Any provenance work pertaining to works and objects of art entering or leaving Italy during and after the Nazi era must cast a pall of suspicion on the following individuals who traded occasionally or frequently with Hermann Goering through two of his principal agents, Walther Hofer and Josef Angerer. Joseph Angerer, who swept through French Jewish collections in Paris during the summer of 1940 on Goering’s account, also acquired works in Rome while he stayed at the Hotel Excelsior there. Some items—tapestries mostly—were purchased from American or British owners living in Rome at the time. Angerer was also well acquainted in Florence with Contini and Bellini, and befriended Grassi there. He knew the city of Milan like the back of his hand.
The bulk of this information stems from detailed postwar interrogations and debriefings of Walther Hofer.
Florence:
Luigi Bellini
Conte Contini--Sometimes, Contini dealt with Goering through Reber, one of Hofer’s oldest friends who lived in Switzerland, using the Rome-based shipping company, Martelli and Rosoni.
Giulio Grassi
Commandantore Ventura
Dr. Victor Wallerstein
Genoa:
Eldebaudo Bossi--Bossi also dealt with Jacques Dubourg, a Paris dealer who was very busy during the Vichy years. Dubourg served as a go-between for Hofer for sales to Goering.
Milan:
Ferruccia Asta
Rome:
Alfredo Barsauli
Ugo Fandola
Dr. Alessandro Morandotti
Galleria Sangiorgi
Galleria Simonetti
Graf Alessandro Tatistscheff
Contessa Lina Traine
Fr. Irene von Benda
Fraulein Staeger
Dr. Ettore Sestieri, art historian, director of Galleria Barberini.
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;
