Wouldn’t Galerie Barbazanges need paintings, such as a few van Goghs, to fill the halls of the gallery with bold light and bright color that was avant-garde chic and had name recognition? Of course it would. Did someone tip off Henri that Schuffenecker was the quiet owner of the painting from 1901 to 1906, before selling it? It could have happened.
When it did open in 1911, Galerie Barbazanges, over the next fifteen years of its operational life, would cut a huge swath through the avant-garde art scene in Paris and in Europe as a whole. Henri’s gallery exhibited Bernard Naudin and the Russian-Jewish artist Marc Chagall in 1924 with a retrospective exhibition of Chagall’s magnificent works;231 the year before Henri bartered Manet’s masterpiece The Old Musician “in exchange for two other French paintings: a portrait by Camille Corot and a nude by Auguste Renoir.”232
The idea of Paul Cassirer being the owner of the painting at some point does make sense, since he saw some version of that painting among van Gogh’s dazzling, seventy-one-piece art exhibition in 1901 at the Bernheim-Jeune.
Naturally, it would be Cassirer, who had championed van Gogh’s form of Post-Impressionism for a decade, who purchased it in Paris and took that painting back to his art gallery in Berlin, since the avant-garde art scene in 1910 had just taken off like a luminous streak of fireworks. It also makes sense that some art dealer, such as a Henri Barbazanges or some other Parisian gallery owner, had bought and sold the van Gogh “masterpiece” to Paul Cassirer in Paris in or around late 1910.233
At the start of the decade, Berlin was the fastest growing city in Europe. From 1871, when Vincent van Gogh was eighteen years old and still several years away from embarking on his career as an artist, Berlin’s population exploded from 827,000 people to nearly 2.1 million people by 1910.234 “Berlin also became the most important railway node in Europe with no less than twenty-two railway stations.”235 Prior to the start of World War I, Berlin had more than 100 daily newspapers, which seems an astounding flow of information in a pre-computer, pre-Internet, and pre-smartphone era.236
Berlin was hot. Berlin was the place to be. And its avant-garde wave of modern paintings began in 1910 and lasted until 1932, just as the Aryanization of Hitler’s Germany descended on the populace like an icy mist of poison gas.
At the start of 1910, Der Sturm magazine was established, “devoted to promoting expressionist art; the term Sturm (“storm”) soon assumed the character of a trademark. This kicked off the new age, the advent of modern art. Two years later, the Sturm Gallery would open in Berlin.”237
The time, 1910. The place, Berlin. The nouveau city, coming of age amid its smoke-spewing factories, was the right place to be at the right time to sell a van Gogh or the work of any other major artist of the day. Paul Cassirer ended up selling the Met’s Wheat Field with Cypresses to German-Jewish industrialist and banking magnate Franz von Mendelssohn in Berlin in December 1910. The art dealer owned it for less than a month, while he owned other van Goghs for years. Why? Did he, too, like a Parisian art dealer before him, notice an oddity about the canvas, something that told Cassirer that it was likely a fake?
In late 1910, Franz, together with his cousin Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, ran the most prominent private and oldest bank in Germany, founded in the second half of the 1700s, when United States of America had broken off as a colony from England to become an independent country.
The cousins’ business skills were only one trait of a talented and passionate family. Before them came world-renowned classical music composer Felix Mendelssohn. As Franz played the violin, so too did his children gravitate toward art and music.
An even more famous ancestor, who perhaps left an even greater impact, was the German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn.
Born in 1729, a son of a Torah scribe, by his mid-twenties Moses befriended philosopher Immanuel Kant and journalist and playwright Gotthold Lessing.238 Moses would publish books defending Judaism in print, yet at the same time use rational thought and reason to reform his religion to assimilate in Germany by recognizing “multiple religions and respected each one,” as he wished to lift the Jewish people out of the ghetto.239
“Moses Mendelssohn not only set in motion the Hebrew Enlightenment of the 19th century, but his classic Letters on Sentiment—considered the foundation of German philosophic-aesthetic criticism—and Phaidon, about the immortality of the soul, proved that one could be both a practicing Jew and an enlightened German.”240
From a robust family tree, with a mixture of solid business underpinnings, intellectual prowess, and an affinity for the arts, Franz and Paul were in a golden era during the rise of Berlin in 1910, an ideal time and place to operate, to lend money to entire industries, to network with business leaders, and to be the financial caretakers of tens of thousands of people, particularly Jewish citizens like them. While becoming rich, they tapped into that family vein of art and culture to become major buyers in modern art.
As they bought dozens of paintings well into the 1920s, Franz would own four van Goghs with “suspect provenance,” as family heir and historian Dr. Julius Schoeps explained in a September 2013 telephone interview, while “Paul owned six van Gogh paintings with clear provenance.” Dr. Schoeps’s reference to “suspect provenance” has only one possible meaning. That one, two, three, or all four of Franz’s van Gogh paintings were either faked or copied before 1910. The First version of the Wheat Field with Cypresses was one of those four paintings with suspect provenance, as the Met’s former art expert Gary Tinterow admitted in his 1998 interview with the New York Times.
Today, Dr. Julius H. Schoeps is the director of the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies at the University of Potsdam and the managing director of the Moses Mendelssohn Foundation. Prior to that appointment, Dr. Schoeps was the first director and cofounder of the Solomon Steinheim Institute.241 As a political scientist and Jewish historian, and heir to the Mendelssohn bloodline, Schoeps brought about a decade-long case in the US courts against the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 2007: “The heir, Julius H. Schoeps, a grandson of one of Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s sisters, has claimed that two of the Picassos—Le Moulin de la Galette, done in 1900, and Boy Leading a Horse, from 1906—were sold under duress during the Nazi regime, and thus, belong to him.”242
The lawsuits were an attempt to spur the museums to do the right thing and return the two priceless Picasso paintings that the Nazis had confiscated during the run-up to World War II, forcing Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy to sell those artworks at below market value. Unfortunately for Schoeps and his family’s esteemed legacy, on January 18, 2016, the US Supreme Court rejected the appeal to hear how the Nazis forced Mendelssohn-Bartholdy to sell the art amid the Aryanization of Germany in 1934.243
Those attempted “clawbacks” of artwork that belonged to the von Mendelssohn family took Julius Schoeps on a long, arduous journey through the US and German court systems to recover a total of five Picasso paintings, while fighting powerful art institutions like MoMA, Guggenheim, and the Munich Museum.244
As was the case with the German Jewish art dealer Paul Cassirer, who would become very successful as chairman of the Berlin Secession, from 1912–1915, the Mendelssohn cousins would grow in wealth and fame in German society, as would their art collection. Franz, Paul, and their families would hit the apex of their lives in Germany in the late 1920s, as their nation was battered by the cold defeat in World War I and the hard reparations of the Versailles Treaty; the emergence from the defeat of war must have reminded them of their ancestry and the postwar rebuilding they did in their day. “Moses’s eldest son, Joseph … [was] … responsible for managing France’s reparations after the Napoleonic Wars, financing railroad development across Eastern Europe and controlling the Tzar’s investments.”245
Whatever optimism had swept through Europe in the 1920s, and with Germany climbing out of its inflationary death spiral, avant-garde art was still a hot investment for col
lectors looking to expand their collections in the Roaring Twenties. Being on the front lines of banking, dealing with businesses and citizens alike, must have forewarned the Mendelssohn cousins that dark clouds were forming on the nearby horizon that would soon loom over the art world, the Jewish people, and the continent.
23
Aryanization
The business partnership between art dealer Paul Cassirer and Johanna Cohen-van Gogh-Bonger dissolved at the start of the First World War, when Cassirer, the gifted director of the Berlin Secession, who had published dozens of translated van Gogh letters and acquired 151 works of art from the Dutch master, was called up to fight for his native Germany in August 1914.246
As for Johanna Cohen-van Gogh-Bonger, widowed a second time two years earlier in 1912, the same year the Titanic struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage and sank, she published the first volume of Dutch edition letters in the spring of 1914. The following year, she moved to New York and began translating van Gogh’s letters into a fourth language, English.247 “At her death, September 2, 1925, she had reached letter 526. She had been back in Holland since 1919. During her lifetime a second printing of the Dutch edition was required, which meant a great success for a small country; she rejoiced in it very much.”248
Without Johanna van Gogh-Bonger’s passion and dedicated work ethic, Vincent van Gogh might have become an overlooked relic of the nineteenth century. Together with many art dealers, especially Paul Cassirer and later on collectors, “such as Helene Kröller, a wealthy art history major from Essen, and an American born pharmaceutical magnate, Alfred C. Barnes, the first American to own a van Gogh,”249 she spread the iconic talent and daring artwork of her late brother-in-law in Europe and across the Atlantic.
A year after Johanna’s death in 1925, workaholic Paul Cassirer’s relationship with his wife had come to an end. The one work of art he didn’t attend to, the relationship with his wife, left him heartbroken, at a loss. He committed suicide in 1926.250
With the deaths of Jo van Gogh-Bonger and Paul Cassirer, the experts who could have identified a fake van Gogh were gone. Thus, the timing of the Otto Wacker affair—the first of two van Gogh fakery scandals—is an event of historical significance. For someone to come out of the woodwork in 1926 with thirty-three never-seen-before (“new”) van Gogh paintings—purchased by a secret “Swiss collector”—the timing was either miraculous or planned by design.251
Otto Wacker was a working-class son of Hans Wacker, an artist, who grew up in Berlin. Otto’s brother Leonhard was a restorer of paintings and had his own art studio. Like Vincent van Gogh, who failed at most professions during his young life before becoming an artist, Otto also dabbled unsuccessfully in several professions, from cabaret singer to dancer, using the alias Olinto Lovael. In 1925, Otto apparently found his calling as an art dealer in Berlin. That was the same year that Johanna van Gogh-Bonger died and Paul Cassirer’s marriage unraveled, leading to his death the following year.
Otto Wacker needed the real experts dead. He got them. All that was left was a group of wealthy collectors owning dozens of van Goghs, but no real experts other than Emile Schuffenecker. The collectors couldn’t tell the difference between the artwork on a German marc and the swirling impasto strokes that vibrated a halo of light around Venus in Starry Night. Or so Wacker believed.
In putting on a van Gogh exhibition with the “new” paintings in 1927, Otto had sent a dozen paintings—about a third of the new, out-of-thin-air van Goghs with no provenance, other than a claim of their coming from a secret Russian collector through a more private Swiss one—over to the Paul Cassirer Gallery. It was the first of several of Otto’s miscalculations. During the unpacking of those canvases, Cassirer’s team of trained artists had become familiar with Vincent van Gogh, since the Dutch painter had been famous in Berlin since 1912. Despite Paul Cassirer’s death a couple of years earlier, his employees knew the artist and the Post-Impressionist style, brushwork, and techniques, and thus were able to see suspect paintings stand out from real ones at first glance. In pulling out five of the first nine paintings, Cassirer’s team noticed something odd. The handful of paintings looked as if several different hands had painted them, with at least one of them being a poor copy of a real van Gogh.
Otto Wacker had created his own trap, instead of buzz for a new Vincent van Gogh exhibition. The market for van Gogh paintings, among others, was red-hot in Berlin. But there still were enough people in the know, in addition to the Cassirer team, who were alive and had insight on the Dutch master, and who had attended enough past exhibitions that might question the provenance on some, if not all, of the thirty-three paintings exhibited.
As fate would have it, the day before the exhibit was set to open, a second major question on the authenticity of the new van Goghs emerged. Twenty-nine of the thirty-three “new” van Goghs hung on the walls of the gallery. The remaining four paintings were placed on the floor in front of the wall they were supposed to hang on. Timing was Wacker’s strategy, but it wasn’t on his side. Had those four van Goghs been delivered earlier, and had they already been hanging on the walls alongside the other 29 paintings, perhaps Otto Wacker would never have been caught. But fate had other plans.
The Wacker bust went down as follows:
When the last four arrived, they were placed next to their assigned positions on the floor. At that moment, Grete Ring, the general manager, saw the paintings and stopped dead. Something about them didn’t look right. Could these pieces be forgeries?
Ring and Walter Feilchenfeldt, the managing director of the firm holding the exhibit, agreed that all four were fakes. The paintings were removed from the exhibit just in time. But then, Ring and Feilchenfeldt wanted to take a closer look at the other 29 paintings.
For the next 5 years, art experts, art dealers, museum curators, and others carefully studied the 33 paintings attributed to van Gogh. In 1932, Wacker was found guilty of fraud and sentenced to 19 months in prison.252
As in most countries, then and now, the long arm of the law moved slowly. The police would end up raiding Wacker’s studio and confiscating the artwork in late 1929. It would be another three years before Otto Wacker would go to trial for the forgeries.253
An account of the trial stated:
Otto Wacker had tried various professions before becoming an art dealer in 1925. He succeeded in establishing a sound reputation with dealers and experts in the Van Gogh field, and De la Faille and Meier-Graefe constantly stressed their faith in his integrity.’ Grete Ring, one of Paul Cassirer’s closest business partners, puts the time much earlier: ‘One day, a youthful dancer, Olindo Lowael [sic], alias Otto Wacker, the son of a Düsseldorf painter, made his appearance in the Berlin art trade. At first—it was around 1922—he offered relatively small dealers comparatively modest pieces, works of the Dutch and Düsseldorf schools, and sometimes major works, an Israëls, an Achenbach, Schuch, Uhde, Trübner.254
Art experts during the trial and since then believed that Otto’s brother Leonhard had painted most, if not all, of the forgeries. Like Amedée Schuffenecker, who switched careers midstream, Otto Wacker jumped on the bandwagon of the easy-money, parasitic salesman-cum-art dealer, not to find his passion but to exploit an opportunity in a hot bubble market that would have brought huge profits—had he not been caught.
The 1932 Wacker Trial marked the end of the German avant-garde era. The rise of Nazi Germany and its Aryanization of the country that year saw the death to modern art. Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi Party and future chancellor of Germany, made sure of that, since he was attracted to Greek and Roman classical art from the past.
Hitler and the Nazis rode on the coattails of reelected German President Paul von Hindenburg on March 13, 1932. In the Weimar Republic, under its system of political rule, Hindenburg was forced to reluctantly appoint Adolf Hitler as the chancellor of Germany.255 The fateful decision set in motion the Aryanization of the country; Hindenburg would soon regret his catastrophic decision.
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In 1933, the first wave of anti-Semitic laws took effect. Jewish students were barred from several schools and colleges, Jews were barred from state service positions, and Jewish lawyers and Jewish tax consultants were either diminished or had their licenses revoked.256
The Nazis would also implement laws that would remove Jews from offices and board seats in public companies, institutions, and banks. That was the first step to liquidate the financial assets and holdings of the banks. Franz and Paul’s Mendelssohn and Company bank sat at the center of the bull’s-eye for the Nazi Party, which would plunder their assets like wild dogs over the next five years: “Nazi policies to eradicate Jewish-owned banks and bankers had reduced his [Paul’s] income to only about fourteen percent (14%) of what it had been only two years earlier and … [f]aced with escalating Nazi predation directed at his real estate property—and with no reasonable expectation of receiving any sustainable future income from Mendelssohn and Co.—in October 1934 Mendelssohn-Bartholdy began liquidating his singular private modern art collection to protect his residual estate from Nazi seizure and to offset his precipitate deficit.”257
The same hard blow struck Franz von Mendelssohn. When his financial transactions became frozen, artwork was used as trade for money, services, goods, food, and for some family members provided a chance to flee as the Nazi seizures of Jewish property ran unchecked and unabated.
Forced to make some difficult choices for their families leading up to World War II, Franz and Paul began to figure out which paintings to keep and which ones to sell (at below-market value) in order to survive.
In his 2006 memoir on the von Mendelssohn family, Looking Back, Fritz Kempner, a cousin of Dr. Peter Witt, who was a grandson of Franz von Mendelssohn, wrote about his travails in surviving after the fall of Germany to the United States and Russia in Berlin at the end of World War II on the European continent:
Breaking van Gogh Page 17