HEIRS - Observations on Provenance

RECOVERY AND COMPENSATION REPAYMENT

Anita Halpern recovered her ancestor's artwork after returning the compensation: See my blogpost THE CASE FOR RESTITUTION

Marilyn Henry is a writer who unravels the most complex aspects of Holocaust restitution in a straightforward way.

In her OPINION   for the Jerusalem Post she offers the art world a source for deeper provenance checking- the records of compensation data belonging to the German government.

These official  German claimant records reflect those artworks that were lost and for which compensation was (in most cases)  granted.

So isn’t this a “case closed” scenario?

NO. Owners who are alive or their heirs may still have rights to them, since the taint of theft has never been erased.

 

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

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

 

 

DESTRUCTION of the TEMPLE

Tisha B’Av- In Memoriam

Tonight we remembered the destruction of the First and Second Temple in Jerusalem. In prayer, Prophet Jeremiah is read, including brutal descriptions of the desecration, spoliation and suffering.

Lamentation 1.

verse 7
…Jerusalem remembers all the treasures that were hers in days of old.

verse 10   
The enemy laid hands on all her treasures;

verse 11
All her people groan as they search for bread; they  barter their treasures for food to keep themselves alive.

NOLDE IN THE NEWS

Ironic that the most recent restitution cases surround this painter so famous for style, albeit infamous for his connection to Nazi ideals.
Emil Nolde was a Nazi.
Nolde was a supporter of the Nazi party from the early 1920s, having become a member of its Danish section. He expressed negative opinions about Jewish artists, and considered Expressionism to be a distinctively Germanic style.

Confoundingly, Emil Nolde’s avant garde modern work was coveted by many Jewish art collectors during the early twentieth century in Europe. Dr. Fred Julius of Hamburg was one. His two British- based heirs have lodged a claim against the city of Linz which holds 1915 painting (above) called "May Meadow" 

Linz, Austria is where Adolph Hitler planned to open a mega cultural museum.  Maybe it is fitting that the nice, new civic modern art museum would get tarnished by the afterglow of Hitler's art policy.   The Lentos Art Museum knowingly bought it in 1953 from another collector known to trade in artworks seized by the Nazis.
 

MORE ON MoMA

Embedded in David D’arcy’s recent review (//daily.greencine.com/archives/004048.html) of Austrian documentary by Elisabeth Scharang, My Dear Republic, is his take on the problem of big powers controlling the version of history that will be remembered instead of the truth. The tag line of the film about Fritz Zawrel’s lifelong mission to expose the Nazi atrocities he witnessed as a child at Am Spiegelgrund, is that the truth cannot be denied. But in the process, those powers that be try to resist and lie to serve their own needs. (Am Spiegelgrund was the "children's clinic" in Vienna where young Zawrel sadly became a ward. Although called a clinic, it, in fact, was a centre for the euthanasia of children.)

However, I bristle when D’arcy chides a Jewish city like New York for not forcing the issue at the MoMA.

D’Arcy writes:

Consider the behavior of the Museum of Modern Art when it was found in late 1997 to have borrowed a painting by Egon Schiele from an Austrian foundation and it was later shown that the picture was looted (aryanized) from a Jewish art dealer in Vienna in 1939. (For years, Austria contended that everything looted from Austria Jews under the Nazis was returned, provided there were living heirs to whom the art could be returned. That's proven to be as true as the myth of Austrian victim-hood under the Nazis.)

First MoMA just tried to send the painting out of the country, and almost succeeded. Then the museum skirted the near-certainty that this painting, Portrait of Wally by Schiele, was looted by the Nazis, and argued that it had to comply with its loan contract, or else the international network of art loans that draw crowds to museums would be endangered. The entire museum community in the US agreed (even the Jewish Museum in New York), and still does. Now, in a lawsuit against the US government, MoMA (along with a foundation funded by the Austrian government) is arguing, among other things, that its officials did not know that the painting was stolen, and that the real tragedy here is that the painting hasn't been seen for almost ten years because of all these annoying legal problems created by a Jewish family that MoMA says was never entitled legally to the painting.

The real victims are not the victims of the Nazis, but museum-goers and well-meaning institutions like MoMA that just want to show them art borrowed in good faith from Austria. (MoMA was never prevented from showing Portrait of Wally. To the contrary - the painting was in storage at MoMA during most of the current lawsuit.) There's a point here. If not showing the painting was a loss to world culture, what about the loss of the truth (still not acknowledged by MoMA) about how and why the painting was looted, and why it has never been returned. Remember the work of art as that fusion of beauty and truth? The Austrians have resisted telling that story, as they resisted telling the story of Fritz Zawrel. (Google D'Arcy MoMA NPR Schiele for more on the Schiele case, which could come trial in federal court next year.)

I fear his point here is that he expects some kind of Judaic moral sway should take hold there. D’Arcy asks, “Why has MoMA made common cause with them [The Austrians who (sic) have resisted telling that story], over this picture stolen by the Nazis, in a city like New York where Nazi crimes are deplored as the worst crimes of human history? 

I think D’arcy’s coverage of the 1997 Schiele episode at the MoMA resulted in his termination from NPR. Granted, most articles I have seen read this way. And, as he admits, the truth of THAT story won’t be heard until next year in court. But he also knows that the city of Jerusalem will not force the Israel museum to return stolen art and Judaica. And he is aware that the American Association of Jewish Museum passed a resolution that, in effect, relieves their obligation to identify stolen objects in their collections. This is startling considering the the push from the Washington Principles, The Claims Conference and the American Association of Museums for ALL museums to identify and assist in the return of artwork to eligible heirs. It is all about self interest.

THE HUNT FOR TROPHY BOOKS

In the hunt for the lost books of the Rome Synagogue Library, I notice that the lead Italian investigator is following the trail into Russia. The report uses the euphemism “sort of trophy art” when it introduces the concept of Trophy Brigades which were actual units of Soviet troops. The US (and Allies) has its Monuments Men, now receiving pleasant attention from the movie The Rape of Europa and Robert Edsel’s passionate support for them: http://www.robertedselblog.com/index.php/2006/06/21/finding-the-monuments-men-a-progress-report. Now the Russsians introduced their own artistic-types who had a singular mission as well. This was to retrieve precious spoils of war from the European Theatre as revenge and replenishment for the utter spoliation of cultural treasures destroyed by the Nazis.

Seems that the Monuments Men and the Trophy Brigades were in direct competition, but God knows there was enough buried treasure in the region to go around. But it is troubling to learn that the highest ranking Monument Man (see Monument Man Gone Wrong in this blog) in Germany was found to have given the Soviets advance coordinates of two Berlin Towers where a huge stash of paintings were located. But maybe he thought the Soviets would hand it over to the MMFA’s Collection Point. Or maybe he was working for them.

Although the MMFA was originally set up to be a shared program between the US and British, records show that there was tremendous friction between the Allies in this division. Indeed, there were two controlling MMFA headquarters on the continent in 1944; that of the Communications Zone in Paris, usually called "Com Z", and that of the Supreme Headquarters Allies Expeditionary Force, 18 miles away in Versailles, customarily shorted to SHAEF. As Stratton Hammond, then US ranking operations officer for the MMF&A in France would later query, “who was running the show?".

Reviewed: ‘THE RAPE OF EUROPA’

By Fern Smiley

Right after watching the Toronto premiere of the brilliant The Rape of Europa, I felt that it may be long, too long for ordinary moviegoers. To my surprise, it was either the power of this film or these very interested viewers but I soon realized - by their exuberant applause - that this movie wholly enthralled the entire audience right until the very last scene.

Admittedly, I was riveted; having read the book The Rape of Europa, over 9 years ago, upon which this documentary was based. It is the story of the fate of Europe’s treasures during the Second World War.

The film starts and ends with the most spectacular story of art theft of the Nazi Era namely, the recently restituted Gustav Klimt paintings to the heirs of the Bloch Bauer family of Vienna. Finally, after all these years in the news, how nice to see their representative, Maria Altman, aristocratic and gracious, admonishing the Austrian government for persisting in the claim of ownership of her family’s art treasure. She was also eloquent in her way of reprimanding Austria for their mythical justification for their actions as being victims of Nazi occupation. It was a loud and clear message: These paintings deserve to be in the public view, in museums, just not in Austria.

Much of the film uses original footage and Experts interviews to document the losses and recoveries endured by Europe’s institutions. Specifically there was the focus on Hitler’s philosophy of Aryan culture which denuded the German museums from precious art – 17,000 pieces that he considered to be ‘degenerate,’. Loosely, this meant all impressionist and modern art - and anything done by a Jewish hand. Occupied countries’ museums were purged of any painting on the wish list made for Hitler’s new planned Germanic museum in Linz or for Goerring’s desire. Polish and Soviet museums, castles, monasteries, and monuments experienced extreme, complete devastation as loathing prevailed over their culture. A culture which was deemed sub-human by the Nazi racial policy.

The film’s considerable photo montages of destroyed Warsaw, Florence, Pisa and the empty Louvre did not elicit the rising emotion of despair - as a slave labourer Parisian Jew recounts his job in a warehouse at the train tracks in Paris. After losing his four brothers and parents to the Nazis, he works sorting objects and comes face-to-face with his possessions. These included photos of his own family amidst the sorting process in the warehouse. His slavery’s toil distributed the valuable (furnishings) and even the mundane (linens) possessions of the deported Jews of France to families in Germany.

The idea here is that the Holocaust was linked to economic plunder. It’s an idea that targets the Jews for their possessions and collections and that the theft was organized, systematic, efficient, and documented both by the Nazis - as well as bystanders. These were people like Rose Valland in Paris who secretly kept the roll call of the paintings from Jewish collectors in the Jeu de Paume in Paris.

Finally, The Rape of Europa exposes the role of the Monuments Men - creative types attached to the US military, who, in 1944, entered the theatre of operations to help secure and protect the cultural treasures of Italy. The film recalls the recovery process in 1944-1952 and the collection points where officials received the contents back from the purged museums and collectors of Europe. As Lynn Nicholas said, “it was like a film in rewind”. The treasures shipments this time going backwards – in the trains, with the packing, and documenting… all over again.

What was a disappointment for me was the lack of updated research since Nicholas’s (shown at right) original book release. She, of course, has gone on to new projects, but the opening of NARA classified X2 files in 2001 and thereafter for the IWG contain information that affect the recovery process. The Russian promise to produce a database of trophy paintings from its collection that may have belonged to Jews in Germany is still waiting completion. The movie quotes the Hermitage Director (shown at left) who shamelessly ignores the agreement by withholding the information to this day.

BAT ANNETTE

By Fern Smiley

Today was my Mother's - Annette's - birthday. At least the date we celebrated for her since I can remember. Only recently did we learn that her real date of birth is July 2nd, 1929 which for some reason was altered for her records when the war ended in 1945. Annette died five months ago - and her memory is largely responsible for my passion in initatiting this weblog.

My Mother was part of a middle class family in Adamow and Parchew that radiated rabbinic orthodoxy and entrepreneurial substance. As a matter of fact, the first electrical current in that region was supplied by her grandfather's mill. Her early life was privileged with summer houses and servants. But the war changed all that. Any art adorning her family's walls were removed by neighbours or the German authorities upon deportation and liquidation of the family home in 1943. My Mother was left an orphan in Chenstochow, Poland, with her younger brother; both suffering misserably but somehow surviving during the Holocaust.

Today, my Mother's legacy cannot pass on to the next generation the precious amd meaningful heirlooms which her family owned: the fine candlesticks, the treasured Jewish ceremonial objects, and the rare books. All that was passed down from her parents or given to her as wedding gifts, as was the tradition, is also gone.

However, my Mother has passed on to me a determined passion for uncovering the truth wherever it resides - and having the ability to forgive and rebuild.

Now I am her heir - Bat Annette.