Goudstikker "Reclaimed" Show: Searchable Online Inventory Book, Question-Raising Exhibition

Goudstikker heir Marei von Saher at the "Reclaimed" press preview

The most fascinating object in the uneven, possibly problematic traveling show now at the Jewish Museum, New York, Reclaimed: Paintings from the Collection of Jacques Goudstikker (to Aug. 2), is now online and searchable. It's the small, meticulously annotated inventory notebook (have patience; it loads slowly) in which the late dealer listed the bulk of his gallery's holdings. Goudstikker is thought to have left behind some 1,400 works, most of which were seized by the Nazis. He died in a fall off the ship on which he was fleeing the Nazi-invaded Netherlands in 1940.

That notebook became the roadmap for the quest by Goudstikker's sole surviving heir, Marei von Saher, to reclaim the expropriated works. In the biggest-volume restitution of works expropriated during the Nazi era, the Dutch government in 2006 handed over to von Saher some 200 old masters. She consigned more than 100 of those for auction at Christie's the following year, in sales held in New York, London and Amsterdam.

And therein lies the problem: I value this exhibition as an important and moving visual documentation of expropriation and reclamation, although (with important exceptions) many, if not most, of the approximately 50 works on view would not have made the cut for a traditional, quality-based museum exhibition. What unsettled me was the possible commercial subtext: Given the past sales, I couldn't help wondering if I was attending a preview for future sales, in which the allure of the offerings would be enhanced by the imprimatur of the host museums (which include the show's first venue, the Bruce Museum, Greenwich, CT, and three other institutions to which it will travel).

At the press preview earlier this month, I asked von Saher's lawyer, prominent cultural-property attorney Larry Kaye (whose team is still working to find and retrieve some 1,000 Goudstikker works), whether any of the pictures on the Jewish Museum's walls might later be sent to market. His lawyerly reply:

I don't think there are any plans at the moment to sell any works.

Similarly, Anne Scher, the Jewish Museum's director of communications, told me:

No sales of the works in the exhibition are planned.

But Karen Levitov, the museum's associate curator conceded that the museum didn't feel it appropriate to extract assurances from von Saher that the works would not be sold at some point in the future.

In a press release issued in March 2007, Kaye's law firm, Herrick, Feinstein, reported that the Dutch government had purchased from von Saher four of the restituted paintings. She donated to the Netherlands a fifth---the hauntingly eerie "Child on Its Deathbed" by Bartholomeus van der Helst, 1645, which I saw at the Bruce Museum but which is not on view in New York. Levitov told me that Peter Sutton, the Bruce's director and organizer of the show, had "tried to negotiate that loan for us" but couldn't get it. The Jewish Museum's version does include several works that were not at the Bruce.

As I've previously stated here, I recognize that restituted art is the family's to do with whatever it likes, including cashing it in. But a public-spirited disposition of such art (such as donating a good portion of it for public display, to commemorate the victim's legacy) would underscore the point that righting the wrongs of Nazi persecution is, above all, an issue of justice, principle and honoring an ancestor, not personal gain.

Back to the interactive notebook: Just added this week to the exhibition's website, it allows you to flip through its pages or click on thumbnails to get to corresponding notebook entries. But this nifty resource is compromised by a frustrating navigation experience: Its content extends beyond the borders of the screen. You have to keep shifting back and forth and up and down, by scrolling, to play this computer game. Levitov assures me that the techies are now laboring mightily "to shrink it down a bit more."

What's more (as also occured with the in-museum version of the interactive notebook), when I clicked on the thumbnail (left column, fourth from bottom) of Ferdinand Bol's "Louise-Marie Gonzaga de Nevers." the notebook opened to an entry for an entirely different work---a landscape. And when I then hit the "click to view image" link on that landscape entry, I saw a an image of an angel with lute, described as "copy after Hans Memling."

I alerted Karen, who assured me she'd tidy up this digital disarray: "We're trying to get all the bugs out."

Here's an image of the notebook: