I was just packing my bag after a very successful morning at the library when the fire alarm went off. Somehow I sensed it was not just a drill. I grabbed my things and made haste for the exit. When I got to the terrace of the Getty Research Institute, the staff and other researchers were just standing, transfixed. The small mountain opposite was completely engulfed in flames. It was already a hot day in July, and the flames seemed to be coming in our direction. Somebody barked orders to head for the trams, which would take us down the hill to the parking lots. To my horror, probably over a thousand visitors from the museum were trying to do the same thing. I squeezed myself into one of the last cars, next to a bewildered German tourist. When we got out, she started asking me about public transport. As the fire trucks whizzed by, I knew that no buses would be arriving soon. I offered her a ride since her family was not scheduled to pick her up for hours. I wanted to talk, and I hadn’t had a chance to call anybody since the alarm went off.
The excitement of the fire aside, I had something of great importance I needed to share—and in some way this unsuspecting German seemed more than appropriate. For the next twenty minutes I delivered an impassioned rant about Nazi looting. I was animated because, just half an hour earlier, I had tracked down a painting that had disappeared under the very nose of Adolf Hitler’s agent.
After finding the Franz von Stuck, one painting still remained missing from the first forced sale between my grandfather and Karl Haberstock: Portrait of a Young Man, with a Green Background, dated 1509, by the German Renaissance artist Hans Baldung Grien. Baldung was considered the heir and most gifted student of Germany’s greatest artist, Albrecht Dürer. Ever since the war it had eluded many, but now I knew where it was, or at least where it had been.
After combing through every monograph and catalog I could find on Baldung Grien, I had finally found in the Getty archives a rare volume published in 1983 by a German academic, Gert von der Osten. Almost all the other books on Baldung Grien focused on his woodcuts and altarpieces, perhaps because not many of his paintings have survived until this day. However, Osten’s small book, his last, entitled Paintings and Documents, was only published in Germany. He had done research in Princeton, New Jersey, in the 1950s, which explained why he, and no other art historian, had located our missing Baldung Grien. While at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Osten had seen the painting in neighboring New Brunswick, at the art gallery of rival Rutgers University.
My father had always believed that most of the artworks he couldn’t trace must have gone behind the Iron Curtain. Now I had found yet another painting right here in the United States.
My first task was to contact Rutgers and make sure the painting was still there. The registrar from their museum, now renamed the Zimmerli Art Museum, replied fairly promptly. As she pointed out, the Zimmerli had over sixty thousand pieces in its permanent collection and the cataloging was far from complete. Fortunately she was soon able to confirm that the Hans Baldung Grien portrait was indeed there. What’s more, their images matched the illustration that I had found a couple of years earlier in a 1938 catalog, dating back to when Fritz had loaned the painting to an exhibition in Rotterdam.
I decided to call the museum director myself. To my relief the new director, Suzanne Delehanty, was extremely civil and not at all adversarial. Not surprisingly, she was more than a little taken aback as I explained the strong likelihood that the Zimmerli possessed an artwork stolen during the Holocaust. She welcomed my suggestion that I put together a portfolio of all the relevant documents and detail the history and provenance of the Baldung Grien.
May and I had wanted to make a trip to New York for a while, so I decided to go to Rutgers in person and present my case. While assembling all the crucial evidence in my files that would prove my family’s loss of the painting, I began to complete the puzzle of the Hans Baldung Grien, which had eluded even Hitler.
Fritz had sent the painting to Paris in the spring of 1939, along with the two Degas pastels and so many other pieces from his collection. The assumption was that the French Maginot Line of defense would hold in case of war. Fritz had, no doubt, also assumed that in an emergency his treasures would be nearer to neutral Switzerland or the relative safety of Italy. I had often wondered how life would have been so different for us all if my grandfather had sent his artworks to England for safekeeping, instead. But after his treatment by the British during the previous war, Fritz did not trust perfidious Albion. The prospect of the British authorities suddenly declaring my family’s assets as enemy property was a real concern.
By the beginning of 1941, Reichskommissar Seyss-Inquart had successfully liquidated about half the Jewish-owned businesses in the Netherlands. Most of the rest were being Aryanized. The objective of stripping the Jews of Holland, step by step, of all their worldly goods was well under way. Next came the special identity cards; when Fritz and Louise received theirs, on the left was a large, ominous capital J. When Karl Haberstock came calling at Bosbeek in early March, Fritz was feeling particularly vulnerable. Orsini’s attempts from Italy to secure an exit visa for his brother-in-law and sister-in-law, Fritz and Louise, had so far failed miserably. When Haberstock offered to “intercede” on my grandparents’ behalf, Fritz was more than receptive. It was clear who Haberstock’s superiors were. The price, however, was some of the greatest paintings from the collection.
As previously noted, in return for the promise of just 122,000 Dutch guilders (perhaps $75,000 at the time), Fritz agreed to sign over eight of his finest old masters and the Franz von Stuck. Haberstock immediately took possession of the Stuck, then known as Die Sünde, along with two Spanish Renaissance shields and a magnificent carpet. The other eight paintings, including the Hans Baldung Grien, however, were already in storage in Paris; for these Fritz signed an authorization to release.
I discovered that two months later Haberstock paid my grandfather barely a quarter of the agreed amount, and that paltry sum was transferred into a frozen account. Meanwhile, Haberstock had immediately sold the Baldung Grien, along with the Cranach, the Elsner, and the Isenbrandt, directly to the Führer’s office—all for a handsome profit. Hitler’s chief curator for the Führermuseum, Hans Posse, made it clear that the Führer coveted the Baldung Grien above all and had paid the most for it. Later the Van Goyen and the Holbein were also purchased for the intended Führermuseum at Linz.
Haberstock set off for Paris to arrange for the shipment of the eight masterpieces to Berlin. Seven, including the Baldung, would go straight to the Reich Chancellery. The Memling that Haberstock offered to both Hitler and Göring, with a price tag of well over one hundred thousand Reichsmarks (more than a million dollars today). However, when Haberstock got to Paris, the paintings were under lock and key, and the dealers to whom Fritz had entrusted his paintings had fled at the beginning of the Nazi occupation. Paul Graupe had made it across the border to Switzerland, and Arthur Goldschmidt was, for the moment, in the relative safety of the south of France. Unoccupied Vichy France was not particularly safe for Jews, either, but fortunately for Goldschmidt, the sunny Côte d’Azur was being run by the Italians. From German-occupied France, Arthur Goldschmidt had been able to smuggle out several artworks and was open for business at the Martinez Hotel in Cannes. Haberstock soon got wind of this and made the trip south. The word was that Goldschmidt had both an important Brouwer and an Ostade for sale as well. Haberstock bought both and quickly resold them as soon as he returned to Berlin—again to Hitler and for a great profit. He also secured from Goldschmidt the authorization for the release of the eight paintings from Fritz’s storage in Paris. Haberstock quickly forwarded the authorization back to Hugo Engel in Paris, who ran errands for both Haberstock and Hans Wendland.
What happened next is unclear. Evidently Hugo Engel presented the collection order to Mme. Wacker-Bondy, the owner of the storage facility. They must have prepared the shipments for Berlin. But when the crates were unpacked at Hitler’s headquarters, on the Wilhelmplatz in Berlin, instead of seven paintings there were only six, causing considerable consternation. The Hans Baldung Grien Portrait of a Young Man, with a Green Background was missing. The Führer had been expecting the arrival of the handsome young man. So far the Führermuseum did not have any works by Baldung, despite his being one of the foremost German artists of the Renaissance. Hitler would be furious.
What followed was a flurry of official letters from Hitler’s chief counsel at the Reich Chancellery, Dr. Killy. I must have counted over a dozen at the German Federal Archives in Koblenz. Dr. Killy was blatantly indignant, and the normally smug and pompous Karl Haberstock was groveling indeed. He immediately offered a full refund, which placated Hitler’s irate lawyer somewhat. However, the Reich Chancellery was still demanding the location of the painting.
For the next few months accusations flew. Fritz, even while under house arrest in Holland, was accused of some mysterious sleight of hand. Next the focus switched to Paul Graupe; had he spirited the Baldung away before leaving for Switzerland? In that case, one would have assumed Mme. Wacker-Bondy or Hugo Engel would have noticed a discrepancy when preparing the shipment to Berlin. Perhaps Arthur Goldschmidt had taken the painting with him when he escaped to the south of France, but had somehow forgotten to mention it when Karl Haberstock arrived to get authorization for the eight paintings.
By the time Haberstock’s angry letter arrived at Goldschmidt’s last known address in Cannes, Goldschmidt had already moved again—several times. After leaving Cannes, Goldschmidt reappeared briefly in Bilbao, Spain, before sailing across the Atlantic to Cuba, in early September 1941. There he seemed to resume his art dealing with little hindrance. I found a declassified American intelligence report that chronicled the wily dealer’s attempt to sell a Rubens in Havana in early 1944 while he waited for an entry visa for the United States.
When it seemed clear the Baldung wasn’t going to resurface anytime soon, Haberstock actually secured a refund out of Fritz’s frozen account.
• • •
As the war was ending in April of 1945, American forces moved into Aschbach, a small town in northern Bavaria. Aschbach had once had a thriving Jewish community, but by 1942 the last Jew had been deported. Overlooking the small town was an old castle or manor house belonging to Baron von Poellnitz. The Americans quickly arrested the baron when they discovered he had been the local Nazi Party leader. What they next found was more surprising. Tucked away throughout the pretty castle was effectively an enormous art warehouse. The American troops quickly put the other residents of the small Schloss under arrest and called the Monuments Men. When the Monuments officers discovered the true identities of two of the residents, the story started to take shape. Their names were Haberstock and Gurlitt. For several months Karl and Magdalene Haberstock, along with crates of their ill-gotten gains, had been hiding in the castle. Hildebrand Gurlitt and his wife, Helene, had also taken refuge in the castle after their home in Dresden had been destroyed by Allied bombers. With them was their daughter, Renate, and their teenage son, the now notorious Cornelius Gurlitt, who had over fourteen hundred pieces of art hidden in his Munich apartment until it was discovered in March 2012.
Baron von Poellnitz had been stationed in Paris during the occupation as a Luftwaffe officer. In his spare time he liked to help arrange deals (as their unofficial representative) for both Gurlitt and Haberstock, even though the two men were technically competitors. The three would meet to compare notes on their next victims at the Ritz Bar in the place Vendôme—their office away from home.
By the end of the war, the baron’s castle also contained a huge proportion of the paintings from the Bamberg Museum and the Kassel Museum, as well as the private stashes of such infamous Nazi commanders as General Fütterer and Field Marshal von Kleist. Captain Posey, the Monuments officer in charge, quickly declared the estate “off-limits.” The estimated value of the art treasures in the Schloss was a cool $100 million.
According to Allied reports under the heading “Questionable Collections,” “one large room on the first floor contained paintings, tapestries, rugs, furniture and other art objects—belonging to Mr. Haberstock—art collector.” In another room were more “Haberstock” paintings, trunks, and valuable books. Upstairs, in one room alone, Gurlitt had stashed over thirty-four crates. Remarkably, considering the quantities involved, Hildebrand Gurlitt attempted to convince the Monuments officers that he was merely a Mischling trying to survive, an innocent art dealer, a victim no less. His defense that he had a Jewish grandmother named Elizabeth Lewald, a sister of a famous Salonnière, Fanny Lewald, was apparently taken into serious consideration. However, that he had obviously been allowed to continue dealing in art in Germany and France throughout the war ought to have created a very different impression. Most of the artworks belonging to Gurlitt were taken into custody, at least temporarily, and sent to the Wiesbaden collecting point, which was primarily for works considered to be German owned.
By the time Germany officially surrendered, even more of Haberstock’s hoard had been found in yet another castle not far from Augsburg, this time belonging to Prince von Thurn und Taxis. Most of these art pieces, unfortunately, were also categorized as “German” and accordingly were sent to Wiesbaden. Among the countless pieces salted away in the Thurn und Taxis castle, I discovered, were the two exquisitely carved Spanish Renaissance coats of arms (from the same first Gutmann-Haberstock transaction). At least one of the shields from Wiesbaden was ultimately returned to Holland. Sadly, to this day, the Dutch authorities have yet to locate either of them. Meanwhile, the majority of Karl Haberstock’s enormous hoard from the Aschbach castle was shipped to the larger Munich Collecting Point, where it would be sorted for repatriation to whichever country the artworks had originated from.
Today it might seem odd, but at the time Hildebrand Gurlitt was treated remarkably leniently. Ultimately he was deemed to have been a victim of Nazi persecution. He claimed that the majority of his paintings had been destroyed in the bombing of Dresden, and the rest of his artworks actually confiscated by the Allies were returned to him by 1950. Gurlitt resumed dealing in art up till his death in a car crash in 1956.
On the other hand, Karl Haberstock was, correctly, described in the Monuments officers’ daily reports of May 18, 1945, as “the most notorious art collector in Europe. He was Hitler’s private art collector and for years drained France, Holland, Belgium, and even Switzerland and Italy of art treasures by unlawful, ruthless and even brutal methods. His name is infamous among all honest collectors in Europe. Mr. Haberstock was unable to furnish an inventory of his art collection at the castle.”
By the late summer of 1945, Karl Haberstock was officially under arrest. He was moved to Austria, where he found himself in a cell with his old cohorts Bruno Lohse and Walter Andreas Hofer. Appropriately, the Art Looting Intelligence Unit of the OSS had chosen Bad Aussee in Austria as the place to imprison Haberstock. It was just a mile down the mountain from the salt mines at Altaussee, where Hitler’s erstwhile Linz Collection had been hidden. For thirty-six days Haberstock was interrogated by the ALIU.
In contrast to his usual cutthroat tactics and bossy demeanor, Haberstock now attempted to present himself more contritely. Hoping to ingratiate himself with his interrogators, he even suggested he could help at the Collecting Point in Munich. Famous for his lack of scruples, Haberstock was now spilling the beans on his onetime Nazi bosses. Then stretching his interrogators’ credulity, the longtime Nazi Party member and vociferous anti-Semite claimed to have helped Jewish “colleagues” escape. He did, however, secure the release of noted art historian Max Friedländer from arrest in the Netherlands, but only because Haberstock needed Friedländer’s advice on acquisitions for Göring and the Führer. Haberstock, although the most important dealer of Nazi Germany, was really of peasant stock and had only a limited education. He certainly had no formal art degree; in fact, he held those with such training in contempt.
At Bad Aussee, Haberstock chronicled his dealings with the Führermuseum, giving Lieutenant Commander Theodore Rousseau full details, including those concerning several of Fritz’s paintings. My grandfather’s agents, he claimed, had never delivered the Baldung Grien, and spluttering in his usual manner, he insisted he had no knowledge of its whereabouts.
Haberstock was next moved to Nuremberg, where he gave testimony against many of the other figures involved in Nazi art looting, including Field Marshal Göring. In an interview with Benjamin Ferencz, the chief prosecutor at the trials, Haberstock lightheartedly bragged how he would “purchase” priceless paintings in Paris. The payments would be by check payable to the Banque de France, but then, through a sleight of hand, the Reich Ministry would add the same amount to the French war debt. Thus the price of the paintings would miraculously be amortized by the war debt; the check would be canceled, and Haberstock would have completed yet another “legal” transaction.
After that, Haberstock was briefly interned in the Hersbruck Camp for war criminals, before being released, only to be arrested again in the summer of 1947. Following a successful appeal, he voluntarily enrolled in a denazification program. Here again Haberstock was not merely being altruistic; he knew full well that if officially certified as having been cleansed of his Nazi past, he would be allowed to deal in art again. He now claimed he was not the main supplier for the Führermuseum. Instead he shifted the blame onto his old competitor Hildebrand Gurlitt. But Gurlitt had already been declared a free man, so technically nobody was to blame.
The looting of all the possessions of the Jews, especially their money and their art, was intrinsically linked to their annihilation. This was barely understood in the years immediately after the war. Accordingly, art looting was considered a bloodless crime.
Like so many others, Haberstock convinced local authorities that he had only been a Nazi “fellow traveler,” and he was soon rehabilitated. Emboldened, he even asked for the return of about fifty paintings from the Munich Collecting Point. Haberstock then went so far as to accuse US personnel of stealing several of his books. I wondered if that included the books he had stolen from my grandfather.
By 1950, Karl Haberstock was back in business dealing in art from his Munich apartment, overlooking the Englischer Garten. In the same building was his old cellmate, Walter Andreas Hofer. Visitors started referring to the building, a little tongue in cheek, as the Braunes Haus, after the Nazi Party headquarters that had been destroyed at the end of the war. Meanwhile, just down the road from the original Braunes Haus, on the Briennerstrasse, the third generation of the Böhler family was enjoying uninterrupted business at the Julius Böhler Gallery.
• • •
Back in Paris, in the years after the war, Bernard and Lili had elicited the help of the indomitable Rose Valland to track down our elusive Baldung Grien. Bernard also reported the loss to Interpol, while inquiries were sent to everybody who had been associated with the portrait. Mme. Wacker-Bondy insisted that the Baldung had been handed over with the other paintings to Haberstock’s agent Hugo Engel, or to his son Herbert Engel. Not long after, Hugo Engel had fled Paris for Switzerland. However, Herbert Engel had continued dealing with the Germans until the Allied liberation of Paris, when he also fled to Switzerland. The Engels fell into that unfortunate category of Jewish art dealers who had cooperated with the Nazis throughout the occupation, presumably to gain protection. But from the safety of Switzerland, Herbert Engel continued to offer his services to Haberstock. Not surprisingly, neither Engel senior nor junior responded to Rose Valland’s demand for information. Meanwhile, Paul Graupe, who had by then relocated from Switzerland to New York and was back in the art world, asserted that Haberstock must still be responsible. Graupe’s son, now called Tommy Grange, insisted Engel was in charge of shipping the Baldung to Berlin, but he didn’t clarify which Engel.
Next my father’s American lawyer was able to track down Graupe’s partner, Arthur Goldschmidt, who had also survived the war and, after a spell in Havana, was now also dealing art in New York. Unfortunately, Goldschmidt’s responses to our questions only seemed to complicate things further. He maintained that the last he knew was that a certain Mr. Meyer from 10 rue Antoine de la Forge, Paris 17e, was going to deliver the paintings, including the Baldung, to Karl Haberstock. I discovered that 10 rue Antoine de la Forge was an apartment building where Edith Piaf, no less, was living at the time. And that Mr. Meyer was in fact August Liebmann Mayer, a well-known art expert, who had fled Munich soon after the Nazis came to power. He had survived in Paris, at least for a while, by making himself useful to the likes of Bruno Lohse, Hans Wendland, and Karl Haberstock. Eventually the ERR confiscated whatever paintings Mayer had in his possession. However, I was not able to find any record of our Baldung Grien in the ERR records. Alas, the clues about Mayer had led to another dead end. The unfortunate and penniless art expert would not be able to answer any of Valland’s questions. Mayer had been arrested, I discovered, with several other Jews, while trying to seek the safety of Monaco. After a spell in the Drancy Internment Camp, August Mayer had been transported to Auschwitz in March 1944, where he was murdered on arrival.
Somebody was lying, but who? Rose Valland saw no alternative but to demand, if not the return of the Baldung, at least compensation from the new West German government. The diplomatic back-and-forth between the French and German authorities would last for years. Meanwhile, Bernard contacted the now-aging art historian Max Friedländer, who before the war had known Fritz’s collection well. Friedländer, who was the great authority on the Northern Renaissance, had survived the war, fairly comfortably, and was still living in Amsterdam. He replied that he had not seen the portrait since before the war, but that he would keep a lookout for it. Bernard never heard from him again, and then in 1958 Friedländer died. Meanwhile, a now elderly and fading Haberstock—he had lost all his teeth, apparently—continued to deny any responsibility. By 1956 Karl Haberstock, my grandfather’s nemesis, was dead also.
During this period Aunt Lili caught wind of some rumors that the painting had resurfaced on the art market. Several names were bandied about, but nothing of substance ever emerged. Ultimately, and despite Rose Valland’s earnest efforts, the West Germans successfully rejected all claims concerning the Hans Baldung Grien. The case had dragged on, amazingly, for fifteen years. Not until November 1960 did a reluctant Rose Valland officially give up her search for the painting.
• • •
Bernard and Lili, of course, had never given up, and I think I carried a good share of that determination with me that day, in July 2009, when I pulled the Gert von der Osten book off the shelf of the Getty library. Finally there were some answers to the Baldung enigma.
The Osten catalogue raisonné documented that in 1924 Fritz Gutmann bought the Baldung from Alfred Strölin, a famous publisher in Lausanne, Switzerland. Fritz is listed as the only owner of the painting from 1924 until after the war. There was no mention of Paul Graupe, Arthur Goldschmidt, or Karl Haberstock. The next entry and the most revealing, however cryptic, stated that the painting was in the hands of a “London dealer” between 1948 and 1950. By this time I had my suspicions, just as Lili had over fifty years before, but there was nothing I could prove and certainly nothing I could put in writing. According to Osten, the Baldung then made it across the Atlantic, where it appeared, in 1953, in the possession of the dealers Rosenberg and Stiebel of New York. Shortly after that, the painting was acquired by a certain Rudolf Heinemann, who ultimately gifted the Hans Baldung Grien in 1959 to the then Rutgers University Art Gallery, now called the Zimmerli Art Museum.
It did not take me long to remember who Rudolf Heinemann was. He was the same German art historian who had cataloged Heinrich Thyssen’s painting collection at the Villa Favorita, in Lugano, Switzerland, in 1941. Among those paintings were at least two that Thyssen had bought from my grandfather in the early thirties, including the beautiful Ercole de’ Roberti called The Argonauts Leaving Colchis. In the Villa Favorita as well were several silver-gilt cups and objets d’art from the Eugen Gutmann collection that Heinemann had also helped catalog; so it stood to reason he was perfectly familiar with the Gutmann collection. My suspicions were confirmed when I discovered that Heinemann had collaborated with Max Friedländer in 1949 on another Thyssen catalog. Friedländer was the same art historian who had written a glowing review of the Portrait of a Young Man just a year before Fritz had bought it. My father had, no doubt, thought it perfectly reasonable to seek help from such an expert considering his familiarity with the painting.
While the French and West German governments were still actively looking for our Baldung Grien, Rudolf Heinemann had discreetly donated the portrait to the low-profile Rutgers University Art Gallery. It seemed an unusual choice, especially as Heinemann, who was an enormously fat man and walked with two canes, had never had any children, let alone one that attended Rutgers. No doubt the Munich transplant, who now lived in New York, must have received a reasonable tax deduction. Though, I imagine, the greatest benefit to the distinguished art dealer, assuming he had deduced most of the sordid story, was knowing he was no longer responsible for the painting that had even eluded Hitler.
In hindsight, I suppose my father was naive in his hope that Friedländer might divulge some crucial information. As a matter of principle, almost no art scholar will ever divulge the whereabouts of a “private collection”—apparently even a Jewish art scholar, and apparently even after the Holocaust. Heinemann, on the other hand, before he could consider doing the right thing, would have had to admit, first, that he had done the wrong thing.
• • •
I arrived at the New Brunswick train station in New Jersey on a chilly October morning in 2009. The Rutgers campus lay before me, but signs to the Zimmerli Museum were few and far between. Eventually I found the museum more by instinct. The registrar came out to greet me before I was introduced to Suzanne Delehanty, the elegant new director. My reception was pleasantly deferential and they listened intently as I outlined the bizarre story of the painting. While we continued the discourse over a working lunch off campus, orders were given to pull the Hans Baldung Grien portrait out of storage. On our return, a solicitous Delehanty directed me to a large and virtually barren room and suggested I might like to spend some time alone with the portrait. To my consternation, the painting was lying on one side on the ground, leaning against the wall, and protected by a mover’s blanket. I’d forgotten it was Columbus Day, and apparently no staff were on hand to find an easel. I crossed the empty room to greet Baldung’s Young Man. He looked remarkably fresh and rosy cheeked, with his hat still at a rakish angle, especially when I noticed, above the artist’s monogram, the date he was created: 1509. The Young Man was exactly five hundred years old.
I could only marvel at the power of art to survive, as I touched, tentatively, the ancient frame. Although closer inspection showed a fair amount of damage to the paintwork of the sitter’s black coat, the colors had, fortunately, remained as vibrant as they must have been in Baldung’s lifetime, especially the green background for which the artist had been famous, and from which he derived his moniker “Grien.” The intricate black-on-white lacing of the Young Man’s snug-fitting jacket was a particular visual delight. It was a rare privilege to commune so privately with such a striking work of art. It was also, most movingly, an opportunity to bond with the grandfather I never knew, at least through the things he treasured.
I joined the others with a renewed sense of family pride. Before leaving them with my carefully researched portfolio, I thanked Suzanne Delehanty and all at the Zimmerli for their graciousness and consideration. They promised to get back to me as soon as they had time to translate and evaluate the many documents I had uncovered. Ultimately, the board of trustees of Rutgers University would have to make the final decision.
Several months passed without any significant progress. I feared that what had begun as such a promising case was inexorably turning into another protracted affair. The legal department at Rutgers had, for the first time most likely, just been thrust into the dark world of art looting and Holocaust restitution. It was clearly going to take some time before they emerged into the light again. By the end of March 2010, I decided we could all use a little bit of help.
The Holocaust Claims Processing Office, a division of the New York Banking Department, had been established in 1997 to help, free of charge, with recovering lost assets from Swiss bank accounts. Most recently, they had been helping me track down a painting by Hercules Seghers, a Dutch artist who had a great influence on Rembrandt. So when Rebecca Friedman, one of their investigative attorneys, offered to help, I was more than receptive. Soon Rebecca established a relationship with Rutgers’s counsel, and progress slowly returned. The university was eager to establish a value for the Baldung. I tried to point out that, high or low, the value should not affect my family’s rightful ownership. Not surprisingly, though, if the Zimmerli was going to do the right thing, as they kept reassuring me, they clearly wanted to know what they would be giving up. By the end of April they let it be known that they had found no documentation whatsoever that would indicate our claim was not legitimate. The next step for the university was to decide whether they wanted to keep the painting and, if so, how much they might be prepared to compensate my family for it. However, Rutgers’s counsel warned that, given that they were a public university, the process could be slow.
• • •
Meanwhile, the Dutch were still dragging out my claim for a fifteenth-century Pietà sculpture, along with a dozen antiques from the Gutmann collection, that had been in the system for about five years.
The Pietà was one of the pieces I had found in the Dutch archives, euphemistically filed under the heading “Origins Unknown.” Leafing through page after page of supposedly “ownerless” artworks, I had eventually come across this tragic image. As soon as I saw their photo of the sculpture, I knew I had seen it somewhere else. Then it came to me. An almost identical image was in the back of one of the portfolios that Nick had been given in Paris in 1996 by the successors of Rose Valland at the French Foreign Ministry. These portfolios consisted of all the documentation that they could find concerning the portion of the Gutmann collection that had been in Paris at the beginning of the war. Ultimately American soldiers had found the Pietà in a freight car outside Berchtesgaden in 1945. (German soldiers had not had time to salt away all of Hermann Göring’s loot before the arrival of the US army.) In March 1947, the Pietà had been returned to the Netherlands on the same train as the three marvelous silver-gilt works that had been in the Rijksmuseum and finally returned to us in 2002. While the Dutch and French restitution authorities argued over whether it was even the same statue, I felt I needed a break.
Two months earlier I’d learned that I required a serious medical procedure. I elected to undergo surgery and, all things being well, recuperate in Italy. The operation was a success, and May, my children, and my friends had helped me find great courage. My recovery on the tranquil shores of Lake Garda provided a welcome and long-overdue opportunity to reflect on the remarkable events of the last few years. From there we traveled down to Florence to visit my dear aunt. We drove out to the country, to a favorite restaurant of hers overlooking the beautiful Medici villa at Artimino. There was so much to tell her. Apart from the Baldung, the Franz von Stuck, the Pietà, and the antiques in Holland, I was also on the trail of our paintings by Hercules Seghers and Biagio d’Antonio, as well as one of the Jacob de Wits and three, no less, by Francesco Guardi. The third Guardi she was having trouble remembering. She marveled at what we had been able to trace, possessions that she thought had been lost forever. I attempted to explain the modern resources at my fingertips: the Getty Research Institute and the US war archives, which I could now access from my computer at home. But every mention of the Internet she would try to brush away with a dismissive sweep of her hand. “Basta! You and your Internet.” Then when I tried to describe searching for her grandfather Eugen Gutmann in Google Books, she laughed derisively. “Google came up with twelve thousand five hundred possibilities!” I persisted. The results were substantial: largely thanks to the digital revolution, I was finally piecing together the lost fragments of our family puzzle.
Immediately on my return to LA, I received a letter from the Dutch Ministry of Culture informing me that they had authorized the return of six more pieces: two beautiful Meissen dishes, three Persian prayer rugs, and a wonderful albarello jar made in 1560 in Castel Durante, which was painted with the story of Daniel and the Dragon. A fourth prayer rug had been deemed so threadbare that the Dutch authorities had destroyed it in the fifties. The letter also promised an imminent decision on five exquisite powder-blue Chinese vases (still in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam) and the large Pietà sculpture (in the Catharijneconvent Museum in Utrecht). Despite my medical close call, 2010 was turning into a very good year.
• • •
By mid-October, Rutgers’s legal team had concluded their due diligence, and the verdict was clear. The Hans Baldung Grien would be returned by the end of the year, or as soon as all the legal transfers could be completed. Rutgers and the Zimmerli had behaved in an exemplary fashion, and their honorable decision was indeed an important milestone in our family’s history. Lili and Nick were deeply moved when I called them. I was also grateful for the relative speed of the whole affair. It had been almost exactly a year since I’d first set foot in Suzanne Delehanty’s office.
In contrast, after a four-year wait, in early December a second settlement from the Swiss banks was finally awarded to my family. Back in 2006, after our first award from the Claims Resolution Tribunal, we became part of an appeal action. Like many other families, our first settlement from the Swiss banks had seemed unrealistic—they claimed they did not know the original value in the accounts.
A few days later the Dutch authorities announced they were returning the five beautiful Kangxi vases from the Rijksmuseum. I was overwhelmed by these successive victories. It was hard to believe how much the world had changed since the prolonged heartbreak that followed the war. Two days after that, the Franz von Stuck beat all expectations at Christie’s in London.
After a happy year-end holiday back home in California, May, James, and I returned in January to a freezing New Jersey. The wind ripped right through us as we stepped onto the icy platform at the New Brunswick station. Even our thickest coats did not seem to offer any protection. Instead we were comforted by the prospect of a warm reception at the museum. This time there was quite a throng, including some press and photographers. Suzanne Delehanty made the cheerful introductions. Soon I was deep in conversation with Dr. Philip Furmanski, the Rutgers executive vice president. When he explained that his parents had escaped Poland at the beginning of the Holocaust, I realized how he must have been an invaluable ally when the university had made its decision. In stark contrast to the first time I had seen the Baldung in that forlorn room, Suzanne now ushered us past a well-stocked refreshments table into a plush, red room. This was a particularly touching and sensitive gesture: Suzanne had made a clear point of remembering what I’d told her about my grandfather. He had hung the Baldung Grien, along with most of his other Renaissance portraits, in his red-walled gentlemen’s smoking room. And there was the Portrait of a Young Man, with a Green Background comfortably resting on a professional-looking easel with a red wall behind it.
I found myself actually holding on to the easel as I began to address all those attending the ceremony. I wanted to express my gratitude for the humanity with which Rutgers and the Zimmerli had treated my family. Getting back the painting had reaffirmed my faith in justice. I felt it was also important to stress how many other museums and institutions had only paid lip service to the Washington Principles, but most had balked when it came to restituting artworks from their own collections. Even museums with more art in storage than on display often resorted to technical legal-defense tactics when confronted with a request to return a looted item. Suzanne Delehanty then added, “The Zimmerli clearly wanted to do the right thing. What happened in the Holocaust was one of the black moments in human history. You want to do anything you can to correct, in some small way, this historic wrong.”
As is often the case, after such elation comes a moment of sadness. The time had come, regrettably, for us to say good-bye to the five-hundred-year-old Young Man. The Gutmanns, or what was left of us, were no longer the wealthy family we once were. Bernhard Gutmann’s Schloss Schönfeld, his fairy-tale moated castle high on a hill overlooking Dresden, seemed like a dream from a distant past. Today’s reality dictated that the only way to divide an heirloom among the heirs was through a sale. Lili would soon be turning ninety-two and I did not want to delay. We returned to Los Angeles and the Baldung Grien went to join the other old masters at Christie’s in New York. The Young Man did us proud.
