In a section on the "ambitious purchasing policy" of the Essen and Dusseldorf museums, which both "ended up buying works that the Nazis had impounded and put up for sale", Hector Feliciano examines the role of brokers whom he describes as "not honest practitioners of their profession".
He mentions Gustav Rochlitz, "who was closely allied with the Nazis implicated in the Paris confiscations" and Alice Manteau. However, the brokers he finds "most interesting" are "Paul Cailleux, J. O. Leegenhoek, and Schmit and Company, all three respectable dealers still in business today."
Like his father George before him, Paul Cailleux has an excellent reputation and is a widely respected authority, and is a specialist in classical paintings, drawings, and antiques. The Cailleux Gallery, with its sober and harmonious decor, is still located at 136, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, at the heart of the 'art triangle' that includes the Rue de la Boetie and the Avenue Matignon. Given its longstanding interest in the field, the gallery created the 'Cailleux Prize' given each year fo the best book of drawings published in France.
After establishing the excellent art market reputation of Paul Cailleux, Feliciano turns to Cailleux's activities in WWII:
During the war, Cailleux, like his colleagues, made substantial deals with German clients. The sixty-three paintings, drawings, tapestries, items of furniture, and objects whose sale he negotiated were mostly from France's national treasures, created by artists and artisans of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Düsseldorf and Krefeld museums were among Cailleux's best clients. Düsseldorf acquired Fragonard's Portrait of a Man in Cape and Hubert Robert's The Gorges of Ollioules in June of 1941, while the Krefeld Museum mostly bought works in a classical vein, such as the Woman with Coiffeuse by Aved, Portrait of Madame de la Martinière by Alexis-Simon Belle, and Portrait of the Marquis de Marigny by Jean-François de Troy...
...The Cailleux client list contained some of the major German players, beginning with Maria Dietrich, Hitler's personal broker, who bought hundreds of pieces for the Linz museum, and who was one of Cailleux' most assiduous clients...The German embassy's dynamic art expert Adolf Wüster, widely known in circles specializing in deals both legal and not, bought several works from the Cailleux Gallery, including one Heinsius for the Krefled Museum.
Looking for art to decorate their Berlin offices, high-level German officers and civil servants came to Cailleux's gallery: Doctor Wolff, the official architect and decorator of Germany's central bank, the Reichsbank, departed Paris with eight tapestries, among them four outstanding eighteenth-century Spanish examples depicting scenes from Don Quixote, woven at the royal works in Madrid, and signed by the Van der Goten brothers. Paul Cailleux did not report the sum he earned for handling this transaction to the DGER, but according to an expert at the Reichsbank it involved some 2.5 million francs-for the four works...
Paul Cailleux, Feliciano tells us, "worked conscientiously for his German clients".
In addition to selling works he acted as an "expert consultant". Cailleux's client list included, in addition to Maria Dietrich, Adolf Wüster and the Reichsbank decorator Dr. Wolff, a Salzburg dealer named Friedrich Welz and the "ubiquitous" Gustav Rochlitz.With such varied clients, Cailleux enjoyed unlimited access to circles whose commercial ethics were not constrictive, and where he was admired for his professional abilities. A French dealer who could not or could not deal with the Germans, and who knew Cailleux, thought that he had gone further than most dealers normally would in accommodating his clients.
Feliciano reproduces a letter addressed to the Commission de Récuperation Artistique (CRA) dated February 22, 1945 in which Léonce Rosenberg, a Jewish art dealer who stayed in Paris during the war, makes "serious accusations" against Cailleux concerning the liquidation of confiscated Jewish art galleries. According to the letter, the General Commissariat on Jewish Affairs had:
asked Paul Cailleux, an art dealer from Faubourg Saint-Honoré, who agreed to get involved in the ... dirty business, and forthwith convoked every last member of the Association de Antiquaires, of which he was of course president. He made them believe they would earn a commission from the sale of the art from these galleries. Many agreed to be - excuse the crudeness of this wor, but it describes their role - vultures. A peculiar situation developed: modern art collections being sold off by antique dealers. And Cailleux, who was in charge of naming temporary administrators, appointed himself as administrator over the Josse Hessel, Bernheim-Jeune, and Wildenstein galleries!...At the time the Journal Officiel printed the names of these administrator and the galleries they were assigned. I believe that if you follow this line of inestigation, you will learn quite a few interesting things, unpleasant though they might be.
- Feliciano, Hector. The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World's Greatest Works of Art, 1997, published by Perseus Basic Books, translated by Tim Bent and Hector Feliciano pg.133-137
Unfortunately, this most interesting book, published some two decades ago before the digital revolution, does not appear to be available as an ebook. Its content seems to be unsearchable on the internet or even on a Kindle (except for Amazon's "look inside" function*).
As art historians and historians of the Holocaust turns to digital sources, there is a serious risk of a mechanical funnelling and narrowing of knowledge. We must remind ourselves again and again of a fact that the best researchers know in their bones: most information is NOT available online.
This is a constraint we must figure out how to take into account when we move to the step of data visualization in the Cailleux Project. It would, as these excerpts from The Lost Museum demonstrate, be misleading to reduce network visualizations to only that data which is easily available in digitized format.
*Page 80 the Paul Rosenberg, Wildenstein, and Cailleux galleries. Across the street…
Page 134 listed in the Schenker Papers are Paul Cailleux, J. O. Leegenh…
Page 135 and not, bought several works from the Cailleux Gallery, including…
Page 136 fond of tapestries and bought several. Cailleux sold him a wor…
Page 137 asked Paul Cailleux, an art dealer from Faubourg Saint-Honore, …
Page 145 intermediaries or independent advisers, like Cailleux. Some of the art …
Page 147 Eiffel Tower, she could invite Paul Cailleux over to give an estimate …
Page 215 pseudonym of the Parisian dealer Paul Cailleux, whose activities …
Page 216 Cailleux for 60,000 francs to the Dusseldorf Museum on Ju…
Page 247 Sated 1758. .Les Gorges Oil Signed& Cailleux 300,00 fr: 10/7/…
Page 251 Landry 80,000 fr: 6/242. Cailleux 250,000 fr: 28//41. Cailleux 35,000 fr…
Page 252 500,000 Cr: aDYPEL Young Woman Pastel Cailleux 250,000 C…
Page 265 Reports), as well as the DGER lists on Cailleux and Jansen, RG 3…
Page 269 …86 Cailleux, Paul, 133-34, 136-37, 145, 147, 215 Cailleux Gallery…
see also:
At Lunch With Hector Feliciano -- A Bulldog on the Heels Of Lost Nazi Loot; A Cause Uncelebrated Becomes a Passion, NYTimes, November 4, 1997
"The Cailleux Project: Digital Tools to Analyze Art Provenance Texts", OpenArtData, Aug 5, 2019 permalink
"What does it mean to find Cailleux in art provenance research?", OpenArtData, Aug 2019 permalink
"Provenance research: Paul Cailleux NEPIP", OpenArtData, June 1, 2018 permalink
"Networks of Gustav Rochlitz", OpenArtData, January 2, 2019 permalink
No comments:
Post a Comment