{"id":428,"date":"2013-10-16T10:00:23","date_gmt":"2013-10-16T17:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/?p=428"},"modified":"2023-10-14T07:53:33","modified_gmt":"2023-10-14T14:53:33","slug":"londons-national-gallery-shows-nazi-loot-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/?p=428","title":{"rendered":"London’s National Gallery Shows Nazi Loot (original)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It might be news to some that\u00a0London’s National Gallery<\/a>\u00a0is featuring an unreturned Nazi-looted painting from Austria in its current show \u201cFacing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900.\u201d\u00a0 Gustav Klimt\u2019s beautiful unfinished portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl, herself a Nazi victim, was owned by Amalie\u2019s friend, the widower and Jewish sugar baron Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer.\u00a0 In March 1938 Ferdinand was forced to flee Austria, and survived the war in Zurich, Switzerland.\u00a0 He died in November 1945.\u00a0 As he explained in his 1942 will, his \u201centire property in Vienna [had been] confiscated and sold off.\u201d\u00a0 His heirs never found or recovered the portrait of Amalie.<\/p>\n

\"Amalie<\/a>The portrait of Amalie hung in Ferdinand\u2019s bedroom since at least 1932, and was still in his home over nine months after Ferdinand fled, as it is listed first in\u00a0an inventory created in January 1939<\/a>\u00a0by the Nazi authorities tasked with distributing Ferdinand\u2019s artworks and selling off his estate to pay off a discriminatory tax judgment that had been imposed.\u00a0 The lawyer Dr. Erich F\u00fchrer, a high-ranking SS officer, had initially been hired by Ferdinand to protect his property, but in the end became the liquidator.\u00a0 Dr. F\u00fchrer even kept twelve of Ferdinand\u2019s paintings, including a Klimt, for himself.\u00a0 A 1943 report of the Central Monument Agency confirmed that \u201cthe Bloch-Bauer collection was completely liquidated by the Finance Office.\u201d\u00a0 Dr. F\u00fchrer was captured after the war and sentenced to hard labor.<\/p>\n

No one knows exactly what Dr. F\u00fchrer did with the portrait of Amalie, but Amalie\u2019s non-Jewish son-in-law Wilhelm M\u00fcller-Hofmann supposedly came into possession of the painting during the War and sold it to the art dealer Vita K\u00fcnstler.\u00a0 Vita held onto the painting for many years, finally donating it to the Austrian Gallery when she died in 2001 at the age of 101.<\/p>\n

In 2006, several months after an Austrian arbitration panel decided to return five other Klimt paintings to Ferdinand\u2019s heirs, the same panel had a change of heart and refused to return the portrait of Amalie.\u00a0 No doubt they were disappointed by the Austrian government\u2019s decision not to exercise its option to purchase and keep the famous gold portrait of Ferdinand\u2019s wife Adele in the country.\u00a0 Feeling great pressure, the arbitrators could not again give another painting to Ferdinand\u2019s heirs, so the\u00a0Panel denied the claim<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The evidence to support the denial was non-existent.\u00a0 In fact, the denial itself was premised on the novel theory that Ferdinand\u2019s heirs should be required to demonstrate exactly what happened to the painting after Ferdinand fled the Nazi advance. \u00a0\u00a0The matter was complicated by the fact that Amalie\u2019s family claimed the painting should be returned to them. \u00a0The young Austrian historian Ruth Pleyer testified that, at age 97, Amalie\u2019s daughter Hermine supposedly told her that\u00a0she thought Ferdinand had arranged for the painting to be given to her family.\u00a0\u00a0<\/a>Protokoll, p. 15<\/a>. \u00a0<\/em>(Hermine failed to confirm this when the Director of the Austrian Galerie Gerbert Frodl and I each spoke to her.)\u00a0 Of course, Hermine had survived the war in hiding in Bavaria and could not possibly have had any first-hand knowledge anyway.\u00a0 In fact, in one private family letter of the time, she had complained of Ferdinand\u2019s \u201cunheard of behavior\u201d in cutting off assistance to her mother, assuming incorrectly that he was living a life of wealth in exile (a common misimpression created by Nazi propaganda).<\/p>\n

All of the parties to the arbitration, Ferdinand and Amalie\u2019s heirs as well as the Republic of Austria, conceded that they did not know exactly what had happened to the painting or how it had left Ferdinand\u2019s estate. \u00a0\u00a0This should have been the end of the matter.\u00a0 Under long-standing laws governing restitution, the victim is never required to demonstrate anything more than that the property had once been owned and was lost.\u00a0 But the Panel changed the law.\u00a0 They said that Austria\u2019s new 1998 art restitution law only applied when it was absolutely proven that the artwork was expropriated, and not transferred in some other manner.<\/p>\n

Ignoring the mountain of circumstantial evidence (i.e. Ferdinand was in Zurich, the painting was in Vienna, and his entire estate was liquidated), the Panel instead leaped to the conclusion that there was no confiscation, but rather that “at the instigation of Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, the painting was voluntarily given over to Hermine M\u00fcller-Hofmann without compensation.” \u00a0Decision, p. 12-13<\/a>. \u00a0<\/em>Again, there was absolutely no evidence to support this conclusion, nor apparently was there any thought given to explaining how exactly this could have been accomplished after Ferdinand’s estate was ordered liquidated. \u00a0Ferdinand had himself written to the artist Oskar Kokoschka in 1941 “In Vienna and Bohemia they have taken everything away from me. \u00a0Not even a souvenir has been left to me! \u00a0Maybe I will get the two Klimt portraits of my poor wife and my portrait [by Kokoschka]. \u00a0I should find that out this week. \u00a0Otherwise I am totally impoverished.” As a work of a degenerate artist, the Kokoschka portrait was in fact delivered to Ferdinand, but, as we know, even the two portraits of his wife Adele were traded and sold by Dr. F\u00fchrer to the Austrian Gallery. \u00a0If Ferdinand could not even rescue for himself the portrait of his own wife, what would make anyone think that he could voluntarily make a gift of a painting to Amalie Zuckerkandl? \u00a0As\u00a0Prof. Hans Dolinar of Linz<\/a>\u00a0concluded, “the naive evaluation of the evidence by the arbitration panel is completely absurd.”<\/p>\n

At the arbitration, I was not even concerned with the crazy theory, propounded by the M\u00fcller-Hofmann family, that Ferdinand had somehow arranged a gift to them from his exile. \u00a0Why not? \u00a0Because such a gift could only have been undertaken as a result of Nazi persecution. \u00a0As\u00a0Prof. Georg Graf of Salzburg<\/a>\u00a0confirmed in his harshly critical review of the Panel’s decision, Austrian restitution law has always been interpreted to mandate the return of gifts made by victims who were forced to flee.<\/p>\n

But the Panel refused to apply this law or any of the ordinary rules regarding restitution of property that had been developed in the post-war period. \u00a0They said that the 1998 art restitution law did not incorporate those older laws and therefore they no longer applied. \u00a0On appeal,\u00a0we argued very strongly<\/a>, as did legal author\u00a0Nikolaus Pitkowitz<\/a>, that the decision of the Panel violated Austrian public policy. \u00a0The best the court could say in upholding the decision was that the construction of the law by the Panel was “not unthinkable” (nicht denkunm\u00f6glich).\u00a0<\/em>Appeal, p. 39<\/a>. \u00a0The\u00a0Austrian Supreme Court affirmed<\/a>, argued that it was possible that the Austrian parliament intended to reverse 50 years of restitution laws when it formulated its 1998 art restitution law, finding that such a construction was not against Austrian public policy.<\/p>\n

The great tragic irony is that shortly after these terrible decisions, the Austrian art restitution advisory board, which had forced the arbitration by refusing to return the portrait of Amalie, clarified its position on the 1998 law<\/a>\u00a0and suddenly decided that it should return artworks that would be considered returnable under the old restitution laws. \u00a0Had they followed this rule with the portrait of Amalie, it would also have been returned.<\/p>\n

So, the portrait of Amalie is a Nazi-looted painting, wrongly withheld by the arbitration Panel. \u00a0Under Austrian law, as it is currently being interpreted, the painting would be returned to Ferdinand’s heirs. \u00a0The only thing that is necessary is for the Minister of Culture and the art restitution advisory board to reconsider the case. \u00a0I have been waiting seven years for this reconsideration to take place. \u00a0Perhaps before the National Gallery returns the painting to the Austrian Gallery in Vienna, it should request a new determination by the Austrian art restitution advisory board. \u00a0That way this misappropriated painting can finally be returned.<\/p>\n

(All documents relating to the Amalie Zuckerkandl painting can be found at\u00a0http:\/\/www.bslaw.com\/altmann\/Zuckerkandl\/<\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It might be news to some that\u00a0London’s National Gallery\u00a0is featuring an unreturned Nazi-looted painting from Austria in its current show \u201cFacing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900.\u201d\u00a0 Gustav Klimt\u2019s beautiful unfinished portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl, herself a Nazi victim, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=428"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3221,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428\/revisions\/3221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}