Mona Lisa - stolen in 1911 and retrieved

Mona Lisa was always a special painting. Leonardo da Vinci began the painting in Italy in 1503, but then when he moved to France in 1516 for the last few years of his life, he sold it to his host, King Francois I. The king placed his treasure in the Louvre where it safely rested and enthralled the crowds for centuries. Note the date when the picture went to France - 1516; it will be important!

Mona Lisa, painted by Leonardo da Vinci, between 1503-16

Then in August 1911, a crisis occurred – France’s beloved Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre. Guards who noticed that the painting was missing assumed it had been removed to be photographed. Once museum officials realised the truth, the Louvre was shut down. Dozens of police arrived to question the staff, re-enact the crime and dust for fingerprints. All employees, past and present, were interrogated and fingerprinted, including the eventual thief. But they were all cleared.

The French border was sealed, and departing ships and trains searched. By the time the museum re-opened nine days later, the theft was front-page news around the world. What could have happened? Jennifer Rosenberg noted that some Frenchmen blamed the Germans, believing the theft a ploy to demoralise their country. And some Germans thought it was a ploy by the French to distract French citizens from international concerns.

Richard Lacayo noted that the newspaper Paris-Journal was offering a reward for information about the crime. A petty thief said he had previously worked as secretary for Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet who was Picasso's constant supporter in the public skirmishes over modern art in the French press. Before long, the thief had implicated Apollinaire. When police arrested Apollinaire, he admitted under pressure that the thief had sold the pilfered works to none other than Picasso. Thinking they had found their way into a crime ring that might be behind the Mona Lisa case, the police then questioned Picasso. Picasso was Spanish citizen and any serious criminal problem could get him deported. And he had reason to be worried, since he almost certainly had dealt with the thief in the past. However there was no evidence against Picasso.

Presumbly it was thought that that modernist enemies of traditional art might have taken the Mona Lisa. But why - to destroy it? to make an art historical-political point?

Vincenzo Peruggia, police documentation, 1913

Two years went by before the real thief was discovered and then only because the man acknowledged his part in the theft. An Italian petty criminal called Vincenzo Peruggia had moved to Paris in 1908 and had worked at the Louvre for a time. He was no criminal master mind but apparently he walked with the painting under a smock and quietly took it to his lodgings in Paris.

Peruggia travelled to Florence by train the following month, taking the Mona Lisa in a trunk with a false bottom. Eventually in Florence he took the painting to an art gallery where the owner, Alfredo Geri, persuaded him to leave it for expert examination. In 1913, the Italian police could finally arrest the thief.

According to Richard Cavendish, Peruggia apparently believed that the Mona Lisa had been stolen from Florence by Napoleon. The thief never planned to damage or destroy the painting; he believed that he was only doing his patriotic duty, by returning the painting to its true home in Italy. In fact Peruggia's patriotic rationale really DID make him a hero in the Italian press. And many Italians really did joyously welcome the masterpiece home at the Uffizi and the Borghese Galleries, Villa Medici, Farnese Palace and the Brera Museum. But we need to remember that Mona Lisa had never been part of Napoleon’s art collection, so I wonder why Peruggia’s gaol sentence was relatively minor.

modern security for Mona Lisa, the Louvre

After the painting’s triumphal tour of Italy, the Mona Lisa was returned to the Louvre and has mostly remained there, in its rightful spot, ever since. Security these days is, needless to say, rather tight.

Stolen art treasures claimed in court: Herzog's collection in Budapest

I have written quite a few times about art stolen from Jewish families during WW2, and I have examined various stages of the repatriation process: stolen art that has been identified, exhibited and compensated.  But I have never focused on Hungary before.

Hungary, a wartime ally of Nazi Germany, was the country that eventually organised the deportation and extermination of its own Jewish citizens. In May 1944, relatively late in the war, the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior issued a decree requiring Jews to register all art objects that they owned. And despite years of negotiations and international appeals for repatriation of this art, Hungary still has those paintings and sculptures.

El Greco, Agony in the Garden, c1595

The works I want to examine today come from the collection of Baron Mór Lipót Herzog, a banker and an avid pre-war art collector in Hungary. Heirs to the Herzog Collection, possibly the largest private art collection in Hungary prior to WW2, filed suit in the USA District Court in DC for the return of their grandfather’s artworks. These art objects are currently in the Museum of Fine Arts Budapest, the Hungarian National Galley and the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest.

Before his death in 1934, Baron Mór Lipót Herzog had bought a total of c2,500 paintings, sculptures, Renaissance furniture, jewellery, silver and other art objects for his collection. They included unbelievable masterpieces by El Greco, Velázquez, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Corot, Renoir and Monet, the best known being being: The Agony in the Garden by El Greco, The Annunciation to Saint Joachim by Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Spring by Gustave Courbet and Portrait of a Woman by Camille Corot.

I have also chosen to show a painting by Francisco de Zurbarán who was born in Spain in 1598. Zurbarán's works were almost all of a religious nature, but his spirituality seemed deeper and more austere than most 17th century artists. Zurbarán's mastery was best seen in his portraits, which I loved, but this all begs the question of why Spanish Catholic Zurbarán appealed so deeply to the urbane, Jewish Hungarian Baron Mór Lipót Herzog.

Lucas Cranach the Elder, Annunciation to Saint Joachim, 1516

After Baron Mór Lipót Herzog's widow died in 1940, the collection was passed to her three children. The three Herzog children  attempted to save their artworks from confiscation by hiding it in the cellar of one of the family’s factories. Nonetheless the Hungarian government and their Nazi collaborators discovered the hiding place, and an art historian carefully inventoried the art objects as they were taken away. Blogger Les cahiers d'Alain Truong says that the seized artworks were taken to Adolf Eichmann, who selected some of the best pieces of the collection, and shipped others to Germany. The rest was handed over by the Hungarian government to the Museum of Fine Arts for safekeeping.

One Herzog son (András) died during the war, but István and Erzsébet survived and there are heirs from all three branches. In fact András’ daughters, who fled to South America in 1944, are very much part of the litigation.

The family has the support of an American organisation called The Commission for Art Recovery, a body focused on ensuring that governments comply with the Washington Principles for Holocaust-era looted art. Fortunately the works have been assessed by the International Foundation for Art Research as being of museum-quality, comparable to the Frick Collection in New York and Wallace Collection in London.

Francisco Zurbarán, St Andrew, 1631

It is fascinating for me to hear that the Germany and Austria governments already returned artworks from the Herzog Collection to the heirs, without need for legal action. So far, the Hungarian government’s view remains that the case is a matter for the courts, not for individual galleries to negotiate.

The Hungarian government also wants to know why the family is only going after masterpieces in Hungarian galleries and not Herzog art works in other nations' galleries. Mainly it is because the 1947 Treaty of Peace between Hungary and the Allies was very specific -  ownership rights to the Herzog Collection in Hungary remained with the children and grandchildren (and if they wait much longer, with the great grandchildren).

But I suspect there was another factor. It was the Hungarians who most devastated Jewish family life in 1944 and 1945, sending two of the three Herzog children to camps, along with 500,000 other murdered Hungarian Jews. The Italians, Czechs, Romanians and Dutch, on the other hand, tried as best they could to protect their Jewish citizens.

Baron Herzog's study in Budapest, in 1934

It may surprise readers to find that the stunning gold and silver art from the original Herzog collection is being sold off at auction this month (May 2011) by Christie's New York. Who officially owned this gold and silver art, and who consigned the lots to the auction house? Who will receive the proceeds from the auctioned art objects?

Interested readers should find The Rape of Europa 2008 by Lynn H. Nicholas and The Monuments Men by Robert Edsel.

Caravaggio's The Taking of Christ - at home in Dublin

I read a Caravaggio article by James F Clarity in The New York Times. Only later did I see a much longer and more detailed analysis of the apparently lost painting in the brilliant BBC series The Private Life of a Masterpiece, 2009. It was a better story than Dan Brown could have told... and all true!

Recently Sergio Benedetti, the gallery's senior conservator, stood behind a hushed crowd in the National Gallery of Ireland. The crowd was expressing its pleasure about the painting he hoped would give the museum new status in the art world: a wide canvas of dark gloom and sparkling light showing Judas as he kissed Christ. At the same time, a soldier gripped Jesus' neck, ready to drag Him away for crucifixion.

Guernica magazine described the scene accurately and colourfully. "The implied violence of the scene foreshadows the future. No routine arrest, this is a brutal takedown, ordered by the highest authorities, of a cult leader whose teachings threatened the social fabric of one of Rome's occupied territories. Because we know the story, and because the tension in the work is so tangible, we know what's to come: interrogations, brutal public torture, and of course, execution. It contains, within a common religious scene, the brutality of an age."

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio's painting, The Taking of Christ c1602, has been hanging in the gallery since Nov 1993. Finally the 3 years of detective work, technical examination and restoration by Mr Benedetti had paid off. It is one of only 65 or 70 works by the painter that experts have certified as authentic. Caravaggio, a notorious carouser and duelist, died in 1610 in rather tragic circumstances, eight years after this particular painting was completed. He was only 39.

The Taking of Christ by Caravaggio, c1602, The National Gallery of Ireland

Since its installation in the Irish gallery, the painting has been attracting spectators at a record pace. "Museum directors all over the world would give their eye teeth to have a painting like this," said Raymond Keaveney, the gallery's director. Mr Benedetti agreed, noting that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has two Caravaggios (Music and Lute Player), but the National Gallery in Washington and the Getty have none. This will put us on the map, he said of the gallery, a splendid Georgian building in the centre of Dublin. The Caravaggio is now the centrepiece of a collection that includes two Rembrandts.

The Caravaggio, whose authenticity was verified by 10 European experts who travelled to Dublin to examine it, first came into Mr Benedetti's view when he was asked to restore it by its owners. The owners were a community of Jesuit priests who had it hanging in the dining room and parlour of their Dublin residence for 60 years. They thought it was, as the title on its frame says, the work of a Dutch painter, Gerrit van Honthorst. Gerard van Honthorst was not a bad guess; he was in any case one of Caravaggio’s Dutch followers. But the real treasure, the original Caravaggio, was thought lost for all times.

The painting, now on permanent loan to the gallery, had reached the Dublin Jesuits by a twisting route, which Mr Benedetti retraced over three long years to verify its provenance. It was painted a year before another Caravaggio masterpiece, Supper at Emmaus, now in the National Gallery in London, for the Roman palace of the Mattei noble family whose ancestors had originally commissioned it.

The painting stayed in the Mattei Palace until 1802. Then it was mislabelled (by mistake or intentionally) as the work of Honthorst and sold to a Scottish landowner, William Hamilton Nisbit. In the 1920s, a Dublin physician, Dr Marie Lea-Wilson, bought it for less than $1,000. In the mid-1930s, Dr. Wilson gave it to the Jesuits, who noticed a few years ago that it was becoming dirty and got in touch with Mr Benedetti.

Sergio Benedetti said "After one month of working on it, everything was so perfect. I began to look for things wrong. But I could find nothing. The pentimenti were all there." These corrective touches by the artist included the over-painting of Judas's ear to make it smaller and the narrowing of a soldier's belt. In addition, on Christ's face, close to the hairline, there is a squiggle indicating a curl probably executed with the butt end of the artist's paint brush," a technique Caravaggio used in other work. "A copyist wouldn't bother with pentimenti. He would follow the original. Honthorst was a good painter, but not one-twentieth of the painter Caravaggio was." He declined to estimate the work's value except to say it would be in the millions of dollars.

The Dublin painting was recently on loan to an Italian gallery, as part of Caravaggio's 400th anniversary.

The National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

In a totally unrelated set of circumstances, Caravaggio's painting The Taking of Christ or The Kiss of Judas c1602, had been stolen in July 2008 from the Ukrainian Museum of Western and Eastern Art in Odessa. The badly damaged work, which looks very similar to our Irish painting, was recently recovered in Berlin after four members of an international gang of art thieves wanted to sell it.

It would be interesting to know if Caravaggio painted both of them, and which of the two paintings came first. The Association for Research into Crimes Against Art reported that the Dublin picture was lighter yet more brooding, and the figures were sharper. The Odessa figures, particularly that of Christ, were different and less refined than Caravaggio’s normal work.

"The Irish work is undisputedly regarded as the work that is documented as having been commissioned in 1602 by the Mattei family in Rome", said Fionnuala Croke, the Irish gallery's Keeper and Head of Collections. "Obviously Caravaggio's influence was enormous in his own lifetime and in succeeding generations and there were many copies of this work because it would have been seen by many, many guests and visitors to the Mattei family home, which was in the centre of Rome. There is a record in the documentation in the Mattei family records that there was a copy commissioned of our painting by another member of the Mattei family in 1626 that was painted by another artist who was otherwise completely unknown called Giovanni di Attilio. Sergio Benedetti believes that it is this copy, painted 20 years after our original, which is the Odessa painting." She added that the Odessa painting had the exact dimensions of the original, which pointed to the fact that it was copied directly from the Caravaggio original.

Plunder of the Arts: the Monuments Men

The students and I are fascinated by the legal and moral issues raised by stolen art objects. Historically I have been most involved in Trevor-Roper’s era i.e the plunder of the Arts in the 17th cent­ury: English King Charles I, Gonzaga rulers of Mantua, Spanish King Philip IV, Queen Christina of Swed­en, Cardinal Mazarin in Paris, Leo­­pold Will­iam in Brussels and other winners and losers.

Recently I became very interested in The Rape of Europa 2008, a film directed by Richard Berge, Bonni Cohen and Nicole Newnham and based on the excellent book of the same name by Lynn H. Nicholas. This film about World War Two specifically paid homage to the Allies' Monuments Men, whose job it was to minimise the damage done by advancing armies and track down stolen works of art. Evacuation of The Louvre and The Hermitage, as seen in the film, was both well organised (by humans) and miraculous.

So I knew a lot about stolen art. But who were these Monuments Men?

Journey of a Bookseller blog discussed The Monuments Men by Robert Edsel. During WW2 a particular individual had felt that art was important and should be preserved. He wasn’t an important military man, and it wasn’t until he met like-minded people that it became possible to develop a small team.

The team gathered in Europe, but didn’t seem to be given much official protection or military funding. In fact The Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives “battalion” was hardly known. Eventually 345 men and women from thirteen Allied nations were trying to save art that hadn't been desecrated in the war zones, bringing back any objects that were transportable for preservation purposes. Eventually, they hoped to return the art to the rightful owners, if the works had been stolen from galleries. Or, if the owners had been individual Jewish families, it was probable that they and their children had been exterminated. The problem of locating the rightful owners' heirs, in this case, would be more difficult.

The Clever Pup blog added another important issue in writing about The Monuments Men: motivation. Frequently entering liberated towns ahead of ground troops, Monuments Men worked quickly to assess damage and make temporary repairs to paintings, sculpture and decorative art objects, before moving on through conquered Nazi territory with the Allied Armies. In the last years of the war, these museum directors, curators, art historians and educators tracked and located more than 5 million art and cultural items stolen by the Nazis. They were not soldiers, bombers, pilots, tank drivers or machine gunners! In fact some of The Monuments Men remained in Europe for years after other soldiers were demobilised, to facilitate and supervise the return of stolen works of art.

Appropriately I think, Running Rabbit blog notes that the work of The Monument Men isn't finished yet. By 2009 many of the stolen pieces have not yet been found and many other stolen pieces, located and clearly identified, have still not been returned. If the original owners were gassed or shot in 1939-45, their children are now elderly themselves. The grandchildren or grandnephews and nieces will soon be the only heirs.

Recommended reading:

Edsel, Robert The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History, Hachette Books, 2009.

Nicholas, Lynne The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War, Vintage, 1995

Trevor-Roper, H Plunder of the Arts in 17th Century, Jarrold, Norwich, 1970.

Emil Nolde: a troubling Expressionist

George Grosz, Emil Nol­de, Otto Dix, Max Beck­mann, Käthe Kollwitz, Egon Schiele, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Franz Marc, Max Ernst etc were German ex­press­ionists, and these avant-garde artists were indeed branded as a threat to the German nation. Edvard Munch, Oskar Kokoschka, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee were not German, but were equally reviled by the Nazi decision-makers. Sanct­ions against Degenerate Artists included being dismissed from teaching positions, being forbidden to exhibit or to sell their art, or being forbidden to produce art entirely. George Grosz's German citizenship was taken away while he was abroad; the Bauh­aus school was closed down; Käthe Kollwitz was expelled from the Prussian Academy of Arts.

Nolde, The Goldsmiths, 1919

Most at-risk artists worth their moral salt left Germany as soon as they could, at least for the duration of the war. Those who remained in Germany were forbidden to work at universities and were subject to Gestapo raids, to ensure that they were not producing artwork. Yet Emil Nolde (1867-1956) was one of the only artists who remained in Germany during the war volunt­ar­ily.

There are two ironies here. Firstly, as Samuel Gruber’s Jewish Art & Monuments blog wrote in Restitution: Settlement on Emil Nolde Work in Swedish Museum, Nolde in his lifetime was known for his anti-Semitic views. He disliked leading Jewish luminaries in Berlin and European art world, especially Max Lieberman, President of the Berlin Academy of Art, and Paul Cassirer, leading modern art dealer. A 7-year legal battle has finally been settled in Sweden where the Moderna Museet has agreed to return to a Nolde painting to the family of Otto Nathan Deutsch, a Jew who fled Germany just before World War Two broke out in 1939. Or to compensate the family for the loss.

Nolde, Masks II, 1920

But more than that. Nolde was a supporter of the Nazi party from well before the 1930s, having been a member of its Danish section. He was born and raised in Schleswig-Holstein that was then on the Danish border. Nolde saw no conflict between his art and Nazism, since he believed Expres­s­­ion­ism was an intrinsicly German style of art.

When Nolde's work was officially condemned by the Nazi regime as deg­en­er­ate, his paintings were of course removed from public museums. Some were even included in the Degenerate Art Exhibition in Munich in 1937, presumably because of his strong colours, primitivism and grotesque visions. Or because he helped found the New Secession in Berlin. Nolde was beside himself and wrote protest letter after protest letter, appealing the injustice of his fate. He did not want to be hung alongside the artists whose work repelled him. However nothing saved him – his endless protests fell on deaf Nazi ears.

After the war, bellebyrd blog noted, The Brücke group was quickly rehabilitated, and there was an attempt to stylise Emil Nolde as a resistance figure. Noted West German art historian Werner Haftmann (not Austrian art historian Werner Hofmann) celebrated Nolde, the artist of inner emigration, as an existential antifascist. Even more than those who were racially persecuted, Haftmann said, Nolde refused political strictures and intensified his own work. It must have worked because after the war, in 1952, Nolde was awarded the German Order of Merit.

Nolde, Lost Paradis, 1921

Yet another art historical problem remains. I agree with the expressionnisme allemand blog who wrote that Emil NOLDE added a special, mystical dimension to German Expressionism. His career illustrated a number of the moral dilemmas which faced German modernists of the new century, since his instincts were nat­ionalist and conservative. In Germany, these were usually anti-Semitic values. So examine the blog HEIRS - Observations on Proven­ance which makes a provocative ob­servation in NOLDE IN THE NEWS: Emil Nolde’s avant-garde modern work was coveted by many Jewish art coll­ectors during the 1920s and 30s in Europe, including the connoisseur collector Dr Fred Julius of Hamburg. With hindsight, one wonders why that was so.

*
Visit New York’s Neue Galerie, 86th Street and Fifth Avenue, which opened for business in 2001. One storey concentrates on early C20th Vienna: painters (Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka etc), architects (Adolf Loos, Otto Wagner) and the decorative artists (Josef Hoffmann, Koloman Moser, Dagobert Peche etc).  And one storey for German art of the same time (August Macke, Franz Marc, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Pechstein, Emil Nolde); the Bauhaus (Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, Oskar Schlemmer, Vasily Kandinsky); the expressionists (Otto Dix, George Grosz); as well as applied artists (Peter Behrens, Marianne Brandt, Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Wilhelm Wagenfeld etc). Art Blog by Bob discussed the Neue Galerie in relation to Otto Dix, but it is equally applicable to Emil Nolde. And to Ernst Kirchner, as displayed by Intelliblog.

Read Lang, G and Lang, K "Banishing the past: The German avant-garde and Nazi Art" in Qualitative Sociology, 19, 3, 1996.