AUGUST 1, 1997
- Dual Tek Motion Detectors
- Floods in Poland destroy libraries
- THE ART WORLD'S SPOILS OF WAR
Date sent: Thu, 31 Jul 97 14:37:06 UT
From: "James Holley" <TheTree@msn.com>
----------
To: All Protection Specialists
From: James Holley ( Wadsworth Atheneum Protection Services )
Date: July 31, 1997
Re: Dual Tek Motion Detectors
I have the need to install a dual tek ( microwave / pir ) above the
recommended specs of 15ft. Aesthetics are important but protection of course
comes first. My leg work as of yet has come up empty. Does anyone have any
leads ?
Museum Security Network, you are to be commended. As an international
lending institution your updates are watched very carefully.
Thank You
-------------------------------------------------------
(forwarded from bibcanlib-l
From: Piotr Pienkowski <pp4@acsu.buffalo.edu>
Subject: Floods in Poland destroy libraries
I'm very sorry for any cross-listings
Dear Friends,
You might have heard about the floods that for the past three weeks
have been ravaging in southern and western Poland,
So far there have been 56 victims of the floods, more than a hundred thousand people were
left homeless, more than a hundred cities, towns and villages were completely devastated and
more than 10% of the country's territory were lay barren. The floods are still affecting a
large part of the country and the damages run into millions of US dollar.
I am writing to you to ask you for an assistance you could possibly offer to university and
public libraries in Poland that in the past three weeks sustained a considerable damage due
to floods and torrential rains, worst in the history of Poland.
The cities that suffered most were Opole and Wroclaw in the western
part of Poland. Specific damages sustained by university and public
libraries there are as follows:
Wroclaw:
1. Main University Library: 7 thousand volumes were destroyed
2. Faculty of Law Library, Wroclaw University: 30 thousand books and
journals were flooded 3. School of Medicine: 50 thousand books and
journals were flooded 4. School of Theology (the town of Nysa): more
than four thousand prints and manuscripts from the 17th and 18th
centuries were flooded
Opole:
1. Main university Library: 180 thousand books and journals were
flooded 2. Main Public Library: about 25 thousand books were damaged
Some of the flooded collections were transferred to other libraries in
Poland where there were frozen and await drying and other renovation
procedures.
The most pressing needs are:
1. vacuum chambers to dry books and journals
2. quartz lamps
3. dryers
4. chemicals and other materials to dry and renovate books
5. financial resources to implement renovation process, to renovate
buildings and to replace damaged facilities
As the director of Polish Academic Information Center operating at the
University at Buffalo I am in a daily contact with the Polish National
Library in Warsaw which coordinates the rescue operation.
If you would like to learn more about the current situation in Poland
in respect of floods and damages please access
http://wings.buffalo.edu/inf-poland/mourn.html or
http://www.flooding.pl
If you would like to learn more about the Polish Academic Information
Center please access: http://wings.buffalo.edu/inf-poland
I will be very happy to provide you with any additional information
you may require and to facilitate your contacts with the libraries in
Poland.
Sincerely yours
Piotr Pienkowski
Director
Polish Academic Information Center
Jagiellonian University, Krakow
State University of New York at Buffalo
SUNY at Buffalo
825 Clemens Hall
Buffalo, N.Y. 14260
tel (716) 645 6569
fax (716) 645 3888
e-mail: pp4@acsu.buffalo.edu
http://wings.buffalo.edu/info-poland
mirror site: http://academic-info.uj.edu.pl
------------------------------------------------------
From: W_Robinson@globe.com
THE ART WORLD'S SPOILS OF WAR
Paradox of peace
Artworks taken as reparations pose US dilemma
By Walter V. Robinson, Globe Staff, 08/01/97
For months, the enormity of Nazi looting from Jews has riveted the
international community, with Switzerland wrestling with its complicity,
Jewish victims demanding compensation and plundered artworks cropping up
with disturbing frequency in the American art market.
But the Rubens painting in Buffalo's Allbright-Knox Art Gallery, the
gilded ceremonial armor that graces the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the
two Dutch paintings that Oberlin College students study in their college
art museum raise another nettlesome moral issue from World War II.
Like thousands of artworks, these pieces were not looted by the Nazis,
but taken from German cultural institutions by the war's victors - many
trucked back to Moscow as war reparations, but others allegedly siphoned
off by unscrupulous dealers and sold to American collectors and museums,
according to archival documents.
For some art specialists, including Germans, these losses pose a
difficult moral question: Do nations now eager to pay reparations to
Holocaust survivors for their losses have an equal responsibility, or any
responsibility at all, to return the cultural artifacts that were carted
away from Germany by the thousands in mid-1945?
What's more, artworks such as those in Philadelphia, Buffalo, and
Oberlin represent a curious paradox for the art world: Hundreds of Jews
whose families lost artworks to Nazi looters are eager to make claims, but
cannot locate their art. Yet some German museums have known for years where
to find their artworks in the United States, but sometimes have made only
feeble attempts to recover them.
The Peter Paul Rubens painting ``St. Gregory of Nazianus,'' which has
been prominently displayed in the Buffalo museum since 1952, is a case in
point. It was taken from a German museum in Gotha, in what became part of
East Germany, in 1945. By 1977, the East German government had traced it to
Buffalo. In 1984, East German officials even asked the US State Department
to intervene with that museum, apparently to no avail.
Yet it was only this week, when the Globe contacted the museum's
director, Douglas Schultz, that the museum learned for the first time that
its 1952 purchase might be tainted. Schultz, who has been the museum's
curator and director for a quarter century, expressed incredulity that the
Gotha museum never contacted him, though he said he believes his
institution legally acquired the painting.
Similarly, the Dresden Museum, before the war one of the world's
greatest, appears to have known since the mid-1980s that five missing items
from its ceremonial armor collection were among the most celebrated pieces
in the extraordinary collection that New York tobacco magnate Otto Von
Kienbusch donated to the Philadelphia museum in 1977.
Sandra Horrocks, the museum's spokeswoman, said yesterday that Dresden
did not file a formal claim for the return of the pieces until February
1995.
Horrocks said the museum, and its lawyers, are hoping to work out ``a
mutually agreeable solution'' with Dresden.
Allied souvenirs
For German museums, German states and the German government, the
end-of-the-war pillaging, much of it by Allied soldiers looking for
valuable souvenirs, has presented special problems. The post-war division
of the country sent East German institutions, which suffered the majority
of the losses, into a Cold War cocoon - from which they feared asking the
Soviets to return plunder and lacked the diplomatic standing or money to
press claims in the United States.
Also, German officials said in interviews this week, the West Germans
have long been reluctant to demand the return of cultural artifacts from
the United States, the country that was responsible for Germany's post-war
economic rebirth. And since the reunification of Germany in 1990, it has
been left to Germany's individual states and museums, many of them
underfinanced, to seek the return of their own art.
Some museums - like Gotha, which lists the Buffalo Rubens and the two
Oberlin paintings among its losses - have made no claims at all.
Some German states have not hesitated to demand the return of artworks.
In April, for example, the German State of Kassel filed suit in US District
Court in Boston against a Brookline antique rug dealer, Thomas P.
Chatalbash, seeking the return of seven 16th-century Flemish miniaturist
paintings that disappeared from a Kassel library collection at the end of
the war. Chatalbash, who claims he bought the works for about $200 in the
mid-1970s, is fighting to keep them.
Germany has taken a different tack with Russia. Many of Germany's
masterpieces, formally confiscated as war reparations by Soviet troops, are
now displayed at museums in Moscow and St. Petersburg, provoking a
contentious foreign policy dispute between Berlin and Moscow. Russian
President Boris Yeltsin has made no secret of his desire to return the
artworks, but the Soviet legislature is determined to keep them.
Moral claim?
Moreover, as Germany's struggle to confront the horrid consequences of
its wartime behavior continues, some Germans - and, quietly, even some US
museum officials - raise another question: Does a country that pillaged a
fifth of the world's art treasures when its troops overran Europe have a
moral claim to recover its own art treasures from the victors?
``What happened to German art treasures after the war is exactly the
same as what Germany did to other countries during the war,'' said
Christoph Grunenberg, a German art historian who is now acting director of
the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Though Germany is legally
entitled to have its artworks returned, Grunenberg said, ``It's still very
difficult for us to present any moral claim for its return.''
If the art world makes a distinction between Jewish art losses and
German art losses, it is sometimes a subtle one.
Last week, for example, officials at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in
New York expressed indignation after The Globe reported that the Met has
two allegedly looted paintings, one claimed by the Belgian government and
the other, a Monet, allegedly taken from a German civilian at war's end.
The reason for the Met's displeasure was that the reports did not
explicitly say that neither claim involves a Jewish victim.
Lloyd P. Goldenberg, a Washington art law specialist whose family lost
relatives in the Holocaust, said it would be a terrible injustice if German
claims were given lesser consideration than those of Jewish victims of the
Nazis.
``The United States contains stolen art from all over the world that is
traded here all the time. Under US law, looted German museums have the same
rights as Holocaust victims to recover works of art ... especially, as is
so often the case, the American institutions never made any `due diligence'
inquiry before they obtained the art,'' Goldenberg said.
If Holocaust survivors and German museums have anything in common in
pursuing such claims, it is that American collectors and museums seldom ask
serious questions about past ownership. The Met, for instance, has
acknowledged that it made no inquiries when one of its trustees donated the
Monet in 1994.
That lack of inquiry is an issue in several of the German claims. Last
February, for example, the auction house Sotheby's returned to a museum in
Weimar - near Gotha - a painting by Johann Friedrich August Tischbein,
``Portrait of Elizabeth Hervey Holding a Dove.'' Though the painting had
been listed in a joint 1965 East and West German catalog as missing from
Weimar, it moved unimpeded through the art market for years.
Willi Korte, a German-born art investigator who hunted down the
Tischbein, said it was sold in 1964 to a New York woman, Greta Feigl, by a
New York dealership, E & A Silberman, which was owned by the influential
dealer Abris Silberman. According to documents made available by Korte,
Silberman told Feigl that the Tischbein had been in his family for decades.
Silberman, who died in 1968, was also the dealer who sold two of the
three Rubens listed as missing from Gotha - the one to Buffalo and the
second, ``St. Elias,'' to the late Curtius O. Baer, whose famous collection
has been exhibited in several museums, including the National Gallery of
Art.
``It seems this art gallery had its special sources,'' Doris
Lemmermeier, the Bremen-based German federal official responsible for
coordinating art recuperation efforts, said in a telephone interview.
In Silberman's own records, the ``St. Gregory'' oil sketch he sold to
the Buffalo museum is listed as having been bought by him from the Gotha
Museum. But the Buffalo museum catalog adds an intervening owner, saying
the painting passed from the Gotha museum to the Duke of Gotha, and was
bought by Silberman soon after the war.
According to both Lemmermeier and Korte, and German documents examined
by the Globe, the duke's collection was nationalized after World War I and
became museum property. In the chaos of mid-1945, with the Soviets about to
take control of Gotha, a museum official moved the three Rubens paintings
westward for safekeeping. About the same time, the Duchess of Gotha,
without authorization, removed other paintings from the museum's
collection. All of them disappeared.
Oberlin College's Allen Memorial Art Museum bought its Dutch paintings,
``Merry Company'' by Jan Steen and ``Allegory of Poverty'' by Adriaen van
de Venne, in about 1960, and considers them important examples of
17th-century Dutch art, according to Marjorie E. Wieseman, the museum's
acting director.
Catalog contradiction
The museum's own catalog contains an obvious contradiction, however: For
the van de Venne, it contains ownership information that omits the Gotha
museum as a past owner. Yet, in citing literature about the painting, it
lists the 1965 German loss volume which includes both paintings as Gotha
museum losses.
Wieseman acknowledged yesterday that she has been aware for 10 years of
the listing in the loss volume, but she insisted that the volume contains
many errors.
In an interview this week about the van de Venne, Wieseman said she had
been recently assured by the Gotha museum director that the van de Venne
had been sold by Gotha before the war. But after the Globe discovered that
the German museum considers both paintings stolen, Wieseman said yesterday
that she had merely been told that some of the museum's works - not
necessarily the two at Oberlin - had been sold before the war.
And though the Oberlin catalog omits Gotha as a past owner, Wieseman
wrote to Gotha in July, 1995 asking about the history of the paintings. Her
letter, she said, went unanswered for nearly two years.
To some lawyers who handle art claims, the unwillingness of German
museums to press claims when they know the whereabouts of an artwork may
make it legally difficult for them to win recovery in the future.
George S. Abrams, a Boston lawyer who is among the country's best-known
collectors of Old Master drawings, recalled a frustrating encounter he had
with the Dresden Museum in the early 1960s over a painting bought by an art
dealer who was his client.
Abrams said the art dealer found evidence that the painting belonged to
Dresden. But after several contacts in which Abrams offered to return the
painting if Dresden reimbursed the dealer the $2,000 he had spent, the
German museum declined the offer.
Even if the Germans do become more aggressive in seeking to repatriate
their artworks, they will almost certainly face stiff resistance from
museum directors like Schultz and Wieseman, who note that the artworks have
been publicly displayed for years without any claims being made.
``I'm not trying to deny that these paintings were in the Gotha. But the
fact is they have been in our collection for almost 40 years and no one
ever suggested they came here illegitimately or ever asked for them back,''
Wieseman said.
Asked whether Oberlin would return the two Dutch paintings if the Gotha
museum presents a valid claim, she replied: ``That's a tough call. It's
like an adopted child. You raise that child for 20 years and then the birth
parents demand it back. And I have no right to that child?''
Kera Ritter of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
Globe coverage of looted World War II artworks can be found on Globe
Online at www.boston.com. The keyword is: paintings.
This story ran on page of the Boston Globe on 08/01/97.
Copyright 1997 Globe Newspaper Company.
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