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I
PROLOGUE:
THEY HAD FOUR YEARS
Germany Before the War: The Nazi Art Purges
On the afternoon of June 30, 1939, a major art auction took place at the elegant Grand Hotel National in the Swiss resort town of Lucerne. Offered that day were 126 paintings and sculptures by an impressive array of modern masters, including Braque, van Gogh, Picasso, Klee, Matisse, Kokoschka, and thirty-three others. The objects had been exhibited for some weeks before in Zurich and Lucerne and a large international group of buyers had gathered.
Next to the well-known German dealer Walter Feilchenfeldt and his wife, Marianne, who had moved in 1933 to the Amsterdam branch of the Berlin-based Cassirer firm to escape the drastic anti-Jewish laws at home, sat the famous producer of The Blue Angel, Josef von Sternberg. A group of Belgian museum officials and collectors led by Dr. Leo van Puyvelde, director of the Brussels Museum of Fine Arts, were in the next row.1 Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., in Europe on his wedding trip, was there with his two friends, dealers Pierre Matisse and Curt Valentin.2 Valentin, formerly of Berlin’s Buchholz Gallery, and only recently established in New York, had persuaded Mr. Pulitzer to attend; armed with commissions from various museums and collectors, he had come prepared to buy.
An auction of this nature was not in itself an unusual thing in 1939. There had been large sales in London and elsewhere that spring. What made this one exceptional was not only the very contemporary nature of the lots but more especially their provenance. For these pictures and sculptures came from Germany’s leading public museums: Munich, Hamburg, Mannheim, Frankfurt, Dresden, Bremen, the Wallraf-Richartz in Cologne, the Folkwang in Essen, and Berlin’s Nationalgalerie. Nor could the lots be considered minor examples of each artist’s work, which might be sold to clear a museum’s storerooms. They included Picasso’s Absinthe Drinker, described in the catalogue as “a masterpiece of the painter’s Blue Period”; van Gogh’s great Self-Portrait from Munich, which Alfred Frankfurter would buy for Maurice Wertheim for SFr 175,000, the highest price of the day; and Matisse’s Bathers with a Turtle. Indeed, Pierre Matisse, bidding for Pulitzer, considered the Bathers one of his father’s masterpieces, and had been prepared to go far higher than the final bid of SFr 9,100.3
Missing at Lucerne were the joy and excitement usually felt at such a sale. Joseph Pulitzer remembers quite different emotions: “To safeguard this art for posterity, I bought—defiantly! … The real motive in buying was to preserve the art.”4 It was widely felt that the proceeds would be used to finance the Nazi party. The auctioneer had been so worried about this perception that he had sent letters to leading dealers assuring them that all profits would be used for German museums. Daniel Kahnweiler, whose own collection had been confiscated and auctioned by the French government after World War I, was not convinced and did not attend.5 Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art, in Paris arranging its upcoming blockbuster Picasso show, did not go either, feeling that the museum should not be linked in any way with such an unpopular sale. He also instructed his staff to state firmly that recent acquisitions from Germany had been bought from the new Buchholz Gallery in New York.6
Those who did attend were torn. Marianne Feilchenfeldt remembers that some who had agreed not to bid finally could not resist. She and her husband, appalled to note that one of the lots was a Kokoschka, Cathedral of Bordeaux, which they had donated to the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, did resist, and the picture did not sell. Friends with them eventually succumbed to the temptation of the low prices and bought Nolde’s Red and Yellow Begonias.
The French journal Beaux Arts called the atmosphere at the Grand National “stifling.” The hall, it said, was filled with curious Swiss spectators, interested in the politics of the sale. American dealers bid low, and no French bidders were in evidence. The auctioneer did not conduct the proceedings as one would expect:
The sale was efficiently conducted by M. [Theodore] Fischer, who was not always able to hide his disdain for certain degenerate pieces. Presenting Man with a Pipe by Pechstein, he said, with a little sneer, “This must be a portrait of the artist” … when he withdrew other lots, which he had started at rather a high minimum, he took wicked pleasure in observing loudly, “Nobody wants that sort of thing,” or “This lady doesn’t please the public” … and he smiled when he said the word “withdrawn.”7
Other accounts were not much kinder.
Theodore Fischer (left, standing) takes bids for van Gogh’s Self-Portrait, formerly in Munich’s Neue Staatsgalerie.