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Category: Nazi plunder

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Hypocrites

If you can ignore human suffering to hold on to something that isn’t yours, you don’t deserve the label (or the tax status) of a philanthropic organization.
l’Acteur, 1904-05, Pablo Picasso, courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Nazis seized an estimated 650,000 works of art between 1933 and 1945. There are well over 100,000 items that have not been returned to their rightful owners. Tens of thousands of these works ended up in public collections in the United States.
In 1998, 44 nations created the Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, spearheaded by our own State Department. It called for a “just and fair solution” if heirs came forward to reclaim their family’s legacy. Museums also pledged to thoroughly research their acquisitions.
That was twenty years ago. In the meantime, many of our museums have stalled for time, using the classic American defense—the courts—to avoid compliance.
Artillerymen, 1915, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
“Prominent U.S. museums have evaded the restitution of Holocaust-era stolen art to rightful owners and heirs by refusing to resolve claims on their facts and merits and by asserting technical defenses, such as statutes of limitations,” the World Jewish Restitution Organization reportedin 2015.
The city with the highest Jewish population in the world is not Jerusalem, but New York, where 1.5 million Jews make their home. Most are the descendants of Jews who escaped persecution in Europe in the 19th and 20th century. Many are enthusiastic supporters of the arts. Sysco co-founder Herbert Irving and his wife Florence are one example among many. Last year their foundation gave the Metropolitan Museum a cool $80 million.
In February of this year, the heirs of Paul Leffmann lost their suit against the Met for the return of Pablo Picasso’s L’acteur. Leffmann sold it under duress for $13,200 when his family fled Cologne in 1938. It is now worth an estimated $100 million.
“The Leffmanns would not have disposed of this seminal work at that time, but for the Nazi and fascist persecution to which they had been, and without doubt would continue to be, subjected,” argued their lawyers. The case is now being appealed.
In October, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation announcedit would return Artillerymen by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner to the heirs of its original owner. Kirchner, a founding member of Die BrĂĽcke, was a seminal figure in Expressionism. He too was a victim of Nazi Germany. Branded a “degenerate,” he ultimately took his own life, but not before he lived to see his entire ouevre confiscated.
The Guggenheim spent two years doing the right thing. They discovered that the painting’s initial attribution was a fabrication. It had in fact been owned by art dealer Alfred Flechtheim, who fled Berlin in 1933. It passed to Flechtheim’s niece, Rosi Hulisch. She committed suicide before she was to be shipped to a concentration camp in 1938.
It was then acquired by Dr. Kurt Feldhäusser. After he died in 1945, his mother sent his art collection to New York to be sold. Artillerymen was purchased by MoMA and then traded to the Guggenheim.
Portrait of Tilla Durieux, 1914, Auguste Renoir, courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan hasn’t been nearly as obliging. Among its treasures is the Portrait of Tilla Durieux, painted by an elderly Auguste Renoir. The sitter, a famous actress, took the painting with her when she and her husband fled Berlin in 1933. She survived; he died in Sachsenhausenin 1943. Their heirs claim that the couple sold the painting under duress in 1935 as they scrambled to find a way to leave Europe.
According to the New York Post, the Neue Galerie, Morgan Library and MoMA all hold looted works by Egon Schiele. These were part of a personal collection belonging to Austrian Jewish cabaret artist Fritz GrĂĽnbaum. GrĂĽnbaum owned more than 400 pieces, including eighty by Schiele. A quarter of the collection appeared on the art market in the early 1950s through Swiss art dealer Eberhard W. Kornfeld. The whereabouts of the rest are unknown.
Grünbaum died at Dachau in 1941. His wife, Elisabeth, was forced to surrender the family’s art collection to the Nazis before her transfer to a death camp in 1942.
If you can ignore that kind of suffering to hold on to something that isn’t yours, you don’t deserve the label (or the tax status) of a philanthropic organization.
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Twisted

Among the missing: Vincent van Gogh’s Vincent on his way to work / The painter on his way to Tarascon, Property of Kulturhistorisches Museum in Magdeburg, Germany (formerly the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum). Missing from the Stassfurt salt mines art repository near Magdeburg, Germany, on April 12, 1945.
When I was doing art festivals, I never worked very hard to secure the inventory. Most other painters took the same approach. While jewelers and other craftsmen sometimes had things stolen, paintings were immune. Most working artists sell paintings to people who have an emotional response to their work, and that’s something that would be blunted if the work in question were acquired dishonestly. Artwork at this level hasn’t been commodified in the same way that collectible masterworks are.
Among the missing: Emil Nolde’s Red Poppies. Purchased for Sl. Dr. Koch, documented on artist’s list (“Purchaser List”). Lost at Hamburg harbor (Ăśberseehafen) in 1939. Painting appeared again in the 1980s and went from a northern Germany collection into a North German Gallery (Kiel or Hamburg?), and after not selling at auction was sold through the Austrian art market (Salzburg) to an unknown purchaser.
That’s vastly different from one of the main moral dilemmas facing our age: the problem of repatriating paintings stolen by the Nazis. Today’s announcementby Federal officials that an eighteenth century painting has been returned to Poland was timed to coincide with the release of George Clooney’s The Monuments Men.
“If members of the American public question the provenance of cultural objects from World War Two in their possession, they are urged to call Homeland Security Investigations,” said Nicole Navas, a spokeswoman for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Right. The bald fact is that, sixty years after the fact, most Nazi loot is returned only reluctantly.
Among the missing: Claude Monet’s Manet painting in Monet’s Garden, Property of Martha and Max Liebermann Collection. Bought by Max Liebermann in France in 1898; visible in a photo hanging in the salon of his Berlin apartment at Pariser Platz, in 1932. It remained in the possession of Liebermann’s widow Martha until it was confiscated and sold in Berlin in 1943.
The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg or ERR was dedicated to stealing cultural property from subdued nations, Jews in particular. It managed to steal 20% of the known art in Europe, operating in France, Belarus, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic states.
A vast amount of that was recovered immediately post-war; however, there are still hundreds of thousands of items that have never been returned to their rightful owners (or their descendants, since those owners are mostly now dead).
Among the missing: Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man. Property of The Czartoryski Museum in Krakow, Poland. Confiscated by Nazi officials in September 1939 for Hitler’s FĂĽhrermuseum, Linz, Austria. Last seen in Dr. Hans Frank’s chalet in Neuhaus on Lake Schliersee, Germany, in January 1945.
Somewhere there is a rich collector who goes to his basement vault to revel in possessing the spectacular haul from the never-solved Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist of 1990. That person is pretty twisted. But the unrecovered Nazi loot is far, far worse, in part because of its scale. There are hundreds or even thousands of people out there holding on to it. They eat off silver and crystal in dining rooms graced with paintings that were bought and paid for with the blood of millions of genocide victims. That’s beyond simple theft; that’s absolute perversion of the soul.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!