AR Tnews DECEMBER MoMA’s Problematic Provenances

©2011 ESTATE OF GEORGE GROSZ/LICENSED BY VAGA, NEW YORK/MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK

THE ARTWORK that confronts visitors ap-proaching the sculpture

garden from the ticket desk of New York’s Museum of Mod-ern Art is Auguste Rodin’s massive bronze sculpture of Hon-oré de Balzac. It was cast in 1954, and a year later, on May3, 1955, at a ceremony in the museum’ssculpture garden, it was presented toMoMA by the “friends of CurtValentin,” a New York art dealer whohad died of a heart attack the previousyear while traveling in Italy. Valentinhad been one of the most influentialdealers of modern art in the world, and130 of his friends had joined together to buy the Balzac anddonate it to the museum as a gift in his memory.Alfred H. Barr Jr., MoMA’s founding director, was a long-

time friend of Valentin’s and had had many business dealingswith him. He told the museum’s patrons that day that he was“deeply grateful” and “greatly touched” by the gift of theRodin and the honor it bestowed on the museum to be “thecustodian of this memorial to Curt Valentin.” He said that

MoMA’sProblematicProvenancesBehind a lawsui t brought aga inst

the Museum of Modern Ar t by

the he i rs of George Grosz l ies a

t roubl ing h is tory of acqui r ing

works se ized by the Naz is and

sold to suppor t the German war

ef for t B Y W I L L I A M D. C O H A N

74 December 2011 ARTnews

William D. Cohan, author of Money and Power: How GoldmanSachs Came to Rule the World (Doubleday), is a columnist forBloomberg View and writes for many publications.

George Grosz,The Poet MaxHerrmann-

Neisse, 1927.

ARTnews DE C E M B E R 2011

ARTnews December 2011 75

MoMA, more than any other museum, was “in-debted” to Valentin.That MoMA would prominently display a

monumental Rodin sculpture is hardly surpris-ing. Far more intriguing, though, is the questionof why MoMA would pay such an enormouspublic tribute to this controversial art dealer. Curt Valentin, who was Jewish, fled Nazi Ger-

many in 1937 and moved to New York, where—with authorization from the Third Reich,according to a November 14, 1936, letter fromthe Reich Chamber of Fine Arts—he opened agallery, first on West 46th Street and two yearslater, as his fortunes improved, on West 57thStreet, to sell what the Nazis considered “de-generate art.” Valentin funneled the proceeds ofthe art sales back to Germany, which neededforeign currency to support its war economy. Hewas one in a group of Jewish art dealers in Ger-many and Austria who were allowed safe pas-sage to New York in order to sell confiscatedartworks and send the foreign currency they

garnered back to the Third Reich. According toStephanie Barron, senior curator at the Los An-geles County Museum of Art and organizer ofthe landmark 1991–92 exhibition “‘DegenerateArt’: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Ger-many,” records kept by the propaganda ministryin Berlin prove that many works were sold toValentin so that he could resell them abroad.Museum officials such as Barr at MoMA and

Hilla Rebay at the Museum of Non-ObjectivePainting (precursor of the Guggenheim Mu-seum) bought artworks from Valentin, usuallyat below market prices, by German artists suchas George Grosz and Paul Klee that were confis-cated or stolen by the Nazis before and duringWorld War II. Those works are still in the per-manent collections of both MoMA and theGuggenheim.New York attorney Raymond J. Dowd, a part-

ner in the firm Dunnington, Bartholow & Miller,and Jonathan Petropoulos, chair of the historydepartment at Claremont McKenna College inClaremont, California, and author of The Faust-ian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany,contend that artwork stolen by the Nazis beforeand during World War II passed throughValentin’s Manhattan art gallery and ended upin MoMA’s permanent collection without com-pensation being paid to the artists or to the col-lectors from whom it had been stolen. On behalf of two heirs of the artist George

Grosz—Martin Grosz, his son, and Lilian Grosz,the wife of his late son Peter—Dowd suedMoMA in federal court in the Southern Districtof New York, in May 2009, to compel the mu-seum to return to the heirs three works by Groszin the museum’s collection: two paintings,The Poet Max Herrmann-Neisse (1927) and Self-Portrait with a Model (1928), and a watercolor,Republican Automatons (1920). In response toDowd’s suit, the museum claimed that it hadproper title to all of the disputed works. In January 2010, Judge Colleen McMahon

tossed out the Grosz lawsuit on the grounds thatthe three-year statute of limitations for makingthe claim against MoMA had run its course. TheUnited States Court of Appeals for the SecondCircuit upheld that decision. Dowd petitionedthe Supreme Court to hear the case, but thispast October the high court turned it down.Dowd contends that the courts ruled in

MoMA’s favor on a technicality—the statute oflimitations—and failed to examine the underly-ing evidence. Charles A. Goldstein, counsel to the Commis-

sion for Art Recovery, is not involved in theGrosz case but has reviewed the suit’s numerousfilings. He says he is appalled by MoMA’s failureto make its files available to researchers tryingto figure out the provenance of the Grosz works


©MAX BECKMANN ESTATE/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK/VG BILD-KUNST, BONN/LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART, GIFT OF JANE WADE-LOMBARD/ROBERT GORE RIFKIND CENTER FOR GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST STUDIES DEPARTMENT

Max Beckmann, Portraitof Curt Valentin, 1946.Many artworks seized or

stolen by the Nazispassed through

Valentin’s hands toAmerican buyers.

and others in the museum’s collection. “It’s re-ally a cover up,” Goldstein says. “We don’t knowwhether they should have them or they shouldnot have them. But we know from their behav-ior that there’s a cover up.”Goldstein says that MoMA director Glenn

Lowry, as a member of the Association of ArtMuseum Directors, should follow AAMD guide-lines that urge museums to comply with thePrinciples on Nazi-Confiscated Art establishedby the State Department–sponsored Washing-ton Conference on Holocaust Era Assets in 1998and agreed to by representatives of 44 nations.“The Washington Principles said, ‘Look at

your collections, examine them, make publicthe information you have, and if claims aremade, deal with them,’” Goldstein says. “‘Reacha just and fair result.’ This museum has agreedthat if a claim is made, it should reach a justand fair result. Now what does it do? It seeks tocut off claims by taking claimants into court.”The general approach of MoMA and other

museums, including the Museum of Fine Arts inBoston, of dragging potential claimants intocourt to resolve provenance disputes, ratherthan trying to settle them privately between theparties or through binding arbitration, has had achilling effect on the claims process, Goldsteinadds. “If you’re a claimant, if you want to talkto a museum, you’ve got to know that if youwalk in the door and say ‘I want to talk to youabout grandpa’s painting,’ that you may be adefendant in federal court,” he says. “That’llgive you a second thought, wouldn’t it?”Citing his travel schedule, Ronald Lauder, a

former chairman of the Museum of Modern Artand founder and chairman of the Commissionfor Art Recovery, declined to comment on thematter to ARTnews.In an e-mail to ARTnews, a MoMA spokes -

person wrote, “The Museum rejects any impli-cation that it is not in compliance with theguidelines established by the Association of ArtMuseum Directors with regard to the Washing-ton Principles.”MoMA also stated that “staff across six cura-

torial departments is engaged in provenance re-search on an ongoing basis. Museum staffconducts research on all incoming and outgoingloans, new acquisitions, and on works inMoMA’s collection. When new information isfound, it is shared with the appropriate parties,and if it concerns works in MoMA’s collection,it is added to the Museum’s records and to theProvenance Research Project web site.”In another statement, the museum said that it

had “worked closely with the [Grosz] estate fornearly six years on the provenance of theworks. . . . The Museum vigorously rejects anyimplication that it takes claims regarding spolia-

tion of World War II art with anything otherthan utmost seriousness, and it is confident thatits efforts in responding to each such claim farsurpass even the highest ethical and legal obli-gations demanded by such extraordinary cir-cumstances. . . . Based on its extensive researchin this case, with the full understanding of andrespect for the sensitivities involved in claims ofthis type, the Museum concluded that it heldgood title to the Grosz works, and advised theestate accordingly in 2005. . . . It is important tonote that the statute of limitations that thecourts have found to preclude the estate’s claimshave nothing to do with obscuring the historicalrecord with regard to World War II or its after-math. . . . Thus any suggestion that the passageof time or the assertion of the statute put theestate at a disadvantage is not credible.”

NINETY BOXES of Curt Valen -tin’s papers,

documenting his 17 years in the United States,are archived at MoMA. According to an index ofthe documents on MoMA’s website, there is littlematerial in the archive dating from the 35 yearsof Valentin’s life in Germany. The biographical


ROLLIE MCKENNA

Alfred H. Barr Jr., MoMA’sfounding director, in themuseum’s sculpturegarden. He purchasedmany works from hisfriend Curt Valentin.

information about Valentin on MoMA’s websiteis truncated. “After completing his education,Valentin became a modern art dealer in Berlin,”it says. There is no mention of Valentin’s work asassistant to Alfred Flecht heim, a prominent Jew-ish art dealer with galleries in both Berlin andDüsseldorf. Flechtheim was born into a family of wealthy

Rhineland grain merchants, but he soon left thefamily business to follow his passion, afterspending his wife’s entire dowry on art. In the1920s, he had galleries in many German cities,showing at various times Max Beckmann,Rudolf Belling, George Grosz, and Karl Hofer, aswell as Picasso, Braque, Chagall, and Renoir. The ordeal of Grosz and his involvement with

Flechtheim, Valentin, and MoMA was describedby Dowd in court filings with the help ofPetropoulos, among other experts. In 1923,Grosz had his first exhibition at the GalerieFlechtheim in Berlin, which helped to establishhis artistic reputation. Two years later, the artistagreed to make Flechtheim his exclusive dealerin exchange for a monthly stipend of between300 and 800 reichmarks. In 1927, Grosz paintedThe Poet Max Herrmann-Neisse, a haunting por-

trait of his friend; in April 1928 he consigned itto Flechtheim. The next month the painting wasexhibited at the Prussian Academy of Arts.In March 1931, MoMA held an exhibition of

German painting and sculpture. Seven of Grosz’spaintings were included, four of which were onloan from the Flechtheim Gallery, including bothHerrmann-Neisse and Self-Portrait with a Model.By December 1931, Flechtheim and his gal-

leries were in financial distress, and the dealercancelled Grosz’s monthly stipend, although hecontinued to try to sell his paintings. In 1932,Flechtheim’s financial situation improved mar-ginally and he tried to reestablish the arrange-ment. By this time, he had hired Valentin as hisassistant and, in May 1932, dispatched him toNew York to meet with Grosz, who was teach-ing for a semester at the Art Students League.The artist, however, rejected the proposed ex-clusive arrangement.Although Grosz and his wife returned briefly

to Berlin from New York, he had decided to fleethe country. Grosz was not Jewish, but he wasan outspoken critic of the Nazis. On January12, 1933, he left Berlin for New York for good.Eighteen days later, Hitler became the Chancel-lor of Germany. The next day, Nazi storm troop-ers raided Grosz’s apartment and his studio. “Ihave reason to believe that I would not bealive, had they found me there,” the artist laterwrote in his autobiography.Within months of Hitler’s assumption of

power, the well-documented process ofAryanization—the confiscation of propertyfrom Jews—began in earnest. In March 1933,an art dealer named Alexander Vömel confis-cated Flechtheim’s Düsseldorf gallery. “Vömelwas a member of the SA (Sturm Abteilung, orBrown Shirts)—the violent Nazi paramilitaryorganization,” Petropoulos wrote in a report hefiled in the Grosz lawsuit. “Vömel’s takeover ofFlechtheim’s Dusseldorf gallery should beviewed as a kind of ‘Aryanization.’ Transfer ofthe Dusseldorf branch away from Flechtheimunder duress is a strong indication that some-thing similar occurred with regards to his Berlingallery.”Indeed, by November 1933, Dowd wrote in

his complaint, before he fled Germany,Flechtheim hired Alfred Schulte, a German “taxadviser,” to take control of his galleries and liq-uidate them, presumably to pay the so-called“flight taxes” required of Jews seeking to leavethe country. “The Galerie Flechtheim is closed,”Schulte wrote to Grosz in New York. He was liq-uidating its business and trying to avoid bank-ruptcy. He demanded that the artist send tohim the 16,255 reichsmarks he believed Groszowed the gallery, but, according to Grosz, hedid not owe the gallery any money because the


COURTESY LILIAN GROSZ

George Grosz. He claimed that hisportrait of Max

Herrmann-Neisse hadbeen stolen from him.

payments made to him over the years were inthe nature of a nonrefundable advance.Schulte also reminded Grosz that the gallery

still had a number of his paintings on consign-ment. But, he added, “such art is definitely notsaleable at the present time. Whatever the cir-cumstance I have [to] get cash from you.” Inthe end, Schulte got Flechtheim’s creditors 20cents on the dollar and avoided a bankruptcyfiling but did not get any money from Grosz. Around the same time, Flechtheim left Berlin

for London, bringing with him a number of thepaintings he had on consignment, and went towork for the James Mayor Gallery. He wroteGrosz in April 1934 that some of Grosz’s paint-ings were now at the Mayor Gallery, includingRepublican Automatons, and some were at theGalerie Billet in Paris, including Self-Portraitwith a Model. He, too, asked Grosz for money.“In Germany everything is over for me and tobe in a foreign country these days withoutmoney!” he lamented. His wife, Betti, hadstayed behind in Berlin in an eight-year, ulti-mately fruitless, effort to sell her real estate toraise the cash needed to pay the exit tax.Alfred Barr was well aware of Flechtheim’s

difficult circumstances. On August 8, 1935,Flechtheim wrote Barr a letter informing him, “Ilost all my money and all my pictures,” addingthat “nearly the only thing” he had been able tosave was a Wilhelm Lehmbruck sculpture, whichhe urged Barr to buy. “He seems to be in prettydire straits.” Barr then wrote to a museumtrustee. “I think he might possibly take as littleas $2,000 for this really great modern figure. Wemight offer him even less.” Lehmbruck’s Stand-ing Youth, as it is now called, is a 1936 gift ofAbby Aldrich Rockefeller to MoMA.Flechtheim’s situation quickly deteriorated.

The dissolution of his Berlin gallery was com-pleted by February 1937. He and Betti had di-vorced in 1936, on the theory that her life wouldbe easier if she were no longer formally associ-ated with him. (They intended to remarry.) InMarch 1937, in London, Flechtheim stepped on arusty nail and developed gangrene. Both of hislegs were amputated, to no avail. He died soonthereafter. In late 1941, told that she was aboutto be sent “to the East,” a euphemism for theconcentration camps, Betti committed suicide byoverdosing on sleeping pills.

VALENTIN left the FlechtheimGallery in 1934 and

began working in the Berlin gallery of KarlBuchholz, who was not Jewish and whowould later, around 1938, become one of fourNazi-authorized art dealers engaged in market-ing massive amounts of art being removedfrom museums, according to Petropoulos and

other experts on the art history of the Nazi era. By November 1936, Valentin had made his

deal with the Nazis that would allow him to emi-grate to New York and to sell “degenerate art” tohelp fund the war effort. “The President of theReich Chamber of Fine Arts instructed me to tellyou that it would be of no objection to him ifyou make use of your connections with the Ger-man art circle and thereby establish supplemen-tary export opportunities, if [this is done]outside Germany,” according to the authorizationletter. “Once you are in a foreign country, youare free to purchase works by German artists inGermany and make use of them in America.”In January 1937, with financing from Buch-

holz, Valentin left for New York and set up theKarl Buchholz Gallery at 3 West 46th Street.According to Buchholz’s daughter Godula, who


©OTTO DIX/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK/VG BILD-KUNST, BONN/AKG-IMAGES/NEWSCOM

Otto Dix, Portrait of theArt Dealer Alfred

Flechtheim, 1926. “InGermany everything isover for me,” Flechtheimwrote to Grosz in 1934.

wrote a biography of her father, Valentin ar-rived in New York supplied with “degenerateart” from Germany. Normally, Jews allowed toleave Nazi Germany were permitted to takewith them only ten reichsmarks, if that. ButValentin carried “baggage containing sculp-tures, [p]aintings, and drawings from the Ga-lerie Buchholz in Berlin,” Godula Buchholzwrote. Her account, published in 2005, con-trasts dramatically with Valentin’s own asser-tion, echoed by Barr, that he came to New Yorkvirtually destitute.Valentin later told the FBI, which during the

war investigated him for violating the Tradingwith the Enemy Act (and seized paintings sentto him by Buchholz), that he had started hisgallery with the help of both the banker E. M.Warburg, who was on MoMA’s board, andsomeone from Cassel & Co., a small investmentfirm. He made no mention to the FBI of his fi-nancial support from Buchholz. Nor did Barrmention it in a letter he wrote in June 1942supporting Valentin’s application for U.S. citi-zenship. “Mr. Valentin is a refugee from theNazis both because of Jewish extraction andbecause of his affiliation with free art move-ments banned by Hitler,” Barr wrote. “He cameto this country in 1937, robbed by the Nazis ofvirtually all possessions and funds.” ButMoMA’s website tells a version of events closerto that of Buchholz’s daughter than to Barr’s.“In 1937 Valentin immigrated to the UnitedStates with a sufficient number of modern Ger-man paintings to open a gallery under theBuchholz name in New York City,” it reads.Barr knew all about Valentin’s relationship

with Buchholz and the Nazi regime, and hewanted to use Valentin as a conduit for the pur-chase of art seized by the Nazis, as their corre-spondence makes clear. Beginning in 1937 theNazis had seized more than 17,000 artworksfrom German museums. After taking the onesHitler preferred, the Nazis piled up most of theremainder, about 4,000 works, in front ofBerlin’s central fire station and torched them, onMarch 20, 1939. A further 700 of the artworks stolen by the

Nazis were given to art dealers to sell in order toraise foreign currency. One such sale of 126paintings and sculptures took place at the FischerGallery, in Lucerne, Switzerland, on June 30,1939. In addition to works by Braque, Chagall,Gauguin, Klee, Matisse, Modigliani, and Mon-drian, there were also works by German and Aus-trian Expressionists, including Otto Dix, ErnstLudwig Kirchner, Oskar Kokoschka, Franz Marc,Max Pechstein, and Emil Nolde.This was a major ethical dilemma for museum

directors around the world. Here was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to acquire pricelessworks of art at auction; unfortunately, theworks had been confiscated from German muse-ums. This fact was enough to persuade mostU.S. museums to stay away, a decision rein-forced by the horrific March conflagration. Oth-ers believed that participating in the Fischerauction was preferable to watching the artworkspossibly be destroyed.In any event, private collectors did participate

in the auction, including the Saint Louis pub-lisher Joseph Pulitzer Jr. and the New Yorkbanker Maurice Wertheim. With the help ofthen–ARTnews editor Alfred Frankfurter,Wertheim purchased van Gogh’s 1888 Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gauguin for 175,000Swiss francs (about $40,000), the highest pricepaid at the auction. The painting had been con-fiscated from the Neue Staatsgalerie in Munichand is now in the Fogg Art Museum of HarvardUniversity. Pulitzer’s adviser was Pierre Matisse,the art-dealing son of Henri.Barr secretly enlisted Valentin as his agent in

the Fischer auction, with funds supplied by histrustees. The museum acquired five artworks thatday: Kirchner’s Street Scene and Lehmbruck’sKneeling Woman, both confiscated from theBerlin National Gallery; Klee’s Around the Fish,from the Dresden Gallery; Matisse’s The BlueWindow, from the Folkwang Museum in Essen;and Derain’s Valley of the Lot at Vers, from theCologne Museum. The day after the auction, Barrwrote to a MoMA colleague from Paris: “I am justas glad not to have the museum’s name or myown associated with the auction. . . . I think itvery important that our releases on our own Ger-man acquisitions should state that [the works]


©ULLSTEIN BILD/THE IMAGE WORKS

Before destroying orselling “degenerate art,”the Nazis exhibited it(here, at the Haus derKunst, Berlin, 1938)

under mocking banners.

have been purchased from the Buchholz Gallery,New York.”That is exactly what happened. Two months

later, MoMA announced that it had purchasedthe five paintings through Valentin’s gallery,which by then he owned in full, having boughtout Buchholz. (He changed the name in 1951 tothe Curt Valentin Gallery.) Art publicationshailed the acquisition as a repudiation of theNazi regime and its policies toward so-calleddegenerate art.Charles Goldstein says that the museum

should have stayed away from the Fischer auc-tion. He adds that any number of State Depart-ment directives after World War II put MoMA“on notice” to be on the lookout for stolen art.“Having been specifically warned, they boughtall of this stuff in the ’50s and ’60s withoutlooking into provenance, or found the prove-nance incomplete,” Goldstein says. Many collectors did boycott the Fischer auc-

tion, according to Barron. She wrote that muse-ums and private collectors “were understandablyambivalent about participating in the sale. Onthe one hand, many of the works to be auc-tioned were of such quality and rarity that theycommanded attention; on the other, sympathyfor a boycott ran high, given the commonplaceassumption . . . that the proceeds were destinedto further Hitler’s nefarious intentions.” Barronbelieves, however, that the purchasers, whatevertheir motives, “saved these works from probabledestruction.”

VALENTIN’S role on behalf ofMoMA at the

Fischer auction was revealed in Alice GoldfarbMarquis’s 1989 biography, Alfred H. Barr, Jr.:Missionary for the Modern. Marquis wrote that“Barr handsomely repaid Valentin for his serv-ices by sending trustees to shop in his galleryand by stopping there himself about once aweek. When the dealer applied for Americancitizenship, in 1943, Barr vouched for his goodcharacter.” Other researchers have dug more deeply into

the link between Valentin and MoMA. In 2000,Laurie Stein, an independent art historian andprovenance expert in Chicago (and for twoyears the director of the Pulitzer Foundationfor the Arts in Saint Louis), researched the con-nection between art seized by the Nazis andthe galleries in Switzerland that sold it. (In thelate 1990s, Stein wrote several articles for ART-news about the German art scene.)Some of Stein’s findings were published in the

Bergier Report, the Swiss government’s volumi-nous effort—the first volume of which was pub-lished in 2001—to explain the role the nationplayed in the sale of seized and stolen art during

World War II. “The highest concentration ofworks of degenerate art from Germany [to] cometo an American museum through Valentin’s in-fluence and connections with Buchholz in Ger-many and Bernoulli”—art dealer ChristopheBernoulli, a longtime Valentin friend—“inSwitzerland, can be found today at the Museumof Modern Art in New York,” Stein concluded.She wrote that the 15-year “close” relation-

ship between Valentin and Barr produced forMoMA any number of “confiscated” artworksand “works of undetermined provenance.” Steinnoted the cooperation she had received fromMoMA’s prints and drawings department andthanked its professionals for their “extraordinaryopenness.” In the first part of her two-partstudy, she listed, in addition to the five worksbought at the Fischer auction, the following art-works in MoMA’s collection that have question-able provenances: Max Beckmann’s The ProdigalSon, a series of four gouaches, from the Folk-wang Museum, Essen; Paul Klee’s Twittering Ma-chine, from the National Gallery in Berlin; EmilNolde’s Magicians; Vasily Kandinsky’s Untitled(Abstrakte Komposition), from the KunsthalleMannheim; and Otto Dix’s Café Couple.According to a letter Dowd wrote to Theodore

H. Katz, the magistrate judge involved in hislawsuit, the second part of Stein’s study for theSwiss government “contains a case study ofrecords at the MoMA showing how CurtValentin brought Nazi-looted artworks throughSwitzerland to the United States,” reflecting theresearch Stein herself wrote she had done in partone of her report. The Swiss government turnedover the first part of Stein’s study to Dowd but


©ULLSTEIN BILD/R. DIETRICH/THE IMAGE WORKS

Among the “degenerate”artworks on display wasJames Ensor’s Death and the Masks, 1897,confiscated from the

Kunsthaus Mannheim in1937 and sold at theFischer auction to theMuseum of Modern andContemporary Art in

Liège, Belgium.

not the second part, which contained Stein’s casestudies of works in MoMA’s collection withsketchy provenances. Dowd asked Katz to forceMoMA to make available to him the second partof Stein’s report. But that didn’t happen beforeJudge McMahon threw out the case, and then itbecame moot.Dowd wrote to Katz that the museum had re-

fused his request to help him procure the sec-ond part of Stein’s report. MoMA declined arequest to make it available to ARTnews. In any event, Stein, who worked for MoMA

as an expert in the Grosz case, has changed herevaluation of Valentin. When Dowd took Stein’sdeposition in the Grosz case, in November2009, she also declined to share the second partof her report, citing her confidentiality agree-ment with the Swiss government. In her depo-

sition with Dowd, a copy of which was re-viewed by ARTnews, Stein contradicted whatshe had written in the Swiss report and as-serted that Curt Valentin was a “reputable artdealer” and that “the liquidation of GalerieFlechtheim was an orderly professionalprocess.” But Dowd pointed out to Katz, in ar-guing why he needed to see the second part ofStein’s report, that Stein’s comments in herdeposition were “directly contrary to the con-clusion reached in the Bergier Report [for]which she was a contributing historian specifi-cally charged with analyzing Alfred Flechtheimand his gallery.” Citing her confidentialityagreement with MoMA, Stein also declined, inan e-mail message, to speak with ARTnews.In an e-mail to ARTnews, a MoMA

spokesperson said, “Ms. Stein remains underon-going confidentiality obligations to the Mu-seum. We decline your request” to speak to her.

ON MAY 29, 1944, proceedingunder the Trading

with the Enemy Act, the U.S. governmentseized 401 artworks that Buchholz had shippedto Valentin. According to MoMA’s website, atleast one of the seized paintings, AugustMacke’s Lady in a Park, found its way intoMoMA’s collection. Valentin later sold thepainting to Henry Pearlman, whose foundationdonated it to MoMA in 1956. Over the years, the museum has occasionally

acknowledged that artworks in its collectionhave “provenance gaps” (MoMA’s words). A1965 MoMA document lists 29 paintings in thecollection by 16 artists “which were formerly inGerman collections and were designated ‘de-generate art’ under the Nazis.” Three of thepaintings—by Beckmann, Klee, and Nolde—bought at the Fischer auction were on the list,as was Matisse’s The Blue Window, a gift fromAbby Aldrich Rockefeller, which had been inthe Folkwang Museum in Essen.Another MoMA list, titled “European Paint-

ings in the Collection of the Museum of Mod-ern Art: Provenance Gaps 1933–1945,” wascreated in April 2000 as part of the testimonygiven by Lowry to the Presidential AdvisoryCommission on Holocaust Assets. It states thatanother 15 artworks in the collection—one ortwo of which are duplicates with the earlierlist—have provenance issues. This second listincludes Braque’s Road Near L’Estaque, whichwas bought through Valentin; Bonnard’s TheBathroom; and Picasso’s Still Life: “Job.” “Wehave no reason to believe that any of these pic-tures were looted by the Nazis before or duringthe Second World War,” Lowry testified in2000, “but we have included them because wedo not yet know where they were during all or


©2011 ESTATE OF GEORGE GROSZ/LICENSED BY VAGA, NEW YORK/MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK, GIFT OF MR. AND MRS. LEO LIONNI

George Grosz, Self-Portrait with aModel, 1928.

part of the Nazi period.” Two of the three paint-ings by Grosz which are in dispute—The PoetMax Herrmann-Neisse and Self-Portrait with aModel—are on both lists.Asked to comment on a list of 17 paintings in

MoMA’s collection with questionable prove-nances, the museum responded that all of theworks are listed in the museum’s ProvenanceResearch Project website. “Their listing reflectsthe fact that the Museum . . . has identifiedthem as works created before 1946 and ac-quired by the Museum after 1932 that mayhave been in Europe between these dates andfor which there may be gaps in provenance. . . .[T]he museum is aware of no particular infor-mation that would make the provenance ofthese works questionable.”

ALL THREE works by Grosz wereon consignment with

Flechtheim at the time his galleries were seizedby the Nazis and he was forced to flee Ger-many. Dowd’s contention is that the paintingswere then stolen from Flechtheim’s galleries—and thus from Grosz, because the artist hadnever ceded ownership of them—and thenfound their way to MoMA, without any com-pensation to Grosz, who had literally become astruggling artist in Manhattan.In his numerous court filings, Dowd argues

that Max Herrmann-Neisse was stolen by Char-lotte Weidler, a German art dealer and criticwho became the curator of the Carnegie Insti-tute in Pittsburgh after emigrating from Berlinto New York in December 1939. Dowd also ar-gues that Weidler was a “Nazi agent.”One of Weidler’s clients was the art collector

Paul Westheim, who fled Berlin in 1933 forParis, leaving his collection of about 50 mod-ernist works with Weidler. The collection evi-dently survived the war and was in Weidler’spossession in the United States, but Westheimwas not able to reclaim it from her. “The ques-tion of the whereabouts of my collection,which I left with Dr. Weidler when I left Berlin,is entangled in a mysterious secret,” Westheimwrote to a friend in June 1959. “The behaviorof Dr. Weidler in this matter, is, to say it moder-ately, embarrassing. Until 1945 we had a vividcorrespondence. When I asked her about mycollection after the war, she broke off all corre-spondence abruptly.”In any event, on April 12, 1937, while they

were still in touch, Weidler wrote Westheim anodd letter, in which she claimed that she had“inherited” from Flechtheim, who had died afew weeks earlier, nine paintings by GeorgeGrosz, including “an early, very exquisite one,”Max Herrmann-Neisse. According to Dowd, it isunlikely that Flechtheim would have left her

these paintings as an inheritance, not only be-cause he did not own the paintings (they wereon consignment), but also because on January18, 1936, he had made a will naming hisnephew, Heinz Hulisch, as his sole heir.Weidler, however, acted as if she owned the

nine works by Grosz that were in her posses-sion. What to do with them was a question.“Selling will hardly be an option,” she wrote inher 1937 letter to Westheim. “Anyways, it reallypleased me. Please don’t publish this, becauseotherwise I will only get in trouble, will have topay inheritance taxes and they will say, howcome you are still in contact with theFlechtheim Family.”Weidler resurfaced in February 1950. That

month, she wrote Barr a letter on her CarnegieInstitute stationery, announcing that she wasgoing to Europe to visit artists’ studios andhoped that he would be interested in buyingsome of the artworks she expected to find. Shealso mentioned that she had “been lucky” that


©2011 ESTATE OF GEORGE GROSZ/LICENSED BY VAGA, NEW YORK/MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK, ADVISORY COMMITTEE FUND

George Grosz,Republican Automatons,

1920.

“some” of her art collection “in Germany” hadbeen “saved” and had “partly arrived in NewYork already.” One of the paintings she was try-ing to sell to Barr was a “strong early Groszwhich once had belonged to the KronzprinzenPalais and has been ousted by Hitler.”According to Dowd, “Barr clearly knew Wei-

dler was trying to sell astolen Grosz to him.”In his complaint, Dowdstates that “sometimeduring 1952, Weidlerasked Valentin to sellPortrait of the PoetHerrmann-Neisse forher.” Valentin con-tacted Barr, andMoMA bought thepainting on April 10,1952, for $775. Themuseum paid another$75 to restore thepainting, which hadbeen damaged. Barrdid not ask Grosz, whowas living full-time inHuntington, New York,and teaching in NewYork City, to do therestoration work (as hehad asked other artiststo do). Nor did MoMAinvite Grosz to the firstexhibition of the

painting. On MoMA’s website, the provenanceof the painting goes from Flechtheim to Weidlerto Valentin and then to the museum.It is the contention of Dowd (and Petropou-

los) that the painting was stolen and that Grosznever received compensation for it. Grosz him-self believed that the painting had been stolenfrom him. MoMA started exhibiting Max Her-rmann-Neisse in 1952, and Grosz wrote hisbrother-in-law in early January 1953, “ModernMuseum exhibited a painting that was stolenfrom me. (I am powerless against that). [T]heybought it from someone, who stole it.” The nextday, Grosz wrote a friend, “Modern Museumbought a painting that was stolen from me. . .(one cannot do anything) old affair.”Dowd argues (and Petropoulos agrees) that

both Self-Portrait with a Model and RepublicanAutomatons were also stolen after Flechtheim’sdeath. Dowd says that a Dutch art dealer, Carelvan Lier, brought a collection of Grosz’s art toAmsterdam after Flechtheim’s death “for a pur-ported ‘auction’” to take place at the beginningof February 1938. Van Lier had previously triedto sell the collection for Flechtheim, but it hadfailed to sell. The new “auction” also failed,

Dowd argues, and van Lier decided to buy Self-Portrait for himself, for around $10. “Van Liernever obtained Grosz’s consent as the owner ofthe artwork, before engaging in this void trans-action,” Dowd wrote in his complaint. Van Lierresold the painting two months later, foraround $95, to Leo Lionni, the art director ofFortune magazine. Lionni donated the paintingto MoMA in 1954.Likewise, at the February 1938 auction, van

Lier sold Republican Automatons, along withfour other works, to Paul Brandt, another artdealer, for around $16. Later that year, Brandtsold the painting to a third dealer, Herbert Tan-nenbaum, who soon sold it to Dr. William Land-man, a Toronto physician. MoMA bought thepainting from Landman in 1946. “MoMA’s filesshow no evidence that MoMA investigated theprovenances of Model and Republican Automa-tons prior to acquisition,” Dowd wrote in hisSupreme Court brief.

IN HIS April 2000 testimony before thePresidential Advisory Commis-

sion, Lowry emphasized MoMA’s ongoing sup-port for and compliance with the AAMD’s 1998guidelines on handling Nazi-looted art, whichformed the basis for the Washington ConferencePrinciples on Nazi-Confiscated Art. The guide-lines in turn created a mechanism for restitutingartworks stolen by the Nazis and urged thatlegal systems the world over “facilitate just andfair solutions with regard to Nazi confiscatedand looted art, and . . . make certain that claimsto recover such art are resolved expeditiouslyand based on the facts and merits.” Lowry also said that MoMA’s provenance re-

search “has been and will continue to be part ofour ongoing work” at the museum. To that end,MoMA created what it calls the Provenance Re-search Project. “The Museum of Modern Artowns approximately 800 paintings” created be-tween 1932 and 1946 “that were or could havebeen in Continental Europe during the Nazi era,”according to the MoMA website. “Researchers atthe Museum have examined, and are continuingto research, the ownership, or provenance,records for works that fall within this category.”Before Dowd’s case was dismissed, he de-

posed Christel Hollevoet-Force, the main re-searcher assigned by MoMA to do provenanceresearch on the collection. She was hired in2001 to “make sure that in the collection of themuseum none of the paintings had anyepisodes of art looting or illegal transfer.” Sheestimated that during her four years at MoMAshe opened provenance research files on 500 ofthe approximately 600 works in the collectionthat might have had controversial provenances,with priority given to paintings only. She said


LUIS SEVILLANO/EL PAIS PHOTOS/NEWSCOM

MoMA director GlennLowry. The museum saysthat it holds good title tothe three Grosz paintingsinvolved in the recent

lawsuit.

she was aware that MoMA had“bought works that were for-merly in German museums”through Valentin, although sheput these artworks in a “differ-ent category” than those stolenfrom victims of the Holocaust.Asked if MoMA ever con-

cealed its ownership of art-works that came from theNazis, she replied, “I honestlydon’t think so.” But she alsoconceded repeatedly that shewas under a lot of pressure topost provenance information onMoMA’s website as quickly aspossible. If she was not com-pletely sure of a work’s prove-nance, she placed theinformation in brackets to indi-cate that more work needed tobe done. (Many of the workslisted in the Provenance Re-search Project have bracketedinformation in their prove-nances.) “My mandate was notto spend six months and have acompletely ironed-out prove-nance for every single work inthe collection,” she said. (Shenow works at the MetropolitanMuseum of Art as a researcher.)The history of the three

Grosz paintings was brought tolight not by a MoMA re-searcher but by art historianRalph Jentsch, who was hiredby the Grosz family in 1994 tofigure out what had happenedto the works. After almost tenyears of digging, Jentsch, man-aging director of the George Grosz estate andauthor of George Grosz: Berlin-New York, haddiscovered the connections among Grosz,Flechtheim, Buchholz, Valentin, and Barr. In2003, he wrote MoMA asking that the threepaintings be returned to the Grosz family. Forthe next three years, the family and the mu-seum “shared research” and “engaged in exten-sive settlement communications,” Dowd wrotein his Supreme Court brief. But by January2006, Jentsch had become concerned thatMoMA was going to reject the claim. On Febru-ary 8, Peter Grosz wrote Lowry, “George Grosz’swork Max-Her[r]mann Neisse was stolen fromGeorge Grosz. Grosz is not a liar. Ergo, this workbelongs to the estate of George Grosz.”On March 22, 2006, MoMA’s trustees re-

ceived the final report of an investigation intothe provenance of two of the three Grosz paint-

ings conducted by Nicholas Katzenbach, theformer U.S. Attorney General. It was brief andto the point. Katzenbach argued that Grosz’sown letters prove that he knew his works in themuseum were stolen but that he chose to re-main silent about that fact and never contactedthe museum to complain or ask for the paint-ings back or in any way seek a settlement.“Accordingly,” Katzenbach concluded, “I rec-

ommend that the claim of the Grosz Estate berejected.” On April 11, 2006, MoMA’s trusteesvoted not to return the paintings to the Groszes,a decision that led nearly three years later to thefiling of Dowd’s lawsuit against MoMA.“This will not be the last word on the fate of

Alfred Flechtheim’s 1933 inventory,” Dowdsays, “and I predict that when the full truthcomes out, we will be back in court, one way oranother.” �


©OTTO DIX/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK/VG BILD-KUNST, BONN/MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK

Otto Dix, Café Couple,1921, was recently shownin MoMA’s exhibition

“German Expressionism:The Graphic Impulse.”

Documents

AR Tnews DECEMBER MoMA’s Problematic Provenances