ART: Sleuthing for looted paintings

For the past decade, Nancy Yeide has acted as the art world’s version of intrepid detective Nancy Drew in hunting the histories of Nazi-looted artworks.

Ms. Yeide, 49, who heads the curatorial records department at the National Gallery of Art, began her sleuthing in the museum’s collection before searching for the thousands of paintings collected by Adolf Hitler’s henchman, Hermann Goering.

“In learning about the archival resources that document Holocaust-era looting and restitution, it became really evident what had not been done in the field,” says the New Jersey-born scholar. “There had not been a single, complete inventory of Goering’s collection.”

Her exhaustive research, involving thousands of documents in American and European archives, has resulted in the first comprehensive study of the paintings acquired and traded by the No. 2 Nazi.

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Published in June, “Beyond the Dreams of Avarice: The Hermann Goering Collection” (Laurel Publishing) is a painstaking reconstruction of the vast holdings amassed by Goering over a decade. Every known and possible painting in his collection is pictured in the book and accompanied by its history of ownership, known in the art world as “provenance.”

“Many people have published 60-year-old lists of [Nazi] looted paintings, but Nancy’s book is the only one that has made a proper stab at an inventory of a major collection,” says restitution expert Lucian Simmons of Sotheby’s. “It gives museums and collectors the chance to understand what Goering had and a resource for looking up those pictures.”

Next to Hitler, Goering was the most voracious collector of artworks plundered from Nazi-occupied lands. He built galleries at his country estate Carinhall outside Berlin to display his loot, which was transported in his private train.

Art advisers helped Goering in his transactions and trades of pictures for what he thought were better works. In 1944, he exchanged about 150 paintings for a work by Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, but it turned out to be a forgery.

Goering saw his collection as the sign of a sophisticated connoisseur — “I am, after all, a Renaissance man,” he once boasted, but he was more interested in self-aggrandizement than cultural patronage. “Quantity was very clearly more important than quality,” says Ms. Yeide.

The reichsmarschall preferred German, French and Dutch Old Masters paintings and amassed dozens of pictures by the same artists, including some 60 works associated with the German Renaissance artist Lucas Cranach. His taste also extended to schmaltzy landscapes and figurative scenes by contemporary Nazi artists, including Hitler.

Unlike his boss, Goering didn’t completely shun so-called “degenerate” modern works but used them as currency for older masterpieces. Among the important paintings he traded away was Vincent van Gogh’s “Portrait of Dr. Gachet,” which sold at auction in 1990 for $82.5 million.

Past books on Goering estimate his collection at 1,375 works based on a well known inventory of recovered loot. However, Ms. Yeide found his holdings more likely included between 1,700 to 1,800 paintings. “There was a lot that wasn’t evacuated, went missing or was recovered at a later date,” she says.

At the end of World War II, most of Goering’s collection ended up in the small German town of Berchtesgaden where it was secured and inventoried by Allied Forces. Other pieces were sent to another Goering property, Veldenstein in Bavaria. Some works were stolen by the locals from the trains and some recovered by the German government after the war.

“The challenge was finding the archival records [related to Goering’s collection] and then comparing the records to see if there were links among them,” says Ms. Yeide.

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