Email this page  Print this page  Comments

Spoils of War

Because of its ties to the Nazi regime, an unremarkable painting that hung for years in a Rhode Island apartment is now at the center of a legal mess. Should it be returned to the estate of the Jewish-owned gallery forced by the Third Reich to liquidate its assets? Or does it belong to the Providence woman who claims — bill of sale in hand — that it is rightfully hers?

Photography by Dana Smith

If it were sculpted shock by Damien Hirst, one might understand how a piece of art could ignite a legal maelstrom. But a painting that has come to symbolize an era of Nazi genocide depicts a serene scene. “Girl from the Sabine Mountains” portrays a maiden in traditional German peasant garb with a band of embroidery and headdress, resting with her eyes closed. There is a hint of seascape in the background as the woman reclines with her arms, cloaked in billowing sleeves, clasped behind her head. The image is said to combine reverie and abandonment.

The rather unremarkable oil-on-canvas — now ironically the subject of a remarkable amount of attention — is by little-known artist Franz Xaver Winterhalter and is estimated to be from the 1830s. Until several years ago, it hung in the dining room alcove of Maria-Luise Bissonnette, an eighty-five-year-old Providence resident. A spry redhead with sea-blue eyes, Bissonnette possesses the genteel demeanor of a noble heritage. Visitors are greeted by old world manners as she ushers them into the two-bedroom apartment shared with her second husband, Conrad Bissonnette, a Woonsocket native and former CIA employee she met at Arthur Murray dance school. The apartment has a Capitol view but is modest in size; only its decor of antique furniture and fine china hint at Bissonnette’s lineage.

Bissonnette was raised in a five-bedroom villa in Germany with two maids and a chauffeur. Her mother, Lilli, was a brunette beauty and countess by birth. Lilli’s grandparents hosted lavish family reunions where sixty to eighty relatives gathered at their twenty-five-room castle on a Baltic island.

Because Lilli married a baron, their daughter, Maria-Luise, was a baroness. After divorcing the baron, Lilli wed Karl Wilharm, a country doctor more than twenty years her elder. Maria-Luise was six years old when she and her mother moved to Wilharm’s estate in a village filled with orchards, north of Frankfurt. They were the only nobility; the majority of residents were farmers and government workers.

Ornate paintings decorated the home like family portraits. “Girl from the Sabine Mountains” hung opposite an Italian Renaissance oak desk in the living room. Having endured World War I, Wilharm considered art to be a safe investment. Lilli later bequeathed the Winterhalter to her daughter; in 2004 Bissonnette decided to sell the painting to pay for breast cancer treatment.

Shortly after she offered the painting to an auction house in Cranston, money and morality would intersect. Another party said the painting was stolen art and declared itself the rightful owner.

Before Wilharm bought it, the Winterhalter was offered by the renowned Galerie Julius Stern in Düsseldorf, then operated by Julius’s son, Max. As a Jew, Max Stern was victim to the Third Reich’s rise to power and the passage of the Nuremberg Laws. A decree restricted Jews from operating a business, and in 1935, Stern was given one month to sell or liquidate his gallery.

Many art dealers were forced to sell their inventory below market value; some used the proceeds for their escape. Other Jewish-owned collections were “Aryanized” (essentially stolen) by the Nazis in their quest to amass the world’s biggest and best art collection. After the war, much of the art was removed from Germany by Allied soldiers (who mistakenly believed it to be German state property) or otherwise sold abroad. The inventory is now spread out in museums and private collections worldwide.

“The Nazi system of confiscation and theft was purposely convoluted and drawn out,” says Lynn Nicholas, author of The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War. “The idea was to achieve their objective of eliminating Jews and other aliens from German society while exploiting their assets and making the process appear legal.”

The Reich Chamber of Culture was created to encourage all forms of artistic creation from the Nazi point of view. Artists were removed from their posts as teachers and members of public institutions and had to tender their “voluntary” resignation. Many of them left Germany; those who did not were condemned to limbo and some were not allowed to work. If an artist was Jewish his work could not be exhibited. “Degenerate” painters were forbidden to buy art supplies; the scent of turpentine or a container of wet brushes was grounds for arrest.

For two years, Stern appealed the Reich’s order to close his gallery. After exhausting every legal avenue, he was forced to liquidate in November 1937; 227 paintings were offered at the Lempertz Auction House in Cologne. It was there that Dr. Wilharm (or a buyer on his behalf) purchased the Winterhalter for 4,140 Reichsmarks (about $1,665 at the time). Fearing for his life, Stern fled Germany the next month. He arrived in Paris the day before Christmas Eve, the ashes of his life crammed into one suitcase.

“We had this discussion early on about whether to focus on Stern’s loss of the painting or the acquisition by Wilharm,” says Dr. Willi Korte, chief investigator on the Max Stern Art Restitution Project and an expert on war crimes and Nazi-looted art. “We thought it best to look at the loss through the relationship between the victim and the regime, not the subsequent relationship of the victim and the buyer. We built that argument in hopes of applying a legal decision to the other 227 Stern paintings that were auctioned.”

Korte’s research indicated that American occupation forces arrested Wilharm after the war for his Nazi affiliations and occupied his home. Wilharm was sent to an internment camp [detention center] for fifteen months. (It was then that a young Bissonnette met her first husband, an American counterintelligence officer who lived at her family’s house while she and her mother stayed nearby in an unused factory.) 

In the Berlin Document Records section of the National Archives, Korte found accounts that portrayed Wilharm as a high ranking member of the Storm Troopers who joined the Nazi party in 1932, a year before it came to power. The main accusations were his involvement in Storm Trooper brutalities that occurred when members rounded up Jews and opponents of the Nazi regime and took them to an unused factory owned by Wilharm. They were severely beaten there, resulting in the subsequent death of some victims. Korte says that Wilharm was never accused of participating in the beatings, but the charges referred to his knowledge, encouragement and consent to the beatings.

“My stepfather did not belong to the Storm Troopers, but he treated them as patients,” says Bissonnette. “He didn’t know they were beating people and he was very upset when he found out. Everyone had to join the Nazi party or they wouldn’t be able to work; there were so many little Hitlers.”

Stern never received any proceeds from the Lempertz auction because the government froze his assets after he left Germany. He was later sent to an internment camp for nearly two years as an “enemy alien” because he was still a German citizen. He eventually settled in Canada and built a new life: Stern married and became a successful and philanthropic gallery owner.

He also attempted to recover the inventory orphaned during the forced auction — a Herculean task considering that Lempertz Auction House had lost its business records during an air raid. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he placed advertisements in art magazines and visited Europe to hunt for the paintings. In 1958, Stern initiated judicial proceedings for the lost art; several years later, a German court awarded his claim for damages on the premise that the paintings were auctioned at fire-sale prices and would have fetched much more if they had been liquidated over time in the gallery and under different circumstances. However, Stern’s compensation was paltry (he may have received less than $40 for the Winterhalter) and was remuneration for damages, not for the loss of the paintings.

When Stern died in 1987, his estate was bequeathed to Montreal’s McGill and Concordia universities and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Executors contacted the London-based Art Loss Register, which maintains the world’s largest private database of stolen, looted and missing works of art, to locate the paintings. Of the approximately 400 missing works of art, executors uncovered the last known whereabouts of at least forty paintings. However, in some cases the art was traced to an auction house and the trail went cold since the houses are not obligated to reveal who purchased the art. Five paintings have been returned to the estate, which is in discussions for the return of twenty-five other paintings.

It’s been estimated that Stern’s collection could be worth tens of millions of dollars (the Max Stern Art Restitution Project is a nonprofit endeavor). Yet Korte hesitates to speculate. “Half of his business was Dutch old master paintings,” he says. “These go for millions and millions, but attribution and condition issues play an enormous role in determining a painting’s value.”

It was the Art Loss Register that found the Winterhalter. In January 2005, an art dealer asked the Register to search the “Girl from the Sabine Mountains” against its database. It identified the work via liveauctioneers.com, which provided a link to Estates Unlimited, the Cranston auction house planning to offer it. “On behalf of the Max Stern Estate,” says Louisa Loringhoven of the Art Loss Register’s Historic Claims Department, “we informed the auction house of the match and asked them to withdraw the painting from the sale.” 

Estates Unlimited obliged and Bissonnette received a letter from Sherri North Cohen, a lawyer with the Holocaust Claims Processing Office (HCPO) in New York, asking that the Winterhalter “respectfully be returned to the Stern estate as it must be considered stolen art given the historical context. The art market does not look favorably at items with a potentially tainted past,” Cohen wrote. “I am sure that you will also agree that there are moral considerations in this case.”

But there was no moral conundrum for Bissonnette. “The estate is making up stories,” she says. “They don’t even have proof that the painting belonged to Stern. I have a bill of sale! Why should I give the painting back when there is no proof that it was a forced sale? Stern had two-and-a-half years to liquidate. He did not have to take the painting to auction, and Lempertz never advertised it as a forced sale.” 

Bissonnette says she felt harassed, with no choice but to sell the Winterhalter to the Stern estate. For representation, she hired John Weltman, a Jewish art litigator in Boston whose prior lost art cases were on behalf of Jewish families. Her initial asking price of $150,000 was dropped during settlement talks. (The painting had been appraised at $75,000 to $94,000.) The estate offered $25,000. Discussions ensued for more than a year with a caveat that “Girl from the Sabine Mountains” remain at Estates Unlimited until the ownership issue was resolved.

But Bissonnette grew impatient. “Weltman said he didn’t think we’d get a fair trial in the States, so I sent the painting to Germany to apply for a clear title,” she says. “I did that without telling anyone, but it’s my painting and I was tired of the fighting.”

It turns out that this overt act of defiance was criminal. According to the National Stolen Property Act, transferring stolen goods with a value in excess of $5,000 across international lines is a federal offense. Bissonnette declared the painting’s value as $50, which also violated German customs laws. Thomas Kline, attorney for the Stern estate, says he does not think that American and German authorities will pursue charges. Weltman was unaware of Bissonnette’s decision until the painting had been sent; he later withdrew from the case because of differences of opinion with his client.

“In twenty years of doing this, I have never seen somebody with the chutzpah or audacity, after over a year of good-faith negotiations, to respond by taking the painting physically out of the country,” Korte said when he learned of the voyage. “I was speechless and, at the same time, kind of impressed that this little old lady had the nerve to say, ‘To hell with you guys, to hell with the state of New York, to hell with any legal arguments. I know what’s right for myself, so I’m going to send the thing to Germany where it came from.’ ”

When executors learned that Bissonnette had initiated a lawsuit in Germany, they countered by petitioning the Rhode Island court system in May 2005. They never suspected the ensuing case would make history.

One and a half years later, shortly before Christmas 2007, U.S. District Judge Mary Lisi instructed Bissonnette to turn the painting over to the Stern estate. She wrote: “Over seventy years ago, the Nazi party took art from Jewish citizens as part of a systematic plan to rob Jewish citizens of their property, their identity and, ultimately, their lives.” Lisi determined that Wilharm never rightly held ownership of the work since “it is clear that Dr. Stern’s relinquishment of his property was anything but voluntary.”

Her ruling expands the definition of works that should be considered looted art in restitution claims. It was the first time in U.S. history that a forced sale was considered a theft. (Some European courts have ruled similarly to Judge Lisi, however.) As for American precedent, she emphasized certain distinctions in this case: Stern did not receive compensation from the forced sale and he attempted to recover the art.

Two years ago, during an infamous U.S. trial on Nazi looted art, the verdict veered in the opposite direction. The Supreme Court upheld an earlier ruling that actress Elizabeth Taylor could keep a Van Gogh painting that may have been illegally seized by Nazis after judges determined that the family who once owned it had waited too long to ask for it back.

Taylor’s father purchased the 1889 painting “View of the Asylum and Chapel at Saint-Remy” at a Sotheby’s auction in London in 1963. He paid $257,600 for art that may now be worth tens of millions of dollars. Descendants of a Jewish woman who fled Germany in 1939 sued Taylor in 2004, claiming that Nazis forced the sale of the painting under duress and it should be returned to them under the 1998 U.S. Holocaust Victims Redress Act. Taylor responded that she was the rightful owner and the painting had passed through two Jewish art dealers without any sign of Nazi coercion before she bought it.

The court determined that Taylor’s acquisition of the painting was discoverable at least by 1990, when it was offered in an international auction, and most probably as early as 1963, when she acquired the painting in a highly publicized international auction. Any claim to the painting, Judge Sidney Thomas wrote, “expired in or before 1993, three years after the last public announcement of Taylor’s ownership.” Lawyer Bonnie Czegledi, who specializes in cultural heritage law, says the most satisfactory outcome in such cases is when disputed works end up going to a museum or charity: “That way, something very good can come of something very tragic.”

During the politically active period of the late eighties and early nineties, an increasing number of Holocaust survivors and their heirs demanded the return of confiscated artworks. In 1996, the Senate Banking Committee investigated the supposedly large quantities of dormant Jewish bank accounts in Swiss banks. The organization believed there were billions of dollars in accounts and that the Swiss banks were making it difficult, if not impossible, for Holocaust survivors and heirs of Nazi persecution victims to retrieve the money. The committee then launched a worldwide research effort into Holocaust-era assets and located $50 million dollars’ worth of gold that has since been donated to a Nazi Persecutee Relief Fund.

In 1998, Congress adopted the Holocaust Victims Redress Act, which authorized $20 million for restitution payments; another act declassified Nazi war crime records. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening up of Eastern Europe, it has become much easier to trace missing pieces that landed in those museums after the war.

Restitution has been described as the right to reclaim objects that are tangible symbols of cultural identity. As Jewish heirs have laid claim to many valuable pieces of art hanging in German museums, some curators argue that such art should remain visible to the public gaze. They also say that returning works on moral grounds is discredited when restituted paintings are then sold for millions of dollars.

Pablo Picasso said that art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth. In this case, judges sifted through both “to right a wrong.” Last year, Bissonnette appealed Judge Lisi’s ruling. She argued that the estate waited too long to bring its lawsuit and she should have been granted more time for discovery [the pre-trial phase in which each party can request evidence from other parties]. Last November, the court upheld Judge Lisi’s verdict that “Girl from the Sabine Mountains” belongs to the Stern estate.

Executors then had the painting shipped to Canada from a warehouse in Germany. “It took quite a bit of time and effort to convince the German customs and cultural authorities that we were entitled to export a valuable piece of German culture since Mrs. Bissonnette was the one who sent it over,” says Korte. He and the executors were also concerned that they might have to pay the thousands owed for Bissonnette’s customs violation. However, once authorities realized this was part of a restitution claim, they decided not to pursue a monetary penalty.

The painting is in Canada having conservation work done: It remains on the original canvas, but there is minor damage around the frame where paint is beginning to lift off. The estate plans to loan it to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts once conservation is complete.

“A verdict on a painting stolen during the Nazi period that identifies a forced sale as being equivalent to a theft is incredibly important,” says Dr. Clarence Epstein, director of the Max Stern Art Restitution Project at Concordia University. The judicial precedent will bolster their arguments when they attempt to claim the hundreds of other works owned by Stern, he adds. “Hopefully it will act as a catalyst for other individuals to pursue their own claims. We hope this will compel people to think carefully about where the lessons of history are and that we cannot forget them now.”

Although the U.S. decision has no legal application in Europe, where most of the paintings are, it confers moral leverage. Korte notes that the art market is international: Sotheby’s and Christie’s, both in New York, are two of the biggest art houses in the world so a U.S. decision has international reverberations. When executors recently located another Stern painting in this country, they wrote the owner that, from a U.S. legal point of view, the art is stolen property.
After the Federal Court of Appeals’ verdict, Bissonnette weighed petitioning the Supreme Court to take her case. However, the allotted time to file expired this spring (ninety days after the Federal Court decision). In February, she filed a grievance with the Boston court system alleging that Judge Lisi’s verdict was unfair.

“I would like to see the case reopened,” she says. “If the estate can prove it was Stern’s painting and he did not want to sell it, then I would certainly agree to give it to them. But they should pay me what my stepfather paid, plus interest on that money. I never said I wouldn’t give them the painting, but to not compensate me fairly is dirty and my family has been slandered. I hope I live long enough to see justice, but I don’t think that will happen in the American courts.”

The Court of Appeals, however, believes justice has been served. In his judgment, Senior Circuit Judge Circuit Judge Bruce Selya wrote: “A de facto confiscation of a work of art that arose out of a notorious exercise of man’s inhumanity to man now ends with the righting of that wrong through the mundane application of common law principles. The mills of justice grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine.”