The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [28]
But in March 1938, Germany had swallowed up Austria. From that date onward, the Nazis declared, the courts’ decisions no longer applied. What belonged to Austria belonged to Germany.
In December 1939, a German industrialist named Philip Reemtsa made an offer to the Czernins of roughly $9.8 million in today’s dollars for The Art of Painting. Reemtsa was a crony of Goering, and a sale to him was, in effect, a sale to Goering. (A few years before, Goering had established an “Art Fund” to provide his admirers a convenient way of demonstrating their support. Reemtsa contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the fund each year.) Goering sent a telegram with Reemtsa’s offer saying that he welcomed the sale.
The head of the Austrian Monuments Office balked and made an appeal to Hitler. A national treasure like this should not disappear into private hands, he argued. If The Art of Painting was to have a new home, then surely it belonged in a “state museum.”
The state museum the Austrian official had in mind, it went without saying, was Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, the fine arts palace overflowing with the accumulated treasures of the Habsburg emperors. But with Hitler prowling around, any mention of the word museum was a tactical blunder. Ah yes, a museum! What better home could The Art of Painting have than the magnificent new museum at Linz?
First, Hitler pushed Goering aside. Goering gave way immediately and wrote a new telegram giving up his claim to The Art of Painting. His chief of staff had “mistakenly sent off the [previous] telegram before I saw it,” Goering wrote. The Vermeer would indeed have made him a fine birthday gift, Goering noted, but not, of course, if the Fuehrer had other plans for it.
Posse stepped in to negotiate a deal on the Fuehrer’s behalf. Had the Czernins been Jewish, this would have been the work of a minute, but here outright confiscation would not do. Hitler called for a tax audit of the Czernins, in the hope of finding something to exploit. It failed to turn up anything. No chance of a deal, then, where the painting could be used to settle an outstanding bill. Then another roadblock: Eugen Czernin didn’t want to sell. Posse persuaded him to reconsider.
By October of 1940, The Art of Painting was in Hitler’s hands. In today’s dollars, the final price was about $9 million, some $800,000 less than Goering had offered via Reemtsa. Count Jaromir Czernin wrote Hitler a short note expressing his “wish that the picture may, My Fuehrer, always bring you joy.”
IN APRIL 1943, Hitler revealed the plans for his art museum to the public for the first time. The news came packaged in a special edition of Heinrich Hoffmann’s sumptuously printed art magazine, Kunst dem Volk, timed to coincide with Hitler’s birthday. Hitler had given his people a gift they would always remember, the magazine announced. (Hitler himself had gone over the wording.) Germany would never be able to repay “its debt of gratitude to its Fuehrer,” whose devotion to the beautification of his nation was unbounded. Other museums had taken centuries to assemble their collections, the magazine noted, but in a few brief years Hitler and his Linz museum had outdone them.
One color illustration after another showed the best of these “acquisitions” from “private collections.” There were fifteen illustrations in all—Leonardo da Vinci’s Leda, Brueghel’s Hay Harvest, and Rembrandt’s Hendrickje Stoffels among them.*
The Art of Painting graced the cover.
15
GOERING’S ART COLLECTION
Until the end, and past it, Goering baffled