Breaking van Gogh

The business partnership between art dealer Paul Cassirer and Johanna Cohen-van Gogh-Bonger dissolved at the start of the First World War, when Cassirer, the gifted director of the Berlin Secession, who had published dozens of translated van Gogh letters and acquired 151 works of art from the Dutch master, was called up to fight for his native Germany in August 1914.246

As for Johanna Cohen-van Gogh-Bonger, widowed a second time two years earlier in 1912, the same year the Titanic struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage and sank, she published the first volume of Dutch edition letters in the spring of 1914. The following year, she moved to New York and began translating van Gogh’s letters into a fourth language, English.247 “At her death, September 2, 1925, she had reached letter 526. She had been back in Holland since 1919. During her lifetime a second printing of the Dutch edition was required, which meant a great success for a small country; she rejoiced in it very much.”248

Without Johanna van Gogh-Bonger’s passion and dedicated work ethic, Vincent van Gogh might have become an overlooked relic of the nineteenth century. Together with many art dealers, especially Paul Cassirer and later on collectors, “such as Helene Kröller, a wealthy art history major from Essen, and an American born pharmaceutical magnate, Alfred C. Barnes, the first American to own a van Gogh,”249 she spread the iconic talent and daring artwork of her late brother-in-law in Europe and across the Atlantic.

A year after Johanna’s death in 1925, workaholic Paul Cassirer’s relationship with his wife had come to an end. The one work of art he didn’t attend to, the relationship with his wife, left him heartbroken, at a loss. He committed suicide in 1926.250

With the deaths of Jo van Gogh-Bonger and Paul Cassirer, the experts who could have identified a fake van Gogh were gone. Thus, the timing of the Otto Wacker affair—the first of two van Gogh fakery scandals—is an event of historical significance. For someone to come out of the woodwork in 1926 with thirty-three never-seen-before (“new”) van Gogh paintings—purchased by a secret “Swiss collector”—the timing was either miraculous or planned by design.251

Otto Wacker was a working-class son of Hans Wacker, an artist, who grew up in Berlin. Otto’s brother Leonhard was a restorer of paintings and had his own art studio. Like Vincent van Gogh, who failed at most professions during his young life before becoming an artist, Otto also dabbled unsuccessfully in several professions, from cabaret singer to dancer, using the alias Olinto Lovael. In 1925, Otto apparently found his calling as an art dealer in Berlin. That was the same year that Johanna van Gogh-Bonger died and Paul Cassirer’s marriage unraveled, leading to his death the following year.

Otto Wacker needed the real experts dead. He got them. All that was left was a group of wealthy collectors owning dozens of van Goghs, but no real experts other than Emile Schuffenecker. The collectors couldn’t tell the difference between the artwork on a German marc and the swirling impasto strokes that vibrated a halo of light around Venus in Starry Night. Or so Wacker believed.

In putting on a van Gogh exhibition with the “new” paintings in 1927, Otto had sent a dozen paintings—about a third of the new, out-of-thin-air van Goghs with no provenance, other than a claim of their coming from a secret Russian collector through a more private Swiss one—over to the Paul Cassirer Gallery. It was the first of several of Otto’s miscalculations. During the unpacking of those canvases, Cassirer’s team of trained artists had become familiar with Vincent van Gogh, since the Dutch painter had been famous in Berlin since 1912. Despite Paul Cassirer’s death a couple of years earlier, his employees knew the artist and the Post-Impressionist style, brushwork, and techniques, and thus were able to see suspect paintings stand out from real ones at first glance. In pulling out five of the first nine paintings, Cassirer’s team noticed something odd. The handful of paintings looked as if several different hands had painted them, with at least one of them being a poor copy of a real van Gogh.

Otto Wacker had created his own trap, instead of buzz for a new Vincent van Gogh exhibition. The market for van Gogh paintings, among others, was red-hot in Berlin. But there still were enough people in the know, in addition to the Cassirer team, who were alive and had insight on the Dutch master, and who had attended enough past exhibitions that might question the provenance on some, if not all, of the thirty-three paintings exhibited.

As fate would have it, the day before the exhibit was set to open, a second major question on the authenticity of the new van Goghs emerged. Twenty-nine of the thirty-three “new” van Goghs hung on the walls of the gallery. The remaining four paintings were placed on the floor in front of the wall they were supposed to hang on. Timing was Wacker’s strategy, but it wasn’t on his side. Had those four van Goghs been delivered earlier, and had they already been hanging on the walls alongside the other 29 paintings, perhaps Otto Wacker would never have been caught. But fate had other plans.

When the last four arrived, they were placed next to their assigned positions on the floor. At that moment, Grete Ring, the general manager, saw the paintings and stopped dead. Something about them didn’t look right. Could these pieces be forgeries?

Ring and Walter Feilchenfeldt, the managing director of the firm holding the exhibit, agreed that all four were fakes. The paintings were removed from the exhibit just in time. But then, Ring and Feilchenfeldt wanted to take a closer look at the other 29 paintings.

For the next 5 years, art experts, art dealers, museum curators, and others carefully studied the 33 paintings attributed to van Gogh. In 1932, Wacker was found guilty of fraud and sentenced to 19 months in prison.252

As in most countries, then and now, the long arm of the law moved slowly. The police would end up raiding Wacker’s studio and confiscating the artwork in late 1929. It would be another three years before Otto Wacker would go to trial for the forgeries.253

Otto Wacker had tried various professions before becoming an art dealer in 1925. He succeeded in establishing a sound reputation with dealers and experts in the Van Gogh field, and De la Faille and Meier-Graefe constantly stressed their faith in his integrity.’ Grete Ring, one of Paul Cassirer’s closest business partners, puts the time much earlier: ‘One day, a youthful dancer, Olindo Lowael [sic], alias Otto Wacker, the son of a Düsseldorf painter, made his appearance in the Berlin art trade. At first—it was around 1922—he offered relatively small dealers comparatively modest pieces, works of the Dutch and Düsseldorf schools, and sometimes major works, an Israëls, an Achenbach, Schuch, Uhde, Trübner.254

Art experts during the trial and since then believed that Otto’s brother Leonhard had painted most, if not all, of the forgeries. Like Amedée Schuffenecker, who switched careers midstream, Otto Wacker jumped on the bandwagon of the easy-money, parasitic salesman-cum-art dealer, not to find his passion but to exploit an opportunity in a hot bubble market that would have brought huge profits—had he not been caught.

The 1932 Wacker Trial marked the end of the German avant-garde era. The rise of Nazi Germany and its Aryanization of the country that year saw the death to modern art. Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi Party and future chancellor of Germany, made sure of that, since he was attracted to Greek and Roman classical art from the past.

Hitler and the Nazis rode on the coattails of reelected German President Paul von Hindenburg on March 13, 1932. In the Weimar Republic, under its system of political rule, Hindenburg was forced to reluctantly appoint Adolf Hitler as the chancellor of Germany.255 The fateful decision set in motion the Aryanization of the country; Hindenburg would soon regret his catastrophic decision.

In 1933, the first wave of anti-Semitic laws took effect. Jewish students were barred from several schools and colleges, Jews were barred from state service positions, and Jewish lawyers and Jewish tax consultants were either diminished or had their licenses revoked.256

The Nazis would also implement laws that would remove Jews from offices and board seats in public companies, institutions, and banks. That was the first step to liquidate the financial assets and holdings of the banks. Franz and Paul’s Mendelssohn and Company bank sat at the center of the bull’s-eye for the Nazi Party, which would plunder their assets like wild dogs over the next five years: “Nazi policies to eradicate Jewish-owned banks and bankers had reduced his [Paul’s] income to only about fourteen percent (14%) of what it had been only two years earlier and … [f]aced with escalating Nazi predation directed at his real estate property—and with no reasonable expectation of receiving any sustainable future income from Mendelssohn and Co.—in October 1934 Mendelssohn-Bartholdy began liquidating his singular private modern art collection to protect his residual estate from Nazi seizure and to offset his precipitate deficit.”257

The same hard blow struck Franz von Mendelssohn. When his financial transactions became frozen, artwork was used as trade for money, services, goods, food, and for some family members provided a chance to flee as the Nazi seizures of Jewish property ran unchecked and unabated.

Forced to make some difficult choices for their families leading up to World War II, Franz and Paul began to figure out which paintings to keep and which ones to sell (at below-market value) in order to survive.

In his 2006 memoir on the von Mendelssohn family, Looking Back, Fritz Kempner, a cousin of Dr. Peter Witt, who was a grandson of Franz von Mendelssohn, wrote about his travails in surviving after the fall of Germany to the United States and Russia in Berlin at the end of World War II on the European continent:

When I drove up to this Shangri-La in my Army jeep in the middle of a fine day in July 1945, I had no idea what I was going to find. A farmhand directed me to the manor house, a two-story modern stone building occupying one side of a huge yard. Upon entering by the front door I found myself in a large vestibule with a marble floor, an open stairway to the second floor and on the wall—to my amazement—both a Van Gogh and a Cézanne that I recognized from my grandparents’ house in Berlin. Leading off the vestibule were four wooden doors, all closed, suggesting secrecy. I had a flash recall that Germans keep interior doors of private houses closed. With a pounding heart I opened a door closest to the sound of people talking. For a moment there was total silence as they were wondering what this soldier was doing interrupting their lunch and I was staring at them, looking for a familiar face. Out of the crowd of some fifteen people I suddenly recognized my mother’s sister and said: Tante Emma (Witt), Fritz Kempner.

I shall never forget the shouts of joyous recognition that this simple statement elicited.258

Coming to that farmhouse and reconnecting with family members was only the first step in rebuilding one’s life. A country like Germany that was going to rebuild, deal with food rations, and bear the fallout of war was no place to begin a new life. Since Peter Witt was young at the time, his life and career lay in front of him—but he had to get educated first.

In 1949, Dr. Peter Witt, together with his new wife, would take Wheat Field with Cypresses, along with twelve other von Mendelssohn-owned paintings, over the German border near their summerhouse into Switzerland, as Dr. Witt’s daughter Elise Witt recalled in a 2013 telephone interview, adding, “He was going to start a family.” Emil G. Bührle acquired the painting soon after.

In 1998, articles in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal noted the provenance issues of the Met’s recently acquired van Gogh, a part of Walter Annenberg’s 1993 donation. Was the landscape painting stolen by the Nazis and used as barter with arms dealer Emil G. Bührle during the war, some wondered. Finally, the Met’s Gary Tinterow was able to reach out to the heir of Franz von Mendelssohn, Dr. Peter Witt, who would become the missing link in the story of what had happened to the van Gogh masterpiece during and right after the war.

Dr. Witt and Gary Tinterow spoke by telephone. Tinterow asked Dr. Witt, who lived in North Carolina at the time, to come to New York City, offering to take him out for lunch to hear his story. But that day never came to pass, since Peter Nikolaus Witt would die later that September.259

Dr. Witt represented the intellectual side of the Moses Mendelssohn triangle of family traits: talent, business acumen, and philosophy. After the war, he would coauthor and produce more than 150 studies, most of them on spiders and their webs, from the “possible genetic component in web building” to LSD’s alteration of web-spinning spiders. His talent didn’t go unnoticed; he was recruited, rumor has it, by the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency. By the late 1950s, Dr. Witt took his family to America, where they settled in the south, and he continued his research.

Wheat Field with Cypresses was one of sixty paintings in the Franz and Paul von Mendelssohn collections. But unlike three-quarters of the artwork, Wheat Field was never used as barter for goods or money—at least the cousins didn’t lose or have to sell all of their artwork.

It’s a marvel that the heirs kept the remaining paintings out of the hands of Nazi General Hermann Göring and his lust to loot European-master art from Jewish art dealers and compromised art collectors—all despite Adolph Hitler labeling the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists “degenerate art.”

Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy would die in May 1935 at sixty. The liquidation of the fifth generation family bank, Mendelssohn and Company, was too much for him to bear. One month later, Franz died in Berlin. He was seventy years old. He, too, could be said to have died of a broken heart.

The deaths of Franz and Paul von Mendelssohn and the takeover four years later of their banking dynasty foreshadowed horrific days for German-Jewish people.