What happened to the collection of Edouard Esmond?

by Marc Masurovsky

[This is the fourth in a series of articles on the fate of Jewish-owned collections confiscated by the ERR in France and their treatment at the Jeu de Paume/Louvre complex up to July 1943.]

Edouard Esmond was married to Valentine Deutsch de laMeurthe, closely linked to the Rothschild family. A British-born dandy and socialite living in Paris, Esmond was better known as a breeder of thoroughbred horses, and a golf enthusiast who founded the EsmondCup which he named after himself and his three daughters, also golf pros in their own right. As a matter of fact, Diane Esmond, one of his three daughters, won the Girls’ Golf Championship in 1926 at the age of 16!

The Esmonds lived at 54, avenue d’Iéna, in Paris, one of the most exclusive avenues on the right bank of Paris which feeds into the Place de l’Etoile where stands the “Arc de Triomphe.” Their immediate neighbor (52, avenue d’Iéna) was a colorful man by the name of Calouste Gulbenkian, Armenian-born oil tycoon and consummate art collector, who made his bed with the Germans in the early years of the German occupation of France before fleeing south due to his anglophile tendencies; he ended up in Portugal in late 1942 with the thousands of objects he collected that he was able to spirit out of German-occupied France.

Diane Esmond was born in 1910. Her passion, aside from golf,was art. While in Paris, she trained as a painter with Edouard MacAvoy and at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. MacAvoy’s father was a banker and his mother descended from Huguenot nobility. Esmond developed a small following, worked closely with creative artists in the performing arts, and designed stage sets among other things. Pending further research, there are no indications that Esmond’s works were exhibited in galleries in Paris, either in group or solo shows.

Diane Esmond, n.d.
dianeesmond.com

In 1940, the Esmonds fled Paris like so many others. Edouard Esmond died in 1945 and Diane returned to France in 1952. She enjoyed a resurgence as an artist and exhibited in a number of well-known venues in Paris and New York through the 50s and 60s. She died in France in 1981.

The Esmonds had the misfortune of living in a building—54, avenue d’Iéna—which the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) requisitioned to house its French headquartes. All residents of the building-mostly Jewish-had their apartments seized and emptied.

Dr. Wunder, a senior official of the ERR, the main Nazi plundering agency, stationed in Paris through 1943, led a raid on the Esmond residence and removed a large part of the Esmond art collection on June 5, 1941. At some point after their arrival, 13 of the 43 works were registered on ERR cards, 1 of which ended up on the “condemned”/vernichtet list. There is no explanation for why the rest of the Esmond items were not carded. Fifteen months later, on September 7, 1942, Dr. Tomforde, one of the ERR’s art specialists at the Jeu de Paume/Louvre complex, inventoried 43 objects from the Esmond collection. Based on the Esmond family’s postwar restitution claim, we know that 12 paintings by 18th and 19th century artists were also removed from the family apartment. They included works by Oudry and Sir Alfred Munnings. The question is: who took them and where did they go? They definitely did not get processed at the Jeu de Paume. 

A page from the ESM inventory,
 Bundesarchiv, B323/270, Koblenz

All told, 55 works and objects of art were removed from the Esmond residence during the war. 47 were paintings (43 by Diane Esmond). 30 werecondemned—declared “vernichtet”—all of them works by Diane Esmond. 14 of the 43 paintings were photographed after their arrival at the Jeu de Paume/Louvre complex, 7 of which ended up being stamped “vernichtet.” This gives us an opportunity to compare the works which were spared and those which were condemned in an attempt to understand the Nazi cultural standards used to select or condemn works of art confiscated from Jewish owners. The photographs were most likely taken shortly after their arrival at the Jeu de Paume/Louvre complex.

Let’s now try to divine the esthetic choices made by Dr. Tomforde.

The following works by Diane Esmond for which we have photographs were marked “vernichtet”. All of the photographs show the works on an easel, no effort being made to conceal the presence of the easel’s stand from the visual field:


ESM 5: Profile of a woman wearing a hat and a flower 

ESM 6: A still life with grapes. The photo of this painting features the easel on which it was placed.

ESM 19: A painter and his palette at work on a canvas.

ESM 20: Portrait of a “negro child”.

ESM 23: A woman wearing a white blouse. Painting on an easel..

ESM 26: A green landscape—perhaps leaning towards abstraction? The painting is on an easel.

ESM 27: A cabaret scene. Painting on easel



The following seven paintings by Esmond were spared and for which we have photographs. These photos have been cropped to conceal the presence of the easel:

ESM 18: Full-length portrait of a naked woman seen from behind.

ESM 24: A woman playing cards.

ESM 25: A woman with a monkey—however we can’t see the monkey; she is seated inside a well-appointed but cluttered living room staring into space.

ESM 28: A clown, seated on the ground, looking forlorn.


ESM 29: Men at a bar

ESM 30: A scene at the ballet

ESM 31: A clothed man viewed from behind.

What were the underlying Nazi cultural and esthetic standards that drove this apparently capricious selection? What explains the purge of Diane Esmond’s works?

Are we to assume that the selection [Selektion] which took place at the Jeu de Paume was an exercise in curatorial abuse? The only hint of Nazi ideology at work—in the form of racist tropes-could refer to ESM 5, ESM 20 and ESM 23, which portray individuals with “non-European” facial characteristics. In Nazi terms, they were not “Aryan.” However, it’s impossible to understand why a still life with grapes, a painting at work in his studio and a landscape could be assigned the “vernichtet” label while a scene of a woman playing cards, men at a bar, and a clown could be spared from destruction.

Your guess is as good as mine, but I would venture that the selection had little or nothing to do with Nazi cultural dogma, with the possible exception of the three works mentioned above.

Sources: the photographs come from Bundesarchiv, B323/853, in Koblenz, Germany.

The destruction of works of art in wartime Paris--Part One

by Marc Masurovsky

This is the first in a series of articles detailing the selective impact of Nazi cultural policy at the Jeu de Paume museum between September 1940 and July 1944. During that time period, the Jeu de Paume served as a central clearinghouse for artistic, cultural and religious objects confiscated from Jewish collectors in Paris and other parts of France.

One nagging question which has not received an adequate answer is the extent to which Nazi cultural policies, strictly enforced inside the Greater German Reich, were equally applied in the Netherlands, Belgium and France.

If Adolf Hitler’s views about art were to be followed to the letter, any artistic object produced after the 1850s (emergence of Impressionism) would be subjected to intense scrutiny by Nazi agents operating in occupied lands, leading inevitably to seizure and confiscation (which happened in any event), censorship (recurrent but not systematic), and/or destruction.

Let’s focus on German-occupied France. There, the machinery of cultural plunder operated as follows.

Jewish collections of objects of cultural, religious and artistic value and significance became the target of confiscations orchestrated by a number of Nazi agencies, most notably the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), the Kunstchutz (cultural arm of the German military administration) and assorted security agencies and police forces (Devisenschutzkommando, Gestapo, SD, etc).

Tens of thousands of objects seized in and around Paris, sometimes from as far as cities and towns in the French Southwest, were stored in a number of facilities and depots scattered about the French capital but mostly centered in its wealthier Western neighborhoods, the most important of which was the cluster comprised of the Jeu de Paume museum and three rooms provided by the Louvre Museum as a storage annex to the Jeu de Paume.

At least 20000 confiscated objects were transferred to the Jeu de Paume/Louvre complex beween 1940-1944. There, roughly 25 per cent of them were photographed, eh vast majority were inventoried, carded and assigned an ID number. ERR staff members decided which objects to transfer to the Reich, which ones should remain in occupied France and which ones should be sold and/or exchanged for “acceptable” works, namely Old Masters.

In order for the staff members of the ERR at the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume to implement Nazi cultural policies, they had to set aside those objects which did not conform to official esthetic and ideological dicta which distinguished between “acceptable” and “unacceptable” or “degenerate” art. Hitler even insisted that no French Impressionist works could enter the German Reich, irrespective of quality and value.

What happened to the objects that were set aside? Two scenarios were contemplated: either offer them for sale to local art dealers and perhaps even dealers in neighboring countries (Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain), or destroy them.

In July 1942, almost two years after the Germans invaded France, works of art not meeting Hitler’s strict esthetic and ideological considerations were inventoried separately, some of them having wallowed at the Jeu de Paume/Louvre complex since late 1940. They were subjected to a separate inventory, reassigned to new categories (Gruppe I, Gruppe II, Gruppe III, Gruppe IV), and crated separately while their fate was being decided. That process lasted until March 1943. At some point during or after this process, a decision was made to get rid of these objects after having gone through the tedium of inventorying and crating.

At least 625 paintings, 48 works on paper, two sculptures (one by Ernst Barlach and the other by Hans Arp) and one of uncertain medium (Friedrich Unger) were set aside and inventoried. Rose Valland, a French curator ordered by Louvre officials to remain at the Jeu de Paume to be the eyes and ears of the French museum administration inside the very museum where she had spent her days prior to June 1940, testified after the war that ERR staff members destroyed these objects by repeated laceration and cremated them with the help of German soldiers in a day-long bonfire on July 21, 1943. Although she witnessed some of the lacerations, she did not witness the bonfire.

The jury is still out about the bonfire having consumed hundreds of “unacceptable” works of art.

After having carefully examined the archival documentation that retraces in minute details the processing of these objects at the Jeu de Paume, we know the following:

-None of the works classified as Impressionist, Pointillist, or Fauvist, were condemned and “destroyed”.

-No work explicitly tagged as “Jude” [Jewish] by artists like Camille Pissarro and Marc Chagall was condemned and “destroyed”.

In other words, Nazi cultural policy somewhat fell apart at this moment and shifted gears, judging “unacceptable” works by their esthetic value and not by the origins of their creators.

Of the 257 collections which were carded and/or inventoried at the Jeu de Paume, 21 collections contained one or more objects which were deliberately set aside for “destruction” (vernichtet).

ERR ID                          Description of collection                                 Numbers “destroyed”

Aux                                   Auxente/Avxente/Alexandra Pregel                                  181
DW                                   David David-Weill                                                                 1
ESM                                  Edouard Esmond                                                                 30
HS                                     Hugo Simon                                                                         12
KA                                    Alphonse Kann                                                                     25
KAP                                  Mrs. Kapferer                                                                         6
L.H                                    Levi-Hermannos                                                                    1
Loewell                             Pierre Loewell                                                                        8
Loewenstein                      Fedor Loewenstein                                                               20
MA-B                                Möbel-Aktion Bilder                                                            13
MGM                                 Michel Georges-Michel                                                     298
PE                                      Hugo Perls                                                                              5
Reichenbach                      François Reichenbach                                                            1
Rosenberg Bernstein         Paul Rosenberg [Bordeaux area]                                            1
Rosenberg Paris                 Paul Rosenberg [Floirac/Paris]                                            14
R                                Members of the French branch of the Rothschild family               8
Spira                                   Mr. Spira                                                                                 1
Spiro                                   Eugen Spiro                                                                          18
U                                         Friedrich Unger                                                                      4
UNB                                   Unbekannt                                                                             18
Watson                               Peter Watson                                                                            9

In Part two, we wil begin the discussion of each collection and the artists who did not make the cut, so to speak.

Sources: 

ERR Jeu de Paume database

Records from the National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD, RG 260

Records of the Bundesarchiv, Koblenz, series B323

ERR database—Frederic Unger collection (U)

by Marc Masurovsky

I went over the items seized by the ERR from Frederic Unger, an Austrian citizen from Vienna who had left his home town in the wake of the Anschluss in late 1938 and headed to Paris, France. He had shipped his liftvans to a storage facility on the outskirts of the French capital and from there had emigrated to the United States. The liftvans never crossed the Atlantic Ocean. They remained in Paris, held hostage by the war effort. Eventually, the German Army rolled into France like in a wad of butter and by mid-June 1940, half of France was occupied as was all of Belgium and Holland.

The ERR seized the liftvans and removed their contents.

The contents of the liftvans arrived at the Jeu de Paume at some point in 1942 and some--not all--were inventoried in October 1942.

The ERR staff at the Jeu de Paume dutifully typed up a set of 44 cards which describe mostly paintings and works on paper seized from Mr. Unger's crates.

As I perused through the items, I realized that there were gaps in the numerical sequence established by the ERR personnel. I checked the inventories against the cards and noted the gaps in the sequences.

There were 6 items that the ERR had not carded. Half of them were designated as 'vernichtet' or slated for destruction including a work that he or one of his kin had penned. Whether or not they were destroyed, I know not.

Many of Mr. Unger's items were eventually shipped to a castle in the former Czechoslovakia in a town called Nikolsburg or Mikulov for our Czech friends. The town of Nikolsburg had been annexed by the Nazis and incorporated into the Reich. The castle, as it should, stood on a hill overlooking the city. It was designated as a depot by the ERR leadership in Berlin to store many items stolen in France from Jews and others as well as items from Belgium. Trainloads of crates reached Nikolsburg from France and Belgium from the fall of 1943 to the spring of 1944. Mr. Unger's paintings and works on paper were shipped from Paris on November 15, 1943.

Out of that group, some Unger items found their way to a castle in Bavaria called Neuschwanstein which served as one of the ERR's oldest and most important depots for French Jewish confiscated collections. Neuschwanstein is the famous castle built by mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria.

I had to re-adjust the information on Frederic Unger's collection to note that about one-third of his items had not reached Neuschwanstein before American troops discovered a small number of crates marked 'Unger' or 'U' together with thousands of other looted objects. They were all eventually shipped through Munich to Paris to be returned to their rightful owners. The present location of the missing items remains unknown. As a result, the database shows them as not having been restituted.

The final exercise for Mr. Unger's property will involve cross-checking his restitution records with information in the database so as to indicate precisely which items were returned to him and on what date. The most complex aspect of this task will involve those items that were sent to the Jeu de Paume by the ERR but were neither carded nor inventoried. All we have are crate numbers and descriptions but we don't know for certain whether they in fact transited through the Jeu de Paume Museum, the main triage and selection facility for looted art in downtown Paris between October 1940 and August 1944.

For more details, go to http://www.errproject.org/jeudepaume.