| | Missing
Objects Each object tells a story. Some are still missing,
some are restituted or resolved, and some have cases still pending. The circumstances
of looting and the efforts for recovery are just as fascinating as the famous
works of art themselves. Vincent
van Gogh, Portrait of Dr. Gachet, 1890
 Portrait
of Dr. Gachet is a depiction of the physician who tried to treat Vincent van
Gogh. The portrait shows a melancholy Dr. Gachet, or as van Gogh put it in a letter
to Paul Gauguin, he tried to capture ‘the heartbroken expression of our time.’
For 14 years, this portrait was the most expensive painting ever sold at auction,
but it now comes with a strongly documented claim that the painting was looted.
The claim has been made by Christine Koenigs of Amsterdam, who is the granddaughter
of its 1930s owner, Franz Koenigs.
Franz
Koenigs was a Protestant German who emigrated to the Netherlands in 1922. Koenigs
was a successful banker and art connoisseur who had a collection of 2671 Old Master
drawings along with over 300 paintings. During the German banking crisis of 1931,
Koenigs was unable to get his money out of Germany. Since he had many assets,
but no cash, he applied to the bank Lisser & Rosenkranz (where he was a minor
shareholder) for an interest-only loan in 1935, using his art collection as collateral.
The contract gave the bank the right to call in the loan in June 1940 and sell
the collateral at auction if Koenigs couldn’t pay back the loan. A list was drawn
up of the artworks that were secured for the loan. Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr.
Gachet was not on this list since Koenigs didn’t buy it until 1938. Koenigs
wanted to get his money out of Germany, but since he was unable to move cash,
he spent his money buying art. He was particularly interested in purchasing art
that the Nazis labeled ‘degenerate’ and purged from German museums. Portrait
of Dr. Gachet was considered ‘degenerate’ and was removed from the Frankfurt
Museum. Koenigs purchased the painting in 1938 and sent it to France. In 1939,
he sent the van Gogh portrait to America and housed it at the Knoedler gallery
in New York. Three months later, Siegfried Kramarsky, one of the directors of
Lisser & Rosenkranz bank, took the painting, claiming that is was collateral against
Koenigs’ loan. Even though he had no paperwork to prove this, the gallery let
him take the painting. Franz Koenigs died
in 1941, allegedly having been pushed from a moving train by a member of the Gestapo.
The possible motive was that Koenigs was working as a British spy and secretly
helping Jews to escape from Germany. There was a Nazi informant working in Koenigs’s
bank who may have tipped German authorities of his whereabouts. Portrait
of Dr. Gachet remained with the Kramarsky family for another 45 years, when
Kramarsky’s widow put the painting up for sale. The painting was sold at Christie’s
in May 1990 in what is now an historic auction. The painting sold for the monumental
sum of $82.5 million, which set a world record that wasn’t broken until 2004.
The portrait was sold to Ryoei Saito of Tokyo. The painting was later acquired
by Sotheby’s in 1997, who sold it in 1998 to an undisclosed buyer. Portrait
of Dr. Gachet painting has not been seen for several years, but it is rumored
that it is currently in Switzerland and that it belongs to the Barilla family
of Italy. The Barillas, who are known for the pastas they sell in America, have
an incredible art collection which includes several van Gogh paintings, have not
confirmed whether or not they own the painting. If Portrait of Dr. Gachet
does resurface, Christine Koenigs hopes that she will be able to get back the
painting and in turn, restore her family’s legacy. | |
Raphael
of Urbino, Portrait of a Young Man Vincent
van Gogh, Portrait of Dr. Gachet |
