Art Litigation: June 30 CLE Presentation at Modern Restaurant at MoMA: How Long Do Victims of Nazi Spoliation Have To Get Their Art Back?

George Grosz' Portrait of the Poet Max-Hermann Neisse

Purchased from Charlotte Weidler through Curt Valentin

I hope that you can join me in a CLE presentation of Grosz v MoMA at the Modern Restaurant on June 30 (next Thursday) - the flyer is embedded below.

6-30-11 Emips Cle Lunch Flyer1 (3)

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Declassified Swiss Government Report Shows Traffic of Nazi Looted Art To Museum of Modern Art (Updated)

Link to image in St. Louis Commerce, full article here

A declassified Swiss government report written by former Pulitzer Foundation director Laurie Stein shows that Nazi looted art passed through Switzerland to arrive at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

As set forth in Laurie Stein's report, Curt Valentin, August Klipstein, and Karl Buchholz were key players in this traffic with Alfred Barr.   MoMA has "the highest concentration of degenerate art from Germany"..... Alfred Barr "did not shy away from buying confiscated art through American-based commercial dealers such as [Curt] Valentin."  (pp 11-12).

Hitler's Swiss Dealer - August Klipstein of Gutekunst & Klipstein, now Galerie Kornfeld

Laurie Stein just chaired a panel in Vienna on Alfred Flechtheim, one of the Weimar Republic's leading art dealers whose gallery was Aryanized by SA officer Alexander Voemel shortly after Hitler took power in 1933.   More on Alfred Flechtheim here, Picasso's Jewish Dealer here, Flechtheim's Nose here, Amicus brief in Grosz v MoMA here, Flechtheim's Portrait By Belling here, Museum directors should be prosecuted for concealing stolen art here .

American museums continue to resist inquiries into the stolen works in their collections.

For more, read below.
Stein Pyritz - Swiss Government Report



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Art Litigation: US Executive Policy, Nazi Looted Art and Flechtheim's Nose

Rudolph Belling's Portrait of Alfred Flechtheim at Harvard

Professor Jennifer Kreder attacks the subject of US Executive policy on Nazi-looted art on the Prawfsblawg here.  The Executive Branch started an exception to the Act of State Doctrine known as the "Bernstein Exception".   In the Bernstein case, the State Department indicated to the Southern District of New York that it was free to unwind any act of the Nazis because the US did not consider the Nazis a legitimate government and the Second Circuit affirmed the District Court's power to review and invalidate Nazi acts.

Very few people know about the Bernstein case and its continuing application to Nazi-looted art cases.  U.S. museums have taken the position that Hitler's acts of stripping German museums of Jewish and "degenerate" artworks should be considered legitimate governmental acts in a bid to hold onto artworks stolen from German museums.

This is problematic on many levels.  Today, the American Association of Museum Directors is desperately trying to keep these stolen artworks by falsifying and concealing the provenance of artworks in its collections and by trying to have Hitler's acts rubber-stamped by the federal courts.

The stolen loot should be returned and American museums should start acknowledging their debts to Germany's Jewish community and the German avant-garde of the 1920's and 30's.

A look at MoMA's website today shows that the MoMA still can't find a picture of Alfred Flechtheim's nose (above) which according to Boston Modern author Judith Bookbinder was the very first modern German sculpture collected by Harvard and what became the Busch-Reisinger Museum.  My posts on Alfred Flechtheim and his tragic story, which has never been recounted by any of the members of the American Association of Museums or American Association of Museum Directors, and MoMA's inability to find Flechtheim's nose here.

MoMA's Portrait of Alfred Flechtheim was gifted to it by Nazi agent Curt Valentin, more on Valentin here.

Maybe MoMA could ask Judith Bookbinder to find Alfred Flechtheim's nose?

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Looting and Exploitation in Nazi-Occupied Europe by Dr. Jonathan Petropoulos

Dr. Jonathan Petropoulos delivered a lecture on Nazi art looting in Vienna last fall, focusing on the case studies of art dealers Curt Valentin and Otto Kallir, both of whom moved large quantities of artworks from Nazi Germany into the United States during and after World War II.   A link to Dr. Petropoulos' lecture on video is here at the Art Stolen from Fritz Grunbaum blog.

Dr. Petropoulos' studies on Curt Valentin and Otto Kallir are extremely important for those trying to track artworks looted by the Nazis that are now in museums and private collections in the United States and abroad.

According to a newly-released study prepared for the Swiss government by Laurie Stein, former founding director of the Pulitzer Foundation, the Museum of Modern Art in New York was the largest recipient of artworks from Curt Valentin.   Other than Dr. Petropoulos, art historians have completely ignored Curt Valentin, whose clients included a Who's Who of American art museums, colleges and wealthy collectors who snapped up modern artworks as the Nazi terror forced Jews to sell the works at fire-sale prices.   Alfred Barr, the MoMA's first director, was said to be in Curt Valentin's gallery on 57th Street on a weekly basis.

Above is an image of Egon Schiele's Girl with Black Hair, you can see her image at Oberlin College's website here.  In 1998, Oberlin College's then-President Nancy Dye promised the Cleveland Plain Dealer that she would investigate Schiele expert Rudolph Leopold's claim that Girl with Black Hair, along with sixteen other Schieles in American museums, belonged to Fritz Grunbaum.  Dye never published any results from her research.  In 2009, the Cleveland Jewish News reported evidence of Grunbaum's prior ownership, the article is here. 

Art catalogues show that this artwork was in the collection of Fritz Grunbaum before he died at the Dachau Concentration Camp.  The work is at the Allen Museum at Oberlin College, which refuses to document or share its research into the work's provenance prior to its acquisition in Switzerland in 1956 by Otto Kallir.  Kallir purchased it from Gutekunst & Klipstein, a clearinghouse for Nazi-looted art in Berne, Switzerland.  Oberlin's President Marvin Krislov has refused to permit me to meet with Oberlin's art historians to discuss the matter on campus.

Oberlin College has both music and Jewish studies programs.  It is shameful that they do not study the life, career, and art collection of Fritz Grunbaum, considered Austria's greatest cabaret performer and comedian of all time, celebrated by the Viennese with Karl Farkas as inventors of the "Doppelconference" a sort of Abbot & Costello routine.

As one account of Fritz's death at Dachau has it:

It was on New Year’s Eve, 1940, that Grünbaum gave his last performance. Gravely ill with tuberculosis, he decided to put on a show for the entertainment of prisoners in the camp infirmary. Despite his sickly appearance, one of the prisoners recognised him from his glory days in Vienna. Grünbaum pleaded:


I beg of you, Fritz Grünbaum is not performing for you, but instead it is the number [and recited his camp number], who just wants to spread a little happiness on the last day of the year.

Soon after this final show he attempted suicide, but was 'saved' by the SS officers. Just two weeks later, on 14 January 1941, a death certificate was made up for him. He had succumbed, according to the Nazis, to a weak heart.

Nazi Looted Art, Fernand Leger and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Last week the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that the Minneapolis Institute of Arts had restituted Fernand Leger's 1911 painting "Smoke Over Rooftops" to the heirs of Alfonse Kann. The article is here. According to the article, it took the heirs ten years of researching and working with the MIA to achieve restitution.
Why such a delay? Many archives are not accessible, much research remains to be done. And there is very little research into a central figure in Nazi art looting: Curt Valentin. Valentin was mentioned in passing in Lynn Nicholas's excellent and groundbreaking work The Rape of Europa (now a film available on DVD).
Curt Valentin left Berlin in 1937 to establish an art gallery in New York City. The gallery was named after Karl Buchholz, one of the four art dealers appointed by Hitler to liquidate art considered "degenerate" by the Nazi regime. I have included a jpeg image above of a letter dated November 14, 1936 from the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts to Curt Valentin stating the following:
Re: Your letter of 22 September 1936
The President of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts instructed me to tell you that it would be of no objection to him if you make use of your connections with the German art circle and thereby establish supplementary export opportunities, if [this is done] outside Germany. Once you are in a foreign country, you are free to purchase works by German artists in Germany and make use of them in America. ###
The letter bears a stamp with an eagle clutching a wreathed Swastika and is found in the Jane Wade papers, Archives of American Art, microfilm reel #2322, frame 929.
The collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (see provenance of El Lissitzky's Proun 2 here, the Museum of Modern Art (a search of the website finds over 40 results for Valentin including a Beckmann here) and many others are full of works purchased from Curt Valentin. When art dealer Otto Kallir came to the United States from Vienna, Austria in 1939, he went to Curt Valentin's gallery on 57th Street in New York City to pick up artworks safely transported out of Nazi Austria. Boston's Museum of Fine Arts has a Beckmann portrait of Valentin here.
Curt Valentin was also the art dealer of choice for Alfred Barr, the founder of the Museum of Modern Art. As Alice Goldfarb Marquis, author of Alfred H. Barr Jr.: Missionary for the Modern, wrote to the New York Times here,
On June 30, 1939, the Fischer Gallery in Lucerne auctioned 150 items. Many dealers boycotted the sale of these stolen works. One of the bidders was Curt Valentin, a German refugee dealer, who owned the Buchholz Gallery in New York. He was there at the behest of Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who provided money donated to the museum.
Mr. Valentin bought five works: Andre Derain's "Valley of the Lot at Vers," stolen from the Cologne Museum; E. L. Kirchner's "Street Scene" and Wilhelm Lehmbruck's "Kneeling Woman," both taken from the Berlin National Gallery; Paul Klee's "Around the Fish," pilfered from the Dresden Gallery, and Henri Matisse's "Blue Window," seized from the Essen Museum.
So why don't all of the other museums return the stolen artworks that they purchased through Curt Valentin? Why don't the other museums frankly acknowledge Curt Valentin's status as a Nazi agent from 1936 through the end of the war?

On Saturday, September 16, 1944, the Federal Register published an Executive Order dated May 29, 1944 describing a seizure of enemy property by the Alien Property Custodian (a U.S. official empowered by the Trading With the Enemy Act). The seizure was of Karl Buchholz's property, destined for Curt Valentin's gallery on 32 East 57th Street. The list (it looks like over 200 artworks) includes the following artist: Ernst Barlach, Max Beckmann, Marc Chagall, Edgar Degas, Otto Dix, Werner Gilles, Erich Heckel, Carol Hofer, Heinrich Campandonc, Gerhard Marcks, Otto Mueller, E.V. Nay, Emil Nolde, Gaston Louis Roux, K. Schmidt-Rottluff, Renee Sindonis, Alex Jawlensky, Oskar Kokoschka, George Kolbe, Kaethe Kollwitz, Alfred Kubin, Wilhelm Lembruck, Fernand Leger, and August Macke.

If you wish to have a moment of tranquility in New York City, you can to to the MOMA's beautiful garden. You'll find August Rodin's Monument to Balzac (1898). It was presented in memory of Curt Valentin by his friends.