d’Accusation) confirmed the decision of the investigating magistrate that: a) a settlement of 3,812,000 francs had been reached between some of the Schloss heirs and the German government in 1961, as confirmed in the letter to the French government on 24 April 1961; and b) Williams bought the painting in good faith at fair market price at Christie’s in London.

A protracted legal battle continued whereby the prosecutor’s office appealed the decision to the French Supreme Court (Cour de Cassation) on 4 June 1998, which in turn reversed the decision of the lower court and returned the case to the Versailles “Chambre d’Accusation” to be re-examined. Effectively, the French Supreme Court established principles that were to be used as future guidelines: 1) the settlement between some Schloss heirs and the German government did not bar any subsequent criminal proceedings, as the settlement did not stop the public prosecutor from pursuing a criminal case based on the same facts, unless a specific law prevented it and the Supreme Court did not find any such law; 2) the settlement is only binding for the Schloss heirs who signed it, and not for the ones who were not a party to it; 3) the settlement with the German Government does not affect any criminal claims that the Schloss family might wish to raise against the Nazis who committed the crime; and finally an important point 4) the absence of bad faith on the part of Williams was not established.

The “Tribunal Correctionnel” at Nanterre indicated that the painting and its provenance were outlined in Collections World Directory published in 1979, stating that the painting was stolen and belonged to the Schloss Collection. It was pointed out that the painting was listed in the French “Répertoire des biens spoliés” (1947) and in the Frans Hals catalogue raisonné published by Seymour Slive (no. 207, 1974), where it was again documented as stolen. The Court adjudicated that a professional dealer, and a reputable Old Master specialist such as Williams, could not claim ignorance and should had done his due diligence by independently researching the painting and not relying on the incomplete provenance from the auction catalogue. As any committed art market professional, he would have found out that the painting was subject to a claim. To further hamper his defence, Williams initially claimed that he had never heard of the Schloss Collection, but had previously confided to another dealer that the painting had been sold several times at auction although it was stolen during the Second World War. This case strongly reiterates that the burden of proof is on the art professionals to prove their bona fide purchase. In addition, this means that indemnification of the Jewish families for their material losses due to looting does not constitute a limitation to subsequent criminal action based on the same facts. 

On 6 July 2001, the Court sentenced Williams to an eight-month suspended prison sentence for possession of artwork looted during the Second World War, and the painting was restituted to the family. Pierre-François Veil, the family’s lawyer, was certain that this landmark ruling would set a precedent that would not only apply to private dealers but to museums and galleries as well. As such, the decision sent a clear message to dealers and auction houses to improve the transparency of their activities, rendering it irrelevant whether they are just mere agents.

Twenty-two years later, Joost van Geel’s Le Duo (Merry Company Making Music), is featured at a Lempertz auction in Cologne on 19 November 2022 (Auction 1209 - Paintings, Drawings Sculpture 14th -19th Centuries) as lot no. 1569, with an estimate of €20,000-30,000. Dr. Walther Bernt had authenticated the work in 1976. The painting remains unrestituted. We have a limited knowledge about the history of this particular painting. The earliest date in its provenance starts with 23 June 1820 at the auction of the estate of Benjamin West, of Royal Academy fame. It was then acquired by a private collection (Perkins), probably in Paris, then by Adolphe Schloss at an unknown date. The van Geel painting shares the same post-confiscation fate as that of the Hals. However, it is alarming that Lempertz does not offer any provenance to the painting, apart from the Walther Bernt certificate.

van Geel painting, 19 November 2022 Lempertz sale

The link to the Lempertz online bid has been removed but the artwork’s details are still available in the auction catalogue, a sign that the German auction house has been made aware of the painting’s troubled past. Since 2001, the artworld has become more sensitive to the Second World War claims. As for the auction houses, hiding behind art-historical certificates and not producing any relevant history of well-documented objects should send clear red flags to any agent, buyer and collector.

More about the author

Saida S. Hasanagic, MA, is an art historian based in London, England. She is an independent scholar specialising in provenance research, art crime and its prevention from perspectives of art history, art business and international relations. Saida worked as a provenance researcher for the JDCRP Foundation: The Pilot Project – The Fate of the Adolphe Schloss Collection. Her main areas of interest are the Second World War plunder and cultural crimes committed in conflicts since then, notably in the former Yugoslavia with focus on spoliation and restitution in Bosnia-Herzegovina. 

Sources

Anglade, Leila. “Art Law and the Holocaust: The French Situation.” Art Antiquity and Law, Volume IV, Issue 4, December 1999, pp. 302-311.

Anglade, Leila. "The Portrait of Pastor Adrianus Tegularius by Franz Hals: The Schloss Case before the French Criminal Courts.” Art Antiquity and Law, Volume VIII, Issue 1, March 2003, pp. 77-87.

Campfens, Evelien (ed.). Fair and Just Solutions. Eleven International Publishing. 2015. The case is mentioned briefly as the footnote 3 on page 153, by Norman Palmer in Chapter 7: The Best We Can Do? pp. 153-185.

Demartini v Williams, 18th Chamber, Tribunal Correctionnel, Nanterre, 6 July 2001. (unpublished)

“Dealer guilty of handling Nazi art.” BBC News. Friday, 6 July 2001.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/1426508.stm

Giovannini, Teresa. “The Holocaust and the looted art.” Art Antiquity and Law, Volume 7, Issue 3, September 2002, pp. 263-280.
https://www.lalive.law/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/tgi_holocaust_and_looted_art.pdf

Melikian, Souren, “Buyer Beware: An Art World Nightmare Worthy of Kafka: The Mystery of a Looted Portrait.” The New York Times. 1 September 2001.
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/01/news/buyer-bewarean-art-world-nightmare-worthy-of-kafka-the-mystery-of-a.html

Slive, Seymour. Frans Hals, Catalogue Raisonné. London: Phaidon Press, 1974.

Other sources

Adam Williams Fine Art
https://www.adam-williams.com/about

ERR database

https://www.errproject.org

HALS (Frans) Anvers, 1581/85 - Haarlem, 1666. Portrait du Pasteur Adrianus Tegularius
https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/sites/archives_diplo/schloss/tableauxH/tableaux76.html

https://pilot-demo.jdcrp.org/artwork/hals_portrait_52560/

Joost van Geel as Merry Company Making Music, Lempertz, 19 November 2022, Auction 1209 - Paintings, Drawings Sculpture 14th -19th Centuries, Cologne, lot no.1569, estimate € 20,000-30,000

https://www.lempertz.com/lempertz_api/images/Kat_1209_AK_Nov_2022_DS.pdf

GEEL. (Joost Van) Rotterdam, 1631 - id., 1698. Le Duo.
https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/sites/archives_diplo/schloss/tableauxG/tableaux53.html

https://pilot-demo.jdcrp.org/artwork/geel_duo_51658/

The Austrian problem with Schloss 91

by Marc Masurovsky

Schloss 91, Portrait of a man, van Helst

"Portrait of a Man”—by van Aelst, stolen from the Schloss family in German-occupied France by French and German agents, catalogued as Schloss 91 by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), had been sent to the Fuhrerbau in Munich in late 1943 where it was stored as part of the future permanent collection of Adolf Hitler’s Linzmuseum. In April 1945, Schloss 91, together with several hundred other works in the Schloss collection which were also stolen and stored at the Fuhrerbau, vanished in the last days of the Nazi era in Munich at the hands of unknown thieves.

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Decades later, it resurfaced in a sale at the Kimsky auction house in Vienna, Austria. The catalogue entry clearly indicated that the consignor and the auctioneer were aware that the painting had never been restituted to the Schloss heirs and invited the claimants to contact the auction house in order to reach a “just and fair solution.”

Pre-plunder photo of the Schloss collection.

The Schloss heirs and their lawyer, Antoine Comte, contacted the auction house and were able to get the painting withdrawn from the sale. Hopefully, restitution will ensue with the assistance of the French government and the Schloss family will have another one of its treasured jewels back home to do as they please with it because it will be theirs once again.

Let’s take this story apart now:

A consignor approaches a Viennese auction house with a painting that the consignor knows was stolen and never returned to its rightful owner. This painting has been listed as stolen since 1945, on American and French loss listings. Some of these listings have been available to anyone wishing to consult them for over seventy years.

The Schloss losses are registered as stolen cultural property on the website of Interpol. It has been listed on French government websites. It is on the ERR database since it went public in October 2010. Hence, any high school student can conduct a search on this painting and find it in less than 10 minutes. IT IS STOLEN PROPERTY. However, in a country where good faith is idolized, much like in Switzerland, where it is used as a potent legal shield against the messes created by genocidal policies and their impact on ownership of blood-soaked properties of all sorts. Good faith works when there is no willingness to think beyond the outer edges of one's wallet. Perhaps the desire not to do the right thing is anchored in an ambivalence towards genocidal crimes themselves. Who knows?

Anyway...

The Viennese auction house openly admits in its catalogue that the painting is stolen property and still wishes to proceed with the sale, thereby putting the onus of responsibility on the claimant to come forward and request that the painting should be withdrawn. This is so wrong that it defies comprehension. At first, I thought: Wow! How great can it be for an auction house to publish a looted provenance and be aware of it. That's so cool. But a friend rudely corrected me and say: Are you crazy? Yes, I had a momentary lapse of judgment, so overwhelmed was I by this apparent exercise in transparency. But that is precisely what transparency is all about--a smokescreen, a pipe filled with substances that make you dumb once you inhale the smoke.  The auction house made us believe that it was genuine about its awareness of thefts from the Holocaust era and wished us all to know it.

However...

That acknowledgment actually made the victim responsible for withdrawing the item before the hammer falls and the ownership of the painting changes hands once again, thus transferring title to a looted painting to another possessor.  Hence, it had failed in its duty to report the painting as stolen, to contact the Austrian authorities, the French authorities, who knows, even the Jewish community of Vienna and work out something else besides a self-serving announcement in its catalogue.

Hasn't anyone learned anything since 1998? The official start date, presumably, of the world (re)awakening to the notion that our societies are awash with assets looted between 1933 and 1945 as part of a genocidal undertaking?

Where was the Austrian government in all of this? 

Where were the Austrian police? 

Where were the restitution experts in Vienna, the Jewish community, when the Schloss painting was advertised as being looted cultural property in Vienna?

Yes, all of these parties should think about what it means to be diligent and to advocate for restitution for all victims, Austrian and non-Austrian, because, when they do not, they perpetuate the continuing mess described as “restitution of plundered art”. Yes, it is 2016 and the feeling that we cannot seem to shake off is that the learning curve is as steep as it ever was.

According to Austrian investigators, this painting came from a Munich collector who owns ten, yes ten, Schloss paintings.

The German collector in Munich

The Fuhrerbau theft was the largest art theft in the history of Munich perpetrated against a single entity. Perhaps the largest art theft perpetrated in Germany’s long and rich history. At least 1000 paintings stolen in April 1945. The American liberators did not really pay heed to the theft until a year later when criminal investigators of the Monuments Fine Arts and Archives (MFAA) who were the new oversees of the Fuhrerbau converted into the Munich Central Collecting Point, took note of the dozens of art works popping up on the Munich black market which all appeared to come from the same source: the Fuhrerbau. Over the next four years, the Americans and their colleagues in the Munich Criminal Police uncovered somewhere between 70 and 100 paintings from that singular theft, or not more than 10 percent of the haul. The rest vanished into thin air.

What must be done

We now know that ten restitutable paintings belonging to the Schloss family are somewhere in Munich, in the hands of a single collector, who is probably aware of their stolen origin.
The onus now is on the German authorities, the French authorities, the Schloss heirs and their attorney to move and obtain the restitution of that small trove which rightfully belongs to the Schloss heirs.

Schloss 91

by Marc Masurovsky

Portrait of a man, Bartholomeus van der Helst

“Portrait of a man” by Bartholomeus van der Helst, once belonged to the renown Schloss brothers in France. Their collection of over 330 Old Master paintings became the focal point of an intense rivalry between the wartime Vichy government and the plundering agents of the Nazi regime, especially Goering’s men, their trusted art advisors and senior officials of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR).

In a farcical race against time, both Vichy and the Germans attempted to be the first to seize the collection. The Germans got the upper hand as they allowed the French to seize it only to force them to hand it over and transfer it to Paris.

The paintings were sorted, inventoried, catalogued and shipped for the most part through the Jeu de Paume to the halfway house to the Linz Museum, the Fuhrerbau, located in the heart of Munich.

Shortly before the American army took control of Munich on April 30, 1945, the vast majority of looted art works stored at the Fuhrerbau were removed by unknown parties and their contents scattered. In the years that followed, American agents working in tandem with the Munich criminal police found not more than 100 paintings which had been stolen from the Fuhrerbau. Schloss 91 was not one of them.

In fact, 90 per cent of the paintings stolen from the Fuherbau remain unaccounted for. Some resurface on occasion. The most famous are the Schloss collection paintings which the French government does not seem anxious to recover on behalf of the Schloss family.

Well, here is an opportunity that might be missed for the 20th time as a looted, unrestituted painting belonging to the Schloss heirs is offered for sale in Vienna, Austria on April 12, 2016.

The provenance indicates that it was nowhere to be found during WWII and names Adolphe Schloss as a prewar owner, forgetting to mention that his heirs were also the rightful owners. That takes guts.

Will someone please say something and stop this sale?

Update:

According to the Kimsky auction house, the looted nature of the painting is obvious. Together with the consignor, it is willing to explore how to apply the Washington Principles to this situation, namely reach a "fair and just solution" or a financial settlement which would allow the painting to be sold.

The solution rests entirely in the hands of the family which is based in Paris, and in the hands of law enforcement--the painting is listed on the Interpol website as well as on at least one looted art database, the ERR/Jeu de Paume database.  It is high time for someone to act and not let this looted painting be sold without a resolution that has been offered by the consignor--a first--and the Viennese auction house--a first as well. We saw recently another Viennese auction house pretend that a bust by Houdon, Diane, resembled one which had been plundered from a Polish castle by German troops. A simple stroll on Poland's looted art website would have revealed in 15 minutes the fact that the Houdon in Vienna was one and the same as the one claimed by the Polish government.

In sum, some progress is being made in the art market whereby it is noticeable that consignors and auction houses, when motivated, can do the right thing.

It would be a shame for the Schloss heirs to let this opportunity slip by as well as Austrian and French law enforcement agencies to sit tight and not intervene.