The auction of two 17th century oil still-life paintings of flowers was recently halted after a foundation claimed they were looted by Nazis during World War II.
The 5-inch by 8-inch paintings were set to be sold by Apple Tree Auction Center in Newark, Ohio as part of a sale of unclaimed items from safety deposit boxes, reported The Columbus Dispatch, which first reported the news.
But research by the Monuments Men and Women Foundation and the Jewish Digital Cultural Recovery Project (JDCRP) pointed to the two paintings as originally part of the art collection of Adolphe and Lucie Haas Schloss. The Jewish-French family’s collection of 333 paintings were “hunted down, seized and divvied up by Nazi officials and their French collaborators in 1943.”
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The Schloss family’s private collection of Old Master paintings was seized and divided “through forced sales and legal maneuvers involving both French and German authorities,” according to the Monuments Men and Women Foundation. “Those Schloss works ultimately destined for Hitler’s planned museum in Linz, including the two paintings in Ohio, were transferred to Munich and stored in the Führerbau, Hitler’s headquarters, before being subsequently looted in the chaotic final days of the Third Reich, as Allied forces entered the city.”
Monuments Men and Women Foundation founder Robert Edsel traveled to Ohio on September 4, shortly after his organization’s researchers received a tip about the two paintings being listed for sale online. “My view was, I have a lot better chance of [getting people to cooperate] if I’m in person with them, than I can doing it through a letter or Zoom call, and it will also send a message about how serious we think this is if I appear,” he told ARTnews on the phone from Maastricht in The Netherlands.
Edsel said images of the artworks on the auction listings on the Apple Tree website were “really bad” but did show German inventory numbers and inventory codes. “They just looked little jewel-like, quality pictures,” he said.
In addition to Edsel’s own experience with collecting Old Master paintings, he is also the co-author of the non-fiction book The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History about the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Section Unit (MFAA) tasked with helping protect cultural property in war areas during and after World War II. The book was adapted into a movie by George Clooney in 2014.
After Edsel informed Apple Tree about the paintings’ provenance and matching information on the JDCRP’s website, the sale of both works was halted and information about them was removed from the auction house’s website.
“When I told them I thought they were looted, they immediately took them down for sale, and they did put them in the vault, and that’s where they are right now,” Edsel said. “They were completely cooperative once I explained to them what the situation was.”
The two oil-on-copper images of flowers in vases are believed to have been painted by Dutch artist Ambrosius Bosschaert (1573 to 1621).
If the two artworks are confirmed to be authentic and indeed by Bosschaert, they could be very valuable after some cleaning and restoration work.
The auction house has not disclosed to the Monuments Men and Women Foundation the name of the consignor of the two paintings, and the organization is working on acquiring the name of the bank which owned the safety deposit box. “Having stopped the sale, our focus now is to determine the consigner, go to them and and get them to voluntarily turn over custody to us temporarily, to return them to the Schloss family,” Edsel said. “That’s the objective at this stage, and and I believe we will be successful doing that.”
In terms of value, Edsel said the two paintings should be cleaned, but were fundamentally “very beautiful.”
“Any collector would be glad to have these in their collection,” he said, estimating their value ranging from $50,000 to $100,000 for Dutch artworks from the late 1600s to early 1700s, to a figure ten times that for works by Bosschaert or another well-known name.
“And of course, we can certainly say they have a fantastic provenance, and now they have this history of having been looted by the Nazis, found and returned. And my experience in seeing works that have come up for sale at Sotheby’s and Christie’s that have those provenances, especially if there’s some sort of label or Nazi German identification code on the back, those tend to have a certain amount of of greater interest among among collectors, just because it’s an added history to the picture.”
Apple Tree Auction Center did not return a call from ARTnews by press time.