The ongoing saga of Nazi art theft

As mentioned in my review of "Rescuing Da Vinci", the theft of European art by the Nazis continues to cause fallout decades on. There are a couple of topical examples I can mention that have been in the news.

In early January 2010 it was reported that three institutional owners of art have reached an out-of-court settlement over three Picasso paintings which came into their collections some years after were sold in the 1930s by a Jewish owner to avoid confiscation by the German state.

The original owner of the artworks Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (a nephew of the famous composer Felix Mendelssohn) sold the works in 1935 as the Nazi state was ratcheting up economic laws against the Jews. Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s actions were prescient. The art dealer who bought the works off Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (himself Jewish) in turn suffered confiscation of much of his collection by the Nazis. The works which are at the centre of legal action escaped the Nazi net and were sold abroad through a series of subsequent owners.

Decades later the descendants of Mendelssohn brought a law suit against their present day owners seeking restitution. Prior to the settlement, there was a court decision by Judge Jed Rakoff favourable to the plaintiffs. The decision is precedential as it establishes that a legal remedy can be obtained where assets were lost under circumstances of duress, without needing to prove that the Nazi state stole property or ordered a sale. Under the settlement the heirs of the original owner will receive compensation, while the artworks will remain with the existing owners. The three paintings covered by the ruling include: The Absinthe Drinker (1903) owned by the Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation, Boy Leading a Horse (1905) owned by the Museum of Modern Art and Le Moulin de la Galette (1900) owned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. The court case has been running for several years and in the interim a court injunction was slapped on an attempt to sell The Absinthe Drinker.

And in a second piece of recent news from December 2009, an American World War II veteran John Pistone has decided to hand in a souvenir he took when his army unit entered Adolf Hitler’s Bavarian retreat "Berchtesgaden".

Hitler had a 31 album collection of photographs of artworks (most of them stolen) which he intended to house in a massive art museum to be built in Linz. Pistone had picked up one of the leather-bound albums to prove to friends and family he had been in Hitler’s home, little realising the significance of the spoil of war as an important record of looting by the Nazi state.

Hitler’s photographic volumes contained records of works stolen from public institutions and from private collectors across Europe, with some of the works confiscated or obtained under threat before the war from German Jewish owners. Recently a friend of Pistone got in contact with Robert Edsel (author of "Rescuing Da Vinci"), who flew in to see the 3 inch 12 pound artefact and recognised its great significance. Edsel was involved in 2007 in the discovery of two similar photographic albums, owned by the family of another American soldier stationed in the Berchtesgaden area. Edsel had previous arranged for the purchase of these records and their donation to public archives.

Rather than sell his book, Pistone is giving the book to the German Government in a ceremony to be held in Washington DC. Unfortunately 11 of the 31 albums are still missing and there are hopes that this news story may inspire others to come forward with some of the companion albums.

Decades on, the book is still not completely closed on the story of the greatest art heist in history.

Related blogs: Book review of Rescuing Da Vinci

Rescuing Da Vinci

Robert Edsel’s book “Rescuing Da Vinci” chronicles one of the most fascinating and tumultuous periods in Art History. During World War II the Nazi state engaged in a massive and systemic plunder of art treasures, stripping objets d’art from public galleries, churches, libraries and private owners. This book recounts the story of how art custodians and officials in a variety of European countries sought to protect their collections from discovery, theft or damage from aerial bombardment. And the tale reveals how the ruthless machinery of a totalitarian state was deployed to steal, or acquire ‘gifts’ and ‘loans’ through coercion.

In this relatively short episode in history a vast proportion of the greatest art treasurers of Western Civilisation were confiscated (one estimate is 1.5 million objects with 100,000 of museum quality still missing). Many of the works passed into private ownership or control of avaricious Nazi officials, with Herman Goring notorious as an instigator and leading beneficiary of the mass theft (he lined the walls of his home with great masters taken from across Europe). Adolf Hitler himself was the principal director of this whole affair, personally involving himself in planning of exhibitions of the trophies and sketching plans for a ‘Fuhrer Museum’ in his home town of Linz where he ultimately planned to house much of the plunder.

This story has been told before in other books in greater detail, but Edsel brings the drama to life in a very well illustrated and decent format book. This book was an independent publishing effort and yet Edsel has made few economies in producing a very beautiful tome. The writing is not conventional history treatment, it’s much more zippy, with Edsel weaving the tale together through a concourse of captioned photographs, illustrations of artworks and reproductions of wartime documents. While this is mainly a story of European tragedy, the author has a patriotic concern to highlight the part played by the United States in seeking to find, identify and repatriate stolen art to their proper owners (the Allied Armies formed a military unit that became better known as the “Monuments Men” or “Venus Fixers” among the troops).

Allied Commanders including General Eisenhower issued a number of orders: barring the trafficking or export of artworks; directing resources to support the return of works to their rightful owners; and asking that great buildings and architectural monuments be spared where possible from the collateral damage of war.

By the war’s end the Allied treasurer hunters had found over 1,000 repositories for the stolen works of art, including the Alt Aussee salt mines containing more than 6,500 paintings and Neuschwanstein castle which housed over 6,000 articles including jewellery and fine furniture. Unfortunately where the Soviet forces discovered horded Nazi loot, many of the rescued goods were brazenly stolen a second time.

To this day the consequences of the Nazi art binge are still with us, as new claimants come forward every year seeking return of artworks stolen from their families, or as museums and galleries uncover through research that the patrimony of certain objects in their collections may be tainted where there are unexplained passages in time where the trail of ownership runs cold.

As art books go this is an unusual one. It is not the definitive history of these events (much more could be said of some of the great collectors who were victims of theft, or of works that remain missing or in dispute), but it is the best illustrated history of this epic tale of greed, audacity and devastation. The satisfying epilogue to this story is that Mr Edsel is fortunately a dedicated/obsessive fellow and has been pressing on with a range of projects to tell other aspects of this quite significant story.

Book specs:
Cloth bound hardcover, 302 pages, 11 x 9.7 inches, nearly 500 illustrations (mostly b&w photos).

Two other books and one DVD on the same subject: