Bernard Taper


Last Friday, the San Francisco Chronicle ran an interesting profile of Bernard Taper, one of the so-called Monument Men who worked to recover works stolen by the Nazi’s after WWII. He worked as an art-intelligence officer with the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section of the U.S. military. I wonder what became of this section. It hasn’t seem to have been involved in any of the major conflicts the U.S. has waged since. Notably the efforts of Matthew Bogdanos in Iraq were on his own initiative because he has a background in Classics. It may be worth examining why this section has disappeared or if it is still functioning. It appears that it was a singular unit charged with repatriation Nazi spoliation. Profiles of these guys are always interesting, and this is no exception. Taper is featured prominently along with some others in the forthcoming documentary titled The rape of Europa. That film is being screened at the San Francisco International Film Festival. For more information click here. Taper has an excellent story to tell as this excerpt shows:

“I was in the Army for three years, and I didn’t fire a shot at anybody and nobody fired a shot at me. That’s the definition of a good war,” the white-haired Taper, sharp at 89, says with a smile. But he did his part to bring forth light, in the form of recovered art, from the darkness of the war.

Born in London and educated at UC Berkeley, Taper was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943. He served in intelligence and infantry units before being sent back to Berkeley to learn Chinese in preparation for work as a liaison officer assigned to Chaing Kai-Shek’s army in China. But at the last minute, the entire class was sent to Germany, where the war was over.

“It was the Army. Why do you think they invented words like ‘snafu’?” laughs Taper, who was assigned to Patton’s Third Army, then sent to Munich to write intelligence reports. Lunching outdoors one day at an officers’ club, he fell into conversation with a dashing chap named Walter Horn, an Aryan German who abhorred Hitler and left, became a professor of medieval history at UC Berkeley and saw combat action during the war.

“He started telling me marvelous, fascinating stories about what it was like in his job to search for lost and stolen art,” recalls Taper, who had begun contributing to the New Yorker and the Nation while serving in occupied Germany. Horn was desperate to go home, but couldn’t until he found a successor for his art-investigating job. “When he met me he found his successor,” says Taper, who told Horn he wasn’t an art historian and probably wasn’t qualified. Horn said the Monuments section was “lousy with art historians,” but what was needed was somebody who knew how to ask questions. As a budding journalist, Taper fit the bill.

As a further inducement, Horn told him he would have the use of a white BMW roadster, wouldn’t have to wear a uniform, could travel freely without orders and would meet women. “And he said if nothing else, there’s all this art you can look at,” recalls Taper, quick to point out that he got a brown Audi sedan, not the promised BMW. For about six weeks, Taper was in charge of the Army’s art-collecting center at Wiesbaden, which was filled with not only looted art but works from various German civic collections.

“They had fantastic stuff there,” Taper says. “In the office, across the whole back wall, was Watteau’s ‘Embarkation for Cythera,’ and a wonderful Degas, where you look up through the orchestra pit, through the beards of the musicians, at these elegant dancers. It was from the Frankfurt Museum.” As Taper says in the documentary, “Just that office alone was worth the price of admission to World War II.” Outside the door stood a 5,000-year-old stone Nefertiti, which also stopped Taper in his tracks. “I couldn’t just brush by. I had to stop and commune with her.”

Building on the work of previous Monument Men, such as his friend Stewart Leonard, a bomb diffuser who single-handedly removed 22 mines from the Chartres Cathedral and later opened crates containing priceless books and Dürer drawings, Taper tracked down mostly mid-level missing artworks, by painters like the 16th century Dutch artist Mierevelt and his Flemish contemporary Teniers, as well church statuary and other looted objects.

“Probably the best artwork I helped recover was from Göring’s train,” Taper says, abandoned on a rail siding not far from Neuschwanstein Castle, where Allied troops found a huge cache of stolen art. The locals had heard there was schnapps on board, Taper says, and after stealing the schnapps, they took the rest of the stuff, which included late-Gothic wood statutes and a 15th century School of Rogier van der Weyden painting. “Not bad,” says Taper, who had the bright idea of tapping the de-Nazifed German police to help him find stolen goods.

Just a thought, but the stories of these Monument Men and the return of stolen art are quite popular and exciting. I wonder if that popularity and the good will they engender may have some kind of a connection to the generous statutes of limitations rules which have been applied to claimants seeking the return of art stolen from their forebears in recent decades.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Lowry Theft at Knifepoint

The Viaduct by LS Lowry

Five paintings by LS Lowry have been stolen at knifepoint. The works may be worth as much as £1.5m. They were taken from an art dealer’s home outside of Manchester. It seems the police have released images of the paintings and a composite sketch of one of the thieves. However, they have not put the images on their website. A police spokesperson said, “They must have known Mr Aird was an art collector and that he would have the paintings in the house.” The trick of course will be how the thieves can cash in on the theft.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Shelby White at the Met

Kate Taylor, of the New York Sun, has lengthy and extremely interesting article on Shelby White, a generous benefactor to the Met, who has also been accused by Italy of purchasing unprovenanced antiquities. The article notes that Michael Steinhardt, a friend of White’s (and who also is a proprietor of the Sun) believes White’s collection has been singled out by Italy for 2 reasons: her collection is published which allows the authorities to check the antiquities against criminal investigations, and she and her husband have been very generous.

Steinhardt is quoted as saying “She and her husband, Leon, have been generous to a fault to all sorts of institutions… Therefore she is a ripe target. Those people who are pursuing her don’t seek justice; they seek victory… Further, I would say, Shelby has stood alone, and was not as strongly defended as she should have been by those very institutions to whom she had been a too-generous donor.”

Steinhardt is not exactly an impartial actor here though. A phiale was seized from his home in 1997 because the customs declaration form was clearly misstated. Interestingly, had the customs form been accurate, and even if it was conclusively shown the phiale had been illegally exported from Italy, there would have been no legal claim for the objects return. The phiale was seized because the customs form was incorrect.

In any event, the article on White highlights the tension Museums are now facing as they change their acquisition policies, and that may require them to refuse donations from wealthy benefactors who have been collecting for many years, many times without being careful about the provenances of objects which they have acquired.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Spring Auction Season

Fred Kaplan has a great article in Slate on the art overload one can experience by visiting the auction houses in New York before the big Spring auction season.

Here’s an excerpt:

I get a bit weak-kneed this time of year. It’s not the pollen or the anticipation of summer. It’s more like a mild case of Stendhal’s Syndrome, an affliction said to induce dizziness (and, in extreme forms, nausea and seizures) after unrelenting exposure to beautiful art.

The disease got its name from the novelist, who suffered its effects during a trip to Florence in 1817. I get it in New York. Over the next few weeks, the New York branches of Sotheby’s and Christie’s will hold their spring auctions for Prints, then Impressionist and Modern Art, then Post-War and Contemporary Art—back to back, one after the other, after the other, after the other, after the other—and the sensory overload makes me swoon.

But it’s not the auctions themselves that put me in this state (though they can be fun, too); it’s the preview exhibitions of the artworks up for sale. These showings are open to the public for several days before the auction, and they’re free of charge. Yet the majority of those who attend are art dealers or collectors. Most people I know go to museums fairly often and pay hefty admission fees for the privilege; almost none of them have ever been to an auction preview or have more than a vague notion that such things exist.

(continue reading)

It’s an interesting article, and one which only reinforces the idea that the auction market is flourishing right now.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

No More Unprovenanced Antiquities in Indianapolis

Yesterday the ArtNewspaper published an excellent article by Maxwell Anderson, the ceo and director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art titled “Why Indianapolis will no longer buy unprovenanced antiquities”. Following in the footsteps of the British Museum, he reveals that “The Indianapolis Museum of Art recently decided to impose a moratorium on acquiring antiquities that left their probable country of modern discovery after 1970, unless we can obtain documents establishing that they were exported legally.”

That is an excellent decision I think, and one which should be praised. Why did they choose 1970? That was the year the UNESCO Convention adopted the Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. It is seen as a watershed moment in which the international community began to shift its thinking on the cultural property. Nothing legally requires them to pick 1970, but it is an important symbolic date, and that is what this measure essentially is. One would hope that the Museum wasn’t purchasing unprovenanced antiquities anyway, and if they did the trustees or museum director could be violating their duties.

Of course an interesting upshot will be that the decision will “prevent our curators, particularly those in the fields of Asian and classical art, from soliciting or accepting gifts from generous donors who bought works of art in good faith.” This refers to the situation which seems to be plaguing the Met as Shelby White has donated many outstanding antiquities for display, but there are concerns that many of them may have been illicit. Anderson speaks to this:

As a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1981-87, I helped to cultivate the support of two couples whose personal collections of classical antiquities became among the world’s foremost: Leon Levy and Shelby White, and Lawrence and Barbara Fleischman. In neither case did I suspect then or now any malevolent intent on the part of these couples in pursuing objects of great quality. On the contrary, I knew them to be drawn to the remarkable breadth of the classical imagination, and by obtaining works of consummate beauty, they were proud to share their commitment with others. I wrote entries in the catalogues of their respective collections, long after leaving the Metropolitan, out of a sense that the works illustrated in those publications were better off known than suppressed. I maintain that position to this day: forswearing the publication of antiquities lacking comprehensive provenance penalises the works and their makers, and does no service to any potential claimants.

It is, instead, the act of purchasing unprovenanced works that connects with a chain of events leading back to their possibly clandestine removal from a country of origin. I believe that it is essential for all of us who care for the evidence of the past to take no actions that might unwittingly contribute to such removals.

Another important factor in the decision is the IMA’s reluctance to be involved in repatriation or title disputes which have plagued other institutions in recent years. As Anderson rightly points out, this legal wrangling prevents institutions from focusing on the art and studying and appreciating it. However, I wonder if this decision might be challenged by friends of the museum or other donors when an institution refuses to accept an unprovenanced, but very valuable or important gift? The possibility seems remote, but there seem to be a growing number of suits challenging the decisions of museums and other cultural institutions as evidenced by the recent controversies in Philadelphia and Buffalo.

In the end, Anderson is arguing for a better museum and collecting culture. One in which the repurcussions in source nations of collecting and curating are taken into account.

He imagines a situation which I think would be ideal, “Our collective goal should be to persuade art-rich countries to join Great Britain, Japan, Israel, and other nations in the creation of a legitimate market in antiquities. Archaeologically rich countries could use funds realised from the open sale of documented antiquities to bolster their efforts to police archaeological sites, and to support research, conservation, and interpretation in museums, while sharing their heritage the world over.” To better accomplish this he advocates a greater use of International Loans, similar to the long-term lease idea which I discussed yesterday.

He also proposes a radical idea, which is that unprovenanced works should be donated to the Smithsonian, which would then be solely responsible for the repatriation and other controversies, thereby eliminating many of these headaches for other museums. That is an interesting idea, but do we really want the Smithsonian, the only real National cultural institution in the US to be associated with illicitly-gained objects; especially given its recent high-profile problems?

In any event the article is fascinating, and I really recommend giving it a read. The move is ultimately a symbolic one, but one that may lead to continued reform of the cultural property trade.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com