The Art Dealer (L'Antiquaire), by François Margolin

by Marc Masurovsky

Why is it that history cannot be told factually on film? Is there something about the creative process that impels so-called artists in the film industry to distort historical facts and create alternative realities which serve only to skew our understanding of the deep subtleties and complexities that drove men and women to betray their kinsmen, their families and friends and business colleagues in times of extreme stress as during the German occupation of France from June 1940 to the fall of 1944?

Case in point: The Art Dealer by François Margolin, which came out in France earlier this year.

Anna Sigalevitch

Briefly put, the story revolves around a somewhat histrionic and passionate woman, Esther Stegman played by Anna Sigalevitch, is a journalist by day, who somehow forgets that she has a job, a husband, and a son. The distraction in her life is her family’s hidden past and her exponentially obsessive desire to KNOW is propelled by a painting, that her husband, Melchior, an auctioneer by trade, is asked to estimate for a possible sale. He makes the mistake of bringing it home to study and appraise it.

The painting is nothing exceptional. Melchior thinks it is. Two leopards basking in a half-sun, a painting allegedly produced by a French artist, Jacques-Laurent Agasse, a disciple of Vernet. Maybe it’s worth one hundred thousand euros. The current possessor is tickled at the news.

François Margolin

One has to wonder whether the movie would have had any legs if Melchior had not brought the painting home. But screenplays are what they are and we should defer to the creator’s best judgment. Sort of.

The Stegmans are a nice upper middle class French Jewish family deeply immersed in the mercantile aspect of the Paris art world, well-educated, well-brought up, and not particularly loquacious about the WWII era.

Simon Stegman,  Esther’s father, sees the painting. He literally has a flashback about the painting and is transported back decades. Esther wonders why her father would go blank and start daydreaming at the sight of this work.

Her desire to know, TO KNOW, gets the better of her. She demands from her husband who does hold down a high-pressured job, to do the research on the PROVENANCE of the painting. WHY? Well, because she wants him to and her father is acting weird. Ok. Well, if you were married to Esther, you would end up abiding by her wishes just to keep the peace at home, although Melchior pushes back somewhat.

As Esther presses her inquiry, she meets different family members. Her questions end up annoying them, a sign that they all have something to hide.

Her only “buddy” is an aging art dealer/collector, Claude Weinstein, who gives her a reel of film taken during the 1930s in Paris and elsewhere, where her grandparents are featured as adoring lovebirds, as well as their friend, a German art dealer, named Klaus Vogel. Handsome dude, blonde locks, beautiful facial features, quite the looker. In fact, everyone in that film is pretty.

As the story unfolds, we find out that Esther’s grandfather was shot by the Germans in late 1941. No one knows why. The family is mum, part of the hidden past. Her grandfather, Jean, had a substantial art collection at the time. Esther wants to know what happened to it. The Agasse painting turned out to be one of Jean’s paintings, a reality that Melchior will have to deal with when he auctions it.

Esther quickly makes a pest of herself both in governmental archives at the Foreign Affairs Ministry, Quai d’Orsay, in lawyer’s offices, and at her father’s apartment, in which she breaks into (she didn’t secure his permission to go into his private files. That is known as trespassing).

Esther becomes more and more troubled both by the official silence that reigns among her relatives regarding the fate of her grandfather’s art collection and the evidence that she amasses about a malversation engineered by her great-uncle, Raoul, in collusion with this Klaus Vogel, to deprive her family of their inheritance.

That is the charge that she levels. Whether she proves it or not, is up for you—the audience—to figure out.

What is the reality?

The film is based on a true story involving the Seligmann family. It is in fact the brainchild of Jean Seligmann’s granddaughter, Sophie, who has spent the past decade trying to reconstruct painstakingly the fate of her grandfather’s collection, piece by piece. In real life, she is not a pest, she is not histrionic, she is--as anyone has to be—consumed with the quest, finding fragments of a story that no one wants to share with her in her search for truth, a historical truth that can shed light on her family's past. She is traumatized by the realization that one part of her family might have betrayed the other part. Her mission is admirable, one that has informed part of her adult life, shaped or reshaped her family life, her professional relationships, her friendships.

For every nugget that she finds, there are dozens of disappointments and perceived betrayals. But such is life.

Historical fallacies are strewn about the film’s dialogues like unpleasant throw-away lines which can be easily refuted if one takes the time to inform oneself. For instance, British citizens living in France during the German occupation were not safe, contrary to a central tenet of the film’s plot, which would have explained why one of the perpetrators of the embezzlement of Jean’s collection, was able to survive in relative ease because of his ties to Albion. Nonsense.

The Weinstein character is a veiled allusion to Georges Wildenstein and his son, Daniel, a well-known family of art dealers in Paris during the interwar years, accused by none other than Hector Feliciano of having collaborated with the Germans. Hector is an accomplished author who, in the mid-1990s, blew the lid over French amnesia concerning art looting in his landmark book, “The Lost Museum.”   In the film, Hector is cast under the alias of Hurtado, and is given a cameo role in Ms. Stegman’s quest for the truth. His promise to write a book about the Stegman saga is but a fiction since it is an artifice of the film. If anyone is writing about the family, it is Jean’s granddaughter. Why Weinstein/Wildenstein would have helped Esther is anyone’s guess.

The long and short of it is that Jean Seligmann was the heir to Jacques Seligmann, the patriarch art dealer, with galleries in Paris and New York., who died in 1934. He and his two brothers were mobilized like all other Frenchmen at the outbreak of war with Germany in 1939.  After France’s humiliating defeat, things got complicated. While Jean’s brothers left for the US, Jean decided to return to German-occupied Paris and reopen the family’s galleries at Place Vendôme. He pleade

Plaee Vendome, Paris

 for months with the German administration, to no avail. He sent his wife and children to safety in the unoccupied part of France, while he straightened things out in German Paris. By early 1941, it was clear that nothing good could come of this. The business was shuttered and plundered—more than 700 objects had disappeared from the family galleries, apartments and storage sites into German and French hands. The Seligmann gallery’s staff turned against Jean. He made several trips to Switzerland which did not go unnoticed by the most militant elements of the German military presence in Paris. Jean was questioned by German policemen in March 1941.  He stood accused of consorting with the enemy (the British and, for some reason, the Americans) and mounting a propaganda campaign against the Reich funded by the New York Seligmann interests. Very complex charges which earned Jean a stay in a Paris jail. From there, he was transferred in name only to the transit camp of Drancy in which he actually never set foot and was promptly executed at the Mont Valérien on December 15, 1941, by a German firing squad together with thirty other men of Jewish descent, all accused of terrorist acts against the Reich.

Jean Seligmann was the only Jewish art dealer executed during the German occupation of France. Other art dealers were deported to concentration camps like René Gimpel who died at Neuengamme in January 1945 Thousands of artists were either killed or deported. Although most of Jean’s paintings were never found, some have surfaced in French museums. Others are still floating about the free global art market. Jean’s granddaughter continues to look for the objects. Most of them have been identified, but not located.

One of the film’s final moments takes place in the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris. For those of you who want to see this film, this scene is plum embarrassing. I can just imagine how Jean’s granddaughter must have felt when she saw her likeness have a hissy fit in the middle of a funeral, Oops! I gave it away. Sorry.

What is there to learn from this film?

Art dealers were involved in despicable acts during World War II and stole from their friends for personal gains. They were never prosecuted. Close family and kinship ties, economic and professional interests have prevented these stories from surfacing, thus contributing to a massive distortion of how art dealers, collectors, museum officials and their pals in government offices and in the business community ordered, coordinated, or otherwise profited from acts of plunder during an act of genocide against men, women, and children, of Jewish descent in France.

Regardless, let’s end on a positive note.

If you can suspend disbelief, much as you have had to with films like “Woman in Gold” and—gasp!—the “Monuments Men,” you might feel slightly rewarded in seeing “The Art Dealer”.

Nazi looted art conference at Lafayette College, October 26-28, 2011: a debriefing (I)

From left to right: Rachel Davidson, Diane Ahl, Radu Pribic

Courtesy: Lafayette College

It has now been close to two weeks since Lafayette College in quaint Easton, PA, hosted a first-ever conference on Nazi looted art. Starting from scratch, the organizers of the conference, Professors Diane Ahl and Radu Pribic, brought together a group of speakers who represented different perspectives on the issue of looted art and art restitution.

Day 1: October 26, 2011

The conference opened on a screening of “The Rape of Europa”, a freewheeling adaptation of Lynn Nicholas’ landmark work of same name which detailed the Nazi-orchestrated plunder of works and objects of art across Europe, while focusing most of its attention on the Allied—read American—civilian and mostly military response to those exactions and the means taken to repair the damage caused by Nazi thefts.

This was my third viewing of “The Rape of Europa” The first time was on television, the second time was at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, during a Jewish Film Festival. That screening was memorable only because I ran into Lynn Nicholas looking a bit lost in the line of viewers waiting to see the film being shown in the East Wing. When I asked her what she was doing there, she said simply that she wanted to be there in case anyone had questions about the movie. What? You mean you weren’t invited to speak at your own movie? No, was the answer. The third screening was in Easton. At the second screening, I noticed three things:

1. someone intimately involved with production and scriptwriting decided to go for the schmaltz factor by inserting several high points of art restitution in the United States—the return of Marie Altmann’s famed paintings by Gustav Klimt, and the recovery of a painting by François Boucher from a Utah museum which had belonged to a member of the Paris-based heavily splintered Seligmann family. The true schmaltz occurred when a German citizen was featured as self-anointed rescuer of Judaica from his small town, the name of which escapes me completely. Not having anything to do with the “Rape of Europa,” it did, however, take on a life of its own by injecting the personal into the political, thus illustrating how a complex topic such as cultural plunder can transform daily lives into a quest for justice and, for others, redemption.
    
2. the Russians were very emotional and steadfast about their desire to equate their policy of no-return of so-called ‘trophy art’ and the humanitarian catastrophe wrought upon them by the Wehrmacht, the SS, and the Luftwaffe against the former Soviet Union, especially during the years-long siege of Leningrad. Interestingly, and memorably, one of the hard-line ministers of culture who was interviewed in what is now Saint-Petersburg dropped a portentous hint, indicating that his countrymen would be willing to discuss the return of trophy art in 20 years or so. Since the movie was produced in the late 1990s, that would place a potential return date… within six to eight years. Now, that’s a sign of hope!
    
3. the “Rape of Europa” spends an unnecessarily long, long time on the siege of Monte Cassino in Italy. That accursed monastery drew hellfire for weeks without harming German defenses, but managing to erase a major cultural monument and killing close to a thousand civilians huddled for safety in what they had rightfully viewed as a ‘sanctuary’ from the horrors of war. Needless to say, I cannot blame your average GI Joe for wondering why ten thousand men had to die for that rock.

The third screening reaffirmed what I had long suspected, that the subject of art looting per se was given short shrift throughout this award-winning documentary. Although well-illustrated in its broadest possible strokes, the “Rape of Europa” goes very light on the very complex and very heavy on the not-so-clear. To wit: the actual plunder of collections in occupied Europe was a complicated affair brought about by conflicting interests within the Nazi hierarchy (Goering, Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Rosenberg, von Ribbentrop, to name a few) and the plethora of local opportunists that the Nazis encountered in countries that they occupied, who were only too willing to provide their assistance, support and expertise in exchange for a cut of the booty. Too heavy on the not-so-clear is evidenced by the French episode on the Jeu de Paume and Rose Valland, the iconic heroine of art restitution in France on the verge of attaining sainthood should anyone pay close attention to the myths that have been designed around her career as an unwitting curator of the Musée du Jeu de Paume in downtown Paris during the period of German occupation and as the lead postwar restitution officer for a succession of failed French governments up until the early 1960s. 


Myth #1: Rose Valland volunteered for her mission to spy on the Germans at the Jeu de Paume; myth number two: she risked her life every day while taking copious notes on the ins and outs of looted works entering and leaving the Jeu de Paume; myth number three: no one knew that she spoke German. These are some of the many details that have filtered out into postwar revisionist history of cultural plunder in France.

Producers of "Rape of Europa": Richard Berge, Nicole Newnham, and Bonni Cohen
Source: Rape of Europa

On the plus side, I was delighted to finally meet up and converse with Nicole Newnham, one of the producers of the “Rape of Europa” who spoke candidly of her experiences making this beautifully-filmed and edited documentary on a subject that resonates even more today than it did a decade ago and which, for some corny reason, brought me close to tears, more so because we are still so far away from reaching a far-reaching solution to the long-term effects of the continental-wide plunder of cultural items during the Third Reich and the postwar occupation of Germany and Austria by Allied forces. It’s not so much the Rape of Europa as it is the rape of the cultural heritage of the victims of Nazism and Fascism, writ large.

De Al-Ándalus al Jeu de Paume: Una lección de procedencia, estilo valenciano

por Martin Terrazas

"La mejor cerámica del siglo XV", C. Velasco
Fuente: Las Provincias

Después de los primeros saqueos dramáticos de las colecciones judías más importantes en la región parisina durante el verano y otoño de 1940 por la infantería de la Embajada de Alemania en Paris (los Geheime Feld Polizei—literalmente, policía secreta campestre—o GFP), se apoderaron los Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) del saqueo manejado por los nazis de arte origen propietario judío en la Francia ocupada, tanto como en todos los territorios invadidos por las tropas alemanes. En París, historiadores de arte y expertos del ERR analizaron a miles de objetos decorativos cuyos pertenecen a individuales como Jean A. Seligmann y sus hermanos André y Arnold; Edouard, James-Armand, Alexandrine, Guy, Henri, y Philippe de Rothschild; los hermanos Bacri, Georges Wildenstein, y Paul Rosenberg. Entre estos objetos, cuales las entidades habían confiscados y transferidos primero al Louvre y de allí al Jeu de Paume, fueron objetos de arte decorativo inapreciables y, en particular, alfarería de Valencia (España).

Que parece como cerámica sencilla, de color azul y blanco, esconde una plétora de líneas de trama. Estos objetos de arte decorativo tiene una historia única, urdiendo cultura y tiempo juntos, quizás en muchas maneras, venir la SGM, sus dueños judíos y saqueadores fascistas no sabían.

Mientras muchos académicos trazan la artesanía a los abasidas de Sāmarrā’, abajo el reino de Jaume II de Aragón el Justo, la tradición fue llevado de Al-Ándalus, en particular las ciudades capitales de Córdoba y Granada y centros de fábrica de Triana y Úbeda, a las orillas de la Turia (Guadalaviar). Abajo sus católicos adoptados, esta cerámica elaborada a mano saltó a la fama mundial, ayudó el puerto de Valencia llegar ser una parada principal en el Mediterráneo, y creyó una industria cerámica española que a pesar de varios cambios gubernamentales, una guerra civil sangrienta, dictadura, subcontratación internacional, depresión económica, y indiferencia por las generaciones siguientes, todavía se mantiene en lugares cómo Manises, Paterna, Alcora, Muel, Villafeliche, Talavera de la Reina, Puente del Arzobispo, Barcelona y Reus.

Jacques Seligmann y Co.:

Large faience platter (Manises), 17th c.

Fuente: Proyecto ERR via Bundesarchiv

Faience jar with handles, 17^th c.

Fuente: Proyecto ERR via Bundesarchiv

From Al-Andalus to the Jeu de Paume: A Lesson in Provenance, Valencia Style

by Martin Terrazas

After initial dramatic seizures of major Jewish collections in the Paris region during the summer and fall of 1940 by the foot soldiers of the German Embassy in Paris (the Geheime Feld Polizei—literally, Secret Field Police—or GFP), the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) seized control of the Nazi-ordered plunder of Jewish-owned art in occupied France, as well as in all territories overrun by German troops. In Paris, the ERR art historians and experts came upon thousands of decorative objects owned by the likes of Jean A. Seligmann and his brothers André and Arnold; Edouard, James-Armand, Alexandrine, Guy, Henri, and Philippe de Rothschild; the Bacri brothers, Georges Wildenstein, and Paul Rosenberg. Among those objects which their units had confiscated and transferred first to the Louvre and from there to the Jeu de Paume, were priceless decorative art objects and in particular ceramics from Valencia, Spain.

What seems like simple, blue-and-white ceramics holds a plethora of plot lines. These decorative objects have a unique history, warping cultures and time together, perhaps in many ways that, come World War II, their Jewish owners and Fascist looters had not previously known.

While many scholars trace the craft back to the Abbasids in Sāmarrā’, under the reign of Jaume II of Aragon, the tradition was brought from Al-Andalus, in particular its capitals of Córdoba and Granada and manufacturing centers of Triana and Úbeda, to the banks of the Turia (Guadalaviar). Under its Catholic adoptees, this hand-crafted pottery gained worldwide fame, helped Valencia’s port become a principal Mediterranean shipping call, and created a Spanish ceramic industry that despite various governments, bloody civil war, dictatorship, outsourcing, economic depression, and indifference by younger generations, is still maintained today in places such as Manises, Paterna, L’Alcora, Muel, Villafeliche, Talavera de la Reina, Puente de Arzobispo, Barcelona and Reus.

From the Rothschild Collection, Paris, France:

Spanish-Moorish vase, 16th c.
Source:ERR Project via Bundesarchiv

Spanish-Moorish Plate, ca. 1429
Source: ERR Project via Bundesarchiv

Spanish-Moorish majolica plate, 16th c.
Source: ERR Project via Bundesarchiv

Spanish-Moorish plate, early 17th c.
Source: ERR Project via Bundesarchiv

Seligmann and Richard Colnaghi

Richard Colnaghi is undeniably one of the most important dealers in the global art market for museum-quality Old Masters. In going through one of his catalogues, one painting stands out because of its problematic provenance: “La Bonne Nouvelle,” by Marguerite Gérard, painted most likely in or around 1804.

The history of the painting hits a snag when it enters “the Seligmann Collection” in 1937. The issue here is simple: although there are many people with the name Seligmann, there are few who collect such distinguished works. They belong to the extended family of Jacques Seligmann whose antique and Old Master business dominated the Place Vendôme in Paris up until its complete dispossession at the hands of the Germans and their Vichy colleagues. Another branch of the family set up shop in New York, running several art and antique businesses—namely, Georges and Germain Seligmann, and Arnold Seligmann and Rey.

La Bonne Nouvelle
Source: © Marguerite Gérard

The ownership of this painting is written in such a way that one can only deduce a seamless stream of ownership from 1937 to the “anonymous” sale of the painting at Galerie Charpentier in Paris on 10 June 1954, before it entered the Bruni-Tedeschi collection, a name that should resonate since it is similar to that of the family name of the current wife of French President, Nicolas Sarkozy.

Question: Is the Seligmann in the provenance the same as that of the Place Vendôme Seligmann? If so, everything that was owned and managed by that family was forcibly removed by the German authorities between June 1940 and 1941--first off by Goering’s men, secondly, by German police under the control of the German Embassy in Paris, thirdly, by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR).

To be continued…