THE GREAT ART ROBBERY

THE NAZIS PLUNDERED EUROPE'S TREASURES, AND THE CRIME HAS NEVER BEEN SET TO RIGHTS

Author: By Christine Temin, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, August 24, 1997

Page: N13

Section: Books

The English translation of Feliciano's book -- which also includes updates -- arrives on the heels of the furor caused by the French original, a furor that has now spread to countries including the United States, where certain museums still harbor art acquired under dubious circumstances during and after World War II. Museums, and their directors and curators, have often played dumb when questioned about the provenance of this art. Ownership, they insist, is difficult if not impossible to trace and prove.

Baloney. Feliciano demonstrates that often it doesn't take a Sherlock Holmes to track down rightful owners or their heirs. He does it, and makes the process seem almost simple in some cases.

The owners of the works Feliciano writes about were prominent people whose art collections were generally well documented. The Nazis inadvertently helped out with the documentation. Their fondness for record keeping, part of an effort to make their crimes look legit, has left paper trails that in many instances tell precisely what was taken, when and where and from whom, and whether the masterpiece in question went to Hitler, Goering, or to the collections of the mega-museum Hitler planned to establish in the Austrian city of Linz, where he spent part of his youth.

Hitler considered himself an artist, Feliciano reminds us. After flunking art school entrance exams, the future fuehrer consoled himself by turning out posters and postcards. Art remained an obsession. Hence the massive looting that decimated European collections -- especially those of French Jews. Feliciano tells this sickening saga through five case studies, examining the fate of the collections of the Rothschilds, the Paul Rosenbergs, the Bernheim-Jeunes, the David-Weills, and the Schlosses, families of great connoisseurs and/or gallery owners. He tracks works including a Degas drawing of a dancer owned by the powerful dealer Paul Rosenberg, which mysteriously fell into the hands of another French dealer, Raphael Gerard, who sold it to Philip Frank, a Mannheim banker. Records indicate the Degas left for Mannheim -- and has never been seen again. Many plundered works were absorbed into museum collections. But many others simply disappeared. The illustrations in ``The Lost Museum'' are a particularly poignant testament to this sad fact, with works by Fragonard, van Gogh, Renoir, Manet, and others captioned ``whereabouts unknown.''

Feliciano also deals with Hitler's ``taste,'' if you can call it that, which favored Northern European art (though the Nazi leader was uncomfortable with Rembrandt's Jewish subjects). And he famously declared much modern art ``degenerate.'' He purposely had works by the likes of Picasso dumped on the Parisian art market rather than hold onto them for himself.

That market boomed during the war, thanks in part to German museums shopping in Paris, scooping up newly available (i.e., confiscated) works. Some French businesses were happy to cooperate in the massive relocation of French luxury goods and services to Berlin. The House of Jansen, important Paris interior decorators, designed a banqueting room for the Reichsbank's headquarters, with a table for 150 set with a gold dinner service. ``After the war,'' Feliciano writes, ``Jansen tried to make sure that its clients forgot about, or never knew about, the services it had provided the Nazis.'' So it was simple for clients including the duchess of Windsor to continue patronizing the firm.

Helping to reroute art was also a specialty of the Swiss, whose laws are shockingly favorable to receivers of stolen goods -- to the point where, to get his art back, a real owner must reimburse someone who has innocently bought his purloined painting. The Swiss brazenly hang many stolen works on the walls of their museums, Feliciano writes, where they are ``untouchable'' under Swiss law.

``The Lost Museum'' is an admirable book but not an ideal one. Lynn Nicholas's 1994 ``Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War'' tells the same story more successfully. Feliciano's treatment suffers from forest-and-trees syndrome, getting bogged down in details that make for a shapeless narrative. And the self-righteousness of his tone is unnecessary: Readers are going to be on his side anyway. The self-aggrandizement weakens a strong book. (``A compact and forceful personal story,'' he writes in the introduction, reviewing his own work.)

He leaves lots of loose ends. One, tantalizing and frustrating, is the punchline of the tale of the Nazis burning the chateau at Rastignac, where the Bernheim-Jeunes had stashed works by Cezanne, Matisse and other masters, works that may have been on trucks the Nazis drove from the scene. ``There are clues,'' writes Feliciano, ``that point to the conclusion that these 30 masterpieces . . . were not burned at Rastignac.'' He must be keeping the clues for a sequel.

Many loose ends are unavoidable, as the stories are ongoing. A Frans Hals portrait owned by the Schloss family is a case in point. Feliciano tells how it resurfaced on the art market and was sold at both Sotheby's and Christie's, even after Harvard University art historian Seymour Slive explained that it was stolen by the Nazis. Christie's and the Schloss heirs are still in litigation over the work, Feliciano writes.

As this and similar stories indicate, vigilance and awareness are ever necessary in dealing with the aftermath of the Nazi reign. Big museums are constantly displaying confiscated works, whether unknowingly or not. Feliciano cites a Degas ``Landscape with Smokestacks'' stolen from Fritz and Louise Gutmann, who both died in concentration camps. Their Degas was shown in 1968 at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum, and in 1987 was bought by Daniel Searle, the pharmaceutical tycoon and a trustee of the Art Institute of Chicago. Like the Schlosses' Frans Hals, the Gutmann Degas is tied up in litigation. Feliciano's accounts of such cases arouse indignation and sympathy. Surely survivors of Nazi atrocities, or the heirs of those who were killed, should at the very least be able to reclaim their property easily and efficiently.

The original publication of ``The Lost Museum'' helped prompt France's national museums, from the Louvre on down, to display hundreds of works of looted art this past spring, in a belated effort to locate the legitimate owners. Even if the Feliciano book weren't the interesting, well-researched read that it is, it would be invaluable for this public service alone -- and for continuing a consciousness-raising that must not cease.