NAZI ART LOOT FOUND IN SMU MUSEUM IS TIP OF ICEBERG

Hundreds of Thousands of Pieces of Nazi Loot Never Returned to Owners

Many in U.S. Collections

Documentation Unearthed Nearly Weekly

Are There Any in Collections Here?

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Craft Beer and Water Conservation Conference Set for Monday

St. Justa by Bartolome Esteban Murillo, looted from Rothschild Family by Nazis in 1941

Collection, Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University

Special to the Readers of Milwaukeeworld

By Michael Horne

And The Milwaukee World Hound Dog Team 

Dallas native Robert M. Edsel announced yesterday, Thursday, October 22nd 2009, that two paintings in the collection of Southern Methodist University had been looted by the Nazis during World War II and suggested their provenance might not have been clear when they were donated to the institution's Meadows Museum.
Edsel's release said the paintings, St. Justa and St. Rufina, by Bartolome Esteban Murillo, were familiar to him from his visits to the museum in his hometown. But he said he was amazed to find the works documented in photographs of Nazi workshops. His release mentioned that it took over two years for the museum to include the Nazi provenance in its records, and that it is still uncertain whether the original owners, the Rothschild family, had regained control of the works prior to their donation to the Texas university's collection. (The release also mentioned, somewhat gratuitously, that SMU is to be the home of the George W. Bush Presidential Library, where one will be quite unlikely to find art, looted or otherwise.)
Edsel, the founder of the Monuments Men Foundation, and the author of "The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History", had been scheduled to deliver an address at the University on November 23rd entitled "Is Art Worth a Life? Hitler, War and the Monuments Men" even before this announcement.
The foundation's goal is to facilitate the repatriation of looted Nazi artwork and to encourage a systematic survey of works in collections worldwide. This comes at a time when many nations, including Egypt and China are likewise demanding repatriation of works "looted" from their countries, particularly during periods of colonialization.
The Monuments Men organization takes its name from a group of museum administrators who worked to identify the owners of tens of thousands of works of art looted during World War II by the Nazis for a planned Fuhrer's Museum to be located in Hitler's hometown of Linz.
The Monuments Man who located the Murillo paintings was James J. Rorimer, who later went on to direct the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

While time has diminished the numbers of victims of Nazi atrocities, as well as those who committed them, it appears there will be decades of work ahead for those who continue to track the booty of the greatest art heist in history. As Edsel said in his press release,

This is a milestone achievement for the Monuments Men Foundation in fulfilling this portion of its Mission Statement by encouraging all museums to comply with the commonly accepted guidelines concerning objects possibly looted by the Nazis.

Two years ago, Edsel discovered, and donated to the National Archives, photographs of looted art in two leatherbound volumes created for Hitler. According to the National Archivist's statement at the time:

"It is exciting to know that original documents shedding light on this important aspect of World War II are still being located, especially so because of the hundreds of thousands of cultural items stolen from victims of Hitler and the Nazis that are still missing."



Are there any such items of dubious provenance in Milwaukee collections? Around here more attention has been paid to works created by Nazi artists on display at the Grohmann Museum at Milwaukee School of Engineering. Marquette University has the Marvin and Janet Fishman collection of Neue Sachlickheit "New Objectivity" artwork of pre-Nazi Germany, which is the sort of work the Nazis would have burned, rather than collected.
A previous work about the Monuments Men by Edsel, Rescuing DaVinci, includes the story of Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine, which was displayed at the Milwaukee Art Museum in the exhibition Leonardo Da Vinci and the Splendor of Poland: A History of Collecting and Patronage in 2002-2003. [MAM personnel were not immediately available to respond to an inquiry about its conformity with American Association of Museum protocols on Nazi-looted art.--Ed.]
UPDATE -- Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 -- Laurie Winters, Director of Exhibitons at the Milwaukee Art Museum, called to say "we don't have anything that would fall into that category [un-repatriated art that had been looted by the Nazis]. We have researched the collection for some time. But we are clear on that."


CRAFT BREWERS - WATER CONSERVATION CONFERENCE MONDAY

After several months of planning, Milwaukee beer expert Lucy Saunders is ready to launch the Great Lakes Craft Brewers and Water Conservation Conference at Discovery World at Pier Wisconsin Monday, October 26th, 2009. Saunders has scored some impressive talent for the event, including Wisconsin Secretary of Commerce Dick J. Leinenkugel, recently mentioned as a possible Democratic party candidate to replace retiring Governor Jim Doyle.
It will be a Leinenkugel family reunion on Monday, when Dick's brother Jake Leinenkugel, president of the Jacob Leinenkugel Brewing Company, will speak at Splash! an open-to-the-public reception to be held in the Pilot House at Pier Wisconsin on Monday evening from 5-8 p.m. [Tickets are still available at $45 per person.]
Splash! will also include beer and cheese tastings, including fromage from Crave Brothers Farmstead Cheese, artisan cheesemakers who were visited by Agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack earlier in the month.
Vilsack and Doyle toured the farm's manure digester, but the focus of the water conservation conference will deal with brewery waste products and the increasing importance of conserving water. A field trip Tuesday will tour the wastewater treatment facility of New Glarus Brewing Company, the first of its kind outside the Pacific Rim, and a presentation Monday by Jeff Edgerton of Bridge Port Brewery, Portland, Oregon, will discuss his near-biblical feat of using only four barrels of water to produce one barrel of beer.

--Michael Horne