Transparency

by Marc Masurovsky

Transparency is the condition of being transparent.

Synonyms can be lucidity, clearness, translucence.

Transparency can be purity like the crystal clarity of the water.

Antonyms are murkiness and opacity

Decades ago, while in high school in Paris, my class visited a water purification plant run by the Compagnie Générale des Eaux (CGE), the people responsible for ensuring that potable water runs through the taps of Parisian homes, offices and businesses, park fountains, swimming pool intake pipes.

As the CGE engineer blithely told us, Parisian water is 50 per cent chemicals, 50 per cent refuse (he actually used the word “merde” which made us all laugh). Nine steps of purification were required to transform the dark brown sludge that we saw turn into pristine-looking, “transparent”, clear as crystal, water. Quite a tour de force! We were all visibly, very impressed.

Is it possible to achieve the same result with the provenance of a work of art? If we compare raw, pre-treated, water flowing into Paris with the typical provenance that we find in museums, auction catalogues and gallery brochures, we could rightfully say that they “stink" much like the murky Seine water being processed by the CGE.

Do we have a process of filtration and purification much like the one put in place by the CGE, to “clean up”, to “purify”, to make the provenance “transparent”, “crystal clear”? Not really, but there has been some improvement over the past decade. However, the means allotted to purify the history of ownership of art objects are chronically lacking and, to a large extent, still elude us. Some say that the leadership of institutions in the art market view provenance research as a perk, a luxury, and merely an option. Although viewed as a necessity by a growing number of museum professionals, auctioneers and even dealers and collectors, there is no significant movement to underwrite the cost of research. And why should there be since billions of euros' worth of art objects were traded last year without regard for provenance?

In the mean time, here are some examples of “murky” histories associated with objects which were randomly selected out of forthcoming sales organized by Christie’s and Sotheby’s, the two largest global auction market power houses in the world. These examples are provided simply to show that there still is much work to be done and to provoke a discussion about what it would take to ensure that all art objects should be accompanied with a "clear" provenance. Or is that even possible?

1/ our first candidate is a15th century Italian Old Master drawing. The first item on the provenance dates to 1975 and there is an indication that the item was exhibited in London in 1953. Two gaps are obvious: between the year of its creation and the London exhibit of 1953 and between 1953 and the 1975 date. Hard to imagine how one fills up 400 years of history. Less fanciful is how to fill the gap between the 1953 exhibit and the 1975 date. The work is of Italian origin. At some point, it left Italy to parts unknown. Assuming that there are no collectors' markings on the back of this work on paper, one is left with little to go with.

2/ Lot 21 of a forthcoming sale of Italian Old Masters at Christie’s New York, features a watercolor on vellum by Mauro Gandolfi, which was produced in the late 18th century. The first item in the provenance is a Max Perl sale in Berlin on 3 December 1936. Afterwards, the watercolor resurfaces in New York in 1989, at Colnaghi’s.

More than 200 years separate the time of creation of the Gandolfi item from the time of its sale in Berlin in 1936 by the Max Perl auction house in Berlin. The auction house is described as a “Jewish auction house” in Barbara Hoffman’s, “Art and Cultural Heritage: Law, Policy and Practice,” [p. 186]. One might wonder how and why this work was on sale in Berlin three years after Hitler took power. Who put it up for sale? Was it, perchance, as a result of a “forced sale” or driven by dire economic necessity unrelated to acts of persecution? Indeed, for a forced sale label to be ascribed to any transaction after 1933, proof must exist that racial, political, or other forms of persecution lay at the root cause of the decision to sell.

A number of works on paper and paintings sold through Max Perl in the mid-1930s became the subject of Holocaust claims decades later.

The Max Perl auction house operated on the edge of what was acceptable by Nazi esthetic and ideological standards regarding the type of art that could be sold in the Reich. As reported in Bernhard Fulda and Aya Solka’s “Max Pechstein, the Rise and Fall of German Expressionism” [p. 324), the Gestapo had raided the Max Perl auction house for selling “pornographic” works—a euphemism used to describe Expressionist and “degenerate” works of art. In that regard, James van Dyke in Franz Radziwill’s “the Contradictions of German art history, 1919-1945” [p. 220) argues that the Max Perl auction house was able to sell many works by Jewish artists unmolested by Nazi authorities.

With this simple check of secondary literature regarding Max Perl, one is entitled to ask the question: who owned this watercolor prior to the sale of 1936? As with most works on paper, and the price that they command on the market, there is little likelihood that the layers of opacity can be thinned out by lengthy research to reach some low level of clarity in the provenance. Murkiness prevails.

3/ At Sotheby’s, similar questions are ever present. A painting by Paul Signac dated 1904, Voiles dans la brume, Canal de la Giudecca, provides a tantalizing provenance which, although, close to complete, reveals its gaps.

To wit: the last pre-1940 owner listed on the provenance of this Signac work in the Sotheby's entry was Claude Roger-Marx, who had acquired this painting by 1922. The next reference to an owner dates to 1956. That owner's name was Alex Maguy, the founder of the Galerie de l’Elysée. 36 years elapsed between the Roger-Marx ownership and Maguy, a game of hopscotch which allows the reader to leapfrog over the German occupation of France (1940-1944).

Sotheby’s is not sure about the 1956 date, it might have been earlier. A quick check of the Jeu de Paume/ERR database shows 35 works by Signac being plundered by the Nazis in German-occupied France, one of which belonged to Claude Roger-Marx. This work does not appear in the Roger-Marx restitution claim which can be read at the archives of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs at La Courneuve [the old citation for the Roger-Marx claim is RA 608]. We can infer therefrom that Roger-Marx sold the Signac to X…. prior to 1940. Hence, we can ask: who owned the Signac between Roger-Marx and Maguy? We are left in a historical, proto-genocidal haze, regarding the temporal interval between Roger-Marx and Alex Maguy. How many owner were there prior to Maguy? 1, 2, 3?

A note on Alex Maguy: he stood in the periphery of the recycling of art looted from Jewish art collectors in wartime Paris. There are lingering suspicions about the inventory with which Maguy opened the Galerie de l’Elysée in 1955 on Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris.

In this brief overview, we have not achieved transparence in the provenance of the three aforementioned items. Was I unfair? I don't think so. They were selected as illustrations of a deep-seated, endemic, no, systemic and ethical problem that permeates our conception of culture, the production, consumption of art objects worldwide, and our desire to sustain or sever their links to the larger history of civil societies from which they sprang and through which they traveled in time and space.

Doubts will linger as to the complete history of these pieces.

You might ask yourselves: is there enough information out there to flesh out those provenances so that one can achieve crystal-clear clarity? Is that even possible?

Entretemps, the art market rolls on, buying, displaying, selling, and we are left to expose its obvious flaws, at worst, for posterity.


Sources:
Sotheby's New York, Lot 5, 7 February 2016
Christie's New York, Lot 21, 27 January 2016

 

It has been 15 years since that fateful year of 1998: what do we have in 2013?

The American government prefers to let the market decide on what is fair and just for Holocaust victims of cultural plunder.

European governments are loath to challenge the cultural institutions that they subsidize directly and indirectly. By so doing, they legitimize the misappropriation of untold numbers of art objects and they prevent an impartial and scientific examination of the history of these objects which “ended up” in their basements and depots during and after the Second World War.

On the brighter side…

A growing number of curators and other art professionals have changed the way they work in American and European institutions when faced with problematic ownership histories for objects being accessioned or already in their collections—that’s reason enough to be guardedly optimistic.

“Art market players” are more aware than in the recent past regarding the complications arising from the trade in looted cultural assets. But that is all relative. Outside of Paris, London, and New York, that statement becomes moot. Moreover, the absence of verifiable statistics makes it nigh impossible to measure the result of such “increased awareness” because of the near impossibility of coming up with even a gross estimate of restitutions triggered exclusively by the art market’s due diligence efforts. Something to work towards for the sake of “transparency.”

Back to the dark side…

Fewer than five—yes, a number between 0 and 5—institutions of higher learning in the world—as far as one can tell—offer either intermittent or regular academic programs focused solely on provenance research. If universities, colleges, institutes—private and public—continue to be obstinate in their refusal to satisfy a growing demand for such programs, the only possible remedy is to create alternative programs that specialize in provenance research and its interdisciplinary corollaries. Where there is a will, there is a way!

There is no public policy--national or international—with which victims of plunder can assert their interests in seeking the recovery of their stolen cultural property.  It’s time to shame international non-governmental organizations that have repeatedly ignored calls to meet the needs of individuals, entities, and groups whose cultural assets have been and continue to be the targets of theft and plunder.

Some lawyers who call themselves “restitution lawyers” have never recovered anything on behalf of their clients, and yet… they command the respect of their peers in the legal profession.

After all these years, claimants still cannot rely on the international Jewish community to support their quest for restitution of stolen cultural assets. Exceptions are few and duly noted: the New York-based Claims Conference—although the Claims Conference does not handle individual art claims, it stands out as the principal advocate on a global scale for laws and policies that favor the return of looted cultural assets to their rightful owners. Oh yes! In Israel, there is a parastatal organization called Hashavah whose mandate for recovery of looted art only pertains to objects that are located in Israel proper. . And that’s about the size of it, folks.

Left standing are the Holocaust Art Restitution Project and the Commission for Art Recovery, both American-based organizations devoted in their specifically different ways to securing some measure of justice for claimants and to documenting cultural losses during the Holocaust. In the United Kingdom, the Commission for Looted Art in Europe marches on.

What is to be done?

Hashava Poster, Source: Federation of Jewish Men's Clubs

Confessions of an art looting “expert” (I)

by Marc Masurovsky I must apologize for not having contributed anything to this blog in over two months. The reason is simple: a generic failure to think that there was anything meaningful to write about after having hatched more than 110 pieces for you to peruse at your leisure.

Why expose myself in this way to perfect strangers? It’s the 21st century thing to do, I guess. But in my case, I feel the urge to ‘out’ my private self enough so that you know with whom you are dealing. Writer’s block has not been the issue these past few months; instead, I have been bruising my head time and time again against a philosophical rock—to wit, the rock of restitution of cultural assets looted during the Nazi/Fascist years and recycled over the past seven decades through private hands and State-controlled entities with no likelihood that these objects will ever be identified, located, recovered, and returned to their rightful owners.

Why bother? The “mission” to locate and restitute looted cultural assets stolen during the Nazi years is so thankless at times that it is even painful to muse over its future. Our past is indeed our prologue but our present might just be our future unless we do something radical to transform it from complacent indifference and lethargy into a dynamic machine fueled by ethics, transparency, search for truth, a truth, a historical truth, the truth about these thefts, about the deliberate misappropriation of millions of cultural objects from the hands and homes of tens of millions of people during twelve long years of oppression, persecution, ostracism, incarceration, exploitation, impoverishment, eviction, expropriation, and more often than not, physical liquidation.

Why bother? That is the question that I ask myself every day when I wake up from a frazzled sleep. There are databases to expand and complete, there are new files to read and analyze, from which information must be gleaned, synthesized and shared with others. There are students to educate, there are faculty members to enlighten out of their impoverished understanding of cultural plunder, the complexities of the illicit trade in looted art and the perplexing paradoxes inherent to the quest for restitution. There are government officials to shake out of their slumber who are too afraid to move their limbs in a forward motion to make some progress, any progress, even infinitesimal progress, just enough progress so that we can say that there is progress in the international arena, of course, where else. Because in the United States, just as an example, there is a continuing state of stasis that makes it so convenient for the so-called “experts” to do the strict minimum and claim that “alles gut”—all is well—that we are making progress, geostationary progress that is—this is true across the board whether it be in the art world writ large, or among well-connected art historians with deep ties in private museums and elite circles who have claimed to be such experts in “Nazi confiscations” and “restitution” and other well-established academics, pundits and political pinheads, bureaucrats of all stripes spanning all agencies and institutions—for the most part, they are well-meaning but fundamentally ignorant and passive, always living in fear of the people upstairs whose scythes might sweep their heads off their fragile shoulders as soon as they make some progress forward on issues which should simply be ignored. The exception is the Office of Holocaust Issues at the US Department of State under new leadership. Most importantly and urgently, there are the rightful owners, the heirs and descendents of the victims themselves who seek an accounting by way of restitution.

Worst of all, there are those specialized bureaucracies that are finely tuned to the cause of remembrance, memory and education about the Holocaust and which are outspokenly silent about the taboo, the unspeakable, unmentionable, untouchable, mystifying topic of cultural plunder. God forbid that any such institution might wish to put a timid foot in front of the other and venture into the dark abyss of Nazi confiscations, Aryanizations, forced sales, expropriations of property, and the recycling of Jewish-owned wealth into ‘Aryan” hands as the fundamental pre-requisites of the dehumanization of entire Jewish communities, the final step before mass annihilation. God forbid that anyone would want to share that thought with the general public. My goodness, where would we be? What would happen to us? Would the sky fall on our heads? Would anti-Semites come crawling out of the ground and scream bloody murder against the Jews? Not really. It’s a bit like the story of Henny Penny, the hen who was convinced that the sky was falling on her head. It’s all in her head. It’s all in their minds. But until the Holocaust education and remembrance community of specialists and administrators signs up for mass therapy sessions, please do not hold your breath. Their august institutions are not likely to promote any programs that would enlighten the general public as well as themselves---they know so much already!—about the economics of the Holocaust and the fundamental tenet which declares unabashedly that one of the root causes of anti-Semitism is economic resentment of the ‘other.’

Did you ever stop and wonder why there are fewer than ten attorneys—yes! Ten attorneys in the entire nation of the United States of America who agree to represent victims of Nazi/Fascist cultural plunder. TEN! Not eleven, not twelve, not twenty. TEN…

Did you ever stop and wonder why there is not a single law firm in the United States that has a pro bono practice (free legal assistance) specifically aimed at Holocaust claimants who wish to reclaim looted cultural assets regardless of the monetary value of the looted asset proper?

Did you ever stop and wonder why there is not a single academic program in the United States which teaches students about plunder, economic crimes against persecuted populations during times of war, especially when acts of genocide accelerate the elimination of millions of men, women, and children from the face of the earth thanks to the active collaboration of countless individuals who see in the disappearance of the Jews a crime of opportunity, an opportunity for personal betterment, improvement and enrichment?

Did you ever stop and wonder why the museum community has not seen fit to establish professional training programs to enhance, refine, and improve the critical research skills of museum professionals in the esoteric arts of provenance research—the investigation into ownership histories of objects in their collections—rooted in a historical understanding of the displacements of cultural assets between 1933 and 1945?

Well, I’d be curious to know if you have answers to the aforementioned questions. If I have erred, I hope—no, I insist—that you point out my deviant ways so as to edify our reading public. But if you cannot correct me, then ask why we are at this stage of the game, two years after the Prague Conference of June 2009 on Holocaust-era assets, thirteen years after the Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets of 1998 and the subsequent formulation of the sacred texts known as the Washington Principles?

There is no easy answer, is there? I didn’t think so. And I don’t blame anyone for not finding an easy answer.

Here I go again wondering: what to do? Is there an end in sight? Are we really going to achieve some modicum of progress, some truly measurable result which fosters research and restitution, transparency and ethics, higher learning and understanding, so-called “best practices” in the cultural arena? After all, the whole point of this ‘mission’ or ‘campaign’ is to close the books on the Second World War and the Nazi years, to clean up the mess left untended by thousands of officials and administrators in the Americas and in Europe who were focused precisely on recovering stolen objects and returning them, more often than not, to nations, not rightful owners. And yet, why should we care? Well, we do. Just like others care about climate change, the plight of penguins in the South Atlantic Ocean or polar bears in the Northern regions, we care about historical wrongs anchored in cultural plunder and the righting of those wrongs. C’est la vie….