Chicago, December 17, 2000

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Key to art Nazis stole may be locked away

Commission's plan to publish postwar loss claims in peril

By Ron Grossman
Tribune Staff Writer

COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- As a government commission on Holocaust reparations prepares to issue its final report, a massive cache of World War II records documenting Nazi looting of works by some of the greatest artists in history may remain virtually inaccessible, despite the commission's earlier plans to publish it.

Those records -- a list of claims made immediately after the war for missing works of art by Old Masters and pioneers of modernism such as Degas, Renoir, Tintoretto and Tiepolo -- have been hidden away in government archives for half a century, frustrating efforts by a dying generation of Holocaust survivors and the art world to track down thousands of paintings and sculptures. Now a lack of funding and bureaucratic mishaps could again consign those documents to an obscure shelf in the National Archives here, instead of being organized into a computer-searchable archive.

"The No. 1 goal of the commission has been to produce information in a way that is easily accessible," said William Singer, a Chicago lawyer and member of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the U.S. "The commission had neither the resources or the time to create this database on its own, but recognizing its importance, we will be recommending to the president that additional measures be taken to ensure its completion."

A continuation of the project would require additional federal funding after the commission's congressional mandate expires at the end of December, when it is expected to file its report. Ken Klothen, executive director of the commission, said that if Congress is not willing to provide the funds (in addition to the $2.7 million it received for this year's appropriation), the commission hopes a private organization can be persuaded to inherit the project.

"It's a pity, because with that database the commission had a chance to make a real difference," said Mark Masurovsky, a researcher formerly on the commission's staff. "It shows a lack of appreciation for the contribution the commission could have made to an issue -- Nazi-looted art -- very much on people's minds."

A Tribune examination of records in the National Archives reveals that the U.S. government has possessed documents key to the issue of to what extent Nazi-looted art has found its way into American museums, but failed to organize it and make it public, leaving museums and private collectors unable to check their holdings against a master list of claims. Other documents in the archives indicate that the U.S. government was aware that stolen art was being funneled into the United States after the war but did not take vigorous measures to halt the illicit trade.

Officials at major American museums, none of whom would be quoted for this story, report that the art world has been largely unaware that the commission was building an electronically searchable database of looted-art claims -- even as museums, led by the Art Institute of Chicago, have been posting lists of questionable works of art on the Internet, hoping to certify that Nazi loot is not hanging on their walls and to help rightful owners find missing works.

"It would be terrible if that database isn't completed," said Willie Korte, a researcher who has helped several Jewish families recover art stolen during the Holocaust, "because those documents take us back to the immediate postwar years, where it's easier to pick up the trail of missing works."

The records from which the commission had been building its database are contained in 35 rolls of microfilm recording thousands of pages of claims filled out in half a dozen languages immediately after World War II by Holocaust survivors and museums whose collections were pillaged during the Nazi occupation of Europe. Over 300,000 in total, they record Nazi looting of furniture, household effects, rare books, Jewish religious materials, musical instruments, antiques, stamp and butterfly collections, as well as fine art.

Beginning earlier this year, researchers for the commission -- some of them college students, others professors with expertise in art history -- had been sorting through that great mass and typing into a computer the relevant data for works of art.

"It would be a very, very useful instrument," said Ori Soltes, chairman of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project, a Washington-based group that aids families looking for property lost during the war, "especially now that American museums have acknowledged their responsibility to publicly account for their holdings and to publish the results of their research on the Web."

The documents the commission had been processing record the disappearance during World War II of such significant works of modern art as Henri Matisse's "Odalisque in Red Pants" and Pierre Bonnard's "Breakfast."

Those documents also witness the pain of Holocaust survivors looking for property stolen by the Nazis, who used the war as an opportunity to loot fine art from their victims on a scale unprecedented in history. In 1945, Hans Feist filed a claim for a painting by the German Renaissance artist Lucas Cranach confiscated from his family in Germany. His brother had died in a concentration camp, while Feist had been allowed to leave the country, but at a cost. "Before our emigration, I paid approximately half a million for the 'Judenabgabe' (Jew tax)," he wrote to U.S. military authorities, "a sort of ransom which had to be paid before it was possible to leave Germany."

A GI on occupation duty in postwar Europe put in a claim for a Courbet painting. "It was owned by my mother," wrote Captain Ulrich E. Biel, "who was deported by the Nazis, late 1942, from her home at Berlin, Rankestr. 9, because she was Jewish. To the best of my knowledge, she has been killed."

Ironically, the Presidential Commission's database could go unfinished even as it has pressured the museum world for greater candor on the issue of looted art. In its final report, the commission will announce that it has negotiated more rigid standards for public disclosure of works that were in Europe during the Nazi era, and thus possibly could have been looted, with the American Association of Museums and the Association of Art Museum Directors, which between them enroll most of the country's museums.

"The American government has called upon the art world to make records of the whereabouts of art during World War II both available and accessible," said Anne Webber, co-chairman of the Commission for Looted Art in Europe, which is working with Oxford University to establish a clearing house for records pertaining to the issue. "That database would be an important part of our effort."

In recent years, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Seattle Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum and Princeton University have either returned works of art to families that lost them during the Holocaust or negotiated financial settlements with them.

The issue first drew widespread attention in America when the Art Institute participated in an out-of-court settlement of a dispute between one of its trustees, Daniel Searle, who had purchased a Degas painting, "Landscape with Smokestacks" that once belonged to Frederich and Louise Guttmann, who perished in the Holocaust.

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Menil Collection in Houston and the Art Institute of Chicago are currently evaluating similar claims that works stolen from Jewish collectors in Europe during World War II afterward found their way into the American art market.

That illicit trade might have been nipped in the bud and looted works returned to their former owners decades earlier had Holocaust survivors' claim forms been available in the immediate postwar years. Indeed, that seems to have been the intention of Ardelia Hall, a crusading State Department official, who collected the mass of documents from which the commission was building its database.

Korte, who has plowed through the material during his research on behalf of Holocaust survivors, said that some current disputes could have been settled earlier, or even avoided, had those documents been made available earlier and in a more accessible form.

Among those records are prewar inventories of the Paul Rosenberg Gallery, a leading Parisian art dealer and the representative of such important artists as Matisse and Picasso. The Rosenberg Gallery was a prime target of Nazi looters after the fall of France in 1940, according to historians of the period.

Ever since the war, the Rosenberg family has been searching for missing works, one of which, Matisse's "Odalisque," was recently returned by the Seattle museum. The family was able to track the painting down only because of a fluke chain of events. In 1995, Hector Feliciano published "The Lost Museum," one of the first book-length studies of the problem of looted art, for which Elaine Rosenberg, Paul Rosenberg's daughter-in-law, lent a photograph of the missing Matisse work. When it appeared, her daughter happened to show the book to a friend, who happened to be the nephew of the Seattle collector who had purchased the painting and eventually donated it to the Seattle museum.

The Rosenbergs' recovery of the Matisse conceivably could have taken place much earlier had documents Hall collected been available to art galleries and auction houses. In 1954, the painting passed through the Knoedler Gallery in New York on its way to the Seattle collector. The gallery or purchaser might have been reluctant to handle the work, had it been public knowledge that it had been looted during the Nazi era.

During World War II, aware of Nazi looting, the U.S. government imposed strict rules for the importation of artworks into this country. The OSS, the forerunner of the CIA, also compiled a list of European art dealers who were aiding the Nazis in funneling looted paintings and sculptures into the international art market. Both the FBI and postal inspectors monitored communications between European dealers with Nazi connections and galleries in Latin America and the U.S. American officials were concerned that looted art was being smuggled along a clandestine route that led from Nazi-occupied Europe through neutral Switzerland to the Americas.

In 1944, an FBI agent monitored links between New York art dealers and Hans Wendland, a dealer in Switzerland with Nazi connections. In a report now on deposit in the National Archives, the agent reported: "Evidence one picture smuggled into U.S. via Diplomatic Pouch."

That same year, postal inspectors intercepted correspondence between dealers in New York and Mexico about arrangements to surreptitiously bring a painting by the Italian Renaissance artist Pisanello into the U.S. The investigator reported that the U.S. dealer cautioned his correspondent, "even the name of the painter of the 'Pink Lady' is not to appear in future correspondence."

By 1946, however, both the government and the art world were anxious to be free of import regulations. New York had become the postwar center of the art market, and American institutions were anxious to fill gaps in their collections with works from Europe. Francis Taylor, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, wrote to the governmental agency charged with monitoring looted art, saying the continuation of customs controls, "will lead to frustration and enmity on the part of the trade which will result in disadvantage to all the institutions involved."

Accordingly, the U.S. government did suspend import regulations on art, but over the vigorous protests of Hall, the State Department's arts and monuments adviser. Hall also fought running battles with the U.S. Army, which had been in charge of returning looted art in postwar Europe. By 1950, the Army was winding up those efforts and shipping claim forms filed by Holocaust survivors to dead storage in military archives. Hall, though, succeeded in having those claims forms transferred to her office, where microfilms were made of them before the originals went into storage. According to Erin Rodgers, a researcher with the Holocaust Commission, Hall wanted to make those records publicly available.

"Hall saw that a great sin was being committed," said Masurovsky, "and she thought that the government should have done something about it,"

For some reason that didn't happen, and upon Hall's retirement in the 1960s, the documents she had collected went into federal archives. There they remained, largely unknown except to a handful of specialists and difficult even for them to use, because they were not organized or indexed. Claims for works of art were mixed in with others for less valuable materials. Then this summer, researchers for the Presidential Commission began the ambitious project of sorting through that mass of material, with the intention of producing the first, computer-searchable database of Nazi-looted art. But with the commission's congressional mandate due to expire at the end of December, the fate of the project remains very much up in the air, despite its potential to solve the puzzle of what happened to so many important works of artworks missing since World War II.

"This isn't just about helping families who suffered losses; there is also so much history of what went on that needs to be written," said Webber. "This is about history."

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