The Spoils: Restitution of Nazi-Looted Art Stalled By Greed, Lack Of Will
By Liz Braun
Rating: A
The Spoils shines a bright light on the tortuous business of returning stolen Nazi art to its rightful owners. What would seem straightforward is complicated by the passage of time, missing paperwork, dodgy provenance and ineffectual national laws, not to mention the old standbys — greed and antisemitism — currently enjoying a major renaissance.
Die Kinder Des Künstlers in Düsseldorf gallery.
A planned art exhibit at the Dusseldorf Stadtmuseum, cancelled at the last minute in November of 2017 by that city’s mayor, is the centre of director Jamie Kastner’s (There Are No Fakes) investigation.
The exhibit was organized around the work owned by Jewish art dealer Max Stern, who was ordered by the Nazis to sell all the paintings in his Dusseldorf gallery at a forced auction in 1937, likely at below-market value. Some 300 pieces of art from Stern’s gallery were sold by Third Reich-approved auction house Lempertz, which still operates today.
There’s a Canadian angle here. Stern fled Germany and ended up in Montreal, where he rebuilt his life and established the highly regarded Dominion Gallery; he and his wife championed such Canadian artists as Emily Carr and Jean-Paul Riopelle.
After his death, Stern’s heirs (McGill, Concordia, and Israel’s Hebrew University) created the Max Stern Art Restitution Project to try to recover the paintings from the forced sale of 1937.
One of the paintings they located was a self-portrait by 19th-century artist Wilhelm von Schadow, held by the Stadtmuseum. At a 2014 restitution ceremony of the von Schadow painting, museum boss Susanne Anna announced that a Max Stern exhibit would be created to both honour Stern and underline the importance of restitution.
Plans for the exhibit went forward, until the opening was only a matter of weeks away. Then it was cancelled. Why would the mayor of Dusseldorf cancel such an important cultural event?
Various reasons were offered at various times by the mayor and others: the exhibit was “too Canadian;” the mayor claimed Susanne Anna was not competent; no one had handed over the catalogue, etc. Nobody got a straight answer.
The cancellation was a scandal in the art world, but not for long. Stern had what one expert in the film describes as average paintings at his Dusseldorf gallery — this is not the headline-grabbing stuff of, say, the purloined Klimt paintings.
But in taking on the tussle over Stern’s paintings, Kastner makes the fraught political issue of restitution personal and accessible, illuminating some of the petty squabbles involved.
A past-master at the give-‘em-enough-rope approach, Kastner includes interviews with Dusseldorf mayor Thomas Geisel, Henri Hanstein (current owner of the Lempertz gallery), lawyer Ludwig Von Pufendorf and curator of the eventually “revamped” (and reviled) Stern exhibit, Dieter Vorsteher.
He also calls upon the experts: National Gallery of Canada archivist Philip Dombowsky, art-architecture expert Clarence Epstein, and lawyer-war crimes expert Willi Korte — all part of the Max Stern Art Restitution Project — as well as art historian Catherine MacKenzie, genocide historian Frank Chalk, and Marc Masurovsky of the Holocaust Art Restitution project.
Kastner fills in some of the general background on looted art by referencing The Monuments Men and Woman In Gold in his film, perhaps acknowledging that movies have done a lot to educate the general public on art restitution. His film will, too.
Besides interviews, the film uses extensive material from Nazi Germany and other archival stills and footage and is seeded with interesting observations that will lead viewers to their own conclusions. As one expert says about Dusseldorf and the Stern works, “A lot of the paintings are probably still in that region.” You begin to see the sort of squeeze that might have been put on the mayor to cancel the exhibit.
The Spoils also covers the lengthy scuffle over another von Schadow painting, The Artist’s Children, which was eventually restituted in 2023. The painting was acquired by the city of Dusseldorf in 1959.
It used to hang in the mayor’s office.
An estimated 100,000 works of Nazi-looted art are still missing.
The Spoils. Written and directed by Jamie Kastner. With Philip Dombowsky, Clarence Epstein, and Willi Korte. In theatres April 4.