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The Spoils of War - World War II and Its Aftermath: The Loss, Reappearance, and Recovery of Cultural Property
Art in America, Feb, 1998 by Michael Fitzgerald
John Frankenheimer's 1965 film The Train opens with a Wehrmacht officer arriving at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. The date is Aug. 2, 1944, and Allied forces are at the outskirts of the city, yet this officer, played with elegance and dignity by Paul Scofield, strides slowly into the building as if he were entering a sacred preserve. The interior is murky until he switches on a few spotlights and reveals that the galleries are immaculately hung with paintings in gilded frames. As he steps from canvas to canvas, he is momentarily unaware that a woman in severe civilian costume has approached. She is a French official, a long-standing member of the museum staff who has stayed to watch over the art and believes she is about to take possession of it. The paintings are masterpieces by Picasso, Gauguin and Manet as well as other leaders of the avant-garde. They are not works from the Jeu de Paume's paltry collection. They are a select group of the Nazis' spoils -- among the finest modern works in France. But as Scofield's character confides to her, "This is degenerate art. As a loyal officer of the Third Reich, I should detest it."
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This double-edged avowal strikes to the heart of the Nazis' program for art and the conflicted nexus of beliefs about art's place in modem culture that keeps many of us fascinated with this period. During earlier stages of the war, the officer's devotion to modern art had made him a covert accomplice in protecting the pictures from the Party's repudiation of everything its leaders believed might subvert their goals. With the Axis forces' collapse, however, he has become a villain almost as despicable as a stereotypical Hitlerian thug. He is visiting the museum for a final look before ordering the canvases packed and delivered to his train for transport to Germany the next morning, The film portrays a desperate race to scuttle his plan, as Resistance fighters struggle to stop the train without destroying the art and hold it until the combat zone has passed farther east.
In this case, Hollywood has not strayed far from the truth. The Germans did transform the Jeu de Paume from its prewar use as a museum of contemporary art into one of their primary storage facilities for art confiscated in France -- mainly from Jewish families who were declared "noncitizens" by Nazi law. In its distinguished galleries, the invaders regularly arranged exhibitions of looted works for visiting big shots, a choice selection of old-master drawings, of Renaissance Madonnas or of 20th-century pictures. (In the fall of 1940, Hermann Goering, Reichsmarschall and bead of the Luftwaffe, interrupted his direction of the London Blitz to rush to the museum and indulge a taste for art.) A French official, Rose Valland, did become a fly on the wall; she carefully watched and recorded the Nazis' activities in the museum throughout the Occupation. As the Nazis fled Paris, a final train bearing pictures from the Jeu de Paume did depart for Germany, and the French did scramble to intervene. In this case, however, fact was stranger than fiction, The Free French team sent to stop the shipment was led by an officer named Alexandre Rosenberg. He was the son of Paul Rosenberg, the dealer of Braque, Leger, Matisse and Picasso, and after he succeeded in halting the train by blowing up the surrounding tracks, Alexandre found it filled with works from his father's gallery. They were not so fine as the ones shown in the movie, but still worth saving.
The most unexpected element of this scenario is the German officer. In fact, he is not a perverse fabrication; he is a composite. And his mix of dedication to the Fatherland with a passion for modern art short-circuits the reductivist, black-and-white judgments that pervade discussions of the Nazis' involvement in art. Most of us are familiar with the Nazi program to promote the racial, ethnic and cultural beliefs of National Socialism through art (presented in Peter Adam's Art of the Third Reich, 1992, among other sources). And we know the cruel flip-side of this policy, which branded works by many artists (from Impressionism through New Objectivity) as degenerate (particularly well treated in Stephanie Barron's exhibition catalogue "Degeneate Art": The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, 1991). Despite the tragic experiences of many avant-garde artists, especially in Germany, the Nazis' condemnations have been in a certain sense reassuring for supporters of modernism -- the label "degenerate" is taken as proof that these artists represented esthetic and ethical positions deeply antithetical to adherents of Nazism.
Yet there were high Nazi officials who divided their loyalties between Hitler and the modern masters. As the German ambassador to France, Otto Abetz was a chief architect of the looting program and went so far as to reserve 21 paintings, including works by Monet, Degas, Bonnard and Braque, for decoration of his house and offices. When he fled Paris in August 1944, he ordered them sent to Germany. Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, acquired looted works by Monet, Bonnard and Degas for the foreign ministry in Berlin and for his own home. None of these works were the aggressively distorted, primitivist compositions that so infuriated the Nazi ideologues, but they definitely fell under the broad category of "degenerate art." All evidence suggests that they were acquired for personal pleasure rather than for trading purposes, the latter being a standard practice of Nazi collectors.
