In 1945 an important cache of paintings that were stashed for safekeeping in a German castle were looted by occupying American soldiers. To date, only two of those pictures have been recovered.
Now another of those paintings has turned up, at Sotheby’s in New York. The work is Johann Friederich August Tischbein’s “Portrait of Elizabeth Hervey”, painted in Rome by the German artist in 1778. Stored in Schwarzburg Castle in a forest outside Weimar, it is thought to have been taken to the United States soon after American soldiers broke into a locked chamber there and looted its contents.
Officials at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar (formerly the Grand Ducal Museum) learned in November that the painting had been consigned at the New York auction house when Sotheby’s Germany began notifying potential buyers. One of those prospective clients was the Erb-Gross-Herzog von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach (grand-duke and descendant of the local nobility that once owned much of the gallery’s collection) who then contacted the Weimar museum. The consigner’s identity has not been revealed, although sources think it is a New York dealer.
Sotheby’s has not commented publicly on the work, which it had not scheduled for sale. “This painting is as stolen as you can get”, said Willi Korte, an investigator and veteran of restitution campaigns who has been advising the Weimar officials.
So far, the auction house has held on to the work and offered a way of resolving the dispute. Sources say Sotheby’s urged Weimar museum officials to form a tax-free non-profit organization here, which under New York law might purchase the picture with tax-deductible donations, presumably from Germany.
Although this approach has worked with a painting stolen from Poland which turned up at Sotheby’s several years ago and was bought back (ransomed, some say) by a Polish-American foundation, no such German foundation exists in the US to do this legally.
The Tischbein painting has a curious postwar provenance. It is presumed to have been taken to the US after the war, yet during the 1960s it passed through the hands of Walter Hofer, the Munich dealer who served the Nazis as Goering’s principal buyer of works of art during the Hitler era. Like many other Nazi art traders, Hofer ran a private gallery after the war. At that time the Tischbein came to the attention of East German officials, who contacted Bavarian museum authorities in the hope of getting the painting back from Hofer. The East Germans stopped short of hiring lawyers to pursue that goal, and Hofer sold the work to a Swiss collector.
Like the Tischbein work, most of the Schloss Schwarzburg horde consisted of small paintings which could have been carried off easily. Three other of those works have surfaced since the war. One, the Lucas Cranach the Elder’s “Venus with Amor and a honey bee”, was donated by an American citizen to Yale University in the 1950s and then sold at Sotheby’s London in the early 1970s. It has not been seen publicly since then.
Other works by Albrecht Dürer, including a 1499 dyptich with panels depicting the Nuremberg merchant Hans Tücher and his wife, was the subject of a lawsuit for their return brought in 1967 and finally resolved in the 1980s with the return of the paintings which had been hanging in the home of a former soldier in Brooklyn. The return of the Dürers marked a pivotal advance in the use of US state courts to argue for the restitution of cultural property to owners outside the country.
The case against Edward I. Elicofon, the former US soldier who was then a lawyer, revealed detailed evidence of the looting of Schloss Schwarzburg, dispelling the myth that only Russians engaged in such pillaging.
Researchers now suspect that a single member of that US Army unit who knew the value of the art in storage there may have brought more than a dozen pictures from the German castle back to the United States right after the war and then sold them to New York dealers.
In that way, the soldier would have acted much like Joe Meador, the US soldier who looted manuscripts and other objects from a cave outside the town of Quedlinburg in former East Germany. The US federal court trial of Meador’s heirs, who sold some of the objects Meador stole, begins in Texas on 3 June.
o Andrew Motion, poet, critic and author, has been appointed to the Arts Council of England. The Secretary of State for Heritage, Mrs Virginia Bottomley, has also appointed Prudence Skene as chairman of its Lottery Advisory Panel. She succeeds Peter Gummer, who resigned following his appointment as chairman -designate of the Royal Opera House. Mrs Bottomley has also accepted the resignation of Trevor Nunn from the Council following his appointment as artistic director of the Royal National Theatre.
Originally appeared in The Art Newspaper as 'War loot surfaces far from Weimar'