The ability of the ultrarich to insulate themselves from the rest of us left Nick and me with a sinking feeling. We seemed to be undertaking not just one David-and-Goliath battle but two at the same time: first Daniel Searle and now Michel Fribourg. Fortunately, we soon realized that, even if the Fribourgs never revealed where they had got the Renoir from, we could still discover where our painting had gone after the sale in New York.
Tom Kline’s next letter was to Sotheby’s, asking for the name of the person who had bought the painting. Their response was also to be expected. Not surprisingly Sotheby’s resisted vigorously, saying it had a duty of confidentiality to its clients. The venerable auction house did, however, seem to offer a possible compromise solution. They indicated that they might be prepared to provide such information if we could show evidence of my family’s due diligence in our efforts to trace the Renoir, and other pieces from the Gutmann collection, stolen during World War II.
The established art world seemed to hold outsiders, such as my family, accountable to a completely different set of standards from themselves. However, not only could we prove our due diligence, but we would demonstrate the 251-year-old auction house’s complete lack of the same. One of the many letters in those bottomless boxes from our dear late father had been from Sotheby’s in 1964, addressed to our mother. The letter gave my parents estimates for several of our stolen paintings, which at the time we were claiming compensation for from the West German government. The Renoir was one of those paintings, and their estimate was based on a copy of Rose Valland’s photo, which they must have kept in their files. All this had taken place less than five years before they would actually sell the painting to somebody else, in 1969.
Nonetheless, we assembled a hefty portfolio that included my father and Lili’s reporting the loss to Interpol and the Dutch, French, and West German authorities. As part of the documentation to support our case, we sent Sotheby’s a memo that was dated April 7, 1964, written by Rose Valland. Her memo confirmed that Renoir’s painting Poirier en Fleurs had been stored by Paul Graupe chez Madame Wacker-Bondy; it had formed part of the Fritz Gutmann collection, and it had been seized in Paris by the ERR at the beginning of the war.
As recently as the eighties Lili had been interviewed on German television about our search for the Renoir, and the rest of the collection. One of the last things Bernard had done was to try to revive our claim for it with the German authorities after German unification in 1991.
We felt more than confident that we had presented a compelling case. But to our disappointment, no quid pro quo was forthcoming. The matter was batted back and forth for virtually a year. Sotheby’s seemed to be playing a legal cat-and-mouse game with us. By the beginning of 1997 we had lost our patience more than once. On February 24, Tom Kline filed in New York State court a petition “to compel the production of documents and the examination of Sotheby’s. Prior to instituting suit to recover personal property.” The judge accepted our petition and issued a directive to Sotheby’s to provide the identity of the 1969 purchaser of Le Poirier. That should have been enough, but still the auction house refused to comply. Tom was never one to lose his cool, but he was coming close. Left with no alternative, we took Sotheby’s to court for a second time. The judge, too, was losing his patience. He threatened their attorney with contempt of court and suggested he might like to spend the weekend in jail while he considered the consequences. Finally Sotheby’s complied, although to our dismay all we got for our troubles was a post office box number in the British Virgin Islands.
After more legal work and a lot more sleuthing, on the last day of May 1997, we were finally given a real name: Dolores Brunilda Núñez Fábrega de Baeza. She had been married at least three times and was part of the moneyed Cuban diaspora. Before the revolution there had been Havana casinos and considerable wealth. Her father was one of the last Prime Ministers before Castro took over. After the communist takeover he settled in Panama, where his wife had come from an equally wealthy and powerful family.
Brunilda Núñez de Baeza and Rafael Navarro, her then husband, had bought Le Poirier at Parke-Bernet in New York in April 1969, presumably as an investment. Following their acquisition, the lovely landscape became a pawn to be shuffled between various trust companies. It bounced, on paper at least, from the Bahamas to Liechtenstein and back again. Ultimately our Renoir ended up as an asset of a trust company called the Mallard Corporation, in the British Virgin Islands. While the deed to the Poirier had flitted from one exotic tax haven to another, the actual painting had been in storage in Zurich with the Union Bank of Switzerland for the first ten years following Núñez de Baeza’s purchase. After that the ephemeral landscape, with its sunlit tones of yellow, orange, green, and deep red set against a bright blue sky, had languished for eighteen years in a drab, industrial neighborhood near Waterloo Station in London. It was hard to imagine a more depressing location for such a beautiful painting than the old brick warehouse on Glasshouse Walk. At least for a couple of years in Paris, while at the Wacker-Bondy storage, the Poirier had been next door to the Café des Arts, an old Montparnasse haunt where even Renoir might have had a drink. From there I could not be certain where the Nazis had taken our painting. Most likely it had ended up in the Galerie Fischer repository in Lucerne, Switzerland, where so much art tagged as “modern” by the ERR was ultimately laundered. Thinking about Fritz and Louise’s orphaned collection, I began to wonder whether art could have a memory. Could Le Poirier, once so lovingly displayed in Louise’s warm living room, feel the pain of neglect as it withered in some warehouse?
Throughout the summer of ’97, while the legal teams were preparing their briefs, Nick had been busy lobbying. He spoke on panels; he met with influential British politicians and then flew to Washington, DC, to meet with the lawyer of Brunilda Núñez de Baeza and the Mallard Corporation. In a singular show of bad faith and arrogance, the lawyer never arrived. Eventually Nick reached him in his London office, which the lawyer had never left. Instead he made an offer to Nick on the phone. The incredibly low offer was almost insulting, but it was an offer. Nick, Tom, and I felt we could build on it.
While I was fielding calls from the press, the New York Post and the Daily Mail in London among others, Nick must have done a dozen interviews. He was a firm believer in the power of the press. Like Daniel Searle and so many other ultrawealthy, Núñez de Baeza shunned publicity. We were hoping a little pressure would result in some concessions, and we were right. They raised their offer by 5 percent.
We were up against the reality that under English law Núñez de Baeza and the Mallard Corporation would most likely be recognized as the lawful owners. The prospect of actually getting the Renoir back was virtually nonexistent. The best we could do was restrict the possessor’s ability to resell the painting. Another problem was that lawyers cannot be hired in the UK on contingency, as can be done in the United States, and most British lawyers wanted to be paid up front. We kept negotiating while Nick stepped up the political pressure. The international “London Conference on Nazi Gold” had just been scheduled for the end of the year, and other looted assets, including artworks, would feature prominently.
The Mallard Corporation retaliated by summoning me to court in London. Their writ was that the various transfers of Le Poirier had given them good title under Bahamian law and that my family was impeding their rights. Fortunately, thanks to some clerical error, they had omitted to serve Nick or Lili with a similar summons. Their mistake allowed us to press one more time for an out-of-court settlement. Nick, to everybody’s surprise, managed to push them up another 5 percent. Realistically, we were pretty sure this was as far as we could go.
Under the terms of the agreement the Renoir would go back to auction. I had tried to get Christie’s involved, but after a month their specialist still hadn’t ventured from the comfort of St. James’s across the river to the unlovely Glasshouse Walk. As a result Núñez de Baeza’s choice prevailed. It was Sotheby’s.
Nick and I felt we had done our best in dealing with another intransigent ultrarich adversary, but what happened next took us completely by surprise.
We had agreed to a barely reasonable percentage of the proceeds based on Sotheby’s estimates. To make matters worse, the estimates had already been lowered a couple of times because, not surprisingly, our lovely Poirier had suffered from years of neglect. The auction began at Sotheby’s in London on a miserable day in October; the room was not well attended. Nick and I were in LA, but Bernard’s dear partner, Eva, was there to witness the sleight of hand.
When the Poirier’s lot came up, the auctioneer gave a cursory and unenthusiastic introduction, in a barely audible tone. There was no flourish and certainly no attempt to coax the room with an imaginary chandelier bid. Before Eva could catch her breath, the auctioneer hammered his podium with a dismissive “pass.” It was over in a flash before any potential bidder even had time to react. It had all happened so fast, Eva could not believe her eyes.
Sotheby’s seemed to have taught us another bitter lesson. We had little alternative when Brunilda Núñez de Baeza’s lawyer bought our share based on the reserve price used for auction.
In 2005 I noticed the Renoir reappear at Sotheby’s in Bond Street. Without much hesitation, it comfortably reached over our original reserve price. Five years after that, in 2010, the lovely Poirier resurfaced yet again at Sotheby’s, in New York instead. This time it sold for four times our original reserve price. Our poor, neglected Renoir had at last found the recognition it deserved. Equally satisfying was that Sotheby’s had finally got the provenance right.
• • •
In the midst of all the tumult from the Degas and the Renoir, after the airing of “The Search” on 60 Minutes, Nick and I were fielding calls left and right. One call was different, however. Christine Koenigs, the granddaughter of Fritz’s old friend Franz Koenigs, had been in New York checking the January sales at the big auction houses. She had hoped for some vital evidence in her valiant, yet quixotic, battle for the dispersed Koenigs collection. Instead, as she relayed with some excitement, she had just discovered Fritz’s missing Botticelli. Nick and I were dumbfounded.
The Sotheby’s Important Old Masters Paintings catalog for January 30, 1997, left no doubt. Lot 74 was by Sandro Botticelli and entitled Portrait of a Young Man in a Red Cap. It was euphemistically listed as the “Property of a European Collector.” However in the provenance, for all to see, was listed Fritz Gutmann. The utter brazenness of the auction house took us aback. We had become accustomed to the Gutmann name disappearing, conveniently, from so many of our paintings’ histories. What was indeed remarkable about Sotheby’s audacity in this instance was that our lawyer, Tom Kline, had only a year before supplied their legal department with a partial list of our family’s missing paintings. The list clearly included the Botticelli. Among the documentation that Tom included was a 1955 memo, yet again by Rose Valland, in which the Botticelli portrait was described, along with several other Gutmann paintings, as being looted by the Nazis. Furthermore, Tom had not sent this list to Sotheby’s on a whim. Our list, which included the Portrait of a Young Man in a Red Cap, had been compiled following a request in February 1996 by Sotheby’s very own legal department, concerning the Gutmann family history.
Sotheby’s had made every effort to ascertain that the portrait was indeed by Botticelli before putting it up for auction. Everett Fahy, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s principal authority on European paintings at the time, had attested that the painting, from 1484, had indeed been painted by Sandro Botticelli. In contrast, concerning the true provenance of the painting, Sotheby’s had clearly never even consulted its own records on the Gutmann losses. As the true story languished in its files, the auction house had no compunction printing in their catalog that after F. B. Gutmann, but with no date, the painting had been “acquired by Dr. R. Wetzlar, Naarden, Holland.” This was despite the fact that the literature, which Sotheby’s made a point of quoting in their catalog, actually still listed Fritz Gutmann as the last owner. The auction catalog also listed the last time the Botticelli portrait had been exhibited—at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in 1934. Again, if they had checked, they would have discovered that Portrait of a Young Man in a Red Cap had been loaned by Fritz Gutmann of Heemstede.
We did not have much time. Christine’s call had come just two days before the auction was to begin. Following several more frantic calls, Tom Kline, as fast as he could, sent the auction house a cease-and-desist notice. Unfortunately, the painting had already been sold by the time Sotheby’s claimed they had received our lawyer’s letter. The auction house was naturally defensive, even evasive, but they realized they could not ignore this action. Reason was on our side; we had first alerted the auction house about our claim for the Botticelli nearly a year before this particular auction. Within a few days Tom prevailed. Reluctantly Sotheby’s agreed to hold the painting, since it had not yet been delivered, and freeze any funds received. The upshot was that the auction house would retain possession until a settlement could be reached.
Before long their legal department regrouped. Sotheby’s changed tack and went on the offensive. Through some legal hocus-pocus they attempted to position themselves as the aggrieved party. They threatened to sue, claiming we were “interfering with their business” by stopping a sale. Heavens forbid that we should interrupt “business as usual” in the art world. Apparently, the consignor of the Portrait of a Young Man in a Red Cap was also threatening a lawsuit.
Just before the situation spun out of control, the press came to our support again. Walter Robinson, in the Boston Globe, wrote, “For Sotheby’s, the Botticelli sale is all the more awkward: Its wartime owner, Friedrich Gutmann of Holland, was beaten to death by the Nazis. His wife, Louise, was killed at Auschwitz. New York’s spring auction season opens next week, and the tainted sales are likely to increase long-standing concerns about the ease with which stolen art moves through the unregulated international art market.”
This was a damning editorial indeed, but in the interim, thanks to our hardworking researcher in Holland, Helen Hofhuis, we had unearthed some telling evidence. Nick was even able to talk to the widow of the man who had supposedly bought the painting from Fritz. Nick then passed the contact information on to Walter Robinson. The Boston Globe continued the story:
The Botticelli, for example, is listed in the Sotheby’s catalog as being sold by Gutmann to Dr. R. Wetzlar of Holland. Yet Wetzlar’s relatives said in interviews this week that Wetzlar bought the painting in about 1955—a decade after Lili Gutmann and her late brother Bernard reported it stolen. Wetzlar, in fact, bought the painting not from Gutmann but from a family that had wartime ties to an art dealer who did substantial business with Nazis, including Göring, who trafficked in looted art. Wetzlar’s stepdaughter, who asked that her name not be used, said her stepfather knew the painting had once been owned by Gutmann, was suspicious, and demanded proof that the seller owned it. So, she said, the seller produced a woman who introduced herself as Lili Gutmann, and Wetzlar bought the Botticelli. But the stepdaughter conceded that the seller may have produced an impostor. Wetzlar’s stepson’s wife, Beatrice Blans, said she now believes Wetzlar was duped. After Wetzlar’s death, the painting was sold to an Italian woman.
Meanwhile, Tom was able to smooth the ruffled legal feathers of the intransigent old auction house. Rather than unpleasant and costly litigation, he suggested a negotiation would be more productive. For once they agreed, and the next thing we heard was that the consignor, an Italian collector, was on his way to New York. Nick jumped on the next plane.
The next morning Tom met him in the lobby before going to the lawyer’s office at Sotheby’s headquarters on York Avenue. Nick confided in me he was feeling extremely anxious. In the conference room he expected to meet Rena Neville, the auction house’s acting general counsel. Instead they were received by a bulldog of a lawyer who barked aggressively until it was time to adjourn for
lunch. Nick was relieved to get out of the room. Over a quick sandwich, Nick and Tom agreed they needed a new strategy. Tom outlined a scenario that might work if only they could get the Italian collector on his own. After lunch Tom suggested to Sotheby’s counsel that they discuss the legal technicalities in a different room. As soon as Nick was alone with the Italian, he tried to appeal to him as one European to another: “We would save a lot of time and money if we could just avoid all these American lawyers.” The collector seemed to be receptive. Nick continued, “I’m sure we can come to a gentleman’s agreement.” It was a small world; the Italian actually knew one of our cousins in Florence. Nick and the collector were quickly developing a bond, but Nick knew he had no time to waste. That bulldog lawyer could storm in at any moment. “Why don’t we just split the profits?” Nick offered with a European shrug. They agreed and shook on it. When Sotheby’s lawyer returned, he was furious, but a deal had been agreed.
In reality the auction house had been keen to avoid any public embarrassment about the sale of another Gutmann painting. Despite its lapses with the Botticelli, Sotheby’s managed to keep its commission, estimated at more than $100,000. The terms of the settlement were confidential. However, the Italian collector recouped his initial outlay from when he had bought the painting in Geneva in 1985 and made a reasonable profit on the new sale. Meanwhile, my family had avoided defending two lawsuits that would have been stacked against us. If Swiss law were applied, because of the painting’s Geneva sale, good title would almost certainly have been granted to the Italian collector. We were also relieved we could pay all our expenses, including Tom Kline’s, and still have funds left over for what we had begun to call our “war chest.”
The Orpheus Clock Page 23
