Nazi Art Looting - Inside Germany's Most Complicated Restitution Case

For those of you who read my post about art dealer Alfred Flechtheim yesterday, here is a link to the Spiegel article that is now available in English.

This article should cause great consternation among the members of the American Association of Art Museum Directors, the folks largely responsible for the trafficking the United States in art stolen from Jews.  Next time you go to a museum, ask where they got that beautiful Picasso and who owned it in 1932.  If the museum can't or won't answer, they are probably lying to you.

Many more posts here on Alfred Flechtheim the man whom the Nazi chose to symbolize international Jewry and the man that MoMA and other museums are trying to write out of history.

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Holocaust Denial: William Randolph Hearst Was an "Innocent Purchaser" of Nazi Looted Art

Tintoretto - "Portrait of Alvise Vendramin"

HT to http://www.freerepublic.com/:   A story of a Jewish family recovering three masterpieces looted by the Nazis from the castle of William Randolph Hearst in 2009.   The punch line?  William Randolph Hearst was an "innocent purchaser".

For a newspaper to claim that Hearst was innocent when headlines of Nazi spoliation of Jews had pounded the American public from March of 1933 is really disgusting.

But three generations of US art historians have watched hundreds of stolen artworks pop up in US collections.  Each time the charade is played: "the purchaser must have been innocent".   This propanganda is principally put out by the members of the American Association of Museums and the American Association of Museum Directors.

"We started to learn about the Holocaust in the 1990's" - is the false claim put out by Holocaust profiteers Sotheby's and Christie's - the principal - and continuing - beneficiaries of the traffic in artworks looted from Jews and other Nazi persecutees 1933-1945.

William Randolph Hearst and his fellow American collectors knew damned well that Germany' Jews were being spoliated and they enjoyed snapping up bargains.   American art collectors, dealers and museums were well aware of the potential to snap up treasures, and they knew damned well where their bargains came from.

In the three generations that have passed since the end of World War II, these profiteers avoided taxes by donating these stolen works to their cronies and patsies in US museums - at inflated values - making the US taxpayer foot the bill for their traffic in stolen artworks.  Even better, they created their own museums and donated things to themselves, giving lip service to "charity".

Stupidly, people who do this are today called "philanthropists" - "generous" and "patrons of the arts" by the oily acolytes who populate the structures these buccaneers left behind.

But this massive raid on the US Treasury has never been studied and never been quantified.  Between 1945 and 1962, almost 4,000 stolen artworks were recovered in the US.   Since then, it seems that every few weeks a newspaper "quietly" announces the "utter shock" of some director who is caught with stolen property.

After generations of ripping off US taxpayers, these museum directors now claim that it is their "fiduciary duty" to make the dead victims and their families prove where the looted art in their collections come from.  The most "ethical" among them have published thousands of provenances with question marks on their websites and simply wait for another generation to die, rather than enlisting researchers to help them find the truth.

Unfortunately, US journalists are complicit in this game.  Few have read Janet Flanner's 1947 New Yorker pieces describing in detail Nazi art looting practices.  Few have looked at newsreels from 1945 where the American public was educated on the complete spoliation of Jews and their artworks.  Few have read the 1946 articles in Atlantic Monthly and National Geographic about Hitler's art spoliation.

And even fewer understand that from the time Hitler came to power, as the New York Times reported in March 1933, "To Be a Jew is a Crime in Nazi Germany" and by April 1933 tens of thousands of refugees were desperately trying to escape Germany while Nazis were stealing everything they had.

And now these lying museum directors are claiming that William Randolph Hearst "innocently" made a purchase at a Nazi auction in 1935?   Shame on them.

And shame on whatever journalist and "art history" schools that are pumping out so many graduates who are completely ignorant of history.

3 Nazi-confiscated works found at Hearst Castle - SFGate

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Audio Debate: Should the US State Dept Form A Commission To Restitute Stolen Art Now In US Museums?

El Lissitzky's Proun 2 (1920) - Stolen from Germany (Provenance below)

An amazing debate that I was fortunate enough to attend earlier this year is now available in audio.  I hope that the Ethics Committee of the American Association of Museums, the American Association of Museum Directors and the College Art Association gives this a listen.   The link is here, courtesy of the American Society of International Law (you need to scroll down to the Friday program).

Tragically, the American museum community has played deaf dumb and blind when it comes to researching the stolen artworks in their collection:  artworks of European origin that entered the US after 1933 but were created before 1945.   After stuffing their collections with stolen artworks, they are hoping that the remaining Holocaust survivors will die before they are forced to reveal what is in their collections and return it to the rightful owners.   Hitler's actions were illegal for the winners of World War II: except to US museums who maintain that stripping Germany of its Jewish culture was perfectly legal.  Three generations of "art historians" have been produced in this nation's universities: almost no one has spoken out.  Is the issue cowardice or ignorance?

If US museums don't give back stolen artworks, the rest of Europe never will either.

Cultural Heritage and the Arts Interest Group: Wrestling the Dead Hand of History: Perspectives on a Proposed State Department Commission on Nazi Looted Art


Moderator: Jennifer Anglim Kreder Panelists: Stuart Eizenstat, Charles Goldstein, J. Christian Kennedy, Lucille Roussin

Date: Friday

$9.99
 
***Provenance for Proun 2 (Construction) at Philadelphia Museum of Art

1920
El Lissitzky (Eleazar Lissitzky), Russian, 1890 - 1941




Städtisches Museum Halle, Germany, purchased 1929 [1]; Hanover Provinzialmuseum/Landesmuseum, Germany, on loan from Städtisches Museum Halle, 1929(?)-1937 [2]; confiscated by the National Socialist authorities, 1937, EK register number 14283 [3]; with Karl Buchholz, Berlin; with Curt Valentin, Buchholz Gallery, New York, 1939 [4]; sold to A. E. Gallatin, New York, 1939 [5]; bequest to PMA, 1952. 1. See Andreas Hüneke, Die faschistische Aktion "Entartete Kunst" 1937 in Halle (Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg Halle, 1987), p. 38, no. 42; and Peter Nisbet, ed., El Lissitzky 1890-1941, exh. cat., 1987, Proun inventory no. 14, p. 160. The acquisition is also noted and illustrated in Museum der Gegenwart 1 (1930/1931), p. 13. The painting was one in a total of 46 oil paintings, drawings, and watercolors by Lissitzky purchased by the Halle museum in that year (see Im Kampf um die moderne Kunst: Das Schicksal einer Sammlung in der 1.Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts, exh. cat., Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg, [1985], p. 48 and p. 52). 2. Alexander Dorner, the director of the Hanover Provinzialmuseum until his forced resignation by the Nazis in 1936, recollected that Mondrian's "Composition in Blue" (1952-61-87) and Lissitzky's "Proun 2C," both later purchased by Gallatin, hung in the famous Abstract Gallery (Abstraktes Kabinett) of the Hanover museum designed 1927-28 by Lissitzky (Cauman, The Living Museum, 1958, p. 55, repr. p. 62 and p. 63, respectively, both horizontally). The information that the painting was on loan to, rather than owned by, the Hanover museum is supplied by a 1958 Art News article in which the author, Ella Winter, quotes a letter from Dorner's widow stating that 'the Lissitzkys you refer to hung in the Abstract Gallery; it [the gallery] was destroyed by the Nazis while my husband was opening the first Munich exhibition in London. When he returned he found that unique and beautiful room dismantled and himself accused of promoting "degenerate" art. The Lissitzky on loan was sold . . . and is now in the Philadelphia Museum' [ellipsis is the author's] (see "Lissitzky: A Revolutionary Out of Favor," April 1958, p. 63). In addition, this painting is not listed in the 1930 catalog of works owned by the Hanover Provinzialmuseum (Katalog der Kunstsammlungen im Provinzialmuseum zu Hannover, Bd. 1, 1930). 3. The "EK" (Entartete Kunst) or confiscation register number 14283 is stamped on a sticker on the back of the painting (the original confiscation register is housed at the Zentrales Staatsarchiv Potsdam; see Barron, ed., "Degenerate Art", exh. cat., 1991, p. 132, n. 15). It is clear from the letter quoted in the Art News article cited above that the Nazis confiscated the painting from the Hanover museum. It is not certain where the painting was stored after confiscation; Mondrian's "Composition with Blue" (PMA 1952-61-87), also confiscated from Hanover, was stored at the Schloss Niederschönhausen, the Nazi sales repository for "Entartete Kunst" confiscated from museums. 4. Four prominent German dealers were appointed to market the inventory of confiscated works, including Karl Buchholz. According to the EK register, this painting was assigned to Buchholz, owner of the Buchholz Gallery in Berlin. He was the mentor and pre-war partner of Curt Valentin (1902-1954) who named the New York gallery he opened in 1937 in Buchholz' honor. Between 1934 and 1937 Valentin ran his own gallery in Buchholz' dealership in Berlin (Nicholas, Rape of Europa, p. 3, 24; Yeide, AAM Guide to Provenance Research, p. 239, 290). Valentin, a German citizen, left Germany in 1937 to go into exile. However, he maintained contact with Buchholz, frequently travelling to Germany, where he acquired works from the Schloss Niederschönhausen and the Lucerne 1939 auction. According to Nicholas he "was able to obtain from this source [Germany] much of the inventory which established him as a major New York dealer" (Nicholas, p. 24). Hüneke, underscoring the connection between Buchholz and Valentin, refers to the latter's New York gallery as "a ready-made platform from which Buchholz could sell to America" (see "Missing Masterpieces," in Degenerate Art, p. 129). 5. Receipt from the Buchholz Gallery/Curt Valentin to Gallatin dated August 24, 1939, for purchase of both the Lissitzky and Mondrian's "Composition with Blue" (stamped "Paid" August 31, 1939).