Nazi-Looted Art and Its Legacies: Introduction

Home , Gurlitt Collection, Looted art, Lost artworks

Andreas Huyssen, Anson Rabinbach, and Avinoam Shalem

In early 2012 German officials investigating violations of tax law discovered a trove of mainly nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European paintings and drawings in the Munich apartment and Salzburg house of Cornelius Gurlitt, the reclusive son of the prominent art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt. The elder Gurlitt had worked for the Nazis but also counted a number of artists despised by them among his friends. Since then, the story of the Gurlitt collection has made headlines worldwide. Beyond the bizarre obsession of the aging son, who lived with and for his artworks hidden from public view, the case raises fundamental questions about the role of art dealers during and after the Third Reich, the mechanics of a largely secretive and insufficiently docu- mented market in looted art, the complicity of art historians and business associations, the shortcomings of postwar denazification, the failure of courts and governments to adjudicate claims, and the unwillingness of museums to determine the provenance not just of Cornelius Gurlitt’s holdings but of

Generous funding for the conference was provided by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service, and Columbia’s Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies. We are also grateful for a donation by Lee Bollinger and Jean Magnano Bollinger. New York’s Jewish Museum provided a festive space for the opening lecture. At Columbia, the conference was cosponsored by the Heyman Center for the Humanities, the Department of History, the University Seminar on Cultural Memory, the Middle East Institute, and the Department of Germanic Languages. Special thanks go to the staffs of the Departments of Art History and of Germanic Languages and their legendary organizational skills. New German Critique 130, Vol. 44, No. 1, February 2017 DOI 10.1215/0094033X-3705667 © 2017 by New German Critique, Inc.

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thousands of artworks looted by the Nazis across Europe and sold off for hard currency by state authorities or their agents. It also raises a host of legal and ethical questions about restitution and what one might call belated transitional justice for stolen art and its former private or public owners. The Gurlitt story was so toxic that it cast glaring light on the failures of German Vergangenheits aufarbeitung with regard to Nazi-looted art, its agents, its national and inter national networks, and its hidden legacies up to the present. The case quickly became a scandal in late 2013 after the German authorities had kept it secret for close to two years. The Bavarian government revealed that the discovery included paintings by Auguste Renoir, Henri Matisse, Franz Marc, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Max Liebermann, and many others. Since the elder Gurlitt was one of Nazi Germany’s most prominent dealers and among postwar Germany’s best-known art entrepreneurs, the paintings were immediately suspected of having been confiscated and stolen from their Jewish owners, or from museums pillaged in the notorious campaign against “degenerate art.” When initial research confirmed that some of the Gurlitt artworks had indeed belonged to Jewish collectors forced to abandon possessions in their desperate efforts to flee abroad, the Jewish Claims Confer- ence intervened; Ronald S. Lauder publicly criticized the German government; and the international press reported at length about a case that to some observ- ers seemed to suggest a perverse equivalence between lost art and lost lives. The Gurlitt case was not the only public manifestation of the controversy over looted art. George Clooney’s 2014 Monuments Men is a clumsy Holly- wood reprise of the famous US Army art conservationists in uniform—sort of the Dirty Dozen meet Art History 101—who rescued large quantities of stolen art at the end of World War II. A year later Helen Mirren starred in Woman in Gold, the story of how Maria Altmann, an Austrian American refugee, was able to reclaim her family’s portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer by Gustav Klimt with the help of a heroic Viennese journalist and an intrepid American lawyer. These objects of loot were and are also sometimes regarded as the last prison- ers of wars, and the fight for their restitution symbolizes the battle for remem- bering and reconstructing stolen lives of individuals and communities.1 Gener- ally speaking and beyond the frame of the Shoah, it is no wonder, then, that museums and other public institutions that amass and store cultural goods become the main arenas in which truth telling, memory, and histories are tested and contested. Today these institutions are put under moral scrutiny.

1. On the emergence of US interest in Nazi-looted art, including earlier films, see Dellheim, “Framing Nazi Art Loot.”

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In Germany the public outcry led to an unprecedented collaboration of German federal and state governments, as well as provenance researchers, legal experts, art historians, and representatives from more than a dozen coun- tries in a newly created task force (Schwabinger Kunstfund). The task force signaled the first concerted effort to determine the provenance of artworks suspected of being looted. As Julia Voss writes in this issue: “For the first time, international experts and representatives of Jewish organizations were asked to join a consulting body.” In this respect, it followed the principles laid down at the 1998 Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets, which declared that “art that had been confiscated by the Nazis and not subsequently restituted should be identified.”2 However, according to German law, the only legal institution devoted exclusively to looted art remains the Limbach Com- mission, established in 2003 to advise museums in restitution cases. As Voss points out, the commission remains a consultative body. It cannot render deci- sions or negotiate restitutions, and it requires that museums actively initiate its assistance. At the height of the discussions of the Gurlitt case in early 2014, Andreas Huyssen from Columbia University’s Department of Germanic Languages and Avinoam Shalem from the university’s Department of Art History and Archaeology joined forces to organize a scholarly conference on Nazi-looted art and its aftereffects in the present. Holger A. Klein, then chair of art history; Anson Rabinbach, European historian at Princeton and specialist in the history of Nazism; and Elisabeth Rochau-Shalem, with her extensive network of museum curators and provenance research scholars in Germany, joined the planning effort. The conference, “Ghosts of the Past: Nazi-Looted Art and Its Legacies,” took place in early 2015 with an evening keynote by Olaf Peters at New York’s Jewish Museum and a long day of lectures and discussions streamed to a large audience at Columbia and beyond. It brought together an international group of historians of Nazi cultural politics, art historians, scholars in provenance research and the history of German art dealerships, members of the German Task Force of Provenance Research, American museum curators from New York and Los Angeles, lawyers, and journalists. Beyond the specific case of the Gurlitts’ long-hidden treasures, the conference was designed to explore the consciously veiled continuities of art dealerships and auction houses from the Nazi period into the Federal Republic, and to take stock of a fast-developing political and cultural debate. Of course there have been earlier attempts to document Nazi cultural policies and to deal

2. See US Department of State, “Washington Conference Principles.”

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with the complicities of the German art-historical establishment.3 The scholar- ship of the 1960s and early 1970s, vital in the context of the student movement and the New Left, had only a limited afterlife and—curiously enough—was not significantly pursued in subsequent decades when the German memory debate about the Holocaust and the Third Reich took off in the public sphere. Much of the conference focused on the current phase of accelerated and officially supported provenance research, which to a large extent responds to public and political pressures. One consequence is that a host of unanswered questions has emerged on what constitutes “looted art.” Do looted works include only those directly confiscated or acquired by theft or “Aryanization,” as some museums have claimed, or do they include coerced acquisitions more broadly conceived? Can the original owners be identified? By what legal proce- dures can restitution be effected? And, should the discussion be restricted to looted European art only? Recently discovered lists of Nazi-confiscated house- hold items (Beschlagnahmungen) from Jewish homes in Munich suggest that the objects of loot were not limited to paintings and masterpieces of European art. They also included silverware, oriental carpets and other collected artworks of “oriental” origin, and of course old manuscripts and rare printed books. Until now, German state-sanctioned commissions at both the federal and the state level only address works held by museums and not those in private collections like Gurlitt’s. As Konstantin Akinsha notes in this issue, artworks seized by the Red Army remain beyond the reach of restitution efforts.4 Jonathan Petropoulos documents the considerable irregularities that often accompanied the otherwise admirable work of the Monuments Men, including lost artworks, acts of personal gain, and even the burning of valuable cultural objects. The postwar United States was hardly exempt from chicanery, as the story of the close relationship between the Nazi art dealer Bruno Lohse and several top American museums illustrates. The main purpose of provenance research is to investigate the fate of specific works. It focuses on the transactions of sale and acquisition under extreme political pressure of Nazi racialized property law, and on meticulous documentation of legitimate or illegitimate ownership, with the goal of establishing parameters for restitution. But as several recent cases have shown, even when former owners of a Nazi-looted artwork and their heirs can be clearly identified, restitution invariably involves lengthy legal battles. Museums, both in Germany

3. Brenner, Die Kunstpolitik des Nationalsozialismus; Wulf, Die bildenden Künste; Hinz, Die Malerei im deutschen Faschismus; Hinz, Art in the Third Reich. See also Rabinbach and Gilman, Third Reich Sourcebook, which includes a number of relevant documents, such as the 1940 SS report “Masterpieces of German Art in Private Jewish Collections” (509). 4. On materials from recently opened Soviet archives, see Rotermund-Reynard, Echoes of Exile.

and in the United States, have been reluctant to restitute. As Lawrence Kaye, who has litigated several key cases, explains in this issue, American museums have been unwilling to adhere to the principles set down in Washington, DC, and subsequently reaffirmed in the 2009 Czech Terezin Declaration on Holo- caust Era Assets and Related Issues. He cites the egregious case of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena and its determination to hold on to its looted holdings through a blizzard of lawsuits and arcane legal maneuvers for almost ten years. By waging this protracted battle, he writes, the Norton Simon Museum “is flouting the dictates of the Washington Principles and the Terezin Declara- tion.” Kaye argues for removing the irrelevant statutes of limitation that museums frequently invoke, and for a “fair and just” approach that encourages both parties to engage in reconciliation: “Claimants will be compelled to forfeit per- fect justice and even corrective justice, to achieve closure with dignity and some recognition of their lost history. Possessors must meet them halfway.” These battles, no doubt, will go on for some time, as the sinister provenance and history of works will be illuminated in more detail in the future. Of particular interest to us, however, is the historical issue of the intersections between art dealers, auction houses, and Nazi policy, and their hidden continuities into the early decades of the Federal Republic. Hildebrand Gurlitt, part Jewish himself and dedicated to advancing modernism as a museum curator in the 1920s, not only became one of the major art dealers working for the regime but also was able to erase his past and reestablish himself as a respected art dealer in Düsseldorf after World War II. As Meike Hopp’s history of Adolf Weinmüller’s auction houses in Munich and Vienna and Meike Hoffmann and Nicola Kuhn’s biography of Hildebrand Gurlitt have shown, we need to under- stand the basic structures and mechanisms of how the art markets were gleich- geschaltet under the Nazis, how dealers were not just complicit but proactive in instituting and enforcing Nazi laws, and how old networks that had devel- oped over the years reemerged from the ashes of the Third Reich.5 Hopp sum- marizes it succinctly in the conclusion to her book: “This targeted and com- prehensively organized disenfranchisement was not planned at the highest levels of the Party; it took place in the midst of the art trade itself. It was mas- sively promoted by professional associations and ‘Aryan’ art dealers who rec- ognized the opportunity to get rid of disagreeable competition” (310). Her findings in the paradigmatic case of the Weinmüller auction houses demon- strate that “confiscation and theft of art collections by the Gestapo from 1938

5. Hopp, Kunsthandel im Nationalsozialismus; Hoffmann and Kuhn, Hitlers Kunsthändler. Both Hopp and Hoffmann participated in the conference, but unfortunately Hopp did not provide us with her paper, which summarized the findings of her book.

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on must be seen as a result of a continuous development that had begun much earlier” (310–11). Hopp’s impressive archival research does not include Wein- müller’s auctions after his house was reestablished in 1949 after denazification. Hoffmann and Kuhn, on the other hand, treat Hildebrand Gurlitt’s activi- ties in the postwar period in great detail. Their recent book provides a rich case study of the art world’s continuities from the Third Reich into the Federal Republic. The methods of provenance research are necessarily extremely detailed, haunted by the difficulty of absent documentation (either hidden or destroyed), and by detective work sometimes so complex that one may miss the forest for the trees. It has to be archive oriented and extremely positivistic, given legal and political pressures and always looming restitution claims. Some in the conference discussions felt that all the emphasis on ambiguities and “gray zones” of complicity, compliance, and complications risked making the meth- odological choice into yet another apologetic strategy at a time when German federal, regional, and local institutions are nationally and internationally pres- sured to come to terms with yet another unwelcome legacy. The danger is to create obfuscation through Wissenschaft. The history spanning the Third Reich and the postwar period is one thing; the lack of easy solutions dealing with the legacies of what one writer has called the “rape of Europe” is another.6 In addition, questions about other looted goods, for example, Jewish private libraries, which were recently the focus of Gish Amit’s study, bring the restitution queries into spaces like the Library of Congress and the Hebrew National Library in Jerusalem.7 Other questions about the looting of Islamic objects, either in the Nazi-occupied regions in North Africa or in other European sites, should also be raised—and the article by Amy Walsh on the story of the Per- sian (Safavid) carpet from the Czartoryski Collection in Kraków sheds light on one such pertinent case.8 Thus the debate about what to do with the Gurlitt collection and how to assess the legacies of Nazi-looted art will go on for some time, as the provenance of so many artworks in private and public hands worldwide remains to be researched. This is a task, we might suggest, not only for German researchers and museums.

6. Nicholas, Rape of Europa. 7. Amit, EX Libris. 8. A provenance research initiative similar to the one run by the Smithsonian Institution in Wash- ington, DC, is needed to cover all these “other” regions. See, e.g., the pioneering work of Banu Karaca on the “missing provenance, ‘lost’ works” of non-Muslim citizens in Turkey during World War II (www.art-histories.de/en/fellows/fellows-20152016/banu-karaca.html [accessed June 14, 2016]). For a report on the Smithsonian Provenance Research Initiative, see Milosch, “Provenance.”

References Amit, Gish. 2014. EX Libris: Hisṭoryah shel gezel, shimur ve-nikhus ba-Sifriyah ha-le’umit bi-Yerushalayim (Chronicles of Theft, Preservation, and Appropriation at the Jew- ish National Library in Jerusalem). Jerusalem: Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and Hakibbutz Hameuhad. Brenner, Hildegard. 1963. Die Kunstpolitik des Nationalsozialismus. Reinbek bei Ham- burg: Rowohlt. Dellheim, Charles. 2008. “Framing Nazi Art Loot.” In The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times, edited by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jonathan Karp, 319–34. Phila- delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hinz, Berthold. 1974. Die Malerei im deutschen Faschismus: Kunst und Konterrevolu- tion. Munich: Hanser. ———. 1979. Art in the Third Reich, translated by Rita Kimber. New York: Pantheon. Hoffmann, Meike, and Nicola Kuhn. 2016. Hitlers Kunsthändler: Hildebrand Gurlitt, 1895–1956. Munich: Beck. Hopp, Meike. 2012. Kunsthandel im Nationalsozialismus: Adolf Weinmüller in München und Wien. Cologne: Böhlau. Milosch, Jane C. 2014. “Provenance: Not the Problem (the Solution): Smithsonian Prove- nance Research Initiative.” Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Pro- fessionals 10, no. 3: 255–64. Nicholas, Lynn H. 1994. The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War. New York: Knopf. Rabinbach, Anson, and Sander Gilman, eds. 2013. The Third Reich Sourcebook. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rotermund-Reynard, Ines, ed. 2015. Echoes of Exile: Moscow Archives and the Arts in Paris, 1933–1945. Berlin: de Gruyter. US Department of State. 1998. “Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art.” www.state.gov/p/eur/rt/hlcst/122038.htm. Wulf, Joseph. 1963. Die bildenden Künste im Dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation. Güters loh: Mohn.

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