Looted by the Nazis
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More than 80 years after it was looted by the Nazis from a Jewish art dealer in Amsterdam, a portrait by an Italian master has been spotted on the website of an estate agent advertising a house for sale in Argentina.
A photo shows the painting, Portrait of a Lady (Contessa Colleoni) by the late-baroque portraitist Giuseppe Ghislandi, also known as Fra’ Galgario, hanging above a sofa in the living room of the property, in a seaside town near Buenos Aires.
The Dutch newspaper AD said it had traced the work, which features in a database of lost art and is listed by the Dutch culture ministry as “unreturned” after the second world war, after a long investigation – and with the unwitting help of the estate agent.
Portrait of a Lady belonged to Jacques Goudstikker, a leading Dutch art dealer who fled the Netherlands in mid-May 1940 to escape the invading Nazis but died after falling in the hold of the vessel carrying him to safety and breaking his neck.
Within weeks, Goudstikker’s entire collection of more than 1,100 artworks, including numerous paintings catalogued as old masters, had been bought up, in a forced sale and for a small fraction of its true value, by Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring.
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I hope she can get it back. My former employer spent years strong arming a woman whose family's art had been looted and sold to a wealthy oil (I think) family, who then donated one of the pieces, a Pisarro, to the university museum. After long negotiations that she said included a coercive 2 am phone call pressuring her to sign something agreeing to the painting bouncing back and forth every three years between the Musee d'Orsay and OU's museum, she lost the battlr. (I don't see anything in the article saying that consideration was ever given to returning it to her, and maybe she didn't want it, but she wanted it to say in France and she didn't get that.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/french-heiress-ends-fight-university-oklahoma-over-nazi-looted-art-n1269297I would be ashamed to keep something that was stolen by Nazis, especially since it was a donation and presumably the museum wouldn't have been out any money--except anything they spent to conserve it, I guess--but that's just me.
The OU museum has a pretty impressive collection that's heavy on big-name European impressionists (Monet, Degas, Renoir, and such), twentieth century American artists (Georgia O'Keeffe, the Taos Society, many Indigenous artists, and such), and some Old Masters. I wonder if much of their European art was bought and later donated by mid-century oil barons and, presumably without their knowledge at the time of purchase, a certain percentage of those paintings were bought at a time when art looted by Nazis was hitting the market. It's anybody's guess whether they or the museum began at some point to suspect any of it might be looted.
I thought they had also held and possibly returned some Benin bronzes, but the internet says no.
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The painting has gone missing.
