Sunflower oil for paintings

by Marc Masurovsky

Art is a commodity which can be traded like widgets. On January 17, 1944, a French company called “Compensex” [Compagnie commerciale d’exportation et de compensation] had the bright idea of proposing to the Vichy government an exchange of commodities to benefit Vichy France and the French export economy. Compensex was a subsidiary of the Banque Worms whose intricate intertwining financial and commercial interests with the French wartime economy and outlying investments in Axis-occupied Europe have been well-documented. [See in particular "Industriels et banquiers francais sous l'Occupation, by Annie Lacroix-Riz, Armand-Colin]

The exchange involved 200 tons of Hungarian sunflower oil worth about 12 million francs (1944 value) for an equivalent amount of paintings allegedly owned by the Galerie Charpentier in Paris, known for its intensive commercial activity during the German occupation of France. The works would be exported to Switzerland. They included paintings by Albert Lebourg, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro and other well-known modernists. The French ministry responsible for supplies and agriculture [ravitaillement et agriculture] notified the Ministry of Finance of its support for the proposed importation of the sunflower oil. The question remained whether the 50 or so paintings would be allowed to leave France.

On January 28, 1944, the French Fine Arts Administration gave its conditional support to the project as long as it could review the list of paintings offered for export.

It is not known, pending further research, whether the exchange actually took place. But it is worth noting that Switzerland was the favored destination for the paintings, thus guaranteeing their absorption in the Swiss market.

At the exact same time, Bruno Lohse, deputy director of the ERR in France and Martin Fabiani, leading collaborationist art dealer in wartime Paris, had hatched an elaborate plot to sell 54 paintings, mostly executed by 19th and 20th century artists officially reviled by Nazi doctrine, which had been confiscated from Jewish collections in and around Paris. Those paintings allegedly were removed from the Jeu de Paume where they had been stored for further disposition.  The plot fell apart in February 1944 when Robert Scholz, administrative overseer of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) operations in occupied countries, personally intervened by traveling from Berlin to Paris to put a stop to what he perceived to be a barely disguised attempt by local officials to profit from confiscated Jewish cultural assets with the help of a notorious art dealer already implicated in the recycling of such property in France and abroad.

The moral of this story is that, once high-value cultural items are available for disposal following their misappropriation by State agents, their dispersal might be facilitated by the commercial and economic interests of the occupation forces and their local vassals, in this instance the German military administration as an extension of the Third Reich in France and the Vichy government and its complex relationship with financial institutions like the Banque Worms.

It is not clear whether Galerie Charpentier’s owners were aware of the Fabiani-Lohse arrangement, but their capacity to participate in complex commercial transactions with Vichy, the Germans and the so-called neutral countries is duly noted.

Looted art in Italy

Although the more than 48 postwar Italian governments have been focused largely on what the Germans removed from Italy during their two-year occupation of the country, little attention has been paid to looted art entering the Italian art market from Western Europe, Switzerland, and Austria.

Italian art dealers are an expert lot with ties to galleries, museums, and collectors around the world, namely in Europe and the Americas. Despite the rise to power of Benito Mussolini in 1922 and the instauration of a Fascist government, normal trade relations and cultural exchanges persisted well into the 1930s between the new Italy and its neighbors, even as far away as the United States.

After the German invasion of Western Europe in spring 1940 and the systematic plundering of hundreds of Jewish collections that ensued over the next four years, Italian galleries were busily entering into the fray as possible avenues of recycling loot. Capitalizing on their privileged relations with art experts and museum officials from Nazi Germany, these Italian dealers were only too glad to be paid in kind with modernist and especially Impressionist works, in exchange for which they offered Italian and other Old Masters to German agents. Italian dealers like Ventura and Bonacossi were more than willing to adapt to the German way of trading art: My Bellotto for 2 Monets. Joke aside, this is as close to the truth as one can get when it comes to these exchanges.

The following works were used to pay off Italian dealers in exchanges brokered by Goering’s favorite art specialist, Walther Andreas Hofer:

A painting by Sisley belonging to the Lindon family in Paris;

Three paintings by Monet, one belonging to Lindon, the other two to Paul Rosenberg;

One painting by Renoir belonging to Paul Rosenberg;

One painting by Degas belonging to Paul Rosenberg;

One painting by Cézanne belonging to Alphonse Kann of Saint-Germain-en-Laye.