Mutually assured destruction

by Marc Masurovsky

Is it possible to imagine an art world without due diligence checks, without databases to consult before buying an art object, before displaying it?

With the open conflict laying bare the inner workings of the London-based Art Loss Register, what are its subscribers thinking right now?

What are the auction houses, Christie’s and Sotheby’s, wondering about the reliability of the ALR in providing the service that it is paid to provide--due diligence, certifying as to the authenticity and the licit or illicit nature of objects being offered for sale on the global art market--with the usual caveats, of course...

And what about insurance companies? Those responsible for assessing the risk of a transaction involving art objects and providing the protection and safeguards that buyers, exhibitors, borrowers, collectors, dealers, require and are entitled to? What will they do if there are no recognized mechanisms which exist to vouch for authenticity, value, and origin?

How do law enforcement agencies from around the world feel about this conflict between two organizations that are there to assist them in identifying and seizing looted antiquities and art objects? Granted, they are accustomed to working with rather unsavory groups and individuals for the greater good, but this is the art world of which we speak at a time when antiquities are disappearing in the hands of armed thugs worldwide.

What would happen if all of the due diligence checkpoints disappeared in a furnace of mutually assured destruction such as the conflict between ALR and ARG is turning into? Should sanity not prevail, the global art world will probably have nowhere to go to get its USDA certificate of good provenance and due diligence, the fig leaf behind which it can safely decide to sell, to buy, to display, to lend, to borrow, to collect.

What will judges do when faced with cases predicated on due diligence, or the absence thereof? Which sources will a judge countenance as worthy of issuing such a certificate, should ALR and ARG collapse in a conflict reminiscent of “Dr. Strangelove”?

Much as with the current American presidential election landscape, the due diligence machine which has been put in place for the past thirty years to provide a minimum amount of protection against theft and forgeries in the art market is about to collapse, unless cooler heads prevail.

It is time to think seriously about establishing a global system of due diligence that does not rely solely on what Albion has to offer us. For those of you who do not know what “Albion” is, it is the 

Albion

name given to the island of Great Britain before it was Great Britain. One ancient site was Londinium, which is today’s London.

Londinium

Recap of the Gurlitt case

by Marc Masurovsky

Two and a half years have elapsed since the Gurlitt case burst onto the international scene. Here is a recap as seen through the tinted glasses of plunderedart.

November 8, 2013

HARP petitioned the German government to release the complete inventory of all of the works of art found in the Munich apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt.

January 19, 2014

The Gurlitt Task Force members are highlighted and the questions raised about its efficacy in the face of opacity from the German government to request for information about the contents of the Gurlitt collection. Emphasis is placed on the dealings of his father, Hildebrand Gurlitt, as a privileged dealer and buyer for the Nazi government in the Reich and in occupied territories.

January 20, 2015

With Cornelius Gurlitt dead, progress on understanding the contents of the Cornelius Gurlitt collection eludes everyone. To add more spice to the already entangled saga of Cornelius Gurlitt, the world finds out that shortly before his death, he bequeathed his collection to the Kunstmuseum in Bern.

January 29, 2015

Monika Gruetters, Germany’s new Minister of Culture, has sought to appease domestic and international critics about the apparent inability of the Gurlitt Task Force to make any significant progress in identifying looted art amongst the more than 1400 objects seized in Munich and Salzburg. She has pledged more funding for provenance research, announced a reorganization of agencies in Germany responsible for provenance research and documenting Nazi thefts of art objectsinto a new Center for Lost Art.

April 23, 2015

The apparent consistent stonewalling by the German government to seek a speedy resolution to the Gurlitt mess made us wonderwhether there was any genuine desire to invest the necessary resources to make of the Gurlitt case an example of how to address ethically and scientifically the complex nature of ideologically motivated thefts of property owned by the victims of Nazism.

August 23, 2015

Ori Soltes, president of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project, reviewed one of the first English-language narratives to appear on the puzzle surrounding the unraveling of the Gurlitt case. This narrative, Hitler’s Art Thief, was penned by Susan Ronald.

January 25, 2016

With the merciful end brought to the less than satisfactory work of the Gurlitt task Force, a quick overview of the Task Force’s findings added even more confusion and perplexity to an already-opaque two year long research effort that resembled more an exercise conducted in the basement of the National Security Agency than a historical research effort aimed at shedding light on the activities of a very prolific Nazi-sponsored agent trained as an art historian and museum official, Hildebrand Gurlitt.

March 11, 2016

With the announced doubling of the research budget for the newly-formed Center for Lost Art, German Culture Minister Monika Gruetters sought to appease, once again, her critics, domestic and foreign, regarding the botched outcome of the now-defunct Gurlitt Task Force. She made a critical misstep by intimating that placing Jews on a German task force called theLimbach Commission would inject bias in its proceedings.

From the publicized discovery of the Cornelius Gurlitt art collection to the shuttering of the Gurlitt Task Force,  the German government has displayed a complicated dual face to its commitment to "deal with the past", its Nazi past, and to effect some measure of justice so that German society can move forward and address the complex crimes associated with thefts and misappropriations of property, especially cultural property. On the one hand, Germany has done a marvelous job addressing the horrors that its citizens perpetrated against Jews and other groups who were full-fledged members of German civil society until they were excluded from it.  German youth are some of the most advanced in the world, outpacing American and Israeli Jewish students, in their mastery and understanding of the events that shook their country and the conscience of the world between 1933 and 1945.  On the other hand, the German government has been unable and/or unwilling to put in place an efficient mechanism by which to identify, investigate, and process humanely, ethically, and legally, instances where looted cultural assets are found in German collections, private and/or public.  The Gurlitt Task Force is the perfect example of this systemic dysfunction and reminds us that it's easier to 'deal with the Holocaust' than with its details, exemplified by looted artistic objects once owned by Jews and which are currently displayed and traded on German territory amongst German citizens, businesses and institutions.

Much work still needs to be done.

Monika Gruetters’ “Jewish problem”

by Marc Masurovsky

On March 3, 2016, the New York Times published an article signed by correspondent Alison Smale which confirmed that the Gurlitt Task Force’s work had been transferred to the “Center for Lost Art” in Magdeburg, Germany, as part of a general overhaul of the German government’s agencies specialized in issues pertaining to looted art. Thanks to Minister Gruetters, this Center has received a badly-needed injection of funds which doubled its previous budget to reach six million euros, renewing her commitment to ensure that research would continue into the provenance of the Gurlitt collection's 1400 objects.

Monika Gruetters

Culture Minister Gruetters has been sharply taken to task by domestic and international critics for the slowness of the research into the possibility that works tainted by anti-Jewish persecution and theft during the Nazi years might be part of the now-infamous Gurlitt collection, “discovered” in 2012 and made public in the fall of 2013. As of now, five paintings are known to have been linked to a victim of Nazi plunder. There are more than 1400 works in the Gurlitt hoard.

Our problem today has to do with a comment that Minister Gruetters made in response to suggestions by Germany’s Jewish community that a member of that community be appointed to the so-called Limbach commission which hears claims for restitution of looted art present in German cultural institutions. The commission’s recommendations are non-binding and, so far, have been mostly hostile to claimants who, in almost every instance, live outside of Germany and are of Jewish descent.

Hence, the Limbach Commission’s objectivity and interest in furthering justice 70 years after the demise of the Third Reich, have been repeatedly called into question. This state of affairs has not prevented Minister Gruetters from pointing out that the presence of a “Jewish figure” at the Limbach Commission would be ill-advised because “that person would be the only voice who would be prejudiced.”

The seating of a member of the Jewish community of Germany on the Limbach Commission would be viewed as injecting bias into the commission’s proceedings. Ms. Gruetters’ comment is provocative for a number of reasons:

Jutta Limbach

1/ a Jewish member of the commission would automatically be prejudiced. In what direction, pray tell? For or against the claimant? As if the quality of being Jewish signified a taint on one’s capacity to be objective and impartial.

2/ the minister’s comment subsumes that Jews favor restitution and have never been known to oppose restitution.

3/ no one has questioned the prejudice or bias of the non-Jewish members of the Limbach Commission. Does the fact that the Limbach commission’s non-Jewish makeup ensure objectivity and impartiality in the proceedings to assess the merit of a claim put forth by a Jewish claimant, whose family once resided in Germany? If anything, ten years of proceedings at the Limbach Commission could make us wonder if, in fact, the commission’s good judgment is tainted, principally, because there is no “outside” voice amongst its members. In short, it behaves as an echo chamber of individuals reluctant to acknowledge the vicissitudes of history when it comes to cultural plunder on its territory, once ruled by the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP).

In passing, the presence (albeit in a minority) of members of the Jewish faith on the Gurlitt Task Force did not appear to have a negative impact on the work of that commission. If anything, those minority voices acted as foils to the “objective” wisdom dispensed by its “non-Jewish” members.

Ms. Gruetters’ tasteless comment reflects a longstanding problem inherent to postwar discussions about the Holocaust, reparations, restitution, and justice. The Jewish voice is still viewed as a voice containing implicit bias in its essence, which denies that voice the capacity to infuse critical thinking in its assessment of the consequences of genocide on individual members of the Jewish community and on the merit of claims for reparations and/or restitution.

Ms. Gruetters should understand that Jews do not speak in one single, unified, public voice on matters pertaining to restitution and reparations. In fact, that discussion is rife with dissenting opinions as one is likely to find among leaders and senior officials of Jewish organizations and Holocaust memorials voices that are indifferent or in fact hostile to restitution, especially in the cultural field. There are notable exceptions, as with the Commission for Art Recovery and the Claims Conference.

It would behoove Ms. Gruetters and other German officials, now and henceforth, to view Jewish individuals as critical thinkers rather than puppets who could not reason because of their appurtenance to their faith. If anything, debate is healthy especially among bureaucrats. It helps shake off the dust and inject fresh blood and new thoughts into an otherwise stilted conversation weighed down by the burdens of law and history, but apparently not sufficiently stirred with sprinkles of ethics and morality.

WWII-era opportunities on the US art market

by Marc Masurovsky

One of the advantages of being at war is that there are three sides-the Allies, the enemy and the non-belligerents or “neutrals.” In the case of WWII, we will only focus on the Allies and the enemy. The United States remained neutral or non-belligerent until it was bombed into entering the war through the somewhat reckless and deceitful Japanese airborne attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Thereafter, the enemy was clearly delineated as being the Axis Powers—the Japanese Empire, the Greater German Reich, and Mussolini’s Italy.

Meanwhile, in preparation for that day when the US would enter the European war, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt had  issued a raft of executive orders aimed at protecting US consumers and producers from the evil Axis powers and their perfidious attempts at penetrating and influencing the American economy and altering the American way of life forever. One of those many decisions aimed at seizing, confiscating, vesting “enemy” property or property suspected of being “enemy-owned or controlled.” In the end, it did not really matter.  The Alien Property Custodian at the Department of the Treasury would be the administrator of such seized property.

Art objects seized by the US government between 1941 and 1945 turned out to be a boon for the American art market, especially art galleries and museums. The fact that an art object entering the US could have an “Axis” provenance, in other words, it could belong to an “enemy national”, most often German, Austrian, Italian, Japanese. Apparently, the US government did not wait too long before it decided to sell off these seized objects, to the great despair of its rightful owners. Here are some examples.

Antiquities

The Baltimore-based Walters Art Museum acquired a Syrian antiquity which had a pre-WWII provenance indicating a German national, Max von Oppenheim. Confiscated in 1943, it was sold to the Walters in 1944 with some assistance from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

German Expressionists

On the Expressionist end of the artistic spectrum, the Museum of Modern Art did very well with objects confiscated from Karl Buchholz, a German-born art dealer who emigrated to the US in the mid-1930s, but not without having already cashed in on the emerging bonanza created by Nazi purges of “degenerated” works of art. His collection was vested or frozen and confiscated by the Alien Property Custodian in 1944, and its contents sold incrementally through the 1940s and early 1950s.

For those who are interested, if the Alien Property Custodian appears in the provenance of an art object, you know that it was confiscated and sold off as “enemy property.” No questions asked.