Art Theft and Looting During World War I ii
Cultured Traveler
Hunting for Looted Fine art in Paris
IN Room 38 of the Louvre's Richelieu Wing hangs "The Astronomer" by the Dutch master Jan Vermeer. It is an exquisite painting. The stargazer sits before a celestial globe, his fingers spanning the constellation Pegasus. He wears a teal Japanese silk robe, a fashion favored by Dutch burghers in the belatedly 17th century. He is lost in thought and bathed in a gilt low-cal.
Of grade we can't see the dorsum of the painting. Only if we could have it downwardly from the wall and plow information technology over, nosotros would discover the spot where a small black swastika was stamped by Nazi curators later on information technology was stolen from Édouard de Rothschild, a Jewish collector whose art had been coveted past Hitler since before the start of the war.
"The Astronomer" is merely i of thousands of pieces of artwork in Paris that carry such a history. French republic was the nigh looted country during World War II, with over one-third of all privately owned art stolen. Seventy years later on the fall of Paris, information technology is still possible to follow a trail of the city's looted treasures, many of which have been recovered and returned to museums and collections all around the city.
In 2001 I visited Paris as a graduate educatee, with a program to inquiry this story of Nazi art theft for a novel. I can still retrieve a 24-hour interval when I stood in the Louvre's Grand Gallery amid a mob of tourists. Only that morn I had been reading the autobiography of the Louvre curator and Resistance hero Rose Valland. In it, old black and white photographs showed the museum in belatedly summer of 1939. The Louvre was shuttered, the great hall emptied of its Leonardos and Mantegnas and behemothic Veronese.
The museum had only been evacuated following fears of a German set on. Empty picture frames lay on the flooring and pedestals stood vacant. "The great gallery looked like a gigantic lumberyard," Lynn Nicholas wrote in her magnificent "Rape of Europa," my guidebook to the war years during my research.
Although the Louvre was never bombed, many of the virtually famous paintings on display today underwent rescues direct out of a wartime thriller. Géricault's "Raft of the Medusa" had to be transported out of Paris in a scenery truck from the Comédie-Française theater, while the three-ton "Winged Victory of Samothrace" was wheeled down a steep staircase, her behemothic wings trembling. (They were both returned to the Louvre at war'south stop, unscathed.)
Epitome
The "Mona Lisa" left Paris on a stretcher, in an ambulance specially fitted with actress shocks. Curators communicated about her whereabouts via coded messages broadcast on the BBC. Only when they heard " La Joconde a le sourire" ("The Mona Lisa is grinning") did they know Da Vinci's masterpiece had arrived safely in the first of many hiding places in the south of France.
When German language forces occupied Paris, Hitler left what remained of France'southward national museums untouched. Jewish collectors, though, fared far worse. Hitler, who fancied himself a great art aficionado and planned a huge "Führermuseum" in his hometown of Linz, Austria, had long desired detail pieces from private Jewish collections. And when Paris vicious, he quickly set nigh seizing them.
When I met him in 2005, Philippe Kraemer, an antiques dealer, recalled listening to the radio in hiding and realizing that his parents' gallery had been emptied, then taken over by the Nazis for use as the headquarters for an anti-Semitic paper, Le Pilori. When Mr. Kraemer returned to Paris, he found only a few of his family unit's pieces adrift on the teeming art market. He bought back what he could. Today, his son Laurent says it took his father 20 years to rebuild the gallery, piece past piece, "starting with the chairs."
Fine antiques like the Kraemers' were coveted by Nazi higher-ups, and usually went direct to officers' collections or to Parisian collaborators. Modern art, however, met a different fate. Some of the near important modern art dealers in Paris were Jewish, including the Bernheim-Jeune brothers, who represented Matisse, and Paul Rosenberg, who represented Picasso.
Over the years, I made several pilgrimages to 21, rue de La Boétie, Paul Rosenberg'southward old home and gallery. It was once filled with works past not only Picasso, just André Masson and Marie Laurencin, both picayune known before Rosenberg took a take a chance in championing their art. Today, most of the edifice is occupied past the offices of a water handling visitor.
Marianne Rosenberg, the art dealer's granddaughter, wrote by e-mail to me recently of her own visit:
"I felt quite estranged there under the eyes of the receptionist who said that things must take changed a lot since my grandparents' time. It was a petty sad to me that she sat there, unaware (and, it seemed, uncaring) that some of the well-nigh important artworks in the final century hung in that location and that history of a sort had been played out there besides."
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Modern collections like Paul Rosenberg's were seized and sent to the Jeu de Paume, the Impressionist art museum, which Germans had prepare as a "warehouse" for looted art. Hermann Goering, Hitler'south second-in-command, visited the Jeu de Paume some xx times over the class of the war, often in total condone for important military maneuvers elsewhere. (His first visit was just days after his Luftwaffe lost the Battle of Britain.) Although he had trivial interest in the modern pieces, which he considered "degenerate," he used them to barter for Old Masters.
After the war, thousands of pieces were recovered, in salt mines and in the palaces of Nazi officials. With so many families having perished in the Holocaust, much of what was salvaged was never reclaimed. These were paintings whose owners could non be plant, many of whom perished in the Holocaust. The fate of this art varied. Most pieces were auctioned off in 1954, while others, those deemed of import to France's artistic heritage — canvases and drawings by the likes of Daumier, Degas and Dürer — were reincorporated into the country'due south national collections.
Many such pieces remain in Paris today. It takes a close examination, but they can exist distinguished by three letters on the accompanying wall text: MNR, for Musées Nationaux Récupération, France'south anonymous painting drove.
By the French authorities's count, at that place are ane,008 of these works at the Louvre lone. There'due south Boucher'south stormy "La Fôret" (MNR 894), a Chardin nevertheless life (MNR 716), and a tempera-on-wood "Proclamation" by Solario (MNR 256). The golden-hued Rubens triptych "The Erection of the Cross" (MNR 411) was recovered from Linz, where it had been stored in preparation for Hitler's museum. At that place are ecstatic Delacroix dancers (MNR 143) and a mournful Géricault lion (MNR 137), whose owners, like all the others, have never been constitute.
Perhaps the nigh hauntingly beautiful museum in all of Paris is the Musée Nissim de Camondo, the quondam habitation of a family unit of Ottoman-French Jewish art collectors. Unlike so many other collections owned by Jews, this one remained untouched. In a twist of fate, the family unit donated it to France earlier the state of war, and and then it was incorporated into the same union of museums every bit the Louvre. This saved the extraordinary art inside, yet could not protect the Camondos. A memorial plaque exterior the museum tells of the family unit members killed at Auschwitz.
At beginning, there's lilliputian in the museum to point this tragic cease. Frothy pastoral scenes line the walls of the Salon des Huet. Sèvres porcelains, painted with exotic birds, seem also exquisite for actual use. Catherine Ii of Russian federation's silver service is set out on the table, as if the family unit were expecting guests for dinner. My favorite room is the kitchen, with its array of copper pots in every size.
Information technology's on the museum's top floor, with its rotating exhibitions of family documents, that i can conjure what was really lost: the people who ate here, who posed for photos in their school uniforms, who strolled along the dusty paths of the Parc Monceau outside, and who loved the fine art inside.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/travel/21lootedart-cultured.html
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