Stealing the Mystic Lamb Review

I've just finished reading Noah Charney's "Stealing the Mystic Lamb:  The True Story of the World's Most Coveted Masterpiece".  This review should probably begin with a disclosure.  Noah is a friend and colleague, first an internet acquaintance, and now we meet up every summer in Amelia during ARCA's MA certificate program which he founded. 

This work tells the story of one massive 2-ton altar piece, the single most stolen work of art of all time, and one that should be familiar to anyone who has taken an introduction to art history course.

After dropping the reader into history as allied forces are searching for the altar piece during World War II, we learn early on that this work was the prize of Hitler and Napoleon.  That this massive masterpiece was nearly destroyed many times over.  Yet somehow it has endured. 

And we should all be glad it has.  The object itself is stunning, Charney in the first chapter takes the reader through the importance of the painting itself, how it helped launch the career of Jan van Eyck, how art historians have puzzled over how much of the work was completed by van Eyck's brother Hubert, how the artist used intricate symbolism, how it helped usher in the era of oil painting and beautiful detail.  But perhaps most importantly, the discussion of this painting and all it symbolizes reminded me why art matters, and how a stunning work of art can change the way we all see the world, and each viewer gets a chance to re-learn or even re-evaluate those shifts in opinion.  And in the end the work begins with a lively account for why individuals have stolen, mutilated, and coveted this work of art.

Next the reader learns about the artist himself, about the "Magician in the Red Turban". the reader also learns about attribution, the recent decline of connoisseurship in the appreciation of art, how the movement of art can cause the re-appraisal of works of art as  happened when the Albert Barnes Collection is preparing to move and many of its Old Master paintings were found to have been misattributed.  We learn about the creation of the Louvre, the place the Ghent altarpiece played in the creation of that museum, and how many of the arguments made for a universal museum were made by Dominique Vivant Denon who served as the architect of the art looting during Napleon's reign.   

Charney spends great care telling the story of the altarpiece during both World Wars, noting the debt we art theft writers owe to Karl Meyer, Robert Edsel and Brett Witter's fine work telling the story of the Monuments Men, and Lynn Nicholas among many others.  Yet what really comes through in Charney's book is a breathless story which merges history, towering figures like Napoleon or Hitler and their associates, art, artists, and imagery that revalidates why so many are interested in the study of art theft:  these are really good stories.  And it ends with an epilogue, yet another of the work's enduring mysteries, that should not be spoiled here.  

Student Comment on Recovering WWII-Era Art from Russia

Michael Cosgrove has a student comment on remedies for the return of art from Russia:  Still Seeing Red: Legal Remedies for Post-Communist Russia's Continued Refusal to Relinquish Art Stolen During World War II, 12 Gonzaga Journal of International Law (2009).  From his introduction:

            When the Red Army entered Germany at the end of World War II, it seized 2.3 million objects including paintings, sculptures, and other works of art. At the time of this writing in 2009, the bulk of those objects are still in Russia. In addition to hundreds of thousands of pieces that belonged to German citizens and German museums the Russians hold paintings that the Nazis had stolen from all over Europe. Many of the works in question have been kept in locked rooms in the basements of museums since the end of the war. Although there were some encouraging signs that the art might be returned, or at least allowed to be displayed, with the end of the communist government, it does not appear that Russia is considering a large scale return of the art at this time. To the contrary, the Russian government has long held that the art is restitution for the destruction and theft of Russian art by the Nazis, and passed a law in 1998 that declares that the art is state property. This article explores the international legal remedy for procuring that art from the Russian government. "[U]ntil every one of those paintings, prints, sculptures, tapestries, and artifacts is returned, it will be impossible for us to walk through most of the world's museums and galleries without wondering if we are staring into the haunted face of the spoils of war." At the outset, a conclusion: favorable verdicts are obtainable, but the successful conclusion of litigation will only be the beginning of the exceedingly difficult task of enforcing a verdict against an obstinate and neo-nationalistic Russian government.

Holocaust (Stolen Art) Restitution Act takes effect

New legislation which took effect on Friday will allow national museums in England and Scotland to act to return works of art, based on the recommendations of the Spoliation Advisory Panel.  The panel resolves claims arising from the loss of objects to the Nazis.  There have been nine instances of wrongful takings in which claimants were compensated, yet the national institutions have been forbidden from returning objects outright.  The only remedy was payment.  This is a welcome change, and allows UK museums to do the just thing.  Andrew Dismore, MP sponsored the act, and said:

It shows what could be achieved by a determined backbencher: by rolling out my sleeping bag and sleeping on the floor of the Public Bill Office overnight, I was able to become the first in the queue to apply for Second Readings after the balloted Bills, and this tactic paid off.

While I do not envisage the Act having to be used very frequently, this is an important moral step, to ensure that we can close yet a further chapter on the appalling crimes of the Holocaust.

1. UK museums can return looted art, BBC, November 13, 2009.

Germany Creates a Restitution Commission

Germany has decided to create a kind of Nazi Spoliation Office. From the AP:

BERLIN (AP) — A new office within Germany's Institute for Museum Research is opening in January to help identify and research art stolen by the Nazis, Germany's culture minister said Wednesday.

The office, which comes under the State Museums of Berlin, will help museums, libraries and archives identify items that were taken from their rightful owners during the Nazi period, Culture Minister Bernd Neumann said.

"I expect from this an important push in Germany in the clarifying of restitution questions," he said.

Neumann founded a working group to look into how to deal with restitution issues, after Berlin sparked controversy with a decision last year to return Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's "Berlin Street Scene" to the heirs of a Jewish collector who said the Nazis forced the family to sell it in the 1930s.

Some art experts questioned whether the expressionist work was sold under duress and whether its return was legal.

With the new office, which has a $1.47 million annual budget, Neumann said he hoped the restitution process would be better coordinated and more transparent.

This appears to be a good idea, and perhaps will preclude the need for private legal disputes when, for example, these works are displayed abroad as is the case with Schiele's Portrait of Wally. Will this commission help to return works to claimants? Offer settlements? Or, will it instead merely warn German institutions that certain objects are suspect and should not be loaned abroad?

Klimt Dispute

In another spoliation story in today's NY Times, A grandson of a woman who died in the Holocaust may be considering legal or other claims for this work, Blooming Meadow (1906) by Gustav Klimt. Georges Jorish is considering legal claims or seeking a settlement. It seems the impetus for the new claims is the publication of another catalogue raisonné, this one by Alfred Weidinger which states the painting belonged to Jorisch's grandmother.

The work now belongs to Leonard Lauder, who purchased the work in 1983. Wouldn't a legal claim have expired under the statute of limitations? Probably not. New York is one of the most generous jurisdictions in the world for original owners. A limitations period won't begin to run in New York until a demand and refusal has been made. Other legal defenses may be available to Lauder if the claimant delayed, but here it seems Jorisch is considering a claim after new information.

Another Dutch Holocaust Claim

Four heirs of art dealer Nathan Katz have brought a claim for 227 works recovered in German at the end of World War II reports Marlise Simons in todays NY Times. Among the contested works is this painting by Salomon van Ruysdael, Horsefair at Valkenburg. The claim was made public Friday, just as the Dutch were moving to discourage new restitution claims.

These restitution disputes are ill-suited to an adversarial litigation process with one winner and one loser as is the current situation in the United States. Professor Norman Palmer has persuasively made this case in the UK, while Jennifer Anglim Kreder has proposed an interesting idea. She makes a great case for an International Tribunal for dealing with Nazi-Looted Art. It's forthcoming in the Brooklyn Law Review, an early version is up on SSRN. In the Netherlands the claims are studied by the Restitution Commission which advises the government on the return of objects lost or stolen when the Germans invaded in WWII.

Here's an excerpt of the NYT story:

Although the Dutch government in exile had decreed that citizens could not trade with the enemy, many Dutch art dealers, both Jews and non-Jews, sold works to eager German collectors, who circulated wish lists in the first few years of the war. Dutch traditional painting was sought after, because the Nazis did not consider it “degenerate” art.

After the war the Dutch government returned 28 paintings that the Katz brothers had claimed. Among them was Rembrandt’s “Portrait of a Man,” believed to have been used to buy their mother’s freedom.

Evelien Campfens, a member of the Restitution Commission in The Hague, said the claim of the Katz heirs would “be a complex case, with many different aspects to it: it will take time.” She said that the Katz brothers were important dealers involved in many transactions, and that many important paintings had passed through their hands.

The Rape of Europa

This new film, "The Rape of Europa" is just being released in New York this week, and should start to make the art house circuit soon. Metacritic seems to be giving the film good marks so far.

It details the spoliation by the Nazis, and the efforts of allied soldiers known as the monument men to track down the works. The theft was on such a grand scale that the issues are still fresh today. Poland and Germany have engaged in a very bitter dispute in recent weeks. The death of Bruno Lohse revealed he had been storing a looted Pissarro in a Swiss bank vault since the end of the war. The Altmann case and the Klimts are given a prominent role as well.

I am eager to see the film, but just watching this trailer I'm struck by how much more powerful images and music are than the articles I write. I can give an academic view, but seeing the works and the black and white pictures bring the story much more depth and emotion. Whether that produces better cultural policy solutions is questionable I think. Perhaps we are allowing emotion to cloud our judgment in some of these cases?

I haven't seen the film of course, but we shouldn't put the blame on Germany alone, though they do rightfully deserve the most criticism. The loss of art and antiquities is an inevitable part of conflict. Russian forces plundered countless works from East Germany, and allied bombs destroyed medieval buildings in Dresden and at Montecassino. An American GI also stole the Quedlinberg treasures, and his family was able to sell them back to the church in the 90's. In the end, the movie should speak to a fundamental question which still plagues us: what is the value of cultural property? Is it essential to a people's heritage? Is it worth sacrificing lives or other economic development?

The NY Times has a short overview, as does Lee Rosenbaum.

Be careful what you throw away

Wild story from Earth times:

Vienna - An old cross recovered by an Austrian woman from a garbage container turned out to be an 800-year-old French masterpiece stolen from a Polish collection by the Nazi regime, Austrian police said on Thursday. In 2004, the woman from Zell am See in the province Salzburg got permission from her neighbours to look through a garbage container of things they had thrown out. Among other things, she took an old, gold-coloured cross. As nobody else liked it, the woman kept the gold-plate and enamel cross under her couch until showing it to art experts earlier this year. According to experts from Vienna's Fine Arts Museum, the piece of garbage turned out to be a passion cross from a manufacturer in Limoges in France made around 1200. Similar pieces fetched up to 400,000 euros (537,000 dollars) at international auctions. Police traced the origin of the cross, showing the piece had been stolen by the Nazi regime from the Polish art collection of Izabella Elzbieta of Czartoryski Dzialinska in 1941. Pieces from the collection were moved from Warsaw to Austria, where the trail ended in 1945. The cross's fate still remains unclear. The London-based Commission for Looted Art, informed by the Polish authorities, is representing the heirs. The local court in Zell am See decided that for the time being the garbage-treasure was to be kept at the local heritage museum at Leogang, where it could be properly stored.

Pretty cool find. One wonders how much is thrown away that does not get rescued. The case presents some interesting legal issues. I imagine the heirs of the deceased collector would perhaps have a claim. I'm not sure what the relevant limitations period in Austria would be, but it may be that the limitations has expired and the finder would get to retain title.

Catching Up

• Frank Pasquale of Concurring Opinions talks about how the difference between viewing a digital reproduction on the internet is much less effective than viewing a photograph in person, and perhaps this is a good argument for strong IP protection of works of art.
  
• Michael Lewis in Commentary magazine talks about efforts by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation to compile a stolen art database of works taken from Prussia. Many of them are now in Russia, where they were removed after WWII.
  
• Stephen Farrell of the NY Times reports on Baghdad hiring dozens of artists to paint murals on concrete barriers in the city.
  
• Bradley Hope of the New York Sun reported on a ceremony to return an ancient Egyptian vessel which appeared in a Christie's auction last year.
• David Gill on looting matters compares archaeologists to animal rights activists; one would hope that not too many archaeologists take their ideas too far as some animal rights activists have done.
  

Bernard Taper

Last Friday, the San Francisco Chronicle ran an interesting profile of Bernard Taper, one of the so-called Monument Men who worked to recover works stolen by the Nazi's after WWII. He worked as an art-intelligence officer with the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section of the U.S. military. I wonder what became of this section. It hasn't seem to have been involved in any of the major conflicts the U.S. has waged since. Notably the efforts of Matthew Bogdanos in Iraq were on his own initiative because he has a background in Classics. It may be worth examining why this section has disappeared or if it is still functioning. It appears that it was a singular unit charged with repatriation Nazi spoliation. Profiles of these guys are always interesting, and this is no exception. Taper is featured prominently along with some others in the forthcoming documentary titled The rape of Europa. That film is being screened at the San Francisco International Film Festival. For more information click here. Taper has an excellent story to tell as this excerpt shows:

"I was in the Army for three years, and I didn't fire a shot at anybody and nobody fired a shot at me. That's the definition of a good war,'' the white-haired Taper, sharp at 89, says with a smile. But he did his part to bring forth light, in the form of recovered art, from the darkness of the war.

Born in London and educated at UC Berkeley, Taper was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943. He served in intelligence and infantry units before being sent back to Berkeley to learn Chinese in preparation for work as a liaison officer assigned to Chaing Kai-Shek's army in China. But at the last minute, the entire class was sent to Germany, where the war was over.

"It was the Army. Why do you think they invented words like 'snafu'?" laughs Taper, who was assigned to Patton's Third Army, then sent to Munich to write intelligence reports. Lunching outdoors one day at an officers' club, he fell into conversation with a dashing chap named Walter Horn, an Aryan German who abhorred Hitler and left, became a professor of medieval history at UC Berkeley and saw combat action during the war.

"He started telling me marvelous, fascinating stories about what it was like in his job to search for lost and stolen art,'' recalls Taper, who had begun contributing to the New Yorker and the Nation while serving in occupied Germany. Horn was desperate to go home, but couldn't until he found a successor for his art-investigating job. "When he met me he found his successor,'' says Taper, who told Horn he wasn't an art historian and probably wasn't qualified. Horn said the Monuments section was "lousy with art historians,'' but what was needed was somebody who knew how to ask questions. As a budding journalist, Taper fit the bill.

As a further inducement, Horn told him he would have the use of a white BMW roadster, wouldn't have to wear a uniform, could travel freely without orders and would meet women. "And he said if nothing else, there's all this art you can look at,'' recalls Taper, quick to point out that he got a brown Audi sedan, not the promised BMW. For about six weeks, Taper was in charge of the Army's art-collecting center at Wiesbaden, which was filled with not only looted art but works from various German civic collections.

"They had fantastic stuff there,'' Taper says. "In the office, across the whole back wall, was Watteau's 'Embarkation for Cythera,' and a wonderful Degas, where you look up through the orchestra pit, through the beards of the musicians, at these elegant dancers. It was from the Frankfurt Museum.'' As Taper says in the documentary, "Just that office alone was worth the price of admission to World War II.'' Outside the door stood a 5,000-year-old stone Nefertiti, which also stopped Taper in his tracks. "I couldn't just brush by. I had to stop and commune with her.''

Building on the work of previous Monument Men, such as his friend Stewart Leonard, a bomb diffuser who single-handedly removed 22 mines from the Chartres Cathedral and later opened crates containing priceless books and Dürer drawings, Taper tracked down mostly mid-level missing artworks, by painters like the 16th century Dutch artist Mierevelt and his Flemish contemporary Teniers, as well church statuary and other looted objects.

"Probably the best artwork I helped recover was from Göring's train,'' Taper says, abandoned on a rail siding not far from Neuschwanstein Castle, where Allied troops found a huge cache of stolen art. The locals had heard there was schnapps on board, Taper says, and after stealing the schnapps, they took the rest of the stuff, which included late-Gothic wood statutes and a 15th century School of Rogier van der Weyden painting. "Not bad,'' says Taper, who had the bright idea of tapping the de-Nazifed German police to help him find stolen goods.

Just a thought, but the stories of these Monument Men and the return of stolen art are quite popular and exciting. I wonder if that popularity and the good will they engender may have some kind of a connection to the generous statutes of limitations rules which have been applied to claimants seeking the return of art stolen from their forebears in recent decades.

The Monument Men

Today's New York Times has a piece on a new book financed by retired Texas oilman Robert M. Edsel. The highlight for me are the pictures, published in the new book, which show American GI's holding up Renaissance masterpieces.
This image shows to soldiers removing a Rembrandt self-portrait from its crate in a salt mine.

The book, called "Rescuing Da Vinci", tells the story of American and other soldiers, known as the monument men, who recovered works of art looted by the Nazi's during World War II. Many of these soldiers went on to shape cultural policy in the US after the war. One soldier, Captain James J. Rorimer, went on to become a director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

At the end of the war, a staggering number of works were missing. They had been destined for Hitler's Fuhrer Museum in Linz, Austria, or on their way to Hermann Goering's private collection. A number of the works are some I've seen on my travels in Europe, including the stained glass from the Strasbourg Cathedral, and Michelangelo's Bruges Madonna. I had no idea at the time that they had been taken away by invading German forces. The work sounds fascinating, and will surely increase the growing acclaim for what has become known as the greatest generation.

However, not all allied soldiers were quite so altruistic. Soviet forces hauled off a great deal of looted treasures after the war. Also, one American soldier, Joe Meador, took the Quedlinburg Cathedral treasures from a cave they had been hidden in during the war. The Quedlinburg treasures were a collection of gold, silver and bejeweled reliquaries. Meador had been ordered to guard them, but brought them home to Texas instead. His heirs attempted to sell the works around 1990, and federal prosecutors considered bringing a criminal seizure action, but the Meador family agreed to a settlement with the church, and the objects have now been safely returned.

The work sounds very interesting, but we should remember that not all soldiers were quite so charitable as the so-called monument men. Regardless, if the photos in the NYT are any indication, it should be quite an entertaining read.