The Orpheus Clock

by Simon Goodman

  Gradually, reality regained the upper hand. The painting did not just belong to me but to the whole family. However, before we could establish a fair value, I would have to do battle with the experts in Munich. It struck me as more than just a cruel irony that the fate of my brief victory lay in the hands of Germans. For the moment, though, I could savor this most striking painting and marvel about my family’s unusual legacy.

  Ultimately, I had to send the Sinnlichkeit to Munich for tests and evaluations. I attached my most reasoned defense of the authenticity of the lascivious lady, along with all supporting documents that seemed relevant. The original outer frame, I pointed out, had obviously been lost at the end of the war. I always had an image of Anni Brandt smuggling the canvas through American lines in 1945. Later, the last two letters of the signature, I argued, could easily have been smudged during a not-so-professional cleaning in the fifties. Without a doubt, the composition clearly resembled the most early etchings in the series. In addition to this, we had the photo from the 1903 catalog, which had been taken while Stuck was still alive in Munich. All of which left the color technique as the last, and most significant, stumbling block. The Stuck Commission deliberated on and off through the winter.

  The commission’s report finally arrived the beginning of March. It was peppered with words such as “difficult” and “interesting.” I reread it several times and was still not sure what they were really saying. The only way I could sum up their opinion was to say that they were being conclusively inconclusive. Like so many experts, they seemed to be more comfortable sitting on the fence rather than committing themselves. However, they did, at least, come up with one new piece of information. On the back of the painting’s stretcher bar had been a hitherto indecipherable ink stamp. They had managed to identify one of the words as Malverfahren, which meant “painting technique or process.” From there I was able to fill in the blanks. The stamp, in fact, referred to Baron Alfons von Pereira’s paint process patented in 1891, which was also the same year Franz von Stuck had painted the Sinnlichkeit. Pereira had introduced the unusual technique, in Munich, at the Glaspalast exhibition of 1890, and Stuck had exhibited there just the year before.

  I concluded that it was probably futile to expect more from the commission. Instead I decided to share this new information with Christie’s. After all, the Villa Stuck seemed to be inviting us to make up our own minds, and the discovery of the stamp on the stretcher bar clearly placed the painting at the right place, and at the right time. James Hastie seemed to agree with me.

  We set the auction date for December. That way I still had the satisfaction of keeping the painting for several months; after the auction each member of the family would get his or her rightful share. In the meantime, we had near-perfect copies made using the Iris-print method. Next, I called the honorable collector to give him fair warning in case he wanted to bid for Sensuality. He seemed to have moved on. He had found a new painting to fit in with his cherished Art Nouveau collection.

  The auction in London was a great success. Our Stuck had caused quite a stir. Ultimately she went for far more than had been expected. The market had spoken and my battle for the lady’s honor had been vindicated.

  CHAPTER 14

  PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG MAN

  It was not until I found this image in a 1938 catalog that I knew what I was looking for.

  I was just packing my bag after a very successful morning at the library when the fire alarm went off. Somehow I sensed it was not just a drill. I grabbed my things and made haste for the exit. When I got to the terrace of the Getty Research Institute, the staff and other researchers were just standing, transfixed. The small mountain opposite was completely engulfed in flames. It was already a hot day in July, and the flames seemed to be coming in our direction. Somebody barked orders to head for the trams, which would take us down the hill to the parking lots. To my horror, probably over a thousand visitors from the museum were trying to do the same thing. I squeezed myself into one of the last cars, next to a bewildered German tourist. When we got out, she started asking me about public transport. As the fire trucks whizzed by, I knew that no buses would be arriving soon. I offered her a ride since her family was not scheduled to pick her up for hours. I wanted to talk, and I hadn’t had a chance to call anybody since the alarm went off.

  The excitement of the fire aside, I had something of great importance I needed to share—and in some way this unsuspecting German seemed more than appropriate. For the next twenty minutes I delivered an impassioned rant about Nazi looting. I was animated because, just half an hour earlier, I had tracked down a painting that had disappeared under the very nose of Adolf Hitler’s agent.

  After finding the Franz von Stuck, one painting still remained missing from the first forced sale between my grandfather and Karl Haberstock: Portrait of a Young Man, with a Green Background, dated 1509, by the German Renaissance artist Hans Baldung Grien. Baldung was considered the heir and most gifted student of Germany’s greatest artist, Albrecht Dürer. Ever since the war it had eluded many, but now I knew where it was, or at least where it had been.

  After combing through every monograph and catalog I could find on Baldung Grien, I had finally found in the Getty archives a rare volume published in 1983 by a German academic, Gert von der Osten. Almost all the other books on Baldung Grien focused on his woodcuts and altarpieces, perhaps because not many of his paintings have survived until this day. However, Osten’s small book, his last, entitled Paintings and Documents, was only published in Germany. He had done research in Princeton, New Jersey, in the 1950s, which explained why he, and no other art historian, had located our missing Baldung Grien. While at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Osten had seen the painting in neighboring New Brunswick, at the art gallery of rival Rutgers University.

  My father had always believed that most of the artworks he couldn’t trace must have gone behind the Iron Curtain. Now I had found yet another painting right here in the United States.

  My first task was to contact Rutgers and make sure the painting was still there. The registrar from their museum, now renamed the Zimmerli Art Museum, replied fairly promptly. As she pointed out, the Zimmerli had over sixty thousand pieces in its permanent collection and the cataloging was far from complete. Fortunately she was soon able to confirm that the Hans Baldung Grien portrait was indeed there. What’s more, their images matched the illustration that I had found a couple of years earlier in a 1938 catalog, dating back to when Fritz had loaned the painting to an exhibition in Rotterdam.

  I decided to call the museum director myself. To my relief the new director, Suzanne Delehanty, was extremely civil and not at all adversarial. Not surprisingly, she was more than a little taken aback as I explained the strong likelihood that the Zimmerli possessed an artwork stolen during the Holocaust. She welcomed my suggestion that I put together a portfolio of all the relevant documents and detail the history and provenance of the Baldung Grien.

  May and I had wanted to make a trip to New York for a while, so I decided to go to Rutgers in person and present my case. While assembling all the crucial evidence in my files that would prove my family’s loss of the painting, I began to complete the puzzle of the Hans Baldung Grien, which had eluded even Hitler.

  Fritz had sent the painting to Paris in the spring of 1939, along with the two Degas pastels and so many other pieces from his collection. The assumption was that the French Maginot Line of defense would hold in case of war. Fritz had, no doubt, also assumed that in an emergency his treasures would be nearer to neutral Switzerland or the relative safety of Italy. I had often wondered how life would have been so different for us all if my grandfather had sent his artworks to England for safekeeping, instead. But after his treatment by the British during the previous war, Fritz did not trust perfidious Albion. The prospect of the British authorities suddenly declaring my family’s assets as enemy property was a real concern.

  By the beginning of 1941, Reichskommissar Se
yss-Inquart had successfully liquidated about half the Jewish-owned businesses in the Netherlands. Most of the rest were being Aryanized. The objective of stripping the Jews of Holland, step by step, of all their worldly goods was well under way. Next came the special identity cards; when Fritz and Louise received theirs, on the left was a large, ominous capital J. When Karl Haberstock came calling at Bosbeek in early March, Fritz was feeling particularly vulnerable. Orsini’s attempts from Italy to secure an exit visa for his brother-in-law and sister-in-law, Fritz and Louise, had so far failed miserably. When Haberstock offered to “intercede” on my grandparents’ behalf, Fritz was more than receptive. It was clear who Haberstock’s superiors were. The price, however, was some of the greatest paintings from the collection.

  As previously noted, in return for the promise of just 122,000 Dutch guilders (perhaps $75,000 at the time), Fritz agreed to sign over eight of his finest old masters and the Franz von Stuck. Haberstock immediately took possession of the Stuck, then known as Die Sünde, along with two Spanish Renaissance shields and a magnificent carpet. The other eight paintings, including the Hans Baldung Grien, however, were already in storage in Paris; for these Fritz signed an authorization to release.

  I discovered that two months later Haberstock paid my grandfather barely a quarter of the agreed amount, and that paltry sum was transferred into a frozen account. Meanwhile, Haberstock had immediately sold the Baldung Grien, along with the Cranach, the Elsner, and the Isenbrandt, directly to the Führer’s office—all for a handsome profit. Hitler’s chief curator for the Führermuseum, Hans Posse, made it clear that the Führer coveted the Baldung Grien above all and had paid the most for it. Later the Van Goyen and the Holbein were also purchased for the intended Führermuseum at Linz.

  Haberstock set off for Paris to arrange for the shipment of the eight masterpieces to Berlin. Seven, including the Baldung, would go straight to the Reich Chancellery. The Memling that Haberstock offered to both Hitler and Göring, with a price tag of well over one hundred thousand Reichsmarks (more than a million dollars today). However, when Haberstock got to Paris, the paintings were under lock and key, and the dealers to whom Fritz had entrusted his paintings had fled at the beginning of the Nazi occupation. Paul Graupe had made it across the border to Switzerland, and Arthur Goldschmidt was, for the moment, in the relative safety of the south of France. Unoccupied Vichy France was not particularly safe for Jews, either, but fortunately for Goldschmidt, the sunny Côte d’Azur was being run by the Italians. From German-occupied France, Arthur Goldschmidt had been able to smuggle out several artworks and was open for business at the Martinez Hotel in Cannes. Haberstock soon got wind of this and made the trip south. The word was that Goldschmidt had both an important Brouwer and an Ostade for sale as well. Haberstock bought both and quickly resold them as soon as he returned to Berlin—again to Hitler and for a great profit. He also secured from Goldschmidt the authorization for the release of the eight paintings from Fritz’s storage in Paris. Haberstock quickly forwarded the authorization back to Hugo Engel in Paris, who ran errands for both Haberstock and Hans Wendland.

  What happened next is unclear. Evidently Hugo Engel presented the collection order to Mme. Wacker-Bondy, the owner of the storage facility. They must have prepared the shipments for Berlin. But when the crates were unpacked at Hitler’s headquarters, on the Wilhelmplatz in Berlin, instead of seven paintings there were only six, causing considerable consternation. The Hans Baldung Grien Portrait of a Young Man, with a Green Background was missing. The Führer had been expecting the arrival of the handsome young man. So far the Führermuseum did not have any works by Baldung, despite his being one of the foremost German artists of the Renaissance. Hitler would be furious.

  What followed was a flurry of official letters from Hitler’s chief counsel at the Reich Chancellery, Dr. Killy. I must have counted over a dozen at the German Federal Archives in Koblenz. Dr. Killy was blatantly indignant, and the normally smug and pompous Karl Haberstock was groveling indeed. He immediately offered a full refund, which placated Hitler’s irate lawyer somewhat. However, the Reich Chancellery was still demanding the location of the painting.

  For the next few months accusations flew. Fritz, even while under house arrest in Holland, was accused of some mysterious sleight of hand. Next the focus switched to Paul Graupe; had he spirited the Baldung away before leaving for Switzerland? In that case, one would have assumed Mme. Wacker-Bondy or Hugo Engel would have noticed a discrepancy when preparing the shipment to Berlin. Perhaps Arthur Goldschmidt had taken the painting with him when he escaped to the south of France, but had somehow forgotten to mention it when Karl Haberstock arrived to get authorization for the eight paintings.

  By the time Haberstock’s angry letter arrived at Goldschmidt’s last known address in Cannes, Goldschmidt had already moved again—several times. After leaving Cannes, Goldschmidt reappeared briefly in Bilbao, Spain, before sailing across the Atlantic to Cuba, in early September 1941. There he seemed to resume his art dealing with little hindrance. I found a declassified American intelligence report that chronicled the wily dealer’s attempt to sell a Rubens in Havana in early 1944 while he waited for an entry visa for the United States.

  When it seemed clear the Baldung wasn’t going to resurface anytime soon, Haberstock actually secured a refund out of Fritz’s frozen account.

  • • •

  As the war was ending in April of 1945, American forces moved into Aschbach, a small town in northern Bavaria. Aschbach had once had a thriving Jewish community, but by 1942 the last Jew had been deported. Overlooking the small town was an old castle or manor house belonging to Baron von Poellnitz. The Americans quickly arrested the baron when they discovered he had been the local Nazi Party leader. What they next found was more surprising. Tucked away throughout the pretty castle was effectively an enormous art warehouse. The American troops quickly put the other residents of the small Schloss under arrest and called the Monuments Men. When the Monuments officers discovered the true identities of two of the residents, the story started to take shape. Their names were Haberstock and Gurlitt. For several months Karl and Magdalene Haberstock, along with crates of their ill-gotten gains, had been hiding in the castle. Hildebrand Gurlitt and his wife, Helene, had also taken refuge in the castle after their home in Dresden had been destroyed by Allied bombers. With them was their daughter, Renate, and their teenage son, the now notorious Cornelius Gurlitt, who had over fourteen hundred pieces of art hidden in his Munich apartment until it was discovered in March 2012.

  Baron von Poellnitz had been stationed in Paris during the occupation as a Luftwaffe officer. In his spare time he liked to help arrange deals (as their unofficial representative) for both Gurlitt and Haberstock, even though the two men were technically competitors. The three would meet to compare notes on their next victims at the Ritz Bar in the place Vendôme—their office away from home.

  By the end of the war, the baron’s castle also contained a huge proportion of the paintings from the Bamberg Museum and the Kassel Museum, as well as the private stashes of such infamous Nazi commanders as General Fütterer and Field Marshal von Kleist. Captain Posey, the Monuments officer in charge, quickly declared the estate “off-limits.” The estimated value of the art treasures in the Schloss was a cool $100 million.

  According to Allied reports under the heading “Questionable Collections,” “one large room on the first floor contained paintings, tapestries, rugs, furniture and other art objects—belonging to Mr. Haberstock—art collector.” In another room were more “Haberstock” paintings, trunks, and valuable books. Upstairs, in one room alone, Gurlitt had stashed over thirty-four crates. Remarkably, considering the quantities involved, Hildebrand Gurlitt attempted to convince the Monuments officers that he was merely a Mischling trying to survive, an innocent art dealer, a victim no less. His defense that he had a Jewish grandmother named Elizabeth Lewald, a sister of a famous Salonnière, Fanny Lewald, was apparently taken into serious con
sideration. However, that he had obviously been allowed to continue dealing in art in Germany and France throughout the war ought to have created a very different impression. Most of the artworks belonging to Gurlitt were taken into custody, at least temporarily, and sent to the Wiesbaden collecting point, which was primarily for works considered to be German owned.

  By the time Germany officially surrendered, even more of Haberstock’s hoard had been found in yet another castle not far from Augsburg, this time belonging to Prince von Thurn und Taxis. Most of these art pieces, unfortunately, were also categorized as “German” and accordingly were sent to Wiesbaden. Among the countless pieces salted away in the Thurn und Taxis castle, I discovered, were the two exquisitely carved Spanish Renaissance coats of arms (from the same first Gutmann-Haberstock transaction). At least one of the shields from Wiesbaden was ultimately returned to Holland. Sadly, to this day, the Dutch authorities have yet to locate either of them. Meanwhile, the majority of Karl Haberstock’s enormous hoard from the Aschbach castle was shipped to the larger Munich Collecting Point, where it would be sorted for repatriation to whichever country the artworks had originated from.

  Today it might seem odd, but at the time Hildebrand Gurlitt was treated remarkably leniently. Ultimately he was deemed to have been a victim of Nazi persecution. He claimed that the majority of his paintings had been destroyed in the bombing of Dresden, and the rest of his artworks actually confiscated by the Allies were returned to him by 1950. Gurlitt resumed dealing in art up till his death in a car crash in 1956.