From the New York Times: Family’s Claim Against MoMA Hinges on Dates
By PATRICIA COHEN
When the Expressionist artist George Grosz, a celebrated painter, fled Nazi Germany in 1933, he left behind two important oil paintings and a watercolor with his Berlin dealer. Next month the United States Supreme Court, in deciding whether to hear the case, will determine whether Grosz’s heirs have any hope that legal action will help them recover the works from their current owner, the Museum of Modern Art.
The lawsuit is an emotional, last-ditch effort by Grosz’s son Martin, and Martin’s sister-in-law, Lilian, to reclaim works they say were lost in the midst of Nazi persecution, only to end up two decades later in one of the world’s most elite art institutions.
Beyond the family, the case has drawn the attention of Jewish groups and experts in international law who argue that the Grosz case, like many others concerning art looted or lost during World War II, have too often been decided not on the merits but on whether claimants filed suit before the legal time limit.
MoMA, for example, has won several lower court decisions in the Grosz case because judges have ruled that the family simply filed its suit too late to be considered under New York State law. The United States has twice signed international agreements that urged nations to decide Holocaust-recovery claims based on their substance, not on legal technicalities. But the agreements do not have the force of law.
“Museums are breaking their own ethics codes and causing the U.S. government to break its international commitments by invoking our courts to resolve Holocaust-era art claims on technical grounds rather than on the merits,” said Jennifer Anglim Kreder, co-chairwoman of the American Society of International Law’s Interest Group on Cultural Heritage & the Arts.
Ms. Kreder is an author of a “friends of the court” brief supporting the Groszes. Several other organizations have also weighed in to argue against the use of statutes of limitations to bar such claims. The organizations include the American Jewish Congress and the nonprofit Commission for Art Recovery.
The museum, which acquired the works in the 1950s, declined to comment because the case is being litigated. But it has maintained in court documents that, regardless of the timing issue, it has diligently researched the artworks’ provenance and has found no evidence that the works were looted by the Nazis or any basis for disputing their legitimate ownership.
Raymond J. Dowd, the Groszes’ lawyer, counters that the lower court considered inadmissible evidence and also failed to take into account a 1998 federal law that was intended to help Holocaust-era victims recover their assets.
Since 2004, the Supreme Court has refused to review several Nazi-era art cases, most recently in June when it decided not to review a case brought against the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif., which ran afoul of a different deadline statute. Lawyers involved in Grosz v. Museum of Modern Art agree that it is unlikely that the high court, given its reluctance to weigh in on matters of state law, will take up this case when it meets on Sept. 26 to review the appeal.
The tangled odyssey of the three disputed works — the portrait “Poet Max Herrmann-Neisse” (1927), “Self-Portrait With Model” (1928) and the watercolor “Republican Automatons” (1920) — begins in 1933. Grosz, a prominent member of the Dada movement best known for his biting caricatures, was a staunch critic of Hitler and emigrated to America just as the Nazi regime was coming to power. Grosz, who was not Jewish, left the three works with Alfred Flechtheim, his dealer, who was Jewish. Under the Nazis, Jewish businesses were boycotted, and within months Flechtheim also left Germany. He died penniless in London four years later.
The Grosz heirs say that Flechtheim was only temporarily caring for the three works and that he was forced to sell or abandon his holdings because of the climate of terror created by Hitler’s regime. The accompanying paper trail that shows bills of sale, liquidation papers and letters, they add, was later fabricated or distorted to mask illicit dealings.
MoMA, which obtained the two oil paintings and the watercolor at different times in the early 1950s, has said it was unaware of any doubts about the chain of ownership. Grosz himself saw the portrait of Herrmann-Neisse hanging on the museum’s walls in 1953, and wrote to his brother-in-law, “Modern Museum exhibits a painting stolen from me (I am powerless against that) they bought it from someone, who stole it.” Grosz, who died in 1959, never contacted the museum about regaining possession, however.
To his heirs the letter is proof that the painting was stolen; to the Modern, it is evidence that Grosz himself passed up opportunities to ask for his art within a reasonable time.
In any case, MoMA has argued, Martin Grosz and Lilian Grosz missed the deadline to file a lawsuit. Under New York law, claimants have three years to sue after their request for the return of their property is rejected.
The first formal request from the Groszes for the works came in November 2003. MoMA says it researched the provenance with scholars from Yale. In July 2005 the museum’s director, Glenn D. Lowry, wrote to the Groszes’ representative that evidence challenging the museum’s ownership was unpersuasive and that the transfers were not forced.
Mr. Lowry’s letter, the museum says, started the clock ticking. The family members, however, argue that Mr. Lowry told them that only the museum trustees could make a final decision, and the Groszes say that they were still negotiating with the museum until April 2006, when the museum board rejected their claim. In their view the board’s vote is what started the clock, and so their lawsuit, filed on April 10, 2009, would have fallen within the allotted three-year period.
Charles A. Goldstein, counsel to the Commission for Art Recovery, said “the museum strung along” the Groszes, holding out the possibility of a settlement while the clock ran out. “The museum was dead wrong,” he said.
During the Nazi regime about 100,000 artworks were looted from public and private collections, including forced sales. To address some of the issues such looting raised, the United States and more than 40 other nations adopted the 1998 Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, and the 2009 Terezin Declaration, which urge nations to decide claims “on the facts and merits” and to take historical circumstances into account when legal hurdles arise. American policymakers have frequently urged other countries to abide by these agreements.
In a keynote address at the Terezin conference, held in the Czech Republic, the leader of the United States delegation, Stuart E. Eizenstat, said he was concerned about the tendency to seek refuge in “technical defenses,” including the statutes of limitations.
Some lawyers who have represented MoMA and other museums in unrelated cases say that laws regarding time limits are not merely technical, but also speak to the question of whether it is possible to reconstruct an accurate historical record after a long lapse. Automatically giving claimants the benefit of the doubt can unfairly penalize honest and rightful owners, said Jo Backer Laird, a lawyer at Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler, a New York firm that represents MoMA and other museums but is not currently involved in any restitution cases.
Mr. Goldstein of the Commission for Art Recovery counters that given stated United States policy on the issue, museums and the courts should respect the 1998 and 2009 agreements. “The statute of limitations was never intended to cover something like wartime mass pillaging of property,” he said.
Monday, August 29, 2011
Guest commentary: Efforts to reclaim Nazi-looted art undermined in court
From the Detroit Free Press: Guest commentary: Efforts to reclaim Nazi-looted art undermined in court
The U.S. Justice Department seems bent on undermining decades of efforts to secure a modicum of justice for Holocaust survivors and their heirs, at least with respect to Nazi-looted art.
Inexplicably, the Justice Department asked the U.S. Supreme Court to deny a rehearing of Von Saher v. Norton Simon Museum of Art at Pasadena, in which the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that California was powerless to extend the statute of limitations for claims involving Nazi-looted art. The Supreme Court in June did as it was asked and declined to take the case.
State laws have been the cornerstone of Holocaust-related restitution claims. J. Christian Kennedy, former State Department special envoy for Holocaust issues, noted four years ago there is "no specific role for the federal government in the art restitution process."
But in Von Saher, the 9th Circuit ruled: "It is beyond dispute that there was no role for individual states to play in the restitution of Nazi-looted assets during and immediately after the war." It reached its conclusion by overlooking traditional federalism and states' rights principles. It also undermined the work of the World War II Army Monuments Men (and Women), who risked their lives to secure Nazi-looted art in the expectation that it would be returned to its owners.
After World War II, Jack B. Tate, U.S. Department of State acting legal adviser, in 1949 expressed to the Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit that it was the "policy of the executive" with respect to Holocaust-era property claims "to relieve American courts from any restraint upon the exercise of their jurisdiction to pass upon the validity of the acts of Nazi officials."
Even during World War II, the State Department issued warnings to those trafficking in Nazi-looted art that a day of reckoning would come. Ardelia Hall proclaimed in the Department of State Bulletin in 1951: "For the first time in history, restitution may be expected to continue for as long as works of art known to have been plundered during a war continue to be rediscovered."
In 2009, the Terezin Declaration, signed by 46 nations, proclaimed that public and private institutions should "ensure that their legal systems or alternative processes ... facilitate just and fair solutions with regard to Nazi-confiscated and looted art, and to make certain that claims to recover such art are resolved expeditiously and based on the facts and merits of the claims."
This was necessary in no small part because some of our most prestigious museums have been duping judges into fearing intrusion upon the executive's foreign affairs domain if they were to proceed in resolving disputes of World War II-related cases dealing with looted art.
The State Department, under the leadership of Stuart Eizenstat, also led the world to adopt the Washington Principles, encouraging re-examination of collections and the restitution of tainted art in 1998. Museums have been defeating claims in court based on technical defenses.
By maintaining that California was powerless to extend its statute of limitations to permit continuations of Nazi-looted art claims, the Justice Department sided with the museums to conjure up a nonexistent looming foreign affairs problem surrounding adjudication of a claim to a painting hanging on a wall in Pasadena.
The government of the Netherlands, the only government that could be directly affected by the case, has even stated that it has no issue with U.S. adjudication. The Supreme Court has rejected almost every claim ever presented to it that federal policy somehow preempts state law.
The U.S. Supreme Court should not have destroyed California's attempt at fundamental fairness for Holocaust survivors by discouraging further claims. Hope is dwindling for the power of state law to act as the cornerstone of restitution in this country.
The U.S. Justice Department seems bent on undermining decades of efforts to secure a modicum of justice for Holocaust survivors and their heirs, at least with respect to Nazi-looted art.
Inexplicably, the Justice Department asked the U.S. Supreme Court to deny a rehearing of Von Saher v. Norton Simon Museum of Art at Pasadena, in which the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that California was powerless to extend the statute of limitations for claims involving Nazi-looted art. The Supreme Court in June did as it was asked and declined to take the case.
State laws have been the cornerstone of Holocaust-related restitution claims. J. Christian Kennedy, former State Department special envoy for Holocaust issues, noted four years ago there is "no specific role for the federal government in the art restitution process."
But in Von Saher, the 9th Circuit ruled: "It is beyond dispute that there was no role for individual states to play in the restitution of Nazi-looted assets during and immediately after the war." It reached its conclusion by overlooking traditional federalism and states' rights principles. It also undermined the work of the World War II Army Monuments Men (and Women), who risked their lives to secure Nazi-looted art in the expectation that it would be returned to its owners.
After World War II, Jack B. Tate, U.S. Department of State acting legal adviser, in 1949 expressed to the Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit that it was the "policy of the executive" with respect to Holocaust-era property claims "to relieve American courts from any restraint upon the exercise of their jurisdiction to pass upon the validity of the acts of Nazi officials."
Even during World War II, the State Department issued warnings to those trafficking in Nazi-looted art that a day of reckoning would come. Ardelia Hall proclaimed in the Department of State Bulletin in 1951: "For the first time in history, restitution may be expected to continue for as long as works of art known to have been plundered during a war continue to be rediscovered."
In 2009, the Terezin Declaration, signed by 46 nations, proclaimed that public and private institutions should "ensure that their legal systems or alternative processes ... facilitate just and fair solutions with regard to Nazi-confiscated and looted art, and to make certain that claims to recover such art are resolved expeditiously and based on the facts and merits of the claims."
This was necessary in no small part because some of our most prestigious museums have been duping judges into fearing intrusion upon the executive's foreign affairs domain if they were to proceed in resolving disputes of World War II-related cases dealing with looted art.
The State Department, under the leadership of Stuart Eizenstat, also led the world to adopt the Washington Principles, encouraging re-examination of collections and the restitution of tainted art in 1998. Museums have been defeating claims in court based on technical defenses.
By maintaining that California was powerless to extend its statute of limitations to permit continuations of Nazi-looted art claims, the Justice Department sided with the museums to conjure up a nonexistent looming foreign affairs problem surrounding adjudication of a claim to a painting hanging on a wall in Pasadena.
The government of the Netherlands, the only government that could be directly affected by the case, has even stated that it has no issue with U.S. adjudication. The Supreme Court has rejected almost every claim ever presented to it that federal policy somehow preempts state law.
The U.S. Supreme Court should not have destroyed California's attempt at fundamental fairness for Holocaust survivors by discouraging further claims. Hope is dwindling for the power of state law to act as the cornerstone of restitution in this country.
Sweet success for Steve Berry
From The Star Online: Sweet success for Steve Berry
Success came slowly but surely for bestselling American author, Steve Berry.
ALTHOUGH every new book of his appears on bestseller lists everywhere from Malaysia to New York, thriller writer Steve Berry likes to say that he does not know much about writing.
“But I’m an expert on rejection,” the 56-year-old adds in his good-humoured drawl, on the phone from his home in St Augustine, Florida.
He explains that he wrote eight manuscripts and had his work dismissed 85 times in total before one story was picked up and published by Ballantine Books in 2002.
That novel was The Amber Room, a tale of art heists and war history. It was followed by nine others, all blending historical fact and heaps of imagination.
Seven of the books star Berry’s popular character, Cotton Malone, a Copenhagen-based rare-book dealer. Berry describes him as an alter ego who gets to do things his creator has not had the chance to try, including firing guns and jumping out of planes. Both collect old books – Berry has more than 1,000 – have a son in his teens, and are “lousy with women”, he jokes.
The latest in the Malone series, The Jefferson Key, is now available in major bookstores in Malaysia. A tale of modern-day piracy and old-school action, the book has had regular spots on The New York Times’ bestseller list since it was published in May.
At first glance, it seems that Berry and his creation have a lot in common with thriller king Dan Brown and his fictional creation Robert Langdon, who is regularly embroiled in historical mystery. Asked about this, Berry responds humbly and happily.
“I’m fine with the comparison. I was a fan long before The Da Vinci Code,” he says, of Brown’s 2003 mega hit. “If it wasn’t for Dan Brown and what he did by publishing The Da Vinci Code, I wouldn’t be here. That book brought the thriller genre back to life.”
In fact, he adds, if he sees a Brown book in a store window, he always pauses to pay his respects. “I stop and I bow. You must pay homage to the Da Vinci!” Like his hero Brown, Berry began writing in the 1990s, but it took him much longer to get published.
After graduating with a law degree from Mercer University in Georgia in the United States, he practised divorce law and, later, criminal law, married and raised a family. But in his 30s, he says, “a little voice in my head started telling me to write books”.
So, every day he would write stories from dawn to breakfast, before either his first wife or three children got up.
“I was 35 years old when I wrote my first book. It was horrible. I wrote a second book – it was horrible. Then I wrote my third book,” he pauses suggestively, “and it was also horrible!”
Finally, he joined a writers’ group in nearby Jacksonville, an hour’s drive away from his then home in Atlanta, Georgia, and the feedback he received over the next six years helped him polish his manuscripts enough for publication.
“I quit three times, but that little voice in your head keeps driving you and nags you and annoys you,” he says.
Now he teaches writing to aspiring authors and the lesson always includes these words: never give up.
Berry spends up to 18 months on every novel and a third of the time is usually research. He reads extensively, consulting perhaps 300 sources for every book and also likes to travel to the locations his characters find themselves in.
He flew to Russia for The Amber Room and France for The Templar Legacy (2006), the first Cotton Malone book. While he failed to find time to head to China for last year’s The Emperor’s Tomb, he had “eyes and ears on the ground” and got regular reports from a friend who visited the country for three weeks.
The next Malone novel is slated for 2013, while Berry is now working on a standalone, which will star a disgraced newspaper reporter.
“Cotton called me on the phone and asked if he could have a year off,” he says in explanation, though clearly it is he who needs the break!
He has no plans to do a John Grisham and write legal thrillers for a change of pace, saying: “I do not adhere to the philosophy that you should write what you know. Write what you love.”
And what he loves is history. His fees from teaching and lecture tours are channelled into History Matters, a non-profit society he founded with his second wife, Elizabeth. They raise funds to preserve historical artefacts, whether art, writing or memorabilia. Most recently, they helped the Bridgeport History Centre raise funds to preserve 19th-century posters.
“History matters,” says Berry. “Without knowing where we’re coming from, we have no clue where we’re going. History is critical in that regard.” – The Straits Times, Singapore/Asia News Network.
Success came slowly but surely for bestselling American author, Steve Berry.
ALTHOUGH every new book of his appears on bestseller lists everywhere from Malaysia to New York, thriller writer Steve Berry likes to say that he does not know much about writing.
“But I’m an expert on rejection,” the 56-year-old adds in his good-humoured drawl, on the phone from his home in St Augustine, Florida.
He explains that he wrote eight manuscripts and had his work dismissed 85 times in total before one story was picked up and published by Ballantine Books in 2002.
That novel was The Amber Room, a tale of art heists and war history. It was followed by nine others, all blending historical fact and heaps of imagination.
Seven of the books star Berry’s popular character, Cotton Malone, a Copenhagen-based rare-book dealer. Berry describes him as an alter ego who gets to do things his creator has not had the chance to try, including firing guns and jumping out of planes. Both collect old books – Berry has more than 1,000 – have a son in his teens, and are “lousy with women”, he jokes.
The latest in the Malone series, The Jefferson Key, is now available in major bookstores in Malaysia. A tale of modern-day piracy and old-school action, the book has had regular spots on The New York Times’ bestseller list since it was published in May.
At first glance, it seems that Berry and his creation have a lot in common with thriller king Dan Brown and his fictional creation Robert Langdon, who is regularly embroiled in historical mystery. Asked about this, Berry responds humbly and happily.
“I’m fine with the comparison. I was a fan long before The Da Vinci Code,” he says, of Brown’s 2003 mega hit. “If it wasn’t for Dan Brown and what he did by publishing The Da Vinci Code, I wouldn’t be here. That book brought the thriller genre back to life.”
In fact, he adds, if he sees a Brown book in a store window, he always pauses to pay his respects. “I stop and I bow. You must pay homage to the Da Vinci!” Like his hero Brown, Berry began writing in the 1990s, but it took him much longer to get published.
After graduating with a law degree from Mercer University in Georgia in the United States, he practised divorce law and, later, criminal law, married and raised a family. But in his 30s, he says, “a little voice in my head started telling me to write books”.
So, every day he would write stories from dawn to breakfast, before either his first wife or three children got up.
“I was 35 years old when I wrote my first book. It was horrible. I wrote a second book – it was horrible. Then I wrote my third book,” he pauses suggestively, “and it was also horrible!”
Finally, he joined a writers’ group in nearby Jacksonville, an hour’s drive away from his then home in Atlanta, Georgia, and the feedback he received over the next six years helped him polish his manuscripts enough for publication.
“I quit three times, but that little voice in your head keeps driving you and nags you and annoys you,” he says.
Now he teaches writing to aspiring authors and the lesson always includes these words: never give up.
Berry spends up to 18 months on every novel and a third of the time is usually research. He reads extensively, consulting perhaps 300 sources for every book and also likes to travel to the locations his characters find themselves in.
He flew to Russia for The Amber Room and France for The Templar Legacy (2006), the first Cotton Malone book. While he failed to find time to head to China for last year’s The Emperor’s Tomb, he had “eyes and ears on the ground” and got regular reports from a friend who visited the country for three weeks.
The next Malone novel is slated for 2013, while Berry is now working on a standalone, which will star a disgraced newspaper reporter.
“Cotton called me on the phone and asked if he could have a year off,” he says in explanation, though clearly it is he who needs the break!
He has no plans to do a John Grisham and write legal thrillers for a change of pace, saying: “I do not adhere to the philosophy that you should write what you know. Write what you love.”
And what he loves is history. His fees from teaching and lecture tours are channelled into History Matters, a non-profit society he founded with his second wife, Elizabeth. They raise funds to preserve historical artefacts, whether art, writing or memorabilia. Most recently, they helped the Bridgeport History Centre raise funds to preserve 19th-century posters.
“History matters,” says Berry. “Without knowing where we’re coming from, we have no clue where we’re going. History is critical in that regard.” – The Straits Times, Singapore/Asia News Network.
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Dutch city settles with Greenwich woman on Nazi-looted Jan Steen painting
From Greenwich Time.com: Dutch city settles with Greenwich woman on Nazi-looted Jan Steen painting
AMSTERDAM -- Lawyers for a Greenwich woman, the U.S. heir of a Jewish art dealer who lost many paintings while fleeing the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, say she has settled with The Hague municipality on a valuable work by Jan Steen.
The lawyers say Marei von Saher will receive €1 million ($1.4 million) and donate her share in the painting "The Marriage of Tobias and Sarah" to a Hague museum.
The piece has an unusual history: it was cut in two before the war and painstakingly restored in the 1990s -- before von Saher's claim to the larger part was established by the Dutch state in 2006. The smaller right side, which depicted the Archangel Raphael, was owned by The Hague. The two fragments were reunited by restorers in 1996.
"Both parties had agreed that they did not want to see the painting divided again," Von Saher's lawyers, Herrick, Feinstein LLP in New York, said in a statement. "The settlement resolves the dispute without separating the painting's two parts."
The painting will be displayed at the Museum Bredius in memory of von Saher's father-in-law, Jacques Goudstikker, the Netherlands' most prominent art dealer in the 1930s.
City spokeswoman Esther Andoetoe confirmed the settlement Monday.
Art historians in The Hague noticed that on the left side of the painting, which belonged to Goudstikker, the tips of the archangel's wings are visible in the top-right corner. This proved that the two fragments belonged to the same painting. The museum says that the pieces that have been reconciled are probably still only the center of a much larger painting.
Though the Dutch government agreed to return its part of "The Wedding Night of Tobias and Sarah" in 2006, the prior joining of the two separated fragments led to a dispute over who should get the complete painting. The two parties began negotiating a settlement more than two years ago.
Marjolein de Jong, deputy mayor in charge of culture in The Hague, wrote in a statement sent by e-mail that the agreed price is lower than Von Saher's initial demands for 1.8 million euros and said the accord "helps preserve the painting for The Hague and future generations."
The Dutch government and Mondriaan Foundation will contribute 400,000 euros toward the settlement, according to Esther Andoetoe, a spokeswoman for The Hague. The Rembrandt Association will pay 200,000 euros, the cultural budget of The Hague will fund 92,000 euros and 308,000 euros comes from insurance money for the loss of two other paintings, she said.
Steen was born in the Dutch city of Leiden in 1625. He painted Bible subjects, landscapes and portraits and left about 800 paintings.
Artworks returned to Von Saher from Dutch museums include pieces by Salomon van Ruysdael, Filippo Lippi and others by Steen. She also has recovered more than 30 works from museums in other countries, including the United States, Germany and Israel.
Goudstikker left about 1,400 artworks in his gallery when he escaped Amsterdam in 1940 on a cargo boat with his wife and baby son. He died during the crossing and his gallery was looted. In 2006, the Dutch government returned 202 works from the national collection to Goudstikker's sole heir, von Saher.
The Bruce Museum in Greenwich displayed more than two dozen of the paintings in the 2008 exhibit, "Reclaimed: Paintings from the Collection of Jacques Goudstikker."
Adolf Hitler's right-hand man in the Nazi party, Hermann Goering, looted the gallery weeks after Goudstikker fled Amsterdam and used the booty to decorate his opulent country estate outside Berlin.
After World War II and the liberation of Nazi-occupied Netherlands, the Allies handed recovered works back to the Dutch government for restitution to the original owners. Those not returned immediately after the war became part of the national collection.
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Nazi looted art: from the Amber Room to Raphael's Portrait of a Young Man
From The Telegraph: Nazi looted art: from the Amber Room to Raphael's Portrait of a Young Man
As Nazi Germany conquered most of continental Europe its forces went on a monumental looting spree, taking an estimated 20 per cent of all European art. Some of the work taken was never seen again.
The Amber Room. Once dubbed the "eighth wonder of the world" the room was a chamber clad entirely with gold-backed amber panels. Dismantled by the Germans from a palace near St Petersburg the priceless amber vanished in the chaos of war. Its possible whereabouts is still the subject of widespread speculation and investigation.
Raphael's Portrait of a Young Man was discovered by German forces found hidden in the Polish city of Kraków for safekeeping. Kept by Hans Frank, the governor-general of Nazi occupied Poland, the painting disappeared in 1945. Art experts say if the work resurfaced today it could fetch over £60 million at auction.
Painter on the Road to Tarascon. A self-portrait by Vincent van Gogh the painting is believed to have been destroyed by allied bombing during the war while stashed in a museum for stolen art although its exact fate was never confirmed.
British POWs 'murdered after being forced to hide Nazi artwork down coal mine'
Documents indicate that in December 1944 under orders from Hans Frank, the infamous governor-general of occupied Poland, POWs from a camp near Auschwitz carried the mysterious crated cargo 300 metres below ground at a mine near the southern town of Bytom, and were then shot.
"We have information and documents which say that at least a thousand prisoners of different nationalities, including British, French, Belgians and others were involved," said Dariusz Psiuch, from the Institute of National Remembrance, the Polish body charged with investigating wartime and communist era crimes.
"They were forced labourers," he added. "We are not dealing with the treasure. We are looking for evidence of a war crime which probably took place."
Researchers believe the bodies were dumped at the bottom of the mine shaft after being killed to ensure they took whatever they knew about the cargo to their graves. They hope any bones, skeletons or clothing fragments found will help identify victims.
But the investigation has been hampered by possibility that the Germans might have rigged booby traps, and by the perilous condition of the mine, which has lain abandoned since the end of the war.
"It's very dangerous because water is pouring down like a waterfall," said local climber Michal Maksalon, who made one decent. "I went down 170 metres, and after that the rock turns to concrete and I can't see any way through."
Exactly what the Germans may have taken such great pains to hide down the mine remains subject to speculation. Historians suggest that with the Red Army grinding Hitler's forces backwards, top Nazis may have constructed a type of safety deposit box underground to stash works of art and gold plundered from museums and private homes across central and eastern Europe.
As Nazi Germany conquered most of continental Europe its forces went on a monumental looting spree, taking an estimated 20 per cent of all European art. Some of the work taken was never seen again.
The Amber Room. Once dubbed the "eighth wonder of the world" the room was a chamber clad entirely with gold-backed amber panels. Dismantled by the Germans from a palace near St Petersburg the priceless amber vanished in the chaos of war. Its possible whereabouts is still the subject of widespread speculation and investigation.
Raphael's Portrait of a Young Man was discovered by German forces found hidden in the Polish city of Kraków for safekeeping. Kept by Hans Frank, the governor-general of Nazi occupied Poland, the painting disappeared in 1945. Art experts say if the work resurfaced today it could fetch over £60 million at auction.
Painter on the Road to Tarascon. A self-portrait by Vincent van Gogh the painting is believed to have been destroyed by allied bombing during the war while stashed in a museum for stolen art although its exact fate was never confirmed.
British POWs 'murdered after being forced to hide Nazi artwork down coal mine'
Documents indicate that in December 1944 under orders from Hans Frank, the infamous governor-general of occupied Poland, POWs from a camp near Auschwitz carried the mysterious crated cargo 300 metres below ground at a mine near the southern town of Bytom, and were then shot.
"We have information and documents which say that at least a thousand prisoners of different nationalities, including British, French, Belgians and others were involved," said Dariusz Psiuch, from the Institute of National Remembrance, the Polish body charged with investigating wartime and communist era crimes.
"They were forced labourers," he added. "We are not dealing with the treasure. We are looking for evidence of a war crime which probably took place."
Researchers believe the bodies were dumped at the bottom of the mine shaft after being killed to ensure they took whatever they knew about the cargo to their graves. They hope any bones, skeletons or clothing fragments found will help identify victims.
But the investigation has been hampered by possibility that the Germans might have rigged booby traps, and by the perilous condition of the mine, which has lain abandoned since the end of the war.
"It's very dangerous because water is pouring down like a waterfall," said local climber Michal Maksalon, who made one decent. "I went down 170 metres, and after that the rock turns to concrete and I can't see any way through."
Exactly what the Germans may have taken such great pains to hide down the mine remains subject to speculation. Historians suggest that with the Red Army grinding Hitler's forces backwards, top Nazis may have constructed a type of safety deposit box underground to stash works of art and gold plundered from museums and private homes across central and eastern Europe.
Friday, August 19, 2011
Collaging Kurt Schwitters
From Bay Area Reporter: Collaging Kurt Schwitters
A tinkerer, a maker, designer, poet, an anthology of art history and a one-man industry: all of these describe German painter/collage artist Kurt Schwitters, whose work seems remarkably familiar if only because he's so often been copied by his inheritors and those he influenced, like Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Ellsworth Kelly and Damien Hirst, to name just a few. Enduring cataclysmic world events that would dampen anyone's avant-garde, utopian idealism, Schwitters emerged from the ruins of WWI, and later, WWII, collecting detritus from the ashes of bombed-out buildings, and signs of life left behind by those who had moved on. He was a scavenger par excellence, a crucial qualification for an oeuvre he made up as he went along.
Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage, now at the Berkeley Art Museum, is the first major overview of the artist's work in the U.S. since 1985. It presents 75 assemblages, sculptures and collages, dating from 1918 to 1947, as well as an intriguing reconstruction of his life's work, an installation destroyed in an Allied bombing raid – but more on that later.
His collages, executed with an astute compositional eye, are an expression of the dissonant collision of information and experience endemic to modern life, a phenomenon that's only accelerated in the digital age. Schwitters' keen ability to balance disparate elements is evident, right from the start, in two of his earliest pieces created in 1918, "Zeichnung, A3" and "Zeichnung A6."
An original thinker with a provocative spirit, Schwitters explored and dabbled in many artistic and intellectual movements, including Russian Constructivism, Dadaism and Expressionism, but, like Picasso, another notorious iconoclast, he neither wholly subscribed to nor obeyed the rules of any of them. It was said he comported himself like a member of the petite-bourgeoisie, but when he opened his mouth, he was "totally Dada."
For his abstract compositions with paper, Schwitters borrowed, interpreted and exercised his stated aim "to erase the boundaries between the arts," by incorporating painting, typography, poetry, phrases, architecture, and words lifted from unfinished sentences. He collected found materials like train tickets, scraps of paper, advertisements, posters, wire mesh and other discarded objects, and applied a loose, fluid paste, then arranged them and let them set. Sometimes he drew or painted on his works like one inscribed and dedicated to Henry Cowell, an avant-garde Berkeley musician and student of John Cage, who toured Europe. That collage, which has an intricate structure worthy of a musical score, is owned by Jasper Johns.
Though works such as "Pink Collage" (1940), a combination of geometric shapes, jagged edges, tissue papers, and muted, washed-out colors, achieve a near-perfect harmony, the appeal of Schwitters' work is primarily cerebral. One senses control rather than contained emotion at play. Beauty is not necessarily the point – evoking associations and making connections is the goal. The collages and even the sleek contours of the pale beech wood sculptures he made in Norway, which reflect a filtered Scandinavian aesthetic, can be like a Rorschach test for viewers, who will be compelled to identify images from the slivers Schwitters supplies, and speculate about their origins.
By the early 1930s, Schwitters gained recognition among collectors and museum curators in both Europe and the U.S., but that exposure, while gratifying, had the unfortunate effect of bringing him to the attention of the Gestapo. He was paid the backhanded compliment of inclusion in the Nazis' notorious hall of shame, the 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition, and fled Germany the same year for the relative safety of Norway. After the Nazis invaded that country, he departed for the Lake District outside London, where his studio was bombed. One step ahead of disaster, war seemed to follow him.
Don't leave the exhibition without going downstairs and visiting a full-sized replica of the artist's lifetime obsession, "Merzbau," a "living" sculptural/architectural installation. The original, which was in Hanover and occupied six rooms of his parents' spacious residence, was destroyed in 1943. Schwitters created four "Merzbau" installations, one in each of the countries he lived; they either didn't survive or were never finished. Once inside the reconstruction by Swiss stage designer Peter Bissegger, you've entered a cross between a white-on-white, Euro-modern studio apartment with color block accents, and a garret with high ceilings that Schwitters dubbed the "Cathedral of Erotic Misery," which contains hidden alcoves called the "Murderers' Cave" or "Goethe Grotto." Portraits, busts and illustrations pop up in surprising places, and there's even a spiral staircase to the "Nest." Schwitters envisioned "Merzbau" as a mutating, evolving space where memories and events could be assembled and transformed into abstract art – a walk-in collage.
Through November 27 at the Berkeley Art Museum.
A tinkerer, a maker, designer, poet, an anthology of art history and a one-man industry: all of these describe German painter/collage artist Kurt Schwitters, whose work seems remarkably familiar if only because he's so often been copied by his inheritors and those he influenced, like Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Ellsworth Kelly and Damien Hirst, to name just a few. Enduring cataclysmic world events that would dampen anyone's avant-garde, utopian idealism, Schwitters emerged from the ruins of WWI, and later, WWII, collecting detritus from the ashes of bombed-out buildings, and signs of life left behind by those who had moved on. He was a scavenger par excellence, a crucial qualification for an oeuvre he made up as he went along.
Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage, now at the Berkeley Art Museum, is the first major overview of the artist's work in the U.S. since 1985. It presents 75 assemblages, sculptures and collages, dating from 1918 to 1947, as well as an intriguing reconstruction of his life's work, an installation destroyed in an Allied bombing raid – but more on that later.
His collages, executed with an astute compositional eye, are an expression of the dissonant collision of information and experience endemic to modern life, a phenomenon that's only accelerated in the digital age. Schwitters' keen ability to balance disparate elements is evident, right from the start, in two of his earliest pieces created in 1918, "Zeichnung, A3" and "Zeichnung A6."
An original thinker with a provocative spirit, Schwitters explored and dabbled in many artistic and intellectual movements, including Russian Constructivism, Dadaism and Expressionism, but, like Picasso, another notorious iconoclast, he neither wholly subscribed to nor obeyed the rules of any of them. It was said he comported himself like a member of the petite-bourgeoisie, but when he opened his mouth, he was "totally Dada."
For his abstract compositions with paper, Schwitters borrowed, interpreted and exercised his stated aim "to erase the boundaries between the arts," by incorporating painting, typography, poetry, phrases, architecture, and words lifted from unfinished sentences. He collected found materials like train tickets, scraps of paper, advertisements, posters, wire mesh and other discarded objects, and applied a loose, fluid paste, then arranged them and let them set. Sometimes he drew or painted on his works like one inscribed and dedicated to Henry Cowell, an avant-garde Berkeley musician and student of John Cage, who toured Europe. That collage, which has an intricate structure worthy of a musical score, is owned by Jasper Johns.
Though works such as "Pink Collage" (1940), a combination of geometric shapes, jagged edges, tissue papers, and muted, washed-out colors, achieve a near-perfect harmony, the appeal of Schwitters' work is primarily cerebral. One senses control rather than contained emotion at play. Beauty is not necessarily the point – evoking associations and making connections is the goal. The collages and even the sleek contours of the pale beech wood sculptures he made in Norway, which reflect a filtered Scandinavian aesthetic, can be like a Rorschach test for viewers, who will be compelled to identify images from the slivers Schwitters supplies, and speculate about their origins.
By the early 1930s, Schwitters gained recognition among collectors and museum curators in both Europe and the U.S., but that exposure, while gratifying, had the unfortunate effect of bringing him to the attention of the Gestapo. He was paid the backhanded compliment of inclusion in the Nazis' notorious hall of shame, the 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition, and fled Germany the same year for the relative safety of Norway. After the Nazis invaded that country, he departed for the Lake District outside London, where his studio was bombed. One step ahead of disaster, war seemed to follow him.
Don't leave the exhibition without going downstairs and visiting a full-sized replica of the artist's lifetime obsession, "Merzbau," a "living" sculptural/architectural installation. The original, which was in Hanover and occupied six rooms of his parents' spacious residence, was destroyed in 1943. Schwitters created four "Merzbau" installations, one in each of the countries he lived; they either didn't survive or were never finished. Once inside the reconstruction by Swiss stage designer Peter Bissegger, you've entered a cross between a white-on-white, Euro-modern studio apartment with color block accents, and a garret with high ceilings that Schwitters dubbed the "Cathedral of Erotic Misery," which contains hidden alcoves called the "Murderers' Cave" or "Goethe Grotto." Portraits, busts and illustrations pop up in surprising places, and there's even a spiral staircase to the "Nest." Schwitters envisioned "Merzbau" as a mutating, evolving space where memories and events could be assembled and transformed into abstract art – a walk-in collage.
Through November 27 at the Berkeley Art Museum.
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Horror and heroics of WW2 star at new exhibition in Chicago
From the Vancouver Sun (July 31, 2011): Horror and heroics of WW2 star at new exhibition in Chicago
The horrors and heroism of World War Two are given a fresh look in an Art Institute of Chicago exhibition of rediscovered Soviet propaganda posters, which depict Hitler as blood-thirsty, anxious and perverse.
One poster in the "Windows on the War" exhibition, opening to the public on Sunday, features a caricature of a worried Hitler hiding a crude hand gesture under his cap while Joseph Goebbels orates nervously.
Another poster produced by Moscow's TASS studios depicts a fearsome, wolf-like Nazi drooling as Allied bombs fall; and another depicts heroic partisans blowing up a Nazi supply train and firing at escaping soldiers.
"Despite the tyranny of Stalin, creativity flourished" in the former Soviet Union as artists felt motivated to contribute to the war effort, said Jill Bugajski of the Art Institute, one of the curators of the exhibition of some 250 posters, paintings and mementos that continues through October 23.
PEN, BRUSH, BAYONET
"I want the pen to be on par with the bayonet," wrote poet and poster contributor Vladimir Mahakovsky, who wrote captions and poems that adorned the posters.
A cache of the now-brittle posters were discovered in 1997 sitting on a shelf in one of the Art Institute's storage closets during a renovation. Two paper rolls and 26 parcels containing the forgotten works were unfolded, restored and some placed behind plexiglass for the exhibition.
Three hundred artists and writers produced some 1,400 poster designs in Moscow's TASS' studios, which was part of the telegraph and news agency.
Using up to 60 stencils for each poster to layer still-bright paint on cheap newsprint, many of the 800,000 TASS posters produced were lost or forgotten.
They were intended to "create a mood of urgency while visually aggrandizing the Soviet solder, defining the Nazi enemy as vile and subhuman, and emphasizing the woeful suffering of the Soviet people," museum exhibitors said.
Inspired by the prewar mocking of "degenerate art" by the Nazis, who also put on an anti-Bolshevik art exhibition, the Soviet artists took liberties with Communist "social realism" to create shocking, sometimes humorous, images.
The hand-painted posters were distributed to newspapers, museums, libraries and "Russian friendship" societies around the world by the Soviet propaganda operation, the USSR Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries.
Frequently placed in the vacant windows of war-time shops and reprinted in newspapers, the posters have been largely forgotten since the war, curators said.
Each illustration had its purpose, which seems distant now in light of the subsequent Cold War and today's up-and-down U.S.-Russia relations: reinforce the Anglo-Soviet alliance against Germany that was signed in September 1941, and lift recruitment and spirits among the beleaguered Allies.
The 157 posters selected for the show offer a diary of the war -- from crushing Soviet losses, to the defense of Stalingrad, to the defeat of Germany in 1945. Among them is a warning to Soviet soldiers that the punishment for retreating was death.
Also on view are haunting photographs of Soviet prisoners of war, and one of eight grimly violent, monumental "The Year of Peril" series of paintings by American artist Thomas Hart Benton.
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