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A Canadian Art Dealer’s Legacy Is Helping to Locate Works Looted by the Nazis

Oct. 22 2014

Max Stern, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, established himself as a successful art dealer in Montreal and went on to revolutionize the Canadian art world. He never spoke of his experiences as a refugee, or mentioned that he and his father had been prominent art dealers in prewar Düsseldorf. Nor did he make public the fact that the Nazis looted his father’s collection. Now, twenty years after his death, researchers are trying to track down 200 paintings the Nazis forced him to sell in 1937, and to return other looted works to their rightful owners as well. A typical story:

The project’s first big break came in January 2005, when the Art Loss Register (ALR) contacted [Clarence] Epstein [the overseer of Stern’s cultural property] about a 19th-century work by Franz Xaver Winterhalter called Girl from the Sabine Mountains. Off the art market for 68 years, the painting of a peasant woman resting languidly by a tree had been consigned to Estates Unlimited, a small Rhode Island auction house, by Maria-Louise Bissonnette, an octogenarian German baroness who lived in Providence. On behalf of the Stern estate, the ALR’s historic-claims department requested the auction house withdraw the painting from the sale, and the Holocaust Claims Processing Office sent Bissonnette a letter asking her to return it to the Stern estate.

The baroness refused, claiming she had inherited the work from her mother, whose second husband, Karl Wilharm, purchased it at the 1937 Lempertz sale. Disputing—or ignoring—the fact that her stepfather was a high-ranking member of Hitler’s storm troopers, she offered his bill of sale as evidence that the work was hers. “Why should I give the painting back,” she asked, “when there is no proof that it was a forced sale?”

Read more at Walrus

More about: Art, Canada, German Jewry, Holocaust restitution

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic