After the excitement of our auctions began to subside, a nagging feeling seemed to take its place. By returning so many pieces to us, the Dutch government had surely done a decent thing—albeit more than a half century late. But I could not help wondering how they had decided exactly what to return. How good a job had they done? After all, if they found so many Meissen cups and saucers, where were the teapots or coffeepots?
I decided to construct, to the best of my ability, a master list of the entire family collection based on every inventory and catalog I could find. My task would be to identify and reference every item that had eventually been recovered or compensated for and every piece that had disappeared. (I’ve been working on this for years and am still not finished.) I incorporated all the prewar documents that had survived and, most important, the meticulous Nazi inventories that were finally becoming available. The Allies, in their wisdom, had sealed all Nazi-looting documents as classified after the war. Now that fifty years had elapsed, the national archives of the United States, Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Germany were opening their vaults for the first time. To this day, many vital documents still elude us. However, to my everlasting astonishment, I now have in my possession copies of Fritz’s first forced sale to Göring’s agent Haberstock, the first Nazi inventory of Bosbeek, their secondary inventory of the estate, the Nazi inventory of the Gutmann Silver Collection, the ERR confiscations from Fritz’s storage in Paris, and so much more.
After a year or two of painstaking work, I began to recognize several pieces from the Gutmann collection that were still in the Dutch National Collection. Most were listed under the euphemistic heading “Origins Unknown,” meaning no known provenance. I began filing claims.
At the same time, I filed a petition for the return of the money my father and aunt had been forced to pay to the Dutch State in 1954. The Ministry of Finance in The Hague had insisted on being “compensated” before it would release over seventy antiques and seventeen paintings belonging to our family. Unfortunately, these new claims would keep me tied up in red tape for several years to come. It soon became apparent that the thaw in restitution practices we had enjoyed in 2002 was often the exception rather than the rule. That being said, several other restitutions began to take place in Holland, most notably for a sizable part of the Goudstikker Collection. However, Christine Koenigs, and others less fortunate, continued to be rebuffed.
Undaunted, I turned my attention elsewhere. During an extended European trip, I put aside a week to make a long-overdue visit to the German Federal Archives in Koblenz, on the Rhine. Each morning I would drive along the scenic river, with medieval castles perched above, from the fabled Lorelei rock to the ancient city of Koblenz. The dichotomy between this idealized view of Germany and the cloaked reality that I would discover in the national archives was startling. On my arrival, across an empty, cavernous hall, I was greeted by a most deferential curator. She seemed to know who I was, which I found a little unsettling. After a busy morning, copying furiously from several enormous index files, I was ready with my most wanted list. It included all the usual suspects: Haberstock, Böhler, Mühlmann, Miedl, and Plietzsch. When I read the name Göring to the archivist, the already-quiet reading room suddenly became several decibels quieter. After a long pause, he explained to me that I was asking for a lot. However, the next day, when I came back, they had two enormous shelves tagged with the name Gutmann. I did not know where to begin.
My photocopying bill ran into the hundreds of dollars. To this day, I have not fully processed this gold mine of information. One of the first gems I uncovered was the actual first forced-sale contract between poor Fritz and Karl Haberstock. Most of the paintings that had been itemized were no surprise to me. They were some of the greatest from Fritz’s collection, and they had been intended for none other than the Führer. They included the Cranach Samson and the Lion, the three different Madonna and Child paintings by Memling, Isenbrandt, and Holbein, the Northern Renaissance portraits of men by Elsner, Burgkmair, and Baldung Grien, and the Van Goyen Landscape with Two Horsecarts. The ninth item consisted of two carved, seventeenth-century Spanish shields, which had apparently originated from the Oppenheim collection. This, in itself, was an invaluable clue, since the Oppenheim family had several well-illustrated catalogs, dating from the turn of the old century. The last item, however, had me baffled: Die Sünde von H. Stuck.
I had seen the word Stuck on some earlier inventories. In German the word simply meant “stucco,” so I assumed it was a typo for Stück, which was “a piece,” as in a piece of furniture. However, the title Die Sünde clearly had no other meaning except “the sin.” Obviously, this had to be a piece of art. Also, considering that all the other items in this forced sale were major works of art, Haberstock, at least, must have valued highly this mysterious piece.
Soon enough I would discover a German Symbolist painter in the late nineteenth century called Franz Stuck. H. Stuck simply meant “Herr Stuck.” Later he was made a knight and became Franz von Stuck. He was a protégé of Franz von Lenbach, who had painted portraits of both Eugen and Sophie. I felt I was onto something; but my enthusiasm was soon dampened when I learned that Stuck had made at least a dozen paintings (as well as engravings) all called The Sin. If you factored into that series those paintings also called The Sensuality or The Vice, there must have been over twenty. What was even more perplexing, though, was the subject matter. All the paintings in the series depicted a very pale young woman, half naked, entwined with an overtly phallic snake.
I had trouble imagining my grandfather even buying such a painting, let alone hanging it on his walls between a Madonna and Child and some turgid sixteenth-century nobleman. The next thing, obviously, was to call my aunt. Did she remember anything by Franz von Stuck? After a long silence came a strange, short laugh. “How did you know?” she exclaimed. Then, while I relayed my discovery, the details began to come back to her.
Lili must have been about ten, at the time, when Fritz came back from the auctions in Munich. Under his arm was this strange painting. Perhaps the repercussions from the crash on Wall Street, just a few months earlier, had unhinged my grandfather—bankers in Germany were reeling from the aftershocks. The world was changing fast and so, perhaps, was Fritz. Clearly he felt he had to try something new. However, when he bravely unveiled his new acquisition to the family, there were screams. Louise quickly banished Franz von Stuck’s sinister image upstairs, out of sight and out of mind. After the initial shock, all this must have been a source of considerable merriment among the guests at Bosbeek before the war.
Then I discovered the deposition Karl Haberstock had made to Allied officers, a year after the war. He claimed he could not return the Stuck because he had sold it to a certain Dr. Brandt, resident in the Schloss Bellevue, Berlin. Well, Schloss Bellevue is now the official residence of the President of Germany, but during the war it was a guesthouse for high-ranking Nazis. After considerably more digging, I discovered the true identity of this Dr. Brandt. In trying to uncover what happened to my family, I have had to delve far deeper into the Holocaust than I ever thought I had the courage for. This was one of those moments.
Dr. Karl Brandt was no ordinary doctor. In 1934 he became Hitler’s personal physician, but it was his medical “experiments” that would earn him the titles of SS-Gruppenführer and SS-Brigadeführer. Starting in 1933, he began the state-sponsored eugenics program to rid the Reich of the “genetically disordered” and the “racially deficient.” By 1939, Brandt was head of the Aktion T4 Euthanasia Program, through which over seventy thousand people would be killed in its extermination centers.
Hitler quickly took the doctor under his wing. The Führer was the guest of honor when Karl Brandt married Anni Rehborn, a renowned athlete and medal-winning swimmer. With her siblings, Anni had become akin to an “Aryan” pinup. Hitler even remarked, “This face could originate from one of the temple friezes of Olympia.” The tall, ambitious physician and his athletic bride seemed to epitomize the new Germanic ideal. Before long, Karl and Anni Brandt were invited into the Führer’s closest inner circle.
The Brandts were soon regulars at the Berghof, Hitler’s weekend mountain retreat on what had been the Austrian border. Anni’s closest friends became Margarete Speer (wife of Albert Speer, later minister of armaments and war production) and Eva Braun, Hitler’s longtime companion. The popular couple even built their own, albeit much smaller, chalet in the shadow of the Führer’s favorite retreat. When their son was born, they named him Karl-Adolf. To this day several home movies, filmed by Eva Braun, survive, showing the close-knit group playing with their children or dogs and cavorting by the shores of the nearby lake, Chiemsee. For the briefest of moments, they appeared like normal, happy people. Then I realized I was still looking at Hitler, Speer, Bormann, Ribbentrop, Heydrich, Himmler, and Karl Brandt.
As the tide turned in the war, by mid-1944 the Berghof estate was largely abandoned. The Brandts were back in Berlin, at their apartment in the Schloss Bellevue, along with their admired art collection. The Franz von Stuck hung alongside other German works by Hans Thoma and Karl Friedrich Lessing. However, as the Allied bombing of Berlin intensified, Brandt stored most of his art treasures in the safety of the Führerbunker. By 1945, with the Red Army no longer far away, Hitler also spent most of his time in the bunker. Then on April 30, 1945, as the Battle for Berlin raged above him, Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide.
Karl Brandt tried to escape but was arrested by British soldiers in northern Germany on May 23. He was transferred to a maximum-security prison camp euphemistically called Camp Ashcan. This was no ordinary camp. The Allies had selected this former hotel in the middle of Luxembourg to house and interrogate eighty-six of the most prominent surviving Nazi leaders. Here Generalmajor Karl Brandt of the Waffen-SS found himself reunited with some of the Führer’s cabinet and inner circle, such as Ribbentrop and Hermann Göring. There was Himmler’s precursor, Wilhelm Frick, and some of the most brutal military commanders the war had known, such as Keitel, Kesselring, Jodl, and Von Rundstedt. Others included Seyss-Inquart and Hans Frank, the murderous Governors of the Netherlands and Poland. The vile propagandist Julius Streicher was another inmate.
On August 10, the inmates were transferred to Nuremberg. The trials would begin three months later. Most of those mentioned above would be sentenced to death.
However, Karl Brandt was singled out for special treatment. Along with some of the other most notorious “medical” practitioners, Dr. Brandt became the primary defendant in what was known as the Doctors’ Trial. Officially it was entitled United States of America v. Karl Brandt, et al. During the exhaustive preparations for trial, the prosecutors took time out to question the accused about his art collection. Most of it, he claimed, he had stored in the bunker under the Reich’s Chancellery. He mentioned Karl Haberstock a few times during the deposition, but he only mentioned the Stuck painting once, and then he was rather evasive. The American interrogators assumed that if any of Brandt’s artworks had survived the battle for the bunker, after Hitler’s suicide, then the victorious Soviet troops would have carried them away. However, Brandt seemed to imply that a Dr. and Frau Schönemann might have managed to smuggle some pieces to Munich, in the American zone.
Earlier, in the waning days of the Third Reich, Brandt had also sneaked his wife, Anni, and young Karl-Adolf behind American lines, in the state of Thuringia, and from there to safety. In doing so, Brandt had almost got himself killed. When Hitler learned that his once-trusted aide had lost faith in the war effort, he accused him of high treason. Brandt was arrested by his own SS and sentenced to death. However, in the chaos of the final days of the war, the sentence was never carried out.
Now Karl Brandt stood accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. To be specific: performing medical experiments on prisoners of war and civilians, in the course of which Brandt, and the other defendants, committed murder, torture, atrocities, and other inhuman acts. He was also accused of planning and performing the mass murder of prisoners of war and civilians. The trial lasted over eight months, at the end of which SS-Gruppenführer Prof. Dr. Karl Brandt, Hitler’s Reichskommissar for Medical and Health Care, was found guilty and sentenced to death.
At the scaffold, Brandt refused the peace and absolution proffered by a nearby priest. Instead he accused the United States and Britain of hypocrisy. “Justice has never been here. What dictates is power. And this power wants victims . . . . I am such a victim.” He was hanged on June 2, 1948, at the Landsberg Prison, between Munich and Augsburg. The Stars and Stripes newspaper reported the next day that the convicted had “paid an eye for 10,000 eyes, a tooth for 10,000 teeth. In a chilling rain they died unfrightened.”
• • •
By the winter of 2008 I had become rather dispirited. I had studied and studied everything I could about Stuck’s femmes fatales and their lascivious snakes. For the life of me, I could not deduce which one Fritz might have owned. Lili had, not surprisingly, pointed out the obvious: they all looked the same to her. She did, amazingly, remember the approximate size. Apparently it had to be one of the smaller versions. Also I could eliminate those in the series that had solid provenances dating back from well before the war. Working from the Franz von Stuck catalogue raisonné, I was able to whittle down my list to just four or five Sins or Sensualities. I had sent a slew of e-mails and letters requesting better provenance histories, including several to Germany. Interestingly, two of the most famous in the series Sin or Die Sünde had the least solid provenances and were now in the National Gallery in Berlin and the Franz von Stuck Museum in Munich. The Berlin painting had appeared on the Berlin art market in 1940 and then, from what I could tell, was found languishing in a German government warehouse in Berlin after the war. Subsequently it had been donated in the 1960s to the Nationalgalerie. The Villa Stuck version, in Munich, had been donated to the newly refurbished Stuck Museum in 1965 by a benefactor. Where it had been before that was unclear.
I decided nobody would get back to me until after the New Year, so I put myself to bed feeling the flu coming on. But then in the last mail just before Christmas came a heavy package for which I had been waiting over a year. May dropped it at the foot of the bed. Inside I discovered a hefty tome dedicated to none other than Fritz’s nemesis—Karl Haberstock. It was entitled (translating from the German) Controversial Art Dealer and Patron of the Arts. I was a little stunned by the choice of words. I even checked my German dictionary to make sure controversial was really the word the authors intended. The book had been commissioned in 2000 by the city of Augsburg, Haberstock’s hometown. An American historian had voiced various misgivings about the Karl and Magdalene Haberstock Bequest, which the city of Augsburg had gratefully received in the 1980s. From what I could tell, the collection consisted of artworks Haberstock had not been forced to return after the war. The introductory essays certainly covered much of Haberstock’s Nazi-era activities, albeit in a strangely neutral, if not obsequious, tone.
The first illustration in the catalog was of a bronze bust of Augsburg’s honored son and citizen. Not until the end of 1999 was the actual bust of Haberstock removed from the entrance to the Schaezlerpalais, which, to this day, still houses the Haberstock bequest. Just a few miles away you can still stroll along Karl-Haberstock-Street if you so wish.
In the catalog, first came the glossy color photos of paintings formerly belonging to Jewish collectors such as Édouard Jonas of Paris, Otto Weissenberger of Dresden, and even our very distant cousins the Gutmanns of Vienna. Then came the antiques, furniture, and china Frau Haberstock had so generously donated. Glancing at these I felt a certain shiver. Maybe it was the flu, but among the china I felt convinced I was looking at my grandmother’s coffee cups. I wondered whether it was possible to inherit memory. The china, clearly, would need a lot more research. I forced myself to press on. Besides, the next section was indeed remarkable. It documented Haberstock’s purchase and sale ledgers from 1933 until the end of 1944. I quickly found all the forced sales Fritz had been subjected to. The editor, Horst Kessler, had done an outstanding job. Then in the sales section for November 1942 I found—“To Professor Dr. Karl Brandt, Berlin—Franz von Stuck Die Sünde.” And finally at the end of the book—they had saved the best until last—was a photo archive of almost all the paintings and sculptures that Haberstock had acquired or sold during the Nazi era. On page 308 was what I had been looking for. They were only tiny photos, but at last I knew what our Franz von Stuck Die Sünde looked like.
The next step was relatively easy. When I had first started looking for this painting, I had made copies of all the relevant pages from the Stuck catalogue raisonné, which I’d found in the Getty Research Institute library, concerning the Sins and Sensualities most likely to be ours. There, in my files, was what I needed; I just hadn’t known it before. Catalog number 58/149 matched perfectly Haberstock’s tiny wartime photo. It was entitled Die Sinnlichkeit, or The Sensuality, after all, and dated around 1891.
The Franz von Stuck catalogue raisonné had been published in 1973 and listed, where possible, the most up-to-date owners. It appeared Fritz’s lost painting had been acquired by the Piccadilly Gallery of London in 1970. I was stunned. When I used to live in London, I had walked past the gallery many times. It had been just around the corner from my mother’s old office.
Furiously, I began searching for somebody to contact at the Piccadilly Gallery. However, to my dismay, I discovered that the gallery had closed just the year before, in 2007. To make matters worse, Godfrey Pilkington, the owner and the man who had apparently found the painting in Munich, had just died in August of that year. But all was not lost. I was able to get a message through to Pilkington’s surviving partner. Eventually a kindly English lady wrote back to me, a little confused, saying that she thought the painting I was inquiring about might have gone to Poland. However, by this time I knew better.
The original Piccadilly Gallery catalog, which I had recently unearthed, entitled Franz von Stuck, 1863–1928 and compiled by Pilkington, had included a striking color photo of our Sensuality. Erich Lessing’s iconic photo of Sensuality had since become a popular poster. Next I found the image reproduced in a book called Femme Fatale: Images of Evil and Fascinating Women. In the acknowledgments, toward the back of the book, was what I had been looking for for nearly two years—the actual name of the current owner and his location.
For legal reasons I cannot reveal the name of the collector. However, his location was the most startling thing. He was here, in Los Angeles, and the painting, remarkably, was less than two miles from my house.
Throughout January I worked with our lawyer, Tom Kline, on our initial claim. I was rather anxious as the collector was a lawyer of some renown. We requested a verification of the painting’s provenance as the first step toward establishing the rightful ownership. The response we got was fairly friendly, but also rather vague. The collector, not surprisingly, was quite shocked by the possibility his Sensuality could be Nazi loot. Eventually he seemed to suggest some kind of settlement might be appropriate. I responded that any settlement would most likely involve compromise, which I believed detracted from the main issue. The Haberstock documentation I had found made it quite clear our Stuck had been lost during the Holocaust. Our case was extremely strong. The point was, we wanted the painting back.
The collector, we discovered, had not paid for the painting. He had received it as a gift about thirty-five years before. Then, when we learned he was Jewish, our hopes increased that he might be prepared to do the right thing. However, as we pressed our claim, the collector decided to seek the counsel of Randy Schoenberg, an expert lawyer in restitution matters. Randy had hit the headlines just a few years before with the spectacular restitution of the famous Gustav Klimt paintings from Austria. I had always considered Randy as something of an ally. If he were to become opposing counsel, this would put us all in a rather awkward situation.
The lawyers inevitably talked about statutes of limitation. The collector, meanwhile, began wondering whether our painting and his painting were even the same. The confusion with the title changing from Sin to Sensuality had apparently left significant doubts. Then to complicate matters he wanted to involve his insurance company. The idea that any insurance might indemnify somebody for being in possession of Nazi loot seemed to me far-fetched. Fortunately, around this time, Randy took the collector to the Getty Research Institute library to check all the Franz von Stuck catalogs. One catalog, which I had also recently come across, they both found particularly convincing. In 1903, the Galerie Henneberg had exhibited in Munich a Franz von Stuck they called Die Sünde, or The Sin; however, the illustration matched exactly the painting in the collector’s home, now called Die Sinnlichkeit, or The Sensuality. This seemed to settle the problems with the painting’s title.
Nobody could find any fault with our claim. Perhaps the real issue was emotional. Just as my family had formed a deep bond with the art Fritz and Eugen had lovingly collected, we were now faced with an obviously decent man who had also developed a strong connection with the painting that had hung in his living room for thirty-five years. So, despite there being no specific objection to our demand, they continued to ask for more information. I did my best to fill in any blanks in the painting’s history.
Regrettably the legal back-and-forth continued for another three months with no tangible results. Nick and I felt we had to change the dynamic. Left with few alternatives, we decided to file a legal complaint as a precursor to an actual trial. As it turned out, the mere mention of issuing a complaint was all that had been needed to break the deadlock. The collector said he was considering a voluntary return of the Von Stuck to our family. At last we had the breakthrough I had hoped for. To complicate matters, though, the collector also wanted to buy the Sinnlichkeit from us, whereas my family, simply, wanted the painting returned. This development would inevitably result in the collector holding on to the painting while I arranged for an expert appraisal. In early May 2009, James Hastie, Christie’s vice president of nineteenth-century painting, arrived in Los Angeles for a few days.
After months of awkward communications, we were all finally to meet at the collector’s Tudor-revival home, just a few canyons over from mine. It was quite a crowd: the tall collector and his elegant wife, my brother and me, Randy Schoenberg, a colleague of Tom Kline’s representing my family, and at least two other people, possibly from the collector’s insurance company. James Hastie arrived for the appraisal.
Randy and our host were most welcoming. The collector, in his deep, gruff voice, directed us to the Franz von Stuck, apparently waiting for our inspection. The tension of the last few months seemed to slip away. For Nick and me it was a strange and emotional event. With a sense of awe we connected for the first time with the Sinnlichkeit, which had been lost for nearly seventy years. Yet we also experienced an unusual sense of familiarity. This was, after all, the painting our grandfather had collected, and it used to live in the same house our father grew up in. Then, as I touched the frame, a shiver went through me as I thought of all those other people who had also admired this unusual work.
As much as I had studied the Sinnlichkeit over the previous years, there was no substitute for experiencing the actual painting. The collector and I shared a moment as we marveled over the glowing gold backdrop. The snake’s eyes and fangs were truly menacing and in stark contrast to the inscrutable acquiescence of the woman. The overall effect was oddly hypnotic, and the collector frankly admitted he had been under her spell for some time now.
We parted on friendly terms, and I agreed we would talk more as soon as the Christie’s evaluations were ready. While we waited, I sent the collector a copy of the English documentary about my family’s quest, Making a Killing. The film would have a dramatic effect on him. He later shared how the image of my grandmother Louise, and the fate that befell her, made a haunting impression. The painting, which he had loved for all these past years, suddenly came with a terrible history.
When the estimates for Sensuality finally came in, the collector decided we should deal with each other directly. I liked that we were developing an understanding. It seemed appropriate that we should settle this in a gentlemanly manner, without the other lawyers. Besides, Randy preferred to take a backseat. At the end of July I invited the collector over to my house for coffee. I welcomed the opportunity to show him some of my grandparents’ treasures from Holland that I had been fortunate enough to keep. The Kangxi porcelain figures of the Immortals watched over us from above the fireplace. The discussion was extremely pleasant but eventually it came down to numbers. The number being offered us was fair, but just not what I thought the ultimate value might be. Moreover, numbers aside, it didn’t feel right to say good-bye to the Sensuality so soon after I had found it. Nevertheless we were obliged to think it over. I promised to call my aunt in Florence and then get back to him, once we had made up our minds.
However, before I could formulate our response to the collector, a dramatic development occurred. While I had been pressing Christie’s for the estimate, James Hastie had asked the Villa Stuck Museum in Munich for their opinion. Now, finally, we had their opinion, and it wasn’t very good. They claimed there were problems not only with the style and the paint, but also with the signature and the frame. At first I was taken aback; then it occurred to me the Villa must have overlooked the strange history of the painting and how it had been handled since 1940. James Hastie and I agreed that significant mitigating circumstances went a long way toward addressing the museum’s misgivings. However, Christie’s felt it had to put its appraisal on hold until we could present the Villa Stuck with our evidence and arguments.
Despite this setback, I couldn’t help feeling there was a silver lining here. I called the collector to tell him about the German experts’ opinion and that, at least for the moment, we could not count on Christie’s (or anybody’s) evaluation of the painting. The collector thanked me for my honesty and then explained that, under the circumstances, he wasn’t prepared to write a six-figure check. I sympathized and then pressed my demand. The only equitable solution was the return of our painting.
The collector seemed to go through much soul-searching. I think the image of my grandmother continued to haunt him. It had also become harder and harder for him to disassociate the painting, which he had once loved, from the specters of Karl Brandt and Adolf Hitler. In contrast he began to focus on his young son, who was just beginning preparations for his bar mitzvah. It must have seemed like an opportune time to show his son what a true mitzvah was.
After much deliberation it was agreed. The transfer documents were drawn up. The collector was relinquishing all ownership of the painting. The only proviso was that I give him thirty days’ advance notice if I chose to sell Sensuality.
On a sunny day in mid-September, I drove the mile along Sunset Boulevard to the canyon that led to the collector’s home. On my arrival, the collector and his son, who was the same age as my son, James, greeted me warmly. Then just the two of us sat down to go over the written agreement. All seemed to be in order and we both signed.
What followed was one of the most remarkable moments I had experienced on this extraordinary journey since my father’s boxes arrived fifteen years earlier. The collector got up and walked over to the wall of his living room to unhook Sensuality. He asked me to help him, and together we walked the painting out of his house. With great care, he helped me load the Franz von Stuck into the trunk of my old Jag. Almost tearfully, we shook hands and said good-bye.
As I drove off down the hill, a wave of emotions and thoughts began to overwhelm me: gratitude, vindication, faith in humanity, justice . . . I started talking to Fritz and Louise and Bernard as if they were in the car with me. When I got home, it was a poignant moment, indeed, as we hung the long-lost painting in our living room. I put it near a Louis XV console and a Louis XVI barometer, also originally from Bosbeek, which I had recovered just a few years before. May and I mused over the incongruity of this lascivious lady and her snake becoming the object of a mitzvah. James was speechless. May invited a photographer friend over to commemorate the event. She must have taken at least a hundred photos.
Gradually, reality regained the upper hand. The painting did not just belong to me but to the whole family. However, before we could establish a fair value, I would have to do battle with the experts in Munich. It struck me as more than just a cruel irony that the fate of my brief victory lay in the hands of Germans. For the moment, though, I could savor this most striking painting and marvel about my family’s unusual legacy.
Ultimately, I had to send the Sinnlichkeit to Munich for tests and evaluations. I attached my most reasoned defense of the authenticity of the lascivious lady, along with all supporting documents that seemed relevant. The original outer frame, I pointed out, had obviously been lost at the end of the war. I always had an image of Anni Brandt smuggling the canvas through American lines in 1945. Later, the last two letters of the signature, I argued, could easily have been smudged during a not-so-professional cleaning in the fifties. Without a doubt, the composition clearly resembled the most early etchings in the series. In addition to this, we had the photo from the 1903 catalog, which had been taken while Stuck was still alive in Munich. All of which left the color technique as the last, and most significant, stumbling block. The Stuck Commission deliberated on and off through the winter.
The commission’s report finally arrived the beginning of March. It was peppered with words such as “difficult” and “interesting.” I reread it several times and was still not sure what they were really saying. The only way I could sum up their opinion was to say that they were being conclusively inconclusive. Like so many experts, they seemed to be more comfortable sitting on the fence rather than committing themselves. However, they did, at least, come up with one new piece of information. On the back of the painting’s stretcher bar had been a hitherto indecipherable ink stamp. They had managed to identify one of the words as Malverfahren, which meant “painting technique or process.” From there I was able to fill in the blanks. The stamp, in fact, referred to Baron Alfons von Pereira’s paint process patented in 1891, which was also the same year Franz von Stuck had painted the Sinnlichkeit. Pereira had introduced the unusual technique, in Munich, at the Glaspalast exhibition of 1890, and Stuck had exhibited there just the year before.
I concluded that it was probably futile to expect more from the commission. Instead I decided to share this new information with Christie’s. After all, the Villa Stuck seemed to be inviting us to make up our own minds, and the discovery of the stamp on the stretcher bar clearly placed the painting at the right place, and at the right time. James Hastie seemed to agree with me.
We set the auction date for December. That way I still had the satisfaction of keeping the painting for several months; after the auction each member of the family would get his or her rightful share. In the meantime, we had near-perfect copies made using the Iris-print method. Next, I called the honorable collector to give him fair warning in case he wanted to bid for Sensuality. He seemed to have moved on. He had found a new painting to fit in with his cherished Art Nouveau collection.
The auction in London was a great success. Our Stuck had caused quite a stir. Ultimately she went for far more than had been expected. The market had spoken and my battle for the lady’s honor had been vindicated.
