Tag: Nazi Spoliation

UK May Revise Nazi-looted Art Policies

The UK is considering new legislation that would revise the restitution process to more easily allow national museums to return works of art looted during World War II.  The Holocaust (stolen art) restitution bill would allow these institutions to return objects from their collections.  Andrew Dismore, the Labour MP for Hendon is quoted in the Guardian:  “I hope it will close another chapter from the Holocaust . . .  It means recognising a right that has been denied for decades. I suspect many people would be prepared to allow their artwork to stay in public collections but it’s their right to decide what happens to it.”

The change is needed because of cases like this one:

When the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, the Feldmanns were evicted from their home, leaving a collection of Old Master drawings in Gestapo hands. Arthur died after being tortured by the Nazis in the Spilberk Castle prison in his home city of Brno. Gisela died in Auschwitz.

With the help of the London-based Commission for Looted Art in Europe, Feldmann’s descendants proved that four of his drawings had ended up in the British Museum. The museum was prepared to return them to the family but was blocked by a high court judge. Instead the family negotiated a deal, including an ex-gratia payment of £175,000, that allows the drawings to remain in London. 

Feldmann’s grandson Uri Peled, 66, who lives in Israel, said that although he did not wish to have the items returned, the principle of the bill – allowing the rightful owner to make the decision about what to do with their art – was important.

 The change will open speculation for claims for other works in UK institutions that may have been taken under less-than-appropriate circumstances—like the Parthenon marbles, the Benin bronzes, the Rosetta stone, or the Lewis chessmen.  As such the legislation is limited to “objects stolen between 1933 and 1945 by the Nazi regime”.  Though the legislation is sharply focused on a narrow historical period, one wonders why only those objects are left open for restitutions when the others are not.  The Second World War was a special circumstance perhaps, but its not clear how that historical period is different from other conflicts. 

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

German Court Rules for Nazi-era Poster Claimant

A German court has ruled that Peter Sachs’ is entitled to an entire poster collection seized from his father in 1938.  The elder Sachs received about $50,000 in compensation for the collection which was then believed to have been destroyed. 

From the AP:

The Berlin administrative court ruled that Hans Sachs never gave up ownership of the collection of 12,500 posters taken from his home on the orders of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.


Sachs, 71, sued in a test case for the return of two posters — a 1932 poster for “Die Blonde Venus” (“Blonde Venus”) starring Marlene Dietrich, and one for Simplicissimus, a satirical German weekly magazine, showing a red bulldog. The court ruled that it was unclear whether “Die Blonde Venus” was part of his father’s collection, but that there was no doubt about the Simplicissimus poster and that it must be returned to him.


The ruling means that the court has backed the claim of Peter Sachs of Sarasota on the surviving portion of his father’s collection — some 4,000 posters at the German Historical Museum in Berlin, said his attorney ,Matthias Druba.


“We are definitely delighted,” Druba said . “It’s a shame that we didn’t get the Blonde Venus, but in the end what is more important is that the general question has been answered clearly in our favor: Peter is the rightful owner of the collection and he has a claim to get them back; we couldn’t want more.”


The posters include advertisements for exhibitions, cabarets, movies and consumer products, as well as political propaganda — all rare, with only small original print runs.
Only a handful of the posters on display at any given time at the German Historical Museum, but officials maintain they form an integral part of its 80,000-piece collection. The museum also points out that those in storage are regularly viewed by researchers.

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Settlement in Nazi-Era Dispute

One of the week’s big stories I haven’t had a chance to talk about was the decision by the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim foundation and the heirs of Paul and Elsa von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy to settle their ongoing claim.  The undisclosed settlement was announced earlier this week, just as jury selection was set to take place in U.S. District Court in New York. 

Unfortunately the settlement will not allow us to learn how these important works were acquired.  Both the claimants offered very different perspectives.  The issue would have likely been when the paintings were transferred — in 1927 before the Nazi rise to power, or in 1935 when Hitler had become Fuhrer.  Said Judge Rakoff, “I find it extraordinarily unfortunate that the public will be left without knowing what the truth is …  The public surely would want to know now and forever which of those diametrically different views was true, and the great crucible of a trial would have made that known”.

Boy Leading a Horse, Picasso, 1905-06/Museum of Modern Art

Le Moulin de la Galette, Picasso, 1900/Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
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Peter Sachs’ Nazi-Era Restitution Disptue

David Rising for the AP has the story of 71-year-old Peter Sachs and his attempts to secure his father’s 12,500 rare posters:

When Peter Sachs was only a year old in 1938, the Nazis seized his father’s collection of 12,500 rare posters on the orders of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.

Sachs’ father, Hans — a Jewish dentist — was then thrown into the Sachsenhausen concentration camp north of Berlin. After his wife managed to secure his release, the family fled to Boston — leaving the posters behind.


Today, some 4,000 of the posters, worth at least euro4.5 million ($5.9 million), are in the possession of the German Historical Museum in Berlin, largely in storage. Peter Sachs goes to court Tuesday to try to get them back.


“I think that any disposition of the posters would be preferable to their languishing in a museum for 70 years without ever seeing the light of day,” Sachs told the AP in a telephone interview from his home in Sarasota, Florida.


The posters include advertisements for exhibitions, cabarets, movies, and consumer products, as well as political propaganda — all rare, with only small original print runs. One jewel of the collection was a 1932 poster for “Die Blonde Venus” — The Blonde Venus — a film starring Marlene Dietrich. It formed the basis for Sachs’ suit when he filed it last year, but museum officials say it is not part of the Sachs collection they have.


Only a handful of the posters on display at any given time but museum officials say they form an integral part of its 80,000-piece collection. The museum also points out that those in storage are regularly viewed by researchers.


The suit at the Berlin administrative court is the latest step in a case that has dragged over several years.


Sachs, 71, lost his first attempt to have the posters returned through a German restitution panel, known as the Limbach Commission, which ruled in 2007 that the museum was the rightful owner. But Gary Osen, Sachs’ Oradell, New Jersey-based attorney, said he is more confident of recovering the posters through the German legal system at Tuesday’s one-day hearing.

It could be a difficult claim for Sachs, as his father accepted compensation in the 1960s of approximately $50,000, and the elder Sachs apparently viewed the sum as an appropriate payment.  

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An End in Sight to Portrait of Wally Forfeiture?


Martha Lufkin of the art newspaper summarizes the nearly 10-year-long dispute between Federal prosecutors, the Bondi family and the Leopold Museum in Vienna. For past posts on the long-running dispute over this work see here.

Lufkin also reports Federal prosecutors have asked that a judgment to be postponed to allow the review of some new evidence:

Judgement on a long-running lawsuit in New York, which helped launch a world outcry over Nazi-looted art at museums and prompted many institutions to begin examining their collections for history of Nazi theft, has been postponed to let the US government review new evidence. On 3 June the schedule was suspended on a case brought by the US government in 1999 to seek confiscation of Egon Schiele’s Portrait of Wally from the Leopold Museum in Vienna, under the US National Stolen Property Act. The US says the Leopold knew that the art was stolen by a Nazi in 1939 from its Jewish owner, Lea Bondi. The case, which the parties had asked the court to resolve without a trial, is before the federal district court in Manhattan.

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Ninth Circuit Hears Nazi Restitution Appeal

It’s not often works of art are implicated by both World Wars, but these paintings present a conflict between successors of claimants from the First World War and claimants from the Second World War.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday heard an appeal over these 500-year-old works of art seized by the Bolsheviks and the Nazis, Saher v. Norton Simon Art Museum, 07-5669. Pictured here are Adam and Eve by Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1520. The claimant, Marei Von Saher is the successor in interest to Jacques Goudstikker who bought the works in a 1931 auction in Berlin. The works remained there in Amsterdam until 1940 when the Nazis instituted a forced sale.

After the war, Desiree Goudstikker reached a settlement with the Dutch government. She received some of her husband’s inventory, but did not claim another set of works because that would have ment returning the purchase price received from the Germans.

The Dutch government transferred those works to George Stroganoff-Scherbatoff, the heir of a noble Russian family who was thought to have lost the paintings to the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution.

The issue here is the timeliness of the action, which may have implications for other claimants — including antiquities. Kenneth Ofgang, Staff Writer for Metropolitan New-Enterprise has more:

“This has nothing to do with foreign policy,” Kaye told the judges. U.S. District Judge John Walter of the Central District of California had ruled that Code of Civil Procedure Sec. 354.3 is preempted because it conflicts with federal primacy in foreign affairs. Fred A. Rowley Jr. of Munger, Tolles and Olson, representing Pasadena’s Norton Simon Art Museum and its supporting foundation said the district judge was correct and the dismissal of Marei Von Saher’s action should be affirmed. Von Saher, a Connecticut resident, sued last year following the collapse of mediation over her claim that she and her family have lawful title to Adam and Eve, a diptych painted by famed German artist Lucas Cranach the Elder in the 16th Century.Von Saher’s late husband, Eduard “Edo” Von Saher, was the son of Jacques Goudstikker, a Dutch Jew who was one of Europe’s leading art dealers in the years leading up to World War II. Goudstikker fled Holland when the Nazis invaded in 1940, but was killed in an accidental fall aboard ship. His widow, Desiree Goudstikker, and their son eventually came to the United States and became citizens, having left behind their gallery; hundreds of art works, many of them by famous painters; and valuable real estate. Young Edo Goodstikker became Edo Von Saher after his mother remarried. The parties agree that Jacques Goudstikker purchased the wood panels at an auction in Berlin in the 1930s. But while Von Saher claims that her father-in-law acquired good title from the Soviet government, the foundation charges that he knew that Cranach’s work had been wrongfully expropriated from the wealthy and powerful Stroganoff family after it fled the Russian Revolution. The museum and foundation say museum benefactor Norton Simon lawfully acquired the panels for $800,000 from Commander George Stroganoff-Scherbatoff, who renounced his hereditary title, became a U.S. citizen, and served in the Navy during World War II.

The primary issue is whether California’s special limitations rule for works looted during the Holocauset era, Sec. 354.3 conflicts with an Executive Order issued by President Truman.

See here for more on Jacques Goudstikker.

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Commemorating Nazi Restitution

Yonat Shimron has the story of this work, Madonna and Child in a Landscape in the News and Observer:

Apart from its origin as an object of religious devotion and a prized piece of German Renaissance art, the “Madonna and Child in a Landscape” is now famous because it was seized by the Nazis as loot. That’s why curators at the Austrian Museum of Applied and Contemporary Art, known as MAK, asked to borrow the painting to round out the exhibit “Recollecting: Looted Art and Restitution,” which opens Wednesday and runs though Feb. 15.
“It’s a great poetic conclusion to the story,” said John Coffey, deputy director of art at the N.C. Museum of Art. “It furthers the conversation of cultural property, who owns it and how it should be managed.”  In 1984, the painting came to the N.C. Museum of Art as a bequest by a California couple. It was mounted in the European art gallery as part of the museum’s permanent collection.
But in 1999, the Commission for Art Recovery of the World Jewish Congress notified the museum that it had a piece of looted Nazi art. Two elderly Austrian sisters — Marianne and Cornelia Hainisch of Vienna — claimed the painting belonged to their great-uncle, Philipp von Gomperz, a wealthy Viennese Jew.
As various documents attested, Gomperz was forced to turn over his art collection to Nazi police at the outbreak of World War II. His Madonna and Child landed in the palace of Vienna’s Nazi governor.  After a months-long investigation, the museum concluded that the sisters were right — and relinquished its claim to the painting. But then, under the terms of a unique agreement, the sisters sold the painting back to the museum for $600,000, half its estimated value.
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Looted Matisse Handed Over to Charity

The AP reports this work, Le Mur Rose, a work by Matisse which was stolen from a Jewish family some time after 1937 by a Nazi officer has been given to a charity:

The story of how “Le Mur Rose,” or “The Pink Wall,” made its way through the war to France is as surprising as the colorful painting itself, and steeped with death, mystery and injustice. Stolen from Jews, proceeds from the expected sale of the painting will go toward the Magen David Adom network of ambulances, paramedics and emergency treatment centers in Israel.  “It’s a remarkable and in some ways slightly creepy story,” said Stuart Glyn, chairman of the British charity Magen David Adom UK. He will take delivery of the artwork at the French Culture Ministry in Paris.  The painting belonged to Harry Fuld, a German Jew who made his fortune in telephones, founding the H. Fuld & Co. Telefon und Telegraphenwerke AG in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1899, the charity says.
“The Fuld family were almost manic collectors, with the broadest of tastes,” Glyn said in a phone interview…

Harry Fuld Jr. died in 1963 and for reasons unknown willed his estate to Gisela Martin, a woman who has remained something of a mystery in this saga. She in turn left her estate to the British charity when she died in Switzerland in 1992, which explains why Magen David Adom UK is now getting the Matisse.  Glyn said they have not been able to determine the nature of the relationship between Fuld and Martin, why he left her his estate or why Martin in turn made Magen David Adom the beneficiary of her will.  The Matisse is worth a “a good six-figure sum,” but will first be displayed in a museum, said Glyn. He said he’s in discussions with museums in Germany and Israel.  The charity is also trying to recover other parts of the Fuld collection, which included 12th-century Buddha statues, 16th-century Italian masters, furniture and other art, Glyn said.”There are pieces in the Hermitage (museum in Russia), there are pieces in museums in Germany, there are pieces believe it or not in Israel,” he said.

 The work had been displayed in France since 1949. 

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First Circuit Court Swats Away "Cardboard Sword"

A de facto confiscation of a work of art that arose out of a notorious exercise of man’s inhumanity to man now ends with the righting of that wrong through the mundane application of common law principles. The mills of justice grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine.

So concluded the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Vineberg v. Bissonnette.  It affirmed summary judgment for successors of an art dealer who lost this work to Nazi Spoliation.  The dispute was an appeal of Vineberg v. Bissonnette, 529 F. Supp. 2d 300 (D.R.I. 2007).  I briefly commented on the earlier district court ruling here. 

The work is a 19th-century painting by Franz Xaver Winterhalter titled Girl from the Sabine Mountains.  It is valued at roughly $70,000 – $94,000 USD according to Ray Henry in brief AP story.  Katie Mulvaney also has a very fine overview for the Providence Journal. 

The current possessor based her defense on laches, an equitable doctrine which essentially posits that it wouldn’t be fair to allow the claimant to regain title to the work.  No luck for the current possessor however.  The opinion was not particularly kind to Bissonnette, perhaps because the appeal seemed thin on the merits.  In one passage Senior Circuit Judge Bruce M. Selya admonished the appellant “Proving prejudice requires more than the frenzied brandishing of a cardboard sword; it requires at least a hint of what witnesses or evidence a timeous investigation might have yielded” (emphasis added).  I must find a way to use that in conversation soon.   

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MIA Returns a Nazi-Looted Work

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA) has made the decision to return this work Smoke Over Rooftops by Fernand Léger.  From the Minneapolis Star Tribune:
The institute’s saga began in 1997 when the museum received a letter claiming that the painting had been taken from Alphonse Kann, a legendary French collector who owned “tons of Picassos, Braques and late-19th-century Impressionist paintings,” according to Patrick Noon, the institute’s paintings curator. His story helped inspire a 1964 movie, “The Train,” starring Burt Lancaster, about a trainload of art that the Germans tried to spirit away before the Allies liberated Paris in 1944.
Much of Kann’s art was returned to him after World War II, but not the Leger. That painting was bequeathed to the museum in 1961 by Minneapolis businessman Putnam Dana McMillan, a General Mills vice president who bought it from the Buchholz Gallery in New York in 1951. No one questioned the picture’s history. Nazi-era archives were sealed in France and inaccessible in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe. 
Responding to the claim took years because the museum had to establish if it was legitimate. Was this Leger the same one Kann had owned? (“Smoke Over Rooftops” was a theme Leger painted at least six times.) If so, what had happened to the picture between 1939, when Kann fled Paris on the eve of war, and 1949 when a New York art dealer bought it from a French gallery? Did Kann sell it freely, or did the Nazis confiscate it?
There’s no indication that this was a settlement of any kind, and a legal claim may have been difficult for the claimant as the work had been owned by the MIA since 1961.  It appears they voluntarily relinquished the work, though the story does make vague reference to a French Lawsuit.  Kaywin Feldmin, the MIA Director says “it was the right thing to do”, which is a refreshing sentiment to hear from a Museum Director.   

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