The Orpheus Clock

by Simon Goodman

  Much later, in his brief 1991 memoir of the Gutmann family (which Eva sent me just before he died), my father would sum up the postwar struggle over the Gutmann estate and the recovered artworks this way: “The entire affair lasted years, and very little came out of it. Only the lawyers made money.”

  • • •

  Sadly, as so often happens in such matters, the drawn-out liquidation of the estate and the Eugen Gutmann trust, and the troubled sale of the artworks and silver pieces, caused further disruptions and divisions among the Gutmann family, pitting nephew against aunt, cousin against cousin, even brother against sister. Perhaps Lili was right to compare the silver collection to the Nibelungen gold—maybe it was cursed. There were accusations, recriminations, complaints by one party or the other that he or she had somehow been shortchanged in the division of the various estates’ insufficient remains. Angry words were followed by years, decades, of angry silence. Even my father and Lili, once so close, did not speak to each other for years and years following a dispute after some of Louise’s jewelry was discovered in Switzerland. Not until the late 1960s, while I was traveling through Italy as a student, was I able to help bring about a full reconciliation between my dear father and aunt.

  The burden of all this family turmoil fell most heavily on Bernard. The role of family executor is seldom enviable, especially when one has to explain to the other heirs that their expectations are unrealistic. In the usual nature of family feuds, the divisions persisted long after the precise reasons for them had been forgotten, even into my own generation. It was why, as a boy, I had never met my aunt or many of my cousins. I had barely been aware they existed, even though several lived just a few miles away in London. My mother had relatives, but otherwise my family consisted of my parents and my brother. This, I’m sure, was one of the reasons why, for much of his life, my father was so lonely.

  Perhaps he would have got over it if the matter of his father’s art collection and other assets had all been firmly wrapped up, if there hadn’t been so many loose ends, so many questions unanswered. But my father knew at least thirty paintings were still missing, that he remembered—paintings that had never been found by the Allies after the war or, if they had been found, were never returned.

  Rose Valland continued, valiantly, to look for the two Degas pastels, the Renoir, and the portraits by Dosso Dossi and Baldung Grien. But even she had given up on the Botticelli. The two fantasy landscapes by Guardi, last seen in Switzerland, had slipped out of the Allies’ jurisdiction. Others such as the Adriaen van Ostade, the Hercules Seghers, a second Jan van Goyen, the strange Franz von Stuck called The Sin, and so many others had just disappeared. Last seen in Munich in 1943 was the wonderful Renaissance cassone panel (originally attributed to Uccello) that had been Fritz’s first acquisition.

  The idea that paintings stolen from his murdered father’s prized collection were hanging on someone else’s wall, perhaps even in the home of some ex-Nazi, ate away at Bernard, tormented him, and eventually obsessed him.

  At this point my father’s secret life must have begun, the secret life that had so mystified me when I was a boy—the unexplained trips, the constant correspondence to and from foreign governments and overseas lawyers, and the mounting sense of frustration and inner rage.

  He traveled relentlessly through Europe, to Holland, Belgium, and France, to Spain and Italy, to Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Endlessly he would search museums and galleries, attend auctions, and search those records that hadn’t been sealed and classified, looking for any hints of his father’s missing art treasures.

  In my early childhood, my family sometimes all went to Europe together. However, my parents would often leave my brother and me alone with our nanny, by a beach in Holland or in Italy by Lake Como. I remember having fun, but sometimes Nick and I were lonely. On occasion, my mother would come back first and we would all wait for Pa together. When we were old enough to start school, my mother took a job in London, and my father continued his journeys alone.

  When at home, Bernard would lock himself away in his study and write letters by the hundreds. Letters to the French Service de Protection des Oeuvres d’Art, to the German Bundesamt für Äussere Restitutionen, to the Interpol section of Scotland Yard, to solicitors and art dealers and museum curators, letters pleading for help, letters demanding action, letters that, as the years went by, became increasingly indignant and frustrated.

  “Bear in mind that we are not refugees being dictated to by what might be for all I know ex-Nazis,” he angrily wrote in a letter referencing a claim against the German government. In another letter to Paris concerning a report that two of his father’s missing Guardis had been sighted in Switzerland, he impatiently declared, “It is not clear to me whether . . . you have started a new inquiry at Geneva as I have repeatedly requested. I have a feeling that you may not have entirely understood my previous letters.”

  In the end, it all came to almost nothing. In 1967, after years of negotiations, Bernard and Lili agreed, very reluctantly with their lawyers, to a restitution settlement with the West German government that paid them a paltry $7,500 each for four stolen and still-missing paintings that had disappeared somewhere in Germany during the war. Officially they were being paid 50 percent of the 1945 values. Apparently, if my father wanted the other half that was due, he would have to go behind the Iron Curtain and get Communist East Germany to pay the rest. For the West German officials, twenty years after the end of the war, it was a convenient resolution for what to them was essentially a nuisance lawsuit. For Bernard and Lili, the settlement barely covered the legal fees.

  For all his travels, all his letters, and all his years of searching, my father never found another of his father’s missing paintings. As the decades went by, as the war and the Holocaust receded in time, government officials, and others, were less and less interested in recovering a few stolen paintings. Most of Germany had become part of the new alliance, and now the authorities were focused on a different enemy, the Soviet bloc. Officials would say what happened was all quite regrettable, most unfortunate, but there was nothing they could do about it—it was time to move on.

  Increasingly, my father’s letters went unanswered. But he could never let it go. Others might forget, but for my father that was never an option. Despite substantial successes immediately after the war—my father and aunt recovered far more than most other comparable families—the failure of the last three decades to redeem his family’s lost legacy had irrevocably changed him. Slowly, bit by bit, the once cheerful, gregarious, fun-loving young man from Cambridge, the loving young father who had lifted me on his shoulders to see the King’s funeral procession, turned into the silent, withdrawn, broken man I came to know.

  As his marriage to my mother slowly fell away, their breakup came not with shouts or angry words, but more by silences that grew ever longer. After their divorce my father took a bachelor flat in Chelsea, a rather cramped place with well-worn carpets and bookcases stacked with art books and museum catalogs, where he just slipped into obscurity. Each time I visited, he seemed to have barely moved from his armchair.

  My father’s otherwise almost nonexistent social calendar had one annual highlight. Each year the “old boys” from his school in Zuoz, the Lyceum Alpinum, would gather for a reunion in the Engadine valley, by St. Moritz, high in the Swiss Alps. My father never failed to attend. Surrounded by his old school friends, once the sons of bankers and industrialists and counts and barons, now bankers and industrialists and counts and barons in their own right, he seemed able for the moment to put aside the tragedies and disillusionment of the last forty years, to immerse himself in happier memories. His dinner jacket and tails still dated from that period. If his wealthy friends noticed that his collars were a bit frayed, his suits a bit worn, they were too nice to say anything about it. One quirk also set my father somewhat apart from the other Zuoz alumni—his utter refusal to speak the common language of the school, which was German. If anyone add
ressed him in German, he would respond in English—not because he had forgotten the language of his youth, but because he detested the country it came from. This stand made what happened next all the more surprising. At a school-reunion dinner in 1978, my father, then sixty-four, met and quietly fell in love with a younger woman named Eva Schultze-Dumbsky. What was even more startling was that Eva was German and had been born in Germany just as Hitler was taking power. After the Zuoz school went coed in the 1950s, she had been among the first females to graduate. The dinner was held at the fashionable Badrutt’s Palace Hotel in St. Moritz—coincidentally one of Fritz’s favorites that summer in 1913, when he had fallen in love with Louise. The result was that not only did my father start speaking German again, but in the early eighties he left London and moved to Eva’s hometown of Tübingen, in southwestern Germany.

  At the time, Nick and I were stunned. When I had the opportunity to ask my father what it was like living in Germany, he just shrugged and said it was fine. I think, after all that had happened, he liked being called sir again in German and being treated with the deference he was originally accustomed to. Obviously Nick and I were pleased that Pa had found some measure of happiness in his later years.

  Yet, despite this apparent accommodation with the past, my father never abandoned his search for the missing paintings. He continued to study art catalogs and auction listings, to haunt museums and art galleries, to write his letters, albeit much less frequently. As Eva later told us, when the Berlin Wall finally came down in 1989, followed in short order by the lifting of the Iron Curtain throughout Eastern Europe, he had happily slapped the breakfast table and announced, “Das ist die Wende!” “This is the turning point!” Ever since its creation, East Germany had consistently refused to restitute property seized by the Nazis. Suddenly East Germany no longer existed. In October of 1990, German reunification became a reality. Bernard quickly summoned the courage to resume his long-dormant correspondence with the Federal German authorities. Convinced now that the paintings had disappeared into East Germany or the Soviet Union, he hoped that finally, after four decades of searching, he would at last be able to track them down.

  But it was not to be. In 1994, during a trip to Venice, my father and Eva spent the night of his eightieth birthday in happy celebration at the famous Harry’s Bar, a familiar haunt from his younger days. The next day he went swimming at the Lido and sank without a sound.

  My father had never been able to express his pain. Like the ghost of an unfulfilled spirit, I believe, part of this pain was passed on. Then two months later, in Los Angeles, those dusty old boxes arrived at our doorstep.

  CHAPTER 10

  SEARCHING FOR DEGAS

  From the old negative taken by Rose Valland and found in Bernard’s boxes.

  My father wasn’t able to leave my brother or me much, or so it seemed. There was no great inheritance. When those musty boxes arrived, I wasn’t sure if they were a gift or a burden.

  My brother and I didn’t know where to begin. So Nick cleared the biggest table he had, and we started to make delicate piles based on any common reference we could detect. Neither of us had any clue where this real-life puzzle might lead. Pa had to have had a reason to keep all this so carefully, decade after decade, country after country, and home after home. Whatever our motivation—filial duty, tender respect—we were determined to find out the answers.

  What emerged before us was a rare glimpse into the withdrawn world of our departed father. From the time we were children, we had always assumed those endless trips to Europe were for his career in the travel business. Only now did we realize that our father’s unspectacular career had a hidden, ulterior purpose.

  We had always taken for granted that what had been lost during the war years had somehow all been accounted for. With each letter, it became more and more clear that little had truly been settled. Our father had never given up his silent struggle to recover his parents’ lost art treasures, right up to the moment of his sudden death.

  Nick and I were beginning to grasp, with a sense of both foreboding and exhilaration, that hidden among these brittle pages were the secrets that Pa had never been able to articulate. Reaching across time, our past, perhaps mercifully out of reach up till this point, was about to become tangible.

  Suddenly, I was grateful for all the times my father had dragged me through those musty museums as a little boy. It was all coming back to me—the familiar names, the familiar artists. Thanks to this gift that had lain dormant for so many years, I felt strangely confident about the task that was unfolding in front of me.

  • • •

  Waves of forgotten memories swept over me while reading names and addresses from a distant childhood, comforted by my father’s headed notepaper, still real after so many years. Brittle stamps, barely hanging on with ancient glue, recalled boyhood heroes such as Churchill and De Gaulle, alongside the likes of Hitler and Mussolini. One pattern quickly became clear. Almost every one of my father’s yellowing letters had the same theme—paintings and art once cherished and then swallowed up in the Nazi whirlwind.

  In particular, Pa had focused most of his attention on the paintings that had been sent to the Paul Graupe gallery in the place Vendôme. In the spring of 1939 and with war imminent, Fritz had sent around twenty-five major paintings from Bosbeek to Paris for safekeeping, along with several sculptures and some very valuable furniture.

  Almost all the Paris documents and inventories that we found in our father’s papers listing the old masters included three missing Impressionist works: a Renoir landscape and two works by Degas.

  Between all the carefully kept envelopes, one stood out. Curiously, it had nothing written on it. Inside were simply three carefully preserved photo-slide negatives. When held up to the light, we could see the ghostlike images of three almost forgotten paintings. One, even to my amateur eye, looked very much like a Degas. Nick quickly had the negatives printed. The excitement was palpable. We had plenty of clues, but here were our first real images.

  The photos, we would discover, were of a Renoir called Le Poirier, a Degas called Femme se Chauffant, and another painting by Edgar Degas entitled simply Paysage. The photos had apparently been taken by Rose Valland. According to Aunt Lili, the paintings had once hung in the drawing room at Bosbeek, but during the war had disappeared from a warehouse in Paris.

  Nick and I were both deeply moved by what we were learning about our father and the quest that had consumed him. Both of us felt that we now had a belated opportunity to decipher our father’s secrets and even ultimately our family’s history—a family we never knew we had. A half century after the war, we decided to take up where our father had left off. The first step: Nick would look for the Renoir and I would look for the two Degas.

  • • •

  I was not a lost-art sleuth. For the previous twenty-five years or so, I had been an executive in the music industry. I had never done this sort of thing before. I didn’t even know whether it could be done, but I was determined to try.

  Today, tracking down a particular artwork, particularly one by a famous artist, can sometimes be a simple, lucky matter of punching a few keys on a computer. Back in 1995, I was still grappling with the DOS system on UCLA’s computers. Museums did not yet routinely display their inventories on the Internet. Auction houses were extremely circumspect, and art galleries had always been downright secretive. Nor could one easily track a painting by its title. Titles were often merely descriptive and subject to change. For example, the same painting might be variously titled Portrait of a Young Man, Portrait of a Young Man in a Red Hat, or simply Portrait of a Man. To complicate matters, over the decades the same artwork would often be attributed (at various times) to completely different artists.

  It was September 1995, exactly fifty years after the end of World War II. For months I had been haunting libraries, combing through art books and old exhibition and auction catalogs looking for a painting to match the old photographs. Most of Septe
mber I had been navigating the various libraries on the UCLA campus, not far from my home. This was my third visit to what is now the Charles E. Young Library. On my previous visit, they had kindly ordered for me some hard-to-get volumes from the larger University of California collection and the books had just arrived from Berkeley. I was excited. Finding an unoccupied Formica-covered table in the Arts Research Library, I quickly established my territory by spreading my reference books around the entire communal desk. A little self-conscious, and easily twice the age of the average student, I felt I needed some boundaries.

  Before I knew it, students were packing up for the day. The library would soon close, but I still needed to go through one catalog. I didn’t want to risk its not being there the next time I came back to UCLA. With one eye on Rose Valland’s photo of the Paysage, I opened Richard Kendall’s Degas Landscapes. The Kendall book had recently been published to coincide with an exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  Quickly leafing through the book, almost instinctively, halfway through it hit me. There it was! As if it jumped off the page, the impact was like a blow to the chest. What had eluded my family for over half a century was staring me in the face: Landscape with Smokestacks, 1890, monotype and pastel, 28x40 cm.

  I grabbed Rose Valland’s photograph, my heart pounding. Degas had painted many landscapes. Trying to be methodical, I compared the slightest details to the reproduction in the book, scanning from side to side and then from the top to bottom—same rolling hills, same smudge of dark smoke in the distance, and down in the bottom left corner, Degas’s same autograph. It was identical! I’d found it!

  The green and blue hues of Edgar Degas’s Norman hills, dotted with wild yellow flowers, were breathtaking. I had no idea the little painting could be so beautiful, so full of color. I laughed quietly at my own lack of imagination—for months I had been looking at the old, wartime, black-and-white photograph. Still in shock, I ascertained that the painting had been loaned to the Metropolitan Museum in New York for an exhibition at the beginning of 1994 , . . . just a year before. Trembling slightly, I dimly realized that by turning that particular page of that particular book, my whole life was about to change. Now reaching out from the past, a past almost lost forever, I had the distinct feeling that my father, Bernard, and my grandfather Fritz were cheering me on.