Nice Work If You Can Get It

Update--Sunday, August 22. See end of post in red.

In June, when the Claremont Unified School District was still negotiating with the Claremont Faculty Association, Wes Woods II had an article in the Daily Bulletin about the heated nature of the contract talks.

One interesting point that came out in Woods' article was the amount CUSD spent on the law firm that represents the district:

The school district's Los Angeles-based law firm, O'Melveny & Myers, also has been an issue for the union. Tonan said the firm spent about $149,000 in reduction in force hearings in 2008-09, while the union's firm spent about $28,000.

A union flier was shared with the media, union officials and the school district that indicated Claremont Unified's attorney Framroze M. Virjee (image nearby) was paid $765 an hour for every hour he was at the bargaining table. Virjee's law firm, O'Melveny & Myers, was paid more than $535,000 in 2008- 09 and more than $365,000 in 2009-10 by Claremont Unified.

That's right. CUSD spent $900,000 on legal expenses in the past two years. That's almost 1 percent of the district's November Measure CL bond, and you can bet that some of the money the bond generates will somehow end up compensating the district for their legal expenses.

As we're discovering, there's real profit (or cost to taxpayers) to be found in the education business, at least in consulting and contracting work. In return for those expenses, administrators and teachers alike avoid the level of sacrifice they ask property owners - the ones footing the bill - to make, and the elected school board officials get to continue to play their self-indulgent fiscal games. The trade off is that schools are more expensive to run but are in no substantial way better than they were last year or the year before that.

It's a little like the inverse of Moore's Law. CUSD's costs relative to performance are falling. Or maybe it's just a manifestation of Baumol's cost disease.

* * * * *

A couple quick comments:

• Since Woods' article in late-June, CUSD and the CFA have agreed to a contract that calls for the union to accept larger class sizes in the middle and high school grads and to concede $1.58 million in health and welfare benefits over the next two fiscal years. In exchange, the union has agreed to support the November Measure CL bond with the understanding that they will get their former benefits back if the bond passes - an arrangement that allows both parties to circumvent the law requiring such school bonds to not be used for administrative or teacher salaries - at least, that's what CUSD officials have said.
  
  
• O'Melveny & Myers is a true legal heavyweight. The firm, which is the 19th largest in the world, has for partners such luminaries as former Reagan White House Counsel Arthur B. Culvahouse, Jr., and former Clinton Administration Secretary of State Warren Christopher.
  
  Claremont is more than a little familiar with O'Melveny & Myers. Former CMC trustee Louis Caldera, who served as U.S. Secretary of the Army from 1998 to 2001 and who lost his most recent White House job in 2009 after a PR flap, is an O'Melveny alumnus. And CMC retained O'Melveny to conduct an investigation into the Nazi stolen art controversy involving CMC history professor Jonathan Petropoulos a few years ago.

Update, Sunday:

Saturday's Claremont Courier touched on this issue. On page 5, The Courier describes an offer at last Thursday's School Board meeting by Marcie Gardner, a Chaparral parent, to help look for a cheaper law firm. As an aside, that ought not to be too hard.

Gardner is quoted, "One area that seems out of control within the district is legal fees, and I say that because I'm a lawyer and I have quite a bit of experience with things related to education. The hourly rate that is being paid by the district for an attorney is double and sometimes triple the going rate of what these services would cost in the open market." [emphasis added]

We also received a cryptic email from a reader on this general topic, and we can't help but read it as also casting aspersions on the ol' Insider:

The reader writes:

900,000 is a lot but how much of that 900,000 was tied to defending Tonan's personal lawsuit against the district? How much was tied to the negotiations that were dragged out to ridiculous lengths only to be settled after Tonan's lawsuit was settled? A settlement, mind you, that could have been reached 6 months ago if it were not for Tonan's conflict of interest.

There is more out there that you are ignoring. I'm wondering if it's intentional.

--Outside Claremont
We asked for additional info, and the reader was good enough to give us one specific that appeared on page 6 of the 2010-2011 Claremont Courier Almanac, sent with the paper a week or so ago (our reader refers to the personal lawsuit between the Tonan family and the district):

Settled for 75k I heard. Settlement between the union, that Tonan heads, and CUSD came immediately afterwards.

One view is the Tonan dragged this out, at great cost, until the issue with his wife was settled...

--Outside Claremont
Notice the walk-back from the main point: "One view is..." Our reader isn't even saying that's what he believes. We hold no brief for Joe Tonan or the merits of his case. The fact is, we never understood nor were given a cogent story on the Cynthia Estep-Tonan dismissal. It seemed both sides were scurrying for cover and obfuscation in that one. (to readers who don't know what we're talking about, we don't blame you. You'll have to look at back numbers of the Claremont Courier from Spring 2010 to see articles on the brouhaha accompanying Ms. Estep-Tonan's dismissal as a school nurse by CUSD.)

Anyway, the reader makes a valid point by inference. Total district legal cost equals average hourly rate times number of billed hours. Ms. Gardner says the average hourly rate is too high; our reader implies that the number of billed hours is higher than necessary.

Both are easily within the control of the School Board: Hilary LaConte, Jeff Stark, Mary Caenepeel, Beth Bingham, and Steven Llanusa. Get a less stratospheric attorney and don't get involved in labor disputes where you are having some one like good old Fram (see above) bill you north of $700 per hour and then have to write a check to your employee for $75K.

Our daddy always told us that the party that had to write the check was the party in the wrong.

Dispute Halts Pissarro Sale

''Le Quai Malaquais et l’Institut'', 1903
Basler Zeitung image

The story of the Camille Pissarro painting we've been following took a strange twist in London yesterday. The painting, stolen from the family of Gisela Bermann-Fischer by the Nazis in 1938, was restituted to her and then placed for auction at Christie's Impressionist/Modern Evening Sale. The work was expected to fetch upwards of $2.46 million.

The Pissarro, which was the only piece in the auction that failed to sell [correction: of 44 lots offered, 30 sold. We regret the earlier error.], was removed from sale shortly before the auction began, according to an article posted on the Times of London's TimesOnline website. Apparently the Pissarro was one of two lots withdrawn prior to the sale.

The Times article states that the sale was halted because a nephew of Bermann-Fischer, one Itai Shoffman, was disputing the painting's restitution and sale. The article said that Shoffman is the grandson of Hildegard Fischer, who was the younger sister of Bermann-Fischer's mother Brigette. Shoffman claims that Hildegard was the black sheep of the family and that her heirs are entitled to half of the proceeds from the sale of the Pissarro:

According to Mr Shoffman, her grandson, Hildegard Fischer was the “black sheep of the family”. She had a disability and by the time she and Hedwig joined the Bermanns in America in 1941, she also had a daughter, Monika, later Mr Shoffman’s mother, born out of wedlock.

According to Christophe Paul, a lawyer in Berlin specialising in inheritance cases, a handwritten will from 1933 proves that her parents wanted their estate to be divided equally between Brigitte and Hildegard. A letter written in 1946 indicates that Hedwig wanted Hildegard to inherit the Pissarro if it was ever found.

Mr Shoffman told The Times that Ms Bermann-Fischer knew the other half of her family well but had excluded them from all matters relating to the Pissarro. He said: “It feels like such a deceitful act. She’s taking away the last remaining legacy of the family and holding it for her own benefit.”

The Times piece reports that the two parties were trying to negotiate a settlement on a split of the money from the sale and that Shoffman said he wanted 50% but was only offered 20%. We can't say at this point what all this means, though we do note that Gisela Bermann-Fischer did spend 500,000 Swiss francs and countless years of searching to recover the painting, so she might quite naturally feel a sense of entitlement to a larger piece of the pie.

We also wonder if the the disputed inheritance might have been a factor in the negotiations Claremont McKenna College history professor Jonathan Petropoulos and German art dealer Peter Griebert had with Gisela Bermann-Fischer, who has accused the two men of threatening her with the loss of her painting forever in their failed attempt to extract a finder's fee from her in January, 2007.

Petropoulos had an interesting quote in the March, 2008, article by CMC's Elise Viebeck in the Claremont Independent:

"I always endeavored to return the painting in question by Camille Pissarro to the person whom I believed was the rightful heir," [Petropoulos] said.

Could Petropoulos and Griebert have known about the other heir? The quote certainly seems to imply that Petropoulos may have questioned Bermann-Fischer's claim to the painting. If so, it's certainly possible that Petropoulos or Griebert or someone associated might have tried contacting Itai Shoffman. We hope we hear more about this aspect of the story in the future.

Dept. of Found Art

PISSARRO RETURNED TO RIGHTFUL OWNER

Le Quai Malaquais et l'Institut, 1903,
Camille Pissarro
Photo Credit: ARTnews, Summer 2007

That Camille Pissarro painting that caused so much controversy last year for Claremont McKenna College history professor Jonathan Petropoulos was back in the news last week.

Some time last year, the painting, Le Quai Malaquais, Printemps, found its way back into the hands of its rightful owner, Gisela Bermann-Fischer. You'll recall that the painting had been looted by Nazis in Vienna in 1938 and didn't resurface until 2007, when it was discovered inside a Swiss bank safe controlled by Nazi art looter Bruno Lohse.


CHRISTIE'S TO AUCTION PAINTING

Bloomberg's Catherine Hickley reports that having at last been reunited with the Pissarro, Bermann-Fischer now plans to sell the painting at auction through Christie's International in London. Christie's estimates the painting's worth to be between £900,000 - £1,500,000 (around $1.48 million to $2.46 million).

The Pissarro will be sold next Tuesday, June 23, 2009, in the Impressionist/Modern Evening Sale, which marks the start of the summer art season.

Interestingly, we learn from the Hickley article that the painting has been renamed Le Quai Malaquais et l'Institut. We're not sure of the reasons for the new title, but it seems to be justified by a letter Pissarro wrote to his son on March 30, 1903, announcing a new “series” of paintings from an Eastward-looking window of the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire which include both the Seine and the dome of the Institut de France. Although he doesn’t say so in his letter, Pissarro’s decision to paint the Institut de France—from which the academic painter, Jean-Léon Gérôme, launched his vitriolic criticisms of the Impressionists decades before—was probably not taken lightly by the painter, who used a particularly radical composition in this, his last Paris series.

The importance of Pissarro’s letter was not lost on Bruno Lohse and François Daulte, who quoted it in the 1984 Lausanne description of the painting. It’s also quoted in the auction catalogue on Christie's website. Although we are aware of only three surviving paintings in this series — one of them painted in morning sun and currently in a private collection, another in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg — the Fischer Pissarro has the youngest spring growth on the trees and turns out to have been painted first. Pissarro died later in 1903, making these the only Pissarro paintings which show significant portions of Paris’s Left Bank and academic quarter.

You may want to go ahead and spend the $40, plus $7 shipping and tax, for the catalogue. It may be a collectible someday and it holds a good deal of local interest. You can order an auction catalogue from Christie's in New York at 1-800-395-6300, Monday - Friday, 9:00am - 5:00pm local time.

Christie's apparently no longer automatically sends a follow-up letter containing a list of prices realized at the actual auction, but you can request one be sent (free of charge) when ordering a catalog. Auction catalogs are often more collectible if this information is kept with them.

The auction description describes the painting as "property restituted to Gisela Bermann Fisher" and tells us some remarkable details about the painting’s history. In the provenance section, we learn that the painting went to Pissarro's son, Georges Manzana-Pissarro, following the painter’s death in 1903. Within just a few years, Manzana-Pissarro had sold the painting to the Bernheim-Jeune gallery (pointedly not to Durand-Ruel, his father's longtime dealer, with whom Pissarro had broken just before 1903). Bermann-Fischer's grandfather, Samuel Fischer, acquired the painting in 1907 on the advice of the legendary art dealer Paul Cassirer, and it remained in the family until the Nazis confiscated the painting.

After that, the trail gets a little murky. According to the catalogue materials, the work was sold in 1940 by the Dorotheum, the collaborationist Vienna auction house, as a painting by "Paul Emile [sic] Pissarro." Two other notorious Nazi art dealers, Eugen Primavesi of Vienna and Hans W. Lange of Berlin, handled the painting before it was passed on to Bruno Lohse, though no date of sale (or exchange) is listed. The catalogue says that the painting went to storage in Zurich (no date is given) and was then restituted to Bermann-Fischer as part of a settlement agreement with Schönart Anstalt, the trust in Liechtenstein that had been controlled by Lohse.

The literature section lists several references to the painting not typically seen in auction listings:

• The 2007 Stefan Koldehoff ARTNews article "Pissarro Lost and Found" about Bermann-Fischer's quest for the painting.
  
  
• The April, 2008, Los Angeles Times article about the whole Petropoulos affair.
  
  

Elise Viebeck's March 13, 2008, piece in Claremont McKenna College's Claremont Independent didn't make the Christie's catalogue, but perhaps should have. Her article led to Petropoulos' resignation as director of the CMC Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights, one of CMC's ten endowed research institutes. Last month, CMC Trustees voted to change the name of the institute to The Center for Human Rights Leadership, though according to a press release on the CMC website "its focus on human rights and the Holocaust won't change."

Viebeck won the Eric Breindel Prize, arguably the most prestigious honor in college journalism, for her groundbreaking reporting on the Pissarro affair, and she was the first to illuminate the role of the Art Loss Register in the case. Unlike the previous year's winner of the Breindel prize, also from CMC, Viebeck's award received no mention on the CMC website. Why was that?

The catalogue's exhibition list is certainly brief. There is only one entry, the 1984 exhibit in Lausanne, Switzerland, which we have speculated may have been a trial run by Lohse to see if anyone was watching for the painting. Other than that, the painting has never before been shown in public (though it would have been seen in the Berlin home of Samuel Fischer by many cultural notables of the era, including future Nobel laureates Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse, both published by S. Fischer Verlag).

Catherine Hickley's Bloomberg article noted that Bermann-Fischer seems to be thinking the same thing we did regarding the Lausanne exhibition:

“I don’t think we’ll ever find out from where to where the painting was transported over the years,” Bermann-Fischer said. “It truly was hidden. I think the exhibition at l’Hermitage Lausanne in 1984 was a test run, to see whether the original owners or any heirs were still on the lookout for the paintings and would make a claim.”

We also found a June 9 World Radio Switzerland interview with Bermann-Fischer in which she said much the same thing. Here's the transcript:

The interview gives some insight into why, after so many years of searching, Bermann-Fischer would now want to sell the Pissarro:

Vincent Landon, WRS: Why are you auctioning it?

Gisela Bermann-Fischer: Why shouldn’t I?

Vincent Landon, WRS: After spending so long, sort of, tracking it down?

Gisela Bermann-Fischer: Well I think looking for it, after it had been looted from my parents’ house in Vienna, certainly it was not the aim of selling it, it was a finding it—that was my aim. It was like looking up my own history, or a heritage. I was quite small when we fled Berlin, and later on we fled Vienna, and then we fled again [to Sweden and then on to the U.S., per the recent Bloomberg article].

So, let’s say, a lot of things I didn’t know… So it was not just a search for this painting, in order to go ahead and then make it [in]to money, it was sort of searching what happened in those times. And they didn’t just loot this painting, they looted everything that was in the house—my rule[??] books, my piano exercise books—everything was gone. And from there on I realized it was a loss altogether for me, too: the friends, and the house, and my bed, and my home. So that kept me going, to see ‘how did the Nazis go about all of this?’

GERMAN PROBE CONTINUES

The Bloomberg article also tells us that the safe in which the Pissarro was stored for so many years was sealed by prosecutors "as part of a continuing three-nation probe into associates of Lohse suspected of extortion and money-laundering." It goes on to say that the two men who approached Gisela Bermann-Fischer in 2007 remain under investigation by German authorities:

The men, an art dealer and an art historian, are under investigation on suspicion of extortion, according to Munich prosecutor Hans-Joachim Lutz. The dealer is also under investigation for money-laundering and breach of trust.

Though the two Lohse associates aren't named in the article, the only two men who had such a meeting with Bermann-Fischer would have been Munich art dealer Peter Griebert and CMC's Jonathan Petropoulos, who strictly speaking is a professor of history, not an academically-trained art historian. You may recall they were initially acting on behalf of the Art Loss Register, of which Christie's is, ironically, a part-owner.*

The ALR was set up to allow victims of Nazi looting to register their art works pro-bono in order to aid in their restitution. According to a March, 2008, Jewish Chronicle article, Griebert and Petropoulos had been hired by ALR in the hopes that his connections to Lohse could help them land a commission for helping recover the Pissarro.

At some point between the time Gisela Bermann-Fischer registered the Pissarro with ALR and the meeting that she had with Griebert and Petropoulos in Zurich in January, 2007, ALR changed its policies on providing information regarding WWII-era looted art. ALR was now requiring a substantial finder's fee. Bermann-Fischer maintains that when she balked at the paying that fee, Griebert and Petropoulos tried to cut their own deal with the implied threat that if Bermann-Fischer did not pay up, the painting might disappear forever.

Although an internal investigation by CMC cleared Professor Petropoulos of any apparent wrongdoing, Elise Viebeck at CMC's Claremont Independent obtained emails from Petropoulos to Griebert that seem to support Bermann-Fischer's account. Viebeck quoted parts of the emails in her own article:

"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, [2007].

Despite CMC's efforts to exonerate Petropoulos, if the information in the most recent Bloomberg article is accurate, it would appear the German investigation into Griebert's and Petropoulos' dealings with Bermann-Fischer is ongoing. Whatever the case, one thing is clear: the legacy of the Holocaust remains with us, even today, sixty-four years after the end of the war in Europe. Catherine Hickley says in her recent Bloomberg article that an almost incomprehensible number of artworks were looted by Nazis from victims like Bermann-Fischer's family - well over half a million pieces. The Art Loss Register has 70,000 missing works still listed. This was the largest art heist in modern history, and it has gone largely unpunished. As Bermann-Fischer put it in the Hickley article:

“There are probably thousands of paintings, still in safes, waiting for the passing away of the last possible claimants,” Bermann-Fischer said.

Bermann-Fischer's quest for the Pissarro may be over, but for many other families, the search goes on. In her World Radio Switzerland interview, Bermann-Fischer reminisced about another lost heirloom:

Vincent Landon, WRS: Where did this painting hang when you were a child? Can you remember it hanging in any…

Gisela Bermann-Fischer: Well, it was in a living-dining room of the house, lovely little old house in Vienna. And there were several paintings on the wall in this dining room. At the time people hung paintings very high up on the walls—I don’t know why—and to me of course being quite small, it seemed even higher. The perspective was very weird. So what I remembered about the painting was more or less the bottom of the painting, but it didn’t interest me that much. There was a Corot there, with a tremendous red flower—that I remembered even more vividly.

* * * * *

*In spite of the nearly 70 years searching for her painting, Gisela Bermann-Fischer (we've decided) must be very forgiving - or tolerant - to choose Christie's as her auctioneer. Not only does Christie's (which is privately-held) have a financial interest in Art Loss Register, which was keen to exploit Petropoulos' relationship to Bruno Lohse in an effort to obtain a lucrative finder's fee, but the auction house twice put on the block the Corot that had until recently been in Lohse's secret Zurich vault with the stolen Pissarro. Femme assise, tenant une Mandoline, a study painted by Corot early in his career, failed to find a minimum bidder at Christie's London Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale on June 20, 2006, where it was offered as the "Property of a European Collector" with an estimate of $375,000 - $560,000 (£200,000 - £300,000). The Corot was offered a second time by Christie's on April 12, 2007, this time in New York in an auction of 19th Century European Paintings and Orientalist Art, but despite the Corot's significantly-reduced estimate of $200,000-$300,000 it once again failed to find a minimum bidder. So who is the mysterious "European Collector" trying to sell a painting from Lohse's secret safe? We're sure there's an explanation, and can't help but think the auction house has been as cooperative with European investigators as it has been with Gisela Bermann-Fischer in preparing next Tuesday's sale of her Pissarro.

Femme assise, tenant une Mandoline (1826-1828),
Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot

CMC Trustee Named to White House Office

Wes Woods II in the Daily Bulletin reports that Claremont McKenna College trustee Louis Caldera has been chosen to be the Director of the White House Military Office for the incoming Obama administration.

Woods quoted CMC President Pamela Gann and President-elect Obama on the Caldera appointment:

"Claremont McKenna College is pleased that a trustee has been selected for this prestigious position in the new Obama administration," Gann wrote in an e-mail.

"Mr. Caldera has been previously an outstanding public servant in California, New Mexico and Washington, D.C., and the country will benefit greatly from his commitment to serving our country."

In a separate news release, Obama said, "Louis has served his country with distinction in uniform and in government, and his pedigree is second-to-none. I know he'll bring to the White House the same dedication and integrity that have earned him the highest praise in every post, from secretary of the Army to university president."

A West Point grad, Caldera was Secretary of the Army in the Clinton administration from 1998 to 2001. Caldera, who has an MBA and JD from Harvard, practiced law in LA before serving in the California State Assembly from 1992 to 1997. After his first White House stint, Caldera was appointed Vice-Chancellor of the California State University system. From 2003 to 2006, he served as the President of the University of New Mexico, where he is now a member of the UNM law school faculty.

Coincidentally, the LA firm Caldera practiced with from 1987 to 1990 was O'Melveny & Myers, the same firm CMC retained to investigate the Jonathan Petropoulos matter. O'Melveny is one of the oldest law firm in Los Angeles and, according to its Wikipedia entry, it is the 19th largest firm in the world. Former Clinton Secretary of State Warren Christopher is a partner, and former Reagan White House Counsel Arthur Culvahouse, Jr., is the firm's chair.

Raiders of the Lost Skull

We came across an odd bit of crime news yesterday.

The Daily Bulletin had an article about the theft of a crystal skull from a Claremont New Age shop called Kindred Spirits.

The article said the skull had been on loan to the shop from its owner, Seal Beach resident Don Marr. The skull had been in the Claremont store for four months without incident, but now it has mysteriously disappeared.

Marr, who named the object Solar Ray, described the skull's unusual history in the Bulletin article:

Solid quartz crystal skulls such as Solar Ray are believed by some to have spiritual significance, attributed to their age and the rare material they are made out of.

Most skulls are believed to originate in Brazil, and some believe they were hand-made hundreds or thousands of years ago over several generations, Marr said.

The legend surrounding the largest of the crystal skulls is that they were produced by people from Atlantis and buried in Central and South America before the collapse of Atlantis, Marr said.

If all are collected, the skulls - believed to number about a dozen - will reveal a seemingly infinite amount of information, Marr said.

"There will be a time in human history when they will be found," Marr said. "Then the true story about their origins will come out. It's almost like the consciousness is not ready to receive information of this ilk yet."

The legend surrounding the skulls has been incorporated into the plot of the forthcoming fourth installment of the Indiana Jones film series.

If only Professor Jones were here to find the crystal skull and save the day. But wait! Claremont McKenna College has its own professor skilled at the restitution of lost treasures, porkpie hat and bullwhip at the ready to track down the stolen artifact, slip in the bag of sand as a counterweight onto the booby-trapped platform holding the skull, and escape the collapsing cave by the skin of his teeth:

Back Home in Claremont

Insider Institute: Interior View

(Click to Enlarge)

It's always fun to get away, but it's even better to be back home. These trips through the space-time continuum take a lot out of us, not to mention the wallop we get when the electric bill from using the Insider Institute time machine (seen above) comes in.

We hope those of you who joined us on our trip back to 1984 Lausanne, Switzerland, enjoyed the journey and the art exhibit, and that you, like ourselves, are happy to be back in the land of Claremonters.

As with any trip, there were a few problems. Our hotel accommodations were less than satisfactory, but that's what you get when you try to do things on a budget. Speaking of budget items, the time machine gave us a few problems. We probably should have spent the extra money and upgraded to a model with a more secure passenger compartment. The thing's always giving us trouble, what with rocks, sticks, and the occasional rebar popping up in the cabin as we materialize.

Our intern, Jerry, had a little problem as we arrived back at the Insider Institute, but he should be fine after a few months of relaxing post-op recuperation. Memo to selves: we also need to rethink our healthcare benefits. At any rate, Jerry should be back shortly. He better, or we'll have to find a new intern.

Jerry has our last intern to thank for our time travel problems. His predecessor Beth was the genius who got the idea to find a discount machine after watching the movie "Napoleon Dynamite."

Lesson learned. You definitely get what you pay for:

Lausanne, 1984: A Virtual Tour, Day Two

A LITTLE BACKGROUND

We continue today on our tour of the 1984 Fondation de l'Hermitage exhibit, l'Impressionnisme dans les Collections Romandes - Impressionism in the Collections of French-speaking Switzerland.

Although the exhibit had 123 works of art, we will focus on five particular paintings. These works are significant to us because according to ArtNews writer Stephen Koldehoff, all five were controlled by Bruno Lohse, a notorious Nazi art looter who made a career after the war dealing in art works, some of which Lohse had helped loot from people in the Nazi-occupied territories of Europe.

Lohse is relevant to us today because one of the five paintings, a springtime view of the Seine by Camille Pissarro, last year came to involve Claremont McKenna College professor Jonathan Petropoulos in a failed attempt to restitute the painting to the rightful owner, Gisela Bermann-Fischer. The affair resulted in a good deal of bad press for the professor, who last month resigned from his director's post at CMC's Center for the Study of Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights.

When Bruno Lohse died in March, 2007, he left behind a secret Swiss bank vault controlled by Lohse's Liechtenstein foundation. When investigators opened up the vault, they found the Pissarro, along with a Renoir and a Monet which also appeared in the 1984 show. Records showed that Peter Griebert, a Munich art dealer, had visited the vault on many occasions since 1988. Griebert was Professor Petropoulos' partner in the attempted return of the Fischer-Pissarro, and Griebert is the subject of an investigation for the German equivalent of extortion for trying to collect a high fee from Ms. Fischer for the painting's restitution. The Los Angeles Times last month indicated that German authorities have not eliminated Petropoulos as a subject of investigation.

Petropoulos and Griebert spent some time at the Swiss bank containing Lohse's vault prior to meeting with Fischer in Zurich in January, 2007, and one of them (apparently Petropoulos) took some photos of the Pissarro as proof that they really knew where it was kept. Petropoulos has denied knowing the true ownership of the painting, clarified that he did not actually enter the vault but only viewed the painting in a conference room at Lohse's bank, and also has said he did not know of Griebert's involvement with Lohse's foundation. So, Petropoulos' main defense has been to plead ignorance and to say that he was merely guilty of being too trusting. But that seems to beg the question, what type of naive, trusting person makes a career of studying Nazis?

And, Petropoulos seems to have been acquainted with Lohse for some time prior to his 2007 meeting with Gisela Fischer over the Pissarro:

Click to Enlarge

Photo Credit: ARTnews, February, 2000
CAPTION: "Historian Jonathan Petropoulos, left, in Munich with Bruno Lohse, a former Nazi official he interviewed for his book."

But that story has been told elsewhere. We're here to see the paintings, and so we return to the 1984 exhibition, where the five Lohse-controlled paintings were publicly shown, possibly as the first step in creating a documented trail to make them more marketable at auction. We wonder, when CMC hired the law firm of O'Melveny and Myers to conduct the investigation that found no legal wrongdoing on Petropoulos' part, did the firm look into any connections between the galleries that exhibited suspected looted art and the auction houses that sold them?

As we wrote yesterday, no indication of the actual ownership of the majority of the show's paintings was given at the exhibit or in the accompanying catalogue of works. If one wanted to spruce up the history of a suspect work, the 1984 Fondation exhibit certainly would have been a good place to start. The Lohse paintings were simply attributed to a "Swiss Private Collection."

In any case, let us return to the show....


L'IMPRESSIONISME DANS LES COLLECTIONS ROMANDES,
INAUGURAL EXHIBIT OF THE FONDATION DE L'HERMITAGE
JUNE 17 - OCTOBER 31, 1984

The images and text we see today are drawn from the exhibit's catalogue, the cover of which we see to the right. As we indicated yesterday, the curator of the show was the late French art historian François Daulte whose own secret vault of paintings was discovered after his death in 1998 (for more, read the Koldehoff Summer 2007 ArtNews article). Daulte himself was the cataloguer for the 1984 show.





We include our own humble translations of the respective catalogue pages via the Insider Translation Services, beginning with the title page:

CATALOGUE

BY FRANÇOIS DAULTE

IMPRESSIONISM
IN ROMANDY
COLLECTIONS
[Romandy is French-speaking Switzerland]

ITS PRECURSORS
ITS MASTERS
ITS HERITAGE

The organizers of the exposition
IMPRESSIONISM IN ROMANDY
COLLECTIONS,
present at the occasion of the opening to the public of the Foundation of the Hermitage, thank all of the museums and private collectors who, with their generous loans, allowed this exhibition to take place.

Across its three sections, this retrospective presents a panorama of one hundred years of creative activity, from Corot to Bonnard.

The catalogue also includes an Abréviations page. This is a comprehensive list of the major scholarship used in reference to most of the exhibition paintings. The Abréviations page in turns points to catalogues raisonnés for the different artists. A catalogue raisonné is a comprehensive list of all of an artist's known works. Inclusion in a given artist's catalogue raisonné makes a painting appear less suspicious, much less likely to appear lost to art history or possibly, for a potential buyer, less likely to have been looted.

The catalogue raisonné citations for the five Lohse-controlled paintings appear more than a bit weak. For instance, the Renoir later found in Lohse's vault shows up in none. And two others, the Corot and the Pissarro, mostly reference pre-World War II catalogues. The scholarship on the Sisley and the Monet appear to feature work by François Daulte and by Daniel Wildenstein, about whose family and their link to Jonathan Petropoulos we wrote several weeks ago.

Femme assise, tenant une Mandoline (1826-1828), Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot

3
Jean-Baptiste Camille COROT
(1796-1875)

Femme assise, tenant une Mandoline (1826-1828)
Seated Woman, Holding a Mandolin

Oil on canvas, 34 x 26 cm.
Signed at bottom right: Corot.

"Robaut counted around thirty studies of Italian men and women which date from the artist's first visit to Rome between 1926 to 1828. The majority of them were still in his studio at the time of his death. These studies are more ambitious than simple notations taken on the fly. These little paintings reveal both a care for composition as well as a fluency of execution and an intelligent distribution of paint. One also observes that the model is posed, sitting with a attitude of concentration that is perhaps itself affected." (Hélène Toussaint).

In Seated Woman, Holding a Mandolin, the model's melancholy face is detached from the gray sky, and one sees the theme of the daydream – a leitmotif of Corot throughout his career – begin to emerge.

Collection: Painting given by Corot to one of his friends around 1873-1874; [property of] George Renand, Paris.

Literature: ROBAUT, Works of Corot, an Illustrated Catalogue Raisonné, Book II, Paris, 1905.

C. BERNHEIM DE VILLERS. Corot, Painter of Figures, Paris, 1930, No. 14, including reproduction; G. BAZIN, Paris, 1951, p. 34, reproduced in color, plate 20.

Swiss Private Collection


This painting's image was uploaded to Wikipedia Commons on 5/19/05, two days before the Alfred Sisley painting below was also uploaded. It is sourced in Wikipedia, like the Sisley image, to the mysterious Yorck Project.

The Corot and the Sisley were reported as not being in the Lohse vault last year, but the Koldehoff ArtNews article described them as controlled by Bruno Lohse's trust. Where are they now?


L’Abreuvoir de Marly (1875),
Alfred Sisley



96
Alfred SISLEY
(1839-1899)

L'Abreuvoir de Marly (1875)
The Basin at Marly

Oil on canvas, 46 x 61 cm.
Signed and dated, in lower right: Sisley, 75.

On the other side, Sisley has painted another outdoor scene depicting "The Washerwomen of Bougival."

During the three years he spent in Marly-le-Roi (1874-1877), in a small residence at No. 2, Route de l'Abreuvoir, Sisley captured the countryside in some twenty canvases painted near his home. From this period come several views of the Seine at Saint-Cloud, at Saint-Germain, or, at different times of day, several compositions which evoke the work of the washerwoman at Bougival—and above all scenes of flooding, painted for the most part in 1876.

The painting we exhibit shows in the foreground the walls of the basin of Marly, decorated in the 17th century with shells from the Antilles, and in the background houses which border the basin. With a marvelously sensitive eye, Sisley was able here to perceive the most delicate harmonies in nature, and succeeded in fixing them on the canvas for our delectation. Thanks to the recent research of Marie-Amynthe Denis, it is possible to compare photographs today of the basin in is current state with the paintings of Sisley, and to measure what in the work of the great landscapist is interpretation and what is faithfulness to reality.

Collections: Bernheim-Jeune, Paris; M. Faber, Castell; M. Thelen, Munich.[ No dates or indications of when the painting changed hands. Castell is in Bavaria, and Munich is also in Bavaria and where Lohse lived.]

Expositions: Alfred Sisley, Art Museum, Bern, February 15 to April 13, 1958, catalog illustration No. 21.

Literature: François Daulte, Alfred Sisley, Catalogue Raisonné of Painted Works, Lausanne, 1959, illustration no. 158. [Most of the literature on the painting seems to relate to Daulte.]

François Daulte, Sisley-Landscapes, Lausanne, 1961, p. 27 and p. 32; Kindler(?) Painting Encyclopedia, Book V, reproduced on pp. 360-361 in color; From Renoir to Vuillard, Marly-le-Roi, Louveciennes, and their surroundings, Promenade Museum of Marly-le-Roi-Louveciennes, March 22 to June 24, 1984, p. 113 with reproduction (and observations of Marie-Amynthe Denis).

Swiss private collection


The painting was identified as L'Abreuvoir de Marly-a-Roi (1875) by ARTnews last summer, and only as L'Abreuvoir de Marly in the 1984 catalogue. An image of the painting was put into Internet circulation nearly three years ago, introduced to French Wikipedia in May 2005, and given the new title Bassin de Marly (Basin of Marly). The painting is used to illustrate two French Wikipedia articles, one on Marly-le-Roi, the other on "Painters of the Yvelines", a sort of an online gallery mainly of Sisley's work.

Here is the Sisley jpeg on its French Wikipedia source page. As with the Corot, the image was uploaded to Wikipedia - on 5/21/05 in the case of the Sisley. Like the Corot, the Sisley image supposedly came from the Yorck Project, a database of paintings described as: The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei [10,000 Masterworks of Painters]. DVD-ROM, 2002. ISBN 3936122202. Distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH.

A number of the other images on that French Wikipedia "Painters of the Yvelines" page also come from the Yorck Project DVD-ROM.

Although we don't know the specific image of Lavandières à Bougival painted on the reverse side of L'Abreuvoir de Marly, if we click on the Lavandières à Bougival on the French "Painters of the Yvelines" Wikipedia page, the image turns out not to have been painted not in 1868 as labelled in its caption on the article, but in 1875, making it a closer possible match for the reverse image of l'Abreuvoir de Marly-a-Roi, also painted in 1875.

Lavandières à Bougival also entered French Wikipedia from the Yorck project DVD Rom on 5/21/05.

So how did this Lohse-controlled painting get onto the German DVD-ROM, and then onto Wikipedia in 2005? As Lohse's safe was systematically cleared of paintings, did someone set out to seed certain images of paintings out into the world, perhaps as a way of opening a marketing opportunity or establishing a sense of legitimacy? Were they posted to Wikipedia to make them look acceptable and established, for want of a better provenance or history?

It is quite possible that Lohse, as he neared the end of his life, felt the urge to liquidate his collection. This isn't a simple matter of posting the paintings on Craigslist. If they were in fact looted, as was the case with the Pissarro, their ownership histories would have gaps. Why not try to make it look like these paintings have been in established collections for a long time, and even out on the web? What better vehicle than Wikipedia commons?


Vue de Vétheuil, l’hiver (1879),
Claude Monet



56
Claude MONET
(1840-1926)

Vue de Vétheuil, l'Hiver (1879)
View of Vétheuil, Winter

Oil on canvas, 60 x 81 cm.
Signed bottom right: Claude Monet

During the four years he lived in Vétheuil, Claude Monet painted several views of the village from the far shore of the river Seine. The very rigorous winter of 1879-1880 gave him the chance to depict the countryside in snow and cold. The Seine churning with ice inspired him to a series of "Débacle" paintings ["débacle" meaning the breaking up of ice], in which the lines are at once fluid and flowing. In the painting we display, a kind of harmony reigns despite the desolation… "The whole history of Monet during the cruel years in Vétheuil is read in this painting," wrote Marthe de Fels. 'I am literally without a penny,' complained Monet for his part, 'obliged to make requests, to practically beg for my existence, not having a penny to buy canvases and colors."

Collection history: Andrew Maxwell, Glasgow (Maxwell sale, Christie's, London, 3 June 1910, No. 59, sold to Durand-Ruel); Durand Ruel and Company, Paris.

Expositions: Monet, National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, and National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, 9 October 1982 to 30 January 1983, with catalog reproduction in color (No. 21).

Literature: WILDENSTEIN, Book 1, Number 552. D. WILDENSTEIN, Claude Monet, Paris, Milan, Tokyo, 1971, reproduced in color, p. 46.

Swiss Private Collection


Several questions regarding the Monet. First, what was it with Lohse paintings and Japanese museums? The Renoir below also made a couple appearances in Japan. Second, how did the Wildensteins obtain a color photo of the Monet? Also, what happened to the painting after 1910? Durand-Ruel was said to have kept good records of its sales, so what gives?

As noted, the Monet, like the Renoir and Pissarro, was still in Lohse's safe at the time of his death. In addition to the paintings found in his vault when Lohse died, 14 paintings are said to have left in recent years. What were they, and where did they go?


La Baie du Moulin Huet à travers les arbres—Guernsey (1883),
Auguste Renoir



72
August RENOIR
(1841-1919)

La Baie du Moulin Huet à travers les arbres - Guernesey (1883)
The bay of Moulin Huet from across the trees -- Guernsey

Oil on canvas, 46 by 55 cm
Signed and dated, in the lower right: Renoir, 83

At the beginning of September 1883, Renoir embarked for the Channel Islands with his wife and his friend Paul Lhote. After having visited Jersey, the three took up residence in a small pension on Guernsey, George Road No. 4. Renoir profited from his stay to paint several seascapes and scenes of bathers. He painted, in particular, three views of the Bay of Moulin Huet, including the one we display [in this exhibition]. "What a lovely little country!" wrote the artist to his friend Edmond Maitre on September 5, 1883. "What lovely roads! Extraordinary rock formations, and beaches like Robinson must have had on his island, plus steak and ale at affordable prices, everything up to now here is beautiful."

Collections: Purchased by Durand-Ruel from the artist on December 17, 1883 for 600 Francs; Durand-Ruel, Paris and New York (Sold by Durand-Ruel to Mr. Thompson on November 10, 1906); Mr. Thompson, New York (sold back by Mr. Thompson to Durand-Ruel on April 14, 1907); Durand-Ruel, New York (Sold by Durand-Ruel to Mr. Bellanger [NO DATE GIVEN]); Mr. Bellanger, Paris; Swiss Private Collection.

Expositions: Paintings by Renoir, Durand-Ruel Galleries, New York, January 5-30, 1924, catalog illustration No. 18; Auguste Renoir, State Gallery, Munich, November 5-December 14, 1958, catalog illustration No. 19; Renoir, Isetan Mseum of Art, Tokyo, September 26-November 6,1979, and Kyoto, Municipal Museum, November 10-December 9 1979,catalog illustration No. 34, reproduced in color.

Swiss Private Collection


As for provenance, it looks like Durand-Ruel bought and sold it several times over in its first few decades before selling it to an "M. Bellanger" in New York, who seems to have had it in his collection in Paris. The date and time of the sale aren't given. From there, it jumps to "Swiss Private Collection" and the 1984 exhibition.

The Renoir was apparently shown in 1958 in Munich, where Bruno Lohse lived and Peter Griebert later had his gallery. Like the Monet, it also took a trip to a show in Japan, appearing in a somewhat obscure show.

The Renoir made one more appearance prior to the 1984 show. It was featured on a stamp issued by the Balliwick of Guernsey as part of a celebration of the 100th anniversary of Renoir's visit to the island. That visit produced some remarkable landscapes, and this Renoir, assuming it is legitimate, is an important one.

Guernsey is a possession of the British crown. It's known as a picturesque island, perfect for a vacation spot, with low tax rates and a very profitable off-shore finance industry (think of the Cayman Islands).


Le Quai Malaquais, Printemps (1903),
Camille Pissarro



65
Camille PISSARRO
(1831-1903)

Le Quai Malaquais, Printemps (1903)
Quai Malaquais, Spring

Oil on canvas, 54 x 65 cm.
Signed and dated, in bottom right: C.Pissarro, 1903.

Several months before his death, in the spring of 1903, Pissarro continued to paint a number of views of Paris. In a letter of March 30th addressed to his son Lucien, the artist gives us invaluable insight into his work: 'I am doing at this moment a series of paintings from the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire: the Pont Royal and the Pont du Carrousel, and also the sweep of the Quai Malaquais with the Institute of France in the background, and to the left the banks of the Seine—superb motifs of light.' The view which we display of Quai Malaquais was painted in the morning, in slightly overcast weather.

There are other versions of the same depicted at different hours of the day, and often in full sunlight.

Collection: Madame S[amuel von] Fischer, Berlin Grunewald.

Exposition: Art Museum, Lucerne, 1950.

Literature: PISSARRO-VENTURI, Number 1290.

Swiss Private Collection


The obvious part of the story is left out here. The part about how the painting was smuggled out of Germany to Austria by the Fischer family and then stolen by the Nazis in 1938.

According to an article in Die Zeit, Samuel (von) Fischer bought the Pissarro from the German art dealer Paul Cassirer in 1907 for 3000 gold marks. It hung in the Fischer family home in Berlin Grunewald, the mansion colony to the west of Berlin. Publisher Samuel Fischer died in 1934, a year after most of his writers he worked with were banned by the Nazis. His widow, children and grandchildren fled to Austria in 1935.

As the catalogue notes, Pissarro painted a series of paintings from the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire (Pomona College's The Student Life could tell you about some of the others). The hotel still exists. It's a lovely place, not far from the Musée d'Orsay and across the Seine from the Louvre and the Musée de l'Orangerie, where you can see Monet's Nymphéas murals hanging on the curved walls of their grand oval rooms. The hotel used to be a good bargain but it's been years since the Insider staff had its annual conference there and that was long before the dollar nosedived. You can still stay there today and, if you're lucky, enjoy something quite similar to this view.

A Trip in Time

Our examination of a certain stolen Impressionist painting moves from the present and recent focus on Claremont McKenna College history professor Jonathan Petropoulos back to the last time the painting in question was publicly exhibited.

The painting, Le Quai Malaquais, Printemps, done in 1903 by Camille Pissarro, was stolen by Nazis in 1938 from the family of German publisher Samuel Fischer and had been secreted away in a Swiss bank vault belonging to a Liechtenstein trust controlled by Bruno Lohse, a German art dealer who had been a key figure in the systematic Nazi program to loot art from occupied Europe during World War II.

The painting, along with four other Impressionist works owned by Lohse's trust, were exhibited as part of an inaugural show for a small Swiss museum in 1984.

The Wayback Machine at the Insider Institute is warmed up and ready to draw the many terawatts of power needed to bend the fabric of space and time to transport us back to the year 1984 and to our destination: Lausanne, Switzerland.

Step into the Wayback and please keep your hands within the passenger compartment at all times. When we arrive in Lausanne, we'll proceed directly to 2, route du Signal, and the Fondation de l'Hermitage.

The Fondation sits on a wooded hill overlooking Lausanne and has a splendid view of Lake Geneva. In 1850, the Swiss banker Charles-Juste Bugnion completed the residence that now houses the Fondation. In the 1970's, Bugnion's family bequeathed the estate and part of the surrounding parkland to the City of Lausanne, and also created the private foundation that runs the museum.

That's the museum to our right, somewhat more foreboding in black-and-white than it actually appears now, but we thought the Gothic quality was a nice touch and seemed to suit the flavor of our trip.

Stay close to the candlelight - the stairs can be treacherous....

Before we enter the exhibit, you'll want to pick up one of the show's catalogues. The exhibit, which ran from June to October, 1984, was titled l'Impressionnisme dans les Collections Romandes and featured Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings and sculptures, as well as a few precursors to Impressionism, from French-speaking Switzerland.

Notice the Renoir on the cover, Jeune Fille au Chapeau garni de Fleurs des Champs (1880), a painting that was also featured on the tickets for the show. The catalogue lists all of the exhibition's paintings, including the five we've come to view:

• Le Quai Malaquais, Printemps (1903), Camille Pissarro
• Vue de Vétheuil, l’hiver (1879), Claude Monet
• La Baie du Moulin Huet à travers les arbres—Guernsey (1883), Auguste Renoir
• Femme assise, tenant une Mandoline (1826-1828), Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot
• L’Abreuvoir à Marly (1875), Alfred Sisley

The first three paintings, the Pissarro, the Monet, and the Renoir, were all together in Bruno Lohse's secret vault in Zurich when he died last year, and it was there that Jonathan Petropoulos and his partner Peter Griebert visited before they met with the rightful owner of the Pissarro, Gisela Bermann-Fischer, in January, 2007. The other two were also apparently controlled by Lohse's trust, which Peter Griebert worked for.

The catalogue fails to list the provenance of the five Lohse-controlled paintings, other than to attribute them to "Swiss Private Collection." Interestingly, of the 111 paintings and 12 Degas sculptures in the show, only six have owners who are named. The rest are attributed to private collections in different Swiss cities: "Collection Particulière, Lausanne," "Collection Particulière, Genève," or "Collection Particulière, Montreux." Only the five Lohse paintings have the broader designation: "Collection Particulière, Suisse."

Did Lohse need an extra layer of protection to hide his ownership of the paintings? If Gisela Fischer or anyone else looking for the painting had known of the particular city, Zurich, where her painting was kept, would it had made it easier for them to find it?

As the Stephen Koldehoff article in the Summer 2007 issue of ArtNews noted, there were also some problems that surfaced later with the exhibition's curator and another Swiss bank vault:

The curator of that show was the French art historian and Renoir cataloguer François Daulte, whose death in 1998 led to a major scandal. His heirs found in his safe at the Credit Suisse Bank in Lausanne 24 paintings by Corot, Degas, Gauguin, Manet, Morisot, Renoir, and Toulouse-Lautrec that had belonged to Anne-Marie Rouart and should have been given to the Académie des Beaux- Arts and its Marmottan Museum in Paris by the executors of her will, one of whom was Daulte’s son Olivier.

Koldehoff also writes that the Fondation de l'Hermitage itself may now be the subject of an investigation:

Moreover, the provenance of the Fondation de l’Hermitage’s own art collection of about 800 works is unclear in some cases. German researcher Monika Tatzkow, who recently published (with Gunnar Schnabel) the comprehensive handbook Nazi Looted Art, has discovered that at least some of these works were acquired from the notorious Swiss art dealer Maria Schmidlin, a Nazi collaborator who bought and sold on their behalf artworks stolen, looted, or extorted from Jewish emigrants.

The Fondation de l’Hermitage did not reply to a request from ARTnews for more information.

As the Koldehoff article pointed out, there was some risk to publicly exposing the paintings, and it was the catalogue from the 1984 Fondation de l'Hermitage exhibit that Camille Pissarro's great-grandson, Joachim Pissarro, gave to Gisela Fischer in 2001 as evidence that her painting still existed. Why would Lohse take the risk of an exhibit for the Pissarro, which was known to be stolen?

Perhaps Lohse intended to create a veneer of propriety for his ownership. By having the painting shown at a relatively minor museum, he would start creating a public trail for the painting, something Loshe may also have tried to do with the Renoir, though the provenance for that painting is unclear. And, given the blurry ownership attribution in the Daulte catalogue for the show, one wonders if any other looted paintings might have been lurking in the exhibit - paintings that had never been exhibited abroad, for instance.

Equally murky for the uninitiated such as ourselves is the world of public and private art collectors and dealers. Paintings go missing, ethical lines seem to get blurred, millions of dollars change hands, and too many of those immersed in the trade accept this as the normal course of affairs. In the real world, things are much clearer. Stolen property is discovered, and it gets returned to the original owner. Sometimes the people who buy the items are charged with possession of stolen property. Having the millions to buy and sell stolen art, though, must also buy you a different sort of ethics, one much more malleable than the everyday variety you and I have to live with.

In any case, we've now arrived at the Fondation's entrance. Tomorrow, we'll take a careful look at the paintings, and maybe even take a sidetrip to the island of Guernsey, where Lohse's Renoir was painted. Make sure you have your tickets ready.

Continued in Part II.

CMC Professor Takes a Break; Insider Takes a Trip

Claremont McKenna College history professor Jonathan Petropoulos is apparently taking a break from his teaching duties next fall. No word yet on how Professor Petropoulos will be spending his time.

Readers will recall that Petropoulos had been attracting a great deal of unwanted attention in the past few months after news of his attempted restitution of a Camille Pissarro painting that had been stolen from a Jewish family in Austria in 1938.

Last month, Petropoulos stepped down from his director's position at CMC's Center for the Study of Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights.

The painting at the center of this story, Pissarro's Le Quai Malaquais, Printemps (1903), has a compelling backstory, and we'd like to take a closer look at some of the painting's travels in the past quarter century.

Join us later this week as we step into the Insider's Time Travel Machine (patent pending) to take a trip back to 1984 to an art exhibit at the Fondation de l'Hermitage in Lausanne, Switzerland, where the Pissarro and several other paintings from the secret vault of Nazi-art looter Bruno Lohse made appearances at the Fondation's inaugural exhibit.

TSL-Taylor Lovefest

At the suggestion of Charles over at the Claremont Conservative, a Claremont McKenna College student blog, we picked up a copy of the April 25th edition of Pomona College's weekly journal of creative writing, The Student Life (TSL).

You may recall that that TSL ran an error-filled article about CMC history professor Jonathan Petropoulos on April 4th that resulted in that week's issue of the paper being pulled from newsstands. TSL's Petropoulos article included a headline that seemed to imply that the professor had been criminally charged with a crime related to a Camille Pissarro painting (Petropoulos has not been charged with any crime), and it also included a very large, mislabeled image of the wrong painting.

Now, we don't want to single out a student paper for an honest error. Lord knows we have our share of mistakes, but we do try to acknowledge those and correct them as soon as possible. TSL's Petropoulos story seemed worse than an simple mistake. Anytime an entire issue of a paper has to be erased from history, something's wrong. Of course, one could argue that the removal may have been an apt metaphor for the whole Petropoulos affair.

Besides the problems with the headline and the image, the article itself seemed like a pastische of passages from other articles, including the work of Claremont Independent editor Elise Viebeck. As we wrote at the time, TSL's reporting for the Petropoulos piece was a lazy sort of journalism.

Click to Enlarge

So, we weren't really expecting much when we got the last week's TSL, which carried an article on page 2 by writer Kavisha Singh about a visit by Claremont Mayor Ellen Taylor on April 16th to Pomona College's Women's Union.

We couldn't help but notice some pretty obvious errors in the piece, some of which could probably be attributed to Queen Ellen's usual dissembling. However, is it too much to ask for a little fact-checking? To begin with, the article states that Taylor contrasted Claremont's strong tradition of women involved in city governance with neighboring La Verne, which the article said "has never had a female council member."

Well, here's an image of the La Verne City Council's website (note the councilmember farthest to the right, Donna Nasmyth):



So, was Ellen wrong, or is she trying to insinuate that La Verne's Nasmyth is a transvestite? Some clarification, please, TSL. To make its point, the article might have said that Nasmyth is La Verne's first female councilmember, but it did not.

The article also painted a false picture of Taylor as being unfairly criticized (much like Hillary Clinton, Taylor seemed to hint), for being a strong woman. Taylor was quoted as saying, "In this field, a strong man is seen as charismatic, but a strong woman is considered aggressive."

What the article failed to acknowledge is that fact that Taylor hasn't been unfairly criticized because of her gender. Instead, she's been rightly characterized as an arrogant, egotistic, bullying person. Her behavior would be wrong in anybody, and Taylor's hiding behind gender is the worst sort of cowardice. TSL's reporter obviously did not do enough homework. After all, how does Taylor's attacking fellow females fit into her portrait of herself as a victim?

There's nothing wrong with a strong woman. There's plenty wrong with an obnoxious autocrat who abuses her position of power.

The article contained plenty of other Taylor misinformation. According to the TLS piece, for instance, Taylor mentioned the acquistion of Johnson's Pasture as a success. TSL failed to mention, though, how the actions of Taylor and fellow councilmembers Peter Yao, Linda Elderkin, and Sam Pedroza almost resulted in the city's failure to be able to purchase the land.

Recall that those four councilmembers were part of the group that pushed the 2006 Parks and Pastures assessment district as a funding mechanism for Johnson's Pasture. The assessment was opposed by a majority of property owners in Claremont because only about half of the money $48 million it would have generated would have gone to paying for the pasture. The rest of the money was at best very loosely programmed and was seen as a backdoor way of creating a new revenue stream for the city. The assessment failed 56% to 44% because of the greed and overreaching of Taylor, et al.

In contrast, the bond measure that was eventually passed for Johnson's Pasture will end up costing about half of what the assessment would have and will be paid off at least five years sooner than the assessment district would have and was initially opposed by Taylor.

The TSL article also claimed that Taylor said the city "is also considering building a medical marijuana dispensary." Imagine that, Claremont going into the ganja biz. Talk about a new revenue stream!

A word to TSL, whenever you plan on doing another article about local issues, check your facts, especially when dealing with our Mayor. Is that really too much to ask?