PARIS — In a frenzied, four-day auction in the grand hall of the
Savoy Hotel in Nice in June 1942, buyers bid on paintings, sculptures and
drawings from “the cabinet of a Parisian art lover.” Among the 445 pieces for
sale were works by Degas, Delacroix, Renoir and Rodin.
اضافة اعلان
The administrator monitoring the sale, appointed by the French
collaborationist Vichy regime, and René Huyghe, a paintings curator at the
Louvre, knew the real identity of the art lover: Armand Isaac Dorville, a
successful Parisian lawyer. They also knew that he was Jewish.
After Hitler’s armies invaded and occupied
Paris in 1940, the Vichy
government began to actively persecute Jews. Barred from his law practice,
Dorville fled Paris to the unoccupied “free zone” in southern France. He died
there of natural causes in 1941.
The Louvre’s Huyghe bought 12 lots from Dorville’s collection
with government funds on behalf of France’s national museums, and the Vichy
authorities seized the proceeds of the entire auction under 1941 “Aryanization”
laws that allowed it to take over personal property owned by Jews. Two years
later, five of Dorville’s family members were deported and perished in
Auschwitz.
The full history of the Dorville auction might have remained
secret had it not been for
Emmanuelle Polack, a 56-year-old art historian and
archival sleuth. The key to her success in discovering the provenance of works
that suspiciously changed hands during the Nazi Occupation was to follow the
money.
France has faced criticism that it lags behind countries like
Germany and the United States in identifying and returning artworks looted
during the war years, and, recently, the Louvre has sought to turn its image
around. Its goal is to find and encourage the descendants of the works’
original owners to reclaim what is rightfully theirs.
“For years I cultivated a secret garden about the art market
during the Occupation,” Polack said in an interview. “And finally, it is
recognized as a crucial field for investigation.”
“The truth makes us free,” Jean-Luc Martinez, the Louvre’s
director, said recently.
In 2020, he hired Polack as the public face of the museum’s
restitution investigations. “When he offered me a job, I said to myself, ‘No,
it’s not possible,’” she said. “And then, suddenly, I found myself working in
the heart of the Louvre’s collections. It is truly an honor.”
In March, the Louvre put a catalog of its entire collection
online — nearly half a million artworks. There is a separate category for a
mini-collection of more than 1,700 stolen artworks returned to France after
World War II that the museum still holds because no rightful owners have come forward.
Other French museums hold several hundred more works.
Their presence is still an embarrassment for France. After World
War II, about 61,000 stolen paintings, sculptures and other artworks were
returned; the postwar government swiftly turned over 45,000 of them to
survivors and heirs, but sold thousands more and kept the funds. The ones that
remain in French museums are sometimes known as the “orphans.”
Polack works closely with Sébastien Allard, the head of the
Louvre’s paintings department, who for years pressed the French art
establishment to do more about finding the owners and heirs of “orphan”
paintings, and who in late 2017 curated two small galleries at the museum to
show about 30 of the works.
Polack is currently studying the provenance of several of those
paintings. She combs through the Louvre’s voluminous files, auction catalogs,
art gallery and framers’ receipts, catalogs raisonnés and correspondence to
track how works of art changed hands over the years. She focuses on the reverse
sides of paintings, which often give clues about sales, restorations and
framers that might lead back to their owners.
“The backs of paintings can be very talkative,” Polack said.
She also has begun to study auction catalogs and documents in
the Drouot auction house, which opened its archives to the Louvre in March.
Polack, who grew up in the upscale Paris suburb of
Saint-Germain-en-Laye, brings personal history to her mission. Her maternal
grandfather was deported and perished in the Buchenwald concentration camp; her
paternal grandfather was a prisoner of war whose possessions were looted by the
Nazis.
“No one, not my grandparents, not my parents, ever talked about
the war,” she said. “The story was transmitted through the unspoken, and there
is nothing worse than the unspoken.”
Polack already had made her reputation abroad, as a member of an
international task force in Germany following the discovery of around 1,500
works squirreled away by Cornelius Gurlitt, whose father, Hildebrand, bought
artworks for Hitler.
While working for the task force, she uncovered the key to the
Dorville story. She looked at the back of a portrait by the Impressionist
painter Jean-Louis Forain and discovered a yellowing label, with an item number
from the catalog of auction in Nice. “CABINET d’un AMATEUR PARISIEN,” it read,
with no other information about the seller’s identity.
Intrigued, she traveled to the city, and uncovered in public
archives the sale catalogs, the auction minutes, the identity of the seller and
documents proving the involvement of the Vichy government’s Commissariat for
Jewish Questions. Working with a genealogical firm, she located and then
befriended the Dorville heirs.
Nearly eight decades after the auction, the consequences of the
sale in Nice continue to haunt France, pitting the French government against
Dorville’s heirs, reviving the ugly history of the Louvre’s involvement in a
problematic sale and putting Polack in an uncomfortable position.
Dorville’s heirs contend that the sale of his artworks was
forced under the wartime anti-Jewish laws, making it an illegal act of
“spoliation” or looting. They argue that, had the government given them the
proceeds from the auction, perhaps the five family members who perished at
Auschwitz might have found a way to survive.
Polack has long supported the family’s position. In a 2017 Le
Monde article, she called the Dorville auction “one of the main sales from
looting carried out by the French in World War II.”
The French government, by contrast, relying largely on gaps in
the evidence about how the auction came to be, arrived at a different
conclusion.
In May, the government accepted the findings of the commission
that examines reparation claims from victims of wartime anti-Jewish laws, which
declared that the Dorville auction was carried out “without coercion or
violence.”
However, because of the Louvre’s involvement, the French
government decided that the 12 works bought by the museum should be returned to
the Dorville heirs. At the same time, since the government did not declare the
sale illegal, several French museums that bought or were given nine additional
works from the auction will get to keep them. Under Culture Ministry rules, the
Louvre cannot comment on the decision.
The irony for Polack is that, as a Louvre employee, she cannot
speak freely about it either. “When I arrived, everyone knew who I was, what I
was doing, what family I was helping,” she said. “But I will stop there.”
The ruling has unleashed a firestorm of criticism among art
historians and critics. In an article in the newspaper Le Figaro, Claire
Bommelaer, a senior culture correspondent, wrote “What is a sale under duress,
if not a sale organized by Vichy, when all the beneficiaries are hunted down,
banned from auction rooms and subject to anti-Jewish laws?”
The Dorville heirs plan to challenge the government’s decision
in a French court. “It wasn’t the Germans who did this,” said Corinne
Hershkovitch, a leading art lawyer who represents the family. “The French state
must admit that this sale fell under the Aryanization laws of Vichy France. It
must recognize that this sale was forced and illegal.”
For Francine Kahn, a 73-year-old biologist and a grandniece of
Dorville, it is the reputation of the family that is at stake.
“This is not about money,” she said in an interview. “We have a
responsibility to honor the memory of the five family members who perished at
Auschwitz.”
She said that she understands Polack’s silence about a case that
helped make her reputation in France. “She cannot say the French government is
wrong, even if she may be convinced otherwise,” she said. “As the French say,
‘You don’t spit in the soup.’”
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