Picasso and the Germans

Picasso: Creator and Destroyer
Source: The Atlantic

Fleeing the German advance on Paris in May 1940, Picasso flees the French capital together with hundreds of thousands of panicked residents. The idea is to go south, as far as south as possible. Picasso settles for the sleepy coastal town of Royan in the southwest of France and, there, rents an apartment overlooking the town's harbor where he resumes his work.

No luck... The German army occupies Royan on its way down to Bordeaux, and the Franco-Spanish border.

What to do. What to do? Paint, draw, enjoy the sun, as much as one can of course under the circumstances.

Not to make light of a dire situation, but one wonders what was going through the Catalan master's mind. After all, he is Pablo Picasso, one of the iconic artists of his time, outranked perhaps in those days by Henri Matisse, and the first school of Paris.

Should he head for Spain and duck under Franco's iron fist? Should he stay put in Royan?

Nothing of the sort. Paris beckons, Paris beguiles. And so it is that Pablo packs up his easels, pens, paints, paper, canvas and inks, and heads back to Paris once the new masters from across the Rhine feel well settled in.

Off to the rue des Grands-Augustins where he has his studio.

Arianna Stassinopoulis Huffington
Source: Wikipedia

Arianna Stasinopoulos Huffington---yes, THE Arianna Huffington, who recently merged with AOL--had penned in 1988 a fun, biting biography of Picasso entitled "Picasso: Creator and Destroyer". In it, she describes how Picasso was summoned to a bank by what we can only presume were the agents of the Devisenschutzkommando or DSK whose job it was to open up all vaults and safes and boxes in financial institutions under German occupation where they searched for securities, precious metals, and other valuables belonging to the enemies of the Reich. Most of the time, those items were confiscated and re-directed to the Reich's coffers.

Here's how Arianna Huffington couches the incident which occurred at some point in the fall of 1940. No footnotes of course, which makes us wonder how apocryphal the story might be:

A German officer holds up one of his paintings. The officer "turned to him in amazement: 'It's you who have painted that? And why do you paint like this?' Picasso replied that he didn't know. He had painted the picture because it had amused him. Suddenly the Nazi officer was struck by an enlightening realization. 'Ah!' he cried. 'It's a fantasy!' The officers left his works alone and departed from the bank's vaults." (Arianna Stassinopoulos, 'Picasso: Creator and Destroyer', 1988, p. 255)

Needless to say, Picasso returns to his apartment, more interested in making sure that his various mistresses remain within earshot of his residence.

My question is: why did he stay in Paris during the ENTIRE period of the German occupation?

Picasso at the Jeu de Paume

At least 86 works by Pablo Picasso fell into the hands of the Nazis' plundering units headed by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) and were taken to the Jeu de Paume for 'processing.'

Most of those Picasso paintings and works on paper came from the private collections of Alphonse Kann who lived in Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Paul Rosenberg whose gallery was on the rue de la Boetie. He had shipped hundreds of paintings for safekeeping to various storage units in southwestern France where the Germans inevitably found them as a result of denunciations and returned them to Paris.

You would think that Nazi doctrine pertaining to art and especially to 'degenerate' artists such as Picasso would have condemned the production of Guernica's master to the trash heap. Absolutely not! Only 5 of Picasso's works were 'slated for destruction' by the ERR's zealous staffers. No evidence that they were in fact destroyed... The rest? Some were incorporated into Goering's collection while a fair number were recycled into the art market through exchanges and the rest languished at the Jeu de Paume.

So much for Nazi Germany's Kulturkampf against 'degenerate' art!

For more details, go to www.errproject.org/jeudepaume. Type in Picasso and see what you get...

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.

ERR database—Impressionists and their collectors

Usually, when people think of art restitution or art looted by the Nazis, they tend to believe that most stolen objects consisted of paintings, drawings and etchings, and more specifically, works by the Impressionists and their followers. Popular names that come to mind: Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Pierre Matisse, and Paul Cézanne.

When the art specialists of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) pilfered the homes and galleries of collectors and dealers across French territory, but more specifically in and around Paris, they came across troves of Impressionist works. One would think that almost anyone who was anyone would collect Impressionists in France, right? Wrong!

On closer look, here's what we found out.

Of the 270 owners who are currently listed in the ERR database, fewer than 10 per cent held works by Impressionists in their collections at the time of the German occupation of France in June 1940.

Let's do a survey by artist (Note: I use the word "unknown" to refer to the MA-B and UNB collections, categories created by the ERR staff to characterize mass seizures of objects from residential homes without due concern for their owners' identities):

• Pierre Bonnard: 8 known owners and at most 6 unknown. 
• Eugène Boudin: 9 known owners and at most 4 unknown. 
• Paul Cézanne: 2 known owners and at most 3 unknown. 
• Edgar Degas: 13 known owners and at most 2 unknown. 
• Paul Gauguin: 5 known owners 
• Marie Laurencin: 11 known owners and at most 3 unknown. 
• Edouard Manet: 7 known owners and 1 unknown. 
• Henri Matisse: 4 known owners and at most 11 unknown. 
• Claude Monet: 4 known owners and at most 4 unknown. 
• Auguste Renoir: 16 known owners and at most 9 unknown. 
• Edouard Vuillard: 7 known owners and 1 unknown. 

Needless to say, we can already conclude that the tastes of collectors in inter-war France extended way beyond the lure of Impressionists that seduces today's learned audiences in the global art market.

The question is: what did people collect if they didn't gravitate towards Impressionists?