Goudstikker's List

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

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Goudstikker’s legacy is that of “ a tastemaker who changed collecting,” says Peter C. Sutton, the director of the Bruce and the show’s organizer. “Prior to Goudstikker, few dealers in Holland offered anything but Dutch and Flemish paintings.”

A man of famed charisma, Goudstikker was a prominent figure in Northern European society. He started as an assistant in his father’s gallery, later founding his own, in a canal house at 458 Herengracht. This was the prewar destination for anyone in the market for Dutch masters and Italian Renaissance paintings. Goudstikker’s clients included the Dutch sugar magnate J. W. Edwin vom Rath and the American financier Andrew Mellon. He organized traveling exhibitions of gallery works to Scandinavia and the U.S. The dealer also sold works directly to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, and even to a museum in Kansas, at a time when few European dealers made such international transactions. He plied his clients with what Sutton characterizes as “the most varied stock of any dealer in Holland at that time, [with] something for everyone’s pocketbook. He collected artists who hadn’t yet caught on but who would subsequently be appreciated and collected widely.”

If his legacy continues today, so does the wrangling over his collection. The 2006 settlement did not please everyone in the Netherlands. Medy van der Laan, then deputy culture minister, said during a press conference that although returning the paintings was “the morally correct outcome,” it was nevertheless “a bloodletting for some of our museums.” It also opened the floodgates. The case, says the restitution committee’s Ekkert “attracted worldwide attention in the press,” resulting “in many more requests of information about claims from all over the world.”

In an unusual twist, one Dutch institution is trying to buy back a work from von Saher. The Dordrecht Museum launched a campaign in March to raise €3.5 million ($5 million) to purchase the van Goyen landscape in the Bruce show, which had become part of its holdings after the war. The museum’s director, Peter Clean, recently told the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad that it would be the most expensive painting the institution has ever purchased but that it has “always been one of the favorites of the public.”

Meanwhile, von Saher is still trying to recover pictures. She believes 500 from the original collection of 1,300 are still missing. “We will continue to look for those paintings,” she says, adding that she assumes some have been lost or destroyed over the years. “We have leads on a few of them. I’m hoping that museums will finally make things a little easier on us and on many other cases. The wrong finally has to be put right.”

Von Saher has also identified some works hanging in major museums. She says that two Lucas Cranach panels in the Norton Simon Museum, in Pasadena, were originally in Goudstikker’s inventory. Last May she filed suit against the institution demanding their return, asserting that the Dutch government incorrectly restituted them to George Stroganoff-Scherbatoff, a Dutch navy commander, who successfully petitioned for the works and then sold them in 1971 to the Norton Simon. Last October, a federal judge dismissed her claim, ruling that the statute of limitations for war restitution cases had expired in California. Von Saher plans to appeal.

In the meantime, debate swirls around where “Reclaimed” might go after the Jewish Museum. There was talk of sending it to Yad Vashem, in Israel, and also to Amsterdam, possibly to be shown at 458 Herengracht. The Yad Vashem plan has apparently been dropped, says Bruce director Sutton, and although Amsterdam is still a possible venue, hard feelings remain there about the recent so-called “bloodletting.” Joël Cahen, the director of Amsterdam’s Jewish Historical Museum, who had offered to help get the exhibition there, says von Saher decided to hold off for now. “It was a brilliant idea to bring the show here, and to do it at the former Goudstikker gallery,” he says. “But they don’t want to step on the sore spots of the Dutch museums that lost some important paintings to the restitution.”