The walls at your local art museum may be populated with saints and angels and long-dead duchesses, but don't let the haloes fool you. Some of these ladies have been around. In their "lifetimes" of hundreds, sometimes thousands of years, they've seen more death and glory than a Star Wars hero. The Crowning of St. Catherine is the largest canvas in the Toledo Museum of Art collection. Some say it's the best example in North America of Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens's late work. Behind this 1633 portrayal of virgin martyrs is an official paper trail of ownership known in collecting circles as "provenance." The public provenance that goes with St. Catherine doesn't say so, but she spent some time in Nazi hands. The Toledo museum holds clear title to the painting, but officials don't play up this romantic aspect of its history. Albert Koppel, the Berlin collector who sold the painting to Toledo in 1950, wants visitors to love St. Catherine for what she is, not for where she's been.
"He objected to the picture being looked-at as a historical document, instead of a work of art," said Toledo Museum of Art director Roger Berkowitz. "And we respect his wishes," said former museum director David Steadman. The Rubens is one of thousands of artworks that were returned to their original owners after World War II. Thousands more were lost, stolen, or destroyed after Nazis stripped clean European museums, churches, galleries, and private collections. The best went to the homes of top officials. The rest was stored in mines and warehouses, for "safekeeping." Brigades of art historians in the Allied forces, including Otto Wittmann, a future Toledo Museum of Art director, worked for years after the war to return the artwork to rightful owners. But many were untraceable, or owners were dead or missing.
The great St. Catherine canvas was one of these German war prisoners, even though her official art museum information sheet makes no mention of her sojourn into Nazi hands. It shows the picture passing in 1911 from a family of English dukes to a presumed Jewish collector in Berlin named Leopold Koppel. His son, Albert, inherited the picture in 1933. He sold it to the Toledo Museum of Art in 1950. Details on dark days in between are not public. The only mention of it appears in a short paragraph in "The Age of Rubens" catalog, a thick volume created to accompany 1994 blockbuster exhibits in Boston and Toledo.
"Hermann Goering appropriated the work, which was discovered after World War II in a salt mine outside Salzberg," is all it says. "It entered the Toledo Museum collection in 1950." Rosenberg & Stiebel, a New York art gallery, handled the sale. Gerald Stiebel opened his archive last week, and explained the silence.
"The museum agreed to honor the seller's desire for silence," Mr. Stiebel said. "But it's been 50 years, and this is so timely. We talked it over, and thought it's time we should talk to you." Stiebel & Rosenberg has two letters, written in 1950 by Albert Koppel and then-Toledo Museum director Blake-More Godwin. In the letter, Koppel says the painting was in the safe of Deutschebank Berlin when he last saw it. After the war he filed a claim with United States military occupation forces, and had St. Catherine and several more Koppel family picturespaintings shipped to the New York dealer. He said he'd heard the painting was kept at Goering's great Karinhall home, where the leader amassed more great art than could fit on the walls. He heard and that St. Catherine was later found in the salt mine, but he could not confirm the stories.
"This information is supplied only in interest of your records," Mr. Koppel wrote. Mr. Godwin is said to have wanted the story to be told then, but agreed to honor Mr. Koppel's wishes. Toledo museum registrar Patricia Whitesides explained the five decades of institutional silence that followed. "That was a sad, difficult time," she explained. "I think he was saying we shouldn't bury or hide the past, but it was time to move on. He didn't want to publicize the picture's story. That is not what makes this picture great."
"The picture was returned to Berlin, to Albert Koppel, so evidently some members of the family survived the war," Dr. Berkowitz said. "We don't know what became of them since." In the last year, Ms. Whitesides and museum record-keepers all over the world have been sweeping through stacks of provenance documents for signs of questionable pasts, spurred by a committee of museum curators. So far, Toledo's collection is clean, she said. "Fortunately, we've been very careful about these things almost from the very beginning," Dr. Steadman said. The record bears him out. Another 50-year-old letter in the Stiebel & Rosenberg archive shows a curatorial foresight that is almost prophetic. Here, Director Godwin urges Mr. Koppel to provide a copy of the military shipment records for the painting's provenance. "We'd like to have our records very clear in that respect - not for the present, when you and [art dealer] Rosenberg and we are all alive - but for the future, when we may not be here, and some question might arise on the transactions involved," he wrote.
"Amazing, isn't it?" Mr. Stiebel said. "Somehow, this man knew. It's almost like he could see us."
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The Toledo Museum of Art boasts a glass collection of more than 7,000 pieces, dating from the 15th century B.C. through last year. Almost 5,000 of the oldest glass items have only one provenance listing: "Collection of Thomas E.A. Curtis."
Mr. Curtis was a Gilded-Age banker and merger manager from New York City. Late in his life he took up arts philanthropy and collecting, and soon focused all his attention on Islamic and ancient glass. In 13 years, according to a museum catalog, he amassed 2,400 glass vessels and 2,500 fragments, gemstones, and glass objects. His was considered the most complete and important collection in the United States. Mr. Curtis died in 1915. Toledo museum benefactor and glass manufacturer Edward Drummond Libbey bought Mr. Curtis's huge collection of ancient glass in 1919 for $121,225.
What the museum provenance listing doesn't say is where Mr. Curtis got his glass. He bought much of it from a Syrian grave robber and antiques dealer named Azeez Khayat. According to Sidney Bergman of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Mr. Khayat spent part of each year in Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, and Palestine "buying antiquities and conducting excavations in ancient cemeteries." Mr. Khayat specialized in glass objects, and sold items with no provenance to millionaire collectors. In 1916, Edward Libbey urged the museum to buy a dozen ancient glasses from Mr. Khayat. "No one had a problem with that. Grave robbers have been around for as long as bodies have been buried with valuables," said David Steadman, former director of the Toledo museum. "Nowadays, no. If the same collection came on the market under those circumstances, we wouldn't touch it."
Not all the glass items came from graves. Some are from excavated cities or temples, or were dug up accidentally by farmers or builders. The issue is not so much one of violating gravesites. It is the clear violation of international laws that bar these items from leaving the country of origin.
Since the weather was cold here in Florida this Saturday afternoon, I decided to go to the movies and see "Entrapment" with Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Actually, a movie with Catherine Zeta-Jones would have drawn me to the movies regardless of the weather being unseasonally cold but that's another story. I found this movie amusing and enjoyed it very much. You will also. It is the story of an art thief (Connery) who is pursued by an insurance investigator (Zeta-Jones) after a series of major art thefts. What I enjoyed most was the wonderful volume of misinformation in the movie with regard to how to break in to a museum and defeat an alarm system. Darn, if we only had advanced systems like they had in this movie!! How could a museum have such elaborate security, but have alarms that are not electronically supervised? How can they have lasers (as opposed to garden variety infrared detectors), then place them so someone can step over them? And if it were only so simple to tap into a CCTV coaxial cable and stop the signal, but cause the last frame to remain on the TV monitor . . . You'll get a kick out of all of the misinformation but you will enjoy the movie very much. There were, however, a few things in the movie that are true.
First, when one item was stolen, it was simply mailed out of the building by the thief. This could happen so easily in most museums! And in another scene where a non-scrambling-type (non-Hirsch type) keypad was used, the thief used fingerprint powder on the keypad to see which keys were the ones used, then figured out the combination. I've done this before by marking the keypad with Vaseline and looking for smudges. Now that the world knows these tricks, be careful.
(Two thumbs up!)
Steve Keller
Museum Security Consultant