Restitution – Page 3 – Illicit Cultural Property

Undoing a Sale to HItler

The Austrian Culture Ministry has revealed that it has received a formal request for the restitution of this work, The Art of Painting by Johannes Vermeer. The family of Jaromir Czernin has urged its return for nearly 40 years, but the Austrian authorities refused on the grounds the sale was voluntary. However an attorney for the Czernin family argues the work was sold to guarantee the safety of Czernin and his family. The work was sold to Hitler in 1940 for 1.65 million Reichsmark. Irrespective of the outcome of this request, arguing Hitler purchased the disputed work is not exactly the kind of publicity Austria’s Kunsthistorisches Museum would enjoy.

Philippe Schwab, Vienna museum fears restitution of stolen Vermeer [AFP, Sep. 13, 2009].

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Yale Sued Again

Yale University has been sued in U.S. District Court in Connecticut by Pierre Konowaloff who alleges a work by Van Gogh—”The Night Cafe”—was confiscated from his great-grandfather during the Communist revolution in Russia.

The action is a counter to Yale’s earlier suit. Yale initially brought suit in March, seeking to pre-empt Konowaloff’s claim. In Yale’s initial suit in March, they argued courts should not undo the property revolution of Russia. Russian law would seem to prevent these kind of claims as well. Back in March, Richard Lacayo noted that Konowalof’s grandfather—Ivan Morozov was “was one of the two outstanding Russian collectors and patrons of modern art early in the 20th century.” The suit, Yale University v. Konowaloff, 09-466, U.S. District Court, District of Connecticut (New Haven), will determine whether this work was seized unlawfully during a Communist takeover of Russia in 1918.

A similar issue recently arose in the UK with the recent dispute over the Royal Academy display of “From Russia: French and Russian Master Paintings 1870-1925 From Moscow and St. Petersburg”. Russia nearly backed out of the deal. The display required an act of Parliament to grant special immunity to prevent the works from being claimed by descendants of the original owners from whom many of the works were summarily seized during the Bolshevik revolution.

2009 must be the year claimants to Yale’s cultural heritage decided to pursue their claims, because of course this suit follows soon after the Republic of Peru’s suit filed in December over artifacts taken from Machu Picchu.

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A Pisarro Hidden for 70 Years to be Auctioned

Camille Pissarro’s Le Quai Malaquais, Printemps (pictured), previously discussed here, recently recovered from a Zurich bank vault will go on sale later this month according to Catherine Hickley for Bloomberg:

Gisela Bermann-Fischer waited almost 70 years to get back a painting by Camille Pissarro stolen from her family’s home in Vienna by the Gestapo in 1938.

She recovered “Le Quai Malaquais, Printemps” after a quest that pitched her into a battle of lawyers’ letters with Bruno Lohse, a Nazi art dealer appointed by Hermann Goering to loot treasures in occupied France, and finally led to a Zurich bank vault, where the picture was stashed in a safe. Prosecutors sealed the safe as part of a continuing three-nation probe into associates of Lohse suspected of extortion and money-laundering.

Now 80, Bermann-Fischer will auction the 1903 painting at Christie’s International’s sale of impressionist and modern art in London on June 23. Its value is estimated at between 900,000 pounds ($1.45 million) and 1.5 million pounds. Bermann-Fischer says it cost her at least 500,000 Swiss francs ($466,000) to recover the Pissarro, mainly in lawyers’ fees. At no point during her quest could she be sure of getting the artwork back.

One of the intriguing parts of the story was the brief resurfacing of the work in 1984:

“I don’t think we’ll ever find out from where to where the painting was transported over the years,” Bermann-Fischer said. “It truly was hidden. I think the exhibition at l’Hermitage Lausanne in 1984 was a test run, to see whether the original owners or any heirs were still on the lookout for the paintings and would make a claim.”

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Another Recovery for the Stern Estate

The AP reports that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have returned this work, St. Jerome by Ludovico Carracci (1595) to the estate of Max Stern. The work was owned by art dealer Max Stern, and he was forced into selling the works in 1937 in Cologne, Germany. The work had been hanging in the home of art dealer Richard L. Feigen. Feigen had read about the other recent return to the Stern estate, and discovered the work had been missing after checking with the Max Stern Art Restitution Project.

This voluntary return follows soon after another recent return, and the recent decision by the First Circuit, Vineberg v. Bissonette.

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MoMA Sued in Nazi-era Restitution Suit

The successors in interest of German artist George Grosz filed suit in federal court last friday to claim three works: Portrait of the Poet Max Herrmann–Neisse (1927), Self-Portrait With Model (1928) and the watercolor Republican Automatons (1920) (pictured here).

The claimants allege the works were left with Grosz’s dealer Alfred Flechtheim when the artist was forced to leave Germany in 1933. The New York Times summarizes the plaintiff’s version of events

Charlotte Weidler, an art dealer and curator for the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, said that she had inherited “Portrait of the Poet Max Herrmann-Neisse” from Flechtheim and that she gave it to Curt Valentin, a German dealer in Manhattan, to sell to the Museum of Modern Art in 1952. The museum bought “Republican Automatons” from a Toronto collector in 1946 and was given “Self-Portrait With Model” in 1954.

Back in 2006 the Met declined to borrow the work Portrait of the Poet Max Herrmann–Neisse due to the potential lawsuit.

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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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China Will Sue over Looted Bronzes

AFP is reporting that China will bring a repatriation suit in France over bronze statues taken from the Old Summer Palace before it was burned in 1860.

Chinese lawyers will sue auction giant Christie’s over the sale of relics owned by the late Yves Saint Laurent which they say were stolen from a looted Beijing palace, according to state press. The lawyers are hoping that French courts will stop the auction house from selling two bronze animal heads at a February sale in Paris and order the return of the relics to China, the Beijing Times reported. “The lawsuit will be placed before a French court in accordance with international law,” Liu Yang, one of 67 Chinese lawyers working on the case, told the paper. “We are demanding that the auction house stop the sale and order the owner of the stolen items to return them.” The relics currently belong to the Yves Saint Laurent Foundation and were being put up for auction by the late fashion magnate’s partner Pierre Berge, the paper said.

This should shape up to be a fascinating dispute. There’s little question I think the bronzes were taken under lass-than-noble circumstances by the British. More background on the dispute here.

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Limiting Art and Antiquities Restitution?

So argues Norman Rosenthal in the Art Newspaper today. The former Exhibitions Secretary at the Royal Academy does not see the merit in the current expansion of restitution and repatriation. He draws parallels between antiquities restitution cases and the claims involving Nazi looted artworks.

Since the late 1990s there has been a strong push towards provenance research of collections and museums, and restitution of items that were looted or taken by the Nazis during their period of power in Europe from 1933 to 1945. This process has been ongoing for ten years, and the items in question have often been claimed by people distanced by two or more generations from their original owners.

I have, perhaps, an idiosyncratic, non-politically-correct view that many people will disagree with, but I believe history is history and that you can’t turn the clock back, or make things good again through art.

History has always looked after works of art in strange ways. Ever since the beginning of recorded history, because of its value, art has been looted and as a result arbitrarily distributed and disseminated throughout the world. Of course, what happened in the Nazi period was unspeakable in its awfulness. I lost many relatives, whom I never knew personally, and who died in concentration camps in the most horrible of circumstances. I believe, however, that grandchildren or distant relations of people who had works of art or property taken away by the Nazis do not now have an inalienable right to ownership, at the beginning of the 21st century. If valuable objects have ended up in the public sphere, even on account of the terrible facts of history, then that is the way it is.

If, because of provenance research, works of art are taken from museums, whether in Russia, Germany, France, the US or the UK, and are then sold on for profit or passed around for political expediency, it is nearly always the rich who are making themselves richer. The vast majority of individuals, who were beaten up or killed during the Nazi period—or indeed by other oppressors in different parts of Europe—did not have art treasures that their children and grandchildren can now claim as compensation. The concept of the “universal museum” is also, in certain circumstances, a politically useful euphemism. Nonetheless, it has to be good that important works of art should be available to all through public ownership. Restitution claims from museums go against this idea and result in the general culture being impoverished.

He makes a good point that much of the restitution litigation has been very profitable for both attornies and auction houses. But these claims are in response to very clear violations of the law. Perhaps we need to be more careful about what circumstances an art or antiquity claim should be made, but when laws are broken claimants should have a right to justice. He concludes by arguing for a statute of limitations on these claims. However such limitations periods currently exist. The difficulty is not the amoutn of time we might choose for a period, but rather what circumstances trigger the running of that limitations period.

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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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