Breaking van Gogh

by James Grundvig

  Why was this important? It showed the line from Wendland-Hofer through Nathan to Bührle as a long-established conduit for looted art during the war. It becomes clear why Emil Bührle destroyed his company records of business transactions, cash flow, and account balances from 1939 to 1945. Had those records ever been found by ALIU, Bührle would have certainly joined Hermann Göring at Nuremberg. Had that happened, who knows where Peter Witt’s version of Wheat Field with Cypresses would have ended up—perhaps somewhere other than hanging in the hallowed halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

  The ALIU report concluded with the personal assets and property that Hans Adolf Wendland owned, might have owned, and might have hidden in stealth bank accounts in Switzerland.

  Had brothers Vincent and Theo van Gogh, or even Jo van Gogh-Bonger for that matter, been around in the aftermath of World War II and borne witness to the wholesale destruction of a race of people, its rich culture and heritage, they would have been repulsed. It would have especially disturbed them that at the center of the shadow market of financing the war was the stolen art of Vincent and his Impressionist brethren from the 1880s into the early decades of the twentieth century.

  It wasn’t until the mid-1990s, four decades after the war ended, that the clawbacks pursued by the likes of Mendelssohn family heir Dr. Julius Schoeps began to track the fates of the missing heirloom artwork sold under extraordinary duress during the Nazi liquidation of Jewish-run and Jewish-owned businesses in Germany before the war, and in the occupied countries of Western Europe, particularly France, during the war. The rapid growth of the World Wide Web had accelerated the ability of the families whose art was looted to communicate more globally, doing quicker and deeper research that simply wasn’t available in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

  The Internet explains why many of the court cases and legal challenges are still being heard in 2016, especially since it takes such a long time for cases to be heard, decisions to be made, appeals filed, and so on, going up through the higher courts both in the United States and Germany, among other European nations where the victims lived and operated their art galleries.

  It also explains why the Simon Wiesenthal Center, with its 2006 report on Nazi-looted art, continues the fight for restitution, and why Jewish organizations forced Switzerland to finally act, not just on the art theft front with the 2002 ICE investigation report, but also through the courts and the United Nations to expose all the secret Swiss bank accounts and Swiss banks and other institutions that aided the Germans during the war by hiding, fencing, and financing stolen property.

  On Monday, November 30, 1998, the US State Department and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum held a four-day summit—the Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets—that focused on Nazi-confiscated art during the 1930s and World War II. The “government-organized, international meeting of forty-four governments and thirteen non-governmental organizations (NGOs) … sought to address the issue of assets confiscated by the Nazis during the Holocaust (1933–45), specifically art and insurance, as well as communal property, archives and books, and to conclude any remaining gold issues.”281 It was built off the success of the London Nazi Gold conference, which had been held the year before.

  The Holocaust-Era Assets conference developed eleven guiding universal principles, though admitting that many of the speakers in attendance, from the United States to France, Germany, and Eastern European countries, operated in different legal systems.282

  Dr. Konstantin Akinsha, Research Director, Project of Documentation of Wartime Cultural Losses, United States, opened his session by stating:

  The establishment of different databases, collecting information about art works looted during WWII, is now a popular topic within the circle of scholars and representatives of organizations and groups involved in the search for the “disappeared” cultural property of the victims of the holocaust. There are many plans and ideas to create a “total” database, which will include all possible claims and information about nearly every artwork looted during the war. Unfortunately, such an undertaking doesn’t appear very realistic.

  In 2010, German authorities intercepted an elderly man, Cornelius Gurlitt, on a train from Zurich to Munich. He was “carrying a large amount” of cash on him, so they went to his apartment and found more than 1,000 works of art by Chagall, Renoir, and a missing Matisse—Seated Woman—stashed away. The combined value of the artwork exceeded $1 billion. What was an old man, living in apartment that resembled a hovel, doing with a trove of missing World War II pieces of art with a value more than that of the building block he lived in? It turned out that his father had worked as an art broker for the Nazis.283 Seated Woman was a painting that had belonged to art dealer Paul Rosenberg before he was forced to flee from the Nazis, leaving behind his art. Rosenberg would subsequently spend years trying to recover the pieces that were looted, and his story is just one of many.

  There would be subsequent conferences that were born out of the 1998 Holocaust-Era Assets summit, including a four-day conference held in Prague in June 2009, which produced a report of over a thousand pages on the proceedings, and a Milan conference in 2011, carrying the title of Restitution Experience Since The Washington Conference (1998), which discussed major achievements since that first summit and what the updated “Washington Principles” called “provenance research on national collections” for the more than forty participating nations.284

  At the 2009 conference in Prague, in a story called “Retaining van Gogh,” it came to light that a New York City attorney had sent a letter to the Detroit Institute of Art (DIA) about Vincent’s Saint-Rémy painting Two Diggers Among Trees (December 1889), which was transferred from the estate of art collector Robert Hudson Tannahill in 1970 to DIA. The letter went on to explain that the painting, along with one other van Gogh, belonged to the estate of Mrs. Hugo Nathan (no relation to Dr. Fritz Nathan), as she was forced to sell it in the liquidation of her assets by the Nazis in 1937, all because she was Jewish.

  As of February 2016, van Gogh’s The Diggers, as DIA calls the painting, can still be seen at the Detroit Institute of Art.285

  More problematic than the resolution of a single particular case is the entrenched mentality, the human keeper mentality, the mentality that led the Germans and the Soviets to fight over every brick of Stalingrad to produce a bloody stalemate. In other words, the behavior of the museum heads to choose to fight, in most cases, rather than to resolve many of the provenance and restitution issues.

  The authors of “Retaining van Gogh” wrote about the issue:

  Our research team repeatedly found the keepers of various archives unwilling to accommodate them, or willing to respond to only the most tightly focused enquiries, behavior that reinforced the need for regulations allowing greater freedom of access in the area of Nazi-looted art.286

  Translation: good luck to the victims in getting your looted artwork, or art sold on the cheap under the Nazi threat, returned to you. They also wrote about the purpose and scale of the looting:

  Many of them were used to enrich the collections of Göring or other Nazi elites. Others were siphoned off to Switzerland, for example, to the Fischer Gallery in Lucerne, while an estimated 500 were destroyed in the symbolic N.S. bonfire at the Jeu de Paume in July 1943, so vividly described by French curator Rose Valland.

  In terms of art looting, the ERR’s most blatant claim to the status of war criminals was the seizure of over 20,000 works of art from over 200 private Jewish collections in France and Belgium. That whole process was instigated by Reichsmarschall Herman Göring in part to enrich his own collection.287

  (ERR refers to Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, which was the special task force set up and overseen by Hitler’s chief ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg.)

  Pushback in response to the demands for restitution of Nazi-plundered art came from all directions, and from top institutions in the United States and Europe. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Director Philippe De Mon
tebello, who at the 1998 conference also sat on the board of the United States Association of Art Museum Directors Task Force, was one director who was not going to cave to demands for either the suspected looted art to be returned to the rightful owners or for financial compensation.

  During his “Break-out Session on Nazi-Confiscated Art Issues: Principles to Address Nazi-Confiscated Art,” in the ten minutes he was allotted to address his art museum peers, members of Congress, and US Holocaust Memorial Museum executives, De Montebello said: “Principally, the task force report called on American art museums to begin to conduct a comprehensive review of their collections to ascertain if any works may have been unlawfully confiscated during the Nazi/World War II era, and never subsequently returned.”288

  He went on to discuss guidelines for museums, and then he managed to waste some of his allotted ten minutes by deflecting away from the core subject of the conference, stating:

  The fact is, museums proudly announce acquisitions—the Met has joyously recorded in recent weeks the purchase of works by Jasper Johns and Van Gogh—and frankly, if my press office had not generated considerable press attention, internationally, someone would now be looking for other work! And of course, museums display new acquisitions prominently in their galleries, indeed all new acquisitions at the Met have a special and highly visible blue sticker on the label.289

  When will all the questions of the looted World War II art, the art with suspect or tainted provenance, be resolved? How many more conferences on Holocaust-era assets need to take place to get close to getting it right?

  My guess … on the hundred-year anniversary of the end of World War II.

  In the year 2045.

  26

  Van Gogh’s Missing DNA

  In 1982, CBS investigative journalist Morley Safer of 60 Minutes thought he had a hot story to pursue with a painting by Georges de La Tour potentially being “branded a fake.” Safer had “produced four English art professionals who attacked the authenticity of The Fortune Teller, believed to be painted by the 17th-century French artist between 1632 and 1635, and purchased by the Met in 1960 at a cost of $675,000.”

  The Met swatted aside Safer’s request for an independent art expert to examine the authenticity of the artwork and denied him copies of the X-rays and results of tests that the Met had done on the painting. The Met art representative used a flimsy excuse not to appear on 60 Minutes, claiming that because the story was more British-centric, he would only be interviewed by the BBC. As the New York Times’s Grace Glueck saw it, “the failure of anyone from the Met to appear on the program did the museum a real disservice.”290

  This author faced a similar stonewalling by the Met in July 2013, when requesting a copy of the museum’s condition report for Wheat Field with Cypresses. When repeated requests to review the Met’s condition report on Wheat Field with Cypresses were denied, editor Stephen Gregory, publisher of the Epoch Times newspaper, wrote a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) letter requesting the condition report; that request was also denied.

  Months later, this author learned through a former employee at the Metropolitan Museum, who will remain nameless, that the Met has an unwritten policy when it comes to paintings with questionable backgrounds and provenances:

  • If the painting was purchased by the Met and later proven to be a fake, the Met would, in most cases, remove it from its walls and store it in a cellar vault alongside many other such fakes that the museum had bought over its nearly 150-year history.

  • If the painting was given as a “gift” to the Met, however, the museum was under no obligation to examine the object’s history to find out whether it was genuine or a forgery.

  Wheat Field with Cypresses fits the second case. The painting was gifted to the Met by Walter Annenberg after he bought it for $57 million (it would be “the most expensive purchase” acquired by the museum).291 Thus, following the Met’s own internal logic, it was under no obligation to verify whether the van Gogh was real or a fake. With that twisted logic, the Met also felt it wasn’t obligated to provide the condition report to a newspaper, even under a FOIA request. So the Met, in its own view, under its so-called unwritten policy, believes that it has no obligation to do what’s right for world-famous, iconic master artists like Vincent van Gogh and for the museum’s visitors.

  The Met’s refusal to release the condition report—which would reveal the analysis of physical condition, aging, repairs, touch-ups, weave counts, pencil sketching or outlining of the subject under the paint, chemical analysis of the pigments and vanishes or sealers, and whether any dirt or pollen made it into the paint if it was painted outdoors—is in stark contrast with the approach taken by the National Gallery.

  Of course, even if the Metropolitan Museum ever does release the condition report, could the document be trusted? This is not to accuse the Met of anything. But after a cascade of denials, rejected FOIA requests, and a raft of major errors of attribution in its 2009 Annenberg Collection art book on Wheat Field with Cypresses, a skeptic would be wary of anything the Met put forth concerning this painting.

  But if the Met had released the real condition report, which would have shown the two previous major owners of the painting—the Bührle family and Franz von Mendelssohn’s family—the following items would prove it to be an outright forgery:

  1. Canvas weave count. With a van Gogh self-portrait suspected of being a fake, two siblings who inherited the painting in 2000 wanted it authenticated. They brought it to Maria-Claude Corbeil, a chemist at the Canadian Conservation Institute of Ottawa. In mining the van Gogh letters, she was able to deduce that the canvas was supposed to be “asymmetrical.” In other words, it contained a “different number of horizontal and vertical threads.” Under X-ray imaging, Corbeil proved the “canvas contained the same number of threads in the horizontal and vertical directions.” Conclusion: the portrait was a fake.292

  Note: Van Gogh’s The Langlois Bridge (May 1888, Arles) at the Wallraf das Museum, Cologne, Germany—the museum conducted a condition report on the painting, which uncovered a weave count of “vertical 12, horizontal 13 threads per cm, very fine, open, almost netlike weave, pale in color.”293 It other words, it is asymmetrical—a genuine van Gogh.

  Question: Does Schuffenecker’s (the Met’s) Wheat Field with Cypresses canvas have the same asymmetrical weave properties? If it’s a square, it’s a fake.

  2. Colors and pigments. As has been stated throughout this book, Vincent van Gogh was very particular in the paints he used. Van Gogh’s custom-made colors and pigments, mixed and ground by Père Tanguy, from the special greens to the lead whites, are one of a kind. In the National Gallery Technical Bulletin for A Wheatfield, with Cypresses, it is stated that van Gogh used “chrome yellow” (lead chromate).

  Note: By 1901, when Schuffenecker forged the Wheat Field with Cypresses, Père Tanguy had been dead for seven years, with no understudy or apprentice in his shop to reproduce those special pigments.

  Question: Does the Met’s Wheat Field with Cypresses contain the special paints for the wheat field (chrome yellow), cypresses (green), and the lead white to “prime” the canvas, and perhaps use for the white clouds? If the yellow was “cadmium,” or any of the other special paints that don’t match pigments used during the Saint-Rémy period, then it’s a fake.

  3. X-rays and impacted impasto. X-rays have been used to detect or confirm certain colors and pigments, weave counts, chemical analysis, and final condition of paints under varnish used by van Gogh in his paintings from the French period.294 If those French-era paintings were from the South of France, then stresses would be detected from age, poor storage, and impacted impasto.

  Note: The National Gallery Technical Bulletin didn’t show any varnish being used on the Final version of the painting. That likely suggests that the other twin, the Small version of Wheat Field with Cypresses, wasn’t treated with varnish either, which would have been out of character for the usually meticulous van Gogh. Yet in September 1
889, Vincent was coming off his bender of depression, so perhaps he either forgot this step of preservation or didn’t have the materials at the time to seal the painting.

  Question: What would the Met’s version reveal under X-rays, with respect to canvas condition, paint colors, and special pigments used? If the X-ray revealed a painting atypical from other pictures van Gogh painted during his thirteen-month stay at the asylum, then it’s a fake. If the Met’s version wasn’t sealed with varnish when other June 1889 landscape paintings were, then it’s likely a fake.

  4. Brushstrokes. Van Gogh’s brushstrokes, athletic and fast, separated him from other painters of his era and following generations. They were “strongly rhythmic” and “tightly arranged, creating a repetitive and patterned impression”; they were “special to van Gogh.”295

  Question: Are the painting’s brushstrokes characteristic of van Gogh’s style? If the “blue blob” on the Alpilles mountains and the spiraling cloud, which looks like the white paint had been sucked through a straw on the canvas in the upper left hand of the Met’s version, are not typical van Gogh brushstrokes and were painted by a different hand, then the painting is a fake.

  5. Cracking. A study by Louis von Tilborgh of the Van Gogh Museum, which examined the weave patterns of van Gogh’s canvases, found: “It is known from Van Gogh’s letters that he preferred rolls of canvas to ready-made, pre-stretched canvases, and information about their weave structure might make it possible to reconstruct painting locations on those rolls.”296

  Note: Van Gogh’s paintings in the South of France, whether done in Arles or Saint-Rémy, all have the same exact characteristic: being rolled for transport. National Gallery’s A Wheatfield, with Cypresses was “rolled” with the physical evidence being more than simple wear and tear or poor storage. That painting suffered from being rolled, showing “impacted” impasto, cracking in the blue sky in the upper right-hand corner of the picture, while the Met version is totally free from any such cracking or impacted thick applications of paint.