Jacques Goudstikker

Jacques Goudstikker (1938)

Jacques Goudstikker (born August 30, 1897 in Venlo ; † May 15 or 16, 1940 on board the Bodegraven ) was a Dutch art dealer whose collections were looted by Hermann Göring . Only after long negotiations were parts of the collection returned to the heirs in 2005.

Life

Jacques Goudstikker came from a family of art dealers. His grandfather Jacob, after whom he was named, had founded an art shop together with his brother Simon in 1845, which mainly sold furniture and handicrafts. Jacob Goudstikker's son Eduard, Jacques Goudstikker's father (* 1866; † 1925), restructured the business around 1890 and concentrated on paintings by Dutch and Flemish masters from the 17th century. Jacques himself, who was trained in business studies at a school and studied art history in Leiden and Utrecht before joining the business at the age of 22, expanded the offer to include paintings from other eras. He became one of the most successful dealers in Flemish paintings of the 16th and 17th centuries. Other focal points of his interest were Italian painters of the 15th and 16th centuries and early German and French painting.

Nijenrode Castle

Albert Figdor estate - auction in Berlin 29./30. September 1930. Hieronymus Bosch's picture “The Prodigal Son” goes to Goudstikker.

Jacques Goudstikker ran his art dealership as an AG with several branches. The head office was located at Herengracht 458 in Amsterdam. In addition to the art trade, he was also interested in cultural and charitable events. The setting was often the Nijenrode Castle in Breukelen an der Vecht , which he had acquired in 1930. In this building, each salon was dedicated to a different era. The Vienna State Opera singer Dési Halban-Kurz (* 1912; † 1996) was involved in an event with the motto “Ausg'steckt in Nijenrode” in favor of persecuted penniless Jews in Germany . Goudstikker, then newly widowed, married Dési von Halban-Kurz soon after this event. Their son Eduard († 1996) was born in 1939. In the same year Goudstikker held his last big festival in Nijenrode, where Pablo Casals played.

After the " Anschluss of Austria " to the German Empire and the events that followed, numerous Jewish friends of Goudstikker emigrated from the Netherlands. Goudstikker himself had lively correspondence with the emigrants, but could not initially make up his mind to take this step. At the urging of his wife, however, he applied for a visa for the USA, which was issued in December 1939 and was valid until May 9, 1940. On the Simon Bolivar , Jacques Goudstikker wanted to send about 20 pictures ahead to London while he was still hesitant to leave the country, but the ship was destroyed by a sea ​​mine . This incident prevented Goudstikker from moving forward quickly with the emigration. On Oostermeer, the family's private residence in Ouderkerk aan de Amstel , he witnessed the bombing of Schiphol Airport on May 10, 1940, and it wasn't until May 14, 1940, after Rotterdam had also been badly hit by air raids, that the family settled down Goudstikker set off for Amsterdam, where Goudstikker handed over the collection of around 1400 works of art to his employees, and then to IJmuiden . Together with about 200 other people, Jacques, Dési and Eduard Goudstikker got on board the SS Bodegraven. This ship was initially supposed to be sunk in order to make the port unusable for the Germans, but was then used for refugees or a transport of children and reached Dover undamaged . There, however, none of the passengers were allowed to disembark because the British authorities feared the infiltration of German spies. The Bodegraven should set course for South America.

On the night of May 16, when the ship was still in the English Channel , Jacques Goudstikker went on deck to smoke a cigarette while his wife stayed with the young son. When her husband did not return, Dési Goudstikker asked the captain to send a search party. One of the sailors who had been hired to do this fell through a hatch on the ship, which was completely darkened to protect against enemy attacks, and injured his spine. The fact that he did not have a fatal accident in the fall was probably due to the fact that he fell on the corpse of Jacques Goudstikker, who had fallen through the same hatch and broken his neck or skull. The captain then drove to Falmouth to take his injured crew member to the hospital. Because of this stopover, Dési Goudstikker managed to prevent her husband from being buried at sea and to have Jacques Goudstikker buried in Falmouth. She herself had to return to the ship, which she and Eduard were only allowed to leave in Liverpool .

Fate of the family

Jacques Goudstikker's widow was able to obtain new visas for her son and herself and emigrated via Canada to the USA, where she earned her living as a singer. In 1946 she returned to Holland to take care of the recovery of her property. Before emigrating, Jacques Goudstikker had a list of 1,241 works of art from his possession drawn up, which he had carried with him in the form of a black ring binder and which Dési Goudstikker used to search for the pictures.

In 1950 she married her lawyer Edward von Saher and had his last name transferred to her son Eduard. He came to Germany as GI in the 1960s , where he met his future wife Marei Langenbein, who appeared at Holiday on Ice . Only after the death of her husband and mother-in-law did Marei von Saher-Langenbein find out about the fate of the art collection and, together with her two daughters, advocate the return of the works of art.

Fate of the collections

1941: Hermann Göring leaving the Goudstikker art dealer

Hermann Göring and Alois Miedl , who came from Munich but had lived in the Netherlands since 1930, took over the gallery a few weeks after the Goudstikker family emigrated. Miedl had initially had the plan to take Goudstikker's business and collection by himself; However, this had been prevented by Goering, who had also kept an eye on the valuable collections. Miedl was married to a Jewish woman, which on the one hand ensured him the trust of Jewish business partners, but on the other made him dependent on Göring's protection. He commissioned the Jewish businessman Max Model, who needed money for his emigration, to get in touch with Goudstikker's conservator Jan Dik senior. This introduced him to Goudstikker's authorized signatory Arie ten Broek. Miedl initially protected intentions to buy some paintings, then took part in several bogus shareholders' meetings and secured the trust of employees and especially his mother, Jacques Goudstikkers: Emily Goudstikker-Sellisberg, who held 15 percent of the shares, was Jewish and had to be protected hope that Miedl promised her and actually gave her when the deportations of Jews from Holland began. Miedl's measures were primarily taken to protect the family's assets: in May 1940, ten Broek was made Aryan chairman of the art dealership. This was legalized by the Jewish notary Arnold van der Bergh, who hoped to receive help in escaping from Holland in return. Ten Broek thus obtained the right to vote for Goudstikker's share in the company; a telegram in which Dési Goudstikker contradicted the sale of the art dealership was ignored. Dik and ten Broek spread the rumor that the company would have to be liquidated or sold due to insolvency, for which they received 210,000 guilders from Miedl. In July 1940 it was sold to Göring and Miedl at a price of 2,550,000 guilders. Göring took over the works of art for 2,000,000 guilders, Miedl the real estate, the name and the business value of the gallery for the rest of the money. Göring immediately secured 780 works of art for his properties in Germany, including 300 for Carinhall alone . He gave around 50 paintings to Hitler , the rest he sold for a large profit - some to his helper Miedl. He traded successfully in art until 1944 and sold around 5000 paintings during this time. In 1944 he left for Spain. He was later questioned as a key witness , but never prosecuted himself. A painting by Jan van Goyen was added to the collection of the East Prussian Gauleiter Erich Koch in 1940 and is now in the National Museum (Danzig) , the museum refuses to return it.

Waiver and restitution

Salomon van Ruysdael: River Landscape with Ferry (1649). Acquired from Christie's in 1930 by Goudstikker ( right: Gouldstikkers register sheet, 1936), donated in 2007 by the heirs to the National Gallery of Art , Washington.

After the Second World War, the Allies found 275 works of art from Goudstikker's possession in the collections of Adolf Hitler, Göring and other Nazi greats. These were handed over to the Dutch state in safe hands in 1945. The order to hand over the works of art to the rightful owners, however, did not comply, but transferred the pictures to public collections to compensate for the losses they had suffered during the war. After the war, the Goudstikker company was under state administration as an enemy property. The takeover by Göring and Miedl was not regarded as a forced sale, although Queen Wilhelmina had already issued a decree of nullity for such sales on June 7, 1940. Dési Goudstikker litigated her property for seven years. After she could no longer pay the legal costs, she withdrew her action in 1952 and reached a settlement with the Dutch state. She received a sum with which she could buy back the real estate and about 165 remaining paintings. She decided not to use the missing paintings, but explicitly excluded the specimens that Göring had acquired. After that she withdrew from Holland forever and apparently gave no information about the fate of the business to her son and later to her daughter-in-law. The Dutch state kept the paintings and distributed them to numerous public collections and institutions, unless they were auctioned.

Marei von Saher-Langenbein, the daughter-in-law of the Goudstikkers, only found out about the events surrounding her father-in-law's art dealership from the journalist Pieter den Hollander in the summer of 1997. In the autumn of the same year, the government also began to give in and admitted its wrong behavior in the post-war period. Cases that were rejected at the time should now be re-examined. However, when Marei von Saher-Langenbein filed a complaint with the State Secretary for Cultural Affairs in 1998, the decision was rejected, citing the waiver of 1952. After she turned to the World Jewish Congress and the Washington Agreement on the Return of Looted Art was signed in December 1998, the case was opened again in 1999. The Ekkart Commission , which has now been used, recommended provisionally in 2001 the government to move away from its rigid position in the restitution cases. Three years later, the return of Goudstikker's property was recommended “for moral reasons”. This recommendation became the new guideline of the Dutch state in restitution policy in 2005. Around 200 paintings, the location of which was already known at the time, immediately returned to the family's possession, and provenance researchers were able to track down around 500 more in public and private collections in the following years; part was not found again. Marei von Saher-Langenbein donated a painting by Bartholomeus van der Helst to the Dutch state in gratitude for the work of the Ekkart Commission and in 2007 had around 170 paintings from the collection auctioned in New York. She also suggested a memorial exhibition in honor of her father-in-law, which was designed as a traveling exhibition.

gallery

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  Panel of the Frankfurt Annenaltar , bought by Goudstikker in 1928, restituted in 2006, acquired by the Frankfurt Historical Museum in 2011 .

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  The resurrection from the Master of the Virgo inter Virgines was sold to Mickey Cartin.

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  Jan van Goyen's huts on the canal are now in the Gdańsk National Museum

literature

• Pieter den Hollander, Melissa Müller: Jacques Goudstikker. 1897-1940. In: Melissa Müller, Monika Tatzkow: Lost Pictures. Lives lost. Jewish collectors and what became of their works of art. 2nd edition, Munich 2009, licensed edition for the Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft Darmstadt, ISBN 978-3-534-23471-4 , pp. 214–229.
• Peter C. Sutton: Reclaimed. Paintings from the Collection of Jacques Goudstikker. Yale University Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0300137293 .

Web links

Commons : Images from the Goudstikker  Collection - collection of images, videos and audio files

Commons : Jacques Goudstikker  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Images from the Goudstikker collection
• Presentation of the exhibition in the Jewish Museum
• Portraits of the Goudstikker couple

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Jacques Goudstikker_ The little black notebook
2. ↑ The information on Goudstikker's cause of death vary in different sources; However, it is questionable whether an autopsy was carried out at all. According to the art magazine  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. the sailor was permanently disabled.  
3. ↑ Patricia Kennedy Grimsted: Nazi-Looted Art from East and West in East Prussia: Initial Findings on the Erich Koch Collection , p. 30 (PDF, Engl.)
4. ↑ New York Times (January 12, 2020): Poland Urged to Look for Nazi-Looted Art Still Held in Its Museums (Engl.)
5. ↑ Der Spiegel : The Packers (Issue 32/2007)
6. ^ A. Heppner: Salomon van Ruysdael: Special exhibition at Goudstikker in Amsterdam . In: International Art World . February 1936.
7. ^ NMA website , accessed November 18, 2017.
8. ↑ http://www.pbpulse.com/arts-and-culture/art-museums/2010/02/25/jacques-goudstikkers-story-a-fascinating-tale-of-art-war-and-theft/  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
9. ↑ goudstikker_sammlung_new_york_versteigert (at kuvi.de)
   2016: Two Cranach pictures remain in the USA. (The descendants of a Jewish art dealer want two Cranach paintings back, which the Nazis once stolen from the family. But a court in the USA ruled against them in favor of the Norton Simon Art Foundation on the basis of the 1952 declaration .) In spiegel online from 23 Aug. 2016 (Adam, Eva, around 1530, both by Lucas Cranach the Elder )