My father wasn’t able to leave my brother or me much, or so it seemed. There was no great inheritance. When those musty boxes arrived, I wasn’t sure if they were a gift or a burden.
My brother and I didn’t know where to begin. So Nick cleared the biggest table he had, and we started to make delicate piles based on any common reference we could detect. Neither of us had any clue where this real-life puzzle might lead. Pa had to have had a reason to keep all this so carefully, decade after decade, country after country, and home after home. Whatever our motivation—filial duty, tender respect—we were determined to find out the answers.
What emerged before us was a rare glimpse into the withdrawn world of our departed father. From the time we were children, we had always assumed those endless trips to Europe were for his career in the travel business. Only now did we realize that our father’s unspectacular career had a hidden, ulterior purpose.
We had always taken for granted that what had been lost during the war years had somehow all been accounted for. With each letter, it became more and more clear that little had truly been settled. Our father had never given up his silent struggle to recover his parents’ lost art treasures, right up to the moment of his sudden death.
Nick and I were beginning to grasp, with a sense of both foreboding and exhilaration, that hidden among these brittle pages were the secrets that Pa had never been able to articulate. Reaching across time, our past, perhaps mercifully out of reach up till this point, was about to become tangible.
Suddenly, I was grateful for all the times my father had dragged me through those musty museums as a little boy. It was all coming back to me—the familiar names, the familiar artists. Thanks to this gift that had lain dormant for so many years, I felt strangely confident about the task that was unfolding in front of me.
• • •
Waves of forgotten memories swept over me while reading names and addresses from a distant childhood, comforted by my father’s headed notepaper, still real after so many years. Brittle stamps, barely hanging on with ancient glue, recalled boyhood heroes such as Churchill and De Gaulle, alongside the likes of Hitler and Mussolini. One pattern quickly became clear. Almost every one of my father’s yellowing letters had the same theme—paintings and art once cherished and then swallowed up in the Nazi whirlwind.
In particular, Pa had focused most of his attention on the paintings that had been sent to the Paul Graupe gallery in the place Vendôme. In the spring of 1939 and with war imminent, Fritz had sent around twenty-five major paintings from Bosbeek to Paris for safekeeping, along with several sculptures and some very valuable furniture.
Almost all the Paris documents and inventories that we found in our father’s papers listing the old masters included three missing Impressionist works: a Renoir landscape and two works by Degas.
Between all the carefully kept envelopes, one stood out. Curiously, it had nothing written on it. Inside were simply three carefully preserved photo-slide negatives. When held up to the light, we could see the ghostlike images of three almost forgotten paintings. One, even to my amateur eye, looked very much like a Degas. Nick quickly had the negatives printed. The excitement was palpable. We had plenty of clues, but here were our first real images.
The photos, we would discover, were of a Renoir called Le Poirier, a Degas called Femme se Chauffant, and another painting by Edgar Degas entitled simply Paysage. The photos had apparently been taken by Rose Valland. According to Aunt Lili, the paintings had once hung in the drawing room at Bosbeek, but during the war had disappeared from a warehouse in Paris.
Nick and I were both deeply moved by what we were learning about our father and the quest that had consumed him. Both of us felt that we now had a belated opportunity to decipher our father’s secrets and even ultimately our family’s history—a family we never knew we had. A half century after the war, we decided to take up where our father had left off. The first step: Nick would look for the Renoir and I would look for the two Degas.
• • •
I was not a lost-art sleuth. For the previous twenty-five years or so, I had been an executive in the music industry. I had never done this sort of thing before. I didn’t even know whether it could be done, but I was determined to try.
Today, tracking down a particular artwork, particularly one by a famous artist, can sometimes be a simple, lucky matter of punching a few keys on a computer. Back in 1995, I was still grappling with the DOS system on UCLA’s computers. Museums did not yet routinely display their inventories on the Internet. Auction houses were extremely circumspect, and art galleries had always been downright secretive. Nor could one easily track a painting by its title. Titles were often merely descriptive and subject to change. For example, the same painting might be variously titled Portrait of a Young Man, Portrait of a Young Man in a Red Hat, or simply Portrait of a Man. To complicate matters, over the decades the same artwork would often be attributed (at various times) to completely different artists.
It was September 1995, exactly fifty years after the end of World War II. For months I had been haunting libraries, combing through art books and old exhibition and auction catalogs looking for a painting to match the old photographs. Most of September I had been navigating the various libraries on the UCLA campus, not far from my home. This was my third visit to what is now the Charles E. Young Library. On my previous visit, they had kindly ordered for me some hard-to-get volumes from the larger University of California collection and the books had just arrived from Berkeley. I was excited. Finding an unoccupied Formica-covered table in the Arts Research Library, I quickly established my territory by spreading my reference books around the entire communal desk. A little self-conscious, and easily twice the age of the average student, I felt I needed some boundaries.
Before I knew it, students were packing up for the day. The library would soon close, but I still needed to go through one catalog. I didn’t want to risk its not being there the next time I came back to UCLA. With one eye on Rose Valland’s photo of the Paysage, I opened Richard Kendall’s Degas Landscapes. The Kendall book had recently been published to coincide with an exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Quickly leafing through the book, almost instinctively, halfway through it hit me. There it was! As if it jumped off the page, the impact was like a blow to the chest. What had eluded my family for over half a century was staring me in the face: Landscape with Smokestacks, 1890, monotype and pastel, 28x40 cm.
I grabbed Rose Valland’s photograph, my heart pounding. Degas had painted many landscapes. Trying to be methodical, I compared the slightest details to the reproduction in the book, scanning from side to side and then from the top to bottom—same rolling hills, same smudge of dark smoke in the distance, and down in the bottom left corner, Degas’s same autograph. It was identical! I’d found it!
The green and blue hues of Edgar Degas’s Norman hills, dotted with wild yellow flowers, were breathtaking. I had no idea the little painting could be so beautiful, so full of color. I laughed quietly at my own lack of imagination—for months I had been looking at the old, wartime, black-and-white photograph. Still in shock, I ascertained that the painting had been loaned to the Metropolitan Museum in New York for an exhibition at the beginning of 1994 , . . . just a year before. Trembling slightly, I dimly realized that by turning that particular page of that particular book, my whole life was about to change. Now reaching out from the past, a past almost lost forever, I had the distinct feeling that my father, Bernard, and my grandfather Fritz were cheering me on.
I read the inscription again. Plate No. 130 Landscape with Smokestacks, 1890, monotype and pastel, 28x40 cm. Followed by the names Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Searle. Who were these people? And how did an American word such as Smokestacks get in there? Was the title change mere clumsiness or was it an attempt to obscure the painting’s identity?
The sudden announcement of the closing of the library jolted me from my reverie. My mind was still racing when I emerged into the brisk early-autumn evening descending over the Westwood campus. Not until I was halfway down Westwood Boulevard did I notice a pay phone. I got through to Nick. He was stunned. I must have gone over my news about three times. The next day, I called Lili in Florence. Her voice went up an octave or two in astonishment. My news brought with it the first real hope that she had felt in decades about her parents’ lost treasures. We were elated by the possibility of recovering one of Fritz and Louise’s stolen artworks.
A few months earlier, Nick and I had wheedled our way into a private lecture that was given by Lynn Nicholas at the old Getty Villa in Malibu. The topic had been “Nazi looting,” and Lynn Nicholas’s seminal book, The Rape of Europa, was the first of its kind. After the lecture we introduced ourselves to her. Our grandfather Fritz was even mentioned in her book. Lynn recommended we contact Willi Korte, an art detective, and Tom Kline, a lawyer. Both were based in Washington, DC, and Tom Kline, we discovered, was the foremost art-recovery lawyer in the United States. He had been the first American lawyer to pioneer the field of art restitution when the Orthodox Church of Cyprus hired him to help recover four famous mosaics. Later, in 1990, Tom had secured his reputation in a groundbreaking restitution case in which American GIs had looted German artifacts from the medieval church in Quedlinburg. Even at the time it seemed more than a little ironic that Germans were trying to reclaim looted art while there had been no cases involving Jewish looted art in more than several decades.
Later, one of the many questions the press would ask us was “How many other families are there who might make a claim?” I had no idea. “Maybe a hundred?” Eventually I would come to realize, with a certain pride, that we were just the beginning. Countless families who had feared all was lost up till this point would soon start reviving their claims.
The day after I found the Degas, Nick called Tom Kline to tell him what had happened. We had two big questions for him. How did our grandparents’ Degas, last seen in Nazi hands in wartime Paris, somehow wind up a half century later in the private collection of a Chicago billionaire? And two, what could we do about it?
Daniel Searle, we would discover, was a gaunt, heavy-smoking man with a dark gray suit for every day of the week. Behind his somber desk he had hung a large portrait of himself. The humorless face in the portrait seemed to mirror exactly the man sitting beneath it. Nevertheless, Daniel Searle was at the pinnacle of Midwestern society. He was a trustee of the Art Institute of Chicago and sat on the board of countless companies and charities. Meanwhile, the Searle Freedom Trust funded a veritable who’s who of right-wing organizations. Donald Rumsfeld was a protégé. The Searle fortune was assured in 1965 when G. D. Searle & Co. developed aspartame, the controversial sugar substitute. Twenty years later, Daniel Searle sold the family pharmaceutical firm to Monsanto for $2.7 billion.
Under Tom’s guidance, we assembled every available document that mentioned the Degas Paysage, now forever known as Landscape with Smokestacks. By December, all of us were confident that we had put together a solid case.
Tom wrote the first official letter to Daniel Searle, which must have arrived just before the holidays. In a nutshell, we were asking for our painting back. Searle’s attorneys responded curtly by denying that it was even the same painting. Fortunately, we were able to establish that there was indeed only one such landscape. Then Searle’s legal team claimed my grandfather had never owned the pastel. Their lawyer demanded, “What’s this painting got to do with these people? Who are the Goodmans or the Gutmanns anyway?” It quickly became apparent, legally at least, that we would have to answer these questions.
Curiously, in the provenance records that I had uncovered at UCLA, and from the many catalogues raisonnés and monographs on Degas, there was no mention of Fritz Gutmann. The leading Degas expert (P. A. Lemoisne) merely listed the prewar owner as the Lütjens Collection, Holland. Eventually we were able to demonstrate, beyond a shadow of doubt, that Helmuth Lütjens was actually the art dealer who had bid for the Paysage on behalf of Fritz Gutmann at an auction in Paris in 1932.
Less than two months later we received startling news. Searle’s lawyer, Ralph Lerner, who was well respected in the art world, had decided to drop the case. He didn’t seem to have the heart for it; perhaps his being Jewish had something to do with it. In any event, we were thrilled.
Unfortunately, our euphoria did not last long. Searle was not giving up. Instead he switched his defense to the Chicago office of the same law firm. The new legal team took a more aggressive position. They now claimed my grandfather must have sold the Degas Paysage. I began to realize that so much more than just the provenance of one painting was being revealed, and in a not-so-roundabout way. Perhaps I had a hard-nosed lawyer from Chicago to thank for the journey on which I was embarking. Pandora’s box had been opened.
• • •
Slowly, we started to trace the journey of Degas’s Paysage through the decades. In a 1968 American study on Degas monotypes, a doctoral candidate named Eugenia Parry Janis had listed the next person in the provenance, after my grandfather’s agent, as Hans Wendland, Paris. The activities of Hans Wendland were now critical to our case. Willi Korte, the art detective, would help expose the truth about him, and as a result, we would uncover the painting’s grim history.
The Degas had been sent to Arthur Goldschmidt in Paris for safekeeping in April 1939, via the shipping company De Gruyter. However, those to whom the painting had been entrusted were also of Jewish origin. Soon they also had to flee the Germans. Not long after it had been stored, on the boulevard Raspail, it would be confiscated as “abandoned Jewish property” by the ERR. At this point the Paysage seemed to disappear.
The landscape, along with several others of Fritz’s artworks, was taken to the Jeu de Paume Museum, just off the place de la Concorde, where Rose Valland was working. The Germans had converted the famous museum into their private storage for thousands of looted artworks. As many as twenty thousand pieces went through the historic gallery in less than four years. Hermann Göring, personally, made several trips to the Jeu de Paume, where he raked through the stolen art. Vast selections were shipped back to his private country residence at Carinhall. Well-known Nazi art dealers, such as Hofer and Haberstock, also scoured the ERR’s loot, which was displayed in the museum. Masterpieces by the trainload were sent back to Hitler and the other top Nazis.
As a rule, the Nazis did not want Impressionist or other “modern” artworks, which they considered degenerate—and here the dealer Hans Adolf Wendland came into the equation. Wendland had devised a plan for “degenerate” art to be smuggled into neutral Switzerland—sometimes in German diplomatic pouches—and sold or traded there for old masters. As part of this scheme, he had conveniently forged a special relationship with Theodor Fischer, the owner of the Fischer Gallery and Auction House in Lucerne.
Many of the Swiss were eager collaborators, not only in the looted-art trade, but later in providing safe harbor for Nazi gold and other assets. The Swiss banks had no compunction expropriating, at the urging of their German neighbors, the “abandoned” assets of Jews, murdered or otherwise. When my father and Lili tried to retrieve Swiss bank accounts opened by Fritz in the early 1920s, the Swiss Banking Association said they had no records. (Roughly sixty years after the end of the war, I would have more luck.)
Meanwhile, since the 1920s Wendland had been the primary German art dealer based in Switzerland. During this time he formed a close working relationship with Fritz’s nemesis Karl Haberstock, which, curiously, ended abruptly in 1927 over a quarrel involving Haberstock’s wife. From 1933 on, Wendland also established a base in Paris. As soon as the Germans took over the French capital, Hans Wendland quickly became the most notorious player in the Nazi stolen-degenerate-art trade. In Paris his friend Bruno Lohse was now second-in-command of the ERR looting machine. Wendland also made a point of being available to facilitate several of Göring’s acquisitions.
After the war Hans Wendland was arrested by the US armed forces in Italy and transferred in 1946 to an internment camp in Germany—in Wannsee of all places. In that same villa, Wendland was grilled by the American OSS Monuments officers. We found a detailed interrogation report in the US Archives in Washington, DC.
Ironically, Wendland’s wartime Paris headquarters were in the Ritz Hotel, where Fritz had also based himself, albeit in happier times. Around the same time, Fritz’s brother Kurt was working incognito downstairs in one of the hotel’s kitchens. Kurt, no doubt, had no idea that his brother’s treasures were hanging in the balance. Even if he had known, I suppose Kurt wouldn’t have lasted long if he had started poisoning Germans in the hotel.
From his perch at the Ritz, Wendland could observe the Paul Graupe gallery just across the place Vendôme. As the Germans consolidated their grip throughout the French capital, Graupe and his associate, Arthur Goldschmidt, were frantically hiding their collections, including Fritz’s many artworks. Unfortunately, their hiding place on the boulevard Raspail was no secret to Wendland. By coincidence or not, Wendland had rented his own space in the same storage facility, which gave him easy access. Before long he led the ERR straight to the Gutmann treasures. It was customary for the ERR to reward Wendland (and his ilk) with some of the pieces of art they didn’t want, such as the Paysage.
In the 1942 raid, the ERR also took from the Gutmann collection a painting of an enigmatic Spanish lady by Jean Barbault (but once attributed to Goya), and an impressive fifteenth-century Baptism of Christ by the great Tuscan Luca Signorelli. Both canvases were earmarked for the Führermuseum. On this same inventory, a small Renaissance portrait by Dosso Dossi was stamped with an ominous H.G. This meant that it had been selected by Hermann Göring himself. The other Degas, Femme se Chauffant, also appeared in the 1942 haul at the Jeu de Paume. It had been designated, dismissively, as “modern” and marked down for exchange. However, the Degas Paysage didn’t even appear in the final ERR accounting at the Jeu de Paume. It had already made its way to Switzerland, where it appeared next in the Hans Wendland collection in Versoix outside Geneva—as if nothing untoward had ever taken place. Wendland never mentioned the Gutmann Degas during his lengthy interrogations with US Monuments officers in September 1946, even though he mentioned Paul Graupe, in a different context, and two other Degas paintings.
Daniel Searle’s lawyers tried to insinuate that Hans Wendland had somehow bought Paysage. But no tangible evidence was offered to this effect. On the contrary, according to the US Monuments interrogators Major Otto Wittmann Jr. and Lieutenant Bernard Taper, Wendland admitted “to claiming pictures as his own which in fact did not belong to him, in his rescues of Jewish-owned art in France.” Furthermore the OSS issued a red-flag list of several hundred people who had participated in the art trade under the Nazis. Wendland was described as “probably the most important individual engaged in quasi-official looted art transactions in France, Germany, and Switzerland in World War II.”
Following the German defeat, the likes of Haberstock, Hofer, and Böhler were eager to show the Allies documents that demonstrated their “aboveboard” professional practices. They were careful to show only papers that demonstrated their “ownership.” From their point of view, they were within the law. Wendland, on the other hand, wouldn’t even admit to being an art dealer—he insisted he was merely a “consultant.”
After the war, Paul Graupe and his son never claimed they had sold the Paysage. Arthur Goldschmidt, Paul Graupe’s partner, in a 1945 statement to a Gutmann family lawyer, declared that he personally had put both Degas pastels in storage on the boulevard Raspail, just before he fled Paris and the Nazis.
Unfortunately, Wendland was soon released from the last “denazification” camp where he had been held. On his return to Switzerland at the beginning of 1948, Wendland then sold the Gutmann Degas to his brother-in-law, Hans Fankhauser. Fankhauser was a Swiss citizen and, as such, immune from Allied arrest or detention. Just a few years later, in 1951, Fankhauser would sell the painting to Emile Wolf, a wealthy collector who lived in New York.
Searle’s lawyers claimed that Wolf must have acquired “good title” to the painting in Switzerland. However, Wendland himself had pointed out on several occasions that even though he was a resident in Switzerland, he was forbidden to sell art on the Swiss market (a privilege reserved for Swiss citizens) because he was a German citizen. Therefore, his brother-in-law, Hans Fankhauser, did not have “good title” to give.
What Emile Wolf knew or did not know is hard to say. All we know is that the Degas was not seen again until 1965, when a painting with the designation “Degas Landscape 11.5 x 16.5 in. lent by Evelyne Wolf-Walborsky” was displayed for over ten weeks in the short-lived Finch College Museum of Art in New York. (Evelyne Wolf-Walborsky was Emile Wolf’s daughter.)
In 1968, the Degas was on public view again for seven weeks as part of an exhibition at Harvard’s Fogg Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The exhibition catalog, which was never published in Europe, was prepared by the doctoral student Eugenia Janis. But the painting now had a different title. Janis, perhaps with Wolf’s encouragement, had created a new name for the Degas—Landscape with Smokestacks. Later, this title was even translated back into French as Paysage avec fumée de cheminées. Edgar Degas would not have recognized this greatly expanded title, which wasn’t even grammatically very good French.
In 1987, Emile Wolf sold the Degas to Daniel Searle for $850,000. Searle’s simple concern, at the time, had been whether this was a “good” Degas. His advisers, including the Art Institute of Chicago, confirmed the artistic importance of the landscape and its significance in art history. The provenance, true to fashion, was never a real consideration.
• • •
Through the seventies and eighties Bernard and Lili continued looking for the missing art. They hired an arts specialist in Munich; Lili went on German television in 1987 and displayed pictures of both the missing Degas paintings. As soon as the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, marking the end of the Iron Curtain, Lili, at age seventy, made a trip to Russia. Unfortunately, she found nothing.
My father, quite reasonably, had always thought of the United States as “the Allies.” In the years after the war, it would never have occurred to him to look for Nazi loot in the United States, especially in the museum of an exclusive Manhattan college for women or on the venerable campus of Harvard.
Based on the brief public showing of the painting in New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts, Searle’s legal team came up with yet another line of defense. They asserted that my father and aunt had not looked hard enough for the Degas and so had no rights. They argued that we should have, somehow, been aware when the Degas was loaned to an exhibition in New England. In legal terms, they asserted that my family had not been “duly diligent.” This came as a surprise to Nick and me when we thought of our father’s years of searching museums and galleries.
In fact, in 1967, just the year before the Harvard exhibition, West German and French authorities had concluded that the Degas, along with three other paintings from the Gutmann collection, could not be traced. As a result, the West German government paid Bernard and Lili a nominal compensation for the four artworks, almost twenty-two years after the end of the war. Rose Valland had backed my family throughout this lengthy process. Additionally, during all this time Interpol had not come up with any clues, either, even though my father had alerted them to the loss of the art within months of the war’s end. The German consensus was that the paintings must have ended up behind the Iron Curtain.
Today we know better. In the years after the war, the gray market in Europe was awash with thousands of artworks of dubious provenance, or no provenance at all. Many American dealers and collectors could not resist the bargain prices. With next to no questions asked, hundreds, if not thousands, of paintings and other art pieces would make their way across the Atlantic.
Searle’s team claimed innocence. They asserted that no one had ever heard of these Nazi art traders. Ignorance had become a defense. We discovered a glaring disconnect in the art world. The benefits of the gray market in art were such that the art world had almost completely overlooked the realities of war and, most specifically, the Holocaust.
By July of 1996, after seven months of patient argument, we realized we had hit a brick wall. Daniel Searle did not want to give the painting back. A billionaire, he could afford a battery of lawyers, and his lawyers were telling him he didn’t have to budge. He said we’d have to sue him—and so we did.
We filed our lawsuit in New York on July 19, 1996. As soon as the writ became public, the phone started ringing off the hook. Apparently we were making history. Our suit against Searle would be the first major Nazi looting case to be tried in the United States. Newspapers from Los Angeles to London and from Jerusalem to Japan were lining up. Just the day after the story broke, Nick received a call from CBS. Morley Safer from 60 Minutes wanted to interview us.
The producers of 60 Minutes decided that the Getty Villa in Malibu would serve as a dramatic setting for the segment. They chose to film the interview in a room with a charming still-life painting by Jean-Étienne Liotard, titled The Tea Set. By coincidence, this painting had once also belonged to my grandfather and had been stolen from the Gutmann possessions in Paris. Unlike the Degas, though, it had become part of Hitler’s Linz collection. After the war, it had been recovered by the US army from Hitler’s secret storage, deep in the salt mines of Altaussee in Austria. Following its restitution, my father and aunt had sold this particular Liotard in Switzerland—reluctantly, but at least legally. After that The Tea Set had passed, ironically, through the hands of Theodor Fischer before being acquired by the Getty in the 1980s.
The Tea Set was a much-studied eighteenth-century oddity with its teacups and china in uncustomary disarray. My brother and I, along with the 60 Minutes producers, agreed it was a fitting metaphor for the family’s scattered collection.
CBS decided to entitle the segment “The Search.” The little Degas pastel over monotype, now known as Landscape with Smokestacks, was about to become famous. Nick and I also had to become accustomed, rather quickly, to the sudden media attention.
When we arrived at the Getty, our hosts unveiled for us, with great pride, their latest acquisition: a beautiful still life by another famous Impressionist, Paul Cézanne. Then, as the CBS cameras followed us around, we walked through the splendid Roman garden of the Getty Villa. Morley Safer encouraged us to describe what life had been like for our family before the Nazi cataclysm. He likened the Gutmanns to Jewish grandees. I tried to emphasize the contrast between the world into which my father had been born and his drastically diminished circumstances at the time of his passing. The segment continued with Nick and me sitting in a grand room surrounded by Louis XV furniture with the Liotard behind us. Next Safer asked me, “Why do you want it [the Degas] back?”
I nearly stuttered, realizing it wasn’t a rhetorical question. There was so much to say. “It’s about honor,” I began. “So much was lost . . . . We can’t bring back the dead . . . . This is all that’s left.”
We were fighting for our birthright and for justice finally, but Safer realized many would not be sympathetic. Skillfully he induced my brother and me to argue our case. “The Search” aired on January 19, 1997, then twice more after that. It would win an Emmy for 60 Minutes and CBS.
Many other journalists would ask the almost identical question. Another persistent query was “Why now?” Patiently, I would point out that we were only doing what we were doing because very little had been settled after the war. Inwardly I wanted to scream, “If your grandparents had been murdered and all their possessions stolen—what would you do?” Finally I hit on a simple phrase that explained so much: “It’s unfinished business.” The British documentary Making a Killing would open with me quoting that phrase as the camera surveyed the courthouse where the landmark case for the Degas landscape was destined to reach its climax.
Perhaps we were lucky to be consumed by the media during all this time. Since we had filed suit against Daniel Searle, the legal process had barely ground forward. Searle’s team, headed by Howard Trienens, seemed content to drag out the “discovery” process as long as possible. The longer it took, the greater the expenses for my family. Even the judge seemed frustrated by the lack of progress. He actually ordered a conference between my brother, me, Aunt Lili, and Daniel Searle. Alas, nothing substantial came of it. Searle’s position had become increasingly narrow and unyielding. Egged on by his legal team, Searle completely disregarded the realities of the Holocaust era. Anne Webber, in her powerful film about the Gutmann saga, Making a Killing, pointed out, “There’s no allowance being made for the unique circumstances of these thefts.”
During a TV interview, obviously inflamed, Searle went so far as to call my family’s claim “extortion.” No doubt the buttoned-down industrialist’s image had been somewhat tarnished by all the bad press. To make things worse, Mrs. Searle had, apparently, become the subject of gossip at their country club. One Chicago newspaper even ran an editorial with the headline “Shame, Shame, Shame.” The article continued, “Shame on Daniel Searle.”
Ironically, just a year before and immediately after we filed suit, Daniel Searle had personally called Nick. He introduced himself bluntly: “I’m the guy you’re trying to sue.” To Nick’s astonishment, Searle then made an offer of $150,000. Obviously he thought we could be induced to go away. Nick politely pointed out that if the painting had been worth $850,000 in 1987, then $150,000 in 1996 could hardly be considered a reasonable offer. Still my family was heartened that Searle seemed disposed to negotiate. At the end of August, Nick wrote back suggesting a more equitable solution. We offered to split the ownership of the painting. Reluctantly, my family had come to the realization that a truly just resolution was probably out of our reach. Given the intransigence of the opposition, along with the complexities of the law, it became apparent that some compromise would be inevitable. The legal realities were beginning to take their toll. Unfortunately, rather than accept graciously or even make a realistic counteroffer, Searle merely suggested we could all get a nice tax write-off. Clearly it hadn’t occurred to the Chicago billionaire that not everybody was in his same tax bracket.
The trial would be held in the Superior Court of Illinois. In September of 1997, Nick and I flew to Chicago, where we met Lili. Over several days we would all give our depositions to Searle’s battery of lawyers. Lili seemed particularly anxious. Her doctors had warned her against the long flight from Italy, considering her recent heart condition.
Throughout this ordeal, Searle’s attorneys seemed determined to put words in our mouths. I was supposed to have found Paysage the very first day I started looking. The implication was that since it had been so “easy” for me, if my father had indeed been searching for the Degas, he would have found it decades earlier. Then they tried to twist Lili’s statements to imply that Fritz had been bankrupt in 1939, that his business had failed, and he was desperate to liquidate his entire collection.
The truth was that Firma F. B. Gutmann did not close until 1942 (two years into the occupation of the Netherlands), and then only on orders of the Nazis. Meanwhile, the Gutmann Trust actually survived the war and, against all odds, emerged with considerable assets.
The case seemed to hinge largely on the interpretation of the word consignment. Searle’s lawyers insisted that the term implied “intent to sell.” This might have been the usual American/English understanding. However, in French, consigner simply designated a shipment entrusted for deposit. Unfortunately these linguistic subtleties seemed to be lost on the hard-nosed Midwesterners we were up against.
Even though Searle’s side conceded that the Gutmann collection was looted by the Nazis, they obstinately claimed there was no “proof” that this particular work had been stolen. The fact that there was not one document indicating a sale of the Degas did not seem to deter Searle or his team. Neither did the fact that Hans Wendland never claimed, after he was arrested, that he had purchased Paysage.
We countered that not only did Fritz’s agent, Paul Graupe, not sell the Degas, he didn’t sell any of the other paintings or artworks from the so-called consignment to Paris—not one. Every piece of the Paris “consignment” had, one way or another, been taken by the Nazis.
Lili, Nick, and I were proud of how much we had been able to piece together after so much time had passed. Inevitably, though, after half a century or more, it was virtually impossible to fill in all the gaps of provenance. We were learning that the burden of proof lay with the victims. My family became increasingly aware of how hard it was to disprove a negative. The insinuation that Fritz had sold the Degas persisted. The more Howard Trienens repeated the allegation, the more stubborn Daniel Searle became.
Oftentimes I wondered whether this legal stonewalling wasn’t just a ploy to push up our expenses and force us to back down. When I arrived in Chicago for the depositions, somebody actually warned me, “Nobody ever sues Daniel Searle!”
The legal back and forth dragged on. On July 30, 1998, just days before the trial was to begin, we were advised that Searle’s request for a motion to dismiss had been denied by the court. Clearly, too much evidence was on our side. Judge Lindberg ruled that the case must proceed to trial. Tom Kline and his Chicago associate, Barry Rosen, had done an exemplary job. This would be the first Nazi looting case to be successfully brought to trial in the United States.
After the elation subsided, Nick and I realized that we had a few tough decisions to make. Our hardworking legal team had already cost us a few hundred thousand dollars. Meanwhile, after the depositions Searle had actually complained to us that he had already spent more on the case than he had spent on the painting. We assumed that to be around a million dollars—evidently Trienens’s legal posturing had not been cost-effective.
The trial would obviously drag out again everything that we had already gone over. Our costs were about to double. Regardless, I was confident that we would win. Right was on our side and so was public opinion. However, a greater consideration came into play. Lili had hated the depositions. She was filled with trepidation when she learned that she would have to return to Chicago and undergo another harsh grilling as the star witness. Nick and I feared that Lili’s weak heart might not endure such a public ordeal. Moreover, the thought of her being forced to relive from the witness stand what had happened to her parents was too much to bear.
On August 7, Nick called Daniel Searle again and reoffered the fifty-fifty arrangement. This time Searle accepted. While it was clearly a victory, a vindication, after nearly three years of battle (and almost sixty years after my family lost possession of the Degas), I felt deflated. We had taken the prudent course, but in my heart I wanted to go to trial. At least the Chicago Jewish Star pointed out how “the final settlement shows just how skewed and crass Searle’s insinuation of extortion was.”
Nick was justly proud of an honorable conclusion. The press started to call it a “Solomonic solution.” The settlement was somewhat complicated, though. Our friend Hector Feliciano (author of The Lost Museum) had helped broker the deal with the Art Institute of Chicago, which would become the third party in the agreement. At first the museum didn’t want to get involved in what appeared to be a legal morass. However, Hector skillfully reminded James Wood, then director of the Art Institute, how much they had always wanted the Degas landscape. Before my family came along, the museum had assumed Searle would bequeath it to them. Now they had an opportunity to acquire Paysage, effectively at half price, since Searle would donate his half. The deal was set. My family would receive payment from the Art Institute for our half of the appraised value; Daniel Searle would donate his half of the painting to the museum in return for a tax deduction.
Clearly, Searle had not wanted to take his chances in court. Another factor that might have loomed large for Searle was the power of the press. Anne Webber’s Making a Killing had received strong reviews in the United Kingdom and Europe. This compelling detective story about my family’s fifty-year quest to recover our missing art collection was set against a background of murder, greed, and corruption. The Seattle Jewish Film Festival would later write, “Making a Killing is not only a beautifully-shot documentary, it has become a powerful tool in the arsenal of those fighting to address the ‘unfinished business of the Holocaust.’ ”
Meanwhile, PBS affiliates had just started to run the US version on TV. It was scheduled to air in Chicago on August 10, but Searle had already viewed an advance copy. According to Anne Webber, now chair of the European Commission on Looted Art, Searle was beginning to have a change of heart after seeing himself in the documentary. Not surprisingly, his cold, offhand bluster had not come across sympathetically.
Before the ceremonies and unveiling of the Degas, which would be organized by the Art Institute, we had one more important piece of business to attend to—the appraisals. The agreement was that two established art institutions would give their estimates for the Degas and that a median price would establish the painting’s current value. The first appraiser had to come from a list supplied by the Art Institute, from which we chose the art dealer Richard Feigen. The second appraiser had to be from either Christie’s or Sotheby’s. We chose Christie’s because we had just begun a new legal dispute with Sotheby’s concerning another painting. During the endless legal delays we had not been idle. We had been busy pursuing our Renoir, Le Poirier.
During the Degas case, we hadn’t given too much notice to the reaction from the art world. Public opinion had been almost universally supportive of my family, but now it became apparent that the art trade thought differently. Before the court ruling in our favor, and the subsequent settlement, the art world had viewed us as upstarts. From art dealers, museum directors, gallery owners, auction houses, and, of course, wealthy collectors came the same indignant questions: Who were these people who suddenly appeared out of nowhere and claimed a valuable painting? Wasn’t it over half a century ago? Aren’t there statutes of limitations? Entirely overlooking the Holocaust and Nazi plunder, their main concern seemed to be that the art market might be “disrupted.” When we prevailed, a lot of hand wringing went on. What will it mean for us? Are there Nazi looted pieces in our collections as well? Will we have to return artworks for which we paid hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars? Will we be exposed in the press as purveyors or possessors of art stolen from Holocaust victims?
I could not feel much sympathy for them, and then, suddenly, it became quite clear that the art trade felt no sympathy for us, either.
In November 1998, the Christie’s appraisal came in at $300,000—a staggering $550,000 less than Daniel Searle had paid for the landscape. Next Richard Feigen, a Chicago native, came in with $575,000 (33 percent below the purchase price of eleven years before).
Was it possible that the art establishment wanted to punish us for helping to expose its witting or unwitting role in the scandal of Holocaust art?
Nick and I decided action was required. We requested a meeting at Christie’s. Meanwhile, I busily prepared a dossier of Degas sale and auction prices. At Christie’s West Coast headquarters in Beverly Hills, we were introduced to Marc Porter, the newly appointed international managing director. Porter appeared friendly, even slightly apologetic. We asked about the disparity between Feigen’s already low estimate and Christie’s rock-bottom evaluation. To reinforce our position, I presented a lengthy list of other Degas pastels that had fared comparatively better on the open market. Porter seemed sympathetic and assured us that Christie’s would do what they could.
A month later, Christie’s increased their appraisal from $300,000 to $400,000. Ultimately the art experts set the average value of the Degas at $487,500—just over half of what Searle had paid a decade earlier. Our portion barely covered our legal fees, but it had never been just about the money. It was still a significant victory and, it would turn out, an important turning point in the history of the art world since the end of World War II.
At the end of 1998, the (American) Association of Art Museum Directors called on all museums to check their collections for Nazi-era artworks. The Art Institute of Chicago agreed to a systematic provenance search on all the institute’s works from the Holocaust era. In October they invited my whole family to an inaugural luncheon before the unveiling of the Degas landscape. Lili had no appetite for such events; the endless compromises had been a bitter experience for her (and certainly did not justify another round-trip from Italy to the States). However, Nick, his daughter Cheyenne, my wife, May, and our son, James, were all there for the emotional occasion.
When Paysage finally went on display at the Art Institute of Chicago—after a world war and more than half a century—it would at long last be publicly credited “From the Collection of Friedrich and Louise Gutmann.”
