NEWS STORY: LOOTED TREASURES: Auction of looted art leads Austria to face a sordid past

c. 1996 Religion News Service (UNDATED) There are no seminal works by Picasso or Titian or Manet in the 874 lots to be auctioned next week in a Vienna museum. The paintings of bucolic landscapes and society portraits for sale depict the normal, bourgeois world in which many of the former owners once dwelled. And […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) There are no seminal works by Picasso or Titian or Manet in the 874 lots to be auctioned next week in a Vienna museum. The paintings of bucolic landscapes and society portraits for sale depict the normal, bourgeois world in which many of the former owners once dwelled.

And yet this collection of some 1,000 paintings and other artwork has assumed enormous value because it survives its patrons, all of whom were Jews vanquished by the Nazis.


After Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Hitler soon began to purge the alpine nation of most of its 200,000 Jewish inhabitants. The Nazis, at his instructions, looted Jewish homes, stealing paintings, tapestries, jewelry, and anything else of value. Hitler, who was born in Austria, had intended to build a museum to house the most valuable of the stolen works in Linz, where he had attended school.

The Oct. 29-30 auction of the unclaimed art at the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts will mark the final official chapter of the sad saga. About 500 individuals, Jewish groups and charitable organizations are expected to bid on the objects valued at between $3.5 million to $6 million, according to Christie’s auction house in London, which is conducting the sale without fee.

Proceeds from the auction will benefit Austrian Holocaust survivors, an accord worked out by Austrian Jewish leaders and the government.”In presenting this in such a public way, it shows what life was really like and not just the pictures of horror of concentration camps,”said Robert Liska, vice president of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Austria, which won legal rights to the art in 1995.”It is almost a frozen moment intact of Jewish life.” But the sale is also a reminder of the horrors that swept away a generation of Jews, an event that Austria and other European countries are being forced to confront anew.

Switzerland has been jolted by disclosures that it bought gold from the Nazis that was looted from Jews. More recently, Swiss historian Peter Hug made public documents from the national archives about secret pacts the Swiss made with East European countries after the war. In those pacts, dormant bank accounts belonging to Jews were used to compensate Swiss businesses whose assets had been seized in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania and the former Yugoslavia.

The revelations come amid a resurgence of far-right groups in Austria, France and Italy, among other countries. Earlier this month, Austria’s anti-immigrant Freedom Party captured 27 percent of the vote in European Parliament elections. Its leader, Joerg Haider, has expressed esteem for veterans of the Nazi secret police.”We are very concerned about the election, both as the future of democracy in Austria and as a sign of where Europe is going,”said Kenneth Jacobson, assistant national director of the Anti-Defamation League in New York.

The Swiss bank affair and the Vienna auction, he said, illustrate that”while we must go forward and want to react to how people conduct their lives now, part of the future is taking care of the past.” Objects for sale at the upcoming auction have been on public display at the Vienna museum since Oct. 22. Highlights of the collection include paintings by 19th-century Austrian Rudolf von Alt. His pencil and watercolor of”Lois Gerls’s House”in Salzburg is expected to fetch up to $50,000.

Other prized pieces include drawings by Italian Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, portraits by Carl Christian Vogel von Vogelstein, landscapes by Wilhelm von Kobell and Old Master paintings by Abraham Brueghel.


An oil painting of the”Madonna and Child with Saints”by 15th-century artist Pietro di Francesco degli Orioli, is expected to bring up to $110,000. The 19th-century artist Friedrich von Amerling’s”The Oriental,”an oil on canvas, is slated to net up to $74,000. And a late 19th-century oil on canvas entitled”In the Schtetl”is expected to fetch about $60,000.

The sale also features coins and medals, Islamic carpets, religious artifacts, neo-classical and Victorian furniture, and European tapestries.

But most of the items are valued at less than several thousand dollars, and many are likely to bring considerably less.

For symbolic reasons, some paintings may yield more than their artistic value, said Mark Poltimore, Christie’s specialist on 19th-century art.

One example may be an oil on canvas by Joseph Wenglein. It is an otherwise unremarkable 1869 painting of a boy with a fishing rod standing on the bank of a stream. Its title,”A Farmland near Dachau,”prefigures the nightmare to come, when that verdant farmland became the site of a concentration camp where tens of thousands of Jews perished.”There are a lot of Americans and people of Jewish decent, Israelis and charitable groups, that want to bid to retain a piece of this”history, Poltimore said.”We’ve also got a lot of dealers and private people who see these works as beautiful art.” The Mauerbach Benefit Sale, named for the 14th-century Mauerbach monastery where the objects were stored for the past 10 years, arrived on a circuitous route that began after 1952, when about 10,000 pieces were returned to owners and heirs.

While the Allied forces insisted that the remaining objects be traced to their owners, the Austrian government’s response was lethargic. In 1965, a Holocaust survivor convinced Austria to pass a law to honor claims until 1972 on about 8,500 additional pieces of art. But the redistribution campaign was modest.


The international art world became energized over the issue in 1984, when the American journal Artnews condemned the slow pace of the redistribution process. The Austrian government responded with a well-publicized effort that led to the return of thousands of items.

The remaining unclaimed objects were stored in Mauerbach, and in 1995 the Austrian Parliament passed a law transferring legal ownership to the Austrian Jewish Federation.

Many Jewish leaders who lauded the final decision said the slow Austrian response was indicative of its attitudes toward the Holocaust.

Liska said many Austrians have falsely believed that the 1938 Anschluss, or German annexation, absolved them of any wrongdoing during the war. But Austrians were among the Third Reich’s most enthusiastic supporters.”Historical doctrine has it that Austria was a victim of Hitler, and of course that is not truthful,”Liska said.

MJP END HEILBRONNER

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