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May 10, 1999
Art Dealers Combat Rumors of Nazi Links
By ALAN RIDING
Embarrassed by persistent rumors that it collaborated with the Nazi occupiers of wartime France, the Wildenstein family, the powerful French-Jewish dynasty of international art dealers, has brought a lawsuit seeking $1 million in damages against an American writer who repeated some of these allegations in a recent book.
The case, which goes to trial in Paris this week, reflects the family's eagerness to clear its name and silence its critics. But it involves a measure of risk: since the court will judge the veracity of postwar Allied reports that the head of the family at the time did business with Nazi art dealers, in a sense it is the Wildensteins, as much as the American writer, Hector Feliciano, who will be in the dock.
The case illustrates how new interest in the fate of looted wartime art collections is suddenly spotlighting murky events that took place in occupied Europe more than half a century ago. But while most disputes revolve around efforts to recover paintings confiscated from wealthy Jews by the Nazis, the Wildenstein case touches on far more sensitive questions.
A three-judge lower court will hear brief statements from lawyers for the parties on Wednesday before adjourning to study arguments and supporting documents already filed with the court. (Copies of the main arguments were obtained from both the Wildensteins and Mr. Feliciano.) A ruling is expected around mid-June. The verdict can then be appealed to the Court of Appeal and to France's Supreme Court.
In his book, published in France in 1995 as ''Le Musee Disparu'' and in the United States in 1997 as ''The Hidden Museum,'' Mr. Feliciano dedicates little space to Georges Wildenstein, who ran the family company from 1910 until his death in 1963. Rather, he focuses on the Nazi seizure, and postwar recovery, of important French-Jewish art collections.
But Mr. Feliciano cites documentary evidence that Georges Wildenstein ''seems to have'' organized some deals with Germans during the Occupation; that after the gallery owner escaped to New York in January 1941 his longtime non-Jewish employee Roger Dequoy was his ''secret representative'' during the Occupation, and that Dequoy did a lot of business with Nazi dealers.
The Wildensteins' lawsuit -- brought by Georges's son, Daniel, 81, his grandsons, Alec and Guy, and the New York-based Wildenstein & Company -- denies all the allegations in the book and accuses Mr. Feliciano of displaying negligence and ''serious and flagrant scorn for searching for the truth'' by associating Georges Wildenstein with the ''war crime'' of collaborating with the enemy.
The Wildensteins also maintain they have suffered ''considerable commercial damage'' as a result of Mr. Feliciano's references of Georges Wildenstein, which, they said, cast ''intolerable suspicion over his honorability that translates directly into distrust by clients and particularly by important Jewish American clients.'' They add that some Jewish clients have stopped visiting the Wildenstein gallery on East 64th Street in Manhattan.
In response Mr. Feliciano's lawyer, Antoine Comte, said the writer worked with ''moderation and professionalism'' in analyzing Allied intelligence and Nazi and French documents of the era that fully supported what he wrote. At the same time, Mr. Feliciano has filed a countersuit claiming $180,000 in damages against the Wildensteins for initiating ''an abusive action'' with intent to discredit the author.
Even before the judges analyze the substance of the dispute, however, they must decide whether the lawsuit is valid. The Wildensteins are suing under articles 1382 and 1383 of the Civil Code, which require reparation to be paid for any kind of damage caused by one person to another. Mr. Comte says the relevant legislation is the 1881 Press Law, which contemplates defamation of the dead only when the intent is to harm living heirs or relatives. The Wildensteins have already conceded that Mr. Feliciano had no such intent.
Mr. Comte said that it was odd that the lawsuit was brought in France since the Wildenstein company and Guy Wildenstein are located in the United States and Daniel and Alec Wildenstein live in Switzerland. He added that the Wildensteins probably did so in the belief that a French court would be more sympathetic to the family's wartime situation and less credulous of American intelligence reports implicating Georges Wildenstein. Denying this motive, the Wildensteins noted that Mr. Feliciano's book was published first in France.
Certainly the outcome of the case appears to depend on the credence given by the judges to these intelligence reports and other documents that detail Georges Wildenstein's prewar business dealings with Karl Habertsock, a Berlin-based Nazi art dealer, and his wartime relationship with Dequoy, who managed the Wildensteins' Paris gallery under his own name during the Occupation and who worked again for Wildensteins after the war.
These documents include a special report on the Wildenstein company prepared for the Office of Strategic Services in 1945 that refers to a visit by Haberstock and Dequoy to Georges Wildenstein in Aix-en-Provence in October 1940. The report quotes Haberstock as saying under interrogation after the war that ''Wildenstein was very eager to do business.'' And it adds, ''In Haberstock's presence, Wildenstein gave Dequoy full authority to deal with his collection.''
Another document, a United States Treasury Department report dated Jan. 29, 1942, is based on questioning of Georges Wildenstein. He said that at first he had hoped to purchase some paintings in France through Dequoy, ship them to America and thereby salvage some of his French franc balances in French banks. ''However, with the exception of 17 pictures, he was unsuccessful,'' the report says.
The thrust of the Wildensteins' case is that these and other documents are unreliable. They argue that, while Dequoy may have done business with Nazis, he was acting on his own behalf and not on instructions from Georges Wildenstein. They further charge that Mr. Feliciano ignored ample evidence of Georges Wildenstein's patriotism, including his work for the Resistance cause for which he was honored after the war.
Mr. Feliciano, who has flown to Paris to attend Wednesday's hearing, said he was surprised to have been sued because the Wildensteins are challenging the validity of documents that have been used by historians and journalists for decades. ''It is strange that they should be drawing attention to Georges Wildenstein in this way,'' he said.
A spokeswoman for Daniel Wildenstein said he would not comment on the case until the verdict was announced. But in an interview in April 1998 Guy Wildenstein said that the family had decided to answer its critics. ''We decided not to remain indifferent now,'' he said. ''For me, the honor of the family is at stake.''
A few days after the interview the Wildensteins sued a French weekly, VSD, for defamation. (A judgment in that case is expected on May 25.) And a few weeks later they took Mr. Feliciano to court.
Correction: May 12, 1999, Wednesday An article on Monday about a lawsuit in Paris brought by the Wildenstein family of international art dealers against the American writer Hector Feliciano, for publishing allegations that the family did business with Nazis during World War II, misstated the title of Mr. Feliciano's book. It is ''The Lost Museum,'' not ''The Hidden Museum.'' |
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My dealer, saint and sinner
Sep 1st 2007
From Economist.com
Profile: The Wildensteins, a power before Picasso
LEGEND maintains that in 1918 Picasso lashed out at his dealer, saying, “Le marchand - voilà l’ennemi!” As Picasso, a shrewd operator, knew only too well, dealers can be aggravatingly powerful. They are the saints of the art world—supporting struggling artists, shining a light on unacknowledged genius, exemplifying the highest standards of scholarship and connoisseurship; and also the sinners, accused of every possible skulduggery in pursuit of a higher price for their artists and a higher profit for themselves.
The dealer who bore the brunt of Picasso’s wrath was called Léonce Rosenberg. His silent partner at the time, in what was to become an historic deal with the artist, was Georges Wildenstein.
The Wildenstein name was already well-known in the art world. Nathan Wildenstein, an exile from Alsace, established a dealership in Paris in the late 1870s founded on his passion for French 18th-century painting—Fragonard, Boucher, Chardin, David, de la Tour and others. The son of a family of horse dealers, who had left school early, Nathan developed his eye studying masterpieces in the Louvre. Within 20 years he had a collection of French, Dutch, Italian and Spanish old masters to rival the Rothschilds' and the Gulbenkians'.
He saw that the real money in fine art was to be made not in Europe, catering to a declining aristocracy, but in America. In 1903 he and a partner opened a gallery on Fifth Avenue where they became indispensable advisors to financiers, industrialists and celebrities including Rockefeller, Mellon, Morgan, Frick, Bache, Lehman, and Edward G. Robinson.
Nathan's son, Georges, expanded the firm’s interests from old masters to impressionists and post-impressionists, nurturing the reputations of figures such as Manet, Degas, Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Pissarro, and Sisley, and establishing long-term relationships with artists such as Picasso. The holdings of impressionist art in American museums and galleries owe much to the Wildensteins’ work in shaping the taste, and sourcing the art, of several generations of philanthropic collectors.
Georges Wildenstein became an acknowledged scholar of Western art, writing many books and founding the Gazette des Beaux Arts, France’s longest-established and poshest arts journal. His son Daniel, who died in 2001, formalised the family’s scholarly interests by setting up a Wildenstein Institute in Paris in 1970. The institute runs conferences and publishes catalogues raisonnés, including the founder’s own 36-year labour of love on Monet.
For all its grandeur, Wildenstein has kept up with the times. In 1993 it teamed up with Pace, a firm specialising in post-modern and contemporary work, to launch a joint venture called PaceWildenstein. The gallery deals in blue-chip modern artists from Picasso, Alexander Calder and Josef Albers, through Mark Rothko and Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd, to Fiona Rae, James Turrell and Keith Tyson.
 Black squareThe Wildensteins famously guard their privacy, but their name has made the headlines involuntarily now and again. In 1991 the family sued an author who claimed that Georges Wildenstein, though Jewish, had dealt knowingly with the Nazis in occupied Paris. In 1998 a spectacularly messy and expensive divorce made one of Daniel's sons, Alec, and his wife, Jocelyne, a mainstay of the tabloids.
Much is rumoured, but little is known for certain, about the art the Wildensteins have collected for themselves down the years. A 1973 inventory of the “vault”, or New York storeroom, was said to have included 20 Renoirs, 25 Courbets, ten Van Goghs, ten Cézannes, ten Gauguins, two Boticellis, eight Rembrandts, eight Rubens, nine El Grecos and five Tintorettos, among a total of 10,000 paintings. Not bad, if true, even for a century's work. |
HName: Wildenstein, Georges
DateBorn: 1892
Placeborn: Paris, France
Datedied: 1963
Placedied: Paris, France
HDescrip: Art dealer, connoisseur and art historian. Wildenstein was the son of Nathan Wildenstein (1851-1934), the founder of the art gallery that bears their name. The younger Wildenstein began working in his father's firm in 1910, assuming the head in 1934 at his father's death. Wildenstein added masterworks of the Impressionists and post impressionists to the gallery's holding, developing vast holdings from which top collectors could chose. He also developed the firm's legendary art reference libraries, considered to be among the finest in the world. Wildenstein took over as publisher of the Gazette des Beaux Arts from its founder, Charles le Blanc, and acted as such until his son, Daniel (q.v.), took over. In 1924 he founded his own weekly serial, Arts. Though Wildenstein was less interested in twentieth-century art, he assisted the Surrealists in the 1930s, lending them a gallery in which to stage their International Surrealist exhibition. In 1932 Wildenstein hired architect Horace Trumbauer to design the New York galleries at East 64th Street, in a regal five storey building. As an art dealer, Wildenstein was famous for turning a profit on great works of art. Between 1923 and 1955, Wildenstein sold one Toulouse Lautrec painting five times, its price having jumped from $1800 to $275,000. Wildenstein was an authority on Gauguin and wrote knowledgeable texts on Ingres and Chardin. The (London) Times' obituary described Wildenstein as Duveen's heir, not entirely a complement. Wildenstein's heirs have had to fend off accusations that the elder man accepted stolen paintings from the Nazis during the French occupation to sell for them.
HCountry: France
HBiography: Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l'histoire de l'art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, pp. 246-251; [Obituary] Gazette des Beaux-Arts 62 Series 6 (July 1963): p. supplement I-II
HBibliography: Ingres. London: Phaidon, 1954; Ingres. London: Phaidon Press, 1956; Manet. Paris: Les Beaux-arts, édition d'études et de documents, 1932; Chardin. Zürich: Manesse, 1963; Gauguin. Paris: Beaux-Arts, 1964. |
Art Dynasty's Suit Over Reports of Wartime Dealings Is Rejected
By ALAN RIDING
Published: May 14, 2000
A Paris appeals court has rejected a claim for damages brought by the Wildenstein family, the New York-based dynasty of international art dealers, against an American writer who in a recent book described business dealings between the French-Jewish family and Nazi officials during Germany's wartime occupation of France.
Upholding a lower court ruling last year, the court said Friday that it was up to ''historians and the public'' to judge the allegations made by Hector Feliciano in his book, ''The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World's Greatest Works of Art,'' published in France in 1995 and in the United States in 1997 (Basic Books). However, in its written findings, the court went out of its way to praise Mr. Feliciano's method of research and dismissed the Wildensteins' argument that he had acted irresponsibly and negligently.
A spokeswoman for the Wildensteins said the family was ''extremely shocked'' by the ruling and was studying whether a further appeal was justified.
She noted that the court had not endorsed the charges contained in Mr. Feliciano's book.
In a telephone interview from his home in New York, Mr. Feliciano said: ''I used reliable documents. The lawsuit has backfired for the Wildensteins.''
Although the suggestion of collaboration related to Georges Wildenstein, who died in 1963, the case was brought by his son, Daniel, 82, his two grandsons, Guy and Alec, and Wildenstein & Company, which has its headquarters on East 64th Street in Manhattan. They sought damages of six million francs, or $850,000 at today's exchange rate, as well as the removal of all references to the Wildensteins in future editions of ''The Lost Museum.''
The lawsuit formed part of a broader campaign by the Wildensteins to improve their image after a wave of bad publicity had begun to affect their business, one of the wealthiest and most powerful in the art world.
What was most embarrassing was the tabloid coverage of messy divorce proceedings involving Alec Wildenstein in New York three years ago. But, apart from Mr. Feliciano's allegations, the Wildensteins' reputation is also under attack in a separate lawsuit in New York charging that after World War II the Wildensteins recovered several medieval manuscripts looted by the Nazis from the home of a French-Jewish art collector, Alphonse Kann.
In his book, Mr. Feliciano said that Georges Wildenstein had business contacts with a well known Nazi art dealer, Karl Haberstock, shortly before the war, immediately after the occupation of France and sporadically during the course of the conflict, even while in exile in New York. Mr. Feliciano's lawyer, Antoine Comte, presented both the lower court and the appeals court with documentary evidence supporting these charges.
After reviewing these documents, the appeals court said it could not share the Wildensteins' claim that Mr. Feliciano's writing was ''manifestly erroneous.'' It said the documents prove that Georges Wildenstein exchanged letters, did business and had meetings with Haberstock.
It said that ''it is also possible to deduce'' that Georges Wildenstein maintained contact throughout the war with Roger Duquoy, a former employee who ran the Wildensteins' Paris gallery during the war and who also did business with Haberstock. |
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October 26, 2001
Daniel Wildenstein, 84, Head of Art-World Dynasty, Dies
By ALAN RIDING
Daniel Wildenstein, the French-born head of one of the art world's wealthiest and most secretive dynasties who was also a prominent figure in thoroughbred horse-racing circles, died on Tuesday in a Paris hospital, the Wildenstein Institute announced here today. He was 84.
Mr. Wildenstein, whose family owns two prominent art galleries in New York and one in Tokyo, was both a highly successful art dealer and an art expert in his own right. He wrote the catalogues raisonnes for Monet, Manet and Gauguin, while several other catalogues raisonnes were published by the Paris-based Wildenstein Institute.
The third member of the billionaire art dynasty, Mr. Wildenstein inherited the company from his father, Georges, who in turn succeeded his grandfather, Nathan, who fled to France when Alsace was annexed by Germany in 1870.
The company, which owns a vast but rarely seen collection of works by both old and modern great masters, is now run by Mr. Wildenstein's sons, Guy and Alec, from its current headquarters on East 64th Street in Manhattan.
The wealth and power of the Wildenstein family have often been the source of resentment in art circles, with Mr. Wildenstein himself frequently embroiled in legal disputes. One current case involves a claim that the Wildensteins illegally acquired illuminated manuscripts seized from another French Jewish collector, Alphonse Kann, by the Nazi occupiers of Paris in 1940. The Wildensteins have rejected the claim, but a New York court recently agreed to hear the case.
In another case being heard in Paris, the Wildensteins have sued Hector Feliciano, the American author of ''The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World's Greatest Works of Art,'' for suggesting that Georges Wildenstein collaborated with the Nazis. The family strongly denied the charge, but both a lower French court and a court of appeal have rejected its claim to $1 million in damages. The Wildensteins are now appealing to France's highest court.
No less embarrassing to the soft-spoken and discreet Mr. Wildenstein was the scandal in 1997 that surrounded the messy divorce of his son, Alec, who was accused of threatening his wife, Jocelyne, with a pistol when she caught him in bed with a young woman. Before the divorce proceedings were settled, Mrs. Wildenstein went out of her way to denounce her husband's family in gossip magazines and tabloids.
Born on Sept. 11, 1917, in Verrieres-le-Buisson outside Paris, Mr. Wildenstein was raised in the world of art, attending the Ecole du Louvre after graduating from the University of Paris.
He worked as exhibitions director at the Jacquemart-Andre Museum here and the Chaalis Museum north of Paris before becoming chairman of the board of Wildenstein & Company in 1959, four years before his father's death.
Although the Wildensteins resumed operations in Paris after World War II, they stopped doing business here in the early 1960's after Andre Malraux, France's minister of culture at the time, publicly accused Georges Wildenstein of bribing a ministry official to authorize the export and sale abroad of Georges de la Tour's painting ''The Fortune Teller.'' The case never went to court, while Mr. Wildenstein refused to explain why the family ended its French operation.
Mr. Wildenstein, who is survived by his two sons, Guy and Alec, and six grandchildren, as well as by his second wife, Sylvia Roth, always considered himself first and foremost a scholar, but he was almost as devoted to horse racing. The owner of important stables, he was six times France's leading owner, and his horses won the prestigious Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe on four occasions.
The publicity surrounding some recent lawsuits prompted him to break his silence in 1999 in ''Art Dealers,'' a book of interviews with a French journalist, Yves Stravides. In it, he not only recounted the story of his grandfather's love of art but also defended his father against charges of collaboration and accused Malraux of malice.
A year earlier, his son, Guy, who is now president of Wildenstein & Company, explained in an interview that, by not responding to charges, the family had given the impression of acquiescing to allegations. ''We decided not to remain indifferent now,'' he said.
''For me, the honor of my family is at stake,'' he added.
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Friday, Mar. 01, 1963
Monsieur Georges
When the noted international art dealer Georges Wildenstein was 14 years old, his father. Nathan, gave him two small works of art that were to become more precious to him than all the masterpieces that he later bought and sold. The gifts were illuminated miniatures that had originally been pages in a late 15th century manuscript, and they were the start of what is today the world's biggest and best private collection. Last week 70 items from that collection were on public display at the Cloisters, the way-uptown adjunct of Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Some are less than 3 in. in height; none are more than 24 in. All glitter with the gemlike colors that they had when their usually anonymous creators made them.
Just why he decided to collect miniatures rather than any other type of art, Wildenstein, now 70, cannot really explain. "I just like—no, I love them," he says. His collection lines the walls of his residences in Paris and in Manhattan, and each item is treated with as much affection as if it were the only one he possessed. Smiling genially behind his glasses, Wildenstein will suddenly get up from his chair, grab a visitor by the arm and begin steering him around the room. "Look at this," he will say, pointing to an illumination by the 16th century Italian artist Giorgio-Giulio Clovio. "It's a beauty. When one looks at a beautiful painting, il faut jouir, one should be enraptured.''
Every Week to the Louvre. In the world of art, Georges Wildenstein—or "Monsieur Georges," as he is known to his galleries in Paris, Manhattan, London and Buenos Aires—is an awesome figure who probably knows more about the peregrinations of Europe's masterpieces than any man alive. But it is not just his huge file of photographs or his unparalleled collection of auction catalogues, or even his incredible memory, that accounts for his ability to spot a fake or dismiss a work of mediocrity within the blink of an eyelid. His father, who fled his native Alsace when the Prussians swarmed through it in 1870 and started the secondhand store in Paris from which the great art empire grew, put his son through a highly personal and rigorous training. When Georges was seven, his father would hold up an object and demand: "is it beautiful or is it ugly?" Georges spent his youth in Europe's museums and galleries, "looking, looking, looking. And I still go to the Louvre at least once a week when I'm in Paris, to keep up with the great masters."
His miniatures do not come from any one period: though the art form flourished from the 12th to the 16th centuries, he owns some that date as late as the 18th century. "I simply buy the most beautiful things I can find," he says. The miniatures come from medieval books of songs, proverbs and prayers, or from the great Books of Hours. Though most portray religious subjects, there are scenes from the history of Troy and the works of Aristotle, even a scene showing Caesar receiving a German ambassador. Since the miniatures were never exposed to light as much as ordinary paintings, they furnish an especially vivid record of the medieval mind. One can almost hear the dogs yelping in the boar hunt of Louis Malet, Sire de Graville and Grand Admiral of France. The golden Flagellation, done around 1350, shows the medieval struggle with the problems of perspective, while the exquisite Crucifixion, painted nearly a century later by an artisan in the workshop of the master of the Rohan Hours, has a deep landscape background with towns in the distance.
Abstractionism Is Horror. Wildenstein is not a man without prejudices. He once owned 250 Picassos,but he got rid of them because he could not stand the way the world's greatest living painter paints. As for today's abstractionists, "they have created horrors. There is no individuality in abstract art. It is all a monumental error."
Wildenstein's own credo has brought him a fortune, but it has also brought him unsurpassed joy. "If you want to learn and to love art," he told a visitor last week, "go and see the great masters. Go and see them as often as you can. When you can feel them, hear them, touch them with your mind, turn their colors over and over on your tongue—then you will begin to understand."
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