"Mann mit blauer Mütze," by Eugeniusz Zak—Part One

by Agnieszka Yass-Alston

[Editor’s note: This is an article released in two parts on the work of Eugeniusz Zak. The author, Agnieszka Yass-Alston, is an art historian and provenance researcher who specializes in the fate of artistic assets of Jewish art collectors in Krakow and the fate of the "oeuvre" of Jewish artists of  the "École de Paris."]

Eugeniusz Zak‘s painting, Mann mit blauer Mütze (Jeune homme au bonnet bleu), will be auctioned on December 10, 2016 by Ketterer Kunst in Münich (offered as Mann mit blauer Kapper), Auction 436 Modern Art I, Lot 253). (Fig. 1)

Fig. 1, Mann mit blauer Mütze

The emergence of this painting is the perfect occasion to explore a particularly important aspect in Eugeniusz Zak’s (1884-1926) oeuvre that partially facilitates provenance research of some of his paintings created between 1919-1923. In times past, unfortunately, it has not been examined correctly and thus led to confusion and misunderstandings especially due to the fact that a lot of his paintings were stripped of marks and labels and very often re-stretched into new frames. Crucial clarification of Zak’s artistic development is needed in order to understand the chronology of his oeuvre. Because these nuances have been missed and misinterpreted, they created perplexity in the ownership history of Zak’s artworks which are discussed in this essay.

As an important reminder, a lot of Zak’s paintings prior to the Second World War belonged to Jewish owners in Poland, Germany, and France. Since the 1980s, art collectors renewed their interest in the “École de Paris”. Zak’s paintings became more desirable, but unfortunately collectors did not pay much attention to their provenance.

That said, the appearance of Mann mit blauer Mütze constitutes a sensational event, as this picture

Fig. 2

was only known to art historians and collectors of works produced by members of the “École de Paris” as demonstrated by a reproduction in H. Ritter’s article “Ewige Romantik” in Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, published in Darmstadt, in 1925. (Fig. 2)

More than ten years later a similar picture’s reproduction appeared in “Wiadomości Literackie”, a weekly published in Warsaw in 1936. The article “W dziesiątą rocznicę śmierci Zaka” written by Zygmunt St. Klingsland, a Polish correspondent in Paris, commemorated the 10th anniversary of the death of Eugeniusz Zak (1882 – 1926).  Klingsland wrote the article as a reminder to his Polish audience about the great artist. It is the closing of the exhibit of Zak’s artworks organized by Zak’s widow Jadwiga at Galerie Zak in Paris that prompted Klingsland to write those few words, illustrated by Zak’s artworks in black and white reproductions including the painting titled Studjum [Study]. (Fig. 3)

In 2004, Barbara Brus-Malinowska published an extensive, and one would think, detailed catalog of Zak’s artworks. This publication accompanied a monographic exhibit of Zak’s oeuvre organized at the National Museum in Warsaw (December 2003 – February 2004). Brus-Malinowska included the painting in the catalog (No. 196, p. 150) stating that the reproductions from Ewige Romantik (Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration) and W dziesiąta rocznicę śmierci Zaka (Wiadomości Literackie) are the same paintings. As photographic support, she used a black and white photograph from the artist’s archive which is located at the National Museum in Warsaw (DI 99830). (Fig. 4)

Fig. 3 Studjum

Fig. 4

Unfortunately, important facts were missed in Brus-Malinowska’s research. In June 1927, Galerie Marcel Bernheim in Paris had organized an Exposition Rétrospective Eugѐne Zak (1884 – 1926). The catalog listed twenty-nine works by Zak including: Jeune homme au bonnet blanc (No. 10) and Jeune homme au bonnet brun (No.26). Regrettably, there are no reproductions of these two paintings in Bernheim’s catalog. 

With this information, an examination of Zak’s development as an artist must be brought to light, especially in the period between 1916 when he had to return to Poland (a relocation, prompted by the events of WWI in France where he had resided since 1902), and 1922 when he left for Germany and subsequently returned to Paris in early 1923.

Most likely in 1918, and at the latest in early 1919, Zak painted a Young Acrobat, a prototype picture to the following three versions of the Young Man in a Hat (blue, white, and brown). The picture was exhibited for the first time in the Annual Salon of the Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts in Warsaw, 1919 (Dec. 13, 1919 – Jan. 28, 1920). Later it was in the collection of Tadeusz Raabe of Warsaw and exhibited in 1926 during the posthumous Zak exhibit in Czesław Garliński’s Salon in Warsaw (presently it is still unknown if the prototype painting survived World War II). Probably, there was one more version of the Young Acrobat which was listed by Stefania Zachorska in her 1927 publication on Eugeniusz Zak. At that time, that painting was in William C. Bullitt’s collection (the archival documentation deposited at the National Museum in Warsaw indicates Bullitt as owner of Jeune acrobate, 1918). The painting was only once reproduced in the article Eugen Zak written by H. Ritter for Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration (vol. 50, 1922). (Fig. 5). In the National Museum in Warsaw there is a black and white photograph of the painting (ID 99828) in the artist’s archive.

It may be assumed that the Young Acrobat is one of the paintings that marked the beginning of the third creative phase in Zak’s artistic development. This is the time when Zak focused on one bigger, single human figure in a closed space of naked walls without any background disturbance. He began to paint lonely acrobats, drunkards, dancers, harlequins, magicians and various musicians. They are passive, disconsolate, dejected. The paintings emanate with melancholy, uncertainty, or perplexity. At that time, Zak lived in Częstochowa, a southern Polish town, far away from colorful, artistic Paris, where he likely heard tragic news about human fate during the world war. Therefore Zak’s romanticism of that time is very often linked to Watteau and his nestled-in lonely dreaming figures of social outcasts. 

Fig. 5

Mieczysław Wallis (Eugeniusz Zak in Sztuka Polska Dwudziestolecia. Wybór pism z lat 1921 – 1957) indicates two sub-periods within this phase; firstly when Zak focused on linear plasticity, secondly around 1924 he turned more to painterliness and colorism. The lines of the human figures are smooth and sensual. They gently intumesce into semicircular curves that oppose straight lines of walls’ corners, and objects such as a bench, a musical instrument, or a pipe. The forms are soft and elongated. There is a certain repetition of a rhythm within the composition of forms and lines that are smooth, long, and elegant (at that time, and also later upon his return to Paris, Zak exhibited with a group of Polish artists - Rytm). In this time, Zak’s figures are still outlined; as the contour disappeared, the intensely distinctive colors took over (after 1924). The paintings of this period emanate with characteristic atmosphere of elegance, fineness, and magicality, but also melancholy. Mieczysław Wallis (1927) and Stafania Zahorska (1927) wrote about the subtlety of Zak’s use of color emphasizing that he repeated the same compositions, meaning the same human figures in exact poses, or groups of figures in various colorations. These were Zak’s experiments with colors. Wallis described Zak’s use of toning practices by the use of white that suppresses color giving the impression of fresco tones. This phase is filled with coloristic dissonances, while naturalism is absent. Zak was leaning toward an expressionistic disharmony of colors in order to stress the strict decorative aspects of his paintings (after his return to Paris, Zak was close to Art Deco, as distinctively represented by Tamara Lempicka). The decorativeness of his paintings is expressed also in specifically closed composition built by rhythmic use of lines and surfaces that create flawless symmetry and balance. A fascinating aspect of this approach to decoratively closed composition was brought forth by Mieczysław Wallis (1927), who recalled that Zak did not like to show his paintings without frames, stating that once framed the artwork was completed. Zak often painted on an already framed canvas.

It is in this period that Zak ultimately defined his depicted human figures as airy, slim, and vertically extended. Their strongly narrow oval faces are reduced to their characteristic features as long dark eyebrows, elongated narrow eyes, straight overlong nose and sharp thin lips. Simple clothing tightly stretches on these slim figures, very often elongated by the use of a conical hat or pointed ballerinas. There is very intensive stylization of shape and movement. Exquisite postures and elegant gestures of the melancholic figures add to their eccentricity and withdrawnness.

(to be continued with Part Two)

List of illustrations:

Figure 1: Eugeniusz Zak, Mann mit blauer Kapper, Oil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm.
Figure 2: Eugeniusz Zak, Mann mit blauer Mütze (oil on canvas, c. 1922), illustration from Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, vol. 56, 1925;
Figure 3: Eugeniusz Zak, Studjum (oil on canvas, c. 1923), illustration from Wiadomości Literackie, nr 42, 1936;
Figure 4: Eugeniusz Zak, Młodzieniec w niebieskiej czapce, photograph in the National Museum Warsaw (ID 99830);
Figure 5: Eugeniusz Zak, Der junger Akrobat (oil on canvas, 1918/1919), illustration from Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, vol. 50, 1922;

Oppose Senate Bill 3155 which legalizes the display of looted art in the United States.

by Marc Masurovsky

Click here to voice your opposition.

If passed, Senate Bill 3155, sponsored by American museum lobbyists and art market players, is a dream come true.

S. 3155 makes it possible for an American museum or, for that matter, any institution located in the United States to borrow any object from any part of the world without fear of judicial seizure, resulting from a claim filed by a victim of cultural theft.

On paper, it all sounds innocent. If it is, how do you explain the total silence emanating from the American museum community’s lobbying arm, the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), which has not uttered a single public word in its campaign to press for passage of S.3155. The AAMD has essentially refused to engage in a public discussion about the merits of S. 3155 through Senate hearings or in the public sphere. Clearly, its sponsors in the Senate have also agreed not to solicit opinions from the public and those most likely to be affected by the passage of this bill—source nations, indigenous groups, victims of cultural theft.

S. 3155 ensures that acts of plunder, whether State-sponsored or not, against entire groups and communities, resulting in systematic looting and misappropriation of cultural assets, do not stand in the way of museums’ ability to borrow freely from art collections across the globe.

There are numerous countries which have suffered from autocratic, dictatorial, even tyrannical governments and regimes which have cost countless lives, suppressed individual freedoms and resulted in untold losses of personal property through expropriation, misappropriation, and outright theft. Many objects displaced during these events have never been returned to their rightful owners. The more desirable ones have been sold and resold on the international art market, or have entered art collections stewarded by the very governments which enabled and sanctioned these illegal confiscations and expropriations.

There are numerous archaeological sites around the world which have been illegally exploited and whose ruins have yielded untold numbers of artifacts recycled through countless intermediaries before reaching museum collections, auction houses, and private dealers in “the West”, including North America.

Indigenous peoples across the globe have been subject to continual harassment and persecution by the governments of the countries in which they reside, victimized by violence and by illegal removals of their sacred objects. These looted objects, often used for ritual practices, find their way into “Western” collections through the illicit trade, once they have been reclassified as "art."

Museums thrive on attracting visitors. To do so, they must constantly borrow beautiful, rare, objects from domestic and foreign collections and highlight them in exceptional exhibits for the public to come and enjoy. We all love to go to museums, but does that excuse their willingness to be be a party to theft and plunder?

It appears so.

Is S. 3155 necessary?

In practical terms, there is no need for S. 3155. The US Department of State has in place a system by which foreign lenders and their American counterparts can request a certificate of immunity from seizure to allow them to lend one or more objects to American institutions for the purpose of an exhibit. The State Department issues these certificates several times a week. For better and for worse, the immunity system works.

So, why does one need S. 3155? There is a political motive underlying its introduction in the Senate. For years, US museums have been unable to borrow masterpieces from Russian museums as a result of several court cases which were interpreted by the Russian government as a direct threat to their ability to lend works of art without fear of them being seized. Whether rational or not, these feelings have translated into a near-absolute freeze in Russian cultural loans to US museums.

Is the AAMD using S.3155 to signal the Russian government that, if passed, Russian museums should relax their stance on loans to the US?

The same reasoning can be applied to other governments with whom the US has had severe difficulties, like the Cuban government. Now that Fidel Castro is dead, all eyes are on that little island off the coast of Florida. The likelihood is quite high that art works confiscated from private Cuban collections will head to the United States. Again, S.3155 will make it possible for these confiscated works to be displayed and will deprive dispossessed Cuban families from being able to seek redress in US courts in order to recover their expropriated property.

The main sponsors of S.3155—Senator Orrin Hatch (Republican-Utah), and Senator Chuck Schumer (Democrat-New York)—are doing everything they can to have this bill passed before the end of 2016. So, time is of the essence to send a clear message to the Senate that this bill is unacceptable, indecent, unethical, and unnecessary.

If you agree that S. 3155 should not be passed by the US Senate, click here and voice your concern.

The duty to memory

by Marc Masurovsky

Which is simpler—recovery of looted cultural objects or memorializing the loss of cultural objects? The short answer is: both are fraught with complications. Let's focus for now on memory.

Remembering what was once “ours”.

When natural disasters strike communities, the survivors get together, mourn their losses, both individual and collective, give thanks for being alive, and remember what was once “theirs.” It is part of the grieving process. Shrines are erected to honor the dead, plaques are affixed to the walls of buildings where a traumatic event occurred, or steles are set up in public squares or at a crossroads, to honor and remember. These acts of remembering are the outward expression of a tacit, implicit accord that we have a duty of memory, our responsibility as an organized citizenry to pay homage, to remind ourselves that, despite events in our common pasts, anchored in mass violence and traumatic upheavals, our communities survived and, although scarred, rebuilt themselves.

Whether it be the “Holocaust,”, the mass murders and tortures in Cambodia, the fratricidal violence in countless countries, the near-total extermination of indigenous groups worldwide, there is a collective duty to remember what we, as humans, are capable of inflicting on our neighbors, our friends, our relatives, and on total strangers. The memory of our “bloodlust” serves as a reminder of what we have lost and what we have done unto others.

In the case of culture, this duty to memory takes an odd turn.

Plaques

Rare are the plaques that memorialize sites of plunder.

Jeu de Paume memorial in Paris

In France, it took the government nearly a half century before it felt that it could memorialize the depredations resulting from the Nazi-led cultural plunder of France. In 2005, a plaque was nailed to the side of the Jeu de Paume museum in the Tuilerie Gardens in Paris. It immortalizes the Jeu de Paume as a storage and transit center for art looted from Jewish victims of Nazi policies in occupied France and Rose Valland’s role in documenting those thefts. The plaque itself is sober. It also cites the number of works that Rose Valland is credited with recovering on behalf of the French State—45,000 in all—. One wonders whether all of those objects transited through the Jeu de Paume or if that figure represents the totality of works of art which the French government was able to repatriate from Germany and Austria after 1945.

In 1942, the Nazi government decided that it was time to expropriate all Jewish-owned property for the benefit of Germans living inside the Reich’s borders. The enforcement of the so-called “Mobel-Aktion” all across Western Europe resulted in the emptying out of tens of thousands of residences either rented or owned by persons of Jewish descent. Their goods were sorted, the most valuable were set aside, while the rest were put on trains to German cities damaged by Allied aerial bombing raids. In German-occupied Paris, a number of sites across the beleaguered capital were used to process expropriated Jewish household goods, a task performed by Jewish inmates from the transit camp of Drancy. One of those sites was called Levitan, once a furniture store at 85-87, rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin. A plaque was erected which honors the Jewish prisoners who worked there as slave laborers.  It also reminds the reader that Jewish goods were sorted at Levitan.  A good many of those goods were art objects which were inspected by Nazi agents and later sent to the Jeu de Paume for cataloguing and shipment to art depots in the Reich or for resale on the Paris art market.

Memorial at Levitan in Paris

Similarly in Germany, there are few memorial plaques reminding the public of Nazi crimes against culture.

Kopenickerstrasse depot memorial in Berlin

In Berlin, a printed text framed inside a clear waterproof casing is nailed to a wall at the former Kopenickerstrasse depot which encapsulated the destructive power of “Aktion Entartete Kunt”. In that depot, thousands of “degenerate” works of art were stored after being confiscated from individuals, galleries and cultural institutions across Germany. A good many were destroyed while the rest were put up for sale on the international art market.

One of the rare plaques honoring the work of an ardent critic of the corruption endemic to post-WWI German society marks the residence of Georg Grosz as one who stood against militarism and who satirized through his graphic work State-sanctioned corruption. Predictably, the Nazi authorities tagged Grosz’ works as “degenerate.” By 1933, Grosz had established himself in New York as a German exile.

Georg Grosz memorial plaque in Berlin, Germany

If we view the Jeu de Paume commemorative plaque as setting a precedent for memorializing sites of plunder, shouldn’t similar plaques be established at former ERR depots in Germany and Austria where loot from across Axis-occupied Europe was amassed?

Here is a brief list of these sites:

Neuschwanstein/Fussen/Hohenschwangau
Buxheim near Memmingen
Alt-Aussee
Kogl
Thurntal
Herrenchiemsee
Amstetten/Seissenegg
Nikolsburg in the Czech Republic.

The ERR depots in Paris should likewise be marked with similar plaques, used for processing Jewish-owned collections and for amassing loot seized during M-Aktion.

6, place des Etats-Unis
17, place des Etats-Unis
12, rue Dumont d’Urville
26, rue Dumont d’Urville
77 Avenue de la Grande-Armée, garage Talbot—sous-sol et 1er étage
23, rue Drouot
41, quai de la Gare d’Austerlitz
43, quai de la Gare d’Austerlitz
Faubourg Saint-Martin : garage Levitan
Rue Fresnel : Garage Fresnel
104, rue de Richelieu
45, rue Labruyère


Maybe plaques should also be placed outside of the Hotel Drouot in Paris, to remind art shoppers that this was an important recycler of looted Jewish-owned property. Is that inappropriate to even suggest a public link between a leading broker of art sales and its managers’ opportunistic behavior during the German occupation of Paris?

How far does one extend the work of memory through memorials without provoking volatile reactions from the public and from the government, starting with the arrondissement, the city and the national government?

Clearly, the complexities associated with remembrance activities, especially those that leave a permanent presence such as physical memorial structures, abound. This fear of offending one part of the public and of rattling old skeletons is nothing new but it plagues the public discourse on cultural plunder during the Nazi years.

At this rate, we can go from one country to the next where acts of plunder occurred and draw up lists of sites of memory.  The list is endless, perhaps because the memory of plunder has not yet been addressed properly.

Museum labels as “memory”

Inadequate labeling can create even more frustration than the absence of labeling associated with works of art on display. Several decades ago, there was widespread indignation at how the French government described the origin of specific works of art in State-owned museums.

Since then, there have been sporadic efforts in the United States to be more upfront about the troubled past of works in permanent collections. At the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston, MA, a project called “Art with a Past” invited viewers to read a text that did not exceed several hundred words on a large-size plaque next to the concerned work of art. The text detailed that the work had been plundered by the Nazis and had since been restituted to its rightful owners before entering the MFA’s collection. A unique experiment in the postwar annals of museum labeling, the “Art with a Past” project shows how a cultural institution can guide the viewing public to explore further the history of ownership of an object and serve as a reminder that history, even traumatic history, can intersect and interfere with the lives of an object’s owners.

Provenance as memory

The history of ownership of an object participates in the duty to memory. After all, museum leaders already encourage their staff to produce a particular telling of the story of the objects in their collections. But they are averse to construct a story of the object as an “object lesson” in how history and art interact and affect the destiny of works and objects of art. The decades-long feud over how provenance is researched and written goes to the core of this duty to remember traumatic events that shape and direct the paths taken by objects and their owners through the sinews of history, both in space and time.

An inability and unwillingness to write these stories constitutes a crime against memory, an appeal to institutional amnesia-"appreciate” art simply as object of worship and study. The art world’s refusal to acknowledge the complex history of art objects blindsides historical truth and cheats the viewing public of a unique chance to learn more about how objects circulate, often without their owners’ consent, as a result of turbulence in the unfolding of history. Governments should encourage cultural institutions to engage their public by using art as an opportunity to teach history. After all, what better way is there to use their tax-exempt status which is there for a reason--to educate their public?

The binary: Holocaust and/or plunder

by Marc Masurovsky

The binary—Holocaust and plunder—is a taboo.

The official binary—Holocaust OR plunder—has been the prevailing dogma characterizing the conceptualization, development and implementation of Holocaust historiography, education, and remembrance, in particular in the United States and Europe. Even flagship institutions like the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, the Shoah Memorial in Paris, France and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Israel, eschew the discussion on plunder thus provoking and perpetuating a revisionist approach to Holocaust remembrance and Holocaust studies.

The conventional approach, at least in the United States, has been to discuss the Third Reich, the Holocaust and the Second World War, without referring to the economic and cultural crimes that preceded, accompanied, and followed crimes against individuals, including the infliction of physical harm and, in many instances, death.

During and immediately following the Second World War, British and American policies were geared towards the physical defeat of the Third Reich and its allies, the neutralization of its economic infrastructure, which was heavily blamed for sustaining, fueling and amplifying the Reich’s predatory, expansionist, and, yes, exterminationist policies. The framers and executors of Reich policies carried out ferocious campaigns against individuals belonging to specific groups, Jews, Roma, political opponents, homosexuals, the handicapped, and others viewed as not worthy, sub-human, and disposable.

And yet, starting with the first months of the National Socialist regime, economic assets, including real estate, businesses, financial assets, and cultural objects, were targeted for seizure, expropriation, forced sale, and incorporation into the Reich’s economic machine. Anti-Jewish and other forms of discriminatory policies went hand in hand with economic deprivation and confiscations of victims’ assets.

The Allies were well aware of this and wanted to prevent at all cost the overt and covert recycling of victims’ assets by those who either confiscated them or profited from their access on the open market. For that reason, they targeted representatives of industry, finance, government, trade, as well as the institutions in which they worked, together with all sorts of brokers and resellers used as fences and cut-outs to exfiltrate victims’ belongings out of the Reich and its occupied territories into neutral zones.

In other words, the postwar recovery and reorientation of economic, commercial, financial and cultural assets was as important to the Allied powers as the neutralization and punishment of those who fought against them and who engineered and implemented criminal acts against their victims.

The planners of the International Military Tribunal at Nurenberg established crimes of plunder as crimes against humanity. Few defendants were charged for such crimes because priorities were reordered and focus given on the planning and carrying out of the Final Solution of the Jewish Question, a genocidal policy. Part of the genocide against the Jews involved the mass removal of Jewish wealth in all its forms and the profiteering that resulted therefrom on a European scale with ramifications worldwide.

Why is it that in the twenty-first century, most, if not all, academic and museological programs dedicated to retelling and teaching the history of the events that we construe as the Holocaust fail to include any reference, mention, or citation of economic crimes committed against Jews and the forcible removal of their property?

Nazi war on culture
The National Socialist movement’s mantra was to tear down the corrupt, “Jewish” culture that poisoned Germany under the Weimar Republic, cleanse the civil society of all its pernicious influences, restore German greatness through a reordering from top to bottom, bottom to top, a “refonte” of the cultural landscape.

For twelve years, Nazi bureaucrats and their Fascist allies in neighboring countries waged an incessant war, a Kulturkampf, against the cultural sphere, and, through expansionism, exported that cultural conflict into the territories the Reich occupied.

That obsession with eradicating negative cultural influences suffused the Nazi discourse, comingling culture and anti-Jewish policies. The inevitable result was the marginalization of the Reich’s cultural enemies, which included the Jews, through job discrimination, eviction, expropriation, pauperization, seizures and confiscations. The consequences are well-known: millions of cultural objects were forced onto the open market without the consent of the owners and sold at whatever prices to a domestic and international clientele for twelve years.

The restitution of these objects is a direct result of Allied policies framed during and after WWII, to restore justice and cancel out the nefarious effects of the Nazi Kulturkampf.
When we hear leaders of Holocaust education proudly state that “they do not do culture,” one’s neck hairs should rightfully bristle.

It’s time to give up these idiotic stereotypes and prejudices against teaching the Holocaust and economic crimes, side by side.

How much courage does it take to pronounce in a single sentence the words Holocaust, Aryanization, forced sales, and restitution?