Hedwig’s Lost Van Gogh

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin in March of eighteen eighty six. Vincent then go move from Antwerp to Paris to live with his brother Theo in montmart.

00:00:31
Speaker 2: He very soon became befriended with some of the other artists living there who would become very famous within the next decades, like, for example, Paul Signac On Reader to Lose Lutrech, Emil Bernard and some others, and he learned a lot from.

00:00:49
Speaker 1: Them, Stefan Koldorff German art.

00:00:52
Speaker 2: Expert, and that led to his willingness to make experiments in becoming an artist. When he painted in rather dark brownish grayish tones during his time before in the Netherlands, he now was willing to try out what to do with color, how to form things with color.

00:01:12
Speaker 1: In Vengo's effort to master oil painting, he painted still lives, mostly flowers he couldn't afford models. In a space of a few years, he produced dozens and dozens of paintings.

00:01:23
Speaker 2: The Paris period means that van Goch just had decided to become an artist. He no longer wanted to try other professions like he did before, like being a preacher or a teacher, or helping people. He now made the decision I want to be a painter, and he knew that Paris is the place to be.

00:01:44
Speaker 1: My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things Overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is a continuation of my investigation into the hoarding habits of art museums. It's about one of those dozens of still lives. Vang painted in his Paris period, a small canvas seventeen inches by fourteen inches, vas with carnations. That little painting, it turns out, has a strange and troubled history. Vengo painted vas with carnations right after his arrival in Paris. At some point after his death four years later, it was acquired by a wealthy German couple.

00:02:35
Speaker 2: Had Uhlmann and her husband Abert Ulman were one of the most important art collector couples in Frankfurt in Western Germany. They made their money out of business. They very early decided to invest money in works of art which were not commonly regarded as very important works. So they were very daring collectors, and that shows that it was not only investment, it was also the love of art which led them to buying works, for example, by Fangoch, but also by several Impressionist painters.

00:03:15
Speaker 1: Headwick Ohman sold Vas with Carnations on consignment to an art dealer who took it back to New York just before the Second World War. That dealer, in turn sold it to William Getz, one of the most powerful producers in Hollywood. Getz and his wife Edith, daughter of the legendary Louis B. Mayer, had one of the greatest private collections of Impressionist art in the world.

00:03:39
Speaker 3: My grandmother was called the Hostess of Hollywood, and she spent her entire life hosting lavish dinner parties people the likes of Laurence Olivier and Trim Caa PODi and Jil Brenner.

00:03:53
Speaker 1: That's gets his granddaughter, Victoria Bleden.

00:03:56
Speaker 3: I mean, I had dinner with Laurence Olivier when I was six years old. You know, I'd be sitting amongst the fans and latour and the dagga and the manna, and this is this is this is our childhood. You know, finger bowl, the whole nine yards, and then they would have movies in the living room. And in the living room, perhaps you've seen any pictures of it. But I mean, this is where the money, the blue Picasso, the other Picasso which she had, a harlequin it was called, and all these things through on the wall, and all of a sudden we sit in the dive in the living room, and all the couches and everything, and a painting would come up and the screen would come down, and then we'd watched movies kind of for our child.

00:04:35
Speaker 1: Is the priceless art would disappear into the ceiling and a movie screen would descend in its place. If that isn't the greatest metaphor for Hollywood, I don't know what is. In nineteen fifty six, Kirk Douglas started a movie about van Go called Lust for Life.

00:04:54
Speaker 4: Few people know the real story of this intense, strong willed man. Now his tumultuous career is revealed for the first time with frankness and intimacy, with all that.

00:05:05
Speaker 1: If you look at the corner of the movie poster for Lust for Life, there it is Carnations. But by then Getz it sold it. He didn't hang on to his van Go the way he did his other treasures. It wasn't for him. The painting passed to the heiress to the Kmart fortune, Katherine Kresgi, who among other things, was once married to a Swedish baron. She convinced him to leave London and come live with her in her native Detroit. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Swedish baron's order for miss Gresgy did not survive the move to Michigan. When Kresgi died in nineteen ninety, she willed vaz with carnations to the Detroit Institute of Art. She gave it without restriction, meaning the di Ia as it's known, could do with it what they wanted, sell it, trade it. They didn't have to make it part of their permanent collection. Kresgy clearly didn't care any more for the painting than Getz did, and neither did the di Ia. They put it in her basement for twenty years. Vincent van Go painted many remarkable canvasses. This is not one of them.

00:06:07
Speaker 2: He also painted larger flower still lives in Paris, but this is a smaller one. Thus kind of canvas which I think was not meant for sale or as a present for acquaintances or girlfriends or his models or so. It was just for trying out things.

00:06:26
Speaker 1: Our experts like to damn with faint praise. Vaz with Carnations gets a lot of faint praise.

00:06:33
Speaker 2: It's very nice, it's very profound, but it's not a very well spectacular composition or color combination. It's just a kind of let me try out what happens if I do this, if I do this, and so it's a nice but not really an important work.

00:06:53
Speaker 1: The current head of the Detroit Institute of Art, Salvador Cellar Ponds, says, the problem is that Viz with Carnations just doesn't look like a van Go. When you say it doesn't look like a van Go, what.

00:07:04
Speaker 5: Do you mean?

00:07:05
Speaker 6: Does it look like the sunflowers?

00:07:07
Speaker 1: Yeah?

00:07:09
Speaker 6: I mean it's not a typical work like you would like the self portrait or the works that he did when he was in the south of France. Those are the most famous works that the general public knows Bangou did.

00:07:28
Speaker 1: Then there's the fact that the painting had a stamp on the back, a sign that it was painted on a fancy bit of stretch canvas. Then Go in his Parisiers was broke. What was he doing with a fancy canvas? It took years to resolve that particular discrepancy and In the meantime, lots of people began to think vuzz with carnations was a fake.

00:07:52
Speaker 6: Later we discovered that that canvas with the stap on the back was not actually part of the work. It was added later. So you had the original canvas, then you have a lightning canvas glued to the original canvas, and then you had the third canvas with a stencil or a stamp on the back. So once we removed that, we understood that was not part of the original work.

00:08:21
Speaker 1: So here we have a van Go that does not look like a van Go, that was never intended to be sold or shown or even given away, that a German couple bought somewhere around the turn of the century and then sold that turned up in the home of a Hollywood mogul and served as a prop in a Kirk Douglas movie poster, then finally landed in Detroit with a Kmart heiress who threw it in as an afterthought when she made her bequest to the Dia, whereupon the painting languished in a cellar for a quarter century because of a dubious bit of canvas glued to the back. What's your personal feeling about this painting.

00:09:02
Speaker 5: Do you like it?

00:09:02
Speaker 1: Are you drawn to it?

00:09:10
Speaker 6: I like it because I have a personal story connected to it. You know, when I came to the museum, the painting was in storage as an attributed painting by Vangal with basically no value. I was able to bring it up to the galleries and put it together with the other four bangals that the DIA has a word that it looks like a painting by a Sunday painter, as considered by a forger, would have no value, no monetary value. But the minute we consider it as by Vango, it has a value of several million dollars. However, the painting has not changed. The painting continues to be what it is. What has changed is the perception that we have on the painting, and that is a really interesting concept to think about. So I like the painting a lot for that.

00:10:05
Speaker 5: Yeah.

00:10:06
Speaker 1: But if someone said to you, when you retire as to directory, you can take one of the DIA's van goes with you, which one would you take?

00:10:13
Speaker 3: Not this one? No?

00:10:18
Speaker 1: So why should we care about Vaz with carnations.

00:10:21
Speaker 7: We shouldn't.

00:10:22
Speaker 1: It's not the painting that matters. The painting is just a mcguffin. In case you don't know what I mean by mcguffin, let's consult The Dick Cavett Show, nineteen seventy two. Cavit's guest is the legendary film director Alfred Hitchcock, the great proponent of mcguffin's.

00:10:48
Speaker 5: Can explain what a mcguffin.

00:10:49
Speaker 8: Yes, a mcguffin you see in most films about spies. It is a thing that the spies are after. In the days of Roger Kipling, it will be the plans of the fort on the Kaiber Pass. It would be the plans of an airplane engine, and the plans of an anthem bomb, anything you like. It's always called the thing that the characters on the screen worry about, but the audience don't care.

00:11:25
Speaker 1: The mcguffin is an object used to propel the plot, to motivate the characters, but which has no intrinsic value to anyone else. VARs with carnations is a mcguffin.

00:11:36
Speaker 8: It's described in a scene in an English train going to Scotland, and one man says to the other opposite him, he said, what's that package above your head there? Now? The man said, oh, that that's a mcguffin. He said, What is a mcguffin. He said, well, it's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands. Man said, but there are no lions in the Scottish Islands. He said, then that's no mcguffin.

00:12:12
Speaker 3: I thank you for clearing that up for us.

00:12:16
Speaker 1: I repeat, it's not the painting that matters. That has always been the mistake with the way people have thought about Vozwi carnations. No more mcguffins. After the break, let's start this story again.

00:12:41
Speaker 9: Let's just talk about your family. Your great grandmother is Hedwig Ulmen.

00:12:47
Speaker 7: Yes, that's correct.

00:12:48
Speaker 10: Yes, she came from a family who had for a very long time lived in Frankfurt. You know, many relatives, very embedded history in the city.

00:12:58
Speaker 1: I'm talking with Sophie Allen. She lives in Melbourne. Her great grandmother was Hedwig Ulmen, the first known owner of Ozwi carnations. Hedwig was born in eighteen seventy two into a wealthy family in Germany, married Albert Ohlmann, lived with him in a grand residence called the Villa Gerlock in Frankfurt, and together built an extraordinary art collection.

00:13:25
Speaker 10: So she collected with a great passion medieval sculpture.

00:13:29
Speaker 7: That was a huge passion of hers.

00:13:31
Speaker 10: She collected porcelain, she collected silver, and I believe she had different rooms for each of these passions in her home.

00:13:43
Speaker 1: Hedwig and Albert had two sons and many grandchildren, one of whom was named Claude. Sophie's father.

00:13:51
Speaker 9: Now, did he remember Hedwig?

00:13:53
Speaker 10: Oh, he was so attached to Hedwig. He was I think the favorite, and she was his favorite. He always spoke of her really fondly, and I think he felt that was probably the person he loved the most.

00:14:07
Speaker 9: Did he talk about what she was like.

00:14:09
Speaker 7: Yes, a little bit.

00:14:11
Speaker 10: Yeah, I mean from what he could remember as a young boy, very warm and loving and quite gentle, incredibly interested in the arts.

00:14:23
Speaker 1: But the life of Claude's grandparents took a sudden turn because the Almonds were Jewish.

00:14:29
Speaker 10: Frankfort was already starting to change in by nineteen thirty three, and I'm not sure exactly what date, but I know that going to the opera became an issue. If you had a Jewish heritage, you couldn't. There was a stage where you couldn't go to the opera, and that was something that Hedvig did constantly.

00:14:45
Speaker 7: She lived around the corner from the opera house. You know, her lifestyle started to change, and so did my grandparents. So they left.

00:14:52
Speaker 10: They left first, and Hedvig didn't come to Milan till right, you know, maybe within six months or the last six months that they were there.

00:15:01
Speaker 9: She's going to be a lot of what year thirty eight or thirty nine, what year do you know?

00:15:05
Speaker 7: I think it was that right at the end of nineteen thirty eight.

00:15:09
Speaker 1: The end of nineteen thirty eight was, of course, Crystal Knocked, the Night of Broken Glass, when at Hitler's direction, mobs destroyed hundreds of synagogues and yeshivas across Germany. It was impossible to be a German Jew. After Crystal Knocked and imagined that you were safe. Hadwig sold off as much of her art collection as she could. She fled to Milan to join her sons. Then the intentions of Mussolini towards Jews became clear, and the whole family fled again, this time to Australia.

00:15:41
Speaker 9: So they got out in.

00:15:43
Speaker 10: The neck of time, yes they did, and they go via the Panama Canal. I remember my father, I don't know how on earth he could have remembered that because he was under two years of age, But I think it was about a six week trip and the two brothers with their families. They both had two children each, and hedvig As as the matriarch. They brought her or so there were nine of them.

00:16:07
Speaker 1: They made it to Melbourne change their last names Allman became Olan and in May of nineteen forty five, four days before the end of the war, Hedwick died.

00:16:18
Speaker 10: My father and my uncle probably spent most of their lives just assimilating and embracing the life they had, and I think bearing the sadness as much as they could, because there's definitely.

00:16:33
Speaker 7: A sadness.

00:16:34
Speaker 10: There's gratitude and there's sadness. They go they kind of almost they go along together in our life and it's come through to my generation too in a way.

00:16:43
Speaker 7: Yeah.

00:16:46
Speaker 1: Then late in his life, Claude Ollen decided to revisit the family's past to find the family's art collection that had been lost in the desperate escape from Germany. What do you think motivated him, what was his How would he have expressed his desire to pursue his.

00:17:02
Speaker 10: Claims without sounding dramatic It's just I know that my father, all throughout his life, to some degree, maybe within his psyche or he struggled with the fact that the family had had to leave Europe. It was like a baseline in his life that there'd been this massive disruption, and it just carried this sense of loss.

00:17:32
Speaker 7: It started. It would have started with the loss of Headvig.

00:17:35
Speaker 10: That would be the first loss he could understand, because it was a loved grandmother, the one who gave him, who doated on him. From the stories, I thought he was the bee's knees, and he was closer to to Headvig than he was to his own mother.

00:17:50
Speaker 1: So Claude Allen sat down and went through his grandmother's papers, trying to reconstruct what artworks she and her family had owned in the years before the war and where they had ended up. Some of the works had vanished, others were in plain sight. You can find a few for yourself if you spend a few hours poking around the internet. There's a Paul Gogen sold by Hedwig's sister in law in nineteen thirty eight as she too fled Frankfort. That painting ended up at the Toledo Museum of art in Ohio. The family had sold the Gogen along with a lovely van Go called the Diggers. The Diggers ended up in the hands of a department store air, who then gave it to the Detroit Institute of Art in the late nineteen sixties. There's a Virgin and Child by Lucas Kronoch the Elder from the sixteenth century, now in the University of Arizona Museum of Art. Then there were the four beautiful wall panels in Hedwig's dining room by the prominent German landscape painter Hans Toma Spring, summer, winter, fall. Claude Ullen couldn't find out where any of those had gone. And finally there was the small, modest still life acquired by Hedwig and her husband back in the heyday of their collecting, Vozwi Carnations Vincent Vengo, eighteen eighty six.

00:19:13
Speaker 10: I wasn't alive during Hedwig's lifetime. I wasn't even born. I wasn't born for another quarter of a century even more. But she was very much a part of our lives, which was talked about constantly and very fondly, and her life was all around us in some way.

00:19:29
Speaker 1: As Claude Ollen began his investigation into Hedwig's last art collections. Other Holocaust survivors and her families started to do the same thing. There were conferences, laws passed. Europe in particular had a growing movement to reconsider the status of art sold lost or confiscated during the.

00:19:48
Speaker 10: War, and it seemed that the world was changing and a restitution might be possible. My father was very excited and hopeful, deeply hopeful about it, whilst I had a very different reaction.

00:20:01
Speaker 7: I was a young adult at the time.

00:20:03
Speaker 10: I was almost sort of like, I don't let's don't get your hopes up, don't go there.

00:20:09
Speaker 7: It's just going to bring up I think it's because I thought it was going to bring.

00:20:13
Speaker 10: Up all these feelings that I knew were down there, but I didn't know what they were.

00:20:18
Speaker 7: And it's very it's.

00:20:20
Speaker 10: Actually for someone whose third generation is still very confronting, and that's actually surprises me, and still it continues to surprise me. I never met Headvig, so why do I feel like this?

00:20:32
Speaker 7: But I do.

00:20:33
Speaker 10: It is very much a part of me, and it's almost inexplicable. I'm sort of trying to interrogate it a little bit more now because I have to face some of these things, some of these situations with the paintings and what to do with a legacy.

00:20:51
Speaker 9: I think it's a really interesting and important point because you know, it was when your father pursued some of these claims. It's not just about the art, it's about healing.

00:21:03
Speaker 10: Oh yeah, absolutely, It's not necessarily about material possesions. The material possessions are kind of like the marker or it's everything orience itself around, but it's not actually what this is really all about.

00:21:17
Speaker 7: The art is a symbol.

00:21:18
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:21:22
Speaker 1: I think it's important to understand what Claude Ollen was up against in his attempt to locate his grandmother's lost art collection. So allow me a digression about a man named Charles Venable. Some years ago, Venable was named director of the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. It was his first director's job, and he decided to begin by taking a close look at the museum's collection.

00:21:51
Speaker 5: And it started with our works on paper collection, where we were just going to get an you know, get some expertise in and we will to look at every single work on paper.

00:22:00
Speaker 1: To help him, Venable brought in a former curator from the Cleveland Museum of Art, which is one of the country's best collections of works on paper.

00:22:09
Speaker 5: The time we went through everything, she said, you have about fifty exceptional pieces out of how many It wasn't a huge collection, but we probably had a couple thousand oh pieces. And then she said, and here's another group that are nice. But in the end it was like, you should just get rid of all of these.

00:22:28
Speaker 1: Keep the fifty good ones, the a pluses, the rest venables sold at auction. And if I'd asked you before that process began in Louisville, what percentage were a plus? What would you have said?

00:22:40
Speaker 5: Works on paper not my curatorial area. But nevertheless I would have said, you know, you would have to have half of them I suppose be exceptional works of art, or why would you have taken them?

00:22:52
Speaker 1: Venable next became the director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, or as it is now known, New Fields. When he arrived, the museum had fifty five thousand objects. It was adding close to one thousand new objects a year, and was on the verge of building a multimillion dollar storage facility to house its ever expanding collection. And Venable's main thought was what if Indianapolis was like Louisville and much of the stuff they were storing at such great expense wasn't worth keeping. So he and his curators at Newfields began coming through every one of the objects in the museum's collection. They assigned each artwork a grade. A was for something that any museum in the world would want. These were things that made sense for Indianapolis to have it in its collection. C's were d's didn't belong at all. The good stuff and the bad stuff were easy to identify, but it took years to figure out the bees and c's. The curators did tons of research, debated, and kept going piece by piece.

00:24:01
Speaker 5: Our collection is now about forty four thousand works of art, down from fifty five fifty five five thousand.

00:24:10
Speaker 1: But Venables still not finished.

00:24:12
Speaker 5: Right now, our collection, based on six years of ranking, is about thirty three percent a's, so right there, those are going nowhere. So there's you know, thousands of works of art, and then clearly we would want a good number of bees of works that we couldn't replace or they're considered totally worthy to be in the gallery for one reason or not but if you take just the c's and the rest of our d's, you know there's probably I'm guessing will be at twenty five thirty thousand works of art.

00:24:47
Speaker 1: They have thousands more to go to be auctioned off or given away.

00:24:52
Speaker 5: We have huge, big holdings in contemporary glass, but we don't need four hundred pieces in storage, So we gave one hundred pieces of contemporary glass to the Glick Center for Glass at Ball State University in Munsey, Indiana, so students could learn technical from them.

00:25:10
Speaker 1: Now, if you listen to the previous episode, you know that no one does this in the museum world. No one tries to get smaller. No one gives things away like that, certainly not on the scale that Venable is doing in Indiana, because most art museums are like smog the dragon. They're hoarders, deep in their layers, fiercely guarding their treasures. Here's an actual headline from Art News, one of the major publications of the Art World. Quote is Charles Venable democratizing a great art museum in Indianapolis or destroying it?

00:25:50
Speaker 9: Are you a kind of Marie? Are you the Marie condo? Is your apartment?

00:25:55
Speaker 1: Like minimalist. Do you get rid of old clothes you no longer wear them? I mean, does this carry over to your private life?

00:26:01
Speaker 4: Oh?

00:26:01
Speaker 5: I not particularly. I mean my husband is much more than eat Nick, who would say I'm going to go through my closet and get rid of all these things, whereas I'm saying, oh, well, I just love that shirt and it might hang in my closet for years years, it could be ten years old, and shoes even worse. But that's not running an art museum.

00:26:22
Speaker 1: Charles Venable is different, not because he's some kind of weird neat Nick. He's different because he sees the problem his profession has and he's figured out a way to do something about it. I asked Randy Frost about what it takes to convince a holder to thin their collection. He's the psychologist we met in the last episode who studies hoarding. He told me that with hoarders, the first step is talking about the object. So you're saying, in this case, the act of forcing someone to conceive and verbalize their attachment to the object helps them get rid of it. Yes, shatters the bond in some.

00:27:05
Speaker 11: Way, or well, I think it puts their attachments into the context of the values of their life. Because we focus a lot on values. What is it that you value in your life? What do you want your life to be like? And once you start talking about this and have this set of ideas about the value and where you want to go in your life, together, it changes the valance of the object.

00:27:33
Speaker 1: This is what Charles Venable and his curators were doing in Indianapolis as they work their way through the collection, changing the valance of the objects. They were asking what is it that we value as a museum? Is this object consistent with those values? Acquiring art costs money. The museum is a nonprofit with a mandate to serve the people of Indiana. Venable doesn't see how collecting more and more stuff that the public will never see, not to mention spending millions of dollars to warehouses somewhere, is consistent without responsibility.

00:28:09
Speaker 5: You know, you need more conservators, you need more art handlers, you need more registrars, you need bigger computer systems.

00:28:15
Speaker 1: If you ask Charles Vennable to give up a work of art for some broader, larger reason, he could do it because he's developed a system for giving things up. So I asked him theoretically about how he and his curators might evaluate Vaz with Carnations if it were in their collection. So there's about as famous as artist as you could find, but it's very much a minor work of that artist.

00:28:40
Speaker 8: Is that not?

00:28:41
Speaker 1: Is that an A or not an A?

00:28:42
Speaker 5: I mean not knowing that particular painting. So I'm just thinking as a as a sort of track question famous artist minor work. We wouldn't call that an A would get We would give it a little bump because it's by Van Goh, a very famous artist, But it wouldn't make it an A just because it had his name on it. It would have it would be a minor work by that artist. And then the questions we would ask is are we doing a great artist by Van Go in many ways change the course of Western art history? Are we doing his legacy and his work a good deed by showing a pretty minor, mediocre work in a great institution, and particularly an institution that has much better works by Van Go? You know where you can show an A plus at a place like Detroit. Why would you bother with a minor thing? If we were offered a painting like that, we would if somebody wanted we wouldn't buy it for sure, And if somebody wanted to give it to us, we would say, well, this is not something that's right to go on our walls. If you want to give it to us, are you willing to let us sell it and then bring the money back to the collection and buy something that your name can go on.

00:30:01
Speaker 1: Charles Venable is adept at changing the valance of the objects in his possession. He can give things up, but he's the exception. The rest of the art world is still in the grip of their compulsion. So back to Claude Ullen, who as a child fled Europe with his family. About fifteen years ago, Allen started asking the museums holding Hedwig's art to do a version of what Charles Venable does at Indianapolis, or what Randy Frost tries to teach hoarders to break their attachment to a specific object by asking a broader question about its relationship to their own values. In essence, Alan told the museums, my grandmother and her family sold some of their prized possessions in a moment of desperation and panic to help finance their escape from certain death. Are you sure you feel right about owning an object with that kind of history. Allens started with the Gaugain Street in Tahiti and the van go The Diggers that were once owned by Hedwig's brother and sister in law. Allen and a group of his relatives approached the Toledo Museum and the Detroit Institute of Art with their requests. The family was forced to give these paintings up under duress in nineteen thirty eight. Could they get them back? And what happened? The two museums turned around and sued the Islans. That was in order to and this is one of those wonderful legal euphemisms, quiet the title to the painting. And when the case went to court, the museums won on the narrow grounds that the statute of limitations had expired. According to the Federal Court in Detroit, the Allens case would have been valid only if they had filed a claim for the Diggers within three years of way the painting was first sold. It was sold in nineteen thirty eight, so they needed to have asked for it back by nineteen forty one, when those members of the Yellen family who had not managed to flee for their lives were sitting in concentration camps. Allen had asked the museums to consider the morality of their attachments. They responded by pointing to the legality of their attachments. They don't want to make this about values. No holder would consider the story of another vango, a spectacular painting called the Night Cafe. It was once owned by a Russian collector. The Bolsheviks seized it when they took power in nineteen eighteen. It's worth hundreds of millions today. Later it was sold by the Soviets to the heir to the Singer's sewing machine fortune. The Soviets collected a huge profit. The heir later willed it to the Yale University Art Museum. Then the original owners descendant came to Yale and said that painting was stolen from my great grandfather. Did yell give it back?

00:33:16
Speaker 8: Of course not.

00:33:17
Speaker 1: They soothed the great grandson and won. There's a picasso in the Metropolitan Museum in New York called The Actor, worth well over one hundred million dollars. It had been owned by Paul and Alice Leffmann, a Jewish couple in Cologne, Germany, who fled for Italy in nineteen thirty seven. Sound familiar. They sold the painting to pay for their escape. Their great grand niece soothed the Met to get it back, saying that it was given up under duress. The court ruled in favor of the Met. The judge in the case said that the Leftmans weren't technically under duress because duress, for the purposes of the law requires quote fear induced by a specific and concrete threat of harm purposefully presented by its author to extort the victim's consent. In other words, in order for the Leftmans to get their Picasso back, an official in the Nazi Party would have had to come to them in nineteen thirty seven, put a gun directly to their head and say sell me your Picasso. And because the Fascists chose to be a touch more subtle in their methods of extortion, that painting still hangs today on the walls of the Met and Vaz with carnations. There's a legal loophole in that case as well. Hedwig gave it to an art dealer in nineteen thirty eight, but that was to sell on consignment, and the art dealer took it to New York and didn't get around to selling it until after the war was over. Hedwig may have given it up under duress of the Nazi threat, but it wasn't sold under the duress of the Nazi threat. Claude Ullen had no legal claim to Vaz with Carnations, just a moral claim, and moral claims matched up against the compulsions of the hoarder don't amount to much.

00:35:16
Speaker 6: In the end.

00:35:16
Speaker 1: It was not a museum that returned any piece of Hedwig's original art collection. It was a packaged goods company, one that sells flower biscuits and beer, the Utker Group, based three hours north of Frankfurt, the Kraft Foods of Germany. The company's former CEO, Rudolf Auguste Utker, had an extensive art collection. The company did a providence check of his paintings and they discovered that in nineteen fifty four, Rudolf had bought one of the four Hans Toma wall paintings that had once hung in Hedwig's living room, a large canvas of children dancing around a blooming tree. One day, out of the blue, your father hears that one of his beloved grandmother's paintings is coming back.

00:36:00
Speaker 7: Yeah, instead of really hit him to the court.

00:36:03
Speaker 1: The heirs did not know the whereabouts of the painting. I'm reading now from the short statement released by the Ukka Group after they contacted the islands. The company advised them that the painting was in its possession and that it wished to return it to them on moral grounds. The heirs have gratefully accepted.

00:36:24
Speaker 9: Do you remember, can you describe what happened when he first.

00:36:27
Speaker 7: Dad would have cried.

00:36:29
Speaker 10: Yeah, he was quite emotional and he was quite emotional about this aspect, and we had several conversations over it, and he would cry nearly every single time.

00:36:42
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:36:43
Speaker 9: Yeah, Is it a beautiful painting, Yes.

00:36:46
Speaker 7: Yeah it is. It's a beautiful painting.

00:36:48
Speaker 10: But it also starts to complete the circle within our family, the stories we would tell because Hedwig had a room where there were the hounds Tomer works. It was a dining room and they were painted around the room and Hans Thomer, I think was one of the art she loved the most. So to have a work returned was it was like almost a completing of the circle.

00:37:17
Speaker 7: And yeah, it was. It was deeply meaningful, especially to my father.

00:37:23
Speaker 1: Claude Allen died shortly after his grandmother's painting was returned. As for vas with Carnations, it's still in Detroit. The Olans are not pursuing their claims to that painting. They know they never win. And where is the painting currently? Is it now on display or is it still in storage?

00:37:44
Speaker 9: Where is it now in the in the museum.

00:37:47
Speaker 6: It's on display, It's been on display, and it was recently featuring an exhibition in the Barberini Gallery in Postam next to Berlina about Bango still lifes.

00:38:03
Speaker 1: The Detroit Institute of Art is in midtown Detroit, across Woodward Avenue from the main branch of the Public Library. A beautiful building with an extraordinary collection. If you get a chance, go and see Vaz with Carnations, and if you like it, stop by the gift shop and pick up a pair of Vaz with Carnations socks for nineteen ninety five, one size fits all, and Voz with Carnations Aloes soap for sixteen ninety five in a little round ten with Van Goh's Carnations on the cover. But don't spend too much time thinking about the painting. The painting is a mcguffin. Think about where it came from and what it stands for, and then do me a favor. When you leave, put a note in the suggestion box. I have seen Vaz with carnations. It doesn't belong here. Revision's History is produced by Mielo, Belle and Leemingestou with Jacob Smith, Aloise Linton and Anna and I. Our editor is Julia Barton. Original scoring by Luis Garra, mastering by Flawn Williams, fact checking by Beth Johnson, and special thanks to the Pushkin Crew Heather Fane, Carl Migliore, Maya Canick, Maggie Taylor, Jason Gambrel and of course El Hafe, Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Glappo.