Fran Von Taaschett Was He an Art Aquirer for the Nazis

The masterpieces stolen by the Nazis

(Image credit:

Drove Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

)

The journeys of looted artworks accept powerful stories that are being explored in a new exhibition, writes Diane Cole.

W

Inside the long history of fine art resides the nearly-equally-long history of looted art. We are dazzled by these treasures from faraway lands and ancient eras, fifty-fifty equally nosotros remain mostly blind to their provenance. Usually left unmentioned is their means of acquisition – all too ofttimes, brutally uprooted from their original homes and owners equally the spoils of war, colonial conquest, or at the dictate of despots.

More like this:
- The art subconscious from Nazi bombs
- The Nazi art hoard that shocked the world
- Recovering what the Nazis stole

Until at present. We're reading more e'er about international disputes over ownership and restitution, including allegations this week that Switzerland'south largest art museum might be displaying up to 90 works with problematic provenances. Too causing controversy recently are stories focusing on the origins – and the fate – of the Benin Bronzes, at least some of which are in the process of finding their fashion back to Nigeria and Democratic Commonwealth of Congo from the many countries and museums to which their colonial rulers dispersed them, including Belgium, Germany, the British Museum and New York's Metropolitan Museum.

Such histories of theft and rescue are fabricated more than existent in a powerful new exhibition at New York'due south Jewish Museum, Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art. And they are presented through treasures both artistic and cultural.

Löwenstein's 1939 Composition (right) appears virtually paintings past Paul Cézanne (Bather and Rocks, left) and Pablo Picasso (Group of Characters, centre) (Credit: Steven Paneccasio)

In the opening galleries, we view one extraordinary canvas afterward another past Pierre Bonnard, Marc Chagall, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Camille Pissarro and other great European modernist painters, each with a story to tell of pillage by the Nazi government. Many of these works were seized from collectors and artists who happened to be Jewish; others the Nazis confiscated and slated for oblivion considering they did not conform to Hitler'southward narrow definition of what Aryan art should be – that is, representational and wholesome in their bailiwick thing, every bit opposed to the oft abstract, expressionistic compositions that characterised so many modernist works, which they labelled every bit "degenerate".

Then at that place are the beautiful arrays of delicately crafted ritual silver objects that once graced the homes and synagogues of the Jews of Europe. They can and should be admired for their craft. But in the context of this prove, they too speak even more powerfully to their crude seizure from their original owners who once wielded them to welcome the Sabbath, celebrate the holidays, and observe the milestones of life and decease, all according to Jewish tradition. You cannot walk through these galleries without thinking of the sense of despoliation experienced past so many people of other cultures throughout history. The emotional pull is visceral.

These objects are the material survivors of the Jewish communities of Europe, each one with a distinct story, an "afterlife" of survival, to reveal. Yet taken as a whole, these tales too attach to what we might recollect of as a new kind of archetypal journey, one that follows the fate of each work, from the original uprooting of cultural theft to displacement to eventual rescue and restitution.

Franz Marc's The Large Bluish Horses (1911) was the inspiration for US poet Mary Oliver'due south 2014 volume Blue Horses (Credit: Drove Walker Art Center, Minneapolis)

The divergent roads to such an afterlife are evident from the moment you enter the exhibition. You're greeted, first, by the gorgeous canvas past the German Expressionist artist, Franz Marc. The Large Blue Horses, painted in 1911, depicts three vibrantly blue horses, clustered sensuously together in the foreground, with the hillside behind them done in splashes of blue, scarlet and green. Although Marc died fighting for Germany in Globe War One, Hitler banned his work.

But information technology escaped the Reich'southward reach because in 1938 its German owner sent it to London, to exist included in an "anti-Hitler" show, and from at that place information technology travelled as part of another exhibition, 20th Century Banned German Art, to the United States, where an American heir-apparent purchased information technology for a drove that is at present part of the Walker Fine art Center in Minneapolis. Information technology seems thematically fitting that the painting appears here, on loan in one case again.

Max Pechstein'south 1912 painting, Nudes in a Landscape, was restored to the heirs of its Jewish owner in 2021 (Credit: Estate of Hugo Simon)

Virtually that sail is a lush, evocative Max Pechstein painting from 1912, Nudes in a Landscape, an exuberant canvas that just this summer was returned past the French government to the heirs of the German-born Jewish banker and fine art collector Hugo Simon. Its murky journey is allegorical of the often long and twisty road travelled by looted art to eventual restitution.

Simon's journey, too, was precarious. He fled Berlin for Paris when Hitler came to power in 1933, and subsequently France fell to Federal republic of germany in 1940, he escaped once more, this time to Brazil. Merely the painting was left backside in Paris and seized past the Nazis. It did not turn up once more until 1966, plant in storage at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris – yet how information technology landed there remains a mystery. From 1998 on, information technology was housed at the modern fine art museum in Nancy, France.

Still Life with Guelder Roses (1892) by Pierre Bonnard, who refused to paint a portrait of the French collaborationist leader during WW2 (Credit: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art)

Some other route to restitution is exemplified in an next sheet. The greenish, yellowish, white Impressionist-style 1892 painting past Pierre Bonnard, Still Life with Guelder Roses, was one of 2,000 pieces stolen past the Nazis from a unmarried collector, David David-Weill, the French-American philanthropist who had headed the banking house Lazard Frères. This canvas was returned to him in 1946, soon after it was recovered by Centrolineal forces among the many works subconscious by the Nazis in an Austrian common salt mine.

Difficult journeys

The relative smoothness of that recovery makes restitution audio easy, right? But take a few steps into the next room, and yet some other work in the exhibition in one case again emphasises the ongoing, perhaps unending work of restitution, in the form of a 1939 Cubist geometric canvass by the German Jewish artist Fédor Löwenstein, that is but at present in the procedure of being returned to heirs of its original owners by the French regime.

Its story too brings dwelling the randomness of both survival and restitution. Afterward its seizure, the work had been relegated to a storage space at the Jeu de Paume Gallery in Paris that was known as "The Room of the Martyrs". Here, German language officers could select and walk off with stolen masterpieces of their selection; those that remained were often deemed degenerate and slated for devastation. But this one slipped through the cracks and survived, peradventure with the help of Rose Valland, the art historian who secretly kept track of the approximately 20,000 works brought at that place, records that played a key role, mail service-war, in recovering much of the stolen fine art.

The Room of Martyrs, a storeroom for fine art banned past the Nazis, at the Jeu de Paume gallery in Paris (Credit: The Jewish Museum)

Yet despite her efforts, Valland could non salvage them all, alas. A black and white photograph of the room, probably from 1942, shows paintings by André Derain and Claude Monet, among others, that did non turn upwardly post-war and most likely were destroyed. It's impossible not to turn from this photo with a sense of gratitude for the presence of the glorious works on display hither by Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Marc Chagall, among others.

Nor are viewers immune to ignore the lives and fates of the families to whom all these material possessions at 1 time belonged. A serial of old family photos is lined up on what seems like a living room mantlepiece, intimating what a normal middle-class Jewish family unit life looked like before the Nazis forced them out. And then, post-obit the Nazi timeline of horror, comes a collection of portraits and drawings made in clandestine, then hidden, by artists interred in Nazi concentration camps.

Ritual objects were rescued by Jewish communities as part of a wider save try (Credit: The Jewish Museum)

Perhaps information technology's no wonder that walking through the galleries, I oftentimes felt immersed in a world turned topsy-turvy past theft, never more so than as I gazed at the vitrines of Jewish ritual objects – Kiddush cups, Sabbath candle sticks, Torah pointers, and other holy objects – lined upward alongside each other every bit if for a massive warehouse auction, with no community, possibly no person, alive to claim them. That is, until the surviving Jewish communities outside of Europe – including the Jewish Museum in New York – stepped in after the state of war to assist rescue the many orphaned objects. All the ceremonial works on display in this exhibition found their own afterlives as office of the Museum's permanent drove, a part of that massive try to salve the remains of European Jewish culture.

Looking forward

That the legacy of stolen art and cultural objects likewise leaves ghostly afterlives in subsequent generations is the subject of the terminal section of the exhibition: new works commissioned by four immature gimmicky artists living in Israel, Berlin, and Brooklyn: Maria Eichhorn, Hadar Gad, Dor Guez, and Lisa Oppenheim.

Each of these artists approaches this history from a different perspective. Conceptual artist Eichhorn immerses us in the very piece of work of recovering, locating, and returning looted objects. She does so by surrounding us with actual cases of archival papers, ledgers, reports, books, and on and on, all needed to verify, certify, analyse, authenticate each artifact, each item. Further intensifying the sense of being thrust into the work itself is the audio properties of an ongoing, non-stop recording of the voice of philosopher Hannah Arendt. She is reading various memos she wrote in her chapters as a manager of the bureau tasked with the sad but urgent goal of sorting through the massive crates of materials that were recovered.

Dor Guez's installation is based on a manuscript from his family's annal that belonged to his paternal grandpa, a Holocaust survivor (Credit: Steven Paneccasio)

In his installation, Dor Guez, the son of a Palestinian female parent and a Due north African Jewish begetter, creates a museum-style display of objects, documents and prints to bring to life again the multiplicity of losses of his family'south Judeo, Tunisian, and Standard arabic languages and culture. Hadar Gad's powerful big-calibration, dream-like collage paintings are based on historical photographs of the aftermath of the destruction of Jewish property by Nazi soldiers. Finally, Lisa Oppenheim bases her series of mysteriously clouded photo-collages on the just remaining epitome of a still-life painting – by the Franco-Flemish painter Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer – that disappeared afterward its confiscation by the Nazis from a Jewish household in Paris.

These, and then, are the afterlives that remain. The emotional impact of the exhibition is overwhelming: joy and gratitude at the rescue of so many exquisite artworks; grief at the losses endured by the destroyed Jewish communities of Europe; and finally comfort in the knowledge that their stories practise endure. There might even be a glimmer of hope that these narratives could also bring some perspective in resolving the many ongoing restitution cases around the world. In the meantime, the archetypal journeys of the globe's looted artworks continue.

Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art is at New York's Jewish Museum until ix January, 2022.

If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you lot have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook  page or message us on Twitter .

And if you liked this story, sign upwardly for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter , called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

lewisparily.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20211123-the-masterpieces-stolen-by-the-nazis

Share this post