Dr. Gachet: From confiscation to exile

[Editor's note: This is the third and last installment of a three-part series on The Portrait of Dr. Gachet produced by Angelina Giovani, which is inspired by Cynthia Salzman's masterful treatment of the history of van Gogh's masterpiece as it survived the Nazi era, crossed the Atlantic Ocean, only to find itself at the antipodes of the world, in Japan.]

by Angelina Giovani

Portrait of Dr. Gachet

Several years after the rise to power of Hitler in Germany, Josef Angerer, a decorative arts dealer whose main client was Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, paid a visit to Friedrich Krebs, the Nazi mayor of Frankfurt, to discuss the fate of the Portrait of Dr. Gachet by van Gogh. He claimed that his job was to make sure that there would no obstacles to the sale of the Portrait. Krebs, questioning Angerer’s authority, decided not to take action until Goering gave specific reasons as to why Gachet should be sold. Firstly, the Portrait's style and form were inconsistent with the newly imposed Nazi esthetics. Secondly, the Reich had every intention of de-accessioning such works, which meant  confiscation without compensation. Lastly, instead of destroying these works, it might be wiser to sell them on the international art market outside the borders of the Reich and, by so doing, generate badly-needed foreign exchange.

Krebs asked for assistance from Kremmers, his deputy, into looking into the circumstances of the donation to the Frankfurt Städtische Museum.  The Frankfurt City Council and the city attorney sought legal avenues by which to keep the picture in Frankfurt under the New Order.  Johanna Mössinger, the then owner, had donated the piece, on the condition that it be on permanent display. Should this condition not be upheld, the owner had the right to request the return of the painting.

Johanna

It became impossible to hold on to Gachet and other paintings from her collection for much longer. Goering ordered the seizure of the Portrait of Dr. Gachet along with two other paintings, Daubigny’s Garden by Van Gogh and A Quarry by Paul Cézanne. He sold the Portrait along with the two other works, to Franz Koenigs, a German collector and banker who lived in Amsterdam and whose collection of Old Master drawings was well-known among European collectors. He had studied law in Munich and worked at a Paris bank. He began to collect Old Master drawings in 1921 and by 1933 he had 2,671 works in his collection. With the proceeds from Gachet’s sale, Goering sought to expand his own art collection, mainly with tapestries and paintings.

Franz Koenigs

As soon as Koenigs received the paintings, he turned around and put them up for sale. He contacted Walter Feilchenfeldt, while he was still director of the Cassirer Gallery in Amsterdam. Outraged by Koenigs’ call, Feilchenfeldt said that he would not touch the paintings, which he considered to be stolen property. Despite objections, Koenings sent the pictures over, so that Siegfried Kramarsky, a German banker who lived in Holland, could view them. Kramarsky and Koenigs had had a business relationship since the 1920’s, and he hoped that Kramarsky would take the pictures.  The three paintings presumably arrived at the Cassirer gallery in May 1938.

Walter Feilchenfeldt

Siegfried Kramarsky was born in 1894, and started working at Lisser & Rosenkranz in 1917. With the help of Franz Lisser, his employer, he met and married Lola Popper, born into a middle class family. Her father was a coal broker. She was well-educated and well-grounded in art and literature. Soon after the wedding, Kramarsky and a colleague named Flörsheim bought the firm in 1922. In 1923, the couple moved to Amsterdam, and Koenings became a close family friend. Koenigs encouraged them to buy art, and since Lola preferred the Impressionists, she persuaded Siegfried to acquire them. 

On June 30, 1939 Theodor Fischer, a Swiss art dealer and auctioneer based in Lucerne, Switzerland, held a big sale of so-called “degenerate art” (modern works of art in violation of Nazi esthetics which had been confiscated and de-accessioned from German public collections) at the Grand Hotel National in Lucerne. By this time the Kramarskys had moved part of their collection from Amsterdam to New York via London. The Portrait of Dr. Gachet was among them. Soon thereafter, with the threat of war coming everyday closer, the Kramarskys packed lightly, and left for the United States. Flörsheim, Kramarsky’s banking partner, remained in Amsterdam to run the bank. After the German invasion of Holland, Alois Miedl, Goering’s private banker and art broker in the Netherlands, acquired 74% of Lisser and Rosencranz. Several months after the Nazis took control of Holland, Krebs realized that Gachet had been taken to the US under new ownership.

With the advent of a global war erupting in Europe, the international center for modern art gradually shifted away from Paris to New York, a transition that Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art, had almost single-handedly masterminded. French émigré dealers like Seligmann, Wildenstein, Rosenberg and others had resettled in New York, fleeing from the Nazi invasion of France. A plethora of modern artists, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, had fled the European continent through Portugal, with the help of Barr’s Emergency Rescue Committee under the valiant leadership of Varian Fry. Scholars and academics followed the rush to safety across the Atlantic Ocean, among them Georg Swarzenski, who obtained work as a research fellow in sculpture and medieval art at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston, Massachusetts. 

Once in the US, the provenance of Dr. Gachet, especially its pre-Nazi presence in the collection of the Städtische Galerie in Frankfurt, vanished from the official narrative of the painting’s ownership. George Wildenstein and Paul Rosenberg held van Gogh exhibitions in the early 1940s, which allowed the Portrait of Dr. Gachet to go on display more than once. In a show organized by Paul Rosenberg in January 1942, the provenance of Dr. Gachet mentioned all previous owners, except for the Städtische Galerie, from which it had been confiscated on Goering's orders.  From this point on the painting’s confiscation history was all but forgotten. When not on display it hung in the Kramarskys’ living room, in their apartment near Central Park. 

By the end of WWII, van Gogh had become a household name among the wealthy and cognoscenti in the United States. The Art Institute of Chicago held a van Gogh retrospective in 1949. Kramarsky lent the Portrait for the show. In 1951, a retrospective of his works took place at MoMA, followed by a van Gogh exhibit at Houston’s Contemporary Art Museum.  By the late 1950s, the Portrait of Dr. Gachet was valued at more than $200,000, twice its value in 1940. 

On December 25, 1961 Siegfried Kramarsky died of lung cancer leaving his widow Lola in a difficult financial situation and forcing her to sell certain art works. Dr. Gachet was not one of these pieces. Paul Rosenberg had made it clear to her that should she decide to sell the Portrait he would gladly find her a buyer.

Speculation that the painting might soon come to market reached Frankfurt. Ernst Holzinger, the new director of the Städtische, wrote to Kramarsky expressing his interest in the painting and in the fact that should there be any inclination in selling the Portrait the museum would be interested. In 1970, the New York-based art dealer Eric Stiebel appraised the painting for a million and a half dollars.

In July 1984, the painting left the Central Park residence and was placed on a long-term loan at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it remained until 1990. The Portrait stood at the heart of the Post-Impressionist collection together with other works by van Gogh. Still, after so many years, the painting’s provenance failed to include its confiscation history.

Meanwhile, new millionaires from the Far East and especially from Japan, were making a splash in the global art market with a ravenous appetite for expensive conversation pieces, trophies of sorts. The Japanese economy had turned into a bubble. The nouveaux riches busily acquired “status objects” considered to be masterpieces of Western Art. Picasso and van Gogh competed for the highest prices. Middlemen brokered these record-breaking transactions for Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works.

In 1984 Wynn Kramarsky had taken over the family’s financial affairs and claimed no emotional ties to the Portrait. He was well versed in the art world, with connections in the trade, and did not hesitate to denounce the hypocrisy of the art market. He recalled endless phone calls that he received from dealers and collectors expressing their interest in his collection, but mainly the Portrait of Dr. Gachet. Wynn was determined to sell it through Christie’s since his family had dealt with the auction house for many years.

Wynn Kramarsky

On February 1, 1990, Christopher Burge, the president of Christie’s, arrived at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and picked up the painting himself. He had estimated the painting at between 40 and 50 million dollars. The reserve price for the Kramarsky family was a minimum of $40 million for the Portrait.   Burge thought that it would be the greatest van Gogh piece to come to the market, its value anchored in its story, encounters and associations. It could easily match Irises by van Gogh which had sold at Sotheby’s for a record $53.9 million.

The Christie’s catalogue for the Gachet sale came out in April 1990, six weeks before the sale, and there, too, the confiscation history had been omitted. On May 15, right before the sale, the reserve for Kramarsky dropped to $35 million. 700 people showed up for the sale. Being the most important lot the painting was placed one third of the way into that day’s public sale. The bidding opened at $20 million. The price kept increasing in increments of 1 million. Once the Portrait had surpassed the $40 million mark, the race was on between Hideto Kobayashi who was in the room and Maria Reinshagen who was bidding from Zurich by telephone. At $75 million, Burge sold the painting to Kobayashi. The painting had broken the previously set record by Irises and since the time Alice Ruben had purchased the portrait in 1897, the price had increased 23.000 times. Soon it was revealed that Kobayashi had purchased the painting on behalf of Ryoei Saito who owned Japan’s second largest paper company. Three weeks after the sale the Portrait left for Tokyo. 

According to Japanese tradition, all precious possessions had to be hidden away.  Saito spent a few hours admiring his new acquisition and left, giving directions to put the picture into a climate-controlled, high security room. The Portrait languished on a shelf out of sight, out of mind.  In order to pay for the painting Saito had leveraged his real estate holdings. In November 1993, he was arrested for bribing a government official, and while serving his time under house arrest he received many offers for Dr. Gachet but rebuffed them all.

The Portrait of Dr. Gachet by Vincent van Gogh remains out of reach and out of view.

The Struggle Continues

by Ori Z. Soltes

Which struggle? 

Not just that on behalf of claimants whose cultural property was seized by the Nazis more than half a century ago and resides in various museums and private collections. Not just that on behalf of the Hopi and Acoma Native Americans and other indigenous peoples whose communal spiritual property--and not merely individual or communal cultural property is being sold on the auction block as if it is merely a series of desirable baubles. Not just the struggle to get museums to educate themselves and their audiences about the provenance aspects of artworks and their histories. But the struggle to get certain museums, auction houses--and nation-states--to consider seriously the importance of moral and not just legal issues. The morality/ethics vs law distinction is fundamental to the distinction between law and justice and to principles that institutions like museums and auction houses consistently lay claim to as essential to what they are: the preservers of civilization (yes, this blog may be seen as a continuation of several previous blogs written by Marc Masurovsky or me). 

Three different bits of news underscore this nicely. A California judge ruled that the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, that holds within its collections a valuable 1897 Pissarro painting seized in 1939 by the Nazis from Lilly Cassirer, (in exchange for a few hundred dollars and a visa out of the country), need not return it to her great-children (their father, Paul, initiated the attempt for restitution when he found where the painting was, back in 2000) on legal grounds. Purely legal grounds: that the laws of Spain, in whose jurisdiction the issue must remain (although the painting moved thorough the American art world for 25 years during its post-war travels) do not mandate that the current owner need return it, since that owner, the museum, purchased the painting (from a Swiss-German baron) unaware of its provenance and thus that it was stolen property.

The judge did go out of his way to express hope that the museum would not allow the matter to end here, but would seek some extra-legal outcome, for moral reasons. So it is clear not only that laws are not always laws--had the judge pushed the case to be adjudicated within an American jurisdiction, the fact that the painting had been effectively stolen from Cassirer-- regardless of how many owners since that seizure by the Nazis had taken possession of it--may well have meant that the current owner doesn't own it. But in no case does anyone dispute the moral fact of the Cassirer ownership and entitlement. So: law wins, justice loses, morality loses. Civilization? a draw, I suppose. We need laws in order to be civilized, but when they permit immoral, unjust outcomes, then are they performing their intended job?

French law, like Spanish law, does not concern itself with the individual from whom an object was illicitly taken in the matter of property possession, just as long as the current owner paid for it--the presumption is that such a purchase was done in good faith and therefore the current possessor should not be penalized for not having bothered to inquire into the provenance of the property. And isn't it a heck of a coincidence that just a few days before the Cassirer verdict the French raised such a ruckus regarding the potential auctioning off of some royal historical artifacts: a 17th- century portrait of King Louis XIII, a portrait of the Duchess of Orleans, and an accounts book from the Chateau d'Amboise, a 15th-century royal residence in the Loire Valley? 

Fleur Pellerin, French Culture Minister

To be precise, the French government intervened to impose an export ban on these three items that descendants of France's former royal family (the House of Orleans) consigned to Sotheby's Paris offices. This was made possible--the State trumps the individual's rights with regard to his/her property--because France's cultural minister, Fleur Pellerin, declared the items as part of France's patrimony, its "national treasure." That designation gives the government legal ground for preventing these objects from going under the hammer and from leaving the country. 

Louis XIII in all his glory

This, of course, as readers of this blog will already now, came fast on the heels of the failure of the Conseil des Ventes--the government office that is tasked with overseeing all auctions and auction house activity in France--refused for the fourth time in barely a year to halt the auction of a number of objects sacred to the Hopi (Arizona) and Acoma (New Mexico) Native American tribes. These are all objects that, by definition can only have ended up in Paris auction houses, such as EVE and Drouot, by having been removed illicitly from these tribes and by being smuggled out of the United States--where the laws against dealing in the sacred and cultural property of Native Americans have become strict--and into France, which does not recognize the American laws as such.

Indeed the President of the Conseil de Ventes, each of these times when she has been confronted with a plea to remove sacred items from the auction block, has failed to do so on purely legal grounds: that the Hopi and Acoma are not entities entitled to legal standing within her jurisdiction (although they are, in the United states) and/or that those who represent the Hopi and the Acoma lack that standing for one technical reason or another. In other words, the moral issue is not one that even crossed her countenance; her ruling was shaped in pure legal terms.

So the sacred objects of Native Americans, essential elements of their identity, count for nothing in the French courts, although a historical account book--which is French, after all!--does. As Marc Masurovsky observed, in comparing the two French situations: "It would appear that sacred artifacts belonging to indigenous tribes the world over don't weigh much against royal artifacts." And while Evelio Acevido Carrero, managing director of the foundation that maintains the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum noted gleefully how "very satisfying" it is to have an American court recognize the ownership rights of a Spanish museum--noted without a scintilla of irony--there is some other kind of irony in the tone of dismissal used by the French CVV toward both American law and American artifacts.

What all three cases have in common (among other things) is the question of where justice and morality fit into these legal questions. Los Angeles Judge John F. Walter invoked morality at the end of his decision, expressing hope that the museum would "do the right thing," even as he felt obliged to ignore "the right thing" in his decision, in the interests of the law; the French court and auction houses and the Spanish museum have both used the law in order to ignore justice and morality--have thus far made it clear that law is the armor in which they shall wrap themselves to protect themselves from justice and morality.

And then--lest we forget!--the Fred Jones, Jr, Museum, at the University of Oklahoma, continues to hang on desperately to “The Shepherdess” by Camille Pissarro that doesn't legally or morally belong to it, against the claim of Leone Meyer, a French woman, from whose father the Nazis stole it--thanks to legal technicalities having to do with the jurisdiction in which the case might be decided--in spite of the moral outrage of nearly everyone in the State of Oklahoma.

It would be nice if law, justice and morality could coincide in these cases that are linked by the lack of that coincidence. It's not that justice is blind, it's that too often many legal practitioners are blind to justice. So the struggle for moral outcomes goes on in the darkness.

My Favorite Rant: on Education, Restitution and the Culture of Museums

by Ori Z Soltes

One of the questions that, as a former Museum Director and Curator I remember having frequently asked my staff, my advisory board and myself is: what is the purpose of our museum? Clearly the raison d’être that every visitor observes in visiting a museum is the ingathering and display of objects. But why collect objects, besides, in the case of many of them, particularly in art and ethnographic museums, the fact that they are simply beautiful? There is no question but that most viewers’ eyes will be challenged in the most positive of ways and even, perhaps, their souls softened, by standing before Michelangelo’s David or before a handful of Monet’s explorations of the Rouen Cathedral in different kinds of light. One of the fascinating things about us as a species is that we respond differently to the same work of art and are moved by some works and not by others—one individual’s hour-long meditation before a Rothko painting is another individual’s swift passage by that painting in search of the Bernini sculptures on exhibition three galleries away.

Art museums presumably need and want to take cognizance of these differences and, as far as possible, provide an enjoyable viewing experience to as wide an audience as possible. More than that, though, they should want to help the viewer understand how Michelangelo’s statuary derived from and differed from the sculpture that preceded it and how it led to and yet not necessarily to Bernini’s different sort of visual vocabulary; why and how Monet’s vision offered such a revolutionary departure from the vision of Leonardo and in turn how Rothko, differently, continued that revolution—and how others since Rothko have further shaped the history of how art is made and seen. We want, that is, to educate our audiences—for a better-educated audience is likely to be both a more appreciative audience and one more capable, on occasion, of responding to exhibitions in ways that may lead the Museum itself to think differently and more deeply about the cultural world it engages.

So we don’t collect just to hoard and we don’t collect just to beautify the spaces devoted to what we collect. Museums are an essential part of the ongoing mechanism of not only preserving human culture and its concomitants but of exploring and explaining how civilization has evolved—what human culture is. Our raison d’être is to teach how the paths of art have diverged and converged, again and again across human history and geography; how our vocabularies of style and symbol have interwoven our aesthetic impulses and have articulated our need to access feelings and thoughts beyond the verbally expressible.

With the history of human culture—twisted in a particularly painful direction during the middle of the last century—as a focus, my HARP colleagues and I have been beating on the doors of our museums for nearly twenty years to be educated and to educate their audiences from a particular angle. We have pushed them to be conscious of provenance possibilities for works of art that have made their way into museum collections with certain holes in the accounts of their ownership histories. The results, as readers of the plundered art blog are aware, have been mixed at best. Most recently, of course, the case of Leone Meyer’s claim against the Fred Jones, Jr. Museum at the University of Oklahoma for her father’s Nazi-stolen Pissarro has revealed that the museum has never done provenance research on its collections, within which a goodly number of works may well have experienced the same sort of depredational fate that La Bergère experienced at the hands of Alfred Rosenberg’s ERR. They failed to research La Bergère’s ownership history even when specifically warned by a colleague from another museum that it might have been stolen by the Nazis from its pre-war owners.

The point here is not to focus on whether or not La Bergère will end up restituted to the family from which it was taken. That outcome, morally unquestionable (that it be returned to Leone Meyer) remains invisible (due to the vagaries of our law courts), unless one is a prophet, and I am not one. The point, however, is to focus on what lies behind the museum’s failure to inquire into the painting’s ownership past. Appropriately enough, this focus is tangent to the comment made by Eric Sundby, President of the student-run Holocaust Restitution and Remembrance Society at the University of Oklahoma, toward the end of his speech supporting the Oklahoma legislature’s proposal of a bill, HR 1026, that would compel the university’s Fred Jones, Jr. museum to fulfill the provenance research obligation that it has steadfastly ignored. Sundby commented that, as students, he and his organization want their tuition dollars to go not to high-paid lawyers who will defend the museum and university from those demanding restitution of Nazi-plundered paintings, but to education. The point that runs tangent to Sundby’s comment is that every museum, and not only those located on college or university campuses, should be committed to education—that this should be a raison d’être, a priority of museums.

One of the obvious contexts for this priority is, to repeat, the explanation and exploration of the aesthetic developments that connect and disconnect Leonardo and Rothko or Michelangelo and Bernini. Important in quite another way is the information—the explanation and exploration—provided by provenance research, whether in the Holocaust or other contexts. Art has never existed in a vacuum; it has always intersected religion (depicting or exploring or addressing divinity, from Egyptian statuary to Leonardo’s Last Supper) and politics (from the depiction of the pharaoh, Khafra, as god-like, to Jacque-Louis David’s painting of the coronation of Napoleon’s wife by the hand of the self-proclaimed Emperor himself)—and economics (without the financial resources, neither Khafra nor Napoleon could have commissioned the works that immortalize them). Without patronage, artists starve (and many have starved precisely for that lack).

Knowing who has owned a work throughout its history is not a footnote to history but essential to understand the work’s place in history: when all those crowds flock to the Louvre to stare at Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, if it does not occur to them to wonder how that Italian girl painted by that Italian man ended up in Paris, the museum is failing its role as an educational institution if it does not provide that information—clearly, simply, right there, for all who choose to do so to be able to read it, and with that reading, to be able to gain some insights into the history of that era and the art that reflects the era.

La Bergère, by Camille Pissarro

ERR card for La Bergere

The essence of history, well-explained, is, like the root of the word itself, story. This is what humans are all about. This is what works of art so often can be, aside from and in addition to their role as sources of visual pleasure. The story of Leonardo’s dying in the arms of his last patron, the French King, Francis I, to whose court he had come with, among other things, his Mona Lisa as a prized possession, is an important part of understanding who Leonardo was, who Francis was, what Italy and France were and are; it fills in an important as well as compelling part of the picture (pun intended) of the human experience. The story of Leone Meyer’s father’s Pissarro and that of others whose art was plundered, whether by the Nazis or by Soviet trophy squads as the war wound down; the story of what American galleries were doing with regard to plundered art during and after the war—like the story of what and how Napoleon dragged back that obelisk from Egypt that graces the Place de la Concord not far from the Louvre, or how the Romans eighteen centuries earlier dragged obelisks back to Rome—matters, if we wish to have a deeper and broader understanding of what we are as a species.

Leone Meyer

It should matter to museums above all. If our collections are not mere eye candy or mere symptoms of an obsession with hoarding or mere bait for tourists willing to pay money to see what we have gathered within our walls—if we are to be what we claim to be, protectors and preservers of culture (which is why some museums argue that Egyptian or Greek or Turkish antiquities are better off, because they are better protected and preserved, within French or English or German or American museums than in their own original countries; and also why, at the outset of the push during the past two decades to garner cooperation from museums regarding research within their collections with an eye toward the matter of Holocaust-era plunder and restitution, there was such stiff opposition within the museum community: they often asserted that, as bastions of civilization it was unthinkable that they might have ill-gotten gains within their walls)—then museums must exhaust every possibility and extend every effort to educate, teach their audiences and not just show them beautiful works of art.

Stroll through some museums and consider how much information regarding ownership history is available—particularly works that came into the collections between, say, 1935 and 1965. Examine the label next to paintings, perhaps some of those at the Fred Jones, Jr. Museum gifted to the museum by the Weitzenhoffer family and purchased by them from the David Findlay gallery in New York, as they had purchased La Bergère from that gallery and gifted it to the museum; or the label identifying Egon Schiele’s Dead City III, hanging on a wall at the Leopold Museum in Vienna;

Dead City III, by Egon Schiele

 or the label discussing the pastel, Landscape with Smokestacks, by Edgar Degas, at the Art Institute of Chicago;

Landscape with smokestacks, by Edgar Degas

or the label next to that beautiful set of Louis XV furniture at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris that belonged to a Jewish family before the war still struggling to gain acknowledgment of its claim—

Musee Carnavalet

or better, examine the labels of paintings and statuary that have not been claimed by Holocaust survivors or their heirs, that have not made the news, the recent circumstances of which have not forced the museums to think about the information that they provide to their audiences. How much do you get from this examination exercise?

Ask yourself—and if the answer is too minimal and unsatisfactory, ask the museum—what is the story within the history of this painting and who owned it? How did its ownership change, particularly in the last century—particularly between 1930 and 1945? Do it! If the Museums don’t educate the public and if the public doesn’t push the museums to educate them more effectively with regard to this, among the myriad aspects of interest in the discussion of art and culture, then what is the purpose of the museum experience beyond aesthetics? How is civilization being preserved when the key details pertaining to the history of objects created and enjoyed by and bought and sold by or stolen from fellow humans disappears from our telling and our understanding?

If it is to matter, our museum staffs must educate ourselves and care about educating ourselves as much about this as about other aspects of the works that we collect and study; and we must further the educational process by educating our audiences—so that they will continue to press us to be more educated in order to educate them better.

In the realm of Nazi-plundered art there is a further turn to this screw. The educational process—even more than the occasionally achieved restitution of cultural property to its pre-Nazi owners or their heirs that research may yield—is also part of another key aspect of human experience and a facilitator of education regarding civilization (indeed an integral part of the process of shaping civilization): memory. In learning and teaching about Raoul Meyer, or the Paris art dealer Paul Rosenberg (no relation to Alfred, of course) or the Dutch banker Fritz Gutmann, we remember those who were an important part of the patronage and ownership of classical and modern art—those whom the Nazis sought not only to divest of their art and their lives but whom they sought to de-humanize and efface from human memory.

Museums’ failures to educate themselves and their audiences regarding those whose works now grace their galleries mark a continuous, posthumous fulfillment of Hitler’s goal of obliteration. Those who make a real effort to learn and teach about those patrons and collectors—often (not always) champions of modern art that had only small audiences in the first third of the twentieth century—offer an ongoing challenge to everything that Hitler and his minions stood for. To offer that challenge is a modest enough and fulfillable goal for institutions claiming to be bastions of civilizations and preservers of human culture.

Stop the illegal sale of sacred Hopi artifacts by EVE auction house in Paris on June 1, 2015!

Editor’s note: We are publishing a letter co-signed by a group of dedicated scholars and museum directors who are outraged that the French government is allowing for the sixth time in over a year the illegal sale of sacred Hopi artifacts through an auction house called EVE. The sale is slated for June 1, 2015. A seventh sale is slated for June 10, 2015. The Conseil des Ventes Volontaires (Council of Voluntary Sales) is a regulatory body which oversees the French auction market. In past attempts to stop these sales, the CVV defiantly noted that the history of ownership or provenance of the objects is merely optional and, more importantly, the Hopi or any other indigenous group or tribe has no legal standing in France to assert a claim of ownership on their objects which, oftentimes, reach the market illicitly.

In the case of these Hopi artifacts referred to as “friends” by their rightful owners, the Hopi, these objects are entering the French market after circulating through a semi-clandestine black market in the United States populated by thieves and established dealers from the Southwest to the hallowed streets of Manhattan in New York City. Under the very nose of the FBI, the Department of State, and the Department of Homeland Security, these ill-gotten objects have left US territory for one reason and one reason only: they cannot be sold legally in the US and the French are more than happy to welcome them so that they can be sold off to a predominately ignorant public despite a permanent cloud on their title.

In order to stop the June 1, 2015, of the claimed objects, a letter is being sent to François Hollande, President of France.]


May 27, 2015



The Honorable François Hollande

Président de la République Française

Palais de l’Elysée

55, rue du faubourg Saint-Honoré

75006 Paris

FRANCE



BY EMAIL & TELEFAX



RE: AUCTION SALE OF SACRED HOPI OBJECTS SCHEDULED FOR JUNE 1, 2015



Mr. President Hollande,



We, the undersigned, are the directors or leaders of several large U.S. institutions with significant collections and interests in Native American art and culture. Collectively, our staffs consist of leading scholars in the field of Native American studies who have significant and long-standing expertise and knowledge of the culture of Native American groups in the Southwest United States, including the Hopi Tribe and the New Mexico Pueblo tribes. Over the past 3 years, we have been appalled by the continued willingness of auction houses in Paris, and in particular the EVE auction house, to proceed with sales which include items described by the Hopi Tribe as “katsina friends,” and that the auction houses have offensively described as “masques katsinam.”



Several of us have, on prior occasions, requested that these auction houses withdraw the katsina friends from sale and that these sacred, communally owned objects be promptly returned to the Hopi and other Pueblo tribes who are their rightful owners. As we have explained in the past, the katsina friends are communal property and cannot be sold by any tribal individual. Furthermore, while katsina friends can be held and cared for by individuals, they belong to the communities from which they come and are cared for by specific ceremonial societies or clans. Under both tribal custom and tribal, state and federal law, they cannot be sold or given away by any individual. As a result, they cannot be legitimately privately owned by individual collectors or institutions, as legal title under tribal, state and federal law could never pass to anyone other than the applicable tribe. Thus, the sale of such items constitutes the sale of stolen property, which is obviously legally prohibited, both in the United States and around the world. While the Hopi Tribe first enacted statutes specifically prohibiting the sale of katsina friends and other communal religious objects in the 1970s, the Hopi and other tribes have openly and notoriously prohibited such sales by communal law and custom since the first contact with non-Natives in the Southwest.

Today, the sale of such objects violates various federal, state and tribal statutes that protect the United States’ cultural resources and tribal property, and prohibit trafficking in stolen goods and various species of birds. In addition to these laws, U.S. case law has clearly established that buying or selling katsina friends is a crime under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (“NAGPRA”). EVE auction house’s statements that NAGPRA does not have criminal prohibitions on the trafficking in katsina friends or in other NAGPRA defined sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony are a blatant and offensive misstatement of U.S. law.

As such, we are shocked to hear that the EVE auction house has, yet again, scheduled another sale that includes the illegal sale of several katsina friends for June 1, 2015 in Paris.

As we have indicated on prior occasions, we can reasonably assert that the proposed sale of these katsina friends, and the international exposure of them, is not only illegal, but is causing and will continue to cause significant outrage, sadness and distress among members the affected tribes. For them, katsina friends are living beings, which is why they are called “friends” (kwatsi) in the Hopi language. The friends are loved, cared for, and ceremonially fed. They are a connection between the human world and the spirits of all living things and the ancestors. To be displayed disembodied in an auction catalogue and on the internet is sacrilegious and offensive. If one claims to value these katsina friends as “works of art”, one must also respect the people who made them and the native traditions that govern their ownership and use. As fellow human beings, it is our hope that you will offer understanding and empathy to the tribal people who are so deeply damaged and affected by this proposed sale. You cannot honor and value these katsina friends while dishonoring their rightful owners. These are universal principles of cross-cultural human conduct which France has continuously endorsed throughout World history.

Furthermore, we are highly concerned to have learned that, twice already, the Hopi Tribe and their representatives have attempted to suspend prior auction sales in Paris through a body controlled by your government, called the “Conseil des Ventes Volontaires (or “CVV”), which has the power to suspend auction sales or to force the withdrawal of certain objects from a sale where sufficient doubt exists on the provenance of these objects. We were especially appalled to learn that, twice, the CVV refused to withdraw katsina friends in prior proceedings by holding the incomprehensible position that neither the Hopi Tribe, nor individual Hopi tribal members, had any legal standing to challenge these sales. This grotesque jurisprudence flies in the face of the long-standing recognition of Native American tribal sovereignty and the fact that U.S. law clearly establishes that federally recognized Indian Tribes have the power to sue in any number of matters. The Hopi Tribe is an ancient culture — with more than 14,117 enrolled members today — that has remained steadfast to its culture, language, heritage and spirituality. It is also a sovereign nation federally recognized by the U.S. government and should be treated accordingly.

Additionally, we are quite troubled by the lack of legal equity and apparent prejudice that the French legal system opposes against American parties, such as Indian Tribes, while at the same time, French museum institutions are the first ones to seek and successfully obtain the leverage of the American legal system when they are plaintiffs in claims involving cultural property stolen in France and subsequently transferred to the United States.

On behalf of the undersigned museums, we request your official intervention to stop the June 1 auction of the katsina friends, and do everything in your power to obtain their swift and prompt restitution to the Hopi people.

Sincerely,

Robert Breunig, Ph.D.
President
The Museum of Northern Arizona

John Bulla
Interim Director & CEO
Heard Museum


Janice Klein
Executive Director
Museum Association of Arizona

Jonathan Batkin
Director
The Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian

Michael F. Brown
President
School for Advanced Research

Christoph Heinrich, Ph.D.
Director
Denver Art Museum

Cc: Gérard Araud
Ambassador of France to the United States
The Embassy of France to the United States
4101 Reservoir Road, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20007
By e-mail: Gerard.araud@diplomatie.gouv.fr



Cc: Cabinet de la Présidence de la République



M. Jean-Pierre Jouyet
Secrétaire général
By e-mail: jean-pierre.jouyet@elysee.fr

M. Thierry Lataste
Directeur de cabinet
By e-mail: thierry.lataste@elysee.fr

M. Jacques Audibert
Conseiller diplomatique
By e-mail: jacques.audibert@elysee.fr

Mme Audrey Azoulay
Conseillère Culture et communication
By e-mail: Audrey.Azoulay@elysee.fr

Mme Françoise Tomé
Conseillère Justice
By e-mail: francoise.tomé@elysee.fr

M. Adrien Abecassis
Conseiller Affaires Bilatérales
Cellule Diplomatique
By e-mail: Adrien.abecassis@elysee.fr


Christiane Taubira
Garde des Sceaux, Ministre de la Justice
13, Place Vendôme
75042 Paris Cedex 01 FRANCE
Fax : (011) 33-1-44-77-60-02
By e-mail: Christiane.Taubira@justice.gouv.fr

Anne Berriat
Directrice adjointe de cabinet
By e-mail: Anne.Berriat@justice.gouv.fr

Carle Deveille-Fontinha
Conseillère Diplomatique
By e-mail: Carla.deveille-fontinha@justice.gouv.fr



Fleur Pellerin
Ministre de la Culture et de la Communication
3, rue de Valois
75001 Paris FRANCE
BY e-mail: Fleur.Pellerin@culture.gouv.fr
Fax: (011) 33-1-40-15-85-30

Fabrice Bakhouche
Directeur de cabinet
By e-mail: fabrice.bahouche@culture.gouv.fr



Laurent Fabius
Ministre des Affaires étrangères et du Développement international
37 Quai d’Orsay
75007 Paris FRANCE
Fax : (011) 33-1-43-17-40-94
By e-mail: Laurent.Fabius@diplomatie.gouv.fr

Alexandre Ziegler
Directeur de cabinet
By e-mail: Alexandre.Ziegler@diplomatie.gouv.fr

M. Benoît Guidée
Conseiller des affaires étrangères, Asie, Amérique
By e-mail: benoit.guidee@diplomatie.gouv.fr



Catherine Chadelat
Conseillère d’Etat
Présidente
Conseil des Ventes Volontaires
19 Avenue de l'opéra
75001 PARIS, France
By e-mail : c.chadelat@conseildesventes.fr
Par Fax: 01-53-45-89-20

Cc: John McCain
U.S. Senator for the State of Arizona
U.S. Senate
241 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Phone: (202) 224-2235
Fax: (202) 228-2862



Jeff Flake
U.S. Senator for the State of Arizona
U.S. Senate
Senate Russell Office Building 368
Washington, D.C. 20510
Phone: 202-224-4521
Fax: 202-228-0515



Ann Kirkpatrick
U.S. Representative, Arizona First District
U.S. House of Representatives
201 Cannon HOB
Washington, DC 20515
Phone: 202-225-3361
Fax: 202-225-3462



Raoul Grijalva
U.S. Representative Arizona Third District
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, D.C. Office
1511 Longworth HOB
Washington, DC 20515
Phone: (202) 225-2435
Fax: (202) 225-1541

Paul Gosar
U.S. Representative, Arizona Fourth District
U.S. House of Representatives
504 Cannon HOB
Washington, DC 20515
Phone: (202) 225-2315

Matt Salmon
U.S. Representative, Arizona Fifth District
U.S. House of Representatives
2349 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
Phone: (202) 225-2635
Fax: (202) 226-4386

David Schweikert
U.S. Representative, Arizona Sixth District
U.S. House of Representatives
1205 Longworth House Office Building
Washington DC, 20515
Phone: (202) 225-2190
Fax: (202) 225-0096

Trent Franks
U.S. Representative, Arizona Eighth District
U.S. House of Representatives
2435 Rayburn HOB
Washington, DC 20515
Phone: (202) 225-4576
Fax: (202) 225-6328

Krysten Sinema
U.S. Representative, Arizona Ninth District
U.S. House of Representatives
1237 Longworth House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
Phone: 202-225-9888

Cc : Her Excellency, Jane D. Hartley
U.S. Ambassador to the French Republic and to the Principality of Monaco
U.S. Embassy in France
2 avenue Gabriel
75382 Paris Cedex 08, France
Fax: (011) 33-1-42669783
By e-mail: HartleyDJ@state.gov

The Honorable Loretta Lynch
Attorney General
United States Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001 U.S.A.
By e-mail: loretta.lynch@usdoj.gov

The Honorable James B. Comey
Director
Federal Bureau of Investigation
935 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20535-0001 U.S.A.

Sally Jewell
Secretary of the Interior
Department of the Interior
1849 C Street, N.W.
Washington DC 20240 U.S.A.
By e-mail: sally_jewell@ios.doi.gov, sallyjewell@ios.doi.gov, sally.jewell@ios.doi.gov,
exsec_exsec@ios.doi.gov

Herman G. Honanie
Chairman
Hopi Tribal Council
Fax: (928) 734-6665
By email: hopicouncil@hopi.nsn.us
P.O. Box 123
Kykotsmovi, AZ 86039
By e-mail: HeHonanie@hopi.nsn.us

Cc: Ori Z. Soltes
Director
Holocaust Art Restitution Project, Inc.
c/o 5114 Westridge Road
Bethesda, MD 20816-1623
By e-mail: orisoltes@gmail.com

Pierre Ciric, Esq.
Member of the Firm
The Ciric Law Firm, PLLC
17A Stuyvesant Oval
New York, NY 10009
By e-mail: pciric@ciriclawfirm.com