Provenance Research And The Many Chasms:

The Continuation after the Schwabinger Taskforce

Of the seven works from the Gurlitt Collection that have been restituted, three have been restituted by the Schwabinger Taskforce, and four have been restituted by the Gurlitt Provenance Research Project and the Reviews, Dokumentation und anlassbezogene Forschungsarbeiten zum Kunstfund Gurlitt.¹ It is significant to look at the dates of the different restitutions because they showcase the amount of time, years in fact, in between some of them. Restitution cases obviously have to go through a long process; however, it must also be stated that a larger task force and budget would have greatly benefited the research process, as stated by experts involved in conducting provenance research of the collection, due to the large number of works. This is true for both the task force put in place by the German government and the provenance research team at the Kunstmuseum Bern. When the German Lost Art Foundation made the above-mentioned task forces responsible for conducting the provenance research on the Gurlitt Collection, it did not provide enough clarity on the complex process of distributing responsibilities among the different groups. Through personal interviews conducted for the purpose of this thesis, it has become apparent that even those who were working directly with the German Lost Art Foundation did not really differentiate between the different task forces. This confusion was reflected in the media coverage as any genuine understanding of the delegation of responsibilities remained very much in-house.

The Gurlitt collection was separated into two groups: 1,259 works that were found in the Munich apartment and 315 works that were found in the Salzburg house.² Much of the confusion regarding the exact content of the Gurlitt collection stems from the lack of information regarding how Germany and Switzerland stored and researched the art collection. It is clear from the published information that Germany invested greater resources in researching the collection and stored a large portion of the works in Germany even after the will of Cornelius Gurlitt was acknowledged. While the will made the Kunstmuseum Bern the new owner of the collection, Germany did not by any means release control of the collection. Of the works found in the Munich apartment, approximately 90 percent were prints and watercolors; approximately 7 percent were oil paintings; approximately 2 percent were magazines, books and other publications; less than 1 percent were sculptures and less than 1 percent were miscellaneous objects. Of the works found in the Salzburg house, approximately 68 percent were prints and watercolors; approximately 17 percent oil paintings; approximately 5 percent sculptures and approximately 8 percent ceramics and other miscellaneous objects like chalices.³ The current whereabouts of some items from the collection are still to this day not fully known.

Some of the collection is at the Kunstmuseum Bern, primarily those works of art that have been deemed not looted, and a large remainder of the collection is currently stored in Germany. Some of the works of art are still being researched for provenances. Personal interviews conducted for the purpose of this thesis indicated that the German government does not have any claims to the works at hand and that the Kunstmuseum Bern allegedly has the right to choose whether the entire collection goes into its holdings or whether some of it goes to the German Federation.

Because much historical information about the Gurlitt Collection remains quite obscure, many ongoing projects — including a project at the Kunstmuseum Bern with the Universität Hamburg, which began in 2019 — are conducting continued provenance research on the collection. These projects are said to be aiding in determining where the collection should eventually reside. With these ambiguities looming around the collection, it is no wonder that answers have been eagerly sought about the involvement of Germany in this process. In developments that arose as this thesis was nearing its completion in January 2020, Germany, with the help of the German Lost Art Foundation, opened an official help desk for claimants seeking their families’ Nazi-looted art. In an aim to help simplify the process, the state-funded help desk will offer expert advice and assistance to claimants looking for their families’ cultural assets.

As of December 28th 2018, 315 works from the Gurlitt Collection remain under the heading “suspected group of degenerate art; responsibility of Kunstmuseum Bern,” according to the German Lost Art Foundation. These works are categorized in three identifying groups by the Gurlitt Provenance Research Project and labelled red, yellow or green. Each color signifies the likelihood that a work is Nazi-looted art, with red representing the highest probability. As of 2018, 4 works were marked as red, 650 as yellow, 28 as green and 42 as “without review."⁴ The works categorized as “without review," include works of art that had been purchased by museums before the Nazis took power. Additional works of art in this category include mass-produced objects and works assigned directly to the Gurlitt family because of personal dedications or because they are the creations of family members.

In addition to providing this data, the German Lost Art Foundation has also published Summary Reports, also identified as Object Records Excerpt (ORE) reports, and Final Reports. Despite being the main resource for documentation related to the collection, these reports do not offer easily accessible and understandable information that individuals can find and read online. Most of the Final Reports are only available in German, while most of the ORE reports are also available in English. For those works with the most complicated provenance research histories involving the Schwabinger Taskforce and the Gurlitt Provenance Research Project, identifying the necessary modified reports takes a great deal of searching, and it takes significant guess work to find the proper links both on the website and through secondary sources. As stated in the Lost Art Database’s general principles for registration and deletion of reports, the foundation can delete reports due to incorrect information, missing information, and information not being in accordance with the purpose of the database. Potential new findings can also invalidate reports.⁵ The last point, in particular, impaired the restitution of the Paul Signac painting found in the Gurlitt Collection, as it will be further elaborated on later. The aim of providing provenance research online is not to add confusion, but to establish a dialogue that facilitates clear communication of information and potential sources for continued research. For example, the new help desk, with its headquarters in Berlin, should help to clarify provenance research in Germany for works between 1933 and 1945 for claimants and domestic and international researchers.

In talking about the Gurlitt Collection, people often use the names of Hildebrand and Cornelius Gurlitt interchangeably. It is clear that more biographical information is known about Cornelius’ father Hildebrand, who is also more historically relevant. However, it is important to note that while the collection was given to Cornelius by his father, Cornelius did survive using income generated from the collection throughout his life through small, discrete sales. This includes the sale of works that did not have clear provenances. Among these works is the famous gouache and pastel work on paper by Max Beckmann, The Lion Tamer. In 2011, Cornelius Gurlitt gave the work to the German auction house Lempertz in Cologne for sale. Just weeks before the opening of the Modern Art sale, after auction catalogues had already been published with the work by Beckmann portrayed as one of the greatest finds, the work was removed from the auction. The sale had been discovered by the lawyer Markus Stötzel who was representing the heirs of Alfred Flechtheim.

Known as one of the biggest collectors of German Modernism, Alfred Flechtheim was among the Jewish figures persecuted by the Nazis. His collection was confiscated by the Nazi regime, including The Lion Tamer. In 2011, Cornelius Gurlitt, whose Munich apartment had already been raided by customs in 2010, acknowledged after being contacted by Stötzel that the work by Beckmann was bought from Alfred Flechtheim by his father in 1934. As Stötzel said himself, “Mr Gurlitt was willing to accept the fact that Mr Flechtheim was a persecuted Jew who had lost his collection under duress.”⁶ At the time, a representative of the auction house, Emmarentia Bahlmann, had already gone to the Munich apartment of Cornelius to authenticate the gouache, which had a sticker on the back of the work identifying Alfred Flechtheim as an owner.⁷ In 2011, The Lion Tamer was auctioned at Lempertz with the agreement that part of the proceeds go to the Flechtheim heirs and part to Cornelius Gurlitt, who was no stranger to the auction house. This was admitted by a previous management member at Lempertz, Karl-Sax Feddersen: “Of course we knew!”.⁸ This statement speaks for itself, and the meaning is unfortunately louder than words.

Restituted Works

Among the seven works restituted thus far, three works by the artists Paul Signac, Henri Matisse and Thomas Couture exemplify the difficulties that the Schwabinger Kunstfund and the Gurlitt Provenance Research team had throughout the provenance research process. Each of these works contains biographical information with its provenance that highlights the atrocities Jewish families faced during WWII. Those, like Hildebrand Gurlitt, who had a hand in buying collections from families who so clearly did not have a choice regarding the safekeeping of their properties would have had to ignore the most obvious facts or, better said, the brutal reality Jewish families faced to keep conducting business as usual. No clear pattern can be discerned regarding how Hildebrand Gurlitt got ahold of the looted works of art, and for many of the works, we simply cannot pinpoint how Hildebrand got the works in the first place. It is clear that his business dealings on behalf of the NS Party in France were some of his most lucrative deals in terms of accumulating works of art for both the NS Party and for himself. Additionally, in some cases involving the restituted works described below, the actions and words used by Hildebrand and his wife after the war suggest that Hildebrand was aware that he had to lie about his knowledge of the location of some of his works. This likely was the case because Hildebrand managed to gather these works from Jewish owners under circumstances of duress.

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Reiter am Strand, by Max Liebermann, completed in 1900, is an oil-on-canvas painting that, in 2015, was restituted to the rightful heirs of David Friedmann, a Jewish collector. The collection of Friedmann was appraised by the NS-Party in 1939, along with much of his property that was forcibly seized and sold. Friedmann was forbidden by the NS-Party to dispose of or move his works of art. In 1941, Friedmann was evicted from his own home in Germany. He was 84 years old. Friedmann died a year later in 1942. That same year his daughter Charlotte was sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in northern Germany, which was only for women. Charlotte was murdered soon after at Auschwitz in October of 1942.

Hildebrand Gurlitt acquired the work Reiter am Strand a month before. Surviving records indicate that the collection of Friedmann was in fact still complete in 1941, until the Schlesisches Museum der Bildenden Künste (National Museum Breslau), acquired some of the works in 1942. The museum was considered one of the most important art collections in Germany at the time. In 1942, Hildebrand Gurlitt traded two works, one of them being the Liebermann, with the museum director Mûller-Hofstede. It was not until 1946, after WWII, that Hildebrand Gurlitt requested that Müller-Hofstede confirm that the work had, in fact, been acquired before the war and had been purchased from a private collector who was “certainly Aryan.”⁹ With this confirmation, Hildebrand Gurlitt was able to succeed in keeping this work at the Central Collecting Point in Wiesbaden, as it gave the provenance of the work a reliable source, as he would have called it. The work was returned to him in 1950. The fact that Hildebrand Gurlitt asked for the help of Mûller-Hofstede immediately after the war in order to keep the work in his collection suggests he was a clear-minded man who strategically protected his collection.

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La Seine vue du Pont-Neuf, au fond le Louvre, by Camille Pissarro, created in 1902, is an oil-on-canvas painting that was restituted to the rightful heirs of Max Heilbronn in 2017. When the Nazi regime invaded France in 1940, all large businesses became Aryanized, which removed all Jewish individuals from important business positions. Among these businesses was the famous department store Galeries Lafayette, which was co-founded by Théophile Bader, whose daughter Paulette was married to Max Heilbronn. The private and commercial properties of Bader and Heilbronn were confiscated by the NS-Party. Heilbronn himself was actively part of the French Resistance and was arrested in Lyon in 1943. He was taken to the Buchenwald concentration camp, one of the largest in Germany, and thereafter to the Dachau concentration camp.

In 1940, Paulette Heilbronn tried to protect her family’s art collection by depositing part of it for safekeeping at the Crédit Commercial de France bank. However, prior to 1941, the safeguarded vault of the Heilbronn collection was opened by the German Devisenschutzkommando, a SS unit established in 1940 by the Nazi regime for art looting, and the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) seized the entirety of the collection. In 1942, the work by Pissarro was part of an exchange between the ERR and Gustav Rochlitz, who worked for Hermann Göring. The name Gustav Rochlitz will also be mentioned frequently in relation to the restituted Henri Matisse painting. After the end of WWII, the Heilbronn family put forth a claim to the French authorities for the Pissarro painting, yet the case was closed in 1961 because the location of the painting was unknown. As stated by the Gurlitt Provenance Research Project, “It is not clear how or when the work entered the Gurlitt collection.”¹⁰

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Das Klavierspiel, by Karl Spitzweg, completed around 1840, is an ink-and-pencil drawing on paper that was restituted in 2014 to the rightful heirs of Henri Hinrichsen. Persecuted by the Nazi regime for being Jewish, the Hinrichsen family saw its property seized and its famous family-owned music publishing company C. F. Peters Aryanized. In 1939, the Oberfinanzpräsident, the state revenue authority in Leipzig, Germany, seized some of the most important works of the Hinrichsen collection and deposited them in the city’s museum of fine arts, the Museum für Bildende Künste. Hildebrand Gurlitt soon after purchased the Spitzweg drawing from the museum through his Kunstkabinett, Dr. H. Gurlitt, from his gallery in Hamburg. This purchase exchange took place and was paid for using a barred account at Deutsche Bank that Henri Hinrichsen could not access. Soon after the seizure of their property, Hinrichsen and his wife Martha, who was a diabetic, fled to Brussels. Martha Hinrichsen, who was in need of insulin but was deprived of this during the Nazi occupation of Brussels, died in 1941. In 1942, Henri Hinrichsen was taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp where he was killed. His sons, Paul and Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen, died during the Holocaust as well.

Among the confiscated personal papers found at the Salzburg home of Cornelius Gurlitt was a photograph of the Spitzweg drawing with an inscription of authentication on the back. The Schwabinger Taskforce affirmed that this document indicated that the drawing was on the market in the 1940s in France and that Hildebrand Gurlitt most likely acquired the work during that time.¹¹ In 1966, the office that was in charge of compensation payments to Nazi victims in Berlin, the Wiedergutmachungsämter, investigated the whereabouts of the property of Hinrichsen. At the time, the widow of Hildebrand Gurlitt, Helene, answered inquiries saying that she had no knowledge of the drawing by Spitzweg. She additionally claimed that all the business records of the Kunstkabinett Dr. H. Gurlitt and her husband were destroyed during the war. It has become apparent through research into the business records and personal correspondence of the Gurlitt family that Helene Gurlitt was quite involved in the business of her husband, as will also be apparent when looking at the restitution of the Thomas Couture painting. It is reasonable to deduce from those sources that Helene Gurlitt would have been aware of the history of the Spitzweg drawing.

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Inneres einer gotischen Kirche, by Adolph Menzel, created in 1874, is a pencil drawing on paper that was restituted in 2017 to the heirs of the rightful owner, Dr. Albert Martin Wolffson. After the death of the prominent German attorney Albert Martin Wolffson in 1913, many of the works in his large collection were acquired by the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, while many others were sold by his wife, Helene Wolffson. The works that remained within the family were passed on to their two children, Dr. Ernst Julius Wolffson and Elsa Helene Cohen. It was found in the business records of Hildebrand Gurlitt that Elsa Helene Cohen had sold 10 works to Hildebrand during the years of his art dealership in 1938. It remains unclear, however, according to the Gurlitt Provenance Research Project, if Elsa Helene Cohen ever received payment for the works. Hildebrand Gurlitt had sold many of these Menzel drawings from the Wolffson collection to the collector Hermann Reemtsma and had noted incorrectly in his business records that the drawing by Menzel, Inneres einer gotischen Kirche, was also included in this sale.¹² Elsa Helene Cohen, whose son had fled Germany for the United States with his family, left Germany as well in 1941. As stated in the provenance report for this Menzel drawing, the timing of the sale, December 1938, was just before the Cohen family fled Germany, strongly suggesting a forced sale.¹³ The heirs of Wolffson tried to recover the Menzel drawings in the mid 1950s, but did not succeed. Hildebrand Gurlitt said, at the time, that all business records were destroyed during the war. Correspondence was found, in addition to an annotated Menzel catalogue marked as property of Dr. Ernst Wolffson, in Cornelius Gurlitt's personal papers confiscated in Salzburg that refer to a Menzel drawing, likely this drawing, which was sent for restoration in 1947.

In some of the original reports completed after WWII by the U.S. Office of Strategic Service (OSS), Hildebrand Gurlitt’s name is frequently mentioned, Specifically, the report entitled Linz: Hitler’s Museum and Library of December 1945, from the Art Looting Investigation Unit-Consolidated Interrogation Reports (CIR), clearly mentions Hildebrand Gurlitt, his son Cornelius and Hildebrand’s cousin Wolfgang in relation to looted art. The report begins by noting, “Complete statements of the Special Linz account in Holland and Italy are included, together with exhaustive reports of the purchases made by H. GURLITT, GOEPEL, and the Dorotheum (Dr. HERBST) in France, Holland and Belgium.” These purchases were made directly for the Führermuseum of Adolf Hitler. In this report are letters signed by Hildebrand Gurlitt, using the name of his Kunstkabinett Dr. H. Gurlitt, and including the salutation “Heil Hitler!”. These letters detail the necessary additional funds he needed transferred to his account at the Dresden Bank in Germany in order to make certain transactions on behalf of the Linz Commission.¹⁴ If one imagines someone reading this document without prior knowledge of who Hildebrand Gurlitt was, or the story of the Gurlitt Collection, he or she would most likely make no distinction between Hildebrand and all the other mentioned people who are clearly considered NS-Party members. Choices have consequences, and these consequences were not unknown to Hildebrand. Indulging him today by believing that he helped Jewish collectors sell their collections in order to save them would be a re-justification of the actions of the Nazi regime.

Paul Signac

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Quai de Clichy , by Paul Signac, created in 1887, is an oil-on-canvas painting that was restituted in 2019 to the heirs of Gaston Lévy, the rightful owners. In an effort to rush out the official publication of the partnered exhibition between the Kunstmuseum Bern and the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn , a handful of serious oversights took place. The book Gurlitt Status Report was published in 2017 to coincide with the openings of the two exhibitions and is offered as the official catalogue for the Gurlitt Collection supported by the government agencies, including the Kanton Bern and the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media. In the book, the painting Quai de Clichy by Signac is captioned as “Provenance undergoing clarification / Currently no indications of being looted art.”¹⁵ The work was classified as green by the German Lost Art Foundation, and thus taken off the website.

During a personal interview conducted for this thesis with one of the leading members of the provenance research team in charge of the Gurlitt Collection at the Kunstmuseum Bern, it was revealed that had it not been for one researcher, the Signac painting would likely not have been restituted. As a result of the expert’s suspicions of the accuracy of the provenance conducted for the painting, this expert asked for the work to be looked at again. Soon after, it was reclassified as yellow on the German Lost Art Foundation due to these reservations, and a claim arrived three weeks later. Neither the name of Gaston Lévy nor those of his heirs are mentioned in the publication’s initial provenance report. However, the work was eventually restituted, and, in recent developments, Quai de Clichy will be sold at auction by the Lévy heirs at Sotheby’s in London in February 2020.¹⁶

This is a perfect example of why it is important to keep public records of works that potential claimants can see regardless of whether the work has been cleared or not, unless the work has, in fact, been restituted with complete accuracy and the heirs have requested for the work not to be shown online. It is evident that provenance research is very difficult and often inconclusive despite the efforts taken to find historical records. However, it is vital to make this path of continued research available, because one can never be sure who will discover a piece of information or remember an old family heirloom unless one makes images of art works with suspicious provenances visible online. In fact, pictures —more than texts, titles or reports — have the potential power to trigger memories.

Gaston Lévy had been a great Jewish art collector and supporter of the artist Paul Signac during his lifetime and was putting together a pré-catalogue raisonné of Signac’s work during 1929 and 1932. In 1962, Lévy submitted a Wiedergutmachungsantrag (WGA), which was a request for compensation that the German government offered after the war as part of the Bundesrückerstattungsgesetz, Federal Restitution Act. Among the works listed by Lévy as having been lost was this piece by Signac. In 1934, Lévy loaned the work for an exhibition at the Petit Palais in Paris. Not long after, in 1940, he decided to take many of his belongings and much of his collection, including this work, away from Paris and store them safely at his residence Les Bouffards in France. Lévy fled with his family to Tunis, North Africa. The collection at Les Bouffards was looted in 1940 after the Nazi regime took over France. After 1943, when the collection was disseminated to different parties, Quai de Clichy went from an art dealer named Lotté to the gallerist Raphaël Gerard who sold it to the Galerie Bénézit.

It is, once again, not clear how Hildebrand Gurlitt exactly came in possession of the work, yet it is assumed that the work became available to Hildebrand via the French art market during one of his collecting trips. Between 1952 and 1954, Hildebrand loaned this painting to museums in Düsseldorf and Essen. As stated in the Final Report of the Gurlitt Provenance Research Project, Hildebrand at that point may have been attempting to be mentioned in the pré-catalogue as the owner of the work.¹⁷ This work is not the only work that Hildebrand bought from the Galerie Bénézit during the German occupation in France. Some of these other works are also among the Gurlitt Art Trove. Personal correspondences have also been found regarding the work by Signac between Hildebrand and his cousin Brigitte, who was an art restorer. An additional photograph was found in Cornelius Gurlitt’s Salzburg house that includes the following annotation on the back: “Notes from Dr. H. Gurlitt out of the catalogue of Madame Signac, who on the occasion of the Signac exhibition in the Düsseldorfer Kunstverein. The painting was given by Signac to Marié for a bicycle.”¹⁸

Hildebrand and Raphaël Gerard, in his role with the Galerie Bénézit, conducted a great deal of business with one another and cultivated a close relationship even after 1945. Gerard, like Hildebrand, is listed under the "red flag" names by ALIU, and during the Nazi regime he had handled looted art from collections confiscated by the Einzatzstabs Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR). While no concrete evidence exists detailing the ownership transition of the work by Signac to Hildebrand, what cannot and should not be ignored is the fact that Hildebrand Gurlitt continued to conduct business even after WWII with a known affiliate of the ERR.

Henri Matisse

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Femme assise dans un fauteuil, by Henri Matisse, completed in 1921, is an oil-on-canvas painting that was restituted in 2015 to the heirs of Paul Rosenberg. Due to the fact that the official Gurlitt Status Report was published after this painting was restituted, it is not included in the publication. The publication only includes the works that had been cleared or were not under high suspicion of being looted art. While both the ORE and the Final Report on the Matisse painting can be found online, it is difficult to make sense of some of the partially redacted documents, as the structure for all of these reports is confusing in both language and layout.

The painting by Matisse was restituted to the Rosenberg heirs through the work of their lawyer Christopher A. Marinello. He was notified at the time by Anne Sinclair, the granddaughter of Paul Rosenberg, that the painting found in the Gurlitt Collection belonged to their family. Marinello, during the process of working with the German authorities for the return of the painting, did not hesitate to publicly state the difficulties he had working and communicating with those in charge. Marinello had to go through approximately 250,000 documents, including letters and photographs from the Rosenberg family records, as he pressured German authorities who insisted that provenance research could not be rushed. Several emails were sent, and phone calls were conducted, resulting initially in a failed agreement. Documentation provided by Marinello to a judge in Augsburg, Germany, who was presiding over the case at the time, went unanswered.

Marinello decided to send an email in German to Cornelius Gurlitt directly, which led to negotiations that almost resulted in the return of the painting. However, before this transaction could be placed in motion, Cornelius Gurlitt fired his lawyer in 2014, and the restitution deal was no longer on the table. Shortly after, Cornelius Gurlitt died, and, per his will, all works deemed to be looted art were to be returned to their rightful owners. However, Marinello had to further negotiate with the Schwabinger Taskforce and the Munich probate court in Germany that was handling the estate, while the collection was, per Gurlitt’s will, bequeathed to the Kunstmuseum Bern. During this time, the Matisse painting was kept at a warehouse in Munich. Marinello is quoted saying, “The Germans are sticklers for detail and accuracy, which is good and important in provenance research, but following the process can be very frustrating to people like my clients, who are humans who suffered at the hands of one of the worst regimes in history.”¹⁹

Paul Rosenberg was an important Jewish art dealer and collector of Modern French art. He eventually opened his own gallery in Paris in 1910 at the rue de La Boétie, which was known as one of the great epicenters for modern art in the 1920s and 1930s. Having close relations with artists like Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, Paul Rosenberg used his financial means to help some of these artists support their craft.²⁰ In the wake of WWII, Rosenberg began to send some of his collection abroad and put a hold on his business in Paris. In 1940, Rosenberg arrived with his family in New York and opened a new gallery with a large portion of his collection that he had taken out of France. It remains unclear how exactly Rosenberg’s Matisse came into the hands of Hildebrand Gurlitt. There is no mention of the Matisse painting in the records of the art holdings hidden away by Hildebrand at the end of the war, nor was it among the works that Hildebrand admitted to handling during the Nazi regime.

Nevertheless, a photograph of Femme assise dans un fauteuil was found in the German federal archives in Koblenz in the photo library of the Einsatzstabes Rechsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) among a collection of works identified as Unbekannt (UNB), which translates to “unknown.” The identity of the collections from which these “unknown” works came was unclear due to looting and the identity of various Nazi storage locations that held the Jewish persecuted collections. Due to a gap of ten years, between 1931 and 1941, separating the last time Rosenberg was identified as the owner of the painting and the date of the seizure of the painting, the Schwabinger Taskforce had problems restituting the work.²¹ This gap was narrowed with the help of the claimants who provided a photograph of the painting at the gallery of Paul Rosenberg from ca. 1935-1937. Additionally mentioned in the Final Report of the Schwabinger Taskforce is the fact that the different disclosed sizes and titles given to the painting do not provide a “gapless” provenance for the work, but instead the provided information suggests with high probability that the work was taken through NS-Party looting.²²

In 1940, Rosenberg's apartment in Paris was targeted by the Nazis. This was considered one of the party’s first important seizures of the property of Jewish collectors and art dealers. Rosenberg had stored many of his works at the Banque nationale pour le commerce et l’industrie (BNCI) in Libourne, France. Yet in 1941 the safe was opened by the Nazis, who took 162 artworks. Many of the works were inventoried and stored at the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris. Further analysis of Matisse paintings with the previously mentioned inscription of UNB revealed that works were categorized by their connection to four prominent French art collections. Among these was the Rosenberg collection, which was often marked by the ERR with the initials “PR" to signify that it was a Rosenberg-seized work.

In 1942, the Matisse painting was given to Gustav Rochlitz by the ERR. Report number Four from the U.S. Army’s Interrogation Reports of the Office of Strategic Services Art Looting Investigation Unit (ALIU), completed in 1945, is dedicated to Gustav Rochlitz alone. According to the report, Rochlitz told the US authorities that during the German occupation of France many of his friends had told him that there were numerous German officials in Paris looking to buy works of art and that he was advised not to hide, but instead to take advantage of the “favorable situation.”²³ In fact, Rochlitz began to sell in great quantities to Germans even though, according to the report, he really did not want to because he was a strong anti-Nazi. The report by ALIU, however, says, “This statement is refuted by all other cognizant informants.”²⁴ Dr. Gurlitt is mentioned multiple times among the names of buyers of works sold by Rochlitz in the report, but not in connection with any Matisse painting. Given by Rochlitz in the report is a list that shows all the alleged art works that he acquired from the ERR that then got lost in transit from Paris to Baden-Baden in 1944. Within this list is “Woman with a Turban” by Matisse, which, according to the Schwabinger Taskforce, is likely the work in question. On the back of the painting is a custom stamp that indicates that the work was exported from France at some point.

Not unlike Hildebrand, Rochlitz entered willingly into work with the ERR and profited greatly through these transactions by maintaining a high position in German art circles and by obtaining great modern art paintings through the exchange of inferior old masters for the NS-Party. In the 1950s, Rosenberg applied for reparations for “non-restituted art losses” under the previously mentioned Bundesrückerstattungsgesetz. A settlement was offered in 1960 by the German government due in large part to the art expert Jacques Dubourg, who, at the time, created a list of all the non-recuperated artworks from the Rosenberg family. The settlement of 2,319,000 Deutsche Mark was less than half of what Dubourg assessed the value to be. The painting by Matisse was included within this settlement.²⁶ The settlement also stated that if any work were to be restituted in the future, 50 percent of the settlement value for the specific work would have to be repaid to the German government. As stated in the ORE of the Matisse painting, “It was a result of that settlement that the BADV (Federal Office for Central Services and Unresolved Property Issues) listed the Matisse on Lostart.de in recent years.”²⁷

Until 2013, the painting by Matisse was not included in any known lists of missing artworks whose location was identified after WWII, including those lists found at the different Collecting Points. While clues here and there from different databases offered suggestions, it was this confusion and lack of accessibility that critically hindered the provenance research and restitution efforts of the Rosenberg heirs. Digitization of these resources would enable faster and easier tracking and could provide a simplified overview for each restitution case, like those found on the German Lost Art Foundation. This need for this was made abundantly clear during The Gurlitt Art Trove – A Never Ending Story at the Rietberg Museum, a conference held in 2019 at the Rietberg Museum in Zürich. Upon discussing the restitution of the Matisse painting, experts involved in the Gurlitt Art Trove said they had surprising difficulty recalling the details of how the work came to be restituted.

Thomas Couture

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Portrait de jeune femme assise, by Thomas Couture, created around 1850-1855, is an oil-on-canvas painting that was restituted in 2019 to the heirs of Georges Mandel. Similar to the Paul Signac painting, the work by Thomas Couture is included in the official Gurlitt Status Report. The report’s caption for the Couture painting reads, “Provenance undergoing clarification.” Additionally, the provenance given in the publication incorrectly identifies Baronne de Gaujal as the original owner of the work based on an inscription on the back of the painting. The work by Couture in fact belonged to Georges Mandel, the resistance fighter who fought for France against the Nazi regime. Under close inspection, the painting by Couture that was found in the Gurlitt Art Trove was, in fact, a canvas that had been re-framed. Therefore, the frame on which the inscription was written was not the original frame.

In addition to being a resistance fighter, Georges Mandel was also a member of the French parliament who held many ministerial posts between WWI and WWII. Mandel had changed his birth name from Rothschild to Mandel, as he believed being too identifiably Jewish would not help him in his political causes. After attempting to resist the Nazi occupation for as long as possible in France, Mandel realized he had to flee in 1940 and left for North Africa. However, that same year, Mandel was captured in Morocco by the Vichy authorities and brought back to France where he was handed over to the German authorities and deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp. In 1944, Mandel returned to France as a political hostage, moving from one prison to the next until his death that same year when he was shot 16 times by the French paramilitary Milice near Paris.

In 1940, the apartment of Mandel in Paris was searched by the Sonderkommando Künsberg. The Sonderkommando Künsberg was put in charge of confiscating archives, art collections and libraries from occupied territories. A secret telegram was found through the provenance research that describes the confiscation of Jewish artworks in France on behalf of Germany, with a specific line stating that the new actions of the commission began with the sweep of the apartment of “the Jew Mandel.”²⁸ A year later in 1941, the apartment of Mandel was once again raided; however, this time it was by the Rassemblement National Populaire, the French Nationalist Party. It was then that the home of Mandel was turned into the headquarters of the Rassemblement National Populaire.

An inventory of the works of art taken from Georges Mandel’s apartment exists that includes a Couture painting identified as “portrait de femme à l’huile, buste, signé Couture.”²⁹ The list was created by his partner, the famous French actress Béatrice Bretty, who lived with Mandel at the time of his arrest in 1940. After the death of Mandel, Bretty took care of his estate and was the sole guardian of his daughter, who had survived the German occupation in hiding. Immediately after the end of WWII, Bretty contacted the French authorities for the restitution of Mandel’s cultural objects. At the Archives Diplomatiques in Paris, where the inventory list created by Bretty can still be found, was an additional note from Rose Valland, who had been in contact with Bretty, on the painting by Couture. Valland had worked at the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris prior to the war, yet he remained at the museum when the Nazis took over the museum and converted it into their headquarters for the ERR. Valland used her position to secretly keep notes and gather information on shipments of looted art that later helped authorities find countless stolen artworks and many Nazi repositories. In the 1950s, she was also already tracking Mandel’s collection in her dossiers, yet she did not manage to get all the necessary information. Considered by the Nazis to be an unimportant woman, who they thought did not speak German, she became one of the leading figures in the post-war restitution efforts. Regarding the Couture work, her notes state, “trou au milieu de la poitrine – reparation apparente,” which describes a hole in the middle of the chest of the woman in the painting that was likely restored.³⁰ Upon close inspection of the Couture painting, the canvas in fact revealed a small hole, of approximately two to three meters in size, as described in the note.

As previously noted in reference to the Paul Signac painting, this Couture painting was one of over seventy looted works handled by the art dealer Raphaël Gerard. Written documents were found in the Gurlitt Art Trove that indicate that the Couture painting was with Gerard in 1944, as also indicated by the inscribed number six on the back of the painting, referencing the art dealer’s inventory number. As stated in the ORE of the Gurlitt Provenance Research Project, it is possible that Hildebrand Gurlitt placed the Couture painting that he acquired during the years in which France was occupied by Germany with Gerard for safekeeping with “the intention of moving the objects at a later date.”³¹ After the death of Hildebrand, his wife Helene and his children Cornelius and Benita are mentioned in some correspondence, which indicates that they were aware of the fact that certain artworks with the given provenance of Raphaël Gerard were of questionable origin. As stated in the report of the Project Provenienzerecherche Gurlitt, they organized, following Hildebrand’s death, discrete shipments of paintings out of the Paris depot of Gerard in 1953.³² Hildebrand, once again, most likely bought the work after WWII, meaning that his excuse, or claim, that he helped Jewish families under duress during the war is of no relevance and should be considered a poor alibi.

Restitution Claims Today

There have been numerous discussions about the Gurlitt Case and the small number of restituted works in relation to the large number of works found. The fact that we are currently aware of only seven works that have been restituted is not an indication that the collection is of little importance.³³ Instead, what has to be realized is that even if only a single work from the over 1,200 works had been restituted, that would be enough to show how important it is to keep searching and to keep listening to claimants no matter how many years have passed since 1945. The provenance research is far from being finished as demonstrated by the above examples. Whether the collection proves to be worth a billion, as first suggested by the media, a million, or much less, the focus should be on providing the opportunity for families to reclaim their past and their heritage. Claimants should not be forced to showcase their commitment or resourcefulness regarding their claims for the return of what rightfully belongs to them. The burden of proof should fall largely on today’s governments that have the resources to act and respond appropriately. We no longer face the same limitations that countries and families had to deal with right after WWII. Countries’ collective moral and ethical responsibilities, intrinsically linked to the development of our societies, have naturally evolved throughout the years. As a result, a revolution is taking place in the art world concerning looted art exemplified by the Gurlitt case.