Vermeer's Art of Painting: sold in 1940, still disputed

On 4 October 1940 Jaromir Czernin, owner of the Czernin family picture gallery in Vienna, accepted an offer from Hans Posse. Posse directed the collection for Hitler’s planned museum in Linz. The offer was 1,650,000 Reichsmarks for Johannes Vermeer’s The Art of Painting. It was a private sale, so there was no hammer price and no buyer’s premium. The Austrian Art Restitution Advisory Board later put Czernin’s net sum at about 1,270,000 Reichsmarks, after an inheritance fee. The sources consulted record no charge against either man.

Czernin had wanted to sell for years. The family had held the canvas since the 1800s, and the museum dates its arrival in Vienna to 1813, though the Lexikon Provenienzforschung says 1804. The family entail, a legal bond that kept the collection whole, was dissolved in 1924, and the picture was put under a preservation order. The monuments office then refused the export licence that a foreign buyer needed. In 1933 Czernin and his uncle Eugen agreed that Jaromir would sell it, with 20 percent of the proceeds going to Eugen. Talks in 1936 with the dealers Duveen Brothers, acting for Andrew Mellon, reached about $1 million but no contract. In 1939 Hitler saw the painting in Munich and did not pay the asking price of 1,700,000 Reichsmarks. A sale to a Hamburg cigarette maker then failed when Vienna’s monuments offices had Hitler stop it.

In September 1940 Czernin gave Hitler’s side an option to buy. The painting went to Munich and was listed for Linz as no. 1096a. During the war it was stored in the Altaussee salt mine. After the war it reached the Munich Central Collecting Point, run by the US forces. In November 1945 it was handed to the Austrian government. The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna holds it today and records it as inventoried in 1958.

Czernin applied for restitution in 1947. The Restitution Commission refused him on 11 January 1949, and the Supreme Restitution Commission did so on 14 May 1949. Both found that neither he nor his wife had been persecuted and that the sale was free of coercion. In 1952 a court declared the painting forfeit to the Austrian state as Hitler’s property. A second application failed in 1955, when the Finance Minister called the sale a speculation that Czernin had thought favourable. The Administrative Court dismissed his appeal in 1960.

In 2009 Czernin’s heirs, among them his daughter Sophie Czernin, asked for the painting back through the lawyer Andreas Theiss. Der Standard reports their case. Czernin’s second wife, Alix-May, had been classed as a “second-degree Mischling” under Nazi law, meaning one Jewish grandparent. The heirs say she was persecuted and that Czernin sold under pressure. Theiss called the sale the price of survival. Helga Conrad, Czernin’s stepdaughter, made a separate claim through the lawyer E. Randol Schoenberg.

On 18 March 2011 the Board unanimously recommended against returning the painting. It found no sign that Czernin was persecuted and noted that he had applied to join the Nazi Party in 1940. It also found that he had wanted to sell since 1933, that his own lawyers pushed the sale, that the price was close to what the Hamburg buyer would have paid, and that he pressed for payment and thanked Hitler in writing. Sabine Haag, the museum’s director, said she was relieved. Schoenberg called the decision an insult and asked for arbitration. Board decisions cannot be appealed. On 23 March 2011 Theiss told Die Presse that a lawsuit in the United States was likely in the end.