Blog'Art

Dan Glaister in Los Angeles
Friday February 23, 2007
The Guardian


Nazi business... Detail from Johannes Verspronck's Portrait of Jean la Gouche, which is to go on sale at Christie's.

A collection of old master paintings once owned by the Nazi leader Hermann Göring is to go on auction, just a year after it was returned to the heirs of its original owner. The sale of around 170 paintings is the latest case of art looted by the Nazis being returned to its original owners and promptly being put up for sale.
Last summer a portrait by Gustav Klimt that had been returned by the Austrian government to the family of its former owner became the most expensive painting ever when it was auctioned for $135m (£69m).

The collection of Jacques Goudstikker will go on sale in the spring at Christie's, the auction house that sold the Klimt painting. The works, including a notable landscape by Salomon van Ruysdael, are expected to raise $22m-$35m.
"Jacques Goudstikker was an extraordinary dealer who had wide-ranging and fascinating taste," said Nicholas Hall, a director of Christie's old master paintings department in New York. "This is arguably the most important collection of old master pictures ever restituted."

Marei von Saher, the widow of the late collector's only son, said a large part of the collection, which originally numbered 1,400 paintings, would be seen in a touring exhibition. "The Dutch government's return of these pictures was an historic event for us and for all families whose possessions were stolen during the Holocaust era," she said. "Although we must part with some beautiful paintings, we are fortunate to be able to keep many of them for our private collection and exhibit those works publicly in the United States and abroad to tell the powerful story of Jacques Goudstikker and his collection."

Goudstikker fled the Netherlands in 1940 as the Nazis advanced, leaving his collection behind. He died at sea during his escape, falling through a hatch on a ship and breaking his neck.

Within days of his departure, Göring appeared at the Goudstikker gallery and, under threat of confiscation, bought the collection for the token price of 2m Dutch gilders.

After the war a large part of the collection was recovered and handed over to the Dutch government, which placed the pieces in its national collections, over the objections of Goudstikker's heirs. A lengthy legal battle was resolved last year when the Dutch government declared that 202 paintings should be handed back to the family.

The ruling prompted criticisms, with the director of one museum which handed over 30 works calling it a "serious haemorrhage of Dutch cultural heritage".

The decision to sell part of the collection also seems likely to raise concerns in the country, where one commentator described restitution as a lucrative business for "an industry of lawyers, advisers and art dealers".

Lawrence Kaye, a lawyer for Ms Von Saher in New York, said: "This property belonged to all these people. It was stolen by the Nazis. It's not their fault it was stolen from them. Why shouldn't she be permitted to sell her art?" He pointed to the costs incurred by the family in tracing the paintings and in taking its case through the Dutch courts for 10 years.

The sale of the Goudstikker collection will take place over three auctions, starting in New York in April.

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/news/story/0,,2019549,00.html

Denmark has returned over 30,000 objects to its former colony in an unusual case of cooperative repatriation

By Martin Bailey | Posted 24 February 2007, The Artnewspaper

LONDON. A possible solution to the Parthenon Marbles dispute between the British Museum and the Greek government has come from a most unlikely source — a gathering in Greenland. Meeting in the depths of the Arctic winter, museum professionals and representatives of indigenous peoples recently assembled in the tiny capital of Nuuk (formerly Godthab) to discuss global strategies on repatriation of cultural heritage.

The Greeks had originally decided to send Minister of Culture Georgios Voulgarakis, but when his officials examined the flight schedule, they realised that he would have to leave Athens for a whole week, missing too much government business. Instead, Greece was represented by Nikoletta Valakou, director of the Athens Ephorate in the Ministry of Culture. In her address, she spoke of the importance of the New Parthenon Museum which is scheduled to open later this year.

Immediately afterwards, Jonathan King took the floor. As the British Museum’s keeper of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, he gave an ethnographer’s view of restitution. He argued that repatriation represents a focus on the past, and "cultural diplomacy" is the way forward.

Both sides politely and eloquently put forward their positions, and a resolution of the century-old dispute seemed just as far away as ever. But following the Nuuk meeting, the director of the Greenland National Museum and Archives, Daniel Thorleifsen, told The Art Newspaper that he hoped the "Greenland example" would be an encouragement to the British and the Greeks.

In an unusual example of cooperative repatriation, Denmark has returned museum material to its former colony, which achieved home rule in 1979. Greenland remains part of Denmark, but is internally self-governing. Its population is only 56,000, living in an area almost ten times the size of the UK. Nuuk is the smallest capital in the northern hemisphere with 13,500 people.

The repatriation was organised at the level of museum professionals, and was based on the principle that both Greenland and Denmark should hold “a representative collection” of objects from Greenland. The first items restituted in 1982 were a collection of 200 watercolours by Aron of Kangeq (1822-69), an Inuit seal hunter and the country’s most important artist.

By 2001, 35,000 objects (mostly archaeological) had been returned from to Greenland from Denmark’s National Museum, leaving around 65,000 pieces in Copenhagen. The Nuuk museum, established in 1966, now receives around 7,000 Greenlandic visitors and 15,000 tourists a year.

When the conference closed on 15 February, it was hoped to issue a Nuuk Declaration, but the wide range of participants (from organisations of Maori to Sami people) meant that immediate agreement could not be reached. Instead a set of general principles were accepted, which included a call on museums to divide material “in equitable ways”. Among the participants was Professor Jack Lohman, director of the Museum of London, who left Greenland having heard a wide range of views, but still feeling that there are “a lot of issues to be addressed” on repatriation.

http://www.theartnewspaper.com/article01.asp?id=576