Watching the Detectives

Melinda R. McCurdy often finds herself alone in the hushed, high-ceilinged rooms of the mansion that is the historic centerpiece of the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens. The 29-year-old UC Santa Barbara art history grad student, whose small office is tucked away behind the tall shelves of art catalogs and books at the San Marino estate, says she’s come to enjoy the solitude.

Her summer internship, which began in early June, started out as a standard assignment for a budding art historian: Research the “provenance”--the ownership history--of the Huntington’s British paintings in preparation for a catalog of the collection, a resource that would mostly be used by other art scholars.

Soon after arriving at the Huntington, however, McCurdy found herself assigned to a new project, this one of much more wide-reaching significance. Now, amid roses and rare manuscripts, camellia and cactus gardens, and afternoon teas, McCurdy has become a detective in what seems to be shaping up as the art world’s crime of the century.

Like most other major museums in Los Angeles and across America, the Huntington is responding to the call to identify works of art--starting with paintings--that may have been looted by the Nazis during World War II.

In 1998, following a handful of well-publicized claims against museums by Jewish heirs, the American Assn. of Museum Directors issued guidelines for the search: Museums should seek out and make public gaps in the ownership history of art works that changed hands during the years 1933 to 1945, and they should make a prompt effort to respond to any claimant in an “equitable, appropriate and mutually agreeable manner.”

At this point, the Huntington and other museums are mostly occupied with Step 1: combing through sales records, personal correspondence, photographs and art catalogs in the time-consuming task of finding and trying to fill those ownership gaps. McCurdy’s summer internship has turned into a full-time job.

“It’s a totally different kind of research,” she says. “It’s something that involves tracing a thread back through time. You can find something concrete--or you might not find anything at all. You can really think of a painting having all these past lives, through those who owned it. Who knows, it may have [had] an illicit life.”

That the Huntington must grapple with the problem of art looted during World War II is actually a bit of a surprise. Railroad entrepreneur Henry E. Huntington, who founded the museum, acquired his collection well before Hitler rose to power. The Huntington’s British and French 18th and 19th century artworks therefore have clear title--if they didn’t change hands during the years of Nazi power, they couldn’t have been looted and resold by the Third Reich.

But one addition to the museum has raised questions. The Adele S. Browning Memorial Collection, a group of 42 paintings, eight portrait miniatures and 30 decorative objects donated in 1978 by Judge Lucius Peyton Green and his wife, Mildred Browning Green, in honor of her mother. The Greens did most of their art collecting in the 1940s and 1950s.

Among the Browning works, the researcher who preceded McCurdy found five paintings with wartime ownership gaps. Of those, that researcher was able to close the gaps on all but two “suspects”: Fragonard’s “Head of a Boy” and Wouwerman’s “Halt of a Hunting Party.” The Greens purchased both paintings--which entered the art market in the late 1800s--from New York’s Newhouse Galleries in the late ‘50s. But from 1933 to 1945, says McCurdy, “we know when the paintings entered various collections, but we don’t know when they left the collections.” McCurdy is still looking for the answers.

“Art historians used to be much more interested in what influence a work of art had on other art of the period--who owned it was of very little interest,” says Mimi Gaudieri, executive director of the American Assn. of Museum Directors. “The word ‘provenance’ has taken on new meaning.”

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In late June, the Getty Museum became the first local institution to go public with the results of its completed 1933-45 provenance research, compiled in cooperation with the Commission for Art Recovery of the World Jewish Congress and the Art Loss Register, two important resources for WWII provenance data. The museum posted special Web pages identifying paintings with gaps. Of the Getty’s 425 paintings, 250 are listed.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art began its research shortly after the association guidelines came out, hiring a full-time researcher, Amy L. Walsh, to examine 300 to 400 paintings (out of about 800 in its holdings) that changed hands during the war era. The museum plans to unveil the results of its Nazi-era provenance research on its Web site in late September or early October.

Pasadena’s Norton Simon Museum also hired a researcher, and plans to complete and make available the results of a preliminary phase of research by the end of September. The Huntington also plans to post its provenance information at some point in the future. The UCLA Hammer Museum is further behind; it has put two coordinators to work researching sources of grant money to hire a staffer for WWII provenance research.

Though much WWII provenance research remains in preliminary phases at L.A.’s museums, officials here are already expressing fear that a “gap” will be misinterpreted as meaning that a painting was, in fact, stolen by the Nazis. They echo the fears already expressed throughout the museum world.

In April, at a much-publicized hearing of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States, Metropolitan Museum of Art director Phillipe de Montebello announced the results so far of his museum’s WWII provenance research, which was posted on the Internet that month: 393 paintings among the museum’s 2,700 European paintings had ownership gaps.

In the same breath, he pleaded for perspective: “Unnecessarily polarizing the discourse--where instead we should be working in harmony--is a disturbing tendency to rush to judgment about works of art, and, by extension, museums themselves.”

For this reason, LACMA will not reveal any of its provenance data until its ready to put up its Web site, says museum spokesman Keith McKeown. The museum was already the victim of one “rush to judgment” earlier this year, when its tempera panel “The Madonna and Child,” by the 15th century Master of the Bargello, was widely reported as an artwork likely to have been stolen because it had passed through the hands of Hans Wendland, a known dealer in looted art. The museum has since been able to clear the painting. “It’s the perfect example of how easy it is to go with easy answers,” McKeown says.

Deborah Gribbon, who is currently the Getty Museum deputy director and takes over as director in October, stresses that in most cases, a gap is just a gap. “Provenance is not an exact science, and for people outside of the field, it is a very hard thing to understand,” she says. “It understates the case to say that it is not unusual for a museum to have objects with gaps in their ownership history--it is the reverse.”

The Getty has particular cause to be sensitive about misinterpretation of gaps. The finding that more than half of its paintings have provenance gaps appears ominous--unless one takes into account that oil baron J. Paul Getty did most of his collecting during and after WWII. Gribbon points out that such a period is more likely to create provenance gaps than peacetime. “Wartime is chaos,” she said.

Often, missing pieces to the provenance puzzle are nothing more than the result of faulty record-keeping--particularly common in wartime. Such was the case with Monet’s 1873 painting “Sunrise,” a multimillion-dollar acquisition made with great fanfare in 1998.

Before purchasing “Sunrise” from Manuel Schmit at Gallerie Schmit Paris, the Getty performed a basic title investigation and found no claims against the painting. Although the dealer had no documented proof, he was confident that the painting had remained in the hands of a family named Stern between 1912 and 1956.

Still, the research turned up a small mystery. One reliable source of Monet provenance information, Daniel Wildenstein’s “Monet: Catalogue Raisonne,” listed a Pierre May as one of the owners of the painting during those years--with no dates attached to the name. The Getty assumed that May was probably a member of the Stern family but, in light of the new emphasis on documented proof, a researcher was assigned to find further information about May.

The Getty found sale records from the gallery that sold the painting to a Rene Stern in 1912, but no mention of May. Wildenstein checked his files and confirmed that the name Pierre May had been entered into his book in error. “He never owned the painting; we don’t even know if he existed,” Gribbon says.

Sara Campbell, director of art at the Norton Simon Museum, said that many gaps have followed paintings to the Norton Simon--again, because of when the collection was acquired. “Norton Simon did not begin his collecting until . . . post-World War II,” she said. “That is a concern for us.”

While its research is far from complete, the Norton Simon has recently been able to clear the Impressionist Jean-Frederic Bazille’s 1869 painting “Woman in a Moorish Costume,” confirming that the painting had remained with the Bazille family until 1967. And earlier this month, it finally found the last pieces in the puzzle of Emil Nolde’s 1912 painting “The Sea.”

Nolde, a German artist, was branded a “degenerate” by the Nazis and forbidden to paint during WWII. During that time, he did a series of watercolors called “The Unpainted Pictures,” avoiding oil paint because the odor might tip off the Nazis that he was still at his easel. “We thought ‘The Sea’ might have been looted along with some of Nolde’s other work,” Campbell says. “But we were able to document that the painting had in fact been protected by a supporter of Nolde’s, a collector in Germany named Bernhard Sprengel.”

Only one major Southern California museum contacted by The Times is not devoting special effort to Nazi-era provenance research--the San Diego Museum of Art. Steven Kern, curator of European art, says that the museum engages in ongoing ownership research on its entire collection--and that’s enough for now. “It’s all a question of resources; our collection is small,” says Kern. “If anyone comes to us with questions, I’m more than happy to deal with it. We have what I think is a responsible approach to our collection, and if we have to change that approach, I’m sure we will.”

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The increased focus on looted art is a natural offshoot of the newly heightened focus on Holocaust-era crimes. The end of the Cold War and the release of previously inaccessible German records have sparked the effort, and the aging of WWII survivors adds to the pressure.

One such survivor in Los Angeles is 84-year-old Maria Altmann, an Austrian-born member of the Bloch-Bauer family, who continues to sue for restitution for several important paintings by Gustav Klimt, valued at $150 million and since the war in possession of the Austrian government.

Also spurring the museums on are several high-profile legal cases in United States and abroad. Making headlines around the time the guidelines came out were claims seeking the surrender of Egon Schiele’s “Portrait of Wally,” which had been on loan to New York’s Museum of Modern Art from an Austrian museum, and Matisse’s “Odalisque,” at the Seattle Art Museum, valued at $2 million. The Matisse--a clearly documented example of Nazi looting that had been purchased by unknowing collectors who later donated it to the museum--was eventually returned to the heirs of French art dealer and collector Paul Rosenberg. In July, a federal judge ruled that Austria’s Leopold Museum-Privatstiftung could keep the Schiele because, although the painting was stolen by the Nazis from a Jewish family, it was recovered by U.S. forces before the museum bought it. The judge said that a federal doctrine holds that “one cannot be convicted of receiving stolen goods if, before the stolen good reached the receiver, the goods had been recovered by their owner or his agent, including the police.”

A flurry of books on the subject has also forced the issue, among them Hector Feliciano’s “The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World’s Greatest Works of Art” (Basic Books, 1997) and Lynn Nicholas’ “The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War” (Knopf, 1994).

The problem of plundered art has long been an ethical question for museums and governments, observes Southwestern University professor Robert Lind, who is at work on a book on art and museum law. Lind cites the Elgin marbles--now held by the British Museum but taken from Athens by the Earl of Elgin in 1812 and long demanded back by Greece--as a prime example.

“I think what is going on is similar to a case where an institution may have a question as to whether one of their holdings is a forgery,” Lind said. “The difference is, when you are talking about a possible forgery, the people who are interested are art historians, and those involved in the purchase.

“In the Nazi art situation, you have living individuals who may have ownership claims. You have individuals really putting the pressure on, and you find museums reacting to that kind of pressure.”

Attorney Lloyd Goldenberg of Washington’s Trans-Art, which investigates art title, agrees that there is emotion involved--and a whole lot of money. “The art market is thriving right now; the prices keep going up and up,” he says. “Things that families bought for a few thousand dollars during the war are now worth many millions. It’s a staggering economic issue.”

Goldenberg adds that if more claimants come forward, the legal ramifications trigger a huge ripple effect--with heirs, donors, dealers and perhaps even estate attorneys all at risk of liability for a museum’s losses if the work is found to be stolen. “It’s a time bomb waiting to explode on the marketplace.”

It’s already happened in the case of the Seattle Art Museum and Matisse’s “Odalisque”: The museum is suing the art gallery that sold the painting to the donor family, for its full-market value.

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Provenance research is complicated, time-consuming, expensive--and, admitted the Getty’s Gribbon, “at some level, it’s deeply boring. I would hope that the results are interesting, but the process is not. It’s not a matter of sleuthing on street corners; it’s a matter of going through catalogs.”

The Norton Simon’s Campbell said that the push to close the gaps has created a demand for researchers with specialized skills.

“They’re very hard to find, we’ve all started networking,” she said. “You not only have to be fluent in three languages, but you have to have a great knowledge of the art-dealing activities in Europe [before the war] in the 1920s and ‘30s.”

It’s mostly a matter of establishing a paper trail--through museum catalogs, art indexes, sale and auction records, photos, and even personal correspondence.

Sometimes, the only way to confirm provenance is to contact the galleries involved in a transaction--many of which have gone out of business. For various reasons, some art donors or sellers may have requested anonymity, further complicating the chase. And many Jews sold their artwork under Nazi coercion, in which case records may have been falsified, destroyed or never kept at all.

Today’s researchers are armed with lists of hundreds of names associated with the Nazi art that may serve as “red flags” in a painting’s provenance. The list, first published in a 1946 report on the Nazi art trade by the Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the CIA) has been widely reprinted, including by the Art Newspaper in January 1999.

A different list enabled the Getty Museum to confirm that one of its holdings, Jan Steen’s 17th century painting “The Satyr and the Peasant,” was looted by the Nazis. A document issued by the Belgian government after the war and turned up during the museum’s provenance research includes the painting among artworks confiscated by the Nazis in that country from 1939 to 1941.

Getty spokeswoman Sylvia Sukop says that the museum, which purchased the painting in 1969, got its first clue that it might have been confiscated from earlier research on the work. A note on the back of a photograph of the painting, in a file at the Witt Library of the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, indicated that it had been stolen, but without documentation or details. The Belgian document provides more concrete evidence.

Sukop said that so far, no claims have been made against the Steen painting, but the museum has received an inquiry about it. As a matter of museum policy, the Getty will not provide information about an ongoing inquiry.

The Getty’s WWII provenance research Web pages list artworks with gaps alphabetically, by painter, with a photo and the existing provenance data. Thus far, it’s not possible to search the site by a family name to see if anything turns up.

But, as increasingly sophisticated databases and lists make their way onto the Web, the result may be a new wave of amateur art detectives. “Five years from now,” points out Trans-Art’s Goldenberg, “somebody sitting at a computer in Budapest will be able to do more mixing and matches, and say: ‘Hey, you know what? That was Grandpa’s!’ ”

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Los Angeles-area museums are so deeply immersed in the process of identifying and filling gaps and creating Web sites that they have not begun specifically to address the issue of restitution.

All say that they will respond on a case-by-case basis according to the museum association’s guidelines--but thus far none has been faced with claims. All say they welcome any ownership leads their Web sites may produce.

But is that enough? Three local museums featuring Judaica--the Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance, the Skirball Cultural Center and the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust--have been concerned with the question of Nazi-looted art long before 1998’s museum director guidelines. For them, the issue is even larger than the restitution of individual artwork.

Grace Cohen Grossman, senior curator at the Skirball, notes that the center has in its possession about 100 objects received in the early 1950s from Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, an organization that served as a clearinghouse for Nazi loot recovered by the British for which no heirs could be found. Each object bears a tag indicating that status.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Museum of Tolerance in West Los Angeles, believes that all museums should adopt the same policy of truth in advertising.

“If, at the end of the day, we [know something was looted and we] can’t find an owner--because so many of these families were totally wiped out--attaching the true history of the piece of art is the minimum anyone can do,” he says. “Or pull it down off the walls and donate it to the aging and indigent victims of the Nazis, to some central organization.

“The energy to finally look at this issue didn’t come from the art world,” he adds, “It came from the media, and human rights groups, and a few individuals who said, you know what, this was 50, 60 years ago, it didn’t happen on my watch, but it’s time to do the right thing. Something’s got to be fixed.

“I’m sure that [museum] lawyers broke out in a sweat--but this is a very welcome development.”