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http://www.seattletimes.com/extra/browse/html97/altmuse_102297.html

Wednesday, Oct. 22, 1997

Nazi art thefts come to haunt top museums

by Robin Updike
Seattle Times art critic

As the Seattle Art Museum is discovering, American art institutions may be the next to feel the backlash of art thefts more than 50 years ago by the Nazis.

In the past two years, many of Paris' most prestigious museums, including the Musee du Louvre and Musee d'Orsay, have had to return artworks stolen by the Nazis from private and public collections in Europe.

Thanks to an investigative book by a Paris-based journalist, it now appears that one of the Seattle Art Museum's two paintings by Henri Matisse was stolen from French art dealer Paul Rosenberg during World War II. SAM was given the 1928 painting, which it calls "Odalisque," by Prentice Bloedel, one of the founders of MacMillan Bloedel Ltd., the Canadian timber company. Bloedel bought it in 1954 from Knoedler & Co., one of New York's most respected galleries. It has been in SAM's collection since 1996, when Bloedel died.

But it now seems that the painting may have been part of the pillage taken from Rosenberg by the Nazis. If so, it likely will be returned to Rosenberg's family, who live in New York. It's unclear whether SAM will be compensated financially in any way if the museum has to return the painting, valued at around $2 million.

And though no one is accusing SAM or Bloedel of knowingly acquiring stolen art, the incident raises such thorny questions as whether dealers, museums and collectors should give closer scrutiny to the source of artworks, and whether they are somehow culpable if they do not.

"What a buyer or acquirer of a work of art is expected to do in terms of checking the past of an acquisition has changed radically in the last 30 years," said Constance Lowenthal, executive director of the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR), a nonprofit New York-based organization.

"In the mid-'70s, IFAR did a survey of museums, and it was clear that awareness of the problem of art theft and the role buyers could play in fueling theft was not even a blip on the screen," Lowenthal said. "Now the awareness is much greater."

Mimi Gardner Gates, SAM's executive director, is out of the country. But Gail Joice, senior deputy director and museum spokeswoman, said SAM had no reason to think there was anything amiss with "Odalisque."

"The painting came from one of the finest collectors in the region, who got it from one of the finest galleries in the nation," Joice said.

Ann Freedman, president of Knoedler, the New York gallery that sold "Odalisque" to Bloedel, said Knoedler bought the painting from a reputable dealer in France in early 1954.

Not questioning artworks' sources is one of the practices that journalist Hector Feliciano rails against in his book, "The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World's Greatest Works of Art," published earlier this year by Basic Books. Feliciano contends that the Nazis stole some 20,000 artworks from France. After the war, the Allies made attempts to return stolen art, but in cases where records were missing or the owners were presumed dead, art often went to French institutions. Other artworks were lost through thefts from Nazi storehouses.

When "Lost Museum" came out in 1995 in France, it helped spark debate over whether French museums had turned a blind eye to many works in their collections that have interrupted or mysterious histories.

But most museums have works of art that do not come with lengthy paper trails documenting every owner and every bill of sale since the artwork left the artist's studio. That is especially true of older works and tribal works. Museums are usually scrupulous in checking the authenticity of a work and the documentation from the donors or sellers certifying them as the legal owners. But verifying an artwork's complete history is often impractical, if not impossible, museums say.

Chase Rynd, executive director of the Tacoma Art Museum, said that "in the 19th and early 20th centuries, people often didn't keep paperwork on art sales."

Richard Andrews, executive director of The Henry Art Gallery, said that ownership issues can arise from such mundane incidents as the long and hallowed practice of artists bartering their works for food or studio space. "A classic situation would be for an Impressionist painter to barter a painting for food at a cafe," Andrews said. "So the cafe owner might hang the piece on the wall, and it could sit there a generation or two before someone noticed it was by Matisse or Picasso. There would probably not be a bill of sale. How do you prove ownership?"

Lowenthal, an art historian who specializes in World War II art thefts, said that in the past 20 years a wave of movies and scholarly research on the Holocaust has resulted in the unearthing of records tracing the original owners of artworks stolen by the Nazis, who had a special division devoted to stealing art.

"I think museums and collectors would do well to look at their collections through this lens and see where ownership history gaps appear," Lowenthal said, "and if it's from the late '30s onward, to research the piece in as much detail as possible. Artworks are beautiful and valuable, and they survive wars, when other things don't, for those reasons."

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