HEIRS - Observations on Provenance

ISRAEL MUSEUM WEBSITE

The Israel Museum has launched an on-line catalogue of works of art and Judaica looted during World War II and given to the museum after the war, the museum announced Sunday. The Jerusalem museum houses several hundred works stolen during the Holocaust that either have no record of prior ownership or came from institutions that did not survive the war. The property was originally given to the Bezalel National Museum, the Israel Museum's predecessor, by the Jewish Restitution Successor Organization, which was charged with reclaiming stolen Jewish property and which transferred many works of art and Judaica to Jewish institutions in Israel and around the world. The works were subsequently moved to the Israel Museum in 1965, when the museum was founded. The on-line catalogue - accessible on the Israel Museum's Web site, www.imj.org.il - provides information on paintings, drawings and Judaica objects, and includes images, titles of works, names of artists (if known), countries of origin (if known), dimensions and other identifying characteristics. The Web site, which is entitled World War II Provenance Research Online , was launched in cooperation with the newly-established Company for Location and Restitution of Holocaust Victims' Assets in Israel, which had pressured the museum and other public institutions in Israel to publicize the information in accordance with the law. Avraham Roet, head of the restitution organization, praised the museum on Sunday for fully acceding to the request to list the information after initially balking at the move. "This is a major moral accomplishment for the state of Israel," said Roet, a Holocaust survivor. Roet said that this was the first time that a Jewish museum was searching for heirs for artwork stolen in the Holocaust and given to Jewish organizations after the war. The new Web site provides instructions for requesting property restitution. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----                   http://www.jpost.com

Check the website and click JUDAICA by Subject. Under cups, for example, the NAMES appear on most kiddush cups.(unfortunately not photographed to take advantage online -Why?) This is a wonderful opportunity to restore family cultural objects and in these few cases, there may actually be HEIRS alive who can match those names to their ancestors. Too bad 1) They were kept so long 2) This is the only Jewish Museum attempting to restore items they received at war's end.

It was with a heavy heart that I looked at each illustrated page of cups, chanukiot, paintings and other objects that came from households whose members suffered such persecution. It's so different than other museums provenance research pages, where there is no assumption that the gaps in provenances automatically mean that they were looted-- In this case, each and every vessel holds a tragedy.

LIZ TAYLOR & THE US SUPREME COURT

"The Canadians who claim that Elizabeth Taylor has their great-grandmother's Vincent van Gogh painting are taking their case to the U.S. Supreme Court. A petition filed on Aug. 16 by Andrew Orkin, Mark Orkin and Sarah-Rose Adler states that View of the Asylum and Chapel at Saint-Remy, painted in 1889, belonged to their great-grandmother Margarethe Mauthner of Berlin, and was taken in the late 1930s under coercion (the family is Jewish). In May, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and the California District Court rejected the Orkins' claim, finding that Taylor had acquired the work in good faith years after Mauthner willingly agreed to its sale. The Orkins are pressing on, citing a presumption in U.S. law that all property owned by Jews between 1933 and 1945 in Germany was deemed to have been confiscated by the Nazis, and that any art works from Germany in that period could be of dubious provenance."

This report, by Val Ross at the Globe and Mail, is missing a point. It leaves out the fact that Elizabeth Taylor was awarded her rights to the Van Gogh based ONLY on  statute of limitations. The court didn't find "that Taylor had acquired the work in good faith years after Mauthner willingly agreed to its sale"

It found for  Taylor because time ran out.

Too bad, too late to claim.

In other words, because the court did not give the HEIRS any relief from the Statute of Limitations in California law, they were deprived of their right to have their facts ring true at that hearing. What is absurd is that in the US, a Holocaust claim can be too late in California while in New York the same claim can be heard.

The real likelihood of coercion, the trail after the loss, all were irrelevant to the outcome once the statute of limitations was invoked. So the real loss is the rights of the family to pursue their property because they didn't "get wind" of the painting resurfacing in the 60's when Taylor's father  bought it at auction. Andrew Orkin was 11 years old around that time. Seems unfair that the HEIRS would be shut out.

The facts around the case itself are VERY compelling and if heard at the US Supreme Court, will show that provenance information that Taylor offered when she once tried to sell the painting in 1990, differ from the scholarly published dates that define Mrs. Mauthner's term of ownership. Taylor's 1990 brochure did not disclose that the painting was registered in the two latest (1939 and 1970) catalogues raisonnées as having been owned in Berlin by Mrs. Mauthner in 1937 or later. Instead, the brochure said only that Mauthner "kept the picture until at least 1928."

And the HEIRS have evidence that as late as 1939, the painting had been listed in an internationally published art catalogue as being part of their grandmother’s collection.

So let the truth of the facts of this case be argued, in a court which will recognize the three 1998 federal statutes intended to address the plight of Holocaust victims to facilitate the restitution of property taken from them during the Nazi era.

POLISH HEIRS

WHO ARE THE HEIRS?

The case of the medieval cross discovered in Austria is fascinating and pertinent in helping understand the purge of cultural objects as the Nazi regime conquered and occupied Europe.

In addition to the planned and executed genocide of Polish Jews, it was the ‘official policy of the Nazis to take into custody all important art treasures which belonged to Polish public institutions, private collections, and the Church. They would not have remained in Poland in case of a German victory, but they would have been used to complement German artistic property’...according to testimony given at Nuremberg.

So, in 1945 when the Germans lost the war, one would expect the Allies to return these Polish treasures to their place of origin and rightful owners. Sometimes fate intervened and the plundered Polish art was plundered a second time. Immediately, black markets arose and anything transportable and tradeable was stolen. This likely occurred in the case of the crucifix, which, in 1941, was taken from Poland by the Nazis to a castle in an Austrian village but ended up being discovered in the trash in a town not very far away, but sixty-three years late.

"We lost track of what happened then -- we don't know how the crucifix ended up in Zell am See," according to police.

In this case, the cross, belonged to Polish aristocratic owners who were stripped of their treasures.

Police traced the origin of the cross, showing the piece had been stolen by the Nazi regime from the Polish art collection of Izabella Elzbieta of Czartoryski Dzialinska

AUSTRIA'S ART DATABASE

The English version of the Art Database of the National Fund of the Republic of Austria has been available on the internet since 3 July 2007. The Art Database provides information in English concerning “heirless” objects of art and objects of cultural value which are likely to have been expropriated in Austria during National Socialism and which then became public property. Link

THE DEMAND IS THERE FOR ENGLISH

A new Web page run by Germany's Finance Ministry attempts to find the proper owners of looted Nazi art by documenting photos and descriptions of paintings and other pieces of art confiscated during the Third Reich.

Although parts of BADV's Web page are available in English, the detailed list of paintings and artworks are not. "We’ll translate the page if the demand is there," said König. (Tell Mr. Konig directly: Harald König harald.koenig@badv.bund.de; Tel.: 030/91608-1292)

An online catalog of some 100 art objects looted by the Nazis was posted online by the Federal Office for Central Services and Unresolved Property Issues (BADV) on Wednesday. The list includes a dozen early Renaissance portraits and biblical scenes by Lucas Cranach the Elder, best known for his oil renditions of Martin Luther, as well as an oil-on-canvas Rubens portrait from the 1600s of the Archbishop Antonio Trieste of Ghent.

The agency, which is a division of the Finance Ministry and has branches throughout Germany, was established last year to handle claims not only for looted art, antique furniture and other cultural artifacts, but also the restitution of real estate and property seized by the Nazis.

 

 Biblical themes are common in works by Lucas Cranach the Elder

According to the BADV's Harald König, the body of case-law dealing with restitution issues and compensation for assets confiscated by the Nazis is still growing more than 60 years after the end of the war.

 

Although most legal claims were settled in the post-war years in the former West Germany, the origins of much of the art unearthed in the eastern states after the reunification in 1990, has only recently begun being documented and returned to the original owners.

 

Mostly oil paintings on list of looted art 

 

So far the provenance of 36 objects out of nearly 600 that have been thoroughly documented have been or are in the process of being returned to Holocaust survivors or their descendents, said König.

 

Returning the art to its proper owners is nearly always a long legal process that can take years, or even decades, for owners to prove the art belongs to them.

 

The looted listed on the BADV's web page consists mainly of oil paintings, but also Italian, English and German antiques replete with detailed descriptions, historical references and a black and white photo. Most of the art has been loaned out to museums throughout Germany, including several works that had been originally intended for Hitler's museum in Linz, Austria.

 

The Nazis looted about 650,000 artworks in all according to estimates by the Jewish Claims Conference, of which only a fraction have been returned in spite of highly publicized restitution efforts since the mid-1990s. One of the main reasons for the meager returns was the difficulty involved in adequately documenting the provenance of art assets.

 

List needs to be in English for target audience

 

 Descendents of Holocaust survivors no longer speak German

"It's marvelous that such information is now being posted by the BADV," said Anne Webber, who is co-chair of the non-profit London-based Commission for Looted Art in Europe, though she added that the comprehensive list compiled by the agency would benefit from being translated into English.

 

Only last month, the National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism, which published its comprehensive database of stolen Nazi art in German last December, provided an English page as well.

 

"Such sites need to be accessible to their target audiences worldwide," Webber said. "The rightful owners are not likely to live in German speaking countries, nor speak German anymore."

Diana Fong
Deutsche Welle - Wed, 01 Aug 2007

 

 

RUSSIAN SECRETS

The Guardian ran an interesting story today about German cultural losses during World War Two. At the war’s end Russian soldiers, called Trophy Brigades, removed thousands of artistic objects from Germany. They were directed by the highest Soviet military authorities to bring it back to the Soviet Union as well deserved booty.
German cultural institutions have recently itemized their missing treasures in an effort to push their claim forward for restitution.
According to Kate Connolly “The detailed inventory, which one critic said read like a "book of mourning" for lost German artefacts, contains a staggering array of treasures, most of which are believed to have been seized by foreign soldiers in 1945”.

Seemingly obvious is the argument that had the National Socialist German government not started the war in the first place, we would not be having this discussion.

So although not pro claimant in this particular case, I wonder why the Russians do not rise to the occasion of sharing the richness of the art that they brought out of Germany. What a loss to world culture. What a loss of opportunity for the world to behold works of this ilk: “sculptures by Nicola Pisano, a delicate relief by Donatello, late Gothic Madonnas and an exquisite array of Baroque works rendered in stone and wood. Other star pieces include paintings by Botticelli and Van Dyck.”

The secretiveness and denials lead me and others to wonder what else do the Russians hoard in their ‘secret depots in Russia and Poland” besides the newly publicized list of German museum trophy art.

We do know, for example, that the Russians also hold a secret lost library, stolen from the Jewish Synagogue in Rome, first by the Nazis and then, at war’s end, stuffed into the bellies of the Soviet planes waiting to transport the precious books back to the Soviet homeland. See my earlier blog ‘Hunt For Trophy Books’ or click here.

How much more went into those planes than what the Germans are now demanding back? We will never really know but rest assured that the storage depots and repositories all over Germany stored not just the fine art of the German museums being protected from the air raids.

Those repositories were also was the point of no return for the artworks stolen from thousands of Jewish families most of who met a fate unimaginable by us all. These are the artworks that the Russians should acknowledge exist in their depots and these are the objects that should be returned to the rightful owners.