When Martha Woolf learned that one of the paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago, Jan Gossaert’s circa 1520 “Madonna and Child,” was selected to be reproduced on last year’s traditional Christmas stamp, she was “very excited.”
But for Woolf, an institute curator of European painting, the excitement was to be short-lived. As she researched the painting’s early history for a catalogue of holdings at the museum, she became aware of gaps in later ownership history, or provenance, from the period of World War II, when thousands of artworks were stolen by the Nazis.
Records indicated the painting had belonged to Dr. Max Wassermann in Paris in 1921. The institute bought it in 1957 from a dealer with galleries in New York and Paris. Woolf wanted to know how it got from Wassermann to the dealer, who admitted buying the painting in 1954 but did not reveal the seller.
Woolf had to know because, spurred by a claim in Chicago six years ago (see adjoining story), the institute systematically had embarked on research into Holocaust-era provenance concurrent with her cataloguing. Until the museum determined a chain of rightful owners of the Gossaert from 1933, the year the Nazis assumed power, to 1945, the end of World War II, the painting might be subject to a claim from heirs of Holocaust-era victims. Because of Woolf’s redirected effort, the painting’s use was forestalled by postal authorities, who chose a mother and child by Bartolomeo Vivarini, from the National Gallery of Art.
While museums long have researched the provenance of pieces in their collections, such work has taken on increased public significance in the wake of international efforts to determine the ownership of art that changed hands during the Holocaust era. Even as a U.S. Government committee on Holocaust reparations ended its mission in December, the museum community continues to research pieces with gaps in provenance during the crucial 12-year period and post findings on their Web sites.
This procedure — as complicated as the issue of restitution — not only has given museums a common focus but also may shape the future of art sales, museum acquisitions and loans, even the art audience.
Each work of art has, of course, its own story. Ethical and legal issues now force museums to learn more about previous ownership, where they might prefer to direct the extraordinary amount of time, money and effort toward other kinds of inquiry. But the responsibility of being a public institution demands confirmation of works the museums already own, and the way they determine provenance is everywhere pretty much the same. So to understand how Woolf cleared the Gossaert is to grasp something of the extent of the effort that proceeds at most American museums. “I kept looking for Dr. Max Wassermann,” Woolf says. “Many lists are circulating of people who have problems and claims outstanding. Every time I saw a list, I’d look up Wassermann and didn’t see him. Finally, I found him. The Einsatzstaub Reichsleiter Rosenberg [ERR] had taken his things. The list I had been given had Wassermann’s name and `ERR Goering.'”
Artworks consolidated
The ERR, founded to confiscate libraries and archives from Freemasons, Jews and political opponents, was the most powerful Nazi organization seizing artworks in occupied countries. It consolidated works of art at the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris, which then satisfied demands from high-level Nazi collectors, including Reichsmarschal Hermann Goering.
The Gossaert, Woolf learned, went from Paris to Goering’s huge country house near Berlin. But close to the end of the war, the painting moved again, to a bunker in Berchtesgaden in Bavaria, where Americans in charge of art recovery at the Munich collecting point found it.
“A colleague at the National Gallery in Washington helped me by getting information from the [chaotically organized] National Archives,” Woolf says, “We determined that on the back of the picture was a number, 6188, which as it turned out, corresponded to one on a card as entered in Munich. You can hardly read it, but it says Berchtesgaden. It [also] says, `List of the art objects given for the collection of Reichsmarschal Hermann Goering.’ The painting is [identified as] `Gossaert Virgin in a Blue Robe with Red Mantle and Child — Wassermann.'”
This was good news. It substantiated the rightful owner of the painting as well as its history during World War II.
“But it wasn’t enough for me,” Woolf says. “I needed to know that the object got back to the heirs of Max Wassermann. I had a good reason for hoping that was the case: The work had been published, and [art historian] Max Friedlander published it again in 1956, in the second edition of his From Van Eyck to Bruegel, with a little footnote saying, `with the heirs of Max Wassermann.’
“But that still wasn’t enough for me. So I wrote again to the dealer [from whom the institute bought the painting]. We eventually got a one-sentence answer saying, yes, it did come from the family of Max Wassermann. We also wrote to the French Government and got an answer from them saying, yes, it was returned to the family [after the war].”
The museum had filled gaps in provenance — incidentally clearing the Gossaert for future use by postal authorities — by proceeding in various directions. A key piece of information, the collecting point number, was on the work itself.That kind of data was not always available. If labels, stamps and other marks on the backs of paintings did not yield important clues, the burden for continuing provenance research rested more heavily on archival and library work. These investigations into unpublished and published sources proceeded in tandem, with archive and library staffs prompted by interns from the University of Chicago under the direction of curators such as Woolf.
The luck factor
Of course, dealing with gaps on an intern’s “preliminary problematic provenance worksheet,” as a template created at the institute is called, required not only industry but luck.
Chicago collector Charles Deering died in 1928. Employees kept a meticulous record of all artworks inherited by his daughters, who like him, gave pieces to the museum. A 17th Century Italian relief came to the institute from them. But they were not collectors themselves, and the relief was not listed among Deering’s purchases or in his estate. Could the daughters have bought the work in wartime, after his death?
“We were baffled, and as a last resort, I went to a publication,” says institute archivist Bart Ryckbosch. “Charles Deering’s brother was James Deering, who built an enormous estate, Vizcaya, in Miami. I remembered once seeing photographs of the estate in the July 1917 issue of Architectural Review. We looked there and found a photo of the relief hanging on the wall. It was part of the interior of the building, so it was never inventoried as art. To clear the piece was a big coup for us. A lucky catch.”
Publications of the sort Ryckbosch used are in the institute’s Ryerson and Burnham Libraries. But the interns, all art historians, had no background in library science. So reference librarian Lauren Lessing entered the project.
Lessing saw her role as providing a gateway to published material, often leading researchers to resources outside the museum — in Chicago, the United States and Europe.
“To generalize, I would say [the interns] were trying to create a paper trail of publications,” Lessing says. “Artworks are funny. They can exist in a private collection for 15, 20, 30 years and never be published. That’s one of the things that makes this research difficult.
“You’re looking for exhibition catalogs, books, periodicals that maybe discuss the work. You’re looking for auction catalogs, gallery catalogs, catalogs of any kind from where the work might have been sold. And you’re looking for biographical information about, in particular, the last known holder. Was the person Jewish? Did they flee Europe? Were they members of a group that might have been targeted for looting? Were other works from that person looted?”
As an intern in the museum’s department of European painting, Margaret Laster asked such questions and more. Her practice was to research a number of works at the same time, like a chess master playing several games concurrently. Three to five paintings proved the most realistic. While focusing on one, she had to keep in mind the needs of the others.
“I became very attached to the first work I cleared,” Laster says, “Vincent van Gogh’s `Fishing in Spring.’ It took a long time, a couple of weeks. One of our collectors was involved, so I was able to research the donor who gave it to the museum and find various exhibitions [the painting] was in throughout the century. Then we were able to ask some outside sources and come up with a clean line of provenance. I really learned a lot because I had to encounter a lot of different types of sources. So `Fishing in Spring’ helped me tremendously with the works I later worked on.”
A little tenacity helps
Two qualities beyond education were a help: tenacity and resignation. Tenacity because researchers must look at every little bit of information even while suspecting it won’t fill a gap in the chain. Resignation because at any time a scarcity of data may force researchers to stop, not knowing if more information ever will come to light.
“What’s interesting to me is how all of this is changing our profession,” says Ian Wardropper, institute curator of European decorative arts and sculpture, and decorative arts. In many ways it’s good. We’re being forced to be much more accountable for provenance. But it’s nonetheless true that the vast majority of objects out there have skimpy records of ownership. If we restrict ourselves to pieces that have complete, compelling histories of ownership back past 1933, then the nature of objects that we buy for the museum will change considerably. I don’t know where it’s going, but all of this may have a profound effect on the profession.”
Suzanne McCullagh, institute curator of earlier prints and drawings, says she already has walked away from drawings for which dealers could not provide adequate provenance. Beyond issues of privacy and time-honored reticence, dealers cannot relate information that owners typically don’t remember, record and keep.
Douglas Druick, institute curator of European painting and prints and drawings, cites having been offered a watercolor by Jean-Francois Millet for which the museum could not find an exhibition record. He had little reason to think anything was wrong with provenance, but because he couldn’t marshal evidence to prove it, Druick did not go ahead with the purchase.
A claim made in New York in 1998 for two paintings by Egon Schiele also presented a new area of concern. The pictures were on loan to the Museum of Modern Art from an Austrian foundation. The Manhattan district attorney’s office seized them pending resolution of the claim. At this writing, their fate is still uncertain.
“[Because of that case,] I think we may see people less willing to lend things overseas,” says Stephanie D’Alessandro, a curatorial fellow in the institute’s department of modern and contemporary art. “So the present climate can change not only museums, but also art audiences.
“Imagine a retrospective exhibition where you can only have pieces from the United States, and you have a computer kiosk where you see the things that are not there. I’m not saying it will come to that. But between the need to have provenance and lenders becoming more concerned about lending, exhibitions will change. And that will affect audiences’ experience in museums.”
How many claims could affect museum collections is open to dispute. Israel Singer, secretary general of the World Jewish Congress, said last March, “50 percent of America’s total art is looted Jewish art.” Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said last April, “the five largest museums in the country… together own some 10,000 paintings in total.”
What’s a casual observer to think?
“Let’s remember that a large number of works in institutions were certainly collected before 1945,” says institute legal counsel Thaddeus Stauber. “There’s no question as to those pieces. Also, many of the pieces are contemporary, by living artists . . . I take solace in the fact that in the five years I’ve been involved in this, there hasn’t been anything more than five to 10 claims [nationwide], and we’ve had a lot of focus on the issue.”
Last April the institute was among the first American museums to post online paintings and sculptures with gaps in provenance during the Holocaust era. They numbered nearly 550. Some have come off the list; others have gone on. Launch date for a similar list of drawings is January 2002.
No new claims
Where critics of museum practices once said few claimants could come forward because they lacked basic information, the amount now provided by the institute has not resulted in any new claims.
Still, many believe the situation would have been different if museums had acted decades ago.
“Why weren’t we all thinking about this earlier?” asks institute director James Wood. “One reason may have been the really quite exemplary role that the United States and many museum people before me played in the restitution process [immediately after WW II]. It’s a very proud record. I think it understandably left us feeling nationally that we had done our part, we had taken a good shot at it, we had really tried to make this better.”
There were, of course, articles and books that treated the restitution effort. But, by and large, early texts did not give prescriptions for the future. They usually documented major collections that already had been returned.
“The Allies had done their best to save the culture at large,” says Anne Rorimer, daughter of art historian and U.S. Monuments officer James Rorimer plus a curator in her own right. “We now are seeing specific instances of private ownership coming to attention, given time . . . If you have surgery, first you stop the bleeding. Then, long after, there are ramifications. You have a scar.”
Awareness of a scar in the art world doubtless was affected by American reactions to what had caused it. And as historian Peter Novick documented in “The Holocaust in American Life” (1999), more than 20 years elapsed before the plight of European Jews in World War II even received a name in public discourse.
“`The Holocaust,’ as we speak of it today, was largely a retrospective construction,” Novick has written, “something that would not have been recognizable to most people at the time. To speak of `the Holocaust’ as a distinct entity, which Americans responded to (or failed to respond to) in various ways, is to introduce an anachronism that stands in the way of contemporary responses.”
What was the climate after the war regarding the recovery effort?
“Nobody was interested,” says S. Lane Faison Jr., who retook art Nazis had stored in Austrian salt mines and later was in charge of the Munich collecting point. “I have a December 1946 letter from Jim Plaut, my superior [at the mines]. It has to do with two articles he wrote about our work. He thought the Reader’s Digest would be fascinated; the articles would be just right to make their summary. And the answer was no. He quoted them: `There is no public interest in this now.’ So there was your climate.”
Faison says he was not even asked by colleagues at Williams College to speak publicly about the effort until unresolved issues began to resurface in the late 1980s.
Did the lack of interest in his work strike him as odd?
“I’m funny that way. I don’t know, when it’s over, it’s over.”
It will be some time before museum officials can adopt that attitude.
