London
Questions relating to the restitution of paintings and drawings stolen by the Nazis have frequently been in the papers of late. Museums in the US and in Europe are looking into the provenance of the works of art in their collections in case they turn out to have a sinister past. But the decorative arts have hardly been mentioned, largely because of the frequent difficulty in identifying specific pieces. Nonetheless, it is precisely in this area that many items are likely to be suspect. The Art Newspaper has found out that tons of looted silver from Germany were released onto the market in New York by auction in 1950.
In 1949, the Office of Military Government withdrew from Germany and in the autumn of that year, the art Collecting Points were closed down. Soldiers, often with a background in the arts, had worked there since the war to return the masses of looted art discovered in Germany. Willi Korte, a lawyer specialising in art recovery related to World War II, says, “Allied restitution was not about restitution to individuals, but to countries”. He adds, “Anything that needed detailed research—decorative arts, books, manuscripts—did not receive the attention it needed”.
In fact, in January 1950 some 400,000 items of looted silver went on display in New York with United Nations Galleries Inc. Despite its name, this had no organisational connection with the UN and shortly after the announcement of the sale, the UN Secretary General, Trygve Lie, protested over the unauthorised use of the name and asked the Galleries, unsuccessfully, for its immediate suppression in association with the sale.
The Galleries had made a deal with the United Nations International Refugee Organisation (UNIRO) whereby, for the price of some $2.5 million, the Galleries “bought” the loot for resale. This transaction effectively gave a clean record to the stolen items. The only records of the sale are the catalogue, which gives scant information about the lots, usually of multiple items, and press photographs of the viewing, which looked like a bargain basement but with what seem to be silver standing cups of around 1600 in the foreground of one image.
The New York Herald Tribune of 10 January 1950 said that this was “the world’s largest collection of silver...stolen by the Nazi armies and hidden in German salt mines...The articles, ranging from table silver to artistic treasures, were looted from Jewish and other families of conquered countries”. Very similar reports in other papers suggest that they were all using the same information put out by the Galleries
Through the newspapers, UNIRO, the US authorities and the auctioneers published a get-out clause: “Former owners able to identify their property will have it returned to them free of charge”. This would have been very difficult as the silver was held before the auction by US Customs in the Foreign Trade zone at Stapleton, Staten Island, a location of which nearly everyone would have been ignorant.
The British authorities were at once alarmed by these events because they doubted the legitimacy of any such looted art sales, however good the cause to which the proceeds might be devoted. On the closure of the Collecting Points they had adopted a policy of handing any remaining items to the Germans, who vested them in the Treuhandverwaltung Kulturgüter and subsequently the ministry of finance (which still holds some 13,000 works of art, which it is about to publish; see The Art Newspaper No. 99 January 2000, p.1).
In response to its enquiries, on 18 January 1950 the British Foreign Office learned that this was the third and last such sale in the US. The report also states, “The French have been much upset by the two previous sales, being in no way sure of the provenance of the objects sold and alleging to us that they came from the Collecting Point in Munich”.
The British Embassy in Washington and British arm of the Allied Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives, the art loot investigators, were even more disturbed by the suggestion that some of the works up for sale were not ordinary Nazi loot but had been part of the Hungarian Gold Train hoard. This consisted largely of Jewish treasure and works of art seized and plundered in Austria by the Americans in May 1945, an episode which is currently the subject of a major US Forces and State Department investigation. In December 1999, ArtNews published an American official report stating that only “non-cultural” assets had been auctioned in New York.
There are two pieces of German silver in the Munich collection of Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza, a nef and a beaker, formerly property of Professor Alfred Pringsheim, a distinguished collector and father-in-law of the novelist, Thomas Mann. His silver collection, said to be one of Germany’s finest, disappeared after being confiscated by the Nazis on Kristallnacht in 1938. The collection is reliably reported to have resurfaced with the US forces at the Allied Collecting Point in Munich in 1945, but no piece ever came back to the Pringsheim heirs.
Almost thirty items from the collection have since passed through major auction rooms in the US and Europe; Christie’s sold a batch of twenty-two pieces in one sale in the late 1960s. Baron Thyssen bought his nef from the New York dealers Rosenberg & Stiebel in 1956 and his beaker from Premsela & Hamburger, Amsterdam, in 1971. It is possible, even probable that they had been among the items sold in 1950.
Given the vast quantities involved, the 1950 United Nations Galleries sale will certainly be a missing link in the provenance of many pieces of continental, especially German and Central European silver, traded thereafter and now in private collections and museums, but the absence of a proper catalogue will for ever make it an unprovable one. This means that collectors and museums need not worry overmuch about claims on their pieces, but it leaves an unpleasant question mark over the history of many of them.