HEIRS - Observations on Provenance

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.

PRIVATE ART DEALERS

A hearing on efforts toward restitution of art stolen from Jews during the Holocaust was held by the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Financial Services, Domestic and International Monetary Policy Subcommittee on July 27, 2006.

The Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA) was represented by Gilbert S. Edelson, Administrative Vice President and Counsel.
But what is so strange is the teeming numbers of dealers in the trade who appear in Art in America’s database (see  my earlier US ART DEALERS post ) while Edelson states his membership hovers around 165.

Even subtracting those dealers that trade in antique furniture, decorative arts, rare books, porcelain, rugs, Asian and Tribal Art, there are still many more than 165 names left on the list I posted.

Seems to me that this is a largely unregulated business and, other than 165, U.S. dealers do not  have to conform to the ADAA Guidelines Regarding Art Looted During the Nazi Era.( P. 7 of Edelson's Testimony).

There are only very few years left for existing claimants victimized during the Holocaust to rediscover their lost artworks. During the war and especially in those years following, knowingly or not, private art dealers in North America were often directly responsible for the dispersal of looted possessions.

They know to be prepared for years and years of difficult claims that will continue to unravel their art market  as HEIRS, rightfully pursue what was once their families’ legacy.

THE ROLE OF THE US GOVERNMENT IN ART RESTITUTION Press Release: US State Department

Wednesday, 25 April 2007, 8:53 am

J. Christian Kennedy, Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues

Potsdam, Germany
April 23, 2007

As Prepared

Thank you, Professor Schoeps, for the opportunity to speak at this conference  and to meet with people who have been and remain deeply engaged in the field of art restitution. This is a subject that has drawn increasing public attention  in the last few years as prominent cases have been resolved or have reached the stage where they have become newsworthy. The vibrant and active art market of today has added a new dimension to the subject of looted art.

The displacement of cultural items has been a feature of warfare for centuries, but it reached a new high in the massive art looting that occurred during World War II. The Allies were well aware during the war of this looting and in  January 1943 issued the London Declaration in which eighteen countries reserved the right to declare invalid any transfers of property both in Germany and in the countries the Nazi forces occupied during the war.