Museum to Return Plundered Painting
König Prüß, GfbAEV
By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday , November 21, 2000 ; Page A01
The National Gallery of Art announced yesterday that it will
relinquish a valuable still life by the 17th-century Flemish artist
Frans Snyders after concluding that the painting was almost
certainly looted by the Nazis from a French Jewish family during
World War II.
The announcement followed 18 months of research into the tangled
history of the painting, whose previous owners included Luftwaffe
chief Hermann Goering, the number two man in the Nazi regime,
and Karl Haberstock, Adolf Hitler's favorite art dealer. The
painting, "Still Life With Fruit and Game," was donated to the
National Gallery in 1990 by a wealthy New York art dealer who is
himself a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany.
"It's a wonderful painting," said Arthur Wheelock, curator of
northern baroque painting at the National Gallery. "We hung it with
great pride." The color-drenched oil on canvas was exhibited
alongside works by other Flemish artists such as Peter Paul Rubens
and David Teniers II, but was taken down several weeks ago after
the gallery concluded that it had been looted.
The National Gallery's wrenching decision to part with its only
Snyders painting is a dramatic illustration of the way in which the
issue of Nazi-confiscated artwork has come to haunt American
museums over the past few years, part of a worldwide controversy
about Holocaust era assets. Art experts believe that hundreds,
perhaps thousands, of artworks looted by the Nazis ended up in
American collections after the war.
Three other American institutions--the North Carolina Museum of
Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Seattle Art Museum--have
acknowledged that paintings in their possession were stolen by the
Nazis from European Jews during the course of World War II and
were never restored to their previous owners. But this is the first
time that a publicly funded federal institution has agreed to part
with a Nazi-looted artwork.
National Gallery officials said they were approached earlier this
year by the heirs of a prominent French Jewish art collector, Edgar
Stern, who identified the Snyders painting on the National Gallery
Web site (www.nga.gov). The heirs were able to provide the gallery
with important additional evidence linking the painting to one that
had been seized from the Stern family collection in Paris in early
1941, soon after the Nazi takeover of northern France.
"Both sides are in agreement that this was a stolen work, and now
the Sterns are providing the National Gallery with a list of heirs,
including a genealogical tree," said Hector Feliciano, an
international art sleuth working with the Stern family and author of
"The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World's Great
Works of Art."
Gallery officials said they wanted to make sure that they returned
the picture to the true heirs. According to Feliciano, the painting
has been claimed by a group of four heirs led by Edgar's grandson
Gerard, who splits his time between France and Switzerland. The
Stern family declined to be interviewed but authorized Feliciano to
speak on its behalf.
The ownership history, or provenance, of the Snyders painting
provides an insight into the extremely complex business of tracking
down looted artworks and restoring them to their rightful owners.
It was assembled painstakingly over the last two years as part of a
huge effort by the National Gallery to vet the 3,175 paintings in its
collection, including 1,600 that were in Europe between 1933 and
1945 and could conceivably have passed through Nazi hands.
A French government commission on Holocaust era issues recently
estimated that a total of 40,000 paintings and other art objects
looted by the Nazis from France during World War II remain
missing.
Gallery officials said they had no idea of the Snyders work's true
history when they accepted the painting in 1990 as a
50th-anniversary gift from Herman Shickman, a prominent New
York art dealer who fled to the United States from Nazi Germany in
1938. The first suggestion of a possible problem with the painting
surfaced in April 1999 when Wheelock, who was researching the
gallery's Flemish holdings, came across the Snyders still life in a
catalogue of paintings that had once belonged to Haberstock.
The Haberstock connection was an immediate red flag to Wheelock
and his fellow National Gallery curators. Known for his opulent
lifestyle and anti-Semitic views, Haberstock had a string of Nazi
clients, including Hitler and Goering, who amassed vast amounts of
art during World War II, much of it looted from Jewish collectors in
France and other German-conquered countries.
"He was the most important art dealer in the Third Reich," said
Jonathan Petropoulos, an art historian at Claremont-McKenna
College in California and one of the world's leading experts on
Nazi-looted art. Business ledgers recently unearthed by
Petropoulos show that Haberstock began selling artworks to Hitler
in 1936, after which he leapt into the inner sanctum of Nazi cultural
bureaucrats.
Further provenance research established that Haberstock had
acquired a Snyders still life--with almost identical dimensions to
the National Gallery painting--from Goering in June 1941 in
exchange for a work by the 19th-century Austrian painter Hans
Makart. Goering, who prided himself on being an art connoisseur,
had picked out the Snyders while on an inspection tour of the Jeu
de Paume, the Paris art museum that became a warehouse for
Nazi-looted art during the war.
Nazi records showed that the Goering Snyders had been looted
from the Paris apartment of Edgar Stern's widow, Marguerite, who
remained in Paris throughout the war and managed to avoid
deportation despite her Jewish background. The Stern collection
was just one of about 50 important art collections belonging to
French Jews that were seized by the Nazis and taken to the Jeu de
Paume.
As with the other confiscated collections, the Nazis meticulously
labeled and catalogued the Stern artworks, using the initials ST as
an identifying mark. The National Gallery Snyders bears the ST
initials scrawled over the back of the canvas, a further indication
that it was part of the looted collection. The Stern heirs were able
to clinch their claim to the still life when they provided curators
with photographs of the backs of other Nazi-confiscated Stern
pictures with similar markings.
Precisely what happened to the still life after the war is somewhat
unclear, although the broad outlines of the story have been
established. National Gallery researchers believe Haberstock gave
the painting to a close collaborator, Baron von Poellnitz, an
aristocratic Nazi who owned a magnificent Bavarian castle north of
Munich. Both Haberstock and von Poellnitz were detained by
American troops who were investigating Nazi art looting, but were
later released and permitted to resume their art-dealing activities.
According to the official National Gallery provenance, in about
1968 von Poellnitz sold the Snyders painting to Shickman, the
Manhattan dealer who had fled Nazi Germany three decades
earlier. This version of events is disputed by Shickman, who says
he never knew von Poellnitz; he maintains that he bought the
painting from the Brod art gallery in London. In a telephone
interview yesterday, Shickman said he had no idea that there was a
problem with the painting.
Shickman said he agreed to donate the painting to the National
Gallery as part of its 50th-anniversary celebration "because I felt I
owed something to this country." He described the painting as one
of Snyders's finest works but declined to put a value on it.
According to Christie's auction house, Snyders's paintings have
recently fetched prices ranging from $40,000 to $1.5 million.
Among the intriguing questions raised by the case is whether
Shickman owes back taxes now that questions have been raised
about the provenance of the painting. Gallery officials persuaded
the Internal Revenue Service to allow donors to deduct the full
value of works of art from their taxes. The market value of a
painting known to have been looted and never returned to its
rightful owners is zero.
Gallery officials said their research had turned up some
"contradictory evidence" about the provenance of the still life,
including confusion over the title of the painting. Archival
documentation of the Stern picture repeatedly refers to "hares"
while the animal in the gallery painting appears to be a small deer.
A gallery statement said that, despite such inconsistencies, the
trustees nevertheless concluded that the painting belonged to the
Stern family and "approved the return of the work" on receipt of
assurances that Gerard Stern represents all the Stern heirs.
© 2000 The Washington Post