A Pissarro in Oklahoma, aka "Meyer 13" at the Jeu de Paume

When I reviewed The Monuments Men, I mentioned the Cate Blanchett character, based on the real life Frenchwoman, Rose Valland who worked at the Jeu de Paume and recorded the art stolen from Jewish families like the Rothschilds, the Rosenbergs, and the Meyers, among others. Her work has continued significance today, as the record she made of stolen art proves who really owns it and should possess it. For example, she inventoried the works stolen from Raoul Meyer, one of which is at the center of his family's dispute with the University of Oklahoma. From The Wall Street Journal, Ronald S. Lauder writes:

Meanwhile, Leone Meyer, daughter of Raoul Meyer, a Jewish businessman in Paris during the Nazi occupation, is suing the University of Oklahoma in the hope of recovering "Shepherdess Bringing in Sheep," an 1886 work by French impressionist Camille Pissarro that was stolen from her father's private collection by the Nazis. Over the years the Pissarro had several owners and traveled to Switzerland and New York before arriving at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, which is owned by the University of Oklahoma. The school has refused to return the painting, citing a 1950s court ruling in Switzerland that denied the Meyer family's claim on grounds that there was a five-year window for such lawsuits. That the Nazis stole the painting is not in dispute.

Such refusals are not only immoral, they fly in the face of postwar agreements. The Nazi thefts from 1933-45 are the greatest displacement of artwork in human history. FDR and Churchill recognized the vast scope of the thefts early in World War II, and in 1943 the Allies declared their intention to invalidate all property transfers—even ones made to look legal—that were part of the Nazis' looting. Official Allied policy was that all governments should work to return stolen property to rightful owners.

After decades in which this issue was conveniently ignored, the U.S. State Department sponsored an international conference in Washington, D.C., in 1998 to resolve the many and complicated issues surrounding the repatriation of Nazi-looted art. The conference introduced 11 protocols, known as the Washington Principles. The U.S. and the 43 other countries that adopted the principles agreed to look for Nazi-looted art in their public art collections and to resolve restitution claims in a just and fair manner.

The Washington Principles amount to these two truths: Art museums and their collections should not be built with stolen property. Passion for art should not displace respect for justice. . . .

Refusing to return stolen art because of the passage of time—not yet 70 years since Auschwitz was liberated—deprives museums of any claim to moral high ground.

There have been museums that have demonstrated clear vision, such as the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens in Jacksonville, Fla., which honored a claim by Ms. Saher involving art from the same collection that is the subject of her claim against the Norton Simon Museum.

Yet too many art museums in the U.S. and Europe seem to have forgotten a simple rule: There should be no impediments to responsible behavior. Above all, we in the art community should not perpetuate the crime against humanity committed by Hitler when he stole Jewish art collections and murdered their owners.

Raoul Meyer was not just any businessman in Paris--he was one of the owners of the Galeries Lafayette on Blvd. Haussmann. That great department store was taken over by the Vichy government and remained open during the Nazi occupation of Paris. One of the other owners survived the Buchenwald camp. Here is the record of the Pissarro; Rolland recorded it as "Meyer 13". I think the University of Oklahoma should return the painting to the family. What do you think?

Movie Review: The Monuments Men (2014)

 

You might have noticed on this blog that I am fascinated by the history of art stolen by the Nazis during World War II from various museums and also the private collectors (often Jewish). The Rape of Europa is the great documentary about Hitler's great plan for a Linz art museum in his name honoring all the great art he desired, the Nazi disgust for certain art they considered degenerate because non-Aryan, efforts to protect and preserve the art in the midst of war, and efforts to return art stolen from individuals to their heirs, etc.

 

So I bought a DVD of The Monuments Men: a mistake. Whatever good intentions George Clooney, director, writer, and producer and his co-writer and co-producer Grant Heslov had, they made a terrible movie, episodic and sentimental, illogical and historically inaccurate.

 

What they did with the character of Claire Simon, based on the real-life Rose Valland, was most disappointing. At first resistant to helping the American museum curator sent to contact her, she then tries to seduce him even as she gives him the detailed notes she made about works stolen from private collections (The Rothschilds, etc). It is the most cynical, cold, calculated attempt of seduction, coming in the context of her mockery of the unfaithfulness of American soldiers to their wives. Matt Damon's character has no trouble rejecting it, although he tries to let her down easy in some trite way.

 

It's too bad that Clooney thought he had to make The Monuments Men into "Ocean's Fourteen"--with buddy movie jokes about mines and tooth decay in the midst of war, death, atrocities, and mayhem. It was horribly disappointing: I'd recommend the documentary and the books about the real "Monument Men" instead. If seeing the movie does lead viewers to those resources, it will have accomplished something good.

Lost Works Found in Munich: The Rape of Europa Revisited

I find the documentary, The Rape of Europa, about Nazi (and Communist) thievery of the art collections of Europe and particularly Europe's Jewish art collectors, haunting and disturbing. It's haunting to think of the works of art still missing and it's disturbing to note that the confiscation of the artworks from the Jewish owners was part of the great Nazi goal to obliterate the Jewish people.

Now comes the story that many works of art were found in 2011--in an apartment searched in the course of a tax evasion investigation:

The legacy of Nazi war crimes resurfaced on Monday when a German magazine reported that a trove of artworks looted from Jewish collectors had been discovered in a Munich apartment. According to the weekly Focus magazine, the hoard of paintings could be worth more than a billion dollars, as it includes masterpieces by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall and Paul Klee. German authorities discovered the works almost by accident in the home of Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of a Munich art collector. As the details of the case have continued to emerge so have the questions about the German authorities’ decision-making.

The problem is that the art was found in 2011 and the news is just now being reported in 2013. In fact, Cornelius Gurlitt was able to auction off one of the works--which Adolf Hitler would have termed "degenerate" art--even after authorities found the treasure trove.

One of the deeply disturbing issues in The Rape of Europa is how hard it is for families to get their property back. The documentary focuses on the Bloch-Bauer family and the portraits of Adele Bloch-Bauer by Gustav Klimt. Government authorities, judges, and museums are reluctant to part with ill-gotten gains: it seems a matter of justice to me that the rightful owners should receive their property. One of the concerns with this case is that authorities are hiding the hidden art. The BBC notes that:

Art is the last unfinished business of World War Two. Though the Allies uncovered large numbers of stolen paintings in 1945 in the Alt Aussee salt mines near Salzburg, and in a castle south of Munich, an unknown number have been lost forever. Russia holds more than 120,000 wartime art objects in three museums round Moscow.

In many cases, the quality of vanished art was the highest. An important Raphael - Portrait of A Young Man - taken from Catholic owners in Poland heads a list of missing art which amounts to a small National Gallery: paintings by Rubens, Van Dyck and Rembrandt to the fore.  [Note that someone knows something about where this Raphael painting is--that it's in a bank vault somewhere safe and should be returned to Poland someday soon, according to this story from 2012.]

Five years ago Austria revealed the existence of more than 10,000 paintings and sculptures, hidden since 1945 in monasteries along the Danube and in state institutions.

Their Jewish owners had not been traced; how hard the Austrian government had tried to trace them was not made clear.

An Austrian list exists on the internet for descendants of the original owners to come forward - if, that is, they can prove the ownership of Jews in concentration camps, or who fled in panic without documents or photographs as Nazi forces approached.

London dealers close to the "restitution" business predict that 100 to 150 paintings will come off the walls of German museums in the next 25 years and be restored to the families of their original owners.

As paintings washed around Europe in the 1950s without clear ownership, German museums whose collections of the 20th Century had been wiped out by Hitler bought what they could, at cheap prices, without asking too many questions.

The past now catches up with the present. Lawyers in Vienna and Berlin now offer "no win no fee" deals to the descendants of concentration camp victims.