Prisoners of war

by Marc Masurovsky

In late January 2014, Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, declared that art objects stolen from Jews “are the last prisoners of WWII”. He asked that they be returned to their rightful owners.  Two years later, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in June 2016 in support of the so-called HEAR Act, S.2763, Ronald Lauder emphasized, rightly or wrongly, that this proposed bill would help return looted works of art, “the final prisoners of World War II,” to their rightful owners.

This is not the first time that we’ve heard art objects being compared to prisoners of war. The analogy, wittingly or not, produces a misconception as to the nature of the thefts of art objects from Jews and distorts the chronology of events surrounding cultural plunder at the hands of the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. It is a recent notion which may have its roots in the “Spoils of War” conference organized by Elizabeth Simpson in 1995 in collaboration with the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative arts.”

The “Spoils of War” conference came on the heels of disclosures that important works of art thought to be missing at the end of WWII had resurfaced in the former Soviet Union. The trove which a shocked world discovered was described by some as the "last prisoners of World War II," citing Karl E. Meyer’s Editorial Notebook: Russia's Hidden Attic; Returning the Spoils of World WarII, (N.Y. TIMES, Feb. 1, 1995, p. A20). Meyer, a journalist for the New York Times, was referring to important French Impressionist paintings that had been deemed lost in the wreckage of WWII only to reappear in an exhibit at the Hermitage. In an unforgettable display of nationalistic and cultural arrogance, Soviet authorities flaunted their prized “takings”, the result of massive sweeps of works and objects of art by so-called Trophy Brigades operating in areas “liberated” by the Red Army in the months leading up to the end of WWII. The Soviets viewed these “treasures” as “reparations” for the staggering losses in lives, equipment, cultural objects and infrastructure that they had suffered at the hands of Nazis and their collaborators. [Cited by Seth A. Stuhl, Spoils of War? A Solution to the Hermitage Trove Debate , 18 J. Int'l L. 409 (2014).

Since 1995, the expression has been re-appropriated time and time again mostly in the form of catchy titles as a mis-characterization of the full dimension and scope of cultural plunder during the Nazi era (1933-1945). Some of the many authors, mostly legal experts, who used the expression:

1997: Margaret M. Mastroberardino, The Last Prisoners of World War II, 9 Pace Int'l L. Rev. 315 (1997)

2002 Emily J. Henson, The Last Prisoners of War: Returning World War II Art to Its Rightful Owners— Can Moral Obligations Be Translated into Legal Duties?, 51 DEPAUL L. REV. 1103, 1105

2004, Geri J. Yonover, NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE: The "Last Prisoners of War" 1: Unrestituted Nazi-Looted Art Fall, 2004 6 J.L. & Soc. Challenges 81

2006 Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, "A Silesian Crossroads for Europe’s Displaced Books: Compensation or Prisoners of War?"  

A world-renown authority on Nazi looting of archives, libraries and books, Dr. Patricia Kennedy Grimsted has often referred to looted books and archives as “prisoners of WWII, held captive by recipient nations as “compensation” or “reparations.”

2010, Jessica Grimes, "Forgotten Prisoners of War: Returning Nazi-Looted Art by Relaxing the National Stolen Property Act ," Roger Williams University Law Review: Vol. 15: Iss. 2, Article 4.


2011, Maria Liberatrice Vicentini, manager of the Nucleo Conservazione Archivio Siviero, suggested that unrestituted works of art should be viewed as “prisoners of war.”

2014, Jessica Schubert, "Prisoners of War: Nazi-Era Looted Art and the Need for Reform in the United States," Touro Law Review: Vol. 30: No. 3, Article 10.

Although these “prisoners of WWII” are universally associated with the former Soviet Union, one can easily argue that they exist in most countries involved in the Second World War, which received untold numbers of cultural items with no provenance that they simply “hung on to”. They rationalized their presence in State collections and warehouses in the same manner as Soviet officials did and their successors in the newly independent nations forged out of the former Soviet Socialist Republics—Russia, Ukraine, Belarus—and their close neighbors in the rest of Eastern Europe. Proof being in the pudding, however, in the absence of coherent, systematic, inventories and audits of such holdings in the aforementioned nations, we can only continue to speculate wildly about the true numbers of these “prisoners.”

Summary:

Let’s give credit where credit is due. The late Elan Steinberg was a major force behind the WJC’s many advocacy campaigns of the 1990s In 1998, he called unrestituted looted art "the last prisoners of war."  In November 1998, the WJC reiterated its assertion that looted paintings by Matisse, Chagall and Fernand Léger residing in French museum collections as “orphans” waiting to be returned to “loving parents” were in fact “the last prisoners of war” and they should be “freed.” .

Unless anyone protests, we will award to Elan Steinberg paternity for the expression, which Ron Lauder must have adopted since then. Still, the expression is laden with misconceptions.

Prisoners of war are people, and like with “orphaned” works, we tend to give human shape to objects and assign them sentient qualities which allows us to compare with them with individuals who have been captured in combat or in a battle zone and subjected to forced internment, confinement, and imprisonment by a hostile force. A prisoner of war is usually a member of the military or an agency affiliated with the one of the branches of a country’s armed forces and taken into custody by the “enemy.”

Prisoners of war are usually released at the end of the conflict that provoked their capture. They can also be exchanged for enemy prisoners. In principle, they have rights covered by international agreements, like the Geneva Convention.

Not to be flip, but can all of the aforementioned be applied to cultural objects being held “against their will” by a country which has no designated right to hold them and whose responsibility, at least its ethical or moral responsibility, is to return them to their rightful owners?

Furthermore, a prisoner of war has to be captured during a period of active military conflict. The looting of art objects under Nazi rule began in 1933, six years before the eruption of military conflict on the European continent. Theoretically, the expression “prisoner of war” cannot apply to any art object which was misappropriated, confiscated, plundered or otherwise stolen from its rightful owner prior to the outbreak of war, in other words, during the six-year period of 1933-1939.

Mountain out of a mole hill? Historical accuracy is important and the use of rhetoric to score political points is so widespread as to constitute an epidemic of sorts and therefore cannot be controlled by conventional methods. Only through education and awareness raising can the record be corrected. Art objects, once again, are not people and do not share their characteristics. They have no will of their own. They might symbolize events that extend far beyond their intended purpose as a result of their twisted or disrupted ownership histories. But they cannot—and should not-- be compared to people held against their will behind bars or barbed wire. If people insist on analogizing unrestituted art objects with “prisoners of war”, then it would be more useful to compare them to US soldiers listed as “MIA-Missing in Action” whose return has been elusive since the end of the Vietnam War.





Where does that get us? Nowhere.

Thoughts about provenance research, 1995-2016

by Marc Masurovsky

It has been almost twenty years, yes, 20, two times 10, 4 times 5, since “provenance research” entered the public sphere in the context of Holocaust-related matters.

Up to that time, no one uttered those two words who was not an art historian or an art expert and only in the most guarded ways. Provenance research had always been the exclusive province of art historians and, by extension, museum professionals and stewards of art collections.

Several events, when viewed cumulatively, can be blamed for upsetting the apple cart of provenance.

1/ the January 1995 “Spoils of War” International conference sponsored by the Bard [College] Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts. Although focused in part on Soviet “takings” of cultural objects which were located in their zone of military occupation in the waning months of WWII, the conference was an opportunity to revisit the massive looting of art objects by all sides, mostly by the Axis powers, during the Nazi era, the Holocaust and WWII. Implicit was the understanding that the provenance history of these mislaid, stolen, plundered, displaced art objects had been severely disrupted as a result of war, occupation, and genocide. In attendance were art historians, lawyers and government officials from a variety of countries.

2/ The Swiss bank crisis regarding Jewish dormant accounts emerged in 1995 initially pitting the World Jewish Congress and its president, Edgar Bronfman, against the Swiss Bankers Association. It exploded into a series of landmark hearings organized by Republican Senator Alfons d’Amato, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, and the launching of a class action suit by 22 American lawyers representing Holocaust survivors and their heirs whose assets were on deposit in Swiss banks. What did this have to do with provenance research? Writ large, the Swiss bank crisis paved the way for a more public discussion of the fate of Jewish assets held in various parts of Europe by institutions, financial and cultural, which had no business holding on to them. If anything, the debate over Swiss banking misdeeds called into question the illicit ownership of tangible assets misappropriated from their rightful owners, Jewish victims of Nazism.

3/ The “Eizenstat reports” of 1996 and 1997 on the (mis)handling of gold looted by the Nazis, sold and/or deposited in Swiss banks and in financial institutions in other so-called “neutral countries” during WWII. Although not focused on art, we can argue that the "provenance" of the gold looted by the Nazis lay at the center of the US government study of "looted gold" and the Swiss role in recycling it.

4/ the September 1997 international conference in Washington, DC on the “legal and moral consequences of art restitution” organized by Ori Z. Soltes, director of the Klutznick Museum of B’nai B’rith in Washington, DC, placed looted art and the challenges of postwar restitution squarely in the forefront of public debate over looted art. That conference witnessed the birth of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project (HARP).

4a/ The World Jewish Congress (WJC) announced the establishment of its own looted art project, the “Commission for Art Recovery", chaired by Ronald S. Lauder.

5/ the seizure of “Portrait of Wally” and “Night City III” by Egon Schiele at the Museum of Modern Art in January 1998 opened wide the doors on how looted art is able to travel, claimed and unrestituted, for decades and end up on loan at an eminent New York cultural institution.

6/ the Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets of December 1998 which produced the much heralded and reviled non-binding “Washington Principles”, acting as guidelines for handling “looted art”. Provenance research lay at the core of these principles.

7/ the legislating of a Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets (PCHA) which saw the light of day in June 1998, and opened its doors in spring of 1999. Art was one of three “assets” to be investigated by an executive commission until 2001. Excluded from consideration were looted art objects in the United States, a critical failure of the PCHA.

8/ the American Association of Museums and the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) enacted their own guidelines on how to handle art objects in their collections.

9/ the AAM published a “Guide to Provenance Research” co-authored by Nancy Yeide of the National Gallery of Art, Amy Walsh of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Konstantin Akinsha, author of “Beautiful Loot.”

In the space of five years, art historians found themselves “sharing” provenance research and with attorneys, government officials, non-art historians, researchers, Holocaust claimants and their advocates, and NGO’s concerned with the location, identification and restitution of art objects misappropriated between 1933 and 1945.

Once viewed as a discrete task limited to the scholarly documentation of the history of art objects, provenance research became politicized overnight with battle lines drawn over how far such research would go and what the ultimate goal of provenance research should be. Is it really about documenting and verifying who has good title to an object? Or should such questions not haunt an art historian’s quest for information about an object?

The debate still rages, the camps have solidified, alliances between American and German museum professionals are the latest incarnation of this struggle as museum professionals and “provenance researchers” on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean cement their strategic partnerships within the museum world. Outside that sphere are those who advocate a more ecumenical and interdisciplinary approach to provenance research, closely connected with political, economic and social history, the upheavals that they document, and using such research to right some wrongs and inject ethics into the stewardship of collections while shedding light on the mechanics of cultural plunder and helping to (re)write the history of art as seen through the distorted prism of mass conflict, dictatorship and genocide. Not pretty but necessary.

Jacopo Zucchi, “The Bath of Bathsheba”: or how pieces of a story build a new story about the same story ex post facto

"The Bath of Bethsheba", Jacopo Zuchhi
Source: Lib-Art

by Marc Masurovsky

In late July 1998, a painting by Jacopo Zucchi, “The Bath of Bathsheba”, returned to its rightful owner, the Galleria Nazionale in Rome, Italy, after it had graced the walls of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum in Hartford, CT, since 1965. This may seem like stale news but the story of the return itself exceeds the boundaries of time.

Let’s begin…

May 25, 1997: The Hartford Courant reviews the decision by the Wadsworth Atheneum to restitute the “Bath of Bathsheba” by Jacopo Zucchi to “its rightful owner,” the Italian Government, “as it should be.” The painting hung at the Wadsworth since 1965. Soviet troops had stolen the painting from the Italian Embassy in Berlin at the end of World War II. According to the journalist, the museum had no idea of the stolen origin of the painting at the time of its purchase.

April 23, 1998: Judith Dobrzynski, a reporter for the New York Times, indicates that the acquisition of the Zucchi painting by the Wadsworth spelled trouble for the museum “almost as soon as” it had acquired it, reminding the reader that the acquisition had been in “good faith from a Paris dealer.” The Wadsworth paid $35,000 in 1965. Thirty-two years later, the time it took to reach a settlement with the Italian government, the value of the painting had risen to $500,000. This is where we find out that the restitution to Italy came with a price attached to it: an exclusive on an exhibit of Carravaggio’s works entitled “Carravaggio and his Italian followers.” Ms. Dobrzynski duly noted that “the swap is not quite even.”

April 29, 1998: Christopher Knight of the Los Angeles Times expounds at length on the Carravaggio exhibit which resulted from the settlement with the Italian government noting somewhat surreally that the Italian government “offered an impressive loan” of paintings “in compensation for Hartford’s loss.” Extraordinary!

June 28, 1998: Stevenson Swanson of the Chicago Tribune reviewed the circumstances under which the Zucchi painting was returning to Italy. The word “restitution” is replaced by the word “settlement”, a settlement that the art world applauded. The director of the Commission for Art Recovery, Constance Lowenthal, hailed the settlement “as a wonderfully creative solution” which could serve as a model for other US museums. In other words, a qualified version of restitution is no longer a restitution. Or, was the Wadsworth solution a “restitution” or something else? Still, new details emerge about the circumstances under which the painting found its way in the hands of the Wadsworth. Presumably, Soviet officers in Berlin had sold the painting to an Italian businessman who then sold it to a Parisian art dealer. Once at the Wadsworth, after the Italian government made initial claims for the return of the painting, the Wadsworth had offered to sell it back to Italy, an odd way of acknowledging that it had acquired a stolen work of art. Peter Sutton, the Wadsworth director who engineered the “settlement” qualified it as a “pretty good deal and… the right thing to do.” The Italian government official who headed the negotiations expounded on how, for love of art, this arrangement served as “an enlightened example” how to recover lost works of art without going to court. An odd way for the rightful owner to describe a situation that should have placed it in the driver’s seat from the get-go. After all, the Wadsworth owned a stolen piece of Italian cultural property that had originated from a State-owned museum in Rome.

July 17, 1998: in the travel section of the New York Times, Michael Kimmelman provides a history of Jacopo Zucchi’s painting. We learn that, in 1908, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica in Rome lent the painting to the Italian Embassy in Berlin and that “Russian officers” had offered the painting for sale in 1947. After the purchase of the painting by the Wadsworth, the Italian government began to press for the return of the painting. Nothing happened until Peter C. Sutton became the director of the Wadsworth in 1996.

January 2001: An entry on art theft in Encyclopedia.com provides an intriguing detail about the “Wadsworth case”: a visitor to the Wadsworth recognized the Zucchi as the same painting which had hung in a “Berlin museum in the 1920s” until it disappeared into Soviet hands and reappeared on the Paris art market. http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3468303299.html

March 8, 2002: Christopher Knight of the Los Angeles Times, commenting on the return to the Krakow-based Czartoryski family of a late Medieval tapestry, contrasted the behavior of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) with that of the Wadsworth, wondering why LACMA stowed away the tapestry out of view of the public while the Wadsworth had shown the painting until its return to Italy. He did note, however, that “no credible argument can be made for keeping stolen art.” Agreed!

August 13, 2002: An online editorial posted by “Antiques and the Arts online” announces the creation of a Nazi-era provenance project at the Wadsworth funded by the Chase Family. Reference is made to the Zucchi painting, the fact that the Museum had acquired it in good faith from a Paris art dealer, who had obtained a lawful export license to ship it to the United States in 1965. The last comment is a subtle hint that the French government acquiesced in the legitimacy of the acquisition, thus adding credibility to an untainted provenance for the Zucchi painting. Strangely enough, the editorial points out that it wasn’t until 1997 that the Wadsworth acknowledged the looted origin of the painting.

January 27, 2004: An undergraduate student posts art-historical information about the Zucchi work, including the battle over its attribution to Zucchi as opposed to his mentor, Giorgio Vasari, which took place in 1925.

April 14, 2009: Using as a pretext a presentation at the Wadsworth Atheneum by Nancy Yeide, head of curatorial records at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, on Hermann Goering and his voracious collecting habits, Daniel D’Ambrosio provided some additional details about the Zucchi’s travails through Europe prior to reaching Hartford. The Paris art dealer who sold the work to the Wadsworth was François Heim did not disclose how he came into possession of the work, declaring simply that it had come from a private Italian collection.

We still do not know exactly what happened in Berlin in 1945, the identity of the seller to François Heim, and the details of the discussions between successive Italian governments and the Wadsworth over a thirty-two year period.

Winding back the clock to late 1997, the publication “Spoils of War” contained a statement by Mario Bondioli Osio, President of the Interministerial Commission for Artworks in Rome, who negotiated the “settlement” with the Wadsworth Atheneum for the return of the Zucchi in exchange for an exhibit of 29 works by Carravaggio and his friends. In this statement, Osio declared:

“Apparently sold in 1945 by Russian soldiers to a Wagon-lit employee, the "Bath of Bethsheba" by Jacopo Zucchi was offered by the same Wagon-lit employee to the Italian Embassy in Paris in 1947. The bureaucratic procedure for disbursing the 30,000 lire requested to the Italian government for the return of the painting was not positively concluded. The painting was subsequently sold to a Parisian art dealer and bought in good faith by the Wadsworth Atheneum in 1965. In 1970 it was identified as the masterpiece formerly in the Italian Embassy in Berlin by the Italian art expert Federico Zeri. Recognizing that it was "the right thing to do", the Board of Trustees of the Wadsworth Atheneum has resolved, in a formal resolution, "to a de-accession from the European Painting Collection ... the "Bath of Bethsheba" ... in order to restitute it to its proper owners, ... contingent upon the receipt and viewing of a loan exhibition.”

To summarize:

“The Bath of Batsheba/Bethseba”, by Jacopo Zucchi, an oil on canvas, painted in or around 1573, was loaned to the Italian Embassy in Berlin in 1908. In 1925, the painting was convincingly attributed to Jacopo Zucchi. Loaned to a Berlin museum in the 1920s, Federico Zeri, a noted Italian art historian, spotted the painting. As Allied troops choked the last pockets of resistance in and around Berlin in late April 1945, Soviet troops stormed the Italian Embassy, ransacked and plundered it. One of the items “liberated” by Soviet troops was the Zucchi painting. Soviet soldiers sold the painting to a sleeping-car train employee, who, two years later, took it to the Italian Embassy in Paris in 1947. The Italian government was unwilling to come up with the funds needed to buy back their own property, although it is uncertain whether or not the Embassy personnel knew that the painting belonged to their government. The year of sale to Heim is not indicated, although François Heim is one of the most important antique and old master dealers in Paris up through the 1970s. The Wadsworth acquires the painting from him in 1965, for which Heim obtains a license to export the work out of France.

It is not until 1970 when Federico Zeri visits the Wadsworth and spots the Zucchi, associating it with the painting that he had last seen in Berlin before the war. The Italian government initiates its claim for the return of the work as its rightful owner. The Wadsworth responds with an offer to sell the painting back to the Italians, arguing that it had bought it in good faith. The dialogue reaches a dead end until Peter Sutton’s arrival as director of the Wadsworth in 1996. Thirty-one years have now elapsed. In that intervening period, the Italian government has modified its tactics on how best to recover works and objects of art looted from its national collections during the Second World War. We have no way of knowing what transpired between the Wadsworth and Sgr. Osio. One thing is certain: the Wadsworth did not restitute the Zucchi painting to Italy. The Italian government, on the other hand, has adopted a strategy for the return of looted State-owned works which does not apply to works plundered from individual Italian citizens and whose works are in US collections. The Gentili family’s travails with US museums like the Princeton Art Museum and the Italian government are a case in point.