New York
A painting that has been seized by the US Customs Service might be a Rembrandt, or it might very well be an eighteenth-century copy. Yet beyond any doubt it is a picture from the collection of Adolphe Schloss, which the pro-Nazi French government confiscated during World War II. The complicated battle over the picture is being watched carefully, since the Schloss Collection is one of the largest groups of paintings pillaged in France under the Nazi occupation and still mostly unrecovered.
Some 333 paintings collected by Adolphe Schloss, a department store magnate (d. 1911), were sent from Paris to a storage place in the town of Chambon, near Tulle, after war broke out. Once the Nazis arrived in Paris, German agents who acquired art for Hitler and other Nazi leaders competed to find the Schloss pictures, since the Nazi leadership prized the work of seventeenth century Dutch painters who made up the large share of this collection. The Germans even negotiated with the Schloss family, offering protection in exchange for the art. Sensing the profits to be made on a horde that it would cost nothing to seize, French officials joined the chase. It was the French Comissariat on Jewish Questions (CGQJ) that hunted down Schloss family members and located the cache of paintings in Chateau Chambon, near Tulle, in 1943. The convoy of seized art was intercepted by German troops on its way north. Violence between French and Germans was narrowly avoided when the Germans agreed to give the Louvre first choice among the works, which the French would be allowed to sell there-after. The museum selected forty-nine paintings. Hitler’s agents bought 262 of the works for the Reich’s projected museum in Linz, Austria (Hitler’s birthplace) and twenty-two other works passed into the private market through dealers known to the CGQJ. The sale to the Nazis earned French officials a clear profit of FFr 50 million.
The paintings destined for Linz ended up in Munich in 1945, however, and before they passed into Allied hands, the Führerbau where they were kept was looted by a mob of German civilians. Most of those pictures have been missing since then. After the war, the Louvre’s forty-nine pictures were returned to the Schloss heirs, who sold them between 1950 and 1954. Few of the other Schloss pictures have resurfaced.
The picture that has re-emerged completes a bizarre itinerary, even by the standards of war loot. Indeed, “Portrait of an old man” (also known as “Portrait of an old Jew” or “Portrait of an old man with a beard”) is probably not the Rembrandt that Adolphe Schloss thought it was when he bought it in 1906.
The painting came back on the market most recently in 1995, when Christopher Glisson, a lawyer in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, contacted a journalist, offering the painting for sale and suggesting that the purchase price be split between the Schloss heirs and the seller. His client turned out to be the disgruntled companion of Sydney Ashkenazie, a San Francisco dealer. Mr Ashkenazie is no stranger to controversy in the United States. The dealer had a brief taste of celebrity when he testified under oath in the 1980s that he provided blank receipts to Leona Helmsley, a wealthy hotel owner convicted of tax evasion, so that she could list jade objects purchased from Mr Ashkenazie as tax-deductible office furniture.
Mr Ashkenazie bought “Portrait of an old man” at Christie’s East for $29,900 in 1993. The work had been consigned by the Ian Woodner estate and Ashkenazie believed that he had come upon a diamond in the rough. (Mr Woodner had bought the picture in 1968 for $110,000 from Michael Shuman of Montreal, who had acquired the work from the Munich dealer Hans Mannestaedter in 1946.) Mr Ashkenazie and his companion, Elizabeth White, then assembled a thick file of documentation on the picture, including ownership by the King of Poland in the eighteenth century, in order to demonstrate that it indeed was a Rembrandt. Their research also determined that the work had indeed been the property of the Schloss family.
What Mr Ashkenazie had not counted on was his firm’s bankruptcy. In 1995, when Elizabeth White left the dealer, taking the picture (for safekeeping, she later said), the painting was under the jurisdiction of a US bankruptcy court which was seeking to sell the work to satisfy Mr Ashkenazie’s creditors.
But before anyone buys the picture, it will now have to be wrested from the hands of the US Customs Service. Last year, after a court forced Elizabeth White to return the picture to Mr Ashkenazie, the dealer brought the alleged Rembrandt to a Manhattan warehouse to show it to a potential buyer. The meeting was a ruse, and that buyer turned out to be Bonnie Goldblatt, a US customs agent, part of a sting operation to seize the work. Customs officials were chagrined to learn that the picture was probably worth even less than what Mr Ashkenazie had paid for it.
That seizure convinced the Schloss heir, Jean de Martini, in Paris to hire an American lawyer to help recover the painting. Until then, de Martini had been reluctant to fight for its return in an American court. The French government declined to play any role in its recovery when the painting resurfaced in 1995.
A court will now examine the evidence for whether “Portrait of an old man” is in fact a Rembrandt or not, before deciding who should keep it. If it turns out to be a workshop painting or, more likely, an eighteenth-century copy with little resale value, lawyers for Mr Ashkenazie’s creditors are expected to abandon their fight over the work. If the picture is a Rembrandt, there is a greater likelihood of a fight over it in bankruptcy court, although an overwhelming body of evidence indicates that it was property of the Schloss family.
This is not the first dispute over a picture from the Schloss collection. At the 1990 Biennale des Antiquaires in Paris, the Newhouse Gallery of Manhattan exhibited another Schloss picture. It was there that Henri de Martini, the adopted son of one of the Schloss heirs, noticed the “Portrait of Adrianus Tegularius” by Frans Hals. Newhouse acquired the work at Christie’s London in April 1989 for £110,000 ($180,000). French police seized the picture as stolen property—the painting had been described as such in Seymour Slive’s 1970 Hals catalogue raisonnée. (Christie’s 1989 sales catalogue gave no indication of the pictures’ status as Nazi plunder.) Adam Williams of Newhouse Galleries was indicted by a French court for offering stolen goods for sale and has since been acquitted in a decision now under appeal. The painting is being held by the French police.
Other pillaged Schloss pictures have been located in the United States. The Rembrandt print, “Old man with a divided fur cap,” had been on view in the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, but it has been taken off display by that institution since the Schloss heirs traced it to the Carnegie. Since that time, museum officials have had no comment on the pillaged work.
Another Schloss picture is in the collection of a museum in Hagerstown, Maryland. Several other Schloss works have been traced to museums in Italy and Holland.
Originally appeared in The Art Newspaper as ‘If not a Rembrandt, at least a Schloss'