The story of Claremont McKenna College history professor Jonathan Petropoulos and the Camille Pissarro painting looted by Nazis in Austria in 1938 continues to puzzle us.The story was hardly a secret, it turns out. As Claremont Independent editor Elise Viebeck noted in her excellent article in the paper's March 12th online edition, the issue was covered extensively by European media in 2007, and Petropoulos' German partner, Munich art dealer Peter Griebert, faces criminal charges over the matter. The Viebeck article has drawn a number of comments in defense of Professor Petropoulos, who was cleared of any legal wrongdoing after a four-month long investigation by Los Angeles law firm O'Melveny & Myers. The firm had been hired by CMC's administration.
Petropoulos, who is also director of CMC's Center for the Study of Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights (CSHGHR), seems to be well-liked by his students, some of whom have weighed in on the Independent's online post of the Viebeck article. On the other hand, some comments on the Claremont Independent's site have called for Petropoulos to step down from his director's role at CSHGHR.
Although CMC's investigation found no wrongdoing on Petropoulos' part, German officials publicly identified Griebert as the subject of a criminal investigation for his dealings with the painting's rightful owner, Gisela Fischer. Viebeck explained:
On April 2 [2007], with no progress in sight, Kückelmann filed charges against Griebert in Munich. He based his complaint on § 253 of the German Criminal Code which defines Erpressung, rendered in English as "demanding with menaces," or blackmail. Munich Chief Prosecutor Christian Schmidt-Sommerfeld told ARTNews in summer 2007 that the investigation did not include Petropoulos because he is an American and his alleged crimes would have taken place outside Germany.
Griebert certainly knew of the connection between Lohse and the Fischer Pissarro, yet he apparently sought to withhold Lohse's identity when they were negotiating with Fischer. Petropoulos steadfastly denies any knowledge of that connection.
As Elise Viebeck indicated in her piece, much of what happened was covered in an ARTnews article in that magazine's Summer 2007 issue. The ARTnews article, by Stefan Koldehoff, featured a color photo of the Fischer Pissarro. That photo appears to have been part of a catalogue from a 1984 show of Impressionist paintings at the Fondation de l'Hermitage in Lausanne, Switzerland. Gisela Fischer's attorney discovered that at least five Lohse-controlled paintings appeared in that 1984 show. According to the ARTnews article, the ownership of the five paintings was attributed to a "Swiss Private Collection."
Here is the photo of the painting from the ARTnews article:
Photo Credit: ARTnews, Summer 2007
CAPTION: "Pissarro's Le Quai Malaquais, Printemps, 1903,
looted from a Jewish family in 1938, has turned up in a Swiss safe."
Further Internet-sleuthing has turned up another photo of the Fischer Pissarro. A June 6, 2007, article by writer Catherine Hickley on Bloomberg.com features a photo of the painting with an interesting attribution: Jonathan Petropoulos. The photo's caption indicates that Bloomberg got the photo from Gisela Fischer, who would have been given the photo when she met with Petropoulos and Griebert in January, 2007.
Petropoulos and Griebert had visited the vault prior to meeting with Fischer and had taken digital photos, which they shared with Fischer as proof that they had really seen the painting. The Hickley article said:
Bermann-Fischer met with Griebert and Petropoulos on Jan. 25 in the Zurich Hotel Sankt Gotthard, where the two men told her they had seen the painting that morning and taken photos, which they showed her. Instead of agreeing to their terms, Bermann- Fischer said, she informed Kueckelmann, who filed a complaint against Griebert with the Munich prosecutors.
Griebert said in the interview that he hadn't seen the painting before that day. He said he had no authority to dispose of the safe's contents and had received the task of negotiating the restitution as a single assignment from a client he declined to identify.
Petropoulos, who directs Claremont McKenna's Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights, said he "never had any idea that Lohse still controlled the painting.'' Asked whether Lohse may have sold other looted paintings, Petropoulos said it was "not only possible, but likely.''
Here is the photo that accompanies Hickley's piece:
Photo Credit: Bloomberg.com
CAPTION: "This is an undated handout photo of 'Le
Quai Malaquais, Printemps, by Camille Pissarro, 1903.
Photographer: Jonathan Petropoulos.
Source: Gisela Bermann-Fischer via Bloomberg News."
[Emphasis Added.]
Petropoulos continues to defend his actions, maintaining his claims of ignorance of any connection between Lohse and the painting or between Lohse and Petropoulos' partner Griebert. In December, 2007, ARTnews ran a letter from Petropoulos responding to the Koldehoff article (below, left).
Click to Enlarge
But there seems to be something lacking in Petropoulos' protestations, then and now. Petropoulos first and foremost fails to acknowledge that when Gisela Fischer originally retained London-based Art Loss Registry (ALR) regarding the Pissarro, ALR's services were offered pro bono to Fischer because of the wartime nature of the loss. ALR and Petropoulos changed the rules game without telling Fischer, according to the Elise Viebeck article.
And, it's not as if Petropoulos didn't have his own self-interest in mind. According to the Summer, 2007, ARTnews article by Stefan Koldehoff, Petropoulos and Peter Griebert were demanding 18% of the value of the painting - about $5 million to $7.5 million. That means that Petropoulos and his partner stood to make nearly $1 million or more if Fischer had agreed to their terms.
In the Koldehoff piece, Petropoulos defended his asking price, saying: "Note that I had made three trips to Europe since December in an effort to help try to recover the painting and had invested hundreds of hours of my own time."
Okay, so let's be generous and say that Petropoulos and Griebert had together spent 1,000 hours of their time trying to locate the painting. First of all, Griebert, by all accounts, had access to the Swiss bank vault where the painting was held and was working with Bruno Lohse, so he would have had to have invested virtually no time finding the painting. This means that the time would primarily Petropoulos'. If they received $1 million, this would represent $1,000 an hour.
Quite a payday. CMC most likely didn't have to pay $1,000 an hour to their O'Melveny & Myers attorneys to investigate the incident. Or half that. So, can we please retire the myth of the self-sacrificing professor trying to help a victim robbed by Nazis? Petropoulos was playing the business man. There was much less altruism involved than the some of Petropoulos' more naive CMC students want to believe. That much is evident from the emails quoted by Elise Viebeck in the Claremont Independent:
In a March 11, 2008 email to the CI Professor Petropoulos defended his actions. "I always endeavored to return the painting in question by Camille Pissarro to the person whom I believed was the rightful heir," he said.
Emails from Petropoulos to Griebert following the Zurich meeting, obtained through a source close to the investigation, paint a different picture.
"If Frau Fischer and Dr. Kueckelmann choose not to engage us, then we cannot say what will happen to the painting," Petropoulos wrote on February 6, 2007. "It would be difficult to give her the names and locations without any compensation. That just won't happen."
"[H]er response is so irrational, it is hard to make sense of it all," he added in an email the next day. "She simply cannot recover the painting without us. At least, I don't know if she would discover on her own the identity of the holders and their current location. We need to keep that in mind. She needs us."
Petropoulos insisted, further, on their original demand for 18 percent. "As we have stressed, we had a deal with Frau Fischer for this amount (and we also hold all the cards right now)," he wrote on February 15.
Lastly, Petropoulos' defense is that he was duped by his partner, Peter Griebert, and by Bruno Lohse. He claims he had no idea that Griebert was working with Lohse or that Lohse was the person in control of the Fischer Pissarro. But, Petropoulos is supposed to be an expert on these Nazi art looters, and he is coming out with a book about Bruno Lohse, whom he had met well before 2007.
The problem with Petropoulos' defense is that it seems to discredit his work as a scholar. He seems to have missed an awful lot in the Fischer Pissarro case, so we have to wonder what else has he missed in his books and his work? And did Petropoulos allow himself to become too close to Lohse - so close that it blinded him to the truth about the man?
The February, 2000, edition of ARTnews featured an interesting book review by assocate editor Hugh Eakin (the article is not available online). Eakin reviewed Jonathan Petropoulos' book The Faustian Bargain, which explored the rise and fall of the Nazis responsible for much of the art looting done by the Germans in World War II.
Oddly, the review makes no mention of Bruno Lohse as one of the five Nazis profiled in the book, so presumably Petropoulos did not include Lohse, perhaps saving him for his current project. In fact, the only appearance Lohse makes in the book review is in a photo showing an elderly Lohse next to a smiling Jonathan Petropoulos. The Petropoulos-Lohse photo appeared in ARTnews nearly seven years before Petropoulos' meeting with Gisela Fischer over the Pissarro, and indications are that the professor and Lohse were in communication during those intervening years.
The photo's caption describes Lohse only as a former Nazi official interviewed by Petropoulos. Was Petropoulos unaware of Lohse's full role in the wartime looting? Or was that role downplayed?
So, even if he committed no legal wrongdoing, you have to wonder if Petropoulos, whether in search of his pot of gold or simply his next book, didn't make a Faustian bargain of his own. There is more than a little irony in the review, which generally praises Petropoulos' scholarship:
...the story of this circle is groundbreaking in its own right....[Petropoulos'] unprecedented interviews with members of the post-war Nazi network, as well as his thorough mining of the judicial records of the late 1940's, enable Petropoulos to reconstruct not just the individual experiences of these men, but also the gray moral universe in which they built their careers.
Petropoulos and his defenders ought to at least acknowledge who the real victim was here. Failing to do so risks forgetting all those lessons Petropoulos claims to be teaching. Which brings us back to the ARTnews piece from last summer:
Gisela Fischer graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. She is a dual citizen of the United States and Switzerland. She is still waiting for the return of her painting, which was discovered only a short walk from her home in Zurich. She was robbed of her heritage once, in Vienna at the age of 9, and she is determined not to be robbed a second time, in Zurich at the age of 79.
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