The Orpheus Clock

by Simon Goodman

  I read the inscription again. Plate No. 130 Landscape with Smokestacks, 1890, monotype and pastel, 28x40 cm. Followed by the names Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Searle. Who were these people? And how did an American word such as Smokestacks get in there? Was the title change mere clumsiness or was it an attempt to obscure the painting’s identity?

  The sudden announcement of the closing of the library jolted me from my reverie. My mind was still racing when I emerged into the brisk early-autumn evening descending over the Westwood campus. Not until I was halfway down Westwood Boulevard did I notice a pay phone. I got through to Nick. He was stunned. I must have gone over my news about three times. The next day, I called Lili in Florence. Her voice went up an octave or two in astonishment. My news brought with it the first real hope that she had felt in decades about her parents’ lost treasures. We were elated by the possibility of recovering one of Fritz and Louise’s stolen artworks.

  A few months earlier, Nick and I had wheedled our way into a private lecture that was given by Lynn Nicholas at the old Getty Villa in Malibu. The topic had been “Nazi looting,” and Lynn Nicholas’s seminal book, The Rape of Europa, was the first of its kind. After the lecture we introduced ourselves to her. Our grandfather Fritz was even mentioned in her book. Lynn recommended we contact Willi Korte, an art detective, and Tom Kline, a lawyer. Both were based in Washington, DC, and Tom Kline, we discovered, was the foremost art-recovery lawyer in the United States. He had been the first American lawyer to pioneer the field of art restitution when the Orthodox Church of Cyprus hired him to help recover four famous mosaics. Later, in 1990, Tom had secured his reputation in a groundbreaking restitution case in which American GIs had looted German artifacts from the medieval church in Quedlinburg. Even at the time it seemed more than a little ironic that Germans were trying to reclaim looted art while there had been no cases involving Jewish looted art in more than several decades.

  Later, one of the many questions the press would ask us was “How many other families are there who might make a claim?” I had no idea. “Maybe a hundred?” Eventually I would come to realize, with a certain pride, that we were just the beginning. Countless families who had feared all was lost up till this point would soon start reviving their claims.

  The day after I found the Degas, Nick called Tom Kline to tell him what had happened. We had two big questions for him. How did our grandparents’ Degas, last seen in Nazi hands in wartime Paris, somehow wind up a half century later in the private collection of a Chicago billionaire? And two, what could we do about it?

  Daniel Searle, we would discover, was a gaunt, heavy-smoking man with a dark gray suit for every day of the week. Behind his somber desk he had hung a large portrait of himself. The humorless face in the portrait seemed to mirror exactly the man sitting beneath it. Nevertheless, Daniel Searle was at the pinnacle of Midwestern society. He was a trustee of the Art Institute of Chicago and sat on the board of countless companies and charities. Meanwhile, the Searle Freedom Trust funded a veritable who’s who of right-wing organizations. Donald Rumsfeld was a protégé. The Searle fortune was assured in 1965 when G. D. Searle & Co. developed aspartame, the controversial sugar substitute. Twenty years later, Daniel Searle sold the family pharmaceutical firm to Monsanto for $2.7 billion.

  Under Tom’s guidance, we assembled every available document that mentioned the Degas Paysage, now forever known as Landscape with Smokestacks. By December, all of us were confident that we had put together a solid case.

  Tom wrote the first official letter to Daniel Searle, which must have arrived just before the holidays. In a nutshell, we were asking for our painting back. Searle’s attorneys responded curtly by denying that it was even the same painting. Fortunately, we were able to establish that there was indeed only one such landscape. Then Searle’s legal team claimed my grandfather had never owned the pastel. Their lawyer demanded, “What’s this painting got to do with these people? Who are the Goodmans or the Gutmanns anyway?” It quickly became apparent, legally at least, that we would have to answer these questions.

  Curiously, in the provenance records that I had uncovered at UCLA, and from the many catalogues raisonnés and monographs on Degas, there was no mention of Fritz Gutmann. The leading Degas expert (P. A. Lemoisne) merely listed the prewar owner as the Lütjens Collection, Holland. Eventually we were able to demonstrate, beyond a shadow of doubt, that Helmuth Lütjens was actually the art dealer who had bid for the Paysage on behalf of Fritz Gutmann at an auction in Paris in 1932.

  Less than two months later we received startling news. Searle’s lawyer, Ralph Lerner, who was well respected in the art world, had decided to drop the case. He didn’t seem to have the heart for it; perhaps his being Jewish had something to do with it. In any event, we were thrilled.

  Unfortunately, our euphoria did not last long. Searle was not giving up. Instead he switched his defense to the Chicago office of the same law firm. The new legal team took a more aggressive position. They now claimed my grandfather must have sold the Degas Paysage. I began to realize that so much more than just the provenance of one painting was being revealed, and in a not-so-roundabout way. Perhaps I had a hard-nosed lawyer from Chicago to thank for the journey on which I was embarking. Pandora’s box had been opened.

  • • •

  Slowly, we started to trace the journey of Degas’s Paysage through the decades. In a 1968 American study on Degas monotypes, a doctoral candidate named Eugenia Parry Janis had listed the next person in the provenance, after my grandfather’s agent, as Hans Wendland, Paris. The activities of Hans Wendland were now critical to our case. Willi Korte, the art detective, would help expose the truth about him, and as a result, we would uncover the painting’s grim history.

  The Degas had been sent to Arthur Goldschmidt in Paris for safekeeping in April 1939, via the shipping company De Gruyter. However, those to whom the painting had been entrusted were also of Jewish origin. Soon they also had to flee the Germans. Not long after it had been stored, on the boulevard Raspail, it would be confiscated as “abandoned Jewish property” by the ERR. At this point the Paysage seemed to disappear.

  The landscape, along with several others of Fritz’s artworks, was taken to the Jeu de Paume Museum, just off the place de la Concorde, where Rose Valland was working. The Germans had converted the famous museum into their private storage for thousands of looted artworks. As many as twenty thousand pieces went through the historic gallery in less than four years. Hermann Göring, personally, made several trips to the Jeu de Paume, where he raked through the stolen art. Vast selections were shipped back to his private country residence at Carinhall. Well-known Nazi art dealers, such as Hofer and Haberstock, also scoured the ERR’s loot, which was displayed in the museum. Masterpieces by the trainload were sent back to Hitler and the other top Nazis.

  As a rule, the Nazis did not want Impressionist or other “modern” artworks, which they considered degenerate—and here the dealer Hans Adolf Wendland came into the equation. Wendland had devised a plan for “degenerate” art to be smuggled into neutral Switzerland—sometimes in German diplomatic pouches—and sold or traded there for old masters. As part of this scheme, he had conveniently forged a special relationship with Theodor Fischer, the owner of the Fischer Gallery and Auction House in Lucerne.

  Many of the Swiss were eager collaborators, not only in the looted-art trade, but later in providing safe harbor for Nazi gold and other assets. The Swiss banks had no compunction expropriating, at the urging of their German neighbors, the “abandoned” assets of Jews, murdered or otherwise. When my father and Lili tried to retrieve Swiss bank accounts opened by Fritz in the early 1920s, the Swiss Banking Association said they had no records. (Roughly sixty years after the end of the war, I would have more luck.)

  Meanwhile, since the 1920s Wendland had been the primary German art dealer based in Switzerland. During this time he formed a close working relationship with Fritz’s nemesis Karl Haberstock, which, curiously, ended abruptly in 192
7 over a quarrel involving Haberstock’s wife. From 1933 on, Wendland also established a base in Paris. As soon as the Germans took over the French capital, Hans Wendland quickly became the most notorious player in the Nazi stolen-degenerate-art trade. In Paris his friend Bruno Lohse was now second-in-command of the ERR looting machine. Wendland also made a point of being available to facilitate several of Göring’s acquisitions.

  After the war Hans Wendland was arrested by the US armed forces in Italy and transferred in 1946 to an internment camp in Germany—in Wannsee of all places. In that same villa, Wendland was grilled by the American OSS Monuments officers. We found a detailed interrogation report in the US Archives in Washington, DC.

  Ironically, Wendland’s wartime Paris headquarters were in the Ritz Hotel, where Fritz had also based himself, albeit in happier times. Around the same time, Fritz’s brother Kurt was working incognito downstairs in one of the hotel’s kitchens. Kurt, no doubt, had no idea that his brother’s treasures were hanging in the balance. Even if he had known, I suppose Kurt wouldn’t have lasted long if he had started poisoning Germans in the hotel.

  From his perch at the Ritz, Wendland could observe the Paul Graupe gallery just across the place Vendôme. As the Germans consolidated their grip throughout the French capital, Graupe and his associate, Arthur Goldschmidt, were frantically hiding their collections, including Fritz’s many artworks. Unfortunately, their hiding place on the boulevard Raspail was no secret to Wendland. By coincidence or not, Wendland had rented his own space in the same storage facility, which gave him easy access. Before long he led the ERR straight to the Gutmann treasures. It was customary for the ERR to reward Wendland (and his ilk) with some of the pieces of art they didn’t want, such as the Paysage.

  In the 1942 raid, the ERR also took from the Gutmann collection a painting of an enigmatic Spanish lady by Jean Barbault (but once attributed to Goya), and an impressive fifteenth-century Baptism of Christ by the great Tuscan Luca Signorelli. Both canvases were earmarked for the Führermuseum. On this same inventory, a small Renaissance portrait by Dosso Dossi was stamped with an ominous H.G. This meant that it had been selected by Hermann Göring himself. The other Degas, Femme se Chauffant, also appeared in the 1942 haul at the Jeu de Paume. It had been designated, dismissively, as “modern” and marked down for exchange. However, the Degas Paysage didn’t even appear in the final ERR accounting at the Jeu de Paume. It had already made its way to Switzerland, where it appeared next in the Hans Wendland collection in Versoix outside Geneva—as if nothing untoward had ever taken place. Wendland never mentioned the Gutmann Degas during his lengthy interrogations with US Monuments officers in September 1946, even though he mentioned Paul Graupe, in a different context, and two other Degas paintings.

  Daniel Searle’s lawyers tried to insinuate that Hans Wendland had somehow bought Paysage. But no tangible evidence was offered to this effect. On the contrary, according to the US Monuments interrogators Major Otto Wittmann Jr. and Lieutenant Bernard Taper, Wendland admitted “to claiming pictures as his own which in fact did not belong to him, in his rescues of Jewish-owned art in France.” Furthermore the OSS issued a red-flag list of several hundred people who had participated in the art trade under the Nazis. Wendland was described as “probably the most important individual engaged in quasi-official looted art transactions in France, Germany, and Switzerland in World War II.”

  Following the German defeat, the likes of Haberstock, Hofer, and Böhler were eager to show the Allies documents that demonstrated their “aboveboard” professional practices. They were careful to show only papers that demonstrated their “ownership.” From their point of view, they were within the law. Wendland, on the other hand, wouldn’t even admit to being an art dealer—he insisted he was merely a “consultant.”

  After the war, Paul Graupe and his son never claimed they had sold the Paysage. Arthur Goldschmidt, Paul Graupe’s partner, in a 1945 statement to a Gutmann family lawyer, declared that he personally had put both Degas pastels in storage on the boulevard Raspail, just before he fled Paris and the Nazis.

  Unfortunately, Wendland was soon released from the last “denazification” camp where he had been held. On his return to Switzerland at the beginning of 1948, Wendland then sold the Gutmann Degas to his brother-in-law, Hans Fankhauser. Fankhauser was a Swiss citizen and, as such, immune from Allied arrest or detention. Just a few years later, in 1951, Fankhauser would sell the painting to Emile Wolf, a wealthy collector who lived in New York.

  Searle’s lawyers claimed that Wolf must have acquired “good title” to the painting in Switzerland. However, Wendland himself had pointed out on several occasions that even though he was a resident in Switzerland, he was forbidden to sell art on the Swiss market (a privilege reserved for Swiss citizens) because he was a German citizen. Therefore, his brother-in-law, Hans Fankhauser, did not have “good title” to give.

  What Emile Wolf knew or did not know is hard to say. All we know is that the Degas was not seen again until 1965, when a painting with the designation “Degas Landscape 11.5 x 16.5 in. lent by Evelyne Wolf-Walborsky” was displayed for over ten weeks in the short-lived Finch College Museum of Art in New York. (Evelyne Wolf-Walborsky was Emile Wolf’s daughter.)

  In 1968, the Degas was on public view again for seven weeks as part of an exhibition at Harvard’s Fogg Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The exhibition catalog, which was never published in Europe, was prepared by the doctoral student Eugenia Janis. But the painting now had a different title. Janis, perhaps with Wolf’s encouragement, had created a new name for the Degas—Landscape with Smokestacks. Later, this title was even translated back into French as Paysage avec fumée de cheminées. Edgar Degas would not have recognized this greatly expanded title, which wasn’t even grammatically very good French.

  In 1987, Emile Wolf sold the Degas to Daniel Searle for $850,000. Searle’s simple concern, at the time, had been whether this was a “good” Degas. His advisers, including the Art Institute of Chicago, confirmed the artistic importance of the landscape and its significance in art history. The provenance, true to fashion, was never a real consideration.

  • • •

  Through the seventies and eighties Bernard and Lili continued looking for the missing art. They hired an arts specialist in Munich; Lili went on German television in 1987 and displayed pictures of both the missing Degas paintings. As soon as the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, marking the end of the Iron Curtain, Lili, at age seventy, made a trip to Russia. Unfortunately, she found nothing.

  My father, quite reasonably, had always thought of the United States as “the Allies.” In the years after the war, it would never have occurred to him to look for Nazi loot in the United States, especially in the museum of an exclusive Manhattan college for women or on the venerable campus of Harvard.

  Based on the brief public showing of the painting in New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts, Searle’s legal team came up with yet another line of defense. They asserted that my father and aunt had not looked hard enough for the Degas and so had no rights. They argued that we should have, somehow, been aware when the Degas was loaned to an exhibition in New England. In legal terms, they asserted that my family had not been “duly diligent.” This came as a surprise to Nick and me when we thought of our father’s years of searching museums and galleries.

  In fact, in 1967, just the year before the Harvard exhibition, West German and French authorities had concluded that the Degas, along with three other paintings from the Gutmann collection, could not be traced. As a result, the West German government paid Bernard and Lili a nominal compensation for the four artworks, almost twenty-two years after the end of the war. Rose Valland had backed my family throughout this lengthy process. Additionally, during all this time Interpol had not come up with any clues, either, even though my father had alerted them to the loss of the art within months of the war’s end. The German consensus was that the paintings must have ended up behind the Iron Curtain.

&nb
sp; Today we know better. In the years after the war, the gray market in Europe was awash with thousands of artworks of dubious provenance, or no provenance at all. Many American dealers and collectors could not resist the bargain prices. With next to no questions asked, hundreds, if not thousands, of paintings and other art pieces would make their way across the Atlantic.

  Searle’s team claimed innocence. They asserted that no one had ever heard of these Nazi art traders. Ignorance had become a defense. We discovered a glaring disconnect in the art world. The benefits of the gray market in art were such that the art world had almost completely overlooked the realities of war and, most specifically, the Holocaust.

  By July of 1996, after seven months of patient argument, we realized we had hit a brick wall. Daniel Searle did not want to give the painting back. A billionaire, he could afford a battery of lawyers, and his lawyers were telling him he didn’t have to budge. He said we’d have to sue him—and so we did.

  We filed our lawsuit in New York on July 19, 1996. As soon as the writ became public, the phone started ringing off the hook. Apparently we were making history. Our suit against Searle would be the first major Nazi looting case to be tried in the United States. Newspapers from Los Angeles to London and from Jerusalem to Japan were lining up. Just the day after the story broke, Nick received a call from CBS. Morley Safer from 60 Minutes wanted to interview us.