The Gurlitt indictment: Washington Principles vs. the German government and its partners

by Marc Masurovsky

Leave it to the diplomats, the pundits, the negotiators, the strategists, the civil servants, and those with a vested interest in doing business with our German colleagues to temper their speech, downplay the problem and minimize the fallout and significance of the Gurlitt Affair.

Reminder: In late 2012, the late Cornelius Gurlitt, a resident of Munich, was placed under tight surveillance by Bavarian law enforcement and German customs over alleged improprieties, fiscal and otherwise. The surveillance led to a search of Gurlitt’s apartment which revealed the existence of at least 1400 works and objects of art.

The rest has become history.

February 2015: Cornelius Gurlitt has been dead for almost a year. His last desire was to bequeath the totality of his art collection to a museum in Bern, Switzerland, the Kunstmuseum Bern. No explanations given. As from the beginning of the publicizing of the Gurlitt Affair in November 2013, everyone “out there” has been left guessing and speculating in the face of stultified, stony posturing from local, regional, and Federal German officials.

Let’s put the Gurlitt Affair to the test of the Washington Principles, a non-binding document drafted and accepted in December 1998 in principle as non-binding a set of recommendations, shall we say—for the art market and governments alike to follow in order to facilitate the location, identification of looted works and objects of art, and resolve as equitably as possible the ensuing mess produced by a claim for those identified looted objects.

Principle 1: Art that had been confiscated by the Nazis and not subsequently restituted should be identified

Have all Gurlitt items been identified and properly labeled as looted? As far as the public is concerned, the answer is NO.

Principle 2: Relevant records and archives should be open and accessible to researchers, in accordance with the guidelines of the International Council on Archives.
Have the relevant records been made available to researchers in order to facilitate the tagging of Gurlitt-owned items as either looted or ‘clean’?

Since the research has been tightly controlled under a pall of secrecy and quasi-national security by the German government, the answer is readily NO. The few documents that have been published on lostart.de have been redacted.

Principle 3: Resources and personnel should be made available to facilitate the identification of all art that had been confiscated by the Nazis and not subsequently restituted.

Those resources that are alluded to should have come in the form of money and personnel. Many suggestions—collegial ones at that—had been made by various parties inside and outside Germany to allow for the most open and collaborative research and information-sharing process. That did not happen. Few monies have been allocated—we presume—to the overall research effort, tightly controlled by the so-called Gurlitt Task Force. Therefore, the answer is NO.

Principle 4: In establishing that a work of art had been confiscated by the Nazis and not subsequently restituted, consideration should be given to unavoidable gaps or ambiguities in the provenance in light of the passage of time and the circumstances of the Holocaust era.

Gaps and ambiguities permeate the status of objects in the Gurlitt collection, precisely because Principles 2 and 3 supra have been molested and neglected. Those independent maverick researchers who have given time and resources to complete their own understanding of the history of the objects in the Gurlitt collection have been stymied in their searches. Hence, the gaps and ambiguities remain vast and deep for the greatest majority of the item in the Gurlitt collection. How much consideration will be given to those gaps and ambiguities in establishing whether or not the objects are “tainted” or “clean” shall be left to the authorities and to the Kunstmuseum Bern, a terrifying prospect.

Principle 5: Every effort should be made to publicize art that is found to have been confiscated by the Nazis and not subsequently restituted in order to locate its pre-War owners or their heirs.

Publicity and openness characterized the clamor unleashed on the German authorities for their failure to even make public the list of objects found in the Gurlitt apartment and later on in a house in Salzburg, Austria. The answer is therefore NO.

Principle 6: Efforts should be made to establish a central registry of such information

The same clamor that characterized Principle 5 supra applies to Principle 6. A central registry was supposed to be established on the website of the Koordinierungsstelle Magdeburg, www.lostart.de. But the process was painful, mind-numbing and grossly inadequate, mired in bureaucratic obstruction and political games that defied comprehension. After all, we were only dealing with art objects. The answer is NO for the German government. However, as a result of the Gurlitt will, the Kunstmuseum Bern became the de factor body through which the lists of Gurlitt-owned items would be released, a massive cop-out on the part of the German government if you ask anyone about this. So, the answer is a tepid YES for the Kunstmuseum Bern.

Principle 7: Pre-War owners and their heirs should be encouraged to come forward and make known their claims to art that was confiscated by the Nazis and not subsequently restituted

As a result of a violation of most of the preceding Washington Principles, pre-war owners and heirs could not readily come forward owing to the near-absence of information on the items in the Gurlitt collection and the method by which they had been acquired, and from whom. Several families did come forward, though, and asserted their claims early in 2014. As of this writing, it does not appear as if any claimed items have been restituted to the heirs of the pre-war owners. Hence, the answer is NO.

Principle 8: If the pre-War owners of art that is found to have been confiscated by the Nazis and not subsequently restituted, or their heirs, can be identified, steps should be taken expeditiously to achieve a just and fair solution, recognizing this may vary according to the facts and circumstances surrounding a specific case

In light of the negative response to Principle 7, the answer to Principle 8 is obviously NO.

Principle 9: If the pre-War owners of art that is found to have been confiscated by the Nazis, or their heirs, cannot be identified, steps should be taken expeditiously to achieve a just and fair solution.

A number of international Jewish organizations and other interested parties have come forward and made numerous suggestions about how to dispose of the ‘heirless’ component of the Gurlitt commission. This initial determination of “heirless” is contingent on the research and the ability to fill gaps and ambiguities in the history of the objects in the Gurlitt collection. According to the agreement signed by the German government with the estate of the late Cornelius Gurlitt and the Kunstmuseum Bern, 2020 is the deadline at which a final determination will be made about the status of the objects being researched under the aegis of the Gurlitt Task Force and by the Kunstmuseum Bern. Some have suggested that the “heirless” items be sent to Israel. Others have asked that they be sold and the proceeds distributed among needy Holocaust survivors and their families. The German government has tentatively endorsed the idea that the “heirless” items should be housed and displayed in a German museum “for a while” once the last ‘clean’ items are transferred to the Kunstmuseum Bern and the “identifiable” items have been returned to their rightful owners. A fair and just solution? So far it’s been unfair and unjust. Therefore, we must cast an interim NO until further notice.

Principle 10: Commissions or other bodies established to identify art that was confiscated by the Nazis and to assist in addressing ownership issues should have a balanced membership

The Gurlitt Task Force was mostly stacked with German civil servants. Only three individuals with noted ties to restitution advocacy and to research on looted art were accepted on the Task Force. The new Center for Provenance Research announced by German Culture Minister Monika Gruetters is supposed to include something akin to an advisory board that might have as many as 13 members. Who will they be? Who will recruit them? On what basis? Nothing specific, as usual. Therefore our answer is NO.

Principle 11: Nations are encouraged to develop national processes to implement these principles, particularly as they relate to alternative dispute resolution mechanisms for resolving ownership issues.

The verdict on Principle 11 is mixed. The Gurlitt Affair demonstrated that the German government’s process to handle questions of looted art in German private and public collections in a fair and equitable manner is broken and ineffectual. NO to Germany.

The fact that most of the items purchased by Cornelius Gurlitt’s father came from German-occupied France would have subsumed that the French government play a leading role in the resolution of the Gurlitt Affair. It did not. Therefore, the answer is NO for France.

The United States on whose territory and on whose initiative the Washington Principles were developed has always been looked upon as the moral standard bearer when it comes to questions of restitution and reparations stemming from the Holocaust and WWII. Its government was unusually quiet during the unfolding of the Gurlitt Affair. Its representatives took forever to even express their concerns about “justice”. Hence, the US gets a failing grade and a big NO.

So, what’s the verdict? Did the Washington Principle fare well in the unfolding and ensuing liquefaction of the Gurlitt Affair? It appears not, since 9 out of 11 principles were either violated or ignored.

What does that mean for the future? Nothing good unless the pressure points to effect meaningful change  come from other venues like the European Union to put some order in the house and mandate that governments in Europe behave properly when it comes to the treatment of plundered cultural objects in their midst.

Schleiertanz (Veil Dance) 1920, by Paul Klee

Schleiertanz, 1920, Paul Klee

by Marc Masurovsky 

Paul Klee produced the watercolor known as “Schleiertanz”, the Veil Dance, in 1920. It was exhibited in Munich at the Neue Kunst Hans Goltz until June 1920. Thereafter, Harry Fuld, Sr., a Jewish businessman from Frankfurt am Main, acquired the Klee watercolor and kept it in the family until his death in 1932. His eleven-year old son, Peter “Harry” Fuld, Jr., and his non-Jewish mother, Ida, inherited the Klee together with the rest of Harry’s considerable art collection, businesses and real property. Peter became a millionaire. However, Hitler’s ascent to power in late January 1933 changed all of that. Due to Nazi persecutions, Peter “Harry” Fuld, Jr. left for England shortly before the outbreak of WWII. Before his departure, the Klee was placed in storage with the shipping firm of Gustav Knauer in 1937 as well as other objects and property belonging to the Fuld family. In 1941, the Reich overrode Fuld’s ownership of items stored at Knauer’s and any real, financial and commercial property still owned by the Fulds in Germany since Harry—his father--was a Jew, Peter, although a “half-Jew”—his mother was not Jewish—was still treated as though he were Jewish. All Jews living in Germany who had “abandoned” their property to go into self-imposed exile, lost whatever assets they still held to the Reich, an act that the victorious Allied powers deemed illegal after their victory over the Third Reich in May 1945.

Some of the objects in the Fuld crates left with Knauer were placed in museums in Frankfurt, where Fuld’s family came from. It could be that all the crates packed by the Fuld family had been deposited with Knauer in Frankfurt instead of Berlin, which some researchers believe to be the case. At some point, perhaps in 1943 or 1944, the ERR, the Nazi plundering agency, designated “Schleiertanz” as a Neuwied item, an indication that it might have been stored at a customs warehouse in Neuwied which served as a central repository for items seized from Jews in Belgium and Holland.

Schloss Kogl

The absence of a “Neuwied number” for “Schleiertanz” makes it more likely that the Klee was sent to ERR headquarters at Bellevuestrasse in Berlin, a way station for confiscated "modern" works of art, from which it was transferred in a crate with other “Neuwied” items to the ERR depot of Kogl in Austria, a main recipient of loot from Western Europe, including items whose owners were “unknown”, like those marked Neuwied. It could be that the Klee was reclassified as a Neuwied item then. In 1945, the Americans found it in a crate stamped “Neuwied" and so designated it as well.
 
In 1940, the British authorities interned the young Peter Fuld as an “enemy alien” and shipped him to Canada where he remained until the end of WWII. He was released in 1941 and went to school at the University of Toronto where he sought both a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor in Law. He took Canadian citizenship in 1946 at the time of his graduation from the University of Toronto. Fuld had also fallen in love with Ivy Lawrence, a “woman of color” from Trinidad and a fellow student who was a year ahead of him.  Their unorthodox interracial romance shook things up on the Toronto campus. 

Ivy Lawrence and Peter "Harry" Fuld in Canada

Although the Nazis would have treated Peter a “mischling” or “halbjude,” still, in Canada, he had a difficult time fitting in anywhere not being born of a Jewish mother, being a native of Germany, and involved romantically with a woman from Trinidad. Ironic that he suffered similar discrimination thousands of miles away from Nazi Germany, free of racial persecution, but not free of discrimination.

In the spring of 1945, American troops liberated Schloss Kogl, one of the ERR’s depots in the Attergau in Austria, and carted off everything it contained including the Klee to the Munich Central Collecting Point (MCCP) in Munich, the administrative center of the US zone of occupation of Germany, where it arrived in 1946. Three years later, in 1949, the Jewish Restitution Successor Organization (JRSO) received Fuld’s Klee as heirless property from the American repatriation authorities in Munich as well as hundreds of other cultural and artistic items. Together with all other heirless properties it had gathered in the Allied occupation zones in Germany and Austria, the JRSO ceded these cultural assets to the Bezalel National Museum in the newly minted State of Israel. Bezalel preceded the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. “Schleiertanz” was transferred in 1950 and incorporated into the permanent collection of the Israel Museum until its restitution in September 2010.

After WWII ended, Fuld returned to England before eventually settling in Germany. He sought out his mother, Ida, with whom he had lost touch upon going into exile as a young man and initiated proceedings to obtain restitution of his family’s lost assets which the Nazis had misappropriated. Ivy joined him in London but , once found, his mother threatened to commit suicide should he ever marry Ivy. That threat caused the breakup between Peter Fuld and Ivy and resulted in tremendous emotional harm to Peter. He required regular care at the hands of a psychiatrist. After returning to Germany, Peter died of brain cancer in March 1962. At his death, Fuld had somehow complicated matters with his estate since he had left a will to which were attached four codicils which resulted in a number of legal proceedings challenging one or more of the codicils. Some had been drafted in England, others in Germany. The messiness of inheritance especially as it affects looted and misappropriated property, cultural, financial, and immovable, was fueled by his bitter mother and the psychiatrist who had cared for Peter through his erratic emotional upheavals.
According to an article that appeared in the magazine “Ebony”, the trial over Peter Fuld’s estate produced transcripts totaling 3 million words and kept Ivy in the witness box for days. 18 million dollars (1962 value) were at stake as well as his looted assets which he had labored to recover from Germany. One third of the “residuary estate” went to Fuld’s aging mother. Another part of the estate went to Ivy with a proviso that she use 10 per cent of it for educational betterment in the West Indies. The rest went to Gita Gisela Martin, his housekeeper.

The late German lawyer and restitution specialist, Dr. Jost von Trott zu Solz, garnered the historical evidence to prove that “Schleiertanz” had once rightfully belonged to the Fuld family which had lost it at the hands of the Nazis. In 2010, the Israel Museum’s leadership accepted the evidence and agreed to restitute the Klee to Gita Gisela Martin who donated it to the Magen David Adom UK, the Israeli equivalent to the Red Cross organization, to which she had donated other “holdings” from the Peter Fuld estate. 

In turn, Magen David sold the Klee in New York through Sotheby’s as Lot Nr. 342 on November 3, 2010. It garnered $326,500.

As usual, beware of mis-written provenances. The Sotheby’s provenance for “Schleiertanz” misinterprets the historical material regarding the Neuwied phase of the Klee’s travails and does not acknowledge the fact that the Israel Museum returned the Klee to the Fuld heir who then donated it to Magen David, the consignor! It’s all in the details.

Plundered love in black and white from the Jeu de Paume

by Marc Masurovsky

It is fitting to celebrate on our own way Valentine's Day, that annual pressure cooker of love and desire complete with chocolate treats and candlelight dinners.  Or is that all it's made out to be?  What else lurks on Valentine's Day?

We decided to take a romp through time and visit the Jeu de Paume in Paris at some point in the early 1940s when the Germans were busy stealing cultural property right and left, of varying degrees of quality.  The Jeu de Paume served as a central repository of plundered goods of all kinds and shapes as long as they were of artistic and cultural interest.

The haul was so vast that it was possible to tease out works and objects and cluster them around a particular theme.

February 14 is a perfect excuse to create our own "museum of desire" borrowing for a minute or two works and objects plundered only to be recycled in Nazi collections or cast out because of their inferior quality onto the Paris art market where covetous eyes preyed on the lost property of mostly Jewish victims and their friends.

On display today are a selection of works and objects that the Germans chose to photograph which, in our view, depict some of today's mood swings.  You be the judge.


Idealized woman from different places and different times

Picasso

Attr. to David, R 1196

Venus-R 4437a

 Act I:  Let's not be shy....

R 4278

W. N. Gardiner-Arn 151

Really?

Watteau-R 866

 

 Bénard-R 1231

Love awaits......

Quiverdo-BoR 183

 Act II: Courage sets in...

G. Vidal-Mer 97

Fr. School-Hal 31

After Baudoin?-Drey 24

Act III: The denouement....

Lavreince-W 138

Fr. School-Ti 3

Fragonard-WP 13

Act IV: Happy Valentine's Day

Van Dongen-MA-B 548

Key to the captions:

Arn=Arnhold
BoR=Botschaft Rothschild
Drey-Dreyfus
Hal=Halphen
MA-B=Mobel Aktion Bilder
Mer=Merzbach
R=Rothschild
Ti=Tinardou
W=Wildenstein
WP= Weil-Picard

For more information, go to www.errproject.org.

I will tell you which one is fake, if you tell me which one is looted

Ideal view of Dulwich Picture Gallery, J.M. Gandy, 1823

by Angelina Giovani

One of the main differences in the way in which we deal with issues of authenticity as opposed to provenance, is that apparently it is more tolerable to joke and play around with authenticity.

Dulwich Picture Gallery in South London is home to hundreds of paintings. On any average day of the year, we probably wouldn’t walk around pondering over the painting’s authenticity. Let alone their provenance. Right now though, we are being asked to wonder, inquire and explore. With the intention of having its audience interact more closely with each and every artwork (even thought unfortunately they are not all at eye level, making the one-on-one interaction impossible) and question issues related to authenticity, the Gallery has commissioned an identical copy of one of their original art works at a cost of $120. The copy will replace the original in the permanent collection from February 10th until April 26, and the visitors are asked to spot the modern version, painted in China.

Source: Dulwich Picture Gallery

Dafen Village, China, where the fakes are mass produed

I should start by stating that I’m supportive of any idea that brings attention to the arts. The idea in question seems very engaging and entertaining, despite being referred to ‘as moronic’ in an article by the Guardian, last month. Anything that makes people want to spend more time in front of a painting, should be applauded and supported.

That being said, as fun as this idea is, it inevitably opens a can of worms. Our admiration of the arts, our said emotional attachment to art and all that we associate with a work’s authenticity are brought into question. What does it say about our appreciation of art, if we are trying to encourage the viewers’ involvement with one and only purpose in mind: find out which of these images is wrong?

What this experiment points to most of all is how fictitious our infatuation with the notion of the authentic really is. This process of spotting the fake will make no difference in how we see or approach the art market, and will not have anyone pondering over the real implications of people walking in a gallery and admiring fakes posing as authentic.

Here’s a more daring challenge. Ask people to spot the looted object, the unprovenanced one, the one that is not home. Let’s imagine for a moment that all the people spending their time pondering ‘if the colors are right, or if the relation between light and shade is disproportionate’ as “connoisseurs”, spent the same amount of time doing research. How did all the Poussin paintings get here? What about all the Dutch paintings?

The Dulwich Picture Gallery is offering people a great deal of harmless fun, but it is failing to educate them. That of course might not be their ultimate goal, but instead they may be merely striving to attract a crowd, in which case, I’d give them a big thumbs up. All in all I fail to see how it could be in any way helpful to be able to identify a fake, especially in a non-commercial environment, where the work is not up for grabs, and where there is no possible buyer set up for deception.

Obviously at the end there will be a winner. Someone (maybe the next Bernard Berenson?) will win the award for having successfully spotted the fake. On the other hand the result could in reality be nothing nothing more than just a lucky guess, completely unrelated to connoisseurship or actual knowledge. But what does it say about the rest of us, who undisputedly comprise the vast majority, who would never spot the fake, were we not told where to look, in the honourable attempt to keep ourselves entertained?

Tom Flynn, DPhil., professor at Kingston University, has over and over again advised his students to walk into galleries and museums and just focus on one work. For ten minutes, not so that they can spot the fake, not to find its faults, but so that they can really see it. Understand and engage. To look at something with the mind’s eyes. To turn the mere act of watching, into a mini study session, an exercise in observation.

Speculating over elements that make the work worthy and real, with no good reason, is simply purposeless. If there is one thing that we can take from this exercise, experiment, or whatever we decide to call this, is that the Chinese manufacturer that produced the replica deserves to be hanging in the Gallery walls as much as any other old masters.

As I visited the collection and even found myself enjoying it, feeling somewhat important in my task to narrow down the possible options and convincing myself I was certainly getting closer to the truth, I soon felt guilty. I realized I had fallen prey to a great marketing strategy and I was wasting my time. So now, I have decided to shake all that experience off, and set up a challenge to whomever has the power and will to give up some ‘pride’ and much ‘treasured secrecy’ in exchange for encouraging people to research and supporting a much neglected area of education.

Inside Dulwich Picture Gallery

Give us a provenance challenge. If we could turn this into a public effort, we could finally be able to approach the tainted history of hundreds and thousands works of art with a lighter heart. If the process is more open and transparent then the responsibility becomes shared’. Maybe this is too much to ask as a starting point. Maybe identifying heirs or possible claimants is too big of a task for people who have never done research, but there are many simpler questions that we could be asking, that everyone could try to answer.

Where was x work during WWII?

Through which dealers was it transacted?

Was it ever at the Jeu de Paume in Paris?

Was it ever at the Munich Central Collecting Point (MCCP)? 

What does its exhibition history tell us?

And in case it all somehow ties together and starts unveiling mysteries of the past, you get to take home something way more valuable and exciting than ‘a print of your choice’ from the gift shop. You get to take home this incredible story, which is certain to impress your friends way more than anything you can buy.


Please go to the ARCAblog and read an equally stimulating treatment of the Dulwich Picture Gallery at

http://art-crime.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/the-stakes-are-in-stroke-made-in-china.html?m=1