Agency says museum took too long to ID Nazi loot

The U.S. Justice Department said it told the National Gallery of Art that four paintings, including Frans Snyders' "Still Life with Fruit and Game," may have been stolen by Nazis

November 23, 2000
Web posted at: 11:17 a.m. EST (1617 GMT)

In this story: Justice Department wants credit Other paintings don't match RELATED STORIES, SITES

NEW YORK (Reuters) -- The U.S. Justice Department said on Wednesday that it told Washington's National Gallery of Art two years ago that four of its paintings might have been looted by the Nazis, and it wondered why the museum did not react more quickly.

The department revealed its warning after the National Gallery claimed sole credit on Monday for discovering that one of the four flagged paintings, "Still Life With Fruit and Game" by the 17th-century Flemish artist Frans Snyders, had probably been looted from Jewish owners by the Nazis who occupied Paris during the Second World War.

The gallery turned the 37-by-56-inch (95-by-143-centimeter) oil on canvas over to the heirs of a French family identified only as the Sterns.

National Gallery officials responded on Wednesday that researching a painting's provenance, or origin, could be a complicated and lengthy business.

They added that by comparing photographs of looted pictures with their own paintings, they had determined that two of the works cited by the Justice Department -- an 18th-century painting by Francois Boucher and a 17th-century one by Jan van Goyen -- had not been taken from victims of the Holocaust.

Nancy Yeide, the National Gallery's head of curatorial records, added that the museum had found no evidence that the fourth painting on the Justice Department's list, a 17th-century landscape by Aert van der Neer, was Nazi booty.

Justice Department officials said that one of their trial attorneys, William Kenety, had come up with the four paintings brought to the National Gallery's attention by comparing titles of stolen artworks compiled by the U.S. Army after the war with names of works in the museum collection.

"I think we should get some credit," said John Russell, a Justice Department spokesman.

Eli Rosenbaum, director of the Office of Special Investigations, in which Kenety works, said he was pleased that the Snyders had been returned but added, "I'm somewhat disappointed it took two years from the time we notified them to accomplish that."

Yeide said that aside from the Justice Department's research, the museum had no evidence that the Snyders had been stolen until a curator found it had been handled by Karl Haberstock, one of German leader Adolf Hitler's favorite art dealers.

Only then did museum staffers examine their painting and discover that its stretcher -- the wooden frame supporting the canvas -- was marked "ST," the Nazi code for works plundered from the Stern family.

Yeide said there was no reason to believe that the gallery's van der Neer, "Moonlit Landscape With Bridge," was stolen by the Nazis because -- unlike many looted works catalogued by the U.S. Army -- its provenance did not include the Goudstikker gallery.

Jacques Goudstikker was a prominent art dealer who left more than 1,200 paintings behind when he fled Amsterdam ahead of the Nazi invasion in 1940.

Although the looted Boucher's title resembles that of the "Allegory of Painting" in the National Gallery, the Army photograph of it shows a main figure facing the other way and no putti, or cupids, National Gallery spokeswoman Deborah Ziska said.

As for van Goyen's "View of Dordrecht From Dordtse Kil," Ziska said, the gallery's version lacks a sailboat on the left noted in the looted painting.

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National Gallery of Art
U.S. Department of Justice
Frans Snyders biography
Jan van Goyen, Web Gallery of Art
WebMuseum: Boucher, François
Aert van der Neer, Web Gallery of Art

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