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Melissa Mller and Monika Tatzkow, Lost Lives, Lost Art: Jewish Collectors, Nazi Art Theft, and the Quest for Justice. New York: Vendome Press, 2010. 256 pp. Peter C. Sutton, Reclaimed: Paintings from the Collection of Jacques Goudstikker. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2008. 224 pp.
An Update on Holocaust Restitution Cases While recognizing the justice being served in the return of masterpieces looted or forcibly sold during World War II to heirs of the Jewish gallery owners and collectors whose walls the paintings once adorned, it is still possible to lament both the narrative being conveyed about the Holocaustthe very wealthy losing material objects which, however rare, do not remotely approach the cost in human livesand the tragedy of the works being removed from the public eye and sold for staggering prices to private collectors. While this is an academic review, it is important, in this discussion, to pay particular attention to popular media, because, for better or for worse, public discourse has affected political discourse. On whichever side of the restitution tugof-war one nds oneself, public perception can be a very powerful force. Museums, even if they are strictly speaking acting appropriately on the basis of the letter of the law, may come under re in mainstream publications for underappreciating the spirit of the law, while heirs trying to reclaim works, if they are not careful, can quickly be painted in the media as greedy philistines. Much ink has been spilled lately over what is often front page news about works and collections being restored to heirs and the inevitable court cases surrounding those returns. Robin Cembalest, Executive Editor of ARTnews, has, over the past few years, consistently produced valuable investigative stories about all aspects of the restitution cases, most notably the high prole story of Maria Altmann (19162011), a niece of collector Adele Bloch-Bauer (18811925), who successfully secured the return from the Austrian government of ve paintings by Gustav Klimt (18621918), which had been stolen from Bloch-Bauers husband Ferdinand (after Adeles death). Although most of the literature on the subject does not address Talmudic principles, one of the major factors in rabbinic literature, particularly the Talmud, in the legal calculus that determines when lost and stolen properties must be returned to the original owners is the concept of yeush (e.g. Baba
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 Also available online brill.nl/ima

Metziya 21a), roughly despair. If the original owner loses hope of ever securing the objects return, the object, in certain cases, belongs to the current owner. Sometimes, however, the objects in question are so valuableeven pricelessthat they are not easy to forget. Can one ever forget a collection of more than a thousand valuable paintings, such as the one that the Dutch art dealer Jacques Goudstikker (18971940) lost to the Nazis? Jewish collectors and art dealers, whose troves of Rembrandts and Pissarros were looted by the Nazis or forcefully sold at far below market prices, were not about to forget their collections. In many instances, their heirs are still ghting in court to retrieve the works, whether from public or private collections, despite the U.S. State Department-supported 1998 Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets and the 2009 Terezin Declaration on Holocaust Era Assets and Related Issues. The story that emerges from Melissa Mller and Monika Tatzkows Lost Lives, Lost Art: Jewish Collectors, Nazi Art Theft, and the Quest for Justice and Peter Suttons Reclaimed: Paintings from the Collection of Jacques Goudstikker is one of very wealthy collectors, whose lavish lifestyles were dashed to pieces almost literally over night. Mller and Tatzkow note (205) that Louis von Rothschild (18821955), after the death of his father Baron Albert von Rothschild (18441911), who collected works by, amongst others, the Dutch landscape painter Meindert Hobbema (16381709), was asked about the value of his palace. How much is St. Stephens Cathedral worth? he was rumored to respond. Writing in an afterword, Gunnar Schnabel, a lawyer who co-wrote Nazi Looted Art: Art Restitution World-Wide (Berlin: Proprietas-Verlag, 2007) with Tatzkow, notes that many books and articles on Nazi art looting have appeared since the mid-1990s, but thousands of works still appear in state museums and private collections. It is still usually up to the claimants themselves to take the initiative, Schnabel writes, to undertake costly and time-insensitive research, to conduct restitution negotiations that may drag on for years, or to le a lawsuit in order to at least partially rectify the prolongation of injustices
IMAGES 5 DOI: 10.1163/187180011X604553

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reviews and important than Holocaust memorycomes at a great expense of the medium. When one tries to evaluate the signicance of a painting of Auschwitz, it is difcult to cling to the same critical vocabulary that one uses to contextualize Monets water lilies. Im in a life and death struggle, Archie Rand told me and art critic Richard McBee in a conversation at the Yeshiva University Museum in 2004, in which he stubbornly insisted his paintings are Jewish art precisely because he authored them that way. What do I care about a specic red? Rands works stand on their own, but his statement about a change in perspective and vocabulary when one is wrestling with issues larger than oral arrangements and donor portraits is a vital one. Art, even if it tackles the most terrifying and terrible of subjects, needs to be addressed as art. Choosing an ambitious even necessarily elusivesubject matter cannot be a shortcut and a smokescreen that evades authentic critical analysis. Mller and Tatzkows fteen chapters tell of immensely wealthy collectors who tried in vain to protect their collections. On the one hand, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer wrote to the painter Oskar Kokoschka on April 2, 1941, They took everything from me in Vienna. I was left without even a memento (156). But the book doesnt really respond to the position articulated by Salomon de Rothschild (17441855) to his younger brother James ( Jakob) (17921868). Too conspicuous, Jakob! he wrote. By showing off your wealth, youre stirring up anti-Semitism. That is not to say that Jewish collectors are in any way guilty because of their nancial success. However much some of them showed off their wealth, they had the right to do so, and many of their peers of other faith groups certainly displayed their wealth with unrestricted glee. But it is a missed opportunity that neither Mller and Tatzkows Lost Lives, Lost Art nor Suttons Reclaimed seriously entertains the possibility that there is a tradeoff involved in the restitutions. It might very well be the case that justice is served if and when every work is returned to heirs of its previous owners, but that justice comes at a price. There is no Solomonic possibility of divvying the paintings up and sending one part

committed decades ago. Schnabel applauds the incremental steps that are being taken, but stresses the urgency of the work ahead: Numerous cases around the world remain unresolved.1 However important Mller and Tatzkows research isand its hard to feel anything but sympathy for the victims and their heirsTyler Green, writing in the Wall Street Journal is not wholly impressed:
Though the authors deftly summarize restitution efforts regarding each particular collector or familys artworks, they uncover little new information, and the vignettes about the art that their subjects owned are cursory and narrowly informed. Most entries seem designed to rouse a sympathetic emotional responsereducing their subjects to a sentimental, what-wonderful-peoplethey-were samenessrather than to present a broad view of Jewish participation in Europes 20th-century avant garde.2

But Green reserves his most passionate criticism for New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman, who accused Altmann of cashing in by selling the Klimt paintings she obtained from the Austrian government in 2006, instead of donating them to a museum. A sensible reaction to this happy news might have been to celebrate that the heirs were nally, belatedly free to do with their property whatever they liked, writes Green, but Kimmelman criticized Altmann instead. If such a prominent observer can still deride great Jewish patrons of the arts as greedy collectors, any attempt to provide a fuller understanding of who they really were is welcome, Green says. Lest anyone accuse Green of taking Kimmelman out of context, the latters response in the New York Times begins, How sadif unsurprisingto hear that the heirs of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer are indeed cashing in, as planned, and selling four Klimts at Christies in November.3 But Greens criticism of the layout and images in Lost Lives, Lost Artthat they often seem a bit like pages torn from Vanity Fairought to extend to the rest of the work as well, and indeed to Holocaust studies in general. All too often, unfortunately, the importance of the messageand there are few subjects more essential

1 Gunnar Schnabel and Monika Tatzkow, Nazi Looted Art: Art Restitution World-Wide (Berlin: Proprietas-Verlag, 2007), 237. 2 Tyler Green, Patrons of the Arts, Victims of the Nazis, Wall Street Journal (October 30, 2010).

3 Michael Kimmelman, Klimts Go to Market; Museums Hold Their Breath, New York Times (September 19, 2006).

reviews to the rightful owners and the other part to public collections, but one cannot help but dream about such a compromise. The closest Mller and Tatzkow ever get to admitting that the subject at hand is far more complex than a simple black-and-white transference of ownership of artworks is in the beginning of their introduction, where they argue:
The origins of a painting have always been a factor in its value on the art market. If it comes straight from the hands of a recognized connoisseur or a famous gure, that is tantamount to a seal of approval and makes the work all the more coveted, because the personality of the collector is reected in the history of the piece. It is another story entirely in the case of looted art, and especially when it comes to its restitution. In such instances, a works provenance is often mentioned only in passing, or not at all. . . . Instead, emotionally charged discussions are launched about the gaping spaces on museum walls, and a hue and cry is raised about the exorbitant prices paid on the present-day art market (7).

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It is impossible to understand the restitution cases, the authors argue, without having a good sense of the biographies of the collectors and dealers who used to own the works. The authors certainly share anecdotes and some background about their subjects. But as a comparison of their Goudstikker chapter with Peter Suttons catalog reveals, their narrative is a bit sensationalist. Where Mller and Pieter den Hollanders essay credits (218) the twenty-two-year-old Goudstikker with entering the family business, becoming a thirdgeneration collector, and immediately set[ting] about transforming it in accordance with his own ideas, focusing exclusively on dealing in old pictures of all periods, and convince[ing] his father to move the business to Amsterdam, Sutton notes (19) that Goudstikker entered the eld and almost immediately introduced distinctive changes, including bringing an increasingly varied international offering to the gallery and its publications, reproducing artists signatures in catalogs, numbering and personally signing catalogs, and adding a Goudstikker word mark to gallery publications. Whether the changes were immediate or almost immediateboth accounts seem likely to be romanticizations, and both feature oddly similar uses of the same adverb immediateSutton accounts for the changes, at least in part, as being in response to alterations in the economic and political fortunes of Amsterdam,

which became an increasingly vital international center for the art trade in the 1920s. Whereas Jacques father Eduard Goudstikker had dealt mostly to Dutch clients, because World War I had limited international trade, Jacques came of gallery-dealing age in a very different Amsterdam, with an expanded market at the expense of the German market, which contracted during the nancially strained years following World War I. Jacques interest in a wider range of periods of art history, which Mller and den Hollander seem to credit to a superior and forward-thinking grasp of his trade, in fact, according to Sutton, can be attributed to Jacques studies under Leiden University Professor Willem Martin, a Seventeenth Century Dutch specialist, and Professor W. Vogelsang in Utrecht, who introduced him to wider elds of study and a more aesthetic assessment of art, particularly early Netherlandish to German and French Gothic, Italian Renaissance, seventeenth and eighteenthcentury French, as well as . . . European art of the nineteenth century. Mller and den Hollanders larger-than-life Goudstikker, who is of course in his day . . . the most successful art dealer in the Netherlands (217), brought previously unknown Italian artists of the fteenth and sixteenth centuries, as well as earlier German and French paintings (218) to Amsterdam, and in so doing awakened and shaped an entirely new taste in art. Goudstikkers talent soon began to be recognized outside his home country, and he swapped ideas with leading art historians and art dealers throughout the world. In addition:
In the two decades of Goudstikkers inuence, Amsterdam grew to be a hub of the international art market; sooner or later, anyone looking for rst-class old masters would come into contact with this young visionary. Following his advice, numerous museums moved away from what was then the standard practice of presenting artworks in a purely documentary way, attempting to cover all established art movements (218).

At Goudstikkers instigation, however, museums ventured into specialized collections and a much more emotional style of presentation. One wonders about other museum collections, like the Frick Collection, bequeathed in 1919 (the year Goudstikker turned twenty-two), and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which opened in Boston in 1903, when Goudstikker was sixsixteen years before he became

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reviews held in The Hague, in which Goudstikker outlined his aesthetic approach:
As always, seventeenth-century masters occupy a place of honor in our exhibition, but one also encounters works from other artistic periods, and among others, a fairly large number of works by the primitive painters. Modern aspirations move more and more in this direction and peoples present-day tastes conform in many regards to those of the fteenth and sixteenth century. (2122).

involved in the gallery at Herengracht 458. Both of them certainly had an approach to display of paintings and objects that was far beyond the purely documentary. Mller and den Hollander are surely justied in calling Goudstikker a young visionary, but their claim that his approach to curating and hanging art was appreciably different from what they call the standard practice inates Goudstikkers contributions. That Jacques Goudstikker is worth discussing at length is undeniablealthough, perhaps, the real estate Mller and den Hollander devote to his courting of and marriage to opera singer Dsire Dsi von Halban-Kurz might have been better allocated elsewherebut, however tragic his death (accidentally falling at night into a gap on the deck of the boat upon which he was eeing the Nazis) and the looting of his collection, it will not do to inate the signicance of the early days of his career. When Mller and den Hollander address Goudstikkers (business, rather that aesthetic) decision never to lower his prices (219) and, if necessary, to hold onto works for years, one is left hoping for more detail. Sutton also speaks of Goudstikkers genius in taking an increasing interest in the quality of his catalogues and the elegance of their appearance (20), even personally signing and numbering some of his catalogs, and going to the trouble in his publications, rare in sales catalogues of the era but more common in museum catalogues, of reproducing facsimiles of the signatures and dates on the paintings. One wishes here too that there was more to be said on how and why Goudstikker devised these approaches. If Sutton disappoints in his brief discussion of some of Goudstikkers innovative approaches to catalogsand perhaps nothing more of Goudstikkers reasons are knownhe does shed light on some of Goudstikkers more general modus operandi. Sutton records a preface to a 1923 catalog to an exhibit

Goudstikkers international offerings, Sutton notes, citing Charlotte Wiethoff (1981), reected a new international taste that had been championed a generation earlier by the inuential director of the Berlin museums, Wilhelm von Bode, who had acquired Italian and German medieval and Renaissance sculpture, Dutch paintings of the Golden Age, as well as many fourteenth- to sixteenth-century Netherlandish, Flemish, German, and Italian paintings. To admit that Goudstikker acted within a larger context and set of traditions does not minimize his artistic and commercial legacy, nor does it reduce the enormity of the Nazis crimes committed against him, his family, and the rest of the Dutch Jewish community. In fact, exaggerating his impact and perpetuating the stylized myth of the boy genius who surfaced ex nihilo might hurt the cause. As every young aspiring lawyer learns in mock trial in grade school, if a witness can be impeached for bbing in one regard, it raises questions about where else he or she might be being sloppy, or worse. If the real Goudstikker were made to stand up in the scholarship, perhaps we might be able to see some scholars tackle the sobering questions of the high prices for restituted works and the gaping holes being left in museum collections. Menachem Wecker Independent Scholar