After Lenin’s death, Joseph Stalin consolidated power, proposing an ambitious industrialization program, known as the First Five-Year Plan. To finance this effort, the Politboro authorized a major art sale in 1928 with a goal of raising 30 million rubles in two years. Twenty five million of this sum was to come from the sale of masterpieces.1 The money from the Old Masters sale was supposedly used to build a tractor factory in Stalingrad, later turned into a tank factory.
In November 1928 and June 1929, auctions of nationalized artworks were held in Berlin and Vienna. European painting, furniture, and decorative arts from private Russian collections along with the Winter Palace, Anchikov, and Gatchina went on the block. The auctions gained worldwide attention and were followed by lawsuits by the artworks’ owners, many Russian émigrés in France. Germany’s Weimar Republic, the first country to recognize Soviet Russia, honored the Bolsheviks’ nationalization decrees. The unwanted publicity from these legal actions revealed the Soviet Union’s desperate economic situation and forced a change in strategy.
The Soviets quietly put the word out to Western art dealers and collectors that the Hermitage paintings were on the market. In February 1928, the State Hermitage Museum and the Russian Museum were ordered to make a list of artworks worth at least two million rubles for export. A special agency called Antiquariat headed by Nikolai Ilyin compiled lists of the most valuable art. Ilyin first approached the Hammer brothers. When that deal fell through, he turned to Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian, an Armenian oil tycoon whose Iraq Petroleum Company was prospecting for oil in the Ukraine. The Turkish-born, British-educated magnate had endeared himself to the Soviets by offering advice on how to dump oil on the world market.
Known as “Mr. Five-Percent” for negotiating a 5 percent share of the newly discovered Iraq oil fields, Gulbenkian applied his legendary business acumen to art collecting, building an impressive trove. Gulbenkian dispatched Parisian jeweler Andre Aucoc to the Hermitage to inspect the condition of various paintings. In 1929, the tycoon offered ten million rubles for eighteen Hermitage masterpieces. His wish list included Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son and Titus, Giorgione’s Judith, Botticelli’s Adoration of the Magi, Rubens’s Portrait of Hélène Fourment and Landscape with a Rainbow, Raphael’s Alba Madonna, and Watteau’s Mezzetin. Moscow countered with a list of less-valuable works.
In April 1929, Gulbenkian paid 54,000 pounds for two dozen French silver and gold objects from the collections of Catherine and Empress Elizabeth, two paintings of Versailles gardens by Hubert Robert (acquired by Alexander III), The Annunciation attributed to Dirc Bouts (bought by Nicholas I), and a Louis XVI marquetry rolltop desk by royal cabinetmaker Jean-Henri Riesener. Gulbenkian paid another 155,000 pounds in February 1930 for fifteen pieces of French jewelry commissioned by Catherine and Elizabeth, along with several paintings—notably Portrait of Hélène Fourment, which Catherine acquired with Robert Walpole’s collection in 1779.2
That June, the oil tycoon clinched his third deal, paying 140,000 pounds sterling for five of Catherine’s paintings: Rembrandt’s Pallas Athene and Portrait of Titus, Lancret’s The Bathers, Watteau’s Mezzetin, and Ter Borch’s Music Lesson.3 In October, Gulbenkian paid 30,000 pounds for his fourth Rembrandt—the highly expressive Portrait of an Old Man, which Catherine acquired with the Crozat acquisition. With the paintings came Houdon’s Diana the Huntress for 20,000 pounds sterling. Catherine had installed the marble in the grotto at Tsarskoe Selo; deeming it obscene, her successors had it removed. Gulbenkian installed the sculpture at the base of the staircase in his elegant Paris mansion. Today, Diana and Rembrandt’s Pallas Athene and Portrait of an Old Man star at Gulbenkian’s eponymous museum in Lisbon, Portugal.
Gulbenkian sold Mezzetin, The Bathers, and Portrait of Titus to art dealer George Wildenstein, who then sold them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a private collector, and Parisian art collector Etienne Nicolas, respectively. The fate of the picture of Rembrandt’s 21-year-old son Titus took a dramatic turn when Adolf Hitler’s art adviser Karl Haberstock paid Etienne Nicolas 60 million French francs for the portrait along with Rembrandt’s Landscape with a Castle for the proposed Führermuseum in Linz. After the war, Portrait of Titus was recovered and returned to Nicolas, who gave it to the Louvre in 1948. From 1956 to 1979, the painting was on loan to the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
After spending 1.5 million dollars on Hermitage masterworks, Gulbenkian advised the Soviets not to sell their national heritage off piecemeal. “You know that I have always held the opinion that the objects which have been in your museums for many years should not be sold,” he wrote the governor of the State Bank of Moscow. “Not only do they represent a national heritage, but they are also a great source of culture and a source of pride for the nation. . . . Sell anything you want which is not out of museums, but to touch the national patrimony will only arouse serious suspicions . . . but if you do sell, then I would like to have first refusal at the same price you would offer them to others and I have asked to be kept informed about which works of art you wish to sell.”4
The advice went unheeded. Disappointed with the proceeds from Gulbenkian, the Soviets began looking for other buyers. They found deeper pockets in 75-year-old Andrew Mellon, America’s silver-haired secretary of the treasury. Having made several fortunes in banking and oil, Mellon served as secretary of the treasury under three presidents—or as one senator put it, three presidents served under Mellon. The international economic meltdown following the October 1929 stock market crash created an unprecedented buyer’s market for art. Stuck with paintings bought during the twenties boom, art dealers were forced to sell at losses. Mellon was anxious to make deals.
At first, Mellon seemed an unlikely candidate. An arch-conservative hostile to communism, Mellon had supported the U.S. decision not to recognize the USSR. As an art collector, he was extremely cautious, insisting on inspecting pictures at his home before buying. Yet Mellon could not resist the prospect of owning extraordinary paintings from the storied Hermitage. An Anglophile who visited England many times and married an Englishwoman, Mellon dreamed of founding a museum modeled after London’s National Gallery. In 1928, with Herbert Hoover’s approval, he’d reserved a five-acre site for his national art gallery. Like Catherine II, Mellon had both unlimited resources and a sense of the glory a fabulous collection conveyed. “Every man wants to connect his life with something he thinks eternal,” he said.5
In April 1930, Mellon seized one of the greatest opportunities in the history of collecting. Ignoring a strict trade embargo on the Soviet Union, Mellon struck nine secret deals over the next year. Sight unseen, he bought twenty-one masterpieces for 6,654,033 dollars (equivalent to about 90 million dollars today). “I have gone deeper into the Russian purchases—perhaps further than I should go in view of the hard times and shrinkage in values, but as such an opportunity is not likely to again occur, and I feel so interested in the ultimate purpose, I have made quite [a] large investment,” Mellon wrote his son, Paul, in April 1931. “However, I have confined myself entirely to examples of ultra-quality. The whole affair is being conducted privately, and it is important that this be kept confidential.”6
Mellon hid the masterpieces in a cupboard in the basement of the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. Of the twenty-one pictures, fifteen had been acquired by Catherine. They include Raphael’s Saint George and the Dragon, Veronese’s The Finding of Moses, five Rembrandts, three van Dycks, Adriaen Hanneman’s Henry Duke of Gloucester, Velazquez’s Pope Innocent X, Hals’s Portrait of a Young Man and Portrait of a Member of the Haarlem Civic Guard, and Chardin’s The House of Cards. Most had arrived in St. Petersburg with the collections of Heinrich von Brühl, Pierre Crozat, and Robert Walpole. Two of the Rembrandts—Joseph Accused by Potiphar’s Wife and A Man in Oriental Costume—originated with Johann Gotzkowsky. Catherine’s nemesis, the Duc de Choiseul, had owned Susanna Fourment and Her Daughter (reattributed from Peter Paul Rubens to Anthony van Dyck).7
Besides Catherine’s treasures, Mellon bought four masterpieces acquired by her grandsons Alexander I and Nicholas I: Sandro Botticelli’s The Adoration of the Magi, Jan van Eyck’s The Annunciation, Titian’s Venus with a Mirror, and Raphael’s The Alba Madonna. At $1,166,400, The Alba Madonna set a new record for a single painting. In 1909, Isabella Gardner had acquired the country’s first two Raphaels. In 1928, Mellon spent $836,000 for Raphael’s Niccolini-Cowper Madonna. With the gem-like Saint George and the Dragon and The Alba Madonna, Mellon became the only American to own three Raphaels. (In 1942, Joseph E. Widener donated Raphael’s Small Cowper Madonna to the new National Gallery of Art; the next year, Samuel Kress donated Raphael’s portrait of his friend, Florentine banker Bindo Altoviti.)
In 1932, Herbert Hoover named Mellon ambassador to Britain. But Franklin Roosevelt’s landslide victory that November ended the Republican’s public service career. Mellon returned to Washington to face charges of tax evasion, an accusation he fought. The federal government maintained that Mellon’s trust to hold paintings and money for a national gallery was a sham to avoid taxes. Though Mellon was eventually acquitted, his reputation suffered. On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve 1936, Mellon met with Roosevelt at the White House, seeking approval to donate his art collection, a museum building, and an endowment to the nation.
After denying the politically charged Hermitage purchase for years, Mellon launched the National Gallery of Art in 1937 with the twenty-one Russian paintings, along with money to build and endow the museum. He hired John Russell Pope to design the neoclassical National Gallery of Art, one of the largest single gifts to the American people. Mellon returned to Washington in 1937 to supervise construction. But stricken with cancer, the 82-year-old philanthropist died that August, four years before his museum opened to the public.
The sale of Catherine’s pictures didn’t end with Gulbenkian and Mellon. Since 1932, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s The Banquet of Cleopatra has resided at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Bought for Saxony’s Frederic Augustus III by Francesco Algorotti, the painting was purchased by Catherine at a sale of the elector’s art in Amsterdam in 1765. Poussin’s The Birth of Venus landed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Purchased by Catherine in 1771, the painting still bears a Russian inscription on the frame and a Hermitage Museum inventory number on the lower left corner of the canvas.
Through the Rembrandt Society, Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum bought three of Catherine’s paintings: Rembrandt’s St. Peter’s Denial (Baudouin), Anthonis Mor’s Portrait of Sir Thomas Gresham (founder of England’s Royal Bank and Gresham College in London), and Portrait of Anne Fernely, his wife (Brühl). In 1934, the German National Museum in Nuremburg acquired Johann Georg Platzer’s The Concert, part of a pair of Catherine’s paintings that included the artist’s erotically charged Orgy. The Austrian rococo painter filled his elaborate fêtes galantes with people, accessories, and drapery, creating an enamel-like effect by applying oil to copperplate.
To conceal the gaps on the walls from the public, the Hermitage staff was ordered to rehang the paintings. In their efforts to preserve art treasures, museum employees were fired, demoted, sent to prison camps, and exiled. The raid of the museum finally ended in 1934. Five years of sales between 1928 and 1933 alone reduced the Hermitage’s holdings by over 24,000 objects.8