The Rape of Europa

by Lynn H. Nicholas

  Fortunately many local authorities were not entirely enthusiastic about enforcing the new rules and managed to ignore the illegal presence of certain residents in their districts, even if they were as conspicuous as Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. These two ladies, despite repeated warnings by the U.S. consul in Lyons, had decided to stay on at their country house in Bilignin, just north of Aix-les-Bains, where they had been since the summer of 1939. Their only foray had been in September of that year, when they had gone to Paris to retrieve the pictures which adorned their famous apartment. But the packing proved too difficult for them, and they were forced to call Daniel Kahnweiler for help. He found Miss Toklas trying to separate the canvas of Cézanne’s Portrait of Hortense from its frame with her foot.67 In the end the ladies took only that picture and Picasso’s famous portrait of Gertrude back to Bilignin with them. For a time they lived frugally but undisturbed, keeping goats and chickens. Until 1941 they were protected by the neutral status of the United States, but this was of no help to them by 1943, when the local subprefect warned them that they must immediately cross over into Switzerland by mountain paths, or be arrested. The twosome still refused to go, but did move into a much more remote house at Culoz. Overhead, day after day, they could now hear the countless Allied bombers heading toward Italy.68

  Peggy Guggenheim, after her initial flight, had moved on to Grenoble, where she spent the winter of 1940–1941 in a miserably cold hotel. She too was urged to leave by the consul in Lyons. In February 1941, with the help of a dealer acquaintance (and temporary lover), she packed her pictures in with her household goods and managed to ship them to the United States.69 In the spring she, like so many others, progressed to Marseilles.70

  The ancient Mediterranean port city, for centuries a haven for smugglers and lowlife of myriad nations, had reached near-saturation. It seethed with desperate German refugees hiding from the Armistice-decreed roundup, Americans trying to get home, Jews and political refugees of every country, and the profiteers who preyed upon them. One passage-seeker described it as “a beggar’s alley gathering the remnants of revolution, democracy and crushed intellect.”71 In this Bosch-like atmosphere there were a few islands of hope. One of these was an extraordinary operation sponsored from the United States known as the Emergency Rescue Committee, whose aim it was to help artists, intellectuals, and political refugees escape to America. Formed three days after the fall of France, its organizing committee included six college presidents and such media names as Dorothy Thompson and Elmer Rice. They had recruited Eleanor Roosevelt, who was to push for liberalization of the mercilessly strict visa regulations. Varían Fry, a former editor for the Foreign Policy Association who spoke French and German, was dispatched to Lisbon with $3,000 and a list of people who presumably needed help. On it were the writer Franz Werfel and his wife, the redoubtable Alma Mahler, and many artists of the calibre of Marc Chagall and Max Ernst.72

  Once in Marseilles, Fry was to find his task almost overwhelming. As cover he started an American relief organization. Eager exiles soon taught him all the tricks of false papers and escape routes to Spain. Help came from such unexpected undercover operatives as André Gide, Henri Matisse, and the aged Aristide Maillol, who sent his model as a Pyrenees guide, after he himself had shown her how to cross the mountain ranges. But only Fry could help with the endless process of obtaining an American visa from the U.S. consulate, which often regarded the refugees as dangerous left-wing agitators. The lucky recipients had to be chosen, by an agonizing process of triage, from some eighty applicants a day. In one ten-day period in October he managed to get writer Lion Feuchtwanger, Werfel and Mahler, plus three of Thomas Mann’s relations off to New York. The journeys were not normal. Feuchtwanger (who had been rescued from a French internment camp by a sympathetic assistant American consul with the historic name of Miles Standish), Werfel, and Mahler, who was carrying the manuscripts of Werfel’s Song of Bernadette and Bruckner’s Third Symphony in her rucksack, climbed out over the Pyrenees. The resultant publicity, though it brought in much money in the form of contributions, was not good. Himmler, who visited Madrid after the escape, extracted an agreement for stricter border controls from the Spanish government. The French and Portuguese followed suit, adding all sorts of exit and transit visas to the already daunting documentation necessary for freedom.73

  After this episode Fry felt it would be wise to be more private and rented a villa—dubbed “Château Espèrevisa”—just outside Marseilles which soon became an extraordinary artistic center. The presence of surrealist writer André Breton and his equally surrealistic wife, Jacqueline (“blonde, beautiful and savage with painted toenails, necklaces of tiger teeth, and bits of mirror glass in her hair”74), attracted the painter Max Ernst, who arrived after surviving a series of detention camps. A host of others lived in or spent their days at the villa, where they passed the time creating surrealist montages—Breton decorated the dinner table with an arrangement of live praying mantises—and holding exhibitions.

  Word of this scene did not take long to reach Peggy Guggenheim, who, after many convolutions described at length in her memoirs, paid for the transatlantic passages of Ernst (whom she later married in New York), André Masson, Breton, and all their families, and helped the committee finance the escapes of Chagall, Lipchitz, and many more. There was a quid pro quo: for $2,000, minus the cost of the fare, Peggy asked for some of Ernst’s pictures. She did well, acquiring quite a generous number. Indeed, she had never stopped buying from needy artists who, like herself, were progressing toward escape.75

  Ernst left on May 1, 1941, having finally obtained his American visa. But his French exit papers were not in order, and at the border he was asked to open his bags. The paintings they contained were spread all over the customs area and Ernst was closely questioned about his artistic ideas. After a time the inspector informed him that his papers were not valid. He must return to Pau on the next train, which was standing on the near track. Under no circumstances, said the inspector, should he board the train on the far track, which was going to Madrid, adding, “Above all, monsieur, do not make a mistake. I adore talent.” Ernst made it to Madrid and went on to Lisbon. Feeling too encumbered by baggage, he went to the post office and sent one of his biggest paintings, Europe after the Rain II, to the Museum of Modern Art in New York by regular mail. It arrived.76

  Chagall, who was living in an ancient stone cottage in the village of Gordes, northwest of Marseilles, and who was very reluctant to leave, had a harder time. Fry had finally persuaded him to go, after having quieted his many worries, including the doubt that there would be cows in America, when he was arrested by Vichy police and only freed when Fry threatened to inform The New York Times.77

  This ploy was successful, but the French clearly would not tolerate Fry forever. By August 1941 the United States consul and even Eleanor Roosevelt knew the operation was over. Fry tried to persuade Peggy Guggenheim to carry on for him, but the ever more frightening atmosphere of Marseilles and strong pressure from the consul were too much for her, and she declined. But it was not until she was questioned in her hotel by French police, whose chief apologetically released her upon discovery of her American papers, that she too got on a train heading for Spain.

  Because of her name she was stripped and searched “for illegal currency” at the frontier, but she had none and continued on to Lisbon to meet Ernst and the rest of her family. On July 14, 1941, they all arrived in New York, where Ernst was immediately detained at Ellis Island as a German national. During his incarceration Peggy and his dealer visited him daily, crossing to the island in a small boat. After a barrage of recommendations from Alfred Barr and MoMA patrons John Hay Whitney and Nelson Rockefeller, Max Ernst too was allowed to set foot on American soil.78

  Martin Fabiani’s shop in 1943, by Utrillo (Photo by Henri Tabak)

  VI

  BUSINESS AND PLEASURE

  France: The Art Market Flourishes;

  Nazi Kultur Withers


  The art market in France was, if anything, even more prosperous and fraught with intrigue than that in Holland. As the occupation government took hold, both sides had been impatient to revive the trade. The Archives Nationales files on the Kunstschutz are full of obsequious letters to Count Metternich from cash-starved countesses, Russian emigrés, and dealers of all kinds offering their possessions and wares. Everyone had apparently heard of the German propensity to spend.

  Officials of the Hotel Drouot, the famous Parisian auction house, asked permission to resume sales on September 26, 1940. This was granted by Dr. Bunjes on condition that all catalogues be sent to him, that all works valued at more than FFr 100,000 be indicated, and that the name and address of the purchasers of such items be reported.1 Like its Dutch and German counterparts, the Drouot was about to have its most successful years of the century. In the 1941–1942 season alone they would sell over a million objects; in March 1942 a Rotterdam paper reported on its front page that the Drouot was “filled with onlookers and buyers” and that the year 1941 had beaten all previous records, citing examples back to 1824. People bought everything they could get their hands on. “For want of Watteaus they bought presumptive Paters,” reported the Dutchman, two canvases by this artist having been snapped up for FFr 1.05 million.2

  Nineteen forty-two was even better, crowned by the phenomenal sale of the late dentist Georges Viau’s Impressionist collection on December 11—14. The auctioneer, Etienne Ader, had written to the Kunstschutz not to list works that would sell for FFr 100,000, which had become rather routine, but rather to report those expected to pass the million mark. Ader’s estimate that only one, a Vallée de l’Arc et Mont Ste.-Victoire by Cézanne, would reach this figure was wildly off.3 The 120 works together brought FFr 46.796 million, the highest total ever reached at the Drouot at a single session, to which had to be added a 10 percent luxury tax on top of a 15 percent sales tax. The Cézanne brought FFr 5 million, for which, a German report noted, one could easily have bought a château with considerable acreage. Degas’s Femme s’essuyant après le bain went for FFr 2.2 million, and thirteen other lots were sold for well over a million francs apiece.

  The event got heavy press coverage both in Paris and Germany. Paul Colin of Le Nouveau Journal described the six hundred seated attendees, who were soon mobbed by a huge standing-room-only crowd, as paradoxically very “vieille France,” noting that it was filled with “monocles, and white moustaches à la gauloise,” elegant ladies of a “very certain age,” and jackets adorned with the red rosettes of the Légion d’honneur. He mentioned that no Jews were allowed to attend, and nastily pointed out that “the Parisian market needs neither Hebrews nor Yankees to have sensational prices reached … which,” he continued, “were absurd and accidental” and due to “Degas snobbism added to Viau snobbism.” As for the Cézanne, “we will perhaps never again find two buyers crazy enough—the word is not too strong—to bid each other up to 5 million for a little landscape (55 × 46 cm).” The Louvre was derided for refusing the Degas in 1918, when it could have been had for FFr 20,000.4

  German reports on the event were a bit more subtle, but no less nasty, attributing the high prices to “the needs of the nouveaux riches for capital investments.” One had the impression, one writer remarked, “that the buyers were more concerned with getting rid of their newly acquired paper money as quickly as possible.” He evidently did not know that the major buyer at the sale was not a French black marketeer but the German dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, one of the buyers for Linz, who in addition to the Cézanne bought three other million-plus pictures: a Corot Paysage composé, Effet gris; a proscribed Pissarro; and for FFr 1.32 million a small Daumier Portrait of a Friend. The truth of the matter was that in France these “degenerate” works were among the hottest items in an overheated market and were being traded and bought to a large degree by those who had condemned them.

  Alas for Gurlitt, both the Cézanne and the Daumier were fakes. The good dentist, it seems, loved to “finish” oil sketches by well-known artists, and copy other works outright. The little Daumier was a copy of the real picture, which had also belonged to Viau, but been sold elsewhere; the Cézanne pure invention. It is now in the study collection of the Musée d’Orsay.5

  Individual dealers, decorators, and purveyors of every stripe were doing just as well as the Drouot. The Germans were no different from the visitors who had lost themselves in the antique-buyer’s paradise of Paris for generations. Behind the dignified façades of many an apartment building a colorful array of amateurs and professionals carried on an enormous secret market in their efforts to sell their conquerors everything short of the Eiffel Tower. One lady repeatedly offered Goering an entire Spanish courtyard. Another gentleman wondered if he would be interested in buying “twelve historic stone capitals which come from the Palace of the Tuileries and bear the ‘N’ of Napoleon,” and which were now “at my house … where I had intended to build a temple.” Monumental offers of this nature were not frivolous: inventories of the Reichsmarschall’s collections reveal that he actually did buy “a small eighteenth-century circular temple with six columns” and “the Cloister of the Cistercian Abbey of Berdoues (Gers)” from dealer Paul Gouvert.

  The Galerie Charpentier, at the behest of Kajetan Mühlmann’s half-brother Josef, put on a show of medieval and Renaissance objects which was visited by Goering, who bought the lot. From his own very decorated apartment, the Vicomte de la Forest-Divonne sold carefully arranged objects and paintings (often obtained from ERR leftovers or the Clignancourt flea market) as if they were his own, claiming always that they had been in the family for generations. To encourage sales, clients were served champagne as they pondered. Another noble lady, the Countess de la Béraudière, worked the black market, accepting only cash transactions.6 The art trade swarmed with middlemen fronting for French citizens who preferred not to reveal to whom they had sold. Thousands of works of art changed hands without receipts or any kind of record.

  The architects helping Hans Frank refurbish the castle at Cracow came and shipped carloads full to the East. The Rhineland Museums (Krefeld, Essen, Bonn, Wuppertal, and Düsseldorf) had a whole team of curators covering Paris who spent well over FFr 40 million on French paintings and decorative arts, which even included a good number of Impressionists. Albert Speer bought twenty-five cases worth of objets, and the sculptor Arno Breker bought works by French artists he admired and shipped them home along with twenty tons of plaster, wine, and cologne. Dr. Hans Herbst spent FFr 15 million on items which were dispatched to the auction rooms of the Dorotheum in Vienna for resale, while Josef Mühlmann travelled the countryside to supply clients in Berlin and Poland, and a certain Herr Possbacher filled orders to the tune of FFr 4.5 million for lesser Nazi party officials unable to visit the City of Light.7

  These purchases were subjected to brilliantly contrived and endless bureaucratic delays by a Louvre curator, Michel Martin, seconded to the French Customs, who demanded reevaluations and ever more documentation before granting export permits. He did not have any illusions about his ability to stop the exports, but in this manner was able to keep track of where declared objects were being sent. The conquerors were forced over and over again to reveal the mailed fist by appealing to the Military Government for intervention.

  All this dazzling but relatively straightforward trade pales when compared to the extraordinary international transactions involving the top Nazi procurers which would peak in 1941–1942. In these dealings the competitive rapaciousness of the buyers was evenly matched by that of the sellers, it being the universal desire to acquire as much art or cash from each other as possible. There was no dearth of either. The German dealers had the great advantage of direct access to the government funds controlled by their patrons, not to mention special travel privileges and the ability to send their purchases across frontiers without the annoyance of customs controls.

  Both Hitler and Goering had full-fledged but carefully separated buying ope
rations going on in Italy as well as in the Low Countries. The Führer’s primary agent, Prince Philip of Hesse, a nephew of Kaiser Wilhelm II, was particularly well placed, as he was married to Princess Mafalda, daughter of the Italian King. He had joined the Nazi movement in the twenties and risen to its highest levels when the war began. In 1940 Hitler had asked him to help Posse find pictures on the Italian market, an assignment he eagerly accepted.8 Hesse’s expertise and entrée were invaluable. Through him Posse was able to procure such gems as the Memling Portrait of a Man from the collection of Prince Corsini, Rubens’s Equestrian Portrait of a Member of the Doria Family, and a Leda and the Swan attributed to Leonardo from the Spiridon family. Posse made three trips to Italy in the spring of 1941, each time asking for more funds to be deposited at the German embassy. He needed them: the Spiridon Leonardo alone went for L 10.5 million, or RM 1.3 million. By May 1942 the total had reached RM 5 million, and Hesse had acquired eighty-eight works for Posse.9 Hofer, with less money to spend, had a more complicated network of dealers and free-lancers from whom he got regular kickbacks at Goering’s expense.

  When the Reichsmarschall himself was in Italy, his principal dealings were with the self-made collector-dealer Count Contini Bonacossi, whose title had been granted by Mussolini. Contini had donated a large part of his collection to the Italian state, but he still had plenty for sale, as his extensive American trade was now cut off. A great bargainer, he sold more than fifty items to Goering, including a considerable amount of furniture.