Elizabeth Taylor Accused Of Owning Van Gogh Stolen By Nazis
Marcel Berlins, The Guardian (London), 12/07/04
On April 14, 1963 the London art dealer Francis Taylor, acting on behalf of an anonymous client, went to a Sotheby's auction and bought a Van Gogh painting, Vue de l'Asile et de la Chapelle de St Remy, for $ 257,000. It didn't take long for the identity of the real purchaser to be revealed: Elizabeth Taylor, his daughter.
Her interest in the painting had, until the sale, been kept secret. If it became public, her father advised, the price would be doubled. She and Richard Burton decamped to Paris to await the outcome of the auction. They married in 1964. The Van Gogh was with them in their house in Gstaad and on their yacht Kalizma, the salon of which was redesigned to exhibit it.
It now hangs in Taylor's mansion in Bel Air, LA - but it may not be there for much longer. Next month, a California court is being asked to decide whether the painting was among Jewish-owned works of art that disappeared during the Nazi period, from 1933 to 1945. If not, then Taylor keeps it. But if a judge finds that Nazi policy towards the Jews was respon sible for the loss of the painting, she will have to give it back to its original owners or their heirs.
The family seeking the return of the Van Gogh are descendants of Margarete Mauthner, a Jewish intellectual and art collector living in Berlin until she and her family were forced to flee Germany. They landed up in South Africa in 1939, where she died in 1947. Frau Mauthner was an early champion of Van Gogh, organising an exhibition of his work - to which hardly anyone came. Three of the claimants are her great-grandchildren, two of them still living in South Africa. The other, Andrew Orkin, is now a lawyer in Canada.
There is nothing new in Jewish-owned works of art confiscated, stolen or looted by the Nazis having to be returned. Many countries have passed specific laws to that end. Many individual collectors and museums have already made restitution. But the legal struggle between the screen legend and the Mauthner descendants threatens to become one of the most bitter conflicts over a work of art ever to reach the courts. Today, the Van Gogh would probably fetch at least £10m; but both sides are adamant that it's not the money that matters most but the principle.
At the heart of the issue is the undoubted fact that neither side can prove where the painting was at critical times."We don't know what happened to it," Andrew Orkin admits."But we don't need to know that," he argues. The law governing restitution does not require the original owner to prove the exact circumstances under which a painting was taken. The claimants argue that it would be enough for victims (or their relatives) to prove that they owned the work in question and that it was lost as a direct consequence of the Nazis' official policy of persecuting Jews and dispossessing them of their finances and assets. So, for example, if a family whose breadwinner had lost his job because he was Jewish had been forced to sell a painting in order to have money to pay the rent, that work was just as much a victim of Nazi policy as if it had been looted in the traditional way.
The claimants' case against Elizabeth Taylor is based on evidence that Frau Mauthner owned the Van Gogh until 1939, but didn't have it when she fled to South Africa. It is possible that she sold it in order to finance the voyage, but that is only conjecture.
But Elizabeth Taylor does not accept that the Van Gogh falls into the definition of an artwork lost to its owner as a result of Nazi policies. Papers filed with the court by her lawyers state that the claimants"have provided not a shred of evidence that the painting ever fell into Nazi hands - or any information concerning how or when Mauthner 'lost possession' of it". Taylor goes further, suggesting that there is evidence that Mauthner had sold the painting to an art dealer even before the Nazis became the German government in 1933. If that's so, the laws on the restitution of works of art don't apply.
Central to the dispute is a document known as a catalogue raisonne. This is a comprehensive, thoroughly researched list of an artist's works, including their sales history. Such catalogues are usually accepted by art historians and museums the world over as accurate as to who owned what, and when. The one on Van Gogh was compiled by the foremost expert on the artist's work, JB de la Faille. The first publication of the catalogue raisonne on Van Gogh, in 1928, showed Frau Mauthner as the owner of the painting. So, crucially, did the next edition, in 1939. This, say Mauthner's heirs, proves that she had owned it shortly before having to flee Germany. Whether she'd sold it in order to raise funds for the trip or it had been taken from her in some other way doesn't matter - the reason she didn't have it any longer was the direct result of Nazi policies towards the Jews.
Andrew Orkin and his siblings accuse Taylor of negligence in buying the painting in 1963. She (through her father, an experienced dealer) had been so determined to acquire it that she had failed to see the" conspicuous red flags" obvious from the Sotheby's catalogue for the 1963 sale. There had been a great deal of publicity about art snatched from Jews. The reference in the 1939 catalogue, which had Frau Mauthner of Berlin as owner, should have rung alarm bells - especially with Taylor's father.
The Sotheby's auction catalogue listed the Van Gogh as being from the collection of the late Alfred Wolf, a well-known art dealer who was around in Berlin and Switzerland in the 1930s. It's impossible to know for certain whether he acquired the Van Gogh directly from Mauthner or through a subsequent deal. To confuse the evidence even further, there were discrepancies between the Sotheby's catalogue of 1963 and a Christie's catalogue of 1990, when Taylor tried to sell the painting.
It's possible that the judge will not need to decide the fate of the Van Gogh at all. Elizabeth Taylor's lawyers argue that the Mauthner heirs should be barred from bringing their claim because of the time that has elapsed since she bought the painting. So why did they wait nearly 40 years? Their simple answer is that they didn't know their ancestor had owned the painting, says Andrew Orkin:"I knew that the family had owned works of art that hadn't come to South Africa. But we didn't talk about it. Our way of dealing with the Holocaust was total silence."
It wasn't until a few years ago that he became aware of the scope of the US 1998 Holocaust Victims Redress Act and other laws allowing restitution of Jewish-owned property lost during the Nazi period. On the off-chance, he gave Margarete's name to a firm of specialist lawyers in Washington DC, who discovered her ownership of the Van Gogh.
Taylor's lawyers do not accept that the US laws apply to the Mauthner heirs' claims, and reject their explanations of the 40-year delay. Attempts to settle the issue amicably have failed."We would have preferred to mediate the claim," Orkin says."We felt it could have been negotiated with Solomonic wisdom. She chose the path of win-lose aggressive litigation and recourse to the courts." The Mauthner heirs' demands during the negotiations were outrageous, riposted Taylor's lawyers.
Taylor took the first step into litigation in May 2004 by seeking a court declaration that she was the owner of the Van Gogh. The Mauthner family replied in October with their claim for the return of the painting. The language in the official documents filed by both sides is becoming more and more angry, accusatory and intemperate. In the meantime, Dame Elizabeth Taylor wonders for how many years more she'll be able to admire the View of the Asylum and Chapel of St Remy.
On April 14, 1963 the London art dealer Francis Taylor, acting on behalf of an anonymous client, went to a Sotheby's auction and bought a Van Gogh painting, Vue de l'Asile et de la Chapelle de St Remy, for $ 257,000. It didn't take long for the identity of the real purchaser to be revealed: Elizabeth Taylor, his daughter.
Her interest in the painting had, until the sale, been kept secret. If it became public, her father advised, the price would be doubled. She and Richard Burton decamped to Paris to await the outcome of the auction. They married in 1964. The Van Gogh was with them in their house in Gstaad and on their yacht Kalizma, the salon of which was redesigned to exhibit it.
It now hangs in Taylor's mansion in Bel Air, LA - but it may not be there for much longer. Next month, a California court is being asked to decide whether the painting was among Jewish-owned works of art that disappeared during the Nazi period, from 1933 to 1945. If not, then Taylor keeps it. But if a judge finds that Nazi policy towards the Jews was respon sible for the loss of the painting, she will have to give it back to its original owners or their heirs.
The family seeking the return of the Van Gogh are descendants of Margarete Mauthner, a Jewish intellectual and art collector living in Berlin until she and her family were forced to flee Germany. They landed up in South Africa in 1939, where she died in 1947. Frau Mauthner was an early champion of Van Gogh, organising an exhibition of his work - to which hardly anyone came. Three of the claimants are her great-grandchildren, two of them still living in South Africa. The other, Andrew Orkin, is now a lawyer in Canada.
There is nothing new in Jewish-owned works of art confiscated, stolen or looted by the Nazis having to be returned. Many countries have passed specific laws to that end. Many individual collectors and museums have already made restitution. But the legal struggle between the screen legend and the Mauthner descendants threatens to become one of the most bitter conflicts over a work of art ever to reach the courts. Today, the Van Gogh would probably fetch at least £10m; but both sides are adamant that it's not the money that matters most but the principle.
At the heart of the issue is the undoubted fact that neither side can prove where the painting was at critical times."We don't know what happened to it," Andrew Orkin admits."But we don't need to know that," he argues. The law governing restitution does not require the original owner to prove the exact circumstances under which a painting was taken. The claimants argue that it would be enough for victims (or their relatives) to prove that they owned the work in question and that it was lost as a direct consequence of the Nazis' official policy of persecuting Jews and dispossessing them of their finances and assets. So, for example, if a family whose breadwinner had lost his job because he was Jewish had been forced to sell a painting in order to have money to pay the rent, that work was just as much a victim of Nazi policy as if it had been looted in the traditional way.
The claimants' case against Elizabeth Taylor is based on evidence that Frau Mauthner owned the Van Gogh until 1939, but didn't have it when she fled to South Africa. It is possible that she sold it in order to finance the voyage, but that is only conjecture.
But Elizabeth Taylor does not accept that the Van Gogh falls into the definition of an artwork lost to its owner as a result of Nazi policies. Papers filed with the court by her lawyers state that the claimants"have provided not a shred of evidence that the painting ever fell into Nazi hands - or any information concerning how or when Mauthner 'lost possession' of it". Taylor goes further, suggesting that there is evidence that Mauthner had sold the painting to an art dealer even before the Nazis became the German government in 1933. If that's so, the laws on the restitution of works of art don't apply.
Central to the dispute is a document known as a catalogue raisonne. This is a comprehensive, thoroughly researched list of an artist's works, including their sales history. Such catalogues are usually accepted by art historians and museums the world over as accurate as to who owned what, and when. The one on Van Gogh was compiled by the foremost expert on the artist's work, JB de la Faille. The first publication of the catalogue raisonne on Van Gogh, in 1928, showed Frau Mauthner as the owner of the painting. So, crucially, did the next edition, in 1939. This, say Mauthner's heirs, proves that she had owned it shortly before having to flee Germany. Whether she'd sold it in order to raise funds for the trip or it had been taken from her in some other way doesn't matter - the reason she didn't have it any longer was the direct result of Nazi policies towards the Jews.
Andrew Orkin and his siblings accuse Taylor of negligence in buying the painting in 1963. She (through her father, an experienced dealer) had been so determined to acquire it that she had failed to see the" conspicuous red flags" obvious from the Sotheby's catalogue for the 1963 sale. There had been a great deal of publicity about art snatched from Jews. The reference in the 1939 catalogue, which had Frau Mauthner of Berlin as owner, should have rung alarm bells - especially with Taylor's father.
The Sotheby's auction catalogue listed the Van Gogh as being from the collection of the late Alfred Wolf, a well-known art dealer who was around in Berlin and Switzerland in the 1930s. It's impossible to know for certain whether he acquired the Van Gogh directly from Mauthner or through a subsequent deal. To confuse the evidence even further, there were discrepancies between the Sotheby's catalogue of 1963 and a Christie's catalogue of 1990, when Taylor tried to sell the painting.
It's possible that the judge will not need to decide the fate of the Van Gogh at all. Elizabeth Taylor's lawyers argue that the Mauthner heirs should be barred from bringing their claim because of the time that has elapsed since she bought the painting. So why did they wait nearly 40 years? Their simple answer is that they didn't know their ancestor had owned the painting, says Andrew Orkin:"I knew that the family had owned works of art that hadn't come to South Africa. But we didn't talk about it. Our way of dealing with the Holocaust was total silence."
It wasn't until a few years ago that he became aware of the scope of the US 1998 Holocaust Victims Redress Act and other laws allowing restitution of Jewish-owned property lost during the Nazi period. On the off-chance, he gave Margarete's name to a firm of specialist lawyers in Washington DC, who discovered her ownership of the Van Gogh.
Taylor's lawyers do not accept that the US laws apply to the Mauthner heirs' claims, and reject their explanations of the 40-year delay. Attempts to settle the issue amicably have failed."We would have preferred to mediate the claim," Orkin says."We felt it could have been negotiated with Solomonic wisdom. She chose the path of win-lose aggressive litigation and recourse to the courts." The Mauthner heirs' demands during the negotiations were outrageous, riposted Taylor's lawyers.
Taylor took the first step into litigation in May 2004 by seeking a court declaration that she was the owner of the Van Gogh. The Mauthner family replied in October with their claim for the return of the painting. The language in the official documents filed by both sides is becoming more and more angry, accusatory and intemperate. In the meantime, Dame Elizabeth Taylor wonders for how many years more she'll be able to admire the View of the Asylum and Chapel of St Remy.