Pictures at an Exhibition (31 page)

Authors: Sara Houghteling

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BOOK: Pictures at an Exhibition

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Pillage accompanies most wars. Yet the systematic looting of art would not have occurred were it not for the voracious appetites and bureaucratic meticulousness of the Reich's two most powerful men: Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering, commander in chief of the Luftwaffe and Hitler's second in command.

Hitler, who as a youth had been rejected from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, planned to build a museum in his hometown of Linz, Austria, dreaming it would become the world's greatest. By 1941, there were 497 paintings in the collection of the future Führermuseum. In 1945, its stores numbered 8,000—four times more artwork than was displayed in the Louvre, according to Jonathan Petropoulos in
Art as Politics in the Third Reich.
(By comparison, the National Gallery in Washington, which was dedicated in the same year, possessed a collection of 3,000 artworks only by 1991.) Later, this collection was stored in the salt mines at Alt Aussee, a labyrinthine tunnel no more than six feet high, cut more than a mile deep into the mountainside. Many of the iconic photographs of the American Monuments Men, General Patton, and General Eisenhower posing with looted artwork were taken there.

Goering, a World War I hero, bon vivant, morphine addict, and art connoisseur, used the looting to enrich both his person (he was said to keep emeralds in his pockets for fondling) and his home, Carinhall, which was named for his deceased wife, Carin. The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), led by propagandist and racial ideologue Reich Minister Alfred Rosenberg, was charged with confiscations first of fine art and, later, through M-Aktion, of furniture and household goods. Colonel Kurt von Behr was its chief in France.

Yet Hitler and the ERR did not want
all
art. Hitler had a taste for Germanic and Old Master paintings (though not religious ones) and an obsession with scenes depicting Leda and the swan (for which a market immediately sprung up). In 1937, the Nazis held the infamous Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibit, which was but a preview to the purging of sixteen thousand contemporary paintings from German museums in 1938 and their subsequent sale in Lucerne in 1939, when Picasso's
Absinthe Drinker
, van Gogh's
Self-Portrait
, Gauguin's
Tahiti
, Matisse's
Bathers with a Turtle
, and Chagall's
Maison bleue
were among the canvases auctioned off.

As soon as Paris fell in June of 1940, the ERR began its French operations. In October, the first four hundred cases of looted artwork arrived at the Jeu de Paume museum, and from November third through fifth, Goering visited and made his first selection: twenty-seven of the finest paintings in the world, including Rembrandt's
Boy with a Red Beret
and Van Dyck's
Portrait of a Lady.
He knew better than to touch the Rothschilds’ Vermeers; those were for the Führer. Due to the conditions of the armistice, the French museums were, much to Hitler's chagrin, off-limits—unlike the national collections, for example, of Poland, which was officially defeated and therefore plundered completely.

Still, France was the most looted country in Europe, with over one-third of all privately held artwork falling into Nazi hands: in all, over 100,000 works of art and several million books. According to the Mattéoli Commission report issued by the French government in 2000, 61,233 artworks were recovered after the war, of which 45,441 were returned to their owners. Two thousand works whose owners could not be identified were placed in national French museums, which inventoried them in “recovery collections,” under the code of MNR (Musées Nationaux Récupérations). In 1954, 13,500 objects of lesser artistic value were sold, and for nearly forty years no further research was carried out to determine the legitimate owners of the plundered art. The locations of some 40,000 art objects remain unknown. They are in public and private collections and, many believe, in the former Soviet Union, plundered a second time by Stalin's Trophy Brigades.

Midway through
Pictures at an Exhibition
, Daniel Berenzon tells his son that the paintings will reappear, not in his lifetime, but in Max's. The more times an artwork changes hands, the more likely it is to be distanced from the person who knows why it should be hidden. In recent years, the rate of high-profile repatriations has increased.

Two thousand paintings in France remain unclaimed. For decades, until the publication of Nicholas's
The Rape of Europa
(1994) and Hector Feliciano's
The Lost Museum
(1995), the ownerless MNR paintings languished in French museums, detectable as war loot to only a few. Today, no major museum is untouched by the burden of proving the wartime provenance of its holdings. As of July 2008, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York lists 535 paintings (out of the 2,700 in its European collection) with “elusive gaps” in their Nazi-era provenances: neither the paintings’ ownership nor their sale can be accounted for during the war years. These include Monet's
Camille Monet on a Garden Bench
, Caravaggio's
The Denial of Saint Peter
, five Cézannes, two Chagalls, five Degas, two Delacroix, works by both Brueghel the Elder and the Younger, Fra Bartolom-meo, Picasso, van Gogh …. Think of a painter, and he is most likely on the list. Laudably, over the past decade, private and national museums have grown more transparent about this question of provenance and wartime history.

If you are ever in France, and from a distance you see a painting that looks roughly handled for a masterpiece—in the Musée d'Orsay, Pompidou, or any of the other hundreds of museums—look closely at the placard beside it, and you will likely see the letters
MNR.
I can still recall the first time I saw them, next to a Sisley with a torn corner.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am deeply indebted to the scholarship of Lynn Nicholas, Hector Feliciano, and Annette Wieviorka, and to the autobiography of Rose Valland,
Le front de l'art
, parts of which appear throughout this book. To interpret the works of Manet and Morisot, I have relied particularly on T. J. Clark's
The Painting of Modern Life
and Anne Higonnet's
Berthe Morisot.

I wish to thank the following individuals and organizations for their support of this novel's research and completion: Nathaniel Rich at the Hald Hovedgård colony; Martha Heasley Cox and Paul Douglass of the John Steinbeck Fellowship at San Jose State University; the French Fulbright Commission; the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation; the Avery Hopwood Awards at the University of Michigan; and the staff at the
Centre de documentation juive contemporaine
and the
Bibliothèque nationale de France.

My professors and classmates at the University of Michigan's MFA program read multiple versions of early drafts of the novel, with insight and patience: Charles Baxter, Peter Ho Davies, Nicholas Delbanco, Reginald McKnight, Eileen Pollack, and Nancy Reisman; Laura Jean Baker, John Bishop, Andrew Cohen, Melodie Edwards, Laura Krughoff, Rattawut Lapcharoensap, John Lee, Patti Lu, David Morse, Michelle Mounts, and Catherine Zeidler.

My gratitude as well goes to: Tara Abrahams, Kate Aherns, Andrea Beauchamp, Rachid Bendacha, Orion Berg, Danielle Berger, Alice and Arthur Berney, Lexy Bloom, Jean Manuel Bourgeois, Mcaela Blay-Thorup, Mary Burchenal, Rob Cohen, Nick Dybek, Nathan Englander, Arnault Finet, Peggy Frankston, Jeff Gracer, Nancy Gutman, Ellen Heller, Lindy Hess, Anne Higonnet, Patrice Higonnet, Betsy Houghteling, Lizzie Hutton, Mariko Johnson, Sandy Karam, Winnie Kao, Barbara Kean, Liz Kean, Théo Klein, Philippe Kraemer, Virginia Larner, Howard Lay, Adam Loss, Maja Lucas, Arnost Lustig, John and Risa Mann, Jean Martin, Peter Mendelsund, Dinaw Mengestu, Margaret Metzger, the Mindelzun family, Charles B. Paul, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, Sharon Pomerantz, Deborah Quitt, Abel Rambert, Sandrine Rameau, Maxine Rodburg, John Rosenberg, Jesse Rosencrantz-Engelmann, Lionel Salem, Elaine Sciolino, Didier Schulmann, Claire Silvy, the Spatzierer family, Marcel and Vivian Steinberg, Laura Stern, Dan and Susan Suleiman, Margaret Taub, David G. Taylor, Emanuel Tanay, LeRoy Votto, Brad Watson, and Annette Wieviorka. Elizabeth Fishel and Bob Houghteling have gone beyond the call of family duty, from literary wisdom to welcoming me for months beneath their roof.

Caroline Clement has been my Parisian host, interpreter, and friend for many years. I could not have undertaken this research without Fred Davis's legal knowledge and historical expertise. I wish to thank Marianne Rosenberg for sharing her family's history with me; her grandfather, Paul Rosenberg, was the inspiration for this novel and her father, Alexandre, makes several appearances within. Seeing an invitation to a gallery opening at 21, rue de La Boétie written in her grandfather's hand and colored by Picasso's was an experience like none other. I am also thankful to Marianne for lending her keen eye to this novel. All errors, of course, on matters historical, artistic, and otherwise, are entirely my own.

I have been blessed to have a brilliant editor at Knopf, Jordan Pavlin. My agent Jennifer Joel has been a tireless advocate and friend. Special thanks also to Leslie Levine for her extraordinary help. Finally, I am grateful to Janet Baker, Nicolette Castle, Katie Sigelman, and Meghan Wilson.

My love and gratitude go to my grandmother Fiora, who first painted the pictures of Paris in my mind, to my father Peter who gave them a melody and to my mother Susan who encouraged me to write them down. To them—and to my sisters Charlotte, Sylvia, and Pearl, and to Daniel—go my love and thanks beyond words.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sara Houghteling is a graduate of Harvard College and received her Master's in Fine Arts from the University of Michigan. She is the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship to Paris, first place in the Avery and Jules Hopwood Awards, and a John Steinbeck Fellowship. She lives in California, where she teaches high school English.

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are
registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Houghteling, Sara.

Pictures at an exhibition / Sara Houghteling.

p. cm.

“This is a Borzoi book”—T.p. verso.

eISBN: 978-0-307-27124-2

1. Art treasures in war—Fiction. 2. Family secrets—Fiction.

3. World War, 1939-1945—France—Fiction. 4. Art dealers—Fiction.