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Date: May 25, 2024 at 04:03:15
From: akira, [DNS_Address]
Subject: ‘Justice can triumph’: painting looted by Nazis returned to owners aft |
URL: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/feb/10/justice-can-triumph-painting-looted-by-nazis-returned-to-owners-after-80-years |
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‘Justice can triumph’: painting looted by Nazis returned to owners after 80
years
This article is more than 2 years old
Piece by German artist Lovis Corinth was entrusted to Royal Museums of
Fine Arts in Brussels
Jennifer Rankin in Brussels
Thu 10 Feb 2022
Approximately 80 years after it was looted by the Nazis, an expressionist
painting has been returned to the descendants of a German-Jewish couple
by the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels.
Flowers, a 1913 still life by the German artist Lovis Corinth, was entrusted to
the museums in 1951, because postwar investigators were unable to trace
the original owners.
After years of research, the painting has been returned, the first restitution of
any artwork looted from a Jewish family in the second world war by the Royal
Museums of Fine Arts, which covers six museums, with works spanning the
old masters to Magritte.
Thomas Dermine, Belgium’s secretary of state in charge of museums,
handed the work to a lawyer representing the nine great-grandchildren of
Gustav and Emma Mayer, a German-Jewish couple who fled Germany in
1938.
Museum staff pack the painting.
View image in fullscreen
Michel Draguet, the museum’s director, said he felt no sadness whatsoever
that the work would leave the museum complex. Photograph: Johanna
Geron/Reuters
“This restitution, the first by the Museums of Fine Arts, is a very strong
signal: even decades later, justice can triumph,” Dermine said. The return of
the painting was also “an opportunity to remind people of the horrors” to
which nationalism and the far right could lead, he said. “To repair is to
remember and to remember is to avoid the return of the worst.”
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The Mayers ran a successful business in Frankfurt before fleeing the Nazi
persecution. They owned 30 paintings, which were left in storage in Brussels
after a 14-month stay in the Belgian capital from 1938-39. Flowers is the only
one to have been recovered.
Lawyers for the family approached the museums in 2016, eight years after it
launched an online database about 27 works of uncertain provenance in the
collections as part of an effort to find owners.
Imke Gielen, a lawyer with the Berlin firm Von Trott, who is acting for the
Mayers’ descendants, said it was a historic day for the family. “They are
delighted that at least one of the missing paintings has been identified after
80 years and has now been returned.”
The nine descendants, who live in the UK, South Africa and US, have yet to
decide what to do with the painting, she said, adding: “Today is the day of
restitution which we celebrate and other things will come in the next few
days. The family has to decide.”
Gustav and Emma Mayer arrived in Brussels in June 1938, after fleeing
through Italy and Switzerland. In August 1939, days before the outbreak of
war, they made it to Britain and settled in Bournemouth.
Their eldest son, Ernst, was interned with other German-Jewish refugees as
an “enemy alien” on the Isle of Man. Gustav Mayer, in poor health when he
left Germany, died in his mid-80s in 1940 of natural causes, although his
death may have been hastened by the trauma of persecution and the difficult
journey. His wife Emma died in 1944.
Museum workers hold the painting Flowers
View image in fullscreen
This is the first restitution of any work of art looted from a Jewish family in
the second world war by the Royal Museums of Fine Arts. Photograph: John
Thys/AFP/Getty Images
They never saw their paintings again. In 1942 a few works from the Mayer
collection disappeared when the Nazi special taskforce led by Hitler’s
acolyte, Alfred Rosenberg, began its work of plundering cultural treasures
that belonged to European Jews.
By 1943 all the Mayer property in Brussels had been stolen. One highlight of
the collection was a painting of a horseman on the beach by Max
Liebermann, one of the leading impressionists in Germany. There were also
other works by Corinth, as well as lesser-known Frankfurt artists.
Michel Draguet, the museum’s director, said he felt no sadness that the work
would leave the museum, where it had been on display in the modern art
collection.
“We never bought this painting, we were never the owners, we were the
custodians for the Belgian state.” He and all his staff felt they were fulfilling
the museum’s role in society, he said.
Draguet had scored out the painting from the museum’s inventory, a brown
foolscap A4-sized book, with the word “register” printed in French and Dutch
on the front.
The handover ceremony took place in a new exhibition room showing other
works given to the museum in 1951, when Belgium’s postwar Economic
Recovery Service, the body in charge of restitution of missing art, was
disbanded. The owners of the original works, a mix of old masters and 19th-
century landscapes, have either never been identified or there are questions
about how they were acquired.
One work by the 17th-century Bavarian artist Hans Rottenhammer, Diana and
Callisto, was bought by a curator employed by Hermann Göring in 1941 from
a Brussels art collector. Nothing of the work’s ownership before 1941 is
known, raising questions about a possible forced sale.
The Mayers’ descendants repaid the German government the “small
compensation” award they had received in the 1970s for the loss of Flowers,
Gielen, their lawyer, said.
Meanwhile, aided by researchers, the family continue to search for the 29
missing paintings, which are registered on the German government
database, lostart.de.
For now, there are no leads. “We have no images; we have descriptions, not
all of them are very detailed so unfortunately,” Gielen said. “None of the other
works has been identified yet.”
This article was amended on 11 February 2022 to correct a misspelling of
the Isle of Man as “the Isle of Mann”.
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Date: May 25, 2024 at 04:08:46
From: akira, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Retrieved after decades: the painting supposedly ‘bought’ by the Nazis |
URL: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/jan/02/retrieved-after-decades-the-painting-supposedly-bought-by-the-nazis |
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Retrieved after decades: the painting supposedly ‘bought’ by the Nazis
This article is more than 2 years old
A new book recounts one woman’s struggle to find looted art – and then
convince a major museum to give it back
Vanessa Thorpe Arts and media correspondent
Sun 2 Jan 2022
Fresh proof that the Nazis set up fake auctions and phoney paperwork to
disguise their looting of art and valuable possessions has been uncovered by
an amateur sleuth researching her own family mystery.
French writer Pauline Baer de Perignon’s investigation has revealed the fate
of a missing collection of art that included work by Monet, Renoir and Degas
and also exposed the reluctance of Europe’s leading museums to accept
evidence of the deceit.
Baer was prompted to look into the past when she bumped into an English
cousin who told her he believed the family had been “robbed”.
“The whole thing has changed my life,” said Baer this weekend. “I have had
to look back at a long-forgotten family story as well as at the hidden secrets
of the Gestapo. And then I had to confront the truth about paintings held by
galleries such as the Louvre and the state museum in Dresden. I was so naive
when I started.”
Baer’s three years of research have led not just to a better understanding of
the way in which significant works of art were systematically stolen after
Germany invaded France, but will culminate later this month in the high-
profile sale of a recovered painting at Sotheby’s in New York.
Black and white formal photograph of Jules Strauss in a suit with black-
rimmed glasses
View image in fullscreen
Jules Strauss, Pauline Baer de Perignon’s great-grandfather, who had the
painting at his home in Paris. Photograph: Alamy
Portrait of a Lady as Pomona, by the revered 18th-century French artist
Nicolas de Largillière, once belonged to her great-grandfather, the Parisian
collector Jules Strauss, and was only returned to his descendants last year. It
is now expected to sell for $1m-$1.5m (£750,000-£1.1m). “I could have
asked my father to tell me about Jules Strauss, but I never did,” Baer has
explained. “My father died when I was 20, before I was bold enough to ask
him about the war, about his parents and grandparents, about his emotions
and his memories.”
Baer’s curiosity was aroused when she bumped into her cousin Andrew
Strauss at a concert in Paris eight years ago. The two had not met since she
was a teenager, but he told her that he worked at Sotheby’s and believed the
apparent sale of the Strauss collection in the early 1940s was “shady”. He
mentioned the involvement of dummy companies, Nazi officers and museum
inventories to his bemused cousin. “Andrew’s words sent my mind tumbling
down a rabbit hole,” said Baer.
Armed with a scribbled note listing the names of famous artists, Baer began
to piece together the lost past. She was now as interested in finding out what
happened to her distant family members as in the fate of the missing art. A
book about her efforts, The Vanished Collection, has already made waves in
France, where it was published last year and where critics have compared it
to a compelling suspense novel. A reviewer for Elle said it was as “devourable
as a thriller”, while others have compared the family’s story to those of other
famous Jewish families whose art was looted in the war, such as the
Camondos, the Rothschilds and the Ephrussis.
At the start of Baer’s inquiries, all she had was one photograph of Strauss,
her illustrious great-grandfather, and another of the many portraits hanging
on the walls of his former home on Avenue Foch in Paris. She knew the
apartment had gone, but that there was one elderly living relative with first-
hand knowledge of what had happened.
She delved into the archives of great museums and asked difficult questions
of the French ministry of culture. She was surprised to discover how the
thefts had been covered up, but her English translator, Natasha Lehrer,
believes the most powerful part of the book concerns howmodern art
institutions have dragged their feet and, at worst, avoided doubts about the
ownership of important paintings.
Photograph of three US soldiers walking down a flight of stairs holding up
paintings to the camera while an officer further up the staircase holds a list
View image in fullscreen
American troops retrieving stolen art from Neuschwanstein Castle, Germany,
in 1945. Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive
“What Pauline stumbled upon was an apparent unwillingness among those
leading various large state museums to admit that they were holding looted
works of art until very recently,” said Lehrer. “This despite the fact that
families and collectors often had all the provenance information available to
identify them as the rightful owners. There has been a notable reluctance to
return artworks.” The English version of Baer’s book is to be published next
month by Head of Zeus.
Baer tracked down the portrait by Largillière to Dresden’s state art
collections and found archival evidence to prove that Strauss had been
forced to sell it. The masterpiece had apparently been acquired in 1941 for
the Reichsbank in Berlin and then transferred to the ministry of finance,
before going to Dresden in 1959. Baer found the words “Collection Jules
Strauss” next to the Largillière’s listing in the German Lost Art Foundation,
but was then told that the Dresden museum’s director was not minded to
return it. She was questioned about whether Strauss was originally happy to
sell, despite evidence of laws that prevented Jews from profiting by such
deals.
“The more I continued with my investigation, the more I realised how unlikely
it was that Jules had been able to avoid his collection becoming seized by
the Nazis,” said Baer. “Even before the invasion of France, the Germans had
compiled a list of large French collections.”
A unique Meissen armorial waste bowl from the service made for Clemens
August, Elector of Cologne
Porcelain seized by Nazis goes up for auction in New York
Read more
Dresden’s state art collections has since said: “The investigation of this
complex case was as extensive and thorough as is necessary to ensure that
a work of art is returned to its rightful owner.” The portrait’s sale in New York
this month will now allow all 20 of Strauss’s heirs a share in its value.
Painted between 1710 and 1714, when Largillière was at the height of his
powers, the sitter for the portrait is thought to be Marie Madeleine de La
Vieuville, the Marquise de Parabère, mistress of Philippe II, Duc d’Orléans.
She is depicted as Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and abundance.
Strauss, a Frankfurt-born banker, built an extraordinary collection of art,
ranging from antiques to the Impressionists, while he was in Paris. It is now
clear that much of it was then stolen or forcibly sold by the Nazis.
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