Nazi looting of artworks by Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh photographed in 1873

Many priceless artworks by the Dutch Post-Impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh were looted by Nazis during 1933–1945, mostly from Jewish collectors forced into exile or murdered.

Some of these works have disappeared into private collections, others have resurfaced in museums, at auction, or have been reclaimed, often in high profile lawsuits taken by their former owners. However, the German Lost Art Foundation still lists dozens of missing van Goghs. As of 2021, the Nazi Era Provenance Internet Portal, published by the American Alliance of Museums, lists 73 van Gogh paintings acquired by American museums after 1933 with questionable provenance.

Background

Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), the famous Dutch Post-Impressionist painter, was one of many artists whose artworks were looted by Nazis, either by direct seizure or by forced or duress sales. From 1933–1945, an estimated 20% of all artwork in Europe was plundered by Nazis.^[1] All property owned by Jews, including artworks, were seized as part of the Holocaust.^[2][3][4] Van Gogh's many Jewish collectors, who had played an important role in the popularisation and dissemination of van Gogh's work, were targeted. In the Netherlands, van Gogh's birthplace and home of many of his collectors, 75% of the Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, and special Nazi looting organizations seized all their property, including art. Some artworks were sold to finance the Nazi war machine, and other entered the private collections of Nazi officials.^[5][6] Some of the most famous van Gogh artworks passed through Nazi hands, and many have never been found.

Van Gogh's Jewish collectors

Painter on the Road to Tarascon, August 1888 (destroyed by fire in the Second World War), formerly in the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, Magdeburg (Germany)

There has been much scholarly speculation about van Gogh's relations with Jewish artists, including his tutor, Dr. M. B. Mendes da Costa, a Jewish teacher in Amsterdam.^[7] The complete number of van Gogh's Jewish collectors is unknown, in part because in the aftermath of the Holocaust the names of Jewish owners were often erased from the ownership history, or provenance, in order to deny or falsify the true origins of artworks and make it difficult to connect the artworks to their former Jewish owners.^[8] Databases created to attempt to track the art lost during the Nazi terror include many van Goghs.^[9] Some of them have disappeared into private hands. Others have resurfaced in museums or at auctions and have been reclaimed, often in high profile lawsuits, by their former owners.

Vincent van Gogh, The Diggers, 1889

In 1999, Germany restituted a van Gogh drawing, L’Olivette, to the only surviving heir of Max Silberberg, a Jewish art collector from Breslau who died in a Nazi concentration camp.^[10] Silberberg's 143 piece collection of impressionists, considered one of the finest private collections in Europe, was sold off in "Jew auctions" before he was killed.^[11][12]

In 2006, the Detroit Institute of Arts was faced with a claim for a van Gogh landscape called The Diggers filed by Martha Nathan, originally of Frankfurt, Germany.^[13][14] The museum, which had been gifted the painting by the Detroit collector Robert H. Tannahill, fought the claim, filing a declaratory action in the U.S. District Court in Detroit, requesting to be named as the painting's owner.^{[15][16][17][18]}

In February 2012 an heir of Margarete Mauthner, a German Jew forced into exile, made a claim for Vue des Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer against the Swiss Oskar Reinhart collection, following an earlier claim for Vue de l'asile et de la Chapelle de Saint-Rémy against the Hollywood movie star Elizabeth Taylor.^[19][20][21]

Before the Nazis' rise, the Jewish collector Mendelssohn-Bartholdy owned several magnificent van Goghs, including the iconic Sunflowers, a landscape in Provence and Madame Roulin and Her Baby, which is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.^[22][23] In December 2022 the heirs of the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy filed a lawsuit against the Japanese Insurance company who owned Sunflowers stating that it had been sold under duress and demanding its restitution.^[24]

Van Gogh's Langlois Bridge at Arles (Mu. number 5805) was seized from the Rothschild collection by the Nazis, recovered by the Monuments Men and brought to the Munich Central Collecting Point.^[25][26]

The Artist on the Road to Tarascon (1888), formerly housed in the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, in Magdeburg, is believed to have been destroyed by fire during WWII.^[27] A drawing Van Gogh made of Starry Night, to show his brother what the painting looked like, emerged in 1992 in the possession of the Russian government.^[28]

The painting known as Head of a Man, whose attribution to van Gogh is controversial, belonged to Richard Semmel before Nazi persecution forced him to sell. It ended up at National Gallery of Victoria, against which Semmel's heirs filed a claim in 2013.^[29] It was restituted in 2014.

In 2020 Malcolm Gladwell dedicated an episode of his Revisionist History podcast^[30] to the story van Gogh's Vase with Carnations,^[31] which had been owned by German Jewish art dealers Albert and Hedwig Ullmann, prior to World War II. They sold the van Gogh before fleeing Germany for Australia to escape the Nazis, and the painting eventually arrived at the Detroit Institute of Arts. When the Ullmann family, which had changed its name to Ulin, located the painting, they requested it be returned, but the museum refused.^[32][33] Gladwell is critical of the museum's position, stating "It was impossible to be a German Jew after Kristallnacht and to imagine you were safe".^[32]

The ownership of one of van Gogh's most famous works, the iconic Portrait of Dr. Gachet, has been disputed for years, by the family of its former owner, the Dutch collector Franz Koenigs.^[34] Though not Jewish, Koenigs fell to his death from a train platform in Cologne in a suspicious event that the family believes was executed by the Nazis.^[35]

Dutch Jewish collector Jacques Goudstikker, who died on the boat on which he was fleeing Holland, left behind an inventory of 1,113 paintings, including artwork by van Gogh. He was 42 years old. After Goudstikker's death the powerful Nazi Hermann Goering would in 1940 take over Goudstikker's gallery inventory, in a transaction presented as a purchase. The name of the looted Goudstikker gallery was then used by Goering's art dealer Alois Miedl "to sell thousands of other artworks, many once belonging to Jews."^[36]

In November 2021, a Van Gogh painting that had belonged to Max Meirowsky, Meules de blé (1888), sold for $35 million at a Christies' auction after a three party restitution agreement involving the heirs of Max Meirowsky, Alexandrine de Rothschild, and representatives for Cox’s estate.^[37][38][39]

German collections

Paul Cassirer, a German Jewish art dealer, played a key role in bringing van Gogh artworks to Germany before the war.^[40][41] While French museums owned only three van Goghs before WWII, van Gogh was, according to Felix Krämer, co-curator of the 2019 exhibition Making Van Gogh: A German Love Story, the most popular modern artist in Germany. "By 1914 there were 150 Van Gogh paintings and drawings in Germany, two thirds of which were owned by Jewish collectors."^[42] When Hitler came to power in Germany, however, persecution of the Jews began immediately, in 1933. The Jewish art dealer Alfred Flechtheim was put out of business the same year through a process of property seizure known as "Aryanization" or "de-Jewification".^[43]

Many German-Jewish art collectors and dealers who did not flee in time were murdered in the Holocaust.^[44] Many of these German Jewish art collectors fled to Switzerland, the UK, the Netherlands, or France.^[45] When the Nazis invaded the latter two countries, the German Jewish refugees attempted to flee again, this time together with the local Dutch or French Jews. At each stage in the flight, van Goghs previously owned by the Jewish collectors changed hands, either seized by Nazi looting organizations like the E.R.R. or the Dienststelle Muhlmann, or through forced sales, "Jew auctions" or duress sales to finance the flight to safety.^[46][47]

Databases of van Gogh artworks in the Nazi era

In Germany, the German Lost Art Foundation still lists dozens of van Goghs.^[48] The French database of objects seized by the Nazi looting organization is known at the E.R.R. references 18 artworks by van Gogh.^[49]

In the United States, the Nazi Era Provenance Internet Portal published by the American Alliance of Museums lists 73 works by van Gogh of questionable provenance that entered American museums after 1933.^[50] In the UK the Collections Trust Spoliation reports from UK museums^[51] lists two van Goghs with provenance to be verified.^[52]

See also

• Aryanization
• Art theft and looting during World War II
• Hermann Göring Collection
• Kajetan Mühlmann
• Lippmann, Rosenthal & Co.
• List of works by Vincent van Gogh
• Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce

References

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2. Fastert, S. (2006). "Koordinierungsstelle für Kulturgutverluste (Hrsg.) Entehrt. Ausgeplündert. Arisiert. Entrechtung und Enteignung der Juden, bearbeitet von Andrea Baresel-Brand". KUR – Kunst und Recht (Review) (in German). 8 (2). doi:10.15542/kur/2006/2/9. ISSN 1437-2355.
3. Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah (1996). Hitler's willing executioners: ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1st ed.). New York: Knopf. ISBN 0-679-44695-8. OCLC 33103054.
4. Petropoulos, Jonathan (2000). The Faustian bargain: the art world in Nazi Germany. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 1-4237-6112-X. OCLC 65185233.
5. Aalders, Gerard (2004). Nazi looting: the plunder of Dutch Jewry during the Second World War. Oxford: Berg. ISBN 1-85973-722-6. OCLC 53223516.
6. Polack, Emmanuelle (2019). Le marché de l'art sous l'Occupation: 1940-1944. Tallandier. ISBN 979-10-210-2089-4. OCLC 1090063439.
7. "Van Gogh Gallery Archives: Jewish Connections". www.vggallery.com. Retrieved 18 February 2021.
8. Nadeau, Barbie Latza (29 November 2018). "Museums Use 'Nazi Tactics' to Keep Art Stolen by the Nazis". The Daily Beast. Retrieved 18 February 2021.
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10. centerforartlaw (5 December 2019). "Sotheby's to auction restituted Pissarro's "Boulevard Montmartre"". New. Retrieved 22 December 2022. While Silberberg's son, Alfred, fled to England after brief internment at Buchenwald, Max Silberberg and his wife were eventually deported to Theresienstadt and then Auschwitz in 1942, where they both perished. (Sotheby's Press Office, 23 Dec. 2013; Bazyler, Holocaust Justice, 205.) After Alfred Silberberg's death, his wife, Gerta, became the sole surviving heir to Max Silberberg's estate, taking up the difficult but at times successful search for his lost art collection. For example, she was the first British relative of a Holocaust victim to recover a work of art under the Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-looted art. The piece, Van Gogh's, L'Olivette (Les Baux), Olive groces with Les Alpilles in the background (L'Olivette), was restituted to Gerta Silberberg from the National Gallery of Berlin in 1999
11. "Return of van Gogh latest in series of decisions on Holocaust restitution". Jewish Telegraphic Agency. 5 August 1999. Retrieved 11 February 2021.
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17. "Museums Respond to Biting Report on Nazi-Looted Art". Observer. 2 July 2015. Retrieved 18 February 2021. Two of the museums mentioned in the report provided the Observer with official statements in response to the accusations: the Toledo Museum of Art and the Detroit Institute of Arts.
    Both museums had come under scrutiny for their handling of cases brought forth by the same Jewish heir, Martha Nathan, which involved artworks sold through the same 1938 sale. The sale involved Paul Gauguin's Street Scene in Tahiti (1891), which was purchased by the Toledo Museum of Art in 1939, and Vincent Van Gogh's Les Becheurs (The Diggers), which was given to the museum by a donor in 1970, according to a joint 2006 statement from the institutions.
18. "REPORT CONCERNING CURRENT APPROACHES OF UNITED STATES MUSEUMS TO HOLOCAUST-ERA ART CLAIMS" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 24 July 2015. Retrieved 20 January 2022. In Detroit Institute, the museum asserted that Michigan's three-year statute of limitations precluded the court or a jury from deciding the merits of the case. According to the museum, the claim was time-barred because it had accrued in 1938, when Ms. Nathan originally sold the paintings to the same European art dealers who purchased the Gauguin Street Scene in Tahiti painting at issue in the Toledo Museum case. The court agreed with the museum that the claim had been filed too late and that the discovery rule, under which the clock on the claim would not have begun to tick until the heirs discovered or reasonably should have discovered the basis for their claims to the painting, did not apply. That meant that Ms. Nathan would have had to bring a claim against the museum no later than 1941, when World War II raged across Europe and when Ms. Nathan could not have known that the museum had the painting.
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23. "Lord Lloyd-Webber foundation settles Nazi confiscation dispute over £33m Picasso". www.lootedart.com. Retrieved 18 February 2021. Mr Von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, the nephew of the composer Felix Mendelssohn, had been effectively coerced into selling the Picasso in a depressed art market, along with his collection of Van Gogh, Manet and Picasso paintings, before he died in 1935.
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31. "Vase with Carnations". www.dia.org. Provenance (J.P. Schneider, Frankfurt am Main, Germany), by 1909 bought by Albert Ullmann [1862-1912] and Hedwig Ullmann [born Nathan, later Ullin] [1872-1945] (Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and Melbourne, Australia), 1909 transferred by Hedwig Ullmann to Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland, as a deposit, August 25, 1931 per Hedwig Ullmann's instructions, shipped by Kunsthalle Basel to (Emil Hirsch, New York, New York), March 10, 1939. Mr. and Mrs. William Goetz [1903-1969] (Los Angeles, California), prior to or in 1947 bought by (Wildenstein & Co., New York, New York), 1947 bought by Catherine Kresge [Mrs. Charles B. Murphy, later Catherine Kresge Dewey] [1908-1990] (Detroit, Michigan, and East Hampton, Suffolk County, New York), 1950 bequeathed to the Detroit Institute of Arts (Detroit, Michigan), 1990
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