Goudstikker's List

Goudstikker's List

Titian Rembrandt van Rijn Cranach Vincent van Gogh Jan van Goyen Jan van der Heyden Jan Anthonisz van Ravesteyn Jos Rubens

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In May 1940, the Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker fled Amsterdam, along with his wife, Desirée, and their one-year-old son, Edo, just ahead of advancing Nazi troops. They carried nothing but the clothes they were wearing, a few pieces of jewelry, the cash Goudstikker had on hand—and a notebook listing 1,300 inventoried art objects from his celebrated Amsterdam gallery, including 1,113 paintings by such masters as Rembrandt, Rubens, Jan Steen, van Gogh and Titian.

After boarding a ship that was to transport them to safety, Goudstikker died unexpectedly: restless in the crowded hold overnight, he went for a walk on deck, tripped into an uncovered hatch and broke his neck. His family continued their journey, winding up in America. Fortunately, they took his list of paintings with them. When Desirée returned to Amsterdam after the war to claim the artworks and the family’s other possessions, she discovered that everything was gone. Goudstikker’s gallery, and his collection, had been looted by the Nazis. About 300 of the pictures were recovered by the Allies after the war and returned to the Dutch state, which then turned them over to the Netherlands’ major museums.

Desirée’s attempts to retrieve the artworks were stymied by the institutions, which wanted to keep them, and by the courts. Both Desirée and Edo died in 1996. It was the Dutch journalist Pieter den Hollander who, in 1997, contacted Marei von Saher, Edo’s widow, after learning about the Goudstikker story while investigating restitution policies. Von Saher then filed a legal claim seeking the return of the paintings, but it wasn’t until 2006 that the court, under pressure from a new Dutch restitution committee led by the art historian and activist Rudi Ekkert, handed 202 paintings over to her.

The 2006 settlement may have given the family some sense of vindication, but the Goudstikker case has hardly receded from view. Indeed, the paintings are still making headlines as the subject of legal claims, as they crop up at art fairs and at auction and travel to museums. Around 35 important works, loaned by the family and private collectors, are featured in “Reclaimed: Paintings from the Collection of Jacques Goudstikker,” on view through September 7 at the Bruce Museum, in Greenwich, Connecticut. Organized in cooperation with the family, the show will travel in 2009 to the Jewish Museum in New York. “I’m just thrilled that by doing the exhibition we keep Jacques Goudstikker’s legacy alive,” says von Saher.

After the verdict, von Saher and her two daughters selected a number of works they wished to keep for personal reasons and put the rest up for sale at auction and through private dealers. “We had to pay our lawyers’ fees,” explains the 64-year-old von Saher, who lives in Greenwich.

In 2006 the 202 paintings were reportedly worth an estimated €56 million to €84 million ($79 million to $110 million). Sales proceeds so far fall short of those numbers. This is hardly surprising, since the estimate included the pictures retained by the family, potentially the most valuable of the trove, and only a portion of the remainder has been sold.

Last year, Christie’s offered 128 of the works— chosen with the assistance of Nicholas Hall, the international head of the firm’s Old Master and British pictures department—in a series of auctions: one each in New York, London and Amsterdam. Only 87 lots sold, for a combined $20.78 million— just above their low presale estimate of $19.2 million. Hall says the results are “respectable,” since many paintings sold much higher than their estimates.

No other auctions are planned at the moment. The von Sahers, however, are continuing to offer some works privately, mostly through the London Old Masters dealer Simon Dickinson. Dickinson brought Jan Steen’s Sacrifice of Iphigenia, 1671, one of Goudstikker’s most significant paintings, to TEFAF Maastricht this past March. The picture, which had hung in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam after 1945, was a star of the show, where it sold for €8 million ($12 million). “It’s certainly one of the greatest Dutch 17thcentury pictures we have ever handled,” says the dealer.