ART : On the Trail of Spoils of War : The World War II duties of Montecito resident Otto Wittmann included undercover intelligence work. His assignment: to help find and recover some of the priceless artworks taken by the Nazis.

Two art books sit on the coffee table in Otto Wittmann’s home here. Both celebrate landmark exhibitions of artworks confiscated during World War II, but that’s about all they have in common.

One publication, “Hidden Treasures Revealed: Impressionist Masterpieces and Other Important French Paintings Preserved by the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg,” makes no secret of its importance.

The splashy hardcover, published by Harry N. Abrams in New York, documents the Hermitage’s current exhibition of 74 paintings taken from German collections and secretly housed in St. Petersburg, Russia, for nearly 50 years. All the paintings are reproduced in color, along with 25 color details, black-and-white illustrations of about 170 related works and a substantial text including scholarly essays.

The other book--a 49-year-old French paperback--is so diminutive and colorless that it all but fades away. It has a long title, “Les Chefs-d’Oeuvre des Collections Francaises Retrouves en Allemagne par la Commission de Recuperation Artistique et les Services Allies” (Masterpieces From French Collections Recovered in Germany by the Commission of Artistic Recuperation and the Allied Services), and it celebrates an even larger exhibition of 284 works staged at Paris’ Orangerie in 1946. But the French issue has only a handful of black-and-white reproductions and a brief text.

Different as they are, both books have stirred up powerful memories for Wittmann, a Harvard-educated art museum consultant whose World War II duty included a stint of counterintelligence with the Office of Strategic Services. Working for the Art Looting Investigation Unit of the OSS, he was among those charged with the recovery and restitution of thousands of artworks taken by the Nazis.

Wittmann later had a 30-year career at the Toledo Art Museum in Ohio, most of it as director. More recently, he has been a fixture on the Los Angeles art scene, serving as a trustee and consultant to Los Angeles County Museum of Art from 1977 to 1979 and as a trustee and trustee emeritus of the J. Paul Getty Trust since 1979.

Something of an eminence grise in the art world, he has accumulated enough credits, titles and honors to fill several resumes, but he has not forgotten his extraordinary wartime experiences. And now his memories are more vivid than ever.

“I was so stunned to see the beautiful catalogue that Abrams had published,” Wittmann said in an interview at his home. “It called to mind this funny little French book I had, this little paperbound thing that’s turning yellow because the paper isn’t very good. It has maybe seven or eight black-and-white illustrations. That’s all there is for 284 works of art because that’s all the French could afford at the time.”

While the war raged, the French witnessed the disappearance of public and private art collections. Their museums were turned into warehouses and their treasures shipped off to Germany.

“Basically what happened is that during the early part of the war, the Germans took over France and headquartered in Paris,” Wittmann said. “Suddenly there appeared a well-organized group that the Germans established to seize works of art, which they took to the building called the Jeu de Paume.”

(The Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume housed a national collection of French Impressionism from 1947 to 1986, when the artworks were sent to the Musee d’Orsay. The Jeu de Paume was converted to a contemporary art museum, which opened in 1991.)

“At the same time as Hermann Goering was head of the German air force, which was trying to conquer England, he was in Paris collecting art,” Wittmann said. “He got an enormous number of pictures.”

Goering reportedly visited the Jeu de Paume periodically to inspect new arrivals, sent Germanic artworks to Hitler for a planned museum and reserved the best French pieces for himself. Trains with specially outfitted cars transported the booty to scattered hideaways.

Several years passed before the Allied Forces began to understand the magnitude of the Nazis’ art looting, Wittmann said. Artworks were squirreled away in ostentatious castles and subterranean chambers, including an Austrian salt mine at Alt Aussee at the end of a seven-mile underground railway. But as the Allies moved into Germany from all sides, word of the secret caches spread and the Americans decided to try to round up and return the wayward treasures.

The fieldwork largely fell to the U.S. Army’s Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives unit, a small group of art-trained military personnel, while the OSS Art Looting Investigation Unit handled intelligence and investigation of methods used by the Nazis to confiscate works of art throughout Europe.

Recovering art was not a high priority, but the task became easier when the MFAA gained the cooperation of Rose Valland, a French museum worker who had been assigned by the Germans to keep track of their loot and had secretly copied the records. The Germans’ own records of art transactions also became available after the war.

Wittmann, who served in the Army Air Force, was not a member of the MFAA, but he was aware of his colleagues’ efforts and eager to help. When he learned that the OSS needed a director for the Art Looting Investigation Unit’s headquarters in Washington, he persuaded his superiors to give him the job. During his tour of duty, he spent extended periods in Paris and in Munich, where a central collection point for the art had been established. He also investigated art transactions in Switzerland and Sweden.

Military officers from France, Holland, Belgium and Italy were invited to the collecting points to identify their countries’ works of art, Wittmann said.

“We made no attempt to return works of art to individuals,” he said, “because by that time we had learned that there was a great amount of collaboration, as you could expect. . . . We didn’t know the full story, so we simply sent the art back to the country. It was up to them to give it back to the so-called owner or not.”

This isn’t the first time Wittmann has revisited his wartime experience.

After the war ended, a group of works from German museums seized by the Allies was shipped to the United States, ostensibly for safekeeping, and displayed at the National Gallery in Washington. Under pressure to share the booty with the rest of the country, military officials sent the exhibition to a dozen museums, including the Toledo Museum of Art, where Wittmann was associate director.

“We had the exhibition for 10 days, and it was an amazing 10 days because a whole company of the Army came with it,” he said. “We housed and fed them at the museum while they stood guard over the pictures.”

The operation was a source of controversy, Wittmann said. Many art professionals objected to removing the artworks from Germany and subjecting them to potential damage on the U.S. tour. Others argued that the United States should keep the art, but it was returned after the exhibition.

In 1950, during Wittmann’s tenure as director, the Toledo Museum bought “The Crowning of Saint Catherine,” a large altarpiece painted in 1633 by Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens, which Wittmann considers “the greatest and most beautiful Rubens in America.”

The painting, commissioned for a church in Belgium and later sold to an English collector, was in a private German collection when the Nazis confiscated it. The owner of the painting fled to Canada but reclaimed it after the war and put it on the market.

More than three decades later, at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Santa Monica, Wittmann came across an image of the Rubens taken at the Munich collecting point by the late Johannes Felbermeyer. Wittmann knew Felbermeyer’s work and had urged the Getty to acquire his archive, but he hadn’t seen his picture of the Rubens.

“It was very exciting to find that photograph,” Wittmann said of the image of four men holding the corners of the immense painting while a fifth man observes it. “Here’s the picture, without a frame, without a stretcher, looking just like a sail. It was wrapped on a big wooden roller to preserve it.”

The Hermitage show has unveiled a group of artworks long thought to have been destroyed. The exhibition is “just the tip of the iceberg,” Wittmann said. “But this is the start, and therefore it’s terribly important to all of us who are interested in the history of art. . . . It’s a wonderful gesture for the Russians and a real departure from what happened during the whole Communist regime.

“The thing that seems so strange and interesting to me is that what went on during the war, as far as the Americans and the British and the French knew it, was revealed day by day,” he said. “The somewhat nefarious dealings of some of the collaborationists and the selling of works of art in neutral countries--the rather messy things that happen in a democracy--were revealed slowly. But at the end of the war, we knew pretty much what had gone on.

“In the case of Russia, it has taken 50 years for this to be revealed,” he said. “It’s the difference between a democracy and a monolithic society where nothing could be said or revealed until that regime was over. . . . There’s a great difference between the fortunate way in which we can live and the way in which Russians had to live, and dare not admit anything.”

Now the Russians face a dilemma about whether or not to return their booty to the Germans, and Wittmann won’t hazard a guess about the outcome.

“We can believe ideally, which I do, that works of art should not be used as spoils of war,” he said. “But on the other hand, I don’t think we are in a very good position to criticize a country that suffered so much during the war. Anyone who lost a child or a husband in the war certainly is not very happy about that, but it’s not like having your whole country destroyed. America’s never had that happen to it yet.”