On The Trail of a Lost Breughel:

Canadian searches for her lost collection

Fern Smiley

"Fern Smiley" <fernsmile@rogers.com>

Although it is only in recent years that art claims from the Holocaust Era garner media attention, for some heirs, like the niece of Ernst and Gisela Pollack of Vienna, 55 years of battles, legal fees and stonewalling bureaucracy precede the publicity these matters now seem to elicit. “It is time we come forward,” indicated Maria Kluge from her Toronto townhouse, “as our situation is already transparent. Databases, confiscation lists and legal briefs dispersed over the internet are now commonplace”. And it is precisely this day and age of electronic information resource that may, in the end, yield the whereabouts of her uncle’s greatest treasure, Pieter Brueghel’s painting, “The Good Shepherd” also known as “Wolf und Hirte”.

In 1938, following the Anschluss, the Pollack family, like all Viennese Jews, were forced to submit detailed inventories of their possessions to the Nazi authorities. While some Jews were immediately relieved of their apartments and contents, Ernst and Gisela were able to fend off the Nazis’ lust for their possessions for four more years. “They were well to do. I mean, we were no Rothschildes, but there were factories, extensive silver, art and coin collections, summer villa….” Ernst reasoned that he could ward off deportation and confiscation by gradually selling assets and bribing Nazi officials, but eventually he and his wife Gisela, were ‘relocated’ to Theresienstadt and perished there in 1942.

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Maria, raised in Hungary, but a frequent holiday and summer guest at the pre-war Pollack home, possesses vivid memories of the paintings, weaponry, enamels and rugs that decorated her family’s several abodes. “The goblin tapestries lining the apartment walls seemed just gigantic to me, but, of course I was only a child at the time.” Upon deportation, the Pollack goblins, like many of the household furnishings and works of art were meticulously catalogued, shipped by Vugesta ( the Gestapo transport, warehousing and sales facility for Jewish property) and later auctioned by the Dorotheum auction house in Vienna in June, 1943.

In Maria’s possession is a remarkable document; a weathered but original catalogue of the Dorotheum sale given to her following the war by a neighbour of the Pollack’s who was outraged at the treatment and deportation of the family. He attended the 1943 Dorotheum auction and annotated in pencil marks all the dispossessed Pollack items with the actual sales figures in the margins of the catalogue.

Not all the Pollak treasures ended up in the Dorotheum sale. Indeed, the Breughel, mentioned above was earmarked for sale in the auction but was pulled before the proceedings by the Nazi Reichstatthalter in Vienna, Baldur von Schirach.

According to Austrian archives, Schirach, a noteworthy art collector, consulted with Hitler and his art advisor, Posse, ostensibly to secure permission to personally acquire the work, “The Good Shepherd”, which belonged to Ernst Pollack. The piece was placed in the Reichstatthalter’s official residence on the Hohe Warte overlooking Vienna. Its present whereabouts are unknown.

Posse, the German art historian/scholar responsible for Hitler’s planned art museum in Linz, Austria, was amassing Germanic art for the grandiose project. Ernst Pollack owned several works desired, confiscated and earmarked for the Linz collection and they suffered a fate separate from the Dorotheum pieces. In this case, the art was twice looted. Removed from Vienna for safekeeping, the Gestapo transported them to a monastery in Gwiggen, near the Austrian-Swiss border to be cared for by the nuns until the end of the war. Allied forces, namely, French Foreign Legion troops, overran the monastery and emptied its repository in 1945. “To the best of our knowledge, nothing from the collection hidden at Gwiggen has ever surfaced” according to Hans Kluge, Maria’s husband and art auction watcher. “The French authorities have been less than forthcoming about sharing information about the military looting issue.”

Documents from the war, postwar claims forms, correspondence and legal files fill the cabinets in the midtown Toronto den the Kluge’s use as their office. Art books line every wall.

Of all the claims on looted art assets, the Pollack case is unusually well documented, with original insurance policy photographs and negatives depicting the artwork. Banking documents and files amassed by Maria during the postwar period when she was helplessly trying to exact restitution share the cabinet with masses of documents that have only recently been made available from Austrian Archives.

A few pieces from the collections that comprised over 450 individual items were returned by Austrian museums. Maria was forced sell or barter most of these valuable pieces at rock-bottom prices to be able to live on during the difficult postwar years.

One painting, “Self Portrait” by Hans Canon was “restituted” in 1946 with a surcharge added, ironically, for “storage fees”, an amount that exceeded Maria’s ability to pay. Maria was forced to sell the painting back to a local museum to cover the cost. In recent weeks, Maria has been heartened by the actions of the same city museum, which was willing to rectify the injustice and has returned the work, this time without any charges.

Encouraged by the Canon restitution and the openness exhibited by various governments since the December, 1998 Washington Conference on Holocaust Era Looted Assets, Maria now dares to hope for some form of redress regarding her family’s outstanding art claims. The Art Loss Register, an industry wide watchdog on stolen art published the Breughel image last year with an alert as to its history. World wide, art museums are publicizing their holdings that lack ownership records for the vulnerable period, 1933-1945. Called provenance review, these lists are emerging on line. Over 600 paintings in Britain alone are suspect, and although to date the US has only eight institutions online, new guidelines will require full provenance disclosure on all works acquired after 1933 that were produced before the conclusion of WWII in 1945. Designed to be a tool to help researchers and claimants, like Maria, the lists inexorably depict the broad reluctance of the art world to “ask too many questions about ownership records” when amassing their collections during the postwar era. Questions about artworks lifted from Nazi repositories and transported to Moscow that included art from Jewish victims’ will be answered when the secret archives are published in a database now being formed by auction houses and private donors in the US.

Time, though, is against Maria. “Not in my lifetime, is her refrain. Even the children, they are so removed from this history, why should they continue the effort?” The answer for Maria may not lie in the future, but in the past. To restore to the provenance of the paintings the name of those who owned them in the past but whose memory was erased by the Holocaust. Ernst and Gisela Pollack.

"Fern Smiley" fernsmile@rogers.com

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