[MSN] Art sales: Nazi loot provides rich pickings. Colin Gleadell reports on the Goudstikker collection.

[Museum Security Network Mailing list]

Art sales: Nazi loot provides rich pickings
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 03/04/2007



Colin Gleadell reports on the Goudstikker collection

In pictures: the Goudstikker collection

Market news

Examples from the largest known collection of Old Master paintings stolen by
the Nazis are to go on view at Christie's in New York next week, before
being sold on April 19. But a large part of the proceeds will go to paying
mounting bills accumulated by lawyers and researchers on the project.

   
Jacopo del Casentino's piece, valued at £400,000 to £600,000:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/04/03/basales103.x
ml

The Goudstikker collection, as it is known, was effectively stock belonging
to the Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, who fled Amsterdam for America
in May 1940 in the face of the German invasion. One of Europe's pre-eminent
dealers in Old Master paintings, he left behind some 1,400 works, half of
which were snapped up by Hermann Goering for his collection. 

Goudstikker, however, never made it to America. Having boarded the last boat
out of Holland with his wife and baby son, he fell down a deck hatch and
died the night after leaving port.

Goudstikker was buried in Liverpool, but from his pocket was retrieved a
little black notebook that listed his stock of paintings in detail. 

That notebook, together with the lavishly illustrated catalogues he
produced, were to prove the foundation of what art detective Clemens
Toussaint describes as "the most comprehensive research project ever to
track down a single-owner art collection stolen by the Nazis". For the past
five years, a team of art historians has been working full-time for
Toussaint, tracking the missing paintings.

The largest haul so far has been more than 200 paintings from Dutch museums,
some of which will be in the New York sale. 

After the war, Goudstikker's widow discovered that many of his paintings had
been handed over to Dutch state museums, but her attempts to recover them
were rebuffed. It was only in 1997, after both she and her son had died,
that her daughter-in-law, Marei von Saher, resurrected the claim after a
tip-off from a Dutch journalist. For the next eight years, she and her
lawyers battled in the Dutch courts until February last year, when the Dutch
government finally relented, agreeing to return 206 paintings. Estimates of
more than £50 million were placed on the collection, but much of that will
be needed to pay for the restitution costs.

Toussaint estimates the cost of research in this case at "several hundred
thousand dollars a year". Then there are the lawyers' fees. Last month, one
of von Saher's former lawyers was awarded £5 million by a Dutch court after
a dispute over fees charged. 


The evidence at the hearing suggested von Saher would also have to pay 20
per cent of the value of the collection to another Dutch lawyer, 10 per cent
to her US lawyers, and another 10 per cent for art-historical research.
Clearly a major sale was necessary to pay the bills.

Until now, sales of restituted works from the Goudstikker collection have
been limited. In 2005, a drawing by Degas that had been returned by the
Israel Museum sold at Sotheby's for £200,000. In January last year, a
rediscovered terracotta relief by Donatello was sold for £2.2 million -
again at Sotheby's. And, following the restitution from the Dutch
government, four paintings were sold to Dutch museums for £2 million.

The sale in New York comprises just 45 lots estimated to make up to £13
million. Reflecting Goudstikker's taste for 17th-century Dutch painting is a
rich array of landscapes (a river view by Salomon van Ruysdael is estimated
at £1.5 million to £2.5 million) and portraits (a portrait by Frans Hals's
contemporary Johannes Verspronck could make £500,000). Goudstikker also
sought to develop a more international style dealing in early Renaissance
Italian paintings. An example in the sale is a 4ft-high, Giotto-esque
tempera-and-gold panel painting of St Lucy by the Florentine painter Jacopo
del Casentino (£400,000 to £600,000).

A further 95 works will be sold later this year in London and Amsterdam, but
what will happen to the other 66 restituted paintings is yet to be decided.
And then there are 1,000 paintings still missing, including, it is thought,
works by Rembrandt, Velázquez, Rubens and Titian. 

One of the most valuable to be identified is Lucas Cranach's diptych of Adam
and Eve in the Norton Simon Museum in California, estimated to be worth some
£50 million. The Christie's sale therefore promises to be the first of many
Goudstikker sales as the costs rise and the bills have to be paid.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/