by Noah Charney
In 1938, Belgian minister of the interior Octave Dierckx was approached by a lawyer who, on behalf of an anonymous client, offered to return the Judges panel for 500,000 francs. The minister contacted the bishop. Bishop Coppieters was willing to pay and claimed that he could get the money. The matter was brought before the Belgian prime minister, Paul-Henri Spaak, who rejected the negotiations out of hand. He said, “One doesn’t do business with gangsters. We’re not in America.”
One year later, a Belgian conservator would begin work on an excellent replacement copy of the Righteous Judges—a copy that many, to this day, think is far too good to be a copy.
In 1939, under his own auspices, the conservator to the Royal Fine Arts Museum, Jef van der Veken, began to paint a copy of the missing Judges panel. He used as his support a two-hundred-year-old cupboard door of the precise correct dimensions and painted with the aid of photographs and the Michiel Coxcie copy in order to re-create the panel as accurately as possible. Van der Veken made only three alterations from the original in his version of the Judges. He added a portrait of the new Belgian king of the time, Leopold III, whose face was placed on one of the judges in the painting in profile. He removed a ring from the finger of one of the judges. And he manipulated one of the judges so that his face was no longer hidden behind a fur hat.
Born in Antwerp, Jef van der Veken was an amateur Surrealist painter and a conservator of the highest acclaim. Specializing in the fifteenth-century Flemish masters, he was entrusted with the restoration of some of Belgium’s greatest masterpieces, including van Eyck’s Madonna with Canon van der Paele and Rogier van der Weyden’s Madonna and Child. The latter was tested in 1999 and found to be primarily the work of van der Veken, not van der Weyden. His incredibly skillful but heavy hand in restoration prompted an exhibit in 2004 at the Groeningmuseum in Bruges called Fake or Not Fake, exploring the limits of acceptable restoration practices.
In the pre-World War II period, restorers tended to paint with a free hand, bringing back a damaged work to the most complete state possible but often adjusting the artist’s intended design to match the values and beliefs of the time. Famously, Bronzino’s Allegory of Love and Lust was subject to censorious restoration when it was acquired by the National Gallery of Art in London in 1860, the restorer adding a flower to cover the rear end of the adolescent, sexualized figure of Cupid, covering over one of Venus’s exposed nipples, and retracting Venus’s tongue, which in the original was extended to kiss Cupid, her son. In 1958 these prurient Victorian restorations were removed, the painting reverting to its original state, nipples, tongues, and all. Today, the prevalent theory is one of conservation rather than restoration—conservators seek to prevent deterioration and further damage to works of art, while touching up the work as little as possible. When conservators do add to paintings, in order to fill in damaged portions of the composition, they do so in a way that is true to the original work but does not try to trick viewers into thinking that the work has not been restored. The restored portions are unapologetically distinct from the original parts of the painting, the restoration efforts are rigorously photographed and documented, and the paints used are chemically divergent from the original paints, so that they can be removed by future conservators if necessary without damaging the original paint. Not so in the 1930s, when van der Veken was at the peak of his career. In van der Veken’s time, restorers were praised for their skill, if their additions to an artwork were indistinguishable from the original.
The great restorer’s expertise and connoisseurship made him the preferred consultant of Emile Renders, a wealthy Belgian banker who assembled the world’s most important private collection of Flemish Primitives, as fifteenth-century Flemish painters were sometimes called, in the years before the Second World War. He was also the author of the 1933 article that suggested that the inscription discovered on the back of the Joos Vijd panel, introducing Hubert van Eyck to the art world, was a sixteenth-century forgery by Ghent Humanists. Hermann Göring bought the entire Renders Collection in 1941 for three hundred kilograms of gold (about $4-5 million today), with the help of the Schmidt-Staehler organization, the Netherlands-based equivalent to the ERR, the Nazi art theft unit. Emile Renders maintains that he was coerced into selling his collection to Göring, though some sources believe that he was not the victim he made himself out to be. Whether van der Veken was involved in this wartime sale is unknown.
Van der Veken enjoyed a sideline in making “new” Flemish Primitives, copies of famous paintings or portions of them, using centuries-old panels as the support. He would then artificially age the works to give them the craquelure and patina of age. What distinguished him from a forger is that there is no record that he ever tried to pass off his own work as a Renaissance original.
There is a long and rich history of artists copying the work of more famous artists in order to learn their techniques. For a restorer, the ability to mimic the work of the masters whose work is theirs to preserve is a critical component of their professional success. Copying and even aging works is only a crime when the creator tries to profit from his imitation, passing it off as an original. Though van der Veken, as far as is known, never tried to do this, his ability to mimic the great Flemish Old Masters is beyond question. As senior conservator at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, he was the logical choice to create a replica of the lost Judges panel, which could once again “complete” The Ghent Altarpiece, filling the gaping hole in its lower left side.
Van der Veken finished his copy in 1945. It was placed in the frame along with the recovered Saint John the Baptist and the eleven original panels in 1950.
But some have suggested that van der Veken was involved in some aspect of the theft itself. It was odd that he began to make the replacement copy on his own, without the official prompting of the diocese. There is a touch of black humor in the restorer’s choice to work on a copy of a panel that was still missing and that only a year before had been the subject of a renewed ransom attempt, four years after Goedertier’s failure.
Oddest of all, on the back of the panel, still in place to this day, is a confusing inscription from the artist. Van der Veken wrote the following in Flemish rhyming verse:I did it for love
And for duty.
And to avenge myself
I borrowed
From the dark side.
It is signed Jef van der Veken, October 1945.
Van der Veken was interviewed on multiple occasions but each time replied that he knew no more than anyone else about the 1934 theft. His reticence made people believe that he knew more than he let on, but there was never any concrete evidence to suggest as much.
Questions about the replacement panel should have been raised in November 1950, when the defender of The Lamb during the First World War, Canon Gabriel van den Gheyn, gave a lecture to the Ghent Historical and Archaeological Society entitled “Three Facts Related to the Mystic Lamb.” He told the story of the adventures of The Lamb, from its theft by the French in 1794 through its theft by the Nazis, to which we turn next. In the course of his fifteen-page speech, no mention whatsoever was made of the 1934 theft. This is particularly strange, as the audience for the lecture would certainly remember the theft, and it would have seemed to them, as it does today, a conspicuous lacuna in an otherwise historically thorough presentation.
Was the one-time savior of the altarpiece party to the 1934 theft or its cover-up conspiracy? Van den Gheyn wore many hats: In addition to being an amateur archaeologist, he was custodian of the cathedral treasures, the diocese treasurer, and also the chief conservator of the cathedral artworks. So it is stranger still that he would not mention the theft even indirectly, in referring to the recently installed copy of the Judges panel by fellow conservator van der Veken. He had so tirelessly defended the altarpiece during the First World War. If the investment-group theory of the 1934 theft is true, then he was involved in the 1934 theft and conspiracy. During the Second World War, it was he who would accompa
ny the Nazi art detective Oberleutnant Heinrich Köhn on his search for the Righteous Judges panel. Could van den Gheyn have been a Nazi collaborator, or was his accompaniment of Köhn a means to divert the Nazi art detective from his task? Köhn and van den Gheyn first spoke in September 1940, but Köhn’s investigation continued through 1942. On 12 May 1942 van den Gheyn and Köhn toured the cathedral archives but found nothing that would lead them to the panel. It was then that they made the discovery that all of the files related to The Ghent Altarpiece, including the files that detailed the 1934 theft and investigation, had disappeared. Perhaps the canon had disposed of the files in anticipation of Köhn’s investigation. They have never resurfaced, leaving a trail strewn with question marks.
This case is one of the great unsolved mysteries in the history of art theft. It colored the popular imagination, even winding its way into literature. Albert Camus’s 1956 novel La Chute (“The Fall”) is a monologue in which a character speaks with a new acquaintance on a series of nights, while drinking at a seedy bar in Amsterdam. In the novel, the Judges panel had hung on the wall of this Amsterdam bar during the years following the theft. The reader later learns that it is currently hidden in a cupboard in the narrator’s apartment. Camus uses the Righteous Judges to raise existential questions about the personal judgments and life decisions of the protagonist narrator, who refers to himself ambiguously as a “judge-penitent.”
In Belgium, the mystery excites a passion reminiscent of the Kennedy assassination in the United States. It has inspired more than a dozen books, fiction and nonfiction, as well as documentaries, docudramas, and countless articles—none of which have been translated into English. The story is still fresh and the investigation, at least from an amateur perspective, still active.
Speculation abounds—the rocks in the background of van der Veken’s copy of the Judges look just like those at Marches-les-Dames, where the Belgian king Albert mysteriously fell and died. Coincidence? To this day, every few months a new clue as to the location of the missing Righteous Judges is announced in Ghent newspapers. In the summer of 2008 the floorboards of a Ghent home were taken apart by the local police after a tip had suggested that the Judges panel was buried beside a skeleton between the floorboards. Authorities continue to investigate astonishing and unbelievable leads, as the search for the missing panel continues.
One final significant clue would present itself decades later. Though it did not solve the mystery of what happened, it may solve the mystery of where the panel is hidden today. But The Ghent Altarpiece, minus the Righteous Judges, would undergo one more hurricane of theft, smuggling, and ultimate salvation.
The Second World War was on the horizon, and Nazi wolves had their sights set on the Lamb of God.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The World’s Greatest Treasure Hunt
The search for Nazi stolen art has been called the greatest treasure hunt in history. The supreme prize among the kidnapped treasures was The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb. And the fate of The Lamb during the Second World War, along with that of most of Europe’s artistic masterpieces, was sealed by the heroism of an Austrian double agent, a group of salt miners, and a fortuitous toothache.
In May 1940 the German army invaded Holland and Belgium. Because many of Belgium’s art treasures had been looted during the First World War, in the face of the advancing storm troopers the Belgian government sought a safe house to which its prized artworks could be sent. The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb was Belgium’s national treasure; as long as it was safe from harm and foreign capture, Belgium was in control.
The government first considered the Vatican as a hiding place. A truck carrying the altarpiece in ten large wooden crates was en route to Italy when Italy joined the Axis and declared war. France then offered to guard The Lamb, and the truck veered west towards Chateau de Pau at the foot of the Pyrenees, birthplace of Henry IV. It was somehow poetic that the birthplace of the French king, whose conversions from Protestantism and Catholicism resulted in so much death and destruction, should protect a Catholic treasure that had nearly been burned by Protestant rioters during the uprising in 1566. Chateau de Pau already housed many of the works from French national museums, including the Louvre. The Lamb was added to its treasure trove. The default guardian of the chateau treasures, and the guardian of all of France’s art during the war, was Jacques Jaujard, director of the French National Museums and the Louvre itself.
Born in Asnières, France, Jaujard was a courageous man in a hopeless position—in charge of the safety of the French national art collections during the Nazi occupation from 1940 through 1944. With each defeat of the French army before the Nazi onslaught, Jaujard ordered the crated art treasures shipped ever further south, away from the front line, to locations that seemed inevitably safe from harm’s way. Surely the Nazis would be stopped before they reached Lyon or Pau. But the tide pressed on with alarming speed. After Paris, Jaujard relocated to Chambord, the castle in the Loire Valley south of Paris that featured a torque double-helix staircase, with two monumental stairs wrapped around each other, yet never meeting, designed by Leonardo da Vinci. He was directing the shipment of art from Chambord to points further south, most to a series of museums and castles in Provence and along the Pyrenees, when the Germans surprised him. They informed him that he was the first important French official whom they had encountered thus far on duty, rather than fleeing or in hiding. He also then learned that Hitler had ordered that all artworks and historical documents in France be seized as collateral in peace negotiations with France—they would become German property in exchange for a cease-fire. There was little that Jaujard could do, other than move artworks further south and pray. While he was unable, in an official capacity, to guarantee that French artworks would remain in France, he had a strategy. He prepared an underground intelligence network that would keep track of which artworks were confiscated and where they were headed. That network consisted, primarily, of an unassuming librarian by the name of Rose Valland, a clerk at the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris, which became the depot for Nazi-looted art in France.
By June the Germans had conquered all of Holland and Belgium. The Belgians were particularly concerned that Hitler would seek out The Lamb by way of revenge for its restitution through the Treaty of Versailles. The fact that Germany had been forced to return the wing panels at the end of the First World War had outraged the German populace. Now, the seizure of The Ghent Altarpiece by Hitler would symbolically erase the perceived wrongs done to Germany at Versailles.
In May 1940, very soon after eleven out of twelve original panels of The Lamb were shipped to Pau for safekeeping, a Nazi officer arrived in Ghent: Oberleutnant Heinrich Köhn of the Nazi Art Protection Department. He had been commissioned specifically to investigate the unsolved 1934 theft of the Righteous Judges—and to hunt down this last missing panel.
Köhn, a fanatical Nazi and Hitler look-alike, sporting a smudge moustache, had been assigned this task by Josef Goebbels. Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda with a doctorate in Romantic drama, rose to power alongside Hitler, making a name for himself early on by spearheading the burnings of books that were considered degenerate by the Nazi government. The mastermind behind the attacks on German Jews, including the infamous Kristallnacht of 1938, he also established a propaganda technique referred to as “The Big Lie,” based on the principle that a lie, if audacious enough and if stated with sufficient conviction and repetition, will be accepted as truth by the masses. Heinrich Köhn was Goebbels’s bloodhound, hunting for a unique gift for the führer. Goebbels had timed this assignment with the aim of presenting the Judges panel to Hitler in 1943, in celebration of the tenth anniversary of his assumption of power.
The people of Ghent had reason to be nervous, even with eleven-twelfths of the altarpiece in storage abroad. Why would a Nazi art detective be sent to find the one missing panel, if the Nazis did not intend to seize the other eleven?
Köhn was a meticulous investigator, but he did
not read Flemish. He enlisted the aid of Nazi sympathizer Max Winders, an Antwerp architect and advisor to the Belgian Ministry of Education’s Art Board, who accompanied him to Ghent. They arrived in September 1940. The first person with whom they spoke was the canon of Saint Bavo Cathedral. Gabriel van den Gheyn had seen The Lamb safely through the First World War and would do his best during the Second. The three men went through every page of the archives on the history of The Lamb and Saint Bavo Cathedral, scouring the Ministry of Justice, the cathedral, and the Ghent city archives. But they encountered a surprising hurdle at each archive: Most of the pages on the Judges theft were missing.
At the time of the 1934 theft there had been talk of cover-up and conspiracy, including the suggestion that sometime hero van den Gheyn had been complicit. Though clues suggested that the panel had been hidden somewhere prominent, perhaps even on the façade of the cathedral, the case was closed, and the files stored in various archives. Now that Köhn was reopening the investigation, portions of the files from all the relevant archives were found missing. Someone had stolen them between the theft and the Second World War. If the investment-group theory was true, then it made sense that the archives had been doctored.
Köhn interviewed everyone who had any involvement in the Righteous Judges investigation, which by this time was six years old. Either the trail had grown stale, or there was a collective agreement on silence. That van den Gheyn accompanied Köhn on his investigations smacked to some of complicity; others thought that the best way for the canon to steer the Nazi detective clear of the truth was to work with him every step of the way. While Köhn’s search for the Judges was fruitless, it indicated to the people of Ghent that the Nazis had serious designs on their treasure.
Although it was as yet unknown outside of Nazi circles, there was good reason to fear a widespread Nazi harvest of Europe’s art treasures. Hitler had a plan to assemble every important artwork in the world and create a kulturhaupstadt, a citywide supermuseum, to be located in his boyhood hometown of Linz, Austria. To this end, Hitler instructed his officers to seize and send him works of art they came across during their conquests.
