What the Nazi Looters Reveal about the Art World
To take their collection our of the country, Greti
and Käthe [Gallia] need the approval of Austria’s Zentralstelle für
Denkmalschutz, its Central Office for Monuments Protection, created
following the First World War to control the export of objects of cultural
significance to Austria. Because the legislation governing this office stipulated
that only the work of artists who had been dead for at least twenty years fell
within its purview, it ignored the family’s Hoffmann and Wiener Werkstätte collection
and most of their modern paintings.
Klimt’s works were within the office’s jurisdiction because he had died
on February 1918, but the office displayed no interest in his work in
1938—perhaps still conceiving of him as a modern artist, whose works were of no
heritage significance—and, in any event, portraits of Jews (as the Nazis deemed
Hermione) enjoyed a special exemption, allowing refugees to take them. When Käthe applied to take the portrait, its
export was as simple as that of the family’s doormats and garbage bins, which
the sisters took too, as part of leaving with almost all their household
possessions.[1]
This paragraph
appears in the Catalogue for the Vienna exhibition held in Melbourne in 2011 at
the end of the chapter on the Gallia Family, an Austrian family who managed to
take out of their homeland at the very moment of Anschluss one of the
most important private collections of turn-of-the-century art to remain intact,
or nearly so, before the Nazis confiscated, looted or destroyed everything of
cultural value owned by Jews. The
description of how this came about by Tim Bonyhardy exposes some of the
features of this process of state-run theft, vandalism and cultural distortion
to be discussed in the present essay.
The Gallia Family were rich Jews at the end of the nineteenth century
who undertook to support the artists and institutions of the so-called Vienna Secession through patronage and
purchase. By the end of the nineteen
thirties, though the children had been strategically converted to Catholicism,
they were still subject to the racial laws inaugurated even before Hitler’s troops
marched across the border to a triumphant and jubilant welcome from Germany to
unite the two nations, so that the family could act quickly to escape before
the new regime clamped down with even more rigorous force of determination and
violence. Two of the adult sisters
passed through the various bureaucratic hoops and were allowed to depart with
most of the family’s movable wealth in the form of household objects. Notice that tax and export regulations were
already in place and could be co-opted to serve the discriminatory purposed of
National Socialism; yet implementation by Austrian authorities was still
legalistic rather than punitive, so that much of the art treasures could slip
through on a technicality, while others passed based on ignorance, and a few,
like the painting of the girls’ mother, Hermione, the subject of one of Gustave Klimt’s
portraits, although a convert herself, was racially a Jew and so of no
“heritage” value to the Austrian state.
This virtually priceless painting by one of the twentieth century’s most
important artists was classified along with doormats and garbage bins being
shipped off to Melbourne, Australia.
Unfortunately,
as we shall see, most Jews, if they themselves managed to escape the monstrous
net closing down on them and to survive the death camps, were forced by
circumstances or coerced by violent threats to sell their art collections for
next to nothing or have them confiscated by superficially legal means. And, it is important to add, since the
passage we are glossing here fails to do so—along with the rest of the
otherwise beautifully illustrated and well-written catalogue of the 2011
exhibition in Melbourne Vienna: Art and Design—that at the very moment
the Gallia sisters were leaving Vienna, respectable men and women were being
mocked and humiliated on the streets, forced to clean the pavement with
toothbrushes, kicked and punched by grinning young storm troopers, and being
hustled off to concentration camps. This
wonderful collection the sisters brought with them—paintings and sculptures,
furniture and cutlery, and a great variety of the new art that shaped the
civilized world we live in—was the occasion for the museums of Vienna to allow
the other works to be loaned to the National Art Gallery of Victoria. Apparently on the grounds that what is being
displayed belongs to the period mainly of 1890 to 1918, the explanatory
material that identifies the works and their makers plays down or ignores the
context of hate and violence that was also part of Austrian society—and which
continues to make it difficult to see or study these works of art, craft and
architecture clearly and truthfully in context and sometimes removes from view
altogether or shamefully displaces to others the works made by, encouraged, and
owned by Jews like the Gallias, most of whom were murdered or went into exile:
—and which continues to obstruct and obfuscate attempts by survivors and heirs
to claim back what is rightfully theirs, not just the objects of art or
buildings themselves, not just the financial compensation their due for such
great losses, but also their place in Viennese history, and the history of
twentieth-century art.
The problem of
restitution and compensation for paintings, statues, architecturally-designed
homes and other objects of art lost, destroyed and sold to private and public
collections becomes more urgent as the memories of Nazi plundering grows dim,
individuals and their immediate heirs who suffered from these crimes begin to
fade away, and other, seemingly more important issues, come to the foreground
of public attention. Courtroom battles
also become more complicated when stolen treasures have passed through a
variety of supposedly legal sales and both auction houses and new purchasers
have come to own these works in good faith.
It therefore becomes important to consider some of the more nuanced
questions that arise as a consequence of the early acts of misappropriation,
deliberate and inadvertent efforts to obfuscate the provenance and original
context of such objets d’art.
In asking
questions of moral and ethical responsibility when judicial and political
structures can no longer adequately deal with the tenuous legal status of
materials moved from country to country and from generation to generation, we
also discover that the whole intricate world of art has to be re-examined
carefully in order to understand aesthetic and intellectual questions as well. If the Fascist and Nazi governments[2] had
merely been gangs of street thugs operating outside of all civilized
institutions and principles, the questions would be much easier to answer and
the problems to solve. But we are
dealing often with clever, even highly educated individuals, many operating not
on the frontline of actual violent plundering or philistine destruction: the
mechanisms of Aryanization were subtle and devious. The very persons and institutions established
to oversee, preserve and display great works of art collaborated with the most
inhumane and uncivilized parties, sometimes fooling themselves into believing
they were serving higher interests, sometimes barely rationalizing private
greed and ambition, and sometimes merely following orders and doing their duty.
Marion F.
Deshmukh sums up the efforts of taking control as more than merely looting and
destroying: “the Nazis asked and demanded that art and the vast system
supporting the arts (commissions, curatorial policies, teaching and art
education) serve the state.”[3] To usurp the place of legitimate authorities
for their own personal advantage and prestige, these Nazi officials pretended
to a legitimacy that was theirs only by technicality, and hence debased the
legitimacy of what had been built up in Germany, as elsewhere in Western
Europe, for generations. Moreover, their
brutal efforts made explicit what had not always been perceived as an
interconnected network of persons, institutions and methods of recording,
preserving, teaching and evaluating art as a national enterprise. Because the National Socialists operated
under the guise of legal and legitimate cultural authority (the term
belongs to Jonathan Petropoulos), it is important to examine closely both what
was transferred from previous government agencies to the new Nazi organs and to
look between the lines they promulgated
and behind the words they used to obfuscate their true intents. In these ambiguous interstices there were
also all-but-invisible operatives, minor officials and collaborators from the
previous regime, who acted in the day-to-day activities that made illegal and
outrageous actions seem normal and familiar.[4]
It is in these
interstices of ambiguity and duplicity that we can catch a glimmer of truths
and realities about the world of art in earlier supposedly “normal” periods,
when it had seemed that artists created their work, patrons bought them,
critics assessed them, museum directors decided what was in the public
interest, and scholars constructed historical paradigms of influence, schools
of thought, and the inter-relatedness of aesthetic and other social values in a
given time and place. Just as it has become
a cliché to say that the very seem cultured individuals who listened to Bach,
Beethoven and Wagner in the evenings, returned the next day to manage the gas
chambers and other facilities of the Nazi war machine, so the men who continued
to direct museums, teach in art schools, and buy and sell paintings and
sculptures played an intrinsic part in the whole system of theft, rape and
murder for the chief leaders of Germany during the 1930s and 1940s. This raises the same question asked about the
immorality of music lovers in the Third Reich: does culture make a person
moral? The argument of Petropoulos in
his studies of art and culture as essential components of the Nazi plan to rule
the world is to show ”how culture is just as corruptible and culpable as any
other sphere of Nazi society.”[5]
This leads
directly to another question: Does a nation that claims to have high spiritual
and aesthetic values at its core of collective identity forfeit such an
identity when it is found guilty of committing genocide and cultural
destruction on a massive scale? Or, to
come down to more pragmatic legal questions of recompense and restitution: Can
such a nation claim as its patrimony works of art and ideas that it was willing
to traduce by those crimes against humanity?
[1] Tim Bonyhardy, “The Gallias: A Modern Viennese
Family” (pp. 26-35) in Christian Witt-Dörring and Paul Asenbaum, curators, Vienna
Art & Design: Klimt, Schiele, Hoffmann, Loos (Melbourne: National Art Gallery of
Victoria, 2011) p. 35. See my review of this catalogue and exhibition in Shofar 31:2 (2013) pp. 172-174.
[2]
Nor should we leave out the
Soviet armies and officials who grabbed whatever booty, under the excuse of
seeking reparations, they could as they
conquered the Nazi German Reich; or even individual US soldiers who took home
“souvenirs” from German hordes. See the
programme for a conference on “Spoils of War v. Cultural Heritage”, Harvard Law
School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 8-9 February 2008 available online at http://www.comartrecovery.org/events/spoils-war-v-cultural-pheritage (seen 04/10/2011).
[3]
Marion F. Deshmukh, “Art as
Politics in the Third Reich”, a review of Jonathan Petropoulos, Art as
Politics in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill, NC and London: University
of North Carolina Press, 1996) in A Teacher’s Guide to the Holocaust
online at http://fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/ resource/ REVIEWS/Petropou (seen 04/10/2011).
[4]
Paul B. Jaskot, review of
Jonathan Petropoulos, The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) on H-Net Reviews in the
Humanities & Social Sciences (November 2001) online at http://www.h-net.org/reviews/ showrev.php?id=5621 (seen 15/08/2011). “In short,”
Jaskot cites Petropoulos as saying, “one of the most insidious aspects of Nazi
Germany: that the regime co-opted ‘ordinary’ people—or alternatively,
individuals induced themselves—to support the Nazi policies and participate in
criminal acts.” “This,” says the
reviewer, “is the heart of his [Petropoulos’] argument and his defence of the
importance of culture to an understanding of National Socialist Germany.”
[5]
Jaskot’s review of The Fasustian Bargain in H-Net
Reviews. This argument does not need to be limited to National Socialist
governments or their collaborating occupied states, but can extent to any
regime that loses its moral bearings, from communist states to more transient
“revolutionary” governments.
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