Artworks Stolen From Alfred Flechtheim at the MOMA

For those who care about artworks stolen from Alfred Flechtheim, the Weimar Republic's greatest artdealer, there is a new Wikipedia page on Flechtheim in English here.   A recent article in Speigel magazine discussed Flechtheim, unfortunately the article is not in English.  Flechtheim was a Jew and the greatest dealer of contemporary art in Berlin in 1933.  He has been written out of history by those persons and institutions, particularly the MoMA, who profited from his demise.  The greatest forgery ring in German history recently ripped off the art collecting world, including comedian/art collector Steve Martin, by faking works from Flechtheim's stolen collection. Flechtheim was selected as Jewry's poster boy by the Nazis for his receding hairline and particularly prominent nose.  Harvard's Busch-Reisinger museum's modern German sculpture collection was founded in the early 1930's with a Rudolph Belling sculpture of Flechtheim's nose.

Alfred Barr borrowed much of Flechtheim's exhibition for the MoMA's first show of German art and Flechtheim gave the MoMA one of the first works to become part of its permanent collection, a sculpture of the boxer Max Schmeling, the guy who Joe Louis beat.  No one seems to know what MoMA did with the Schmeling sculpture.  History has failed to document Alfred Barr's intellectual and other debts to Alfred Flechtheim.  Barr, of course, was gleefully grabbing up art bargains that the Nazis had stolen from Jews, including the great critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin.

Many works stolen from Flechtheim are now at New York's Museum of Modern Art.  In Grosz v. MoMA the heirs of Berlin artist George Grosz sought to reclaim artworks that Grosz had left with Flechtheim when Grosz fled Hitler in January 1933 to come to New York to teach at the Art Students League.   MoMA got the case dismissed by falsely claiming to a federal judge that MoMA had refused the Grosz heirs claims and thus succeeded in applying the statute of limitations to hold onto the stolen art.  MoMA refused to provide the research files from MoMA's Provenance Research Project to the Grosz Heir and refused to provide its documents on art dealer Curt Valentin, MoMA's conduit to the Nazis.

MoMA's trafficking in artworks looted by the Nazis was the subject of William Cohan's excellent article MoMA's Problematic Provenances.

Glen Lowry, MoMA's director under whose tenure the files from the Provenance Research Project apparently disappeared, remains at its head.  Cohan won a Silurians Award (article here) for his article exposing MoMA's crimes, but MoMA's Trustees seem to have taken little note.  Hopefully German museums will start to write and publish work about Flechtheim, his Aryanization by Nazi SS  (earlier of Der Stahlhelm) member Alexander Voemel, and this research will force U.S. museums to start doing the right thing.

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#art MoMA's Problematic Provenances - George Grosz

Willi Baumeister no title 1928 (collage for Alfred Flechtheim)  image Artvalue here.

Excellent article by William Cohan on MoMA's concealment of the provenances of artworks in Alfred Flechtheim's 1933 inventory in December 2011 Art News here.  Alfred Flechtheim, depicted above by Willi Baumeister, was the most prominent contemporary art dealer of the Weimar Republic.  Scandal erupted over claims by the heirs of George Grosz that Grosz had left artworks now at MoMA in the hands of Flechtheim, who in turn was "Aryanized" by a Nazi from Dusseldorf named Alexander Voemel in 1933.

Cohan's article points out how MoMA has tried to erase Flechtheim from art history.

The MoMA, like a number of other U.S. museums, has used statutes of limitations to hold onto stolen art, even though museum administrators and trustees had concealed information that would permit heirs to make claims for decades.

MoMA Executive Glenn Lowry misled the Grosz heirs by claiming that he had no authority to refuse their claims to the three artworks in question and had not refused their claims to the artworks.    MoMA, represented by the Proskauer law firm, then changed its position, claiming that Lowry actually did have the authority to refuse the claims and that he'd actually refused the claims much earlier than he had by simply not returning the artworks.   

MoMA was successful in convincing federal judges that the "refusal" had triggered New York's three year statute of limitations.

You can read the cert petition in Grosz v MoMA here.   You can read the Second Circuit's opinion here.

It should shock the conscience of Americans that museums can use statutes of limitations to hold onto stolen art, the acquisition of which has been subsidized by U.S. taxpayers.    Rich people should not be able to avoid paying taxes by taken art stolen from Jews in the Holocaust and putting it into U.S. museums where it is hidden from scrutiny - often for decades.

Cohan does an excellent job of outing Nazi agent Curt Valentin.   More on Valentin here and here.

More on Alfred Flechtheim here and here and here.

The first part of Laurie Stein's declassified Swiss report (reference by Cohan) here.

(disclosure - the author represented the Grosz heirs in Grosz v. MoMA).

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Art Litigation - Grosz v MoMA Amicus Curiae Brief on Nazi Spoliation

Jacob Hilsdorf 1910 photograph of Alfred Flechtheim

When artist George Grosz fled Nazi Germany in January 1933, he left his artworks in the care of Jewish art dealer Alfred Flechtheim.   Flechtheim was the premier contemporary art dealer of the Weimar Republic.  You haven't heard his name before and no one in the United States has even cared enough to make a Wikipedia page for him in English, even though our museums are full of works that passed through his hands.   My earlier posts on him here .   Big article in Welt Online today on Flechtheim here.  Use Google Translate to read it if you don't read German, it predicts that the Flechtheim restitution litigation will be the biggest ever filed in Germany.

My firm represents the heirs of George Grosz in trying to obtain restitution of artworks Grosz left with Flechtheim's gallery in 1933.  Our complaint was dismissed pursuant to Rule 12 b 6 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure as time-barred based on a settlement communication sent by MoMA Director Glenn Lowry to a representative of the Grosz Heirs, which the MoMA claimed, and the district judge accepted, to be a "refusal" for statute of limitations purposes under New York's demand and refusal rule.

I understand that MoMA made an informal presentation of its position to the NY City Bar Association's Art Law Committee, I am hopeful that we will receive equal time.

The Grosz Heirs appealed to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, the appeal is now pending.  An amicus brief was filed in support of our position, a list of the Amici and a copy of the brief below:

American Jewish Congress, Commission for Art Recovery; Filippa Marullo Anzalone, Yehuda Bauer, Michael J. Bazyler, Bernard Dov Beliak, Michael Berenbaum, Donald S. Burris, Judy Chicago and Donald Woodman, Talbert D’Alemberte, Marion F. Desmukh, Hedy Epstein, Hector Feliciano, Irving Greenberg, Grace Cohen Grossman, Marcia Sachs Littell, Hubert G. Locke, Carrie Menkel-Meadow, Arthur R. Miller, Carol Rittner, John K. Roth, Lucille A. Roussin, William L. Shulman, Stephen D. Smith and Fritz Weinschenk, In Support of Plaintiffs-Appellants and Reversal


Grosz v MoMA Amicus Brief - Nazi Art Looting

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Art Litigation: American Association of Museums Should Be Prosecuted For Concealing Stolen Property

MoMA's Glenn Lowry - Asserting Statutes of Limitations Against Heirs of Nazi Persecutees and Getting Richly Compensated For It

On Friday, I attended a panel on the U.S. State Department's proposal to set up a U.S. Commission to deal with the problem of Nazi-looted art in U.S. museum collections.   More on the panel, Wrestling the Dead Hand of History organized by Prof. Jennifer Kreder here.

Amb. Stuart Eizenstat - Expressing Outrage

The atmosphere was one of unanimous outrage over the misbehavior of U.S. museums and their lack of adherence to the Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art.  U.S. museums have taken to suing heirs of victims of Nazi persecution to avoid discovery and litigation "on the merits".   U.S. museums assert laches and statute of limitations defenses, knowing that it will damage international efforts to obtain recoveries of artworks from museum collections around the world.  If the U.S. is not going to support Jewish heirs, then who will?

The Jewish Claims Conference and Ronald Lauder's Commission for Art Recovery have asked U.S. museums to renounce the use of "technical" legal defenses such as laches and statutes of limitations as being unethical.   According to Lauder's lawyer Charles Goldstein, who signed the letter, the AAM and AAMD have not even bothered to respond to the request.   This is not the usual museum practice in dealing with a billionaire's lawyer.

In the postwar era, U.S. museums acquired tens of thousands of potentially-looted artworks. They've given virtually none of it back, have not properly researched their collections, and sit back hoping that the heirs of an exterminated population will never figure it out.   According to the museums, it is the job of the people who were murdered to finance and assert claims, after which, museums will decide whether or not to give the work back.

Museums claim that no one had any idea about the Holocaust when they acquired these artworks from the 1940's until today, often as donations, almost always without paperwork.   Since the severe Nazi persecution of Jews and the spoliation of their property was on the front page of every newspaper in the world starting in March 1933, the museums are engaging in a particularly pernicious form of Holocaust denial.

The custom and practice in the art world has always been to get documentation of the artwork's prior ownership and authenticity.  If you didn't get the paperwork, you were taking a risk that the property was stolen.   This practice has not changed, yet museums falsely claim that this is a recent development.  Wealthy Americans who bought European art at bargain prices without paperwork in the '40's, '50's and 60's knew darned well that they were probably buying stolen art.  Museum people always knew of the problem and were specifically and repeatedly warned in writing by the U.S. State Department in the 1940's and 1950's against acquiring artworks lacking paperwork.  Receiving stolen property has alway been a crime.


18 U.S.C. § 662 : US Code - Section 662: Receiving stolen property within special maritime and territorial jurisdiction

Whoever, within the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States, buys, receives, or conceals any money, goods, bank notes, or other thing which may be the subject of larceny, which has been feloniously taken, stolen, or embezzled, from any other person, knowing the same to have been so taken, stolen, or embezzled, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; but if the amount or value of thing so taken, stolen or embezzled does not exceed $1,000, he shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.

(Italics supplied).

U.S. museums that refuse to disclose the documents necessary to trace the true owners of artworks in their collections should be prosecuted and their directors jailed.

Alfred Flechtheim - U.S. Museums Will Not Reveal Provenance Documents Relating To His 1933 Inventory

Image Jacob Hilsdorf 1910 courtesy Wikipedia

U.S. museums have it backwards and should be trying to figure out whose stolen property they are holding.  It was heartwarming to hear Goldstein affirm that museums do not have a fiduciary duty to litigate all claims and defenses relating to the stolen art in their collections.

When will the AAM and AAMD respond?   And without Robert Morgenthau on the scene, who will keep the museums honest?