The Rape of Europa (79 page)

Having won his fight on principle, Rosenberg did later sell the purloined pictures, and many others, to Bührle. Today they are demurely listed as “acquired from a French private collection in 1951” or the like. The introduction to a recent catalogue for a show of Bührle’s collection at the National Gallery of Art notes that “as the war neared its end he succumbed once more to the urge to buy” and discovered “thanks to Paul Rosenberg, further important works.” And, the writer innocently continues, “a brief note of 1944 (preserved by chance) informs us that in a relatively short time Bührle had purchased twelve paintings by artists from Corot to Matisse. The magnificent group documents his voracious appetite for painting and his need to experience works of art at first hand.”
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By 1953 Rosenberg was still missing seventy-one pictures; five years later this figure had fallen to twenty. Gathering his documentation once again, he submitted a claim to the Federal Republic of Germany, which had in July 1957 passed a law authorizing monetary compensation for such losses. After two years of negotiation the Germans offered less than half the amount claimed. Paul Rosenberg having died by then, his family accepted the German offer; but this was still not the end of it. Since 1958 seven more paintings have been accounted for, if not all recovered. One had been given to the Rothschilds by mistake. In 1970 a lawyer in Cologne wrote to Alexandre Rosenberg to say that unnamed clients had his Degas
Deux danseuses
and would like to make a deal. The Rosenbergs had several options: they could go to court and try to get it back, and if they did,
repay the German government for its value; they could buy it back; or they could accept a payment from the new owners and transfer title to them. Alexandre, tired of the endless process, chose the third course. The payment was far below market value. “I do not like so enriching the successors to thieves,” he wrote, “but have come to learn that the defense of one’s own and one’s family interests is somewhat like politics and indeed life itself. It is principally the art of the possible.”
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Other Rosenberg pictures continue to surface in the trade. In 1974 the heirs were able to seize a Braque,
Le Guéridon au paquet de tabac
, at a Versailles auction. This is not an easy process: the original owner must have excellent documentation and convince the relevant enforcement agencies of the justice of his claim. If there is any warning, the picture is likely to be withdrawn by the usually anonymous consignor, as did happen in the case of another missing picture, Degas’s
Portrait of Gabrielle Diot.
This drawing was advertised in 1987 in a full-page ad placed by a Hamburg dealer, complete with the Paul Rosenberg provenance, but disappeared again when too many inquiries were forthcoming.

Retrieving collections such as that of Paul Rosenberg was hard and unpleasant work. Even more so was the job of deciding whether the things for which the Nazis had paid should or should not be returned to their original owners. This nasty duty fell to the national commissions of recuperation, who had to determine if a sale had been “forced” or if collaboration was involved. Some who had sold for vast sums to the Nazis were not shy about reclaiming their former possessions, and the publicity surrounding the return of the works would make it difficult for the more discreet to hide. With much press coverage the French Commission put on an exhibition of three hundred recovered works in January 1946. Most had never been seen in public before and almost all belonged to private collectors, traditionally wary of the tax man, whose names were carefully left out of the catalogue.

The two Rembrandts sold by wine mogul Etienne Nicolas to Haberstock were not in the catalogue at all, though they were in the show. There they were spotted by the Fraud section of French Customs, which formally requested that the Commission block their restitution to Nicolas as the agency planned to seize them and give them to the Louvre.
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Nicolas resisted for a time, referring in his correspondence to “the pictures confiscated from me by the Germans,” but soon settled, informing Henraux at the Commission that he had always meant to give them to the Louvre, which of course was true.
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This was not quite enough for the government, which then fined him the exact amount he had received from
the Germans on the grounds that he had “contributed materially to the impoverishment of the State.”

In Belgium, Emile Renders had much the same experience, although it was he who brought suit and not the government. In the court’s view, his long-term bargaining with Goering for higher prices overrode the Reichsmarschall’s threats, and his pictures went to the Belgian state. Count Jaromir Czernin reclaimed his Vermeer the day after Ritchie brought it back to Austria, on grounds that it had been extorted by the Nazis. An Austrian tribunal held that this claim had no relation to the facts, and published the Count’s little thank-you note to Hitler. He appealed this decision, according to one source, with the backing of an unknown American who wanted to buy the Vermeer.
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This was rejected, and the picture now hangs in the Kunsthistorisches, which had, of course, hoped that the Führer was buying it for them.

No one in Holland ever publicly discussed van Beuningen’s very profitable sales to Posse, but there was perhaps no need to do so: his recovered paintings and the rest of his collections were soon donated to the Boymans Museum and his name added to its title. Though it was assumed for a long time that the Koenigs drawings which Posse had bought from him had perished, the fact that they had gone to the USSR was gradually revealed by clues in the writings of East German scholars. In 1983 a Baldung Grien from the collection was offered to the Boymans by a Berlin lawyer representing an unknown Soviet client who hinted that there were more where that had come from. The offer was withdrawn when the Dutch government intervened; a few years later the drawing turned up in the hands of the American collector Ian Woodner. He resisted restitution until his death in 1991, when it was returned by his estate. The Netherlands Office for Fine Arts, successor to its recuperation commission, in 1989 published an elaborate catalogue of the 526 drawings still missing, most of which were believed to be in the Soviet Union. In 1992 this was officially confirmed by the Russian Minister of Culture, and it is assumed that they will soon return to Rotterdam.

More complicated for the committee was the disposition of the Mannheimer and Goudstikker collections. It was all very businesslike. Although under the Dutch law declaring all transactions with the Nazis illegal the Mannheimer works were considered to have been confiscated, the proceeds of their sale had been used to settle their owner’s debts to Dutch citizens. The committee therefore felt that Mme Mannheimer had no claim on the objects that came back to Holland. The best things were taken by the Rijksmuseum, and the rest of the enormous collection was sold at auction for the profit of the Dutch state. The paintings which Mühlmann had
garnered at the last moment in France had, however, gone back to that country. The Dutch were not about to give up on these works, which had been part of Mühlmann’s original contract. Representatives of the Rijksmuseum entered into negotiations with Mme Mannheimer in Paris. This was tricky, as her late husband had also had French and British interests, but in the end a deal was struck and Mme Mannheimer was allowed to keep a number of works,
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among them the charming Chardin
Soap Bubbles
, which eventually came to the United States and was sold to the Met.

The Goudstikker case was equally complex. Alois Miedl had kept his word and protected Desi Goudstikker’s share of the company, which had been carefully invested in Dutch stocks and currency and not in Reichsmarks. Behind him he had left, in some disarray, what remained of the Goudstikker art and real estate. When Mrs. Goudstikker arrived back in Holland she found the old staff of the firm, including those who had sold it, there to greet her. Knowing little of what had transpired, she was unsure of how to regard them. It was up to her to prove that the sale of the firm had been forced and that the price paid was too low. The latter issue was made more difficult because Goudstikker had, in the thirties, consistently undervalued or written off works, and more than 160 pictures were on the books as having been worth one guilder. Nor were the Dutch authorities persuaded that the sale engineered by the Goudstikker employees had been forced. Mrs. Goudstikker, who had not been involved in the firm’s business affairs, was now afraid she would lose everything, and gave up her claim to the pictures sold to Goering. For a time she tried to get back the things which were still in Miedl’s name, but after six years gave that up too; all the recovered works went to the Dutch state. In the end she bought back the three houses Miedl had taken over, but soon had to sell Castle Nyenrode and the Amsterdam headquarters of the firm. Beautiful Ostermeer she offered to the Dutch government in return for permission to live in a cottage on the grounds. The gift was refused, as it was not endowed, and that house too was sold.

The idea of a freeze on the art trade in the formerly occupied countries come the liberation, proposed by both Georges Wildenstein and Jacques Seligmann in the early days of the war, evaporated without trace. As Kenneth Clark discovered, the continental trade had continued with only slight interruption, the only place where there was a freeze being Germany. Indeed, the Wildenstein firm was one of the first to resume its international operations. Well before the fall of Germany, their man Dequoy showered both the New York and London offices with chatty cables full of news and
proposed sales, and set in motion the claims process for the objects confiscated from the firm. He even became something of a Resistance hero for a time. A story in
The New York Times
on September 11, 1944, under the headline “Paris Gallery Foiled Nazi Art Collectors,” ran as follows:

Frenchmen have revealed with relish how at least in one case the Nazis paid for French loot but never received the goods. Roger Dequoy, manager of the Georges Wildenstein Art Gallery, had a four-year fencing match with German art collectors ending in a complete victory for him. Nightly, during the Nazi occupation, M. Dequoy and his staff moved Renoirs, Manets, Goyas, valuable 18th century furnishings, rugs and tapestries into hiding places…. Once the Nazis learned the picture collection was stored in the vaults they demanded the right to purchase from it. Knowing he would get only a tenth of the real value of the collection, M. Dequoy managed to substitute inferior paintings before the arrival of the purchasers.

By late 1944 not one dealer’s doors had been closed by the authorities. This seeming insouciance on the part of the French upset the OSS investigators whose mounting stacks of evidence pointed straight to numerous Paris dealers, but who could get little cooperation from their French counterparts, the Direction Générale des Etudes et Recherches (DGER)—the result more of chauvinism and political turmoil than of inaction.

Laws were, in fact, passed aimed at prosecuting those who had profited illegally from trading with the enemy. A DGER agent reported that after an official Art Dealers Association meeting in early January 1945, the principal members had met secretly to decide what their “attitude” would be toward the financial decrees. The situation of the art dealers was “delicate,” he reported, as some 80 percent of them had done significant business with the Germans, much of which had not been entered in their books. They had reckoned without the meticulous habits of the Nazis. “The secret of their operations is difficult to keep since certain operations are already known and the objects have been found in Germany.” For fear of financial reprisal, they had agreed not to provide any information at all, a situation which, the agent felt, could delay the more important objective of the recovery of confiscated works of art.
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By April 1945 Lefranc, the Vichy agent who had engineered the Schloss affair, was in jail and others were being investigated and fined, which had the effect of depressing the auction business at the Drouot and promoting underground trading for cash. The DGER found this deplorable: the strict measures, they lamented, were driving sales abroad. Though they agreed that the worst offenders should be punished,
they recommended to the Commission de Récupération Artistique that collectors and merchants should be encouraged to revive the art trade, and should especially seek out nineteenth-century French works in occupied Germany, where they could surely be obtained cheaply, and where “American artistic centers have already sent representatives.” Only by exploiting this opportunity would Paris remain “the indispensable artistic center of the entire world”; neglect of it would “condemn them to watching the center of the art trade move across the Atlantic.”
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But the Commission de Récupération and the French representatives at the Collecting Points felt otherwise. Commandant Pierre-Louis Duchartre at Munich told Henraux that the image of a corrupt Parisian market would please those who “would be happy to see the Paris art trade damaged” and urged that the government send more help to the delegation at the Collecting Point, which the DGER had so far refused to do. Indeed, the lack of personnel had forced Duchartre to hire two slightly dubious Yugoslav refugees, who had so far been a great success and turned up twenty-one of the missing Schloss pictures in and around Munich.
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Martin Fabiani was arrested in September 1945, but not before he too had managed to wangle a visa to go to London, where he was put up at the Wildenstein suite at the Dorchester.
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He was forced to pay a whopping FFr 146 million fine. His troubles did not end for a long time. There was still the matter of the five or six hundred (the figures vary) Vollard pictures stuck in Ottawa, where they were being carefully tended in the storerooms of the National Gallery of Canada. These he could not claim, as he had at last been put on the Allied Blacklist and could not get a visa. There was another little complication: Vollard’s will had specified that his collection be inventoried, which had never been done in his lifetime, and that it then be divided among several heirs, of which the City of Paris was one. This Fabiani and co-heir de Galea had failed to do before the outbreak of war, so that no one really knew what had been in the collection at the time of Vollard’s death.