Breaking van Gogh

Before Emil G. Bührle enriched himself with the spoils of war, purchasing the majority of his art collection (including Wheat Field with Cypresses, acquired from Dr. Peter Witt) right after the European conflict up until his death ten years later, the richest man in Europe during World War II was a major armament manufacturer supplying both sides with arms and munitions.

Because he was operating out of neutral Switzerland, Bührle’s business-first approach allowed him to not choose sides during the fighting. Like many people at the start of World War II, he didn’t know which side would come out victorious. Would it be Hitler’s Germany? Stalin’s Russia? Or America and its allies? Without choosing sides, Bührle kept his German roots in check while the “Brown Sauce” poisoned German citizens and troops with nationalist fervor, exploited by Adolf Hitler.

Emil Bührle focused on enriching himself at the expense of others, no matter the moral implications, blood spilt, or lives lost. In the end, it didn’t mean anything to him, as long as he and his family business survived and kept growing. But few people really knew who Emil Bührle was and whether he looted art from Jewish art dealers, owners, or collectors. That would only become clear in the years and decades after World War II, when the CIA declassified “Project SafeHaven.”

The secret US operation to track Nazi gold after the war was first revealed to the public in the mid-1990s, though rumors had existed for years. With the declassification of “Project SafeHaven” came Switzerland’s own end-of-the-century investigation into such war crimes. Switzerland launched the Independent Commission of Experts (ICE), which published its final report in 2002. That, in turn, led to the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s publishing its 165-page report on the Nazi looting of art—The Hunt Controversy: A Shadow Report, researched and written by Erin Gibbons in 2006.

Not one of those documents painted a favorable portrait of Bührle. That led to a change of perception—some of the paintings in the arms manufacturer’s possession were not just “suspect”; they were also “tainted.”

From the ICE report, it is crystal clear which company dominated business in “neutral” Switzerland over the five years of the war. Oerlikon-Bührle & Co. had 490.5 million francs in export permits; the next closest company, Tavaro SA, Geneva, brought in one-fifth of that amount at 105.6 million francs. To give real perspective on how well Bührle’s company did during the war as an arms supplier, it suffices to mention that it outperformed the next thirty-eight companies on that list combined, including Tavaro, which cumulatively grossed 455.5 million francs, or 45 million francs less than Oerlikon-Bührle’s dominant, monster-sized company.260

But when Oerlikon-Bührle, Switzerland’s largest arms exporting company, went on the record long after the war stating that its annual reports went missing from 1939 to 1945, the entire duration of World War II, it showed that Emil could still cast a long shadow over his company a half-century after his death.261

In its investigation of the looting or buying of stolen European art during the war, the ICE Report raised several issues with Emil G. Bührle. In Table 9, “Restitution claims involving cultural assets before the Chamber of Looted Assets,” it pointed to the Vincent van Gogh drawing, Paysage—Landschaft in German, Landscape in English—as being looted during the war from Alexandrine de Rothschild, perhaps the only family with more combined wealth than Emil Bührle. It was taken from Alexandrine de Rothschild’s home on 2 rue Léonard de Vinci, Paris, by agents of Hermann Göring during the war, who sold it directly to Emil Bührle.262

The date of action in Switzerland for that drawing was November 13, 1947; the restitution of the object “as per judgement” came the following year, on July 5, 1948.263

Bührle, as the three investigations would show, was no saint. In fact, he was a known buyer of looted Nazi art.

Could Vincent have imagined that one of his masterpieces would run through two world wars? Or that the biggest European arms dealer after the war would own one version, some version, of his magnificent Wheat Field with Cypresses landscape painting?

In the Simon Wiesenthal Center–sponsored report, an entire chapter—“Herr Buhl and his associates in Lucerne”—was dedicated to Emil Georg Bührle. Herr Buhl, whose identity remains otherwise elusive, was identified as an art trafficker who both sold and commissioned a number of forgeries during the war. The report rhetorically asked whether this Swiss art dealer’s name, “Herr Buhl,” was in fact mistranslated from the original source material by Irish military intelligence officers.264 With clues such as “an unreliable dealer who sells forgeries,” who isn’t a “prompt payer in money matters and is unreliable as well,”265 one starts to see Buhl as Bührle when all of his other moral, ethical, greedy, and power-hungry issues are looked at in concert.

Another thoroughly researched, well-documented source points to the Göring-Bührle connection of stolen Nazi art. It comes from the 2013 book Hermann Göring and the Nazi Art Collection, written by Kenneth Alford:

Three French Impressionist paintings were also included as well two or possibly three pictures bought by the Swiss arms manufacturer Bührle from Dequoy in Paris.

Wendland claimed to be unable to remember the method by which Bührle’s pictures were transmitted so conveniently from Paris, but it is possible that Wendland had begged this favor his good friend and powerful protector [Göring.]

When the Impressionist pictures arrived in Lucerne late in 1941, Wendland noted that four of the finest pictures he had chosen were missing.

In 1943 Wendland accompanied Bührle and a Zurich lawyer to a bank vault in Zurich for the purpose of viewing some paintings, which according to the lawyer who was the custodian of the key of the vault, were being offered for sale by a Dutch firm.

The paintings were recognized by Wendland as the four missing paintings which were supposed to be adorning Göring’s bedroom walls, as he advised Bührle against buying them.

Göring himself never went to Switzerland. Hofer and Angerer were the only two agents active there and, of the two, Hofer was the more significant as he had lived there and was closely associated with the two most important figures, Fischer and Wendland.266

After the war, Hermann Göring was tried and sentenced to be executed at the Nuremberg Trial for war crimes against humanity (he committed suicide on the eve of his execution). With the loss of Göring, Emil Bührle needed new agents to search, locate, and secure the best artworks across Europe. (After the war, only seventeen art historians emigrated to Switzerland, while the rest of the experts left Europe and emigrated abroad, about 85 percent of the total before the war. Among them was Paul Rosenberg, who moved to New York City.)267

Dr. Fritz Nathan, one of the leading Jewish architects before the rise of Adolf Hitler, moved to Holland, the land of van Gogh, in 1938.268 He would become the de facto go-between on several acquisitions made by Emil Bührle after the war, since art deals between wealthy buyers like Bührle needed a trusted broker, a middleman who would find the sellers, vetting the works of art for sale, their condition, the names of the artists, whether the paintings were authentic or crude forgeries, and whether there was a paper trail of past owners.

Dr. Fritz Nathan would represent Dr. Peter Witt on more than one sale, with Nathan’s name on the Met’s provenance and not that of Peter Witt himself.

As discussed earlier, Peter Nikolaus Witt, the Mendelssohn family heir, carried Schuffenecker’s Wheat Field with Cypresses across the Swiss border to freedom in the aftermath of Nazi Germany. His scholarship eventually enabled him to move to America, which he saw as the land of opportunity. In order to move his family there, he needed money. It so happened that both he and Emil G. Bührle, whose wealth and love of art were well known, lived in Switzerland.

In 1951, Peter Witt gave two inherited Vincent van Gogh paintings to Dr. Fritz Nathan to broker a sale to Bührle: Blossoming Chestnut Branches269 and the well-traveled Wheat Field with Cypresses.270

In the 1998 interview with the New York Times, in the months before his death, Dr. Witt revealed his reason for selling the van Goghs: “‘We needed money, and he was the only person who had the cash in his pocket,’ Dr. Witt recalled. He said he could not remember how much Bührle had paid, except that ‘it was quite a large sum.’”271 That “large sum” of money allowed Peter Witt to leave Europe with his family and continue his stellar career for the next three decades.

As for Emil G. Bührle, he got what he wanted—more priceless van Goghs—for what would become easily the best and most impressive private collection in Europe, as Charles Moffett, Walter Annenberg, and NGA Director J. Carter Brown would see firsthand. But without the expertise to detect a forgery or the ability to identify the real version by comparing and contrasting the condition and quality of the different versions of Wheat Field with Cypresses, Bührle had no idea that he had been sold a forgery. There was no way of telling.

Visiting the E. G. Bührle Foundation online, one reads that the arms dealer to the Nazis had bought three-quarters of his vast collection of artwork from 1951 to 1956. Not a bad haul for the start of the Cold War. Did he really do that? That would have been 75 percent of the final tally of 155 paintings, two gothic altarpieces, and two dozen medieval sculptures. With a grand total of 181 works of art, it meant that he had purchased 136 of those pieces over the scant last six years of his life. The more likely scenario is that Bührle acquired most of his paintings during or right after the war. And just like the Oerlikon’s financial records, which magically disappeared, any records Bührle might have kept on the purchase, barter, or theft of the paintings were long gone.