Elizabeth Taylor could be forced to hand over a Van Gogh painting
chillled
Hanging in the balance
Elizabeth Taylor could be forced to hand over a Van Gogh painting if a
US court decides it was Jewish-owned in Nazi times. Marcel Berlins reports
Marcel Berlins
Tuesday December 7, 2004
The Guardian
On April 14, 1963 the London art dealer Francis Taylor, acting on behalf
of an anonymous client, went to a Sotheby's auction and bought a Van
Gogh painting, Vue de l'Asile et de la Chapelle de St Remy, for
$257,000. It didn't take long for the identity of the real purchaser to
be revealed: Elizabeth Taylor, his daughter.
Her interest in the painting had, until the sale, been kept secret. If
it became public, her father advised, the price would be doubled. She
and Richard Burton decamped to Paris to await the outcome of the
auction. They married in 1964. The Van Gogh was with them in their house
in Gstaad and on their yacht Kalizma, the salon of which was redesigned
to exhibit it.
It now hangs in Taylor's mansion in Bel Air, LA - but it may not be
there for much longer. Next month, a California court is being asked to
decide whether the painting was among Jewish-owned works of art that
disappeared during the Nazi period, from 1933 to 1945. If not, then
Taylor keeps it. But if a judge finds that Nazi policy towards the Jews
was responsible for the loss of the painting, she will have to give it
back to its original owners or their heirs.
The family seeking the return of the Van Gogh are descendants of
Margarete Mauthner, a Jewish intellectual and art collector living in
Berlin until she and her family were forced to flee Germany. They landed
up in South Africa in 1939, where she died in 1947. Frau Mauthner was an
early champion of Van Gogh, organising an exhibition of his work - to
which hardly anyone came. Three of the claimants are her
great-grandchildren, two of them still living in South Africa. The
other, Andrew Orkin, is now a lawyer in Canada.
There is nothing new in Jewish-owned works of art confiscated, stolen or
looted by the Nazis having to be returned. Many countries have passed
specific laws to that end. Many individual collectors and museums have
already made restitution. But the legal struggle between the screen
legend and the Mauthner descendants threatens to become one of the most
bitter conflicts over a work of art ever to reach the courts. Today, the
Van Gogh would probably fetch at least £10m; but both sides are adamant
that it's not the money that matters most but the principle.
At the heart of the issue is the undoubted fact that neither side can
prove where the painting was at critical times. "We don't know what
happened to it," Andrew Orkin admits. "But we don't need to know that,"
he argues. The law governing restitution does not require the original
owner to prove the exact circumstances under which a painting was taken.
The claimants argue that it would be enough for victims (or their
relatives) to prove that they owned the work in question and that it was
lost as a direct consequence of the Nazis' official policy of
persecuting Jews and dispossessing them of their finances and assets.
So, for example, if a family whose breadwinner had lost his job because
he was Jewish had been forced to sell a painting in order to have money
to pay the rent, that work was just as much a victim of Nazi policy as
if it had been looted in the traditional way.
The claimants' case against Elizabeth Taylor is based on evidence that
Frau Mauthner owned the Van Gogh until 1939, but didn't have it when she
fled to South Africa. It is possible that she sold it in order to
finance the voyage, but that is only conjecture.
But Elizabeth Taylor does not accept that the Van Gogh falls into the
definition of an artwork lost to its owner as a result of Nazi policies.
Papers filed with the court by her lawyers state that the claimants
"have provided not a shred of evidence that the painting ever fell into
Nazi hands - or any information concerning how or when Mauthner 'lost
possession' of it". Taylor goes further, suggesting that there is
evidence that Mauthner had sold the painting to an art dealer even
before the Nazis became the German government in 1933. If that's so, the
laws on the restitution of works of art don't apply.
Central to the dispute is a document known as a catalogue raisonné. This
is a comprehensive, thoroughly researched list of an artist's works,
including their sales history. Such catalogues are usually accepted by
art historians and museums the world over as accurate as to who owned
what, and when. The one on Van Gogh was compiled by the foremost expert
on the artist's work, JB de la Faille. The first publication of the
catalogue raisonné on Van Gogh, in 1928, showed Frau Mauthner as the
owner of the painting. So, crucially, did the next edition, in 1939.
This, say Mauthner's heirs, proves that she had owned it shortly before
having to flee Germany. Whether she'd sold it in order to raise funds
for the trip or it had been taken from her in some other way doesn't
matter - the reason she didn't have it any longer was the direct result
of Nazi policies towards the Jews.
Andrew Orkin and his siblings accuse Taylor of negligence in buying the
painting in 1963. She (through her father, an experienced dealer) had
been so determined to acquire it that she had failed to see the
"conspicuous red flags" obvious from the Sotheby's catalogue for the
1963 sale. There had been a great deal of publicity about art snatched
from Jews. The reference in the 1939 catalogue, which had Frau Mauthner
of Berlin as owner, should have rung alarm bells - especially with
Taylor's father.
The Sotheby's auction catalogue listed the Van Gogh as being from the
collection of the late Alfred Wolf, a well-known art dealer who was
around in Berlin and Switzerland in the 1930s. It's impossible to know
for certain whether he acquired the Van Gogh directly from Mauthner or
through a subsequent deal. To confuse the evidence even further, there
were discrepancies between the Sotheby's catalogue of 1963 and a
Christie's catalogue of 1990, when Taylor tried to sell the painting.
It's possible that the judge will not need to decide the fate of the Van
Gogh at all. Elizabeth Taylor's lawyers argue that the Mauthner heirs
should be barred from bringing their claim because of the time that has
elapsed since she bought the painting. So why did they wait nearly 40
years? Their simple answer is that they didn't know their ancestor had
owned the painting, says Andrew Orkin: "I knew that the family had owned
works of art that hadn't come to South Africa. But we didn't talk about
it. Our way of dealing with the Holocaust was total silence."
It wasn't until a few years ago that he became aware of the scope of the
US 1998 Holocaust Victims Redress Act and other laws allowing
restitution of Jewish-owned property lost during the Nazi period. On the
off-chance, he gave Margarete's name to a firm of specialist lawyers in
Washington DC, who discovered her ownership of the Van Gogh.
Taylor's lawyers do not accept that the US laws apply to the Mauthner
heirs' claims, and reject their explanations of the 40-year delay.
Attempts to settle the issue amicably have failed. "We would have
preferred to mediate the claim," Orkin says. "We felt it could have been
negotiated with Solomonic wisdom. She chose the path of win-lose
aggressive litigation and recourse to the courts." The Mauthner heirs'
demands during the negotiations were outrageous, riposted Taylor's lawyers.
Taylor took the first step into litigation in May 2004 by seeking a
court declaration that she was the owner of the Van Gogh. The Mauthner
family replied in October with their claim for the return of the
painting. The language in the official documents filed by both sides is
becoming more and more angry, accusatory and intemperate. In the
meantime, Dame Elizabeth Taylor wonders for how many years more she'll
be able to admire the View of the Asylum and Chapel of St Remy.