The Max Stern Art Restitution Project: How Canadian Institutions Are Blazing the Trail in Nazi-Looted Art Recovery

May 23, 2014

The Max Stern Art Restitution Project: How Canadian Institutions Are Blazing the Trail In Nazi-Looted Art Recovery

Chairman: Andrea Wood, President-Elect, The Empire Club of Canada

Head Table Guests

M.J. Perry, Vice-President and Owner, Mr. Discount Ltd., and Director, The Empire Club of Canada;

Miranda Li, Global Business Management Program, Centennial College;

Tom McKaig, Adjunct Professor, University of Guelph, Author for Mc- Graw-Hill Publishers, and Director, The Empire Club of Canada; and

Dena Libman, Director, Operations and Compliance, The Azrieli Foundation; Rupert Duchesne, Group Chief Executive, Aimia.

Introduction by Andrea Wood

Ladies and gentlemen, I am honoured to be able to introduce two extraordinary speakers today, starting with Dr. Clarence Epstein.

In his role as Senior Director of Urban and Cultural Affairs at Concordia University, Clarence is very involved in the day-to-day operations of the university. He’s responsible for Museum Relations, Cultural Property, Built Heritage and Urban Planning. And he has overseen one of the largest public art programs of any Canadian university. He’s also responsible for managing the development of Quartier Concordia, an urban planning project that is transforming the western downtown core of Montreal into a unique university precinct. So yes, he has a big day job.

I prefer to think of Clarence, though, as a latter-day monuments man, a kind of a better-looking George Clooney or an even brainier Matt Damon. This is because one of the hats that Clarence wears most proudly is that of Director of the Max Stern Restitution Project. Clarence will tell you more about the Restitution Project during his remarks, and I don’t want to steal his thunder. Suffice it to say that Clarence and his team of experts scour the world looking for artworks that were lost by Max Stern during the Holocaust Period. When they find them, they work to secure their return to the Max Stern estate. This work involves determination, patience and enormous amounts of emotional intelligence. Clarence has all those things in spades.

I was first introduced to Clarence in Montreal by my friend, Susan McArthur, who had persuaded me to get involved in the documentary that Susan was developing about Clarence and the Restitution Project. When I met him, he was in full swing, coordinating a ceremony celebrating the return of an artwork to the Max Stern estate. To attend the event, he had assembled a remarkable cast of characters: art dealers; a famous international art hunter, who you saw in that trailer; museum curators; university officials and even Homeland Security.

Since that first meeting, Susan and I and our latest collaborators, HLP Productions, have been the storm chasers of the Restitution world, racing to the sites of Restitution events hosted by Clarence in cities as diverse as Montreal, Berlin, The Hague and most recently, Düsseldorf. Having seen him in action, I can tell you that Canada could not have a better ambassador on the world stage. Clarence’s network is vast and varied. He navigates the challenging issues raised by art restitution with tact and discretion.

Clarence will speak for a few moments and then invite Hana Gartner to join him on the stage. We were so delighted that Hana was prepared to join us today. Hana tells me that she got an Honours Degree from Concordia, but an education from the CBC. For over three decades, she travelled the country and the world on behalf of the CBC, delving into the minds of people from every walk of life and telling their stories.

She’s climbed a glacier in Austria, investigating the mysterious disappearance of a Canadian hockey player. She’s trekked through Uganda and Kenya, tracking down a bookkeeper who embezzled close to $1 million from children’s daycare centres, and she brought him home to face justice.

Hana has grilled everyone from prime ministers to contract killers. She’s investigated everything from polygamy to airport security. She’s taken on the corrupt and the inept and has explored and exposed that which makes us human and that which makes us inhumane. She says, in the end, all she ever really did was ask questions, the ones you would ask. We look forward to having her do that today. Clarence, over to you. Please take it away.

Clarence Epstein

Good afternoon everybody. It’s truly an honour to be here today. It’s not often that a dyed-in-the-wool Montrealer gets to sing “O Canada,” except at hockey games against the rival teams. Yesterday, when we attended another lunch in Montreal, held by the Italian Chamber of Commerce in Canada, our university president gave a presentation on the role that Canadian universities can play on the international scene. In effect, that is an important segue to the work that the Max Stern Restitution Project conducts by virtue of its connection to two Canadian universities, McGill and Concordia in Montreal, and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which has a very strong and vibrant arm here in Canada via the Canadian Friends of Hebrew University. The three universities are heirs to the estate of Dr. Max Stern, the story of which I’m going to reveal in brief this afternoon and explain to you a little bit about how the Restitution Project unfolded.

[A series of slides were shown]

The first person, of course, of interest in any project is our man, Dr. Max Stern. You see the young Max Stern here with his father, Julius Stern. Julius was a merchant in a small town called Mönchengladbach in the vicinity of Düsseldorf, where he started in the clothing industry and followed his passion in the arts until eventually investing in an art dealership in Düsseldorf, wherein he moved his family of three children, Max and two daughters, and his wife.

Düsseldorf, in the early 20th century, was a fairly influential centre in Germany and in Europe. A great number of industrialists based in that city were gaining an influence, in part, by making important acquisitions, including that of works of art—both old master paintings and 19thcentury and early 20th-century German paintings. Therein is where the Stern family set up their business. Within that business plan was a vision to educate their children and to eventually have their children, most specifically Max, become the defined heir of the estate, or rather of the gallery.

The unfortunate death of Julius in 1934 precipitated a much quicker responsibility of the young Max in the dealings of the gallery. Now 1934, of course, echoes an important period in German history. With the rise of the National Socialist government came a number of repercussions that at first were somewhat slow and seemingly benign but, of course, became what we know today as the rise of the Third Reich. Therein is where the young Max found himself in 1934–35.

By that year, 1935, he received his first letter from the Gestapo, or from a wing of them called the Chamber of Fine Arts, wherein he was reminded that as a member of the Jewish faith, he was no longer allowed to practise his trade. This was something quite confusing to German Jews in any profession. At the beginning, they were trying to find recourse on how to circumvent this kind of edict. For a number of years, they proposed different solutions on how to manage an art gallery that was owned by Jews. With every subsequent appeal they failed, until 1937 when the young Max Stern received the last notice that he had to wind up the gallery, liquidate the remaining assets and effectively remove himself from the business. It was at that time that the last act in the Galerie Stern took place, which was the forced liquidation of the collection at an auction house in Düsseldorf, called Lempertz, a name that I’m going to repeat a few times this afternoon because they remain in business today in Cologne and they remain a somewhat problematic entity for us and many other claimants of looted art.

The story of Max Stern, of course, is one that leads us to Canada, because after Stern left Germany in late ’37 with just a suitcase in hand, he first landed in London, where he tried, with his sisters, to set up another art gallery business. For the unfortunate reason of being Jewish, he was forced out of any kind of civilian life and into internment camps, first in Britain and then eventually in Canada. Canada, of course, being part of that extended empire for lack of a better word, was accommodating internment camps in New Brunswick and in Quebec, where the young Max Stern was placed.

That internment camp experience was one, I think, that is not to be really underestimated, because there were many Germans who were in these internment camps, both Jewish and non-Jewish, but they faced a similar exile. Many of them chose Canada during the war and after the war to settle in and make their home. It’s part of that exodus from Germany that, in some ways, has enriched Canada in its immigrant experience. Max is one of those immigrants.

He made his way to Montreal with nothing. He eventually introduced himself to a small gallery called the Dominion Gallery, run by the Millman family and eventually rose to become the director of that gallery, not yet the owner. Not yet the owner because he did not have any funds with which to build another business. Those early funds actually came from a source that is quite important and a reflection of how resolved Max Stern was, even right after the war to try and recover his own belongings.

He met a woman whom he eventually married, Iris Westerberg. Together they mounted a publicity campaign to try to recover their works of art lost before the war. You see a picture of them here en route to Europe in pursuit of lost works. That page in his hand is an extract from an art magazine where he had bought an ad to advertise some of his losses. From the mid-1940s, Max Stern was already pursuing restitution. What is even more compelling, and I think an indication once again that as Canadians we don’t always promote our own history and take pride in what we’ve done, he reached out to a young Cultural Affairs Minister in Canada named Lester Pearson.

We have correspondence between Lester Pearson and young Max Stern requesting assistance from the Canadian government to pursue these losses. Lester Pearson wrote letters of introduction for Max Stern to Europe to various ambassadors based in the European countries of the alliance and he wrote to the Canadian military representative in Germany at the time in the hope that the military could assist Max Stern. Our story has yet to be told about the role that Canada played in the post-war efforts to recover looted art, because some of the monies that were acquired by Max Stern to eventually buy the Dominion Gallery came to him and Iris from the paintings recovered with the assistance of the Canadian military.

That is part of a long story that has quite a wide gap in between, because in the years where Max attempted to recover works, which is a fairly limited period, there were all kinds of statutes and decisions taken by the European and American Alliances and the German government insofar as making restitution claims. At a certain point, Max turned his life around and built a gallery like no other in Canada—the Dominion Gallery.

Here you have Max towards the end of his life kind of presenting himself with what were his children, because he had no children. When he passed away in 1987, he left the bulk of his estate to three universities: Concordia, McGill and Hebrew University, which are, in effect, acting like his children in pursuit of their rightful belongings. That’s where the story jumps from the mid-’40s when Max was pursuing claims on his own behalf, to the late ’90s when Concordia University became involved in the management of his estate. His estate was a vast estate. He was a very, very wealthy man when he passed away. He had also left more than 5,000 paintings in the Dominion Gallery inventory, as well as an important private collection that he left to museums across North America and Israel.

In the process of managing that estate, we were taken aback by the amount of work and the amount of information that was available to us in the archives that Max Stern left. What happened, effectively, is in the same way the universities were responsible in liquidating the Dominion Gallery collections for the purposes of winding up that business, we found out that there was another business that had been operating that none of us had known about, which was the Galerie Stern. We uncovered this catalogue, which was a catalogue of the sale at Lempertz in 1937 of the final remnants of the Galerie Stern.

From there, forensically, we built an argument around what were three imperatives that the universities shared. We had a fiduciary obligation as his heirs; we had a moral obligation; and we had an educational obligation. Those three together formed what has become the Max Stern Art Restitution Project at a time which was quite pivotal, because 1998 was the year that the Washington Principles were signed, which was a gathering of 44 countries in Washington that agreed to find fair and just solutions in relation to lost works such as those of art during and before the war.

For three universities to manage this, we had to rely on our strengths. We weren’t going to start following legal procedures that didn’t exist. We weren’t going to start advertising losses like the young Max did, because those were no longer vehicles that were opportune or feasible at the time for three universities. What we did is we leant on what, for us, was our strength, which is research and education. We proposed to the executors of the estate a vision wherein we would create an exhibition. That exhibition— we hoped; we weren’t sure at the time—would travel the world; it’s an exhibition, designed and curated by one of our professors, Catherine MacKenzie, at Concordia University. We created what we believed was a ghost exhibition, an exhibition of works whose last whereabouts were no longer known. It was unclear to us who might be holding them or possessing them as we called it. In effect, we were trying to use this as a platform for information gathering.

This became one of the hallmarks of the project in terms of combining research, education and transparency in objectives that are not very common in the art world. That is not the way the art world functions on a day-to day basis. Through this exhibition, we were breaking new ground. What happened in effect, though, was that we reached out to partners of collections of other major estates that we had worked with. These were the auction houses in Canada and internationally, such as Waddington’s in Toronto and, of course, Christie’s and Sotheby’s, who had representation in Canada but were completely intertwined in the art world network internationally.

Just on the eve when this exhibition was about to open in Montreal, where we had no paintings, only ghost reproductions, we got a call from Sotheby’s—I’ll bring Christie’s in very shortly. They had uncovered in a very timely and opportune moment a painting that belonged to the estate and was in that famous forced Lempertz sale. Sotheby’s returned the painting back to us unconditionally. You see the painting in front, in colour; the first painting that was returned to the estate—a work by a 19th-century Romantic artist named Émile Vernet Lecomte. This became the first painting that we never thought we would get. We didn’t believe that we had any chance, because we weren’t quite sure how deep the well was and how precarious it was going to be to recover things.

Well, the exhibition became the guide for us in the process of developing a restitution project that was based primarily on research and education. The exhibition traveled from Montreal to New York and was exhibited at the Leo Baeck Institute. Just in time for the opening of the ghost exhibition at the Leo Baeck Institute, we got a contact from a foundation based in Spain. We had done some research and had discovered that a small foundation in Mallorca, named the Jakober Foundation, had a collection of childhood portraiture and adolescent portraiture that included this painting by Nicolas Neufchatel, the “Portrait of Jan van Eversdy ck.” This was a Lempertz painting.

When we reached out to the foundation, it turned out that Mr. Jakober was the son of Holocaust survivors. He immediately recognized the issue at hand and unconditionally returned the painting in time for the opening of the exhibition in New York. You can imagine what is starting to happen now for us. We are starting to understand the power of educating and the power of promoting the power of finding people who share in doing the right thing.

The exhibition travelled. It went to London. It became part of an exhibition series for the Ben Uri Gallery, which is the London Jewish Museum of Art. As good timing would have it, our good friends at Christie’s gave us a call and advised us that this work was a work that they had caught and that had a problematic ownership history connected with the Galerie Stern. Christie’s, similar to what Sotheby’s had done before in Montreal, returned this work in time for the first European leg of the exhibition and, most importantly, was a breakthrough for us, because most of these paintings are circulating on the continent or in the markets in London and New York.

This work by Jan de Vos was unveiled in time for the opening of the exhibition in London. We’re starting to get used to this formula of opening an exhibition in a city and eventually getting a painting back. But I don’t think there were going to be enough cities interested in our timetable as there were paintings that needed to be recovered, more than 400 as you have heard earlier. What happened was that we started a relationship with the auction houses and with the art trade that was symbiotic, because the auction houses and the rest of the art trade are quite dependent on both their reputational exposure, as well as the conflict of having a painting that does not have a clear, rightful heir in modern legal circumstances. Working with them has been a very important step in sharing information, as well as learning about the whereabouts of paintings that we would otherwise not know about, because of the complications of sharing information in the art world.

What happened was while the exhibition was touring in London, it eventually made its way to Israel. We organized a very large conference in Israel with the assistance of the Hebrew University and the Israel Museum, both of which were heirs of the estate as well, and started promoting a number of the larger issues related to restitution, not only in connection with the Stern Project, but in connection with other families and other individuals who were being forced in the same way to deal with a very limited set of information bits and a very large and precarious art world.

What happened was we took that conference model and we understood that there was a conference going on in Berlin, not one that we could control, because it was being supported by the German government. With the assistance of Christie’s, once again, we were able to secure the recovery of another painting. This is a work by the Circle of Jan Wellens de Cock, “Flight into Egypt,” that we unveiled on the eve of an important conference in Germany that was addressing the role that German museums and German art institutions had in dealing with this issue. We took a position, by that time having already achieved a certain amount of success in the exhibition circuit of the work that was being done by Concordia. The exhibition was called “Auktion 392, Reclaiming the Galerie Stern, Düsseldorf.” That term “reclaiming” was a very loaded one, especially in Germany where the Germans were in somewhat of a state of denial about this being still an issue, still a hangover from the war.

The next morning, the German Minister of Culture recognized the press conference that we had the day before and made reference to the work that we were doing. For us, this was an important coup, because Europe was not the only focus. It was truly what we were going to be doing in German-speaking countries, since so many of these paintings that had circulated in the Düsseldorf scene, were paintings that were circulating in areas like Holland, in areas like Germany, in areas like Austria.

With that recovery, we had an important statement to make in Germany, but we didn’t yet have relations with the Germans. This was something that takes many years. We have to thank the Canadian government for facilitating introductions to the universities of diplomatic officials overseas.

What happened concurrently with this is that we discovered another painting that was going up for sale in Rhode Island in a very small, unknown auction house. This painting was extremely problematic. A problematic one because it had a direct link with the Galerie Stern in those most difficult years, but that the possessor of the work who had consigned it to the auction, also decided to post all the paperwork in connection with the painting and showed the proof of sale from the Lempertz auction that her step-father had bought it in. We immediately raised red flags because this was in the United States. This is a jurisdiction that we hoped would understand the problems and the complexities. We went to appeal to this possessor/owner, who turned out to be a German baroness, who had left Germany just after the war to make a new life in the United States. At first, we thought she was somewhat sympathetic to our cause, until she decided, without any legal advice, to ship this painting back to Germany in the hope of removing it from U.S. jurisdiction and not making any declaration.

At that point, we had to take legal action. Through that legal action, a number of important steps and the turning point in the project took place. What you have to understand was that this was the poster child of the Lempertz sale. This was the piece that was drawing the attention of all those buyers who were going to come and pick up discounts at a Jewish sale in Germany just on the eve of the war. The role that the estate took in supporting with the universities, a legal action against the Baroness in the United States was pivotal. What happened is that we went to the First Circuit of the Federal Court of the United States. After several years’ arguments, we won our case. Not only did we win our case, the baroness appealed and she lost the appeal. The decision by the United States government, in effect, to render this painting back to the heirs of the estate, the three universities, was critical. Our arguments were what we believed to be solid.

This is an image of the painting in the baron’s castle during that period right after the Lempertz sale. He effectively took this work and gave it a pride of place. When the story broke internationally with regard to the court actions and the winnings, this was a turning point for us because not only were we on the international stage by virtue of the decision, but we were also coming into the alliance of the United States government. By virtue of this decision, all works, that were from that forced sale, were deemed to be stolen by the United States government. Therefore, the Department of Homeland Security calls us now when they catch paintings. We don’t call them anymore, because they are acting on a decision and not acting on a request.

This is an ironic picture, and I show it to you now very quickly. When the story broke and started appearing in all the international art magazines, look who bought the ad next to the story. It was uncanny. Lempertz does not recognize and still does not recognize the bona fide rights that the universities have in pursuing these claims. It is a problem that we still face today. We’re not sure how Lempertz is going to move forward in this universally agreed, problematic issue.

Just after the Winterhalter was recovered, the United States government started sending out their Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers under cover to the art markets, to the art fairs. They do that regularly when there are looted works that are in circulation. In this case, this piece that was at Maastricht at the time, was seized by the Department of Homeland Security by two undercover officers and returned to the estate. The story made the headlines again in the United States. All the major media outlets in the United States covered it, including the New York Times. With that New York Times article, other dealers started recognizing this connection between Max Stern and the Galerie Stern.

Within two weeks of recovering the work of “the Bagpiper,” we recovered this work by Ludovico Carracci, an important Italian old master painter, that was in the collection of the great old master dealers, Richard Feigen, who called me at my office and basically asked me for my address so that he could send this painting back, unconditionally. This was the start of an important movement for us in terms of having North American recognition of what we all believed was the right thing to do. But getting the Europeans to believe in it is another story and something that for us is an ongoing challenge.

The first place we were successful in doing it was in Holland where this painting, a work by Jan Brueghel the Elder, was on display at the Noordbrabants Museum, one of the state museums, and was on the list of paintings that the government of Holland had published that were considered problematic. We argued our case in front of the Restitutions Committee in the Netherlands and we won the return of this work, which is an important coup in having a European government like we had a North American government recognize the rightful claims of the estate. That created a little bit of momentum, a momentum that was supported by the large auction houses that remain close to us and work with us regularly in support of the issue of restitution.

A work by Juriaen Pool, a 17th century Dutch painter, was uncovered by Sotheby’s. As it turns out, this work was with a German casino. It was, as you can imagine with a title like “The Masters of the Goldsmith Guild,” very appropriate for a casino in Germany to display as a sign of wealth and taste. This painting was eventually recovered to us and was the first time that a German entity had acknowledged the estate’s right-to-claim.

Soon after that, the fields started opening in Germany. We reached out to the Stuttgart Museum wherein we found this painting. We presented an argument that was very similar to the argument of the Brueghel painting. However, the Stuttgart Museum found that our research was not yet conclusive or definitive. Within two years of this painstaking work, which is done by an incredible group of researchers based in Washington, Ottawa, New York and London that work as part of the Restitution team, we uncovered a paper trail wherein this work was proven to be used as extortion by the storage company that was holding this painting for Stern during the war as payment in lieu of rent. That payment in lieu of rent, Max had to secure in order to purchase an exit visa for his mother from Germany just before World War II. By proving that, the Stuttgart Museum returned the work and agreed that this was clearly a non-issue.

The success of that brought about connections with the Canadian government. In the same year that that piece was recovered, Canada was the Chair of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and wanted to take it upon themselves to make a mark internationally that year in Holocaust remembrance activities. At a ceremony at the Canadian Embassy in Berlin, Minister Kenney came personally to unveil the work and announce Canada’s commitment to the issue of restitution, a commitment that continues now with the Canadian Art Museum Directors Organization, that is now working on case studies of research with Canadian museum collections in the hope of clearing any taint from any of our museums.

Soon after the Stuttgart painting, which was attributed to the “Master of Flémalle,” another work by an important German 19th century realist was uncovered at an auction house that was the competitor of Lempertz, an auction house that had given us problems in the past, but that had agreed to return this work to us. With the return of this work, the Canadian Embassy in Berlin shipped the painting as they did the Stuttgart painting to Berlin. We had an important return ceremony with a number of officials from northern Germany. Northern Germany is where the heart of our issue is, because that’s where the paintings are circulating. In northern Germany, we have now come full circle from the young Max Stern and his issues as a young Düsseldorf gallery owner to the City of Düsseldorf itself, which is really back to the scene of the crime. In Düsseldorf, we have now developed an important set of relationships with the government of Düsseldorf and with their museums wherein we are finding a number of problematic works in the museums.

The first one that was returned is this important self portrait of one of the pioneer artists of Düsseldorf, Schadow. Schadow was the Director of the Düsseldorf Academy. The Düsseldorf Academy was the greatest academy of art in the early 19th century in Europe. The fact that the Düsseldorf Museum returned this work and acknowledged it, a work that was great pride of place in their city, was an acknowledgment that this pride of place was put into question by the taint of the painting and its history. The recovery of that painting, less than two months ago, was held in Düsseldorf in the presence of Düsseldorf officials as well as our Canadian ambassador, who made the trip as well to Berlin and had taken a vested interest over the year in looking at this link between Canada, the Holocaust Alliance and the activities of two Canadian universities out of three that are committed to such a cause.

In effect, we’re looking at an important network of members of the art trade, of members of the Canadian diplomatic corps, of other European countries, of law enforcement, of universities, of researchers that are coming together in the most unusual way to work towards a common end. That common end is one where 10 years ago we had never believed we were going to get one painting back. We are now up to 12. We have hundreds more to pursue. We are one cause out of many; many causes that have not yet been heard in terms of recovering works of art that were looted by families and individuals before and during the war. Anything that we can do to share and to assist in that cause is one, which we hope will create international reverberations for our universities and for our country.

Hana, I invite you to come up and expand a little bit on this issue.

Hana Gartner

Is this a movie or what? First of all, I thank you very much. I’m honoured to have been invited to ask the sorts of questions that I’m curious about. For justice, you are going up and down a lot of murky paths to get there. I think this is a 007. We’ve got one painting; we had an exhibit; we had a conference and the paintings came.

Clarence Epstein

Right.

Hana Gartner

I’ve become fascinated by this and I have done some limited reading. I’m understanding the complexity of all of this—the history, the morality, and the law. What I’m curious about is what made you decide to leave that last painting in Düsseldorf on the wall of that museum in Düsseldorf on loan? Most people, when they get their property back, want to go home, put it in their suitcase and bring it home.

Clarence Epstein

Right. It’s part of a strategy. The whole Stern Project is one built on a strategic plan, a strategic plan that evolves. But with stakeholders like museums what you want to do is you want the issue to resonate. It cannot resonate in Canada as much as it can resonate in Germany when the scene of the crime remains in Germany. Leaving the painting on loan in Düsseldorf was important for the museum director, because that piece is one of her signature pieces in her collection, but also it allowed her the opportunity to approach her mayor and present a plan that if the estate had agreed to keep this painting on loan, her museum would organize a major retrospective on Max Stern, which is happening in 2018 in Düsseldorf. Often we have to look at the pluses and not the minuses when we’re recovering paintings. Hana Gartner

This is, am I right to say, uncommon?

Clarence Epstein

For us, it’s been something that we’ve decided in the last few years as being strategic. More often than not, it’s not institutions that recover paintings; it’s individuals. They have the right to sell that painting whenever they want and to realize the gains that their ancestors did not realize.

Hana Gartner

When ownership is established it goes from museum to auction. Doesn’t that just serve to feed the art market and starve the public?

Clarence Epstein

The paintings are still available for research. They are not going to all sit in museums. An artist did not paint a painting for it to sit in a museum. An artist painted a painting in pursuit of their passion. In the way that collectors and markets and museums and anybody who would like to acquire something goes, these works are free to circulate. Very often they land in museums and don’t necessarily find their way anywhere else and don’t even get exhibited sometimes. We know that perhaps 1 per cent of a museum’s collection is on display at any given time. The fact that these works might circulate in private collections or be sold by individuals is something that is very normal in the art world. It shouldn’t be shunned upon. We also have the opportunity to share the work with the public for a greater good.

Hana Gartner

You alluded to the fact that some 44 countries signed this agreement in ’98 and there was another one in 2009.

Clarence Epstein

Right, in Terezin.

Hana Gartner

…pledging that there would be a resolution to all of these claims. Why have these international agreements been so spectacularly unsuccessful?

Clarence Epstein

Inasmuch as a government would sign these principles, it cannot enforce them legally. Each country has its own set of laws and within that set of laws, there are separate issues related to stolen property.

Hana Gartner

I’m not a cynic. I am a skeptic. Why would they all rush to sign this thing then if they couldn’t do anything about it?

Clarence Epstein

Because they’re principles; they’re not signing laws. It’s a step forward to sign principles in the hope that you’re going to bring those principles back to your country and develop them into the rewriting of law.

Hana Gartner

So, why was there a silence in the firmament?

Clarence Epstein

Right now, what we’re seeing is a gradual recognition. It takes years by these governments. We can’t expect them to turn this around in a year or two years.

Hana Gartner

This is why this man is so good. He’s such a diplomat. They would throw me out immediately.

Clarence Epstein

I wish I could cast aspersions, but the truth is these issues take time. Holland is one of the countries that is the quickest to have turned around their policies, created a Restitutions Committee, and helped the government advance this.

Hana Gartner

Why now? Is it a coincidence that suddenly we seem to be reading and hearing about all this restitution, the Max Stern Project, Cornelius Gurlitt with over 1,400 paintings?

Clarence Epstein

I don’t think it’s a coincidence, but I think that the stars are aligned. That is what is really important with regard to this issue. This Gurlitt hoard, that was uncovered just over six months ago, is one that has broken the back on the issue in Germany. In the past, you had individual claims that the German government did not get involved in because they were trying to distance themselves from the issue by saying, “You have an issue in Germany with the museum or with one of our art commercial businesses. As a result, you need to resolve it independently.” This one was beyond any one decision. This one came out of a German government’s ignorance to the fact that this many paintings were not in circulation; they were believed to have either been destroyed or had never been hoarded by one individual like Gurlitt had hoarded them.

Hana Gartner

This had to be a very large secret shared by a great many people in the know. The art world is a pretty closed entity.

Clarence Epstein

True.

Hana Gartner

How was it all these people were able to sit on this for so long, so well?

Clarence Epstein

There probably were people who knew about this collection in some way or knew about the Gurlitt family and the fact that they had works, but they weren’t sure.

Hana Gartner

Because there was self-interest in that pool of people.

Clarence Epstein

Precisely. Gurlitt himself, the son, sold paintings slowly to subsidize his life. As a result of selling those paintings, there were certain dealers that we had heard about both in Switzerland and Austria, that had sold works. In Cologne, Lempertz was known to have sold the work that Gurlitt’s son had consigned to them.

Hana Gartner

I applaud the honour of seeking justice and doing the right thing. But then, you start to think, whether all looted art should be returned?

Clarence Epstein

Big question and a question that at a university is one that is of great interest to the academics. We recently hosted a conference in November called Plundered Cultures, where we took three case studies: Germany during the war, Armenia, and the Aboriginal experience in Canada. We looked at them comparatively to see what overlap there was and what issues were shared. This issue of injustice remains continual. But sometimes history, sometimes politics, sometimes life gets in the way of these matters. Bringing them out academically is the first step towards getting some kind of critical path together in the form of injustice on a much more macro scale as you’re suggesting.

Hana Gartner

When you start thinking about the practicality, should there not be some statute of limitations? When you start thinking about who owns what in all of these museums, natural history, art museums all over the world, we could empty them all out. We could empty out the British National Museum.

Clarence Epstein

Absolutely. I think this is a crisis that is going to have to be managed.

Hana Gartner

It’s called the spoils of war, right, looting?

Clarence Epstein

Precisely. You see that now between Russia and Germany. Germany does not recognize the claims that Russia makes on anything looted, because it says it’s quid pro quo. We went to war together. Our losses are our losses. Your losses are your losses. We beg to differ on any claims. That is a problem, but one that the museums are going to be facing, because they’re going to have to own up to the ownership history of every object in their collection. Sometimes it will be impossible for anyone to prove it. In some cases, there will be trails that might have been somewhat suppressed in the files.

Hana Gartner

This sounds like a new concept. Isn’t investigating the provenance of these pieces of art part of the responsibility of a museum? Like, “Where does this thing come from?”

Clarence Epstein

Yes. It comes out of a set of, I guess, misguided traditions that are very typical in the art world where the control of information and the control of transparency gives you power. Museums have and need that same control of information and power to compete against other museums and to compete against other researchers with whom they don’t want to share that information, because they want to publish it. They want to present it.

Hana Gartner

I also think of the other side of this whole issue, and that would be the good faith buyer. Somebody actually buys a piece of art in good faith and somebody knocks on the door and says, “No, it’s mine.” Is it justice that they just have to fork it over?

Clarence Epstein

It’s not. It’s a problem that the estate faces regularly on paintings wherein an auction house has it consigned by a collector who is seven or eight degrees separated from the original forced sale in the ’30s. We acknowledge that and we try to find ways to work it out. In the end, there is a black mark on this painting, a black mark that we cannot lift as an estate, because the work is believed to be ours, but a work that remains rightfully theirs by virtue of the laws of their country. As a result of that, neither of us can actually make a move without both of us agreeing to what the move is.

Hana Gartner

We think of art and the art world; we put it on a pedestal, but it sounds as if this can get really down and dirty.

Clarence Epstein

I think it probably is dirty and in many cases we don’t hear about it. You don’t get presentations really on failed attempts to negotiate and on issues that remain in negotiation, because negotiations are very sensitive. If you try and air your dirty laundry during a negotiation, it can hurt you. You have to be careful. Sometimes people believe that no matter how failed they are in their current approach, they’ll have success later. If they try and air their laundry now, they might compromise their chances of having that success later.

Hana Gartner

Human nature being what it is, if you owned something for 65, 70 years, who thinks of provenance? It’s yours, because you’ve had it that long. How common is it for museums, generally, to hide Nazi art works with just confusing and misleading provenance to actively try to keep this art lost?

Clarence Epstein

I would hate to think that it’s intentional.

Hana Gartner

You said it’s not intentional, but that’s willful.

Clarence Epstein

It might be willful. Without pointing the finger at one curator, one can only imagine that a curator would hate to have to release one of their treasured objects if they didn’t have to. Because the burden of proof is on the claimant, sometimes we do not always get the information that the museum has on file in a very straight- forward and direct way.

Hana Gartner

To what degree are museums, not just in Europe, but in North America too, because there have been issues here, complicit in sort of a willful collective forgetting because it’s cost effective to do that?

Clarence Epstein

We’ve recently seen with the Museum of Modern Art a challenge on their collections and particularly works looted during the Holocaust period and a great turnaround. Have you seen the movie “The Portrait of Wally” and the recovery of the Egon Schiele painting wherein the Museum of Modern Art is questioned in its intentions and its genuineness in wanting to resolve a wrongful issue? That is sometimes something that has to be dealt with at a political level.

Hana Gartner

It’s something that has confused me. I haven’t figured out why it is there’s been such a resounding silence, even with Jewish museums, in not coming forward and seeking the same sort of justice as vocally as you are.

Clarence Epstein

A museum is a museum. It’s not necessarily because it has a Zionistic mandate that it will have a different role to play as a museum. Within Israel there are problematic works in collections that are dealt with in the same way they’re dealt with in other museums in any other part of the world. You’re looking at a kind of entity, which is the museum wherever it is, and the problems that museums face right now in having to revisit their policies and revisit what is in effect a tradition that has to change.

Hana Gartner

The road to fairness and justice is obviously not an easy one. This is a bumpy ride. I’m sure you have stories that I wish we had time for.

Clarence Epstein

Absolutely. To be continued.

Hana Gartner

I thank you so much.

Clarence Epstein

A pleasure.

Hana Gartner

Thank you very much.

The appreciation of the meeting was expressed by M.J. Perry, Vice- President and Owner, Mr. Discount Ltd., and Director, The Empire Club of Canada.