Declassified Swiss Government Report Shows Traffic of Nazi Looted Art To Museum of Modern Art (Updated)

Link to image in St. Louis Commerce, full article here

A declassified Swiss government report written by former Pulitzer Foundation director Laurie Stein shows that Nazi looted art passed through Switzerland to arrive at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

As set forth in Laurie Stein's report, Curt Valentin, August Klipstein, and Karl Buchholz were key players in this traffic with Alfred Barr.   MoMA has "the highest concentration of degenerate art from Germany"..... Alfred Barr "did not shy away from buying confiscated art through American-based commercial dealers such as [Curt] Valentin."  (pp 11-12).

Hitler's Swiss Dealer - August Klipstein of Gutekunst & Klipstein, now Galerie Kornfeld

Laurie Stein just chaired a panel in Vienna on Alfred Flechtheim, one of the Weimar Republic's leading art dealers whose gallery was Aryanized by SA officer Alexander Voemel shortly after Hitler took power in 1933.   More on Alfred Flechtheim here, Picasso's Jewish Dealer here, Flechtheim's Nose here, Amicus brief in Grosz v MoMA here, Flechtheim's Portrait By Belling here, Museum directors should be prosecuted for concealing stolen art here .

American museums continue to resist inquiries into the stolen works in their collections.

For more, read below.
Stein Pyritz - Swiss Government Report



 http://www.dunnington.com/rdowd_bio.html
 Purchase Copyright Litigation Handbook 2010 by Raymond J. Dowd from West here  

Art Litigation: Nazi Art Looting #art - Recent Developments in Federal Courts

Fides Trust/Fides Treuhand Founded in 1910 - Faithfully Concealing Nazi Art Looting Transactions For the Swiss http://www.fides.ch/


Nazi Art Looting - Case Developments [Compatibility Mode]

Above is a link to a Powerpoint Presentation I gave last week to the ABA Retirement Funds at the Ritz Carleton at Dove Mountain, outside Tucson, Arizona. It is similar to a presentation I gave last month to the Federal Bar Association's Phoenix Chapter.

As the Powerpoint above shows, a wave of decisions involving Nazi art looting hit the federal circuit courts of appeal in 2010 and it looks like the traffic will continue unabated.

Very few American legal scholars have addressed the questions relevant to stolen chattels in the hands of U.S. museums and private collectors and the consequences of the museum community's failure to squarely address its misconduct in receiving stolen art following World War II and by concealing its provenance to this day.   No one has surveyed the damage to the American taxpayer as wealthy Americans shielded their income from taxation by donating stolen works to U.S. museums.

The Internal Revenue Service should investigate this racket.

As can be seen from the Powerpoint, the American Association of Museums and the American Association of Museum Directors have betrayed the Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art by suing descendants of Holocaust victims and by concealing their research into the provenance of artworks in their collections.   Rather than encouraging and publishing scholarship, museums hire large and expensive law firms, then cloak all research under "attorney client privilege".    This is simply the concealment of stolen property, a state and federal crime, with museums hiring law firms to cloak their criminal actions.

More on Nazi art looting here.

Purchase Copyright Litigation Handbook 2010 by Raymond J. Dowd from West here  

Following the Trail to "Dead City" at Gratz College in Philadelphia - April 16

Egon Schiele's Dead City III - Now at the Leopold Museum

On April 16, Gratz College in Philadelphia is hosting a continuing legal education program called "Following the Trail to "Dead City" that will discuss the Egon Schiele oil Dead City III stolen from Fritz Grunbaum while he was in the Dachau Concentration Camp.   Austria recently appointed a commission to investigate the provenance of Dead City and is expected to issue a report in the next few months.   The decision will have repercussions on institutions such as Oberlin College, the Morgan Library, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Institute, Harvard's Fogg Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, all of which have artworks that followed the same provenance path as Dead City - through an art gallery in Switzerland called Gutekunst & Klipstein that is today Galerie Kornfeld run by Eberhard Kornfeld through Galerie St. Etienne in New York City.


If you would like to make a full day of it, the morning session features IBM and the Holocaust: Legal and Ethical Implications by Edwin Black (I included the information below).

The link is here.

Raymond J. Dowd, Esquire

April 16, 2010

Event Categories: Continuing Legal Education at Gratz College

This course presents the intriguing story of Egon Schiele’s painting, Dead City, after it was stolen by the Nazis and legal efforts to bring it back into the Grunbaum family.

Mr. Dowd will discuss how Fritz Grunbaum’s art collection surfaced in Switzerland in 1956 under disputed circumstances and was later found in the Leopold and Albertina museums in Austria. In 1998, District Attorney Robert Morgenthau seized Dead City (along with Portrait of Wally) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and unleashed an international debate over what countries should be doing to return art to Jewish heirs. Mr. Dowd will underscore the role of the Swiss in laundering Nazi-looted art; the response of the Austrian government, which has been somewhat less than cooperative; and the new commission the U.S. may establish to assist Holocaust victims and their heirs. Mr. Dowd has spoken on this topic at the Jewish Museum in Berlin and at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. A terrific companion to last year’s popular course on “Reclaiming Nazi Looted Art.”

1:00 pm - 4:30 pm

Three (3) substantive credits: $100

Discount for full day: $185. Contact Mindy Blechman for discount: mblechman@gratz.edu; 215-635-7300 x 154

Lunch included for participants who attend both classes.

Cost: $100.00

MORNING PROGRAM

CLE: IBM and the Holocaust: Legal and Ethical Implications


Mr. Edwin Black

April 16, 2010


Event Categories: Continuing Legal Education at Gratz College
As the Third Reich embarked upon its plan of conquest and genocide, IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s, all for the sake of profit. Mr. Black will review the carefully crafted corporate collusion with the Third Reich as well as the structured deniability of oral agreements, undated letters, and Geneva intermediaries. This was undertaken as the newspapers blazed with accounts of persecution and destruction.

Mr. Black will then broaden his discussion on corporate complicity in the Holocaust to the Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Carnegie and Rockefeller.

One (1) ethics and two (2) substantive credits: $100

Breakfast included; dietary laws observed.

Doors open at 8:30 am; course starts promptly at 9:00 am.

Speaker’s publications available for purchase and signing.





Cost: $100.00