The Orpheus Clock

by Simon Goodman

Fritz and Louise were also close socially to their neighbor Catalina von Pannwitz. Young Bernard and Lili knew her as Aunt Käthe. Catalina was a strikingly beautiful, German-born daughter of an enormously wealthy German Argentinean cattle baron. Her much older husband, Walther von Pannwitz, a prominent and equally wealthy Berlin lawyer, had served as close legal adviser and confidant to Kaiser Wilhelm II. When the Emperor was forced into exile in Holland, the Von Pannwitz family had dutifully followed.

  The Kaiser, who had barely escaped being extradited from Holland and tried as a war criminal by the Allies, often left his Dutch estate in Doorn to visit Von Pannwitz at his Hartekamp estate. After Walther died in 1920 and left the still-beautiful Catalina a widow, Wilhelm’s visits became even more frequent. Suggestions of an illicit affair between the former Kaiser and the heiress were rife.

  Fritz and Louise also had connections in Holland with members of the former German and future Dutch royal families. Eugen had been a financial counselor to the Kaiser before the war, and brother Herbert remained a friend and benefactor of Crown Prince Wilhelm’s family in Berlin. As a result, Fritz often provided financial services and advice for the former Kaiser in Holland and saw him frequently at gala dinners at Hartekamp and occasionally at Bosbeek. All of which seems a bit curious. Wilhelm’s anti-Semitism had been apparent even when he’d surrounded himself with his Kaiserjuden advisers before the war. During his exile, it had only grown and festered. The deposed monarch was frequently heard blaming “Jewish parasites” for Germany’s defeat. He even, infamously, suggested that to “gas” the lot of them would be the best and final solution. Again, it appeared to be another perverse example of “Of course, we don’t mean you.”

  Fritz was not in awe of his former sovereign. In Germany it had been protocol at dinners with the Kaiser for the footmen or butlers to remove a course setting as soon as Wilhelm finished, regardless if the other guests were still eating. The still-haughty former emperor took this etiquette with him into exile. Fritz quite rightly thought this was ridiculous and notoriously made the point at a dinner at Hartekamp by waving off the waiter and loudly declaring, “I’m not done yet!” One can imagine the uncomfortable silence as Fritz finished his soup while the aging Emperor fumed.

  Later, Fritz, Louise, and their children were also friends and hosts to Prince Bernhard zur Lippe-Biesterfeld, another deposed and somewhat impecunious German royal who was courting Catalina Pannwitz’s beautiful daughter, Ursula (an older friend to Lili). However, Prince Bernhard later married Dutch Crown Princess Juliana and became Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, a connection that would have a significant impact on my father during the Second World War.

  Almost all of my grandparents’ friends were deeply involved in art, often as connoisseurs and scholars, as well as collectors. Many assembled significant collections, each according to his or her individual tastes and expertise. Dr. Lanz specialized in Italian Renaissance works. Ernst Proehl had an extensive collection of old-master paintings, including Lucas Cranach the Elder’s life-size, early-sixteenth-century Venus, said to be the most sensual and erotic painting of the German Renaissance. Fritz Mannheimer amassed a fabulous collection of Renaissance bronzes, crystal, silver, and gold as well as numerous paintings. Franz Koenigs had what was perhaps the world’s greatest single collection of old-master drawings, more than twenty-six hundred of them, as well as paintings and, later, select Impressionist works. (These included Van Gogh’s now famous Portrait of Dr. Gachet.) And Catalina von Pannwitz’s Hartekamp estate was a virtual art museum, combining her late husband’s extensive collection of ancient bronzes, Meissen, and other porcelain treasures with her own equally extensive collection of fifteenth- to eighteenth-century European paintings. These art collectors all moved in the same circles, went to the same art auctions, and used the same internationally known art dealers for advice and counsel: Goudstikker and Helmuth Lütjens in Amsterdam, Kurt Bachstitz in The Hague, the Van Diemen Gallery and Paul Cassirer & Co. in Berlin, and Ambroise Vollard and Jacques Seligmann in Paris, among others. Their passion for collecting went far beyond their obvious appreciation of high culture. Relentlessly, they bought, sold, traded, and searched for pieces to embellish their collections.

  Fritz moved easily and knowledgeably within this circle. As the legal custodian and, in effect, the artistic curator of the Gutmann silver collection, Fritz was already in possession of an internationally famous collection of objets d’art. Since his arrival in Holland, Fritz had also begun to assemble his own rather magnificent collection of paintings, a collection that would consume not only his own passions, but also eventually his son’s, and now, to this day, mine.

  • • •

  Fritz, drawn by the pull of tangible history, began his art collection with the old masters of Italy. The scope of his taste would soon widen in a somewhat eclectic manner to encompass all of Western Europe. His first acquisition, from Count Trotti in Paris shortly after the end of the First World War, was a large, fifteenth-century Italian Renaissance cassone panel called The Siege of Veii, a marvelously detailed and wonderfully colorful depiction of an ancient Roman battle by Florentine painter Biagio d’Antonio. Later he added several paintings by Francesco Guardi, the eighteenth-century Venetian painter known for his architectural fantasies and atmospheric depictions of the Venetian landscape. Prophetically, one of those Guardis, Paesaggio di Fantasia con Isola della Laguna, portrayed an area in the lagoon of Venice where Fritz’s son, my father, would later drown.

  Other early acquisitions included an Italian Baroque pair of gouache capriccios by Marco Ricci, another master of the architectural fantasy. Through a tortuous chain of events, these two works, along with a portrait of a veiled Spanish lady by eighteenth-century French painter Jean Barbault, would one day wind up in our family house in Shepherd Market. I didn’t know how important this painting was to my father, yet I remember being fascinated by it when I was a child.

  Works by artists of the Northern Renaissance were also one of Fritz’s special passions—a passion that would, tragically, later be shared by some of the leading Nazis. Like his friend Ernst Proehl, Fritz acquired several works by Lucas Cranach the Elder, one of the most important German masters. These paintings reflected the various subgenres of that artist’s work: the allegorical Melancholy, the biblical Samson and the Lion, and, Cranach’s most common subject, portraiture—in this case Portrait of Johann Friedrich the Magnanimous, Elector of Saxony. Normally the electors (or princes) of Saxony were portrayed as stern Protestant patriarchs, but in this atypical portrait the prince was resplendent in his nuptial finery. A fifteenth-century Madonna with Child by Hans Memling, one of the leading masters of the early Netherlandish style, was a particularly exciting acquisition for Fritz, given the beauty and rarity of Memling’s work.

  The collection of old masters that covered the walls in the Bosbeek estate grew each year. Aunt Lili remembered that her father hardly ever returned from a trip without bringing another artwork home with him. Two were early-seventeenth-century landscapes by Jan van Goyen, one of the most prolific landscape artists of the Dutch Golden Age. In Switzerland, Fritz found a rare portrait by the sixteenth-century German Renaissance artist Hans Baldung Grien, Portrait of a Young Man, which bore one of those generic titles that cause researchers endless frustration. Another painting was, in retrospect, an important part of my personal history. It was Portrait of Isaac Abrahamsz. Massa by Frans Hals. This was the painting that my father stared at wistfully years later when he brought me to the San Diego Museum of Art. Another was the descriptively titled Small Portrait of a Young Man with a Red Jerkin by Giovanni Dosso Dossi, court artist to the dukes of Ferrara, which would one day wind up in Hermann Göring’s Carinhall estate.

  Interestingly, old masters rarely signed or named their paintings, so the names and even the attributions of paintings vary widely over the years. Fritz’s fifteenth-century panel Adoration of the Magi was painted by an anonymous German artist known simply, after the artist’s most famo
us work, as “the Master of the St. Bartholomew Altarpiece.” One more late-fifteenth-century portrait of an Austrian archduke was by yet another anonymous German artist known cryptically as “the Master of the Mornauer Portrait.” Both of these artists, along with Cranach and Memling, would one day stir the Nazi soul.

  The early-sixteenth-century head of the Madonna, originally part of a pentaptych altarpiece by Augsburg artist Hans Holbein the Elder, was another exceptional find for Fritz. A fifteenth-century masterpiece, The Argonauts Leaving Colchis, was by the sadly short-lived Ercole de’ Roberti, who was also from Ferrara. According to Vasari, Ercole’s “extraordinary love of wine” led to a sudden demise at the age of forty. Then there was an eighteenth-century portrait of a young woman by Thomas Gainsborough, best known as the painter of The Blue Boy. Two exquisite still lifes were painted in the last days of the eighteenth century by Swiss French artist Jean-Étienne Liotard. A delicate chalk self-portrait by Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, the most important female painter of the eighteenth century, was one of the few works by woman artists in Fritz’s collection.

  Perhaps the most curious of Fritz’s old-master acquisitions was a small oil painting barely more than ten by eight inches, The Temptation of St. Anthony, by Hieronymus Bosch. On a trip to Madrid in 1926, Fritz bought the Bosch, known as El Bosco, from a private collector. Years later, when I was barely ten, my father sat me in front of the massive Garden of Earthly Delights, known aptly as Between Heaven and Hell, to contemplate El Bosco’s masterpiece in Madrid’s Prado. Bosch was the early-sixteenth-century Dutch master famed for his surrealistic, even nightmarish, visions of hell, death, sin, and other religious subjects. His paintings were populated with fantastic animal and human forms in surreal situations that were symbolic of various contemporary social and religious themes. Fritz’s St. Anthony—one of two paintings by Bosch that featured the hermit Egyptian saint—certainly fit that description, showing a cloaked and hooded Saint Anthony surrounded by, among other odd things, a frog rigged up with sails, an archer shooting an arrow from inside a broken eggshell, and a kneeling, naked man with his head in a bag, his foot in a jar, and what appear to be swallows flying out of a funnel protruding from his backside. The Bosch was a somewhat bold acquisition on Fritz’s part, considering that Bosch did not loom nearly as large among art scholars and the general public as he does today. In fact, when St. Anthony was displayed on loan from Fritz’s collection, alongside 450 other old-master paintings, at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the New York Times seemed confused by its inclusion. Describing it as the “queerest painting” in the exhibition, the newspaper primly suggested that it more appropriately belonged with Salvador Dalí’s Dream of Venus exhibit—which perhaps it did, given that Dalí and other modern-day surrealists were heavily influenced by Bosch.

  Other significant artists that Fritz added to the collection included Fra Bartolommeo, François Boucher, Adriaen Isenbrandt, Hercules Seghers, Luca Signorelli, Adriaen van Ostade, and Paolo Veronese. Eventually his collection of old-master paintings would number well over sixty, which easily placed Fritz among the most important private collectors in Holland. It was all quite impressive—except that at least one member of the Bosbeek household was not always impressed.

  Young Lili, schooled in the appreciation of art from the earliest age, spent many hours perusing her father’s extensive collection of art books, acquiring a budding connoisseur’s eye. She remembered how once an art dealer came to Bosbeek to try to sell Fritz what was purported to be a painting by Raphael, but when he unveiled the work, Lili took one look and declared, “Das ist kein Raphael!” (“That is no Raphael!”), which, as it turned out, it wasn’t. The embarrassed dealer made a quick exit.

  Meanwhile Lili, despite her precocious knowledge of art, found some of Fritz’s collection rather dreary, especially the German Renaissance portraits. They were “hideous” and “boring,” she said. Many had “dreadful noses.” Whenever he brought home yet another painting of some poor German, dead for four centuries, she would complain vociferously in the way that favored daughters could. Lili recalled that her father often told her, “Ah, you do not understand them. They are really quite beautiful.” But she remained unconvinced when Fritz explained to her the finer points of composition, perspective, and brushwork. She insisted that the paintings were old and ugly and boring, and she wanted to know why Papi never brought home anything that was new and fresh and exciting. Louise agreed they needed something more contemporary, so starting in 1928, Fritz began to expand his painting collection beyond old masters.

  Fritz had long been exposed to modern trends in art, both in Berlin and in Paris. However, the Expressionist movement in Germany was so angst-ridden, it reminded him why he didn’t like to live there anymore. The new, fractured world of cubism was almost as unsettling.

  So, during a visit to the Paul Cassirer Gallery in Berlin in 1928, Fritz bought a small (eighteen-by-fifteen-inch) oil called Le Poirier, or The Pear Tree (in Bloom). It had been painted around 1871 by one of the earliest and greatest figures of the Impressionist movement, Pierre-Auguste Renoir. For Renoir, a prolific painter best known for his nudes and portraits, it was a less typical piece portraying, as the name simply suggested, a pear tree in the then-rural area of Louveciennes, located west of Paris. Renoir’s vibrant use of light and free brush style offered a sensation of movement. This ephemeral, windswept landscape set in springtime seemed to reflect the new optimism of the period immediately after the Franco-Prussian War.

  The following year, during a visit to the famous Ambroise Vollard in Paris, Fritz acquired the 1880 pastel Femme se Chauffant or Woman Warming Herself, by another great and prolific figure of French Impressionism, Edgar Degas. Two years later, through his agent at a Paris auction, Fritz bought yet another Degas, a landscape simply known as Paysage and later deceptively reincarnated in English as Landscape with Smokestacks.

  Both Degas paintings were quite beautiful, with vivid colors and deep luminescence, and, in the case of Paysage, somewhat rare because his landscapes were not well-known. Degas himself, on the other hand, was anything but beautiful. Ever since the Dreyfus affair, he had become increasingly withdrawn, until even his best friends viewed him as a cranky misanthrope. First he drove away all his Jewish friends, such as Pissarro, and then even his closest friends, such as Renoir. Fritz knew that Degas had turned into a notoriously outspoken anti-Semite. Nevertheless, Fritz was not the sort to judge art by the beliefs of the artist—and as a German Jew, albeit a converted one, he was more or less inured to such things. No doubt to Lili’s and Louise’s delight, the Renoir and the two Degas paintings took their places among the underappreciated old masters on the walls at Bosbeek. Mother and daughter agreed that they certainly brightened up the house.

  Apart from some sculpture, Fritz made one other foray into Modernism that is worth noting. In 1929, during a trip to Munich, he purchased a startling work by Bavarian Symbolist painter Franz von Stuck, whose work was considered a precursor of Art Nouveau. Painted in 1891 and variously titled Die Sünde (The Sin) or Die Sinnlichkeit (The Sensuality), it portrayed a Garden of Eden theme with a seductively posed naked woman embraced within the coils of an exceedingly large and decidedly evil-looking snake.

  It seemed an odd acquisition on Fritz’s part, even though Stuck’s mentor Franz von Lenbach had painted portraits of Fritz’s parents as well as Louise’s grandmother and aunt.

  Artistic significance was always crucial to Fritz, but ultimately he always bought only pieces that he liked. Unfortunately, just as I imagine how Sensuality caught Fritz’s eye, years later it would also catch the attention of one of the worst Nazis who ever lived.

  • • •

  How much was Fritz’s collection of art worth? It’s perhaps a crass question, but probably inevitable. It’s also difficult to answer, especially almost a century later. Artists and artworks have waxed and waned in popularity—and thus in price—among collectors and dealers over the decades. The value of an individu
al piece by a given artist also varies widely based on numerous factors: the subject, the period of the artist’s life in which it was painted, the strength of its composition and provenance, its physical condition, and, of course, the economy at the time. As always, size matters. For example, at a 2011 auction in London, a forty-seven-by-eighty-inch veduta by Francesco Guardi titled View of the Rialto Bridge was sold for an astonishing $42 million. A year later, a pair of Venetian vedute also painted by Guardi, each measuring just seven by eight inches, were sold for $660,000 at auction.

  In today’s superheated art market, we are accustomed to seeing tens of millions, even hundreds of millions, dollars spent on paintings. It was all rather different in Fritz’s day. Obviously, then as now, the collecting of art masterpieces was a rich man’s obsession, but the real cost of being such a collector then was still considerably less than it is now. For example, Portrait of a Man with Arms Akimbo by Rembrandt sold for $33 million in 2009. In 1930, it had sold at auction for roughly $72,000, or the equivalent of just under $1 million today. The Van Gogh Portrait of Dr. Gachet, which went for $82 million in 1990, had been sold by Van Gogh’s own sister in 1897 for a paltry three hundred French francs (about $1,000 today). In 1938, Fritz’s dear friend Franz Koenigs paid about $50,000 for it, which was about $800,000 today. Suffice it to say that the paintings in Fritz’s collection were worth many hundreds of thousands of dollars then, and several millions of dollars today.

  All things considered, the 1920s were a happy time for Fritz and Louise. They were wealthy, popular, good-looking, still relatively young, blessed with two healthy and intelligent children, surrounded by art and culture and music, and living in a stable and peaceful country. Yet, as the 1930s dawned, Fritz and Louise could not remain immune to the turmoil and tumult of history, any more than they had in 1914. While neither they, nor anyone else, could fully understand or accurately predict just how terrible the implications, they could not help but see that a catastrophe was rising just over the border.