Deconstructing Aphrodite: the Getty Art Museum, looted antiquities and the art trade

The 4th century BC marble sculpture of winged griffins at center of controversy, acquired illegally by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1985
Source: NPR

An interesting event took place on Tuesday 24 January at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. The theme of this cultural evening, organized by Keri Douglas, the highly-accomplished energetic chief executive of Nine Muses International, focused on the international scandal surrounding the J. Paul Getty Museum’s unabashed no-holds barred acquisitions of illegally excavated Greek and Roman antiquities. To make a real long story short, Marion True, a senior curator of antiquities at the Getty, was left holding the bag and has been the subject of a number of lawsuits, especially in Italy, where she was forced to stand trial.

Getty Center, Los Angeles, CA
Source: Wikipedia

Getty Villa, Pacific Palisades, CA
Source: Wikipedia

The main speakers were Arthur Houghton, formerly of the Getty and a character in the saga of the looted antiquities, Gary Vikan, director of the Baltimore-based Walters Art Museum, and a self-proclaimed reformer amongst his museum director peers, Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino, co-authors of the book, “Chasing Aphrodite” who led the investigation into the illicit Getty acquisitions, and James Grimaldi, a Washington Post investigative reporter who has undertaken a fair number of inquiries into corruption, high and low.

Jason Felch
Source: Chasing Aphrodite

Ralph Frammolino
Source: Chasing Aphrodite

The story itself is worthy of a mini-series. The comments by all involved, however entertaining and mildly caustic, reaffirmed some long-held truths and realities about the international art market, museums, the search for truth in ownership, and the knotty question of ethics—whether one can be ethical and be a collector, dealer, museum director or curator.

Marion True
Source: The Art Newspaper

Gary Vikan believes in the capacity of a museum to be anchored in “experience” as opposed to “ownership.” Or, put another way (hopefully more clearly), American museums are obsessed with the idea of acquiring and owning pieces, sometimes at any cost, simply for the selfish, narcissistic pleasure of owning, of being the proprietor of something beautiful and beguiling. That insatiable quest for owning gets in the way of the mission of sharing cultural objects with the general public and encouraging heretofore unseen objects to come to the light of day and be exposed for the time to the gaping eyes of the incredulous and starstruck public.   The antidote to "ownership" is "experience" and this can only occur if museums focus on the idea that a carefully-constructed network of mutually-beneficial relationships anchored in long-term loans and exchanges can encourage museums to dig into the second basement and bring to the surface long-forgotten items which are worthy of adoration and can be shared with like-minded institutions worldwide, thus favoring relationships with smaller and less recognized institutions that hold unknown treasures of the past. That is a nice idea, but one that eschews the fundamental problem, which is how the object entered the collection in the first place. By displacing the discussion away from the source of the object and its potentially illicit itinerary into the collection of a museum, the end result simply becomes one whereby the past should be left … in the past and we ought to focus more on the all-inclusivity of the global community of custodians of great art sharing their wealth with the masses. How grand!

Arthur Houghton, on the other hand, was irreverently charming, despite his cynical embrace of the art world’s megalomania for unfettered opacity in trade and demanding to be left alone so that it can continue to play to the tune of fifty billion dollars’ worth of globally-traded assets per annum, mostly under cover of darkness. He predicted, perhaps rightfully so, that nothing human could bring this dynamic, insolently unregulated marketplace to heel and to abide by those boring and annoyingly pesky rules of ethical behavior that require objects to be properly sourced and not to be traded if they are in fact “hot,” as in stolen.

Last but not least, our two co-authors, Felch and Frammolino, made a compelling case for why the Getty Museum’s officers and senior staff should have been dragged in chains before Federal judges on charges of conspiracy to commit grand theft and other violations that come with aiding and abetting international trading in stolen cultural property. But, as was pointed out by various members of the audience and the speakers themselves, no one in their right mind would dare take on the esteemed leadership of the global arts community. Even more interesting, Felch argued that American museums have been abusing their tax-exempt status for decades, a privilege that allows them to acquire and display without much oversight at all from external agencies.  Should they be held accountable for their uses and misuses of their tax-exemption? or is that simply another fruitless windmill?

What’s the lesson here?

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. This would be the view of a cynical realist.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way, would be the view of the cautious, thanklessly persistent and guarded pessimistic optimist. Persistence, perseverance, and relentless patience through constant prodding, investigation, and clinging to uncompromising standards of transparency and truth in reporting—those combined, with help of some deities, should be able to move the rock of Sysiphus further up the hill, and closer to its inevitable tipping point. So, we wish.

“The Portrait of Walli”: The Case that Will Not Go Away

Portrait of Walli, by Egon Schiele
Source: Bloomberg

In an odd twist of events that allows Egon Schiele’s “Portrait of Walli” to resurface as a magnet for attention, Robert E. Roistacher, former chairperson of the Manhattan Solid Waste Advisory Board, and a 1968 graduate of Columbia University, filed a “demand for judgment” against Andre Bondi and Edith Southwell, the heirs of Lea Bondi Jarai, the late rightful owner of “Walli” whose painting was returned to the Leopold Foundation in Vienna, Austria, in exchange for 19,000,000 $. [the complaint was officially filed, right? Is there a public source to the info?]

Mr. Roistacher is asking for $4,500,000 in professional services that he rendered to the family which include “developing a plan to restrain the property…from leaving New York County, New York, and the jurisdiction of United States courts, until restitution was made therefor.” Roistacher argues that he introduced the Bondi Jaray family members to “legal counsel” and helped in the recovery of the painting.

The demand represents a quarter of the settled value of the painting, and was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York on November 14, 2011.

The “Walli” case has an original aspect to it. You might recall that the painting was identified in late 1997 as being the property of Lea Bondi Jaray’s family while on display at the Museum of Modern Art of New York, loaned for that purpose by the Leopold Foundation in Vienna, as part of a major retrospective of Egon Schiele’s works. Ronald S. Lauder, former US Ambassador to Austria, and chairman of the Board of MOMA, was instrumental in facilitating this keystone exhibit of the Austrian Secessionist’s provocative and sensual works.

Robert Morgenthau, former District Attorney of Manhattan
Source: Zimbio

Once “Walli” was fingered as possible looted cultural property, a mad scramble ensued to keep the painting from returning to Austria after the exhibit had ended its run at MOMA. The painting, wrapped and crated, was slated to depart in the first week of January 1998. On the eve of its departure, however, then District Attorney of Manhattan, Robert Morgenthau, son of the late Henry Morgenthau, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Treasury Secretary from 1933 to 1945, called in the cavalry in the form of New York’s “finest men in blue”—the Police Department—and had the painting seized in order for the aggrieved parties to be given a fair hearing on the matter of the ownership of “Walli.”

The seizure represented Phase One of the case. Phase Two dragged on for twelve long years until a settlement was reached with the Leopold Foundation in July 2010, which was brokered by the law firm of Herrick Feinstein acting on behalf of the Lea Bondi Jaray estate.

The question raised by this new twist appears to be: what exactly happened during Phase One? It was sufficiently complex that a serious history of that period may need to be written. Until then, we will see what unfolds with Mr. Roistacher’s claim.

The “three graces” of art restitution

"The Graces of the Gardens of the Hesperides", Rubens, taken by the ERR
Source: Holocaust-Era Assets Portal, NARA, RG 111-SC-374665

Although they were not paragons of beauty by any Classical standard, Ardelia Hall, Evelyn Tucker, and Rose Valland, constitute a trinity of hard-nosed women who flew the standard of art restitution in the post-1945 era as high and as steadily as they possibly could with the bare means put at their disposal to do justice in their own special way.

Indeed, each one of them behaved in a unique way, faced with specific sets of challenges that on occasion may have seemed insurmountable to them. And yet, they persevered. Although Ardelia Hall and Evelyn Tucker left their respective duties with very mixed feelings, Rose Valland, in relative terms, fared far better and benefited from additional institutional support for her mission to recover items belonging to France and to individuals living in France at the time of the German occupation and the Vichy years. In true French style, Rose Valland was awarded some of the highest honors commensurate with engaging in feats of Resistance during the German occupation.

On the other hand, Ardelia Hall and Evelyn Tucker, the former at the US Department of State, the latter in the US zone of occupation in Austria, were given short shrift throughout their tenure in the US government and were forced to turn into one-woman armies with skeletal staff support in an all-male world. I emphasize this gender issue because it stands out as self-evident. The worlds of international diplomacy and Allied military occupation and civil administration were populated by men, while women, for the most part, served in auxiliary functions. Even the various Allied art recovery commissions established by France (Vaucher), Great Britain (Macmillan), and the United States (Roberts) were all-male casts of museum directors, art historians, curators, and civil servants.

While Ardelia Hall and Rose Valland were creatures of the prewar museum world, Evelyn Tucker was not. Ardelia Hall was a specialist in ancient China and began her museum career in Boston at the Museum of Fine Arts before moving on to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, from which she was tapped to serve in a small office of cultural affairs at the US Department of State in 1944. Rose Valland worked in a curatorial capacity in prewar Paris, and was referred to by a senior curator in France, as a “little mouse”[la petite souris du Louvre] at the Louvre, before she was thrust into the weird world of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) at the Jeu de Paume.  Her tenacity earned her many postwar stars as an unwitting observer of institutional plunder for four long years. Following the Liberation of France, she served at Baden-Baden in the French zone of occupation of Germany where she coordinated restitution operations on behalf of the French government.

In some strange way, based on a comparative reading of the correspondence between Ardelia Hall, Evelyn Tucker and Rose Valland, Ardelia appeared to be the one on whom they both relied for strength, inspiration, and support, especially Evelyn whose continual run-ins with the US military administration in Vienna and Salzburg and confrontations with the leadership of the Munich Central Collecting Point (MCCP) made her tasks all the more arduous. This might explain why Evelyn Tucker became increasingly an advocate of Austrian interests, sometimes setting her at odds even with official US restitution policy.

More will appear in these pages about Ardelia, Evelyn, and Rose. Suffice it to say, for now, that without their extraordinary displays of bravura and stubbornness, we would not be blessed today with hundreds of thousands of pages of invaluable information regarding thefts, investigations, and recoveries of countless cultural items purloined by the Nazis in Europe. In a corny way, I feel compelled to doff my invisible hat and say to them: thank you for sticking by your guns and handing over to us and future generations a priceless legacy of historical information documenting one of the most complex events of the last century.

Les trois muses. Fragment de décoration de la maison de Titus Dentatius Panthera à Pompéi, (54-68 ap.J.C.)
Source: Radio France Internationale (RFI) via Musée national d'archéologie de Naples

"Der Garten Daubignys," Vincent van Gogh

Shortly before the troubled, inspired, and heartbreaking life of Vincent van Gogh came to a violent end on July 29, 1890, at Auvers-sur-Oise, he produced a series of oil paintings focused on the garden of the painter Charles-François Daubigny.  One of them was "Der Garten Daubignys" or "Le Jardin de Daubigny" or "Daubigny's Garden", painted at some point in June 1890, and measures 53 x 103 cm.

Der Garten Daubignys, Charles-Francois Daubigny
Source: Wikimedia

In 1929, Ludwig Justi, director of the National Galerie in Berlin paid 240,000 Marks for “Der Garten Daubignys [Jardin de Daubigny/Daubigny’s Garden] which he acquired from renowned Paris art dealer, Paul Rosenberg.

In 1938 the National Socialists accelerated their war against all forms of “degenerate” art by enforcing the de-accesioning of those works deemed to be objectionable and antithetical to the new racially-tinged esthetic creed, which could be found in cultural institutions subsidized by the State. As part of this purging campaign, the National Galerie in Berlin was forced to disgorge its “degenerate” art including three oils by van Gogh, one of which was “Der Garten Daubignys.” According to Franz Roh, Hermann Goering took custody of the three paintings and sold them with the help of one of his trusted dealers, Josef Angerer, who later served Goering in a similar capacity—seizing and brokering sales of looted cultural assets—across German-occupied Europe. The “Jardin de Daubigny” presumably fetched 150,000 Reichsmarks for the Reich. The buyer of the van Gogh painting was a German-born banker, Franz Koenigs, who, as a result of his antipathy towards the National Socialists, elected to move to neighboring Holland, converting much of his cash into cultural assets. Koenigs became a naturalized Dutch citizen in 1939.

According to Jeannette Greenfield, Koenigs sold the “Jardin de Daubigny” to Siegfried and Lola Kramarsky. However, based on information gleaned from the Sage Recovery website, Koenigs had sent to Knoedlers Gallery in New York for safekeeping another van Gogh painting, “Portrait of Dr. Gachet”, purchased under similar circumstances as the “Jardin de Daubigny” following its de-accession from a Frankfurt museum. Kramarsky then “took” Gachet as collateral for an unpaid loan consented to Koenigs by Kramarsky’s bank, Lisser and Rosenkranz. Koenigs died in 1941 presumably at the hands of the Gestapo. Did the “Jardin de Daubigny” follow the same path as “Dr. Gachet”? Publicly available information does not shed light on this particular aspect of the transaction. Suffice it to say that the painting remained in New York in the private collection of the Kramarskys for many decades.

Enter the Japanese. Flush with capital at the height of an economic and financial boom in the 1980s and 1990s, Japanese bankers and investors go on massive shopping sprees in the West and buy up for then-astronomical sums masterpieces by Impressionist painters. Van Gogh paintings are snapped up at outrageously inflated prices in headline-grabbing auctions.

The Hiroshima Museum of Art opens its doors in 1978. It is not clear whether the “Jardin de Daubigny” is “present at the creation” or enters the permanent collection of the Hiroshima Museum thereafter. But it does currently adorn the walls of Gallery 2 of this famed Japanese cultural institution. Jeffrey Archer indicates that this version of the “Jardin de Daubigny” went to the Nishido Gallery in Tokyo. That fact is impossible to verify.

Does the saga end here? Not quite, since for decades, a pall of suspicion has been cast over “Der Garten Daubignys” as a possible forgery produced by a French painter who had fallen in love with van Gogh’s works, Emile Schuffenecker.  Even the Japanese subjected the painting to a series of rigorous forensic tests using state-of-the-art technology to ascertain its authenticity, which they maintain to this day.

Hence, here we have a late masterpiece by van Gogh, illegally removed from the walls of a German State collection, sold to raise cash for the Reich, purchased by a German-born banker, and acquired under less than clear circumstances either in Holland or in New York, which now hangs on the wall of a museum in Japan. Who is the rightful owner? According to a statement released by Christine Koenigs in April 2000, the “Jardin de Daubigny” is listed as one of many works “displaced” from Franz Koenigs’ collection.