NORTHERN NETHERLANDISH SCHOOL, 1632
Portrait of a Musician Playing a Bagpipe
inscribed AE. s (with the A and E conjoined) SUE 57 and dated A. o 1632 in the upper center
oil on panel
15 ¾ x 11 ¾ inches (40 x 30 cm.)
MAKING THE CIRCLE ROUND
During the holiday season, people tend to reflect on the past and look to the future. As is often said, if you don’t reflect on the past, you can never change the future. For some the past is last year and for others, it can be the tragedy and hardship that has befallen their family in past generations.
WWII brought many hardships to people across Europe. Most are well documented and many stories have been told. What is so fascinating (a possibly biased opinion!) is that nothing seems to better reflect the circumstances that many families went through during this time like the stories of restituted art. I am not sure if it is because they are so meticulously detailed in research and documents – or if it is because they seem so personal. Art is personal and people who handle it by dealing, collecting or both, are passionate about it. The story is never ‘just’ about the art. It is about the pressure, the terror and often details of the escape (if possible). The story of a restituted painting frequently gives a more complete picture. And, when it IS actually restituted, it makes the circle round and offers us all some type of closure on a terrible part of history. The story of our purchase of this small panel and its subsequent recovery which generated so much press, is an important one to tell not only from an art historical point of view, but from a personal one.
In 1934 Dr. Max Stern inherited the Galerie Julius Stern in Düsseldorf from his father. By 1935 Dr. Stern was prohibited by the Reich Chamber for the Visual Arts from buying and selling art, with the final blow delivered in 1937 when ordered to immediately liquidate his entire stock. In compliance with this order, 228 paintings were sold in an auction on November 13, 1937 at Lempertz in Cologne. On December 23, 1937, Dr. Stern fled to England and never received any proceeds from the auction. By 1939, along with 2,000 other German and Austrian civilian refugees, he was incarcerated as a dangerous alien on the Isle of Man for three months, until the opportunity to emigrate to Canada arose. Once there he wound up in internment camps until 1942. Remarkably Dr. Stern was able to rebuild his life when given a job at the Dominion Gallery in Montreal, which eventually he would come to own, and rise to be one of Canada’s leading art dealers. Sadly, he suffered a fatal heart attack in 1987 while on a business trip to Paris. Dr. Stern never spoke about the 1937 Lempertz sale. His heirs Concordia University, Montreal; McGill University, Montreal; and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem only discovered this travesty ten years after his death, and then undertook the mission to assure that the world would never forget such injustices.
In 2008 Lawrence Steigrad Fine Arts purchased the Portrait of a Musician Playing a Bagpipe. Prior to its publication in our 2009 catalog and subsequent exhibition at the TEFAF fair in Maastricht, we checked its status with the Art Loss Registry; “the world’s largest resource for tracking looted or lost works”. Lempertz, who had sold it again in 2007, had done the same. The painting was cleared for sale. Louisa Loringhoven of Art Loss Register explained the repeated mistake by stating “The Lempertz catalog from 2007 describes the painting as a portrait of a musician aged 57, while our database describes the painting as a portrait of a bagpipe player. Though the picture was searched by description and title, it was missed because of these differences”. Shortly after our return from Maastricht in April 2009, ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents enacted a sting operation at our gallery to seize the painting. Two days prior we had learned that the work had been sold under duress and discussions were underway as how to return the panel to the Stern estate. We had already removed the painting from the gallery in preparation for its return when the sting occurred. Naturally, we were quite taken aback as this had not previously happened due to a forced auction before World War II. The painting was duly returned and we were privileged to be among the invited guests when the panel was exhibited and formally handed over by the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Holocaust Remembrance Day April 21, 2009 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, New York. Similarly, the consignment of this painting by the estate of Max Stern for sale to our firm is an honor. As the Max Stern Art Restitution Project is a not-for-profit organization, their proceeds from the sale of this work will be used to further the search and reclamation of the hundreds of works still missing from the estate.
As I wrote this note, the one thing I could not understand was after all that had happened to Dr. Stern, his silence on his loss. I finally asked my 98-year-old mother, herself a holocaust survivor, why she thought he never mentioned the forced sale of his stock. Her reply was “because we wanted to forget, we wanted to be just like everyone else, but most of all we were scared it would happen again”.
Peggy Stone
3 December, 2020