Tiepolo and the Nazis: unexpected story behind one painting

Domenico Tiepolo. Trojan Horse series in three parts at the Tiepolo: Venice in the North exhibition at the Sinebrychoff Art Museum – Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki, Finland. Autumn 2020 – Winter 2021. Photo (C) Hannu Pakarinen. Credit: Sinebrychoff Art Museum – Finnish National Gallery, Finland. With kind permission of the Sinebrychoff Art Museum.

By Inna Rogatchi (C) 

 

With special thanks to inspired and inspiring colleagues: director of Amos Rex Museum, Dr Kai Kartio, director of the Sinebrychoff Art Museum-Finnish National Gallery Dr Kirsi Eskelinen, chief curator of the Sinebrychoff Art Museum-Finnish National Gallery Dr Ira Westergard, researcher at the University of Helsinki Kersti Tainio.

 From Unremarkable Acquisition To Major Re-discovery

This year, the end of April 2021, marks the 25th anniversary of a very special art acquisition which resulted in one of the most stunning re-discoveries in the present day art history. In April 1996, an initially unremarkable acquisition was made by the Sinebrychoff Art Museum in Helsinki, Finland. It was an Italian artwork of the XVIII century, by an anonymous artist. As it turned out, it was the beginning of an extraordinary story which has become the subject of my forthcoming art historical documentary.

Eight months after the acquisition, in December 1996, the Museum and the Finnish National Gallery had had to call the press-conference. There it was announced that since now on, the Museum owns not one Tiepolo, as it was known since the Museum’s establishing, but two of them, with the second work being identified as the masterpiece of Domenico Tiepolo, the son of the great Venetian master of the XVIII century and the famous artist himself.

The work resurrected in Helsinki in 1996  was not an ordinary piece of art. It was the missing part of the series created by Domenico Tiepolo on Trojan Horse, the series which were widely well known and described in the art literature in detail. 

Helsinki, 2020-2021: first unification of Tiepolo’s Trojan Horse triptych in more than 200 years

Year 2020 was the time of the 250th anniversary of the death of Domenico Tiepolo’s father, the great Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo. In commemoration of it, the Sinebrychoff Art  Museum in Finland has organised a gem of an exhibition Tiepolo: Venice in the North, which I dubbed as ‘the exhibition of discoveries’ .

It was at that exhibition, when one of the most notable events in the world of fine arts in recent time has occurred. For the first time in over 200 years, the series originally created as the three-parts entity by Domenico Tiepolo on Trojan Horse has been exhibited in its entirety. For the first time in over 200 years, the two parts of that notable work which belongs to the London National Gallery for over the century, were united with its third part which was presumed to be  lost under the most dramatic circumstances, at the most dramatic time, before it resurrected in Finland, over 70 years ago, and was re-identified a quarter of century ago.

Domenico Tiepolo. Trojan Horse series in three parts at the Tiepolo: Venice in the North exhibition at the Sinebrychoff Art Museum – Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki, Finland. Autumn 2020 – Winter 2021. Photo (C) Hannu Pakarinen. Credit: Sinebrychoff Art Museum – Finnish National Gallery, Finland. With kind permission of the Sinebrychoff Art Museum.

 Helsinki, 1996: the missing part

It was a regular monthly auction at Hagelstam auction house in Helsinki in April 1996, with a few potential buyers presented, and with nothing extraordinary mentioned in the preliminary published catalogue. Among those several people at the well-known Hagelstam auction rooms, there was a young curator from the Sinebrychoff Art Museum. When he saw the photo of the work planned for sale at Hagelstam a bit earlier, he who always had a soft spot for Tiepolo, was thinking to himself: “Hmm, this dark old work of Venetian art does resemble Tiepolo , or his workshop, perhaps”.  Today, Kai Kartio,  now one of the leading culture figures in Finland, director of the new and popular Amos-Rex Museum recalls the events of the 25 years back in our conversations, with still recognisable amazement.

The bid was quite low, and the young curator had had the mandate from the Museum’s director at the time for such modest purchases which would fit a very small acquisition budget that the Museum had in the mid 1990s.

As Kai Kartio recalls today, ‘at the time when we still operated in Finnish marks, the estimate was equivalent to a few hundreds Euro”. There were other bidders for the work, as well, so when Kai eventually got the painting for the museum, its price fetched the sum which was the equivalent of  under 2000 Euro. The Sinebrychoff Art Museum does not commit itself for public estimate of their treasure, understandably. According to some professional Italian estimates, the works could be conservatively valued today at 500 – 600 thousand Euros. 

Domenico Tiepolo. The Greeks Sacking Troy. 1773-1775. (C) Sinebrychoff Art Museum – Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki. With kind permission of the Sinebrychoff Art Museum.

 

 Being an able researcher, at the Helsinki University library, he consulted the best possible source, published in Munich and Zurich 8-volumed detailed catalogue of iconography of Christian symbols in art, Lexikon der christlichen ikonographie.   

“ As it turned out, the subject of the Trojan Horse has been depicted in art surprisingly rarely, – Kai Kartio told me recently, – and the Domenico Tiepolo’s series of three paintings on the subject were well-known and properly described in that really extremely thorough Lexicon. Moreover, at the Lexicon, there was also mentioned that the article in the German art magazine Pantheon, the leading German art publication at the time, has written about the one of the works in the series in particular in the 1930s, due to the big Tiepolo exhibition in Chicago where it has been shown.”

Dr Kai Kartio, director of the Amos Rex Museum, Helsinki. (C) Jussi Mankkinen. With kind permission of Dr Kai Kartio.

After reading the description at the Lexicon, Kai Kartio ran to Finnish National Gallery archive where, as he knew, they had kept some of the Pantheon magazines, due to ‘the extremely close ties between Germany and Finland before the WWII in the culture field’, he mentioned. He found it.

When Kai opened the issue of Pantheon magazine on international art from 1930,  he saw the picture of the work which he had just bought at the Hagelstam monthly auction a few months before for peanuts as the work of ‘anonymous, Italy, XVIII century” .

“Of course, I went to see Wenzel Hagelstam, the head of the auction house ( and the long-term host of the Finnish franchise of Antic, Antic TV-show), and showed him my discoveries. He was completely stunned. My quest for him was any documentation regarding the work which the auction house might have, and of course, I wanted to know now who was the seller, and any possible circumstances around the sale”, – recalls Kai Kartio.

 

From that moment on, the story around Domenico Tiepolo’s The Greeks Sacking Troy in a blink of an eye has moved half a century back, and brought us to Berlin soon after the end of the Second World War, in 1948.

In the saga of tracing the provenance of the 245-year-old work by Tiepolo-son undertaken by my Finnish colleagues, aspiring and thorough art historians, this aspect and time period has attracted my attention in particular, due to my own historical research in different aspects of the post-Second World War period.  I have spent several months looking at the specific aspects of the history of this painting: all possible circumstances in connection with the work in a period between 1930 and 1948, historical, cultural and human context of the astonishing adventures of the Venetian master’ masterpiece.

Berlin, 1948: Unanswered questions. How Tiepolo Jr. has become ‘an anonymous artist’?  

The man who unexpectedly for himself has become into possession of  the dark, unclear work of ‘anonymous Italian artist’ was Finnish diplomat Tauno Sutinen who was stationed in Germany before and during the Second World War as the Second Secretary of the Embassy of Finland in Berlin.  He had to return to Finland from Germany rather abruptly in 1944. Many of his dealings in Germany, including his ongoing relations with a certain art-dealer there, were left in the middle.

When Sutinen realised that he won’t be returning back to Germany as planned originally, he asked some of his acquaintances there to handle these unfinished businesses on his behalf. This is how the batch of six artworks from Berlin had eventually got to Helsinki in 1948, preceded by the letter of Sutinen’s acquaintance in Berlin describing that in return of the money that he left with the dealer, the later provided several artworks, including the one  ‘rather impressive work by an anonymous Italian artist of the XVIII century’.  The work was marked in the letter as being worth 15 000 RM ( Reich Marks) by the German art dealer. The sum in 1948 was equivalent of $ 6000. It is comparable to 55.000 Euros of the money value of today.

From that time onward, Domenico Tiepolo’s unrecognised masterpiece had been hung on the Finnish diplomat’s wall at his apartment in Helsinki. More than twenty years after his death in 1974, followed by the consequent death of his widow, the family decided to sell some of their art via Hagelstam auction. 

The dealer in Berlin who sent the batch of six artworks to Tauno Suutinen in 1948 via certain Georgy Ribakoff was Herbert Ulrich. As established by the Finnish researchers, in 1944, the gallery was bombed severely, but he was able to resume his business, at the other location, surprisingly quickly, as early as in 1946, running it until his death in 1991. The business continued after his passing, and I saw that there is an art gallery with this name in the prestigious area of Berlin today. 

Why on earth a savvy German art dealer in Berlin has decided, in the immediate aftermath  of the Second World War, to attribute a well-known and properly described artwork as the work of ‘an anonymous artist’. What he was aiming to hide? Whom, when and how did he get the work from?

The only reason prompted him to change The  Greeks Sacking Troy’s authorship from Tiepolo to ‘ an anonymous’ was the previous owner of the work, or a middleman who dealt in the total upheaval of the art market during WWII. The most tricky detail which was brought to public attention as recently as in the autumn 2020, by the publication of the findings by the Finnish art historians Dr Ira Westergard and Kersti Tainio  ( Travelling with Tiepolo, Helsinki, 2020) is the fact of the cut of the top edge of the label note on the back side of the work’s frame. The note is in German, and it describes the topic of the work. As the Finnish researchers justly noticed, with the photograph illustrating their point, the note is cut precisely at the place where the name of the artist is supposed to be.  

When I undertook my own art historical research based on professional thorough work of my colleagues from the Sinebrychoff Art Museum in Helsinki, I was looking into any possible further lead coming of their discoveries, in the given period between 1930 and 1948. In the beginning of my research, I was electrified to see the name of the art dealer in Paris who, as it was established recently, had the Tiepolo’s work in his possession until 1942.

London 1945: A very special intelligence unit. In search of looted art of Europe.

I was electrified because I knew that name already. I came across it in the course of my previous research related to post-WWII Europe and the US. I saw that name in the OSS ( the US Intelligence) files on wanted Nazis. At the time of completing the files, in 1945-1946, the OSS in Europe was overwhelmed with the volume of their tasks. Established special unit gathering intelligence on looted art known as ALIU was actually run by just ten people who were supposed to get to the bottom of that incredible, giant looting  organised by the Nazis that swept Europe during the six years of the war. 

 In the course of their round o’clock work, ALIU experts were able to distill the mess of personalities involved in the process of the Nazi crimes against culture down to 2000 individuals, both Nazi officials tasked with mass art looting and those dealers and middlemen who cooperated with them eagerly.

 I have been working on the theme of looted art since the early 1990s, and have first-hand knowledge about how the process of investigation of that aspect of the Nazi crimes had been evolving from its very start in 1945. My knowledge comes from a number of great people who did participate in it personally, including late Simon Wiesenthal who was working closely with the OSS in Austria in particular with regard to Hitler beloved project, his future  Linz Art Museum, a giant operation which had an undisputed priority among all Reich projects on looted art.

Among them is also a legendary Peter Sichel who was running super-secret the CIA Strategic Unit in Berlin from 1946 onward, leading art dealer and art historian Achim Moeller , professor Konrad Kwiet who was the Chief Historian at the Commission of the Nazi Crimes Investigation in Australia, as well as former minister for foreign affairs of the Czech Republic and mentor of Vaclav Havel, dear friend Prince Karel von Schwarzenberg, whose family’s property and possessions had been looted by the Nazis in the Czech Republic, and the others. 

Inna Rogatchi and Simon Wiesenthal at the Wiesenthal’s office in Vienna, 1995. (C) Michael Rogatchi. Courtesy: The Rogatchi Archive.

Based on that massive first-hand knowledge, I would like to emphasise that if the OSS and its  Art Looting Intelligence Unit, ALIU, back in 1945-1946 has put a certain art dealer in their Wanted List, known also as Red-Flag List, it means that the evidence against that person’s dealing with the Nazis were overwhelming.

Paris, 1940-1942: Murky dealer, trustee of the Nazis, at particular Paris address

Italian Mario d’Atri  who was residing in Paris for many years, ran his art dealership business there,  and  he also  had a registered business address in Rome. The both addresses are mentioned in the OSS ALIU Red-Flag list and reports, most likely given by the interrogated senior German art looters who were buying from d’Atri.

I have looked into both of these addresses in detail. There cannot be two more different business addresses, indeed. In Rome, the address at 28, via Lima gets us to off-centre street in Parioli area, and to quite unremarkable building which most likely was d’Atri residential address in Rome or the place of his storage which would be very convenient at such casually looking unkempt place.

The address in Paris which he boasted on specially printed cards, just cannot be more different. He boasted about it for a very good reason.  Firstly, rue la Boetie in the most prestigious 8th arrondissement of Paris was known as the place of concentration of the several most prominent art dealership businesses. But the specific number 23 on the street was known to everyone in the art world in Paris and beyond it as ‘a Picasso address’.

When Pablo Picasso finally got married, for the first time, at the age of 37, in 1917,  his first wife was well-known Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlov, the star of the Djagilev’s Le Ballet Russes. Picasso himself was deeply involved as a set and dress designer in several of Djagilev’s productions at the time.  Being finally married, Picasso needed respectability and a prestigious address in Paris to live and work at and a high-class milieu to be associated with.The couple was arranged to live and Picasso to work at 23, rue La Boetie, the address registered at the OSS ALIU entrees for d’Atri.

21-23, rue la Boetie, Paris. Photo: Inna Rogatchi.

Significantly, Picasso’s way of work and life at that stage was secured and paid for by his  principal dealer Paul Rosenberg whose famous gallery was situated at the next building, at 21, rue La Boetie, and who also lived with his family there.  

Picasso lived and worked at 23, rue la Boetie until the war when he changed his Parisian address. Even then, he still was renting his two floors at 23, rue la Boetie until 1951, and would continue to do so, unless the French government decided to end unused leases which was the case for him and 23, rue la Boetie at the time.  

As for his dealer and owner of the neighbouring house at 21, rue la Boetie, almost all Rosenberg family, except his brother and his son who fought the Nazis with the Allied forces, had left Paris in February 1940. With the occupation of Paris in June 1940,  everything that Rosenbergs has left behind, has been confiscated and seized by the Nazis.

Everyone who is walking today via central rue la Boetie in the prestigious 8th arrondissement of Paris, is welcome to read quite a visible memorial plaque at number 21.

Memorial plaque on the facade of the former Rosenberg family’s house and business, at 21, rue la Boetie, Paris. Photo: Inna Rogatchi.

But there is more. 21, rue la Boetie in Paris is a screaming address not only in the history of art, but in modern history in general. In the utterly mocking gesture, the Nazis did establish at the address infamous L’Institut d’Etude des Questions Juives  ( IEQJ) , happily ran by French anti-Semites and Nazi collaborators organisation whose mainly business was to create and produce outrageous, insulting propaganda products of vile anti-Semitism. The whole operation was supervised by the Goebbels ministry and was conducted by the infamous German Embassy in France.

No wonder that after the war, despite the fact that the French state returned the house to the Rosenbergs, they found it impossible to live there, either on 21, rue la Boetie, or in France. For the rest of his life (he died in 1959 in New York), Paul Rosenberg would be looking for looted from him by the Nazis and their enthusiastic collabos, as the Nazi collaborators were known in France, as many as 400 paintings, the gems of the world art, from Rembrandt to post-Impressionists.

The OSS ALIU red-flag register and some of the unit’s reports has provided us with clear indications whom Mario d’Atri was dealing with among the Nazi senior art looters. Mentioned there are Walter Andres Hofer, the director of the Göering art looted collection, and Kajetan Muhlmann,  super-active minister for Fine Arts in post-Anschluss Austria, who led a total looting of Poland and Holland, and who is regarded as one of the most notorious art looters in the XX century.

 

The Nazis at the Louvre. Commons Images Open Library.

In the course of my research, I did revisit various information from different sources regarding notable Nazi personalities involved in the mass art looting at the given places and time, in between Paris and Berlin from 1940 to 1944, and in the post-war Germany until 1947.

With regard to Hofer, the thing is that the director of the Göering personal art collection after being detained by the US Army in 1945, tried very hard to be useful, and he ‘sang’ it all in an amazing detail. There are several entries in the OSS internal reports mentioning that ‘Hofer seemed to remember every transaction’ during the past six years ( of WWII). In the fountain of Hofner’s super-detailed testimonies in 1945,  however, there was no mention of the work by Domenico Tiepolo which would be the case if he would handle it. It was also not a major loot  – as a work by Rembrandt would be – , so in the way which Hofet has chosen to behave with his American captors, he had no reason for hiding it.

It leaves the experts looking for the person who bought Tiepolo’s artwork from d’Atri, with a possible lead to Muhlmann and one more figure.  We’ll come back to that most intriguing part of the story a bit later, after understanding how Mario d’Atri has got the Tiepolo-son’s work in the first place, where, when and from whom?

Paris, 1930: the same dealer, trustee of the Stalin agents

According to the publication in the Pantheon magazine in 1938, the work at the important Tiepolo exhibition in Chicago was presented by Mario d’Atri, with a note next to the illustration: “[ From the ] Coll[ection] of the Soviet Trade Representative Office, Paris, France”. In 2020, those two facts were clearly presented in the important study into the work’s provenance undertaken by Dr Ira Westergard and Kersti Tainio in Finland ( Travelling with Tiepolo, Helsinki, 2020). And it has been known to the Tiepolo experts before. These two facts are telling us that from 1930 till 1938 at least, the work was at d’Atri’s hands, being sold to him by the official representatives of the Soviet Union.

Tiepolo’s work was sold to a murky Italian art dealer in Paris in an aggressive selling spree of the Soviet state treasures ordered by Stalin in 1929.  

I have started to research the matter in detail from the end of the 1990s. The first wave happened in the early 1920s and was ordered by Lenin, with a truly vicious role played in that first wave of total sale-out played by American Armand Hammer who had several one-to-one long private meetings with Lenin planning the operation.

 With the second wave, the Soviet leaders were hoping to get enough resources for massive industrialisation of the country, plus all non-declared expenses, such as military ones. Because it has been done in a massive number of the most revered art treasures in the world, during the short period of time, hastily and  unprofessionally, with involvement of unqualified people, the result was the over-flooding of the international market, with inevitable sharp dumping, dropping prices in a half.

There is more. Not well known publicly facts are telling that in that rush, the emissaries of the USSR acting abroad had clumsily left a huge number of the precious artworks in the German hands shortly before Hitler’s reign began. With the Nazis’ seisure of power, that clumsiness had empowered the Third Reich with all those art treasures. The Nazis were only happy to  handle the Soviet art left in their hands, selling it professionally and at high prices, plus a bonus of mockery over the Kremlin on the matter.

When I was busy with looking into the different aspects of the history of the looted art in the  end of the 1990s-beginning of the 2000s, I spoke several times with a top Russian official who was supervising the quiet official look into the real inventory books of the Hermitage and other leading Russian museums, preparing a special internal report for the Russian authorities on what has country really lost during its Soviet history. Once he was sighing deeply, and said: “It is so awful that we cannot produce this report, we just cannot publish it, even for the internal use”. They never did. But we know the part of that tragic for art and culture story.

With regard to the Soviet agents’ art sale activities in Paris, the point here is that in France in the 1930 it was impossible to make any official transactions because the trade between Soviet Union and France was forbidden and illegal. It means that a representative of the Soviet authorities, or Komintern agent who was tasked to sell  the Domenico Tiepolo’s  artwork from the Hermitage collection in Paris  had had to cooperate with a trusted person — who would be able to re-route the transaction via some third country, as Switzerland, for example.

D’Atri could do it, for sure. He had a very suitable Swiss connection in the art dealership world for that, to whom we will return. He could also pay cash to his counter-agent from the Soviet Trade Office, as it was an accepted practice in that Stalin operation which I dubbed ‘Art for Might’. The operation actually resulted  in a complete fiasco. The proceeds of all those impossible sales of the national treasures fetched just 1% of the USSR budget at the time, as the internal Communist Party audit conducted after Stalin’s death has shown.

Helsinki, 2016-2020 — Tracing the destiny of the Domenico Tiepolo work

 Twenty years after the re-discovery in Helsinki, Kai Katrio’s successor, chief curator of the Sinebrychoff Art Museum Dr Ira Westergard and working with her researcher at the Helsinki University Kersti Tainio embarked onto an incredible journey. The purpose of their project was to research the provenance of this work in detail. They did a very good job, with publishing their findings in a catalogue of the fascinating Tiepolo exhibition in Helsinki in the autumn 2020.

Dr Kirsi Eskelinen, director, Sinebrychoff Art Museum ( on the right) and Dr Ira Westergard, chief curator of the museum, next to the Tiepolo’s artwork at the exhibition at the museum in Helsinki. 2020. Photo: Hannu Hakarinen. Credit: Sinebrychoff Art Museum-Finnish National Gallery, Finland. With kind permission of the Museum.

We have discussed the matter with Ira several times, in a painstaking detail, with a particular aspect of it in close attention.  “Knowing the story of this particular painting, before anything else, we started to look in all detail at possible belonging of the work to some of Jewish families or collectors. It was an imperative for us to turn every stone in this direction. Of course, it is impossible to say anything on that period with 100% assurance, it would be simply unprofessional, but I can state that within a very thorough two-year research project and specifically looking into that  very matter we did not come across any Jewish ownership of the work neither in the given period, or any other one” – Ira confirmed to me.

Yet before this effort was undertaken by the museum a few years back, Finnish National Gallery had examined the opportunity  immediately after the astonishing news of re-discovering Tiepolo instead of acquiring ‘an unknown Venetian artist of XVIII century’. “Can you imagine that the leading state art institution in Finland would not investigate this possibility? – Kai Kartio told me.  – In Finland, it is  out of question. Absolutely out of question. As we know, many museums in many countries did allow for itself to keep the art with painful history, namely, looted by the Nazis from the Jewish families. It has happened in many cases in Austria, and as unbelievable as it is, it still is happening in France. But in Finland, we would examine every turn of the history and provenance of the work, especially knowing what kind of dealers it had been with during the war, both d’Atri and Ulrich. And we would react absolutely appropriately here if anything of this sort would be found out. But it was not”.

I was also relieved to read about the official statement by the leadership of the Finnish Jewish community made in 2018 in the course of the Sinebrychoff Museum provenance research project confirming that they did not find any traces of such possibility in the course of their separate investigation of the matter. Before that, yet back in the end of the 1990s, the Jewish community of Finland had made an official request to the World Jewish Congress to investigate. The result was that there is no evidence of the fact that the work had belonged to a Jewish family.

The story of this painting is a truly rare case when being such a treasure and being in the hands of not one but two very dubious art dealers during the Second World War, being deprived of its authenticity, with its author concealed deliberately in alarming post-war period in Berlin of all places, it turned out as most likely, not being stolen from a Jewish owners. It was an important relief for me personally, too.

But how Domenico Tiepolo’s masterpiece which was created by him in 1773-1775 in Venice as a part of a three-works series, found its way apart from them?

St Petersburg, 1817: famous action of Tiepolo dealer’s trove 

The Tiepolo family was highly popular in the highest echelons of the Russian Empire at the time when St Petersburg was thriving with the appearance of many new superb palaces, including the Winter Palace.

Back in the end of the XVIII – beginning of the XIX century, very shrewd and experienced Italian art-dealers certainly did not let such a lucrative opportunity be missed. The one of the most known of them, Niccolo Leonetti, after the death of Domenico Tiepolo in 1804, travelled to Russia with a trove of Domenico’s, his father and his brother’s works as soon as the circumstances of the post-Napoleon invasion of Russia did allow it, in 1814. He started to work quite actively in St Petersburg, but his luck did not last for long. Leonetti died in St Petersburg just two years after his arrival, in 1816. Soon after that sudden death, a big auction was organised in St Petersburg in 1817, with trading of over 250 art works by Italian masters, including 23 of them created by father and sons Tiepolo.

“We found and saw the catalogue! – Ira Westergard was telling me with beaming eyes. – The original catalogue of the auction in 1817 in St Petersburg”. In that superb discovery, the experts saw the entries of three works depicting the Trojan Horse theme by Domenico Tiepolo written all together, one after another.  This documented discovery provided experts with the understanding that Tiepolo Jr. had created those three modellis in 1773-1775 as the series.

Domenico Tiepolo. The Procession of the Trojan Horse into Troy. 1773-1775. Oil on canvas. 38,8 x 66, 7 cm. The National Gallery, London. inv. 3319. With kind permission of the organisers of the Tiepolo: Venice in the North exhibition, Helsinki, 2020-2021.

At the auction, two of the works were bought most likely by the well-known British painter George Dawe who resided at the time in St Petersburg and who was commissioned to create as many as over 300 portraits of the Russian generals and top military personnel, the winners in the counter-Napoleon campaign, for special and quite imposing gallery in the Winter Palace known as the Military  Gallery. These two parts of the series went with Mr Dawe straight to Britain, and after his death in the 1830s, they were at different estates in Britain. In 1918, the two gorgeous works were acquired by the National Gallery to which collection they belong ever since.

The third work – the part which entered such incredible adventures – was bought, most likely at the same auction, by one of the noble Russian families. Noted by the Sinebrychoff Museum experts, there is a special stamp on the back-side of the frame of the work which was a typical way to mark such acquisitions. The experts believe that the work was in the collection of that noble family, most likely, in St Petersburg, for a century, from 1817 through 1917 or so.

After the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 and followed total nationalisation of private art collections and private property in general, the work was sent to the Hermitage collection, where from it was forcibly extracted by the Soviet authorities alongside many extraordinary treasures in 1929 to be sold to Mario d’Atri in Paris in 1930.

Inna Rogatchi (C). History Shadows. Paris I. Fine art photography. Extra limited edition. 1/10. Special authored print. 50 x 40 cm. 2021.

Tellingly, d’Atri knowing precisely that the work was by Domenico Tiepolo and was done in 1773-1775, has altered both the work’s authorship and date when he was frantically trying to sell it in the midst of the war.  There is documented evidence of him trying to sell the work as authored by ‘Giambattista Tiepolo’, the father, and attributed as created ‘in the XVII century’. This bold fake tells about the character of a doggy dealer.

He tried to contact the UK National Gallery, the most natural potential buyer for the missing part of the Troyan Horse series in the midst of the war, via intermediaries. But the British ignored his offer, still keeping the documentation with this regard in their archive. We owe that telling piece of the puzzle to Dr Ira Westergard and Kersti Tainio’s excellent research.

 The Legacy of Loot: Crimes Without Punishment.

1942 – 1947, Paris-Berlin: the mystery of Domenico Tiepolo masterpiece’s  key-time location is still unsolved

In a serious break-through of their research, the art historians from the Sinebrychoff Art Museum – Finnish National Gallery were able to examine the work by the newest infra-red equipment recently. They saw there the detail of crucial importance – number 1942 very well seen under the infra-red examination but completely unseen by a regular eye. That fact has provided the experts with the ground for establishing the fact that Mario d’Atri has sold Tiepolo’s The Greeks Sacking Troy artwork in 1942. Previously, it was established that well-seen on the frame (19)38 figure marks the time when the work travelled to Chicago for the exhibition. It is a known habit of art dealers to mark the dates of the works in their possession while shipping or changing hands.

This ‘1942’ mark seen in infra-red most likely solves the issue with potential Jewish ownership of the work, according to all experts with whom I have discussed the matter.

But it keeps opened the key-question in that almost a century-old, from 1930 onward, drama around a single art-piece: where has it been in the period between 1942, after Mario d’Atri sold it to some of the Germans,  and 1947 when it has been registered by Herbert Ulrich in his inventory, with changed description of the author to ‘an anonymous’ and tearing off the top of the note on the painting’s back with the name of the painter there?

Who had bought the work from d’Atri in 1942? The more I am looking into this amazing story, the more I am interested in that crucial moment.  

In my view, after serious research has been undertaken, out of the circle of possible buyers, two of them look more potential than the others. On both of them, there are extensive reports prepared by the OSS ALIU, dedicated to them personally, separately, among just a dozen of this kind of personal reports produced by the OSS operatives on the selected major suspects. Those suspects were regarded as the most important ones to come with these reports, initially thought to be the background material for possible prosecution. Some of it had been used during the Nuremberg trial.

One possible person to have the Domenico Tiepolo’s modello from d’Atri  would be notorious Austrian Nazi art looter Kajetan Muhlmann. The report on him was prepared by the OSS ALIU intelligence unit as number 8 out of 15 personal reports. Three of the prepared reports, including the report on Muhlmann, were not published, and there is a good reason to investigate in detail why. Still, the material of the report does exist. 

Not only Dr Kajetan Muhlmann whose role in plotting the Anschluss from inside was major, benefited hugely being the first appointed Minister for Fine Arts in the post-Anschluss Austria, and having the leading role in total confiscation of art from Jews and anti-Nazi nobility – as Prince Schwarzenberg family was. Later on, he was appointed by Göering personally to be in charge with virtual looting of entire Poland, and later on, entire Holland where richness of art treasures required the establishing of a special Muhlmann Agency – of the loot, of course .

That person was in the position in the Third Reich that had allowed him to dispute with Hitler over the Hitler’s manner to travel with some of the looted Durer’s originals of which Adolf was fancy, insisting that it is his, Muhlmann’s ultimate responsibility over the safety of the looted art treasures,  and that he was objecting herr fuhrer’s self-indulgent way of endangering the art treasures.  Hitler never liked the man.

It is established by the OSS documents that d’Atri has dealt with Muhlmann.  Additionally to that, my attention was attracted to the fact that Muhlmann and d’Atri both knew and dealt with and via Gottlieb Reber,  active and authorised by the Nazis German art dealer who during the war lived and operated in between Switzerland, France and Italy, and whose special mission was to organise buying for nothing and looting art from Italy to the Nazi Reich. I decided to have a closer look into Reber’s connections and activities.

Reber was also a close working contact of d’Atri and might help him to reroute illegal under the French law dealings with the Soviet representatives in the early 1930s.

My attention was alerted by two things: during the war, Gottlieb Reber was on a special mission from the Reich to bring there Italian art treasures, so the work by Tiepolo-son would be very much in the centre of his interest, and he was the perfect person to stash the work with, as Muhlmann was doing with he works which were left in his possession. It was established by the OSS investigators that in the post-war chaos, Muhlmann succeeded to hide quite many of the looted art treasures that he appropriated in a typical gangster way, and then he was gradually selling them via trusted dealers to live on, to sustain himself and many of his girl-friends, including another Hitler’s hysterical but calculative acolyte Leni Riefenstahl. The system worked perfectly well for Muhlmann and his harem for several years, well into the 1950s.  

Inna Rogatchi(C). Insomnia. Homage to Primo Levi. Watercolour, wax pastel, oil pastel, encre a l’alcool, perle de jaune on authored original archival print on cotton paper. 50 x 70 cm. 2010-2016-2020.

However, there is another person among that despicable bunch of the Nazi art looters whom I tend to think about as the most plausible buyer of The Greeks Sacking Troy from Mario d’Atri in 1942 in Paris. I have researched this aspect in detail.

Maria-Almas Dietrich was both an exceptional and typical character in the mixed realities of the Third Reich.  We know about her because of the detailed material gathered by the OSS and aimed for their special report dedicated to her exclusively. That report was numbered as 13th among 15 prepared personal reports. In her case, similarly to the case of the report on Muhlmann, it was not published, but the materials of it do exist.

The importance of Dietrich is illustrated by the fact that among 2000 personalities collected by the ALIU investigators as being actively involved in the Nazi looting of art, only fifteen of them were selected as the important subjects to complete an individual reports about.

That woman without proper art education managed to compensate for the luck of it by her connections. She who owned a rather unremarkable small antique shop in Munich has had a close relationship with Eva Braun and has managed to get as close to Hitler personally, as one can.

She also has had a long liaison with Heinrich Hoffmann, official photographer and close personal friend of Hitler whom Hitler trusted personally so much that he did appoint him, the person without art education, to supervise the Reich art policy from its beginning in the mid-1930s. From that time on,  Hoffmann’s role in the Nazi mass art looting was huge. It was Hoffmann who introduced  his acquaintance Dietrich to his boss Hitler in 1936.

As it often happened in the case of the individuals around Hitler, personal chemistry was a defining factor in many otherwise  irrational arrangements that he has maintained. When Hitler started to become an art collector,  it was Dietrich who was shuttling between Munich and Berlin proposing the first subjects for his private collection to him. She tried hard and was always at hand.

It is important to understand the personal and psychological background of the monsters-in-action, otherwise humanity always would foolishly repeat its own mistakes. Hitler felt psychologically comfortable with both Hoffmann and Dietrich. To a certain degree,  it was because of the deficiency of their all’ proper art education, and the general education, too, for that matter. He felt at home with people like that, and with two those individuals, in particular. His trust in loyal them originated in this psychological comfortability, born out of  evenness of under-educated minds. And corresponding art tastes, not the least.

Unlike many of my historians and writers colleagues, I never was surprised by the most known Hitler’s phrase regarding art, with what he has stamped the pride of human genius blatantly: “ I will not tolerate unfinished art!”  As pathetic as it is, he meant it. Because he was a willing beginner, but never an artist at all. In fact, regarding his art abilities, he was a very limited copyist, at best. The same as press photographer Hoffmann was not a fine photographer at any stage, and the same as specialising in repaired Turkish rugs Dietrich was not an expert in antiques and art whatsoever.

Later on, Dietrich was authorised to buy the looted art for Hitler directly, being the only person who was permitted to act on her own, without otherwise mandatory approval of any purchase by either the director of the planned  Linz Art Museum Hans Posse  or Martin Bormann. She was also the person who managed to sell the highest number of artworks to the Hitler personal art collection.

 The art looting by the Nazis was such a vast operation that it has to be compartmentalised, with implementing a rather inflexible system  of vetoing. There was the art looted for Hitler personal art collection, the art looted massively for his dreamed Linz Art Museum, the art looted for Göering personal art collection, the art looted for the Reich art depositary, and so on. All these destinations of looting, so to say, were conducted distinctively separately, with special funding for each of them.

In the Nazi war against culture, all designated looted art middlemen had to provide their proposals to the certain Nazi officials in charge of vetoing the process which was conducted through fixed and inflexible machinery. The process was conducted on each of the directions, for each of the collections. In the case of Hitler, his personal art collection soon enough   was run closely in parallel with his maniac project for the Linz Art Museum, the designated officials for approval of any object were Posse and Bormann. For all the others, including educated gangster Dr Muhlmann, except a close fuhrer’s trustee, uneducated frau Dietrich.

Enjoying a special favour of the fuhrer, Dietrich also has had easily accessible funds for her frenetic shopping sprees.  Being far from an expert, she bought art based on her own taste and understanding of an owner of a second-class antique shop in Munich.

When Nazis occupied France and celebrated their unbelievable luck of being the feared masters of Paris, for many of them just this thought alone was having a champagne-like effect psychologically. It is known that Dietrich was enjoying herself in Paris overwhelmingly, with all her Bavarian crudity. She just could not have enough of it, and has become the talk of the town in no time.

Dietrich was shuttling between Germany and Paris non-stop, and lived there in a vulgar way of a self-appointed bossy celebrity overwhelmed by power and champagne. She also did  run through the art galleries in Paris regularly, emptying them efficiently.

Two moments registered in the OSS documents regarding Dietrich got my special attention: in Paris, most frequently she visited the galleries located on rue la Boetie. And she bought quite many modelli, oil sketches on canvas, which Tiepolo’s work in question was in its technique,  – for the same reasons that they were popular from the time of Tiepolo and  thereafter – easy  to transport, of a manageable size, and still commanding high prices being original artworks executed in oil on canvas and by old masters.

The map of Paris prepared for the Nazi Germany troops before the invasion. Commons Images Library.

Another important consideration is that it is also quite plausible  that d’Atri was able ‘to feed’ his false attribution of the work, with its switched authorship and date, to that under-educated art shopaholic much easier than to his other Nazi clients. Of many of those Germans who were hunting the art treasures in Paris and were more professional and better educated, Maria-Alma Dietrich was the type who would not know the difference neither between father and son Tiepolo’s manners, or between the distinctions of XVII and XVIII centuries in nuances of Venetian art .

So, in theory, she could be easily deceived by d’Atri, bought The Greeks Sacking Troy from him and brought it to Berlin in 1942. Hitler might be not that impressed by rather dark work which needed a restoration, thus leaving frau Dietrich with the work in her hands before she passed it to Heinrich Ulrich, selling it to him or leaving it with him on commission for possible sale. Ulrich’s imposing gallery was in Berlin at least until 1944 when it was bombed, and was located just around the corner, eight minutes walk, from the Hitler’s Chancellery where Dietrich was a regular visitor. 

 Analysing all pro and contra-s of the case, given the kind of art that has been in the possession of Muhlmann, and his professional awareness of periods and masters, I tend to think that in 1942 in the occupied Paris, it might be that it was rather uneducated and sporadic frau Dietrich whom d’Atri could fool over The Greeks Sacking Troy work’s date and its author, it well may be her who was  frequent at his gallery at 23, rue Boetie, and who bought modelli regularly. My bet is on Dietrich as a likely Nazi buyer of the Tiepolo’s work from d’Atri in Paris in 1942.

According to my line of thinking, when Ulrich resumed his business as early as in 1946, he was in need to clear his stock from problematic pieces. Authored by Tiepolo-son modello previously from the Hermitage collection, importantly, – about which Ulrich must knew due to the popularity of the German Pantheon magazine, it was a must reading among professionals – the work  that he possibly got from nobody else but the personal provider of looted art to Hitler, was undoubtedly a very undesirable asset to own under the circumstances.

The savvy German dealer active during a war-time sacrificed the work’s ownership, physically too, tearing the top of the note on the back of the frame off, and sent the work to Finland, where it was left unrecognised on a private wall for 48 years.

Who would expect that a half of a century later, in a distant Finland, 30-something Kai Kartio would possess a required intuition, professional curiosity, and expert approach to know where to check on the  provenance  of a dark obscure work? And it is highly important that we know so much about the extraordinary history of the Tiepolo work at the Sinebrychoff Museum collection today. With this kind of public knowledge on this kind of public crime, there are no statute of limitations.

 Germany, Austria, 1945-1950s: crimes without punishment. 

When I am researching in detail the situation after the war, with that unbelievable success of so many of the Nazis and their collaborators in escaping the punishment, I inevitably come to that powerfully distorted balance of good and evil. In that outcome, good was shrank terribly and evil was laughing big. Even after the defeat of the Third Reich. Namely, after that defeat.

The OSS special unit on the Nazi looted art ALIU was  working literally round o’clock for three years, preparing the documentation for possible prosecution of the main Nazi officials who were tasked with the cultural war of an unprecedented scale. How many of them have been prosecuted? None. All of them were briefly detained, questioned, interrogated, and released. All of them were living the years after the war out of the stashes of the looted art that was left in their possession, with most recognisable artworks being hidden and dispersed among their trusted accomplices mainly in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and some of it in Spain.

Göering’s personal art provider Hofer, despite being convicted by the French military court in absentia to ten years of imprisonment, never spent a day behind the bars. Instead, he was  nicely and profitably keeping his art dealership business in Munich until his death in 1971.  He did not even need to bother to try the rat-line to escape to Latin America, as many of his Nazi colleagues did.  You see, Munich seemed to be too far from the French border, in the eyes of the post-war French authorities, in a giant distance of 350 km.

France also did not look into the dealings of the one of the most close to the Nazis dealers Mario d’Atri, who was never charged with anything and who is believed to sell his business, its Parisian part,  at his pleasure in the 1960s. There are some indications that d’Atri was benefiting from his Italian citizenship and retreated there during the hot first period after the end of war, but then was able to maintain his business as he pleased well into the 1960s.

D’Atri’s major client Marie-Almas Dietrich was similarly happily running her antique store in Munich as well, until her death at the same year as Hofer’s, 1971, with her daughter – who was that special connection of Dietrich to Eva Braun – continuing  the family business thereafter. They did it as practically all the families of the notorious Nazi art looters, middlemen and dealers did. The point here is that they all were allowed to do it.

In a  jaw-dropping arrogance, Dietrich’s antique shop at Odeonplatz in Munich, that has become an art gallery of course, has been promoted by the art organisations and professional media in Germany as ‘the one of the leading art galleries in Munich’ in the 1970s, alongside with similar establishments owned by many of Dietrich’s pals and some rivals from their happy Nazi days.

Dietrich’s patron who introduced her to Hitler, the close friend of the fuhrer, member of the NDSA  number 59 from its earliest days in 1920,  and a major figure in the Nazi art looting process, Heinrich Hoffmann was sentenced by the Allies to the devastating punishment of four years of imprisonment – after which, in 1956,  he did manage to return to himself and his family ‘his’ personal art collection by the decision of the Bavarian Financial Ministry. Hoffmann collection was not only known to be assembled of the looted art. It has been put into scrupulous inventory by the OSS ALIU officers in its entirety in preparation of its planned confiscation. That closest Hitler associate has been officially designated by the Allies  as ‘major offender’ regarding the Nazi art looting process. That designation had a legal meaning as well – implication for complete confiscation of his art looted collection. 

But Hoffmann, as many other senior Nazis, had an arrogance – and possibilities, importantly – to fight for his rights in astonishing defiance. They all did it because they were provided with many possibilities – legal, human, social – in the realities of post-war Germany to be allowed to do that, successfully.

The decision of the Bavarian authorities came two years after Hoffmann was released from his terrible four-years imprisonment, in 1956. The most charming moment there is the disarming phrasing of the decision: “the all art objects (belonging to Hoffmann) under administration of the Bavarian State Paintings Collections to be turned over to Mr. Heinrich Hoffmann, Nazi Party photographer.” ( as cited in the Steffen Winter’s article on the topic in Der Spiegel magazine back in 2013). What is yet more charming is the fact that in black on white, the decision has been referred to as being conducted ‘in the process of (Hoffmann’s) denazification’. 

The one of the most serious criminals of the Third Reich, Kajetan Muhlmann who was ranked Nazi officer, also died there in Munich in 1958 of natural causes escaping prosecution in a mind-blowing defiance of any remnant of any norms of civility of the German and international post-war establishment. This is despite him being tried in absentia by both Poland and Austria, and despite all active efforts by the both countries for his extradition, from also oh-so-very far from Vienna, South Bavaria. The escape of the punishment by Muhlmann in particular is qualified by leading art historians as ‘unbelievable failure of justice’ ( prof. John Petropoulus, 2016).

It is telling to see this screaming phenomenon by the inner look of the decent German journalist:  “No one likes to talk about this enormous cache of Nazi treasure, partly because of a feeling of guilt for possessing assets that are often of unclear provenance: Art objects acquired from Jewish collections that were sold off in a panic after 1933, or that were simply taken from their rightful owners before they disappeared into concentration camps” –  Steffen Werner wrote in his “A Nazi Legacy Hidden in German Museums” investigative report – no, not in 1956, but in 2013.

Inna Rogatchi (C). Holocaust Travelling I. History Shadows series. Watercolour, wax pastel, oil pastel, lapice pastel, encre l’alcool, crayons Luminance on authored original archival print on cotton paper. 70 x 70 cm. 2019.

 Helsinki & London, 2020-2021: reflections of the united triptych

Coming back to the word of art, the unification of all the parts of Domenico Tiepolo’s series on Trojan Horse that has happened at the Tiepolo exhibition in Helsinki in the autumn 2020-winter 2021 at the Sinebrychoff Art Museum does look different in the light of the restored saga of believed to be lost part of the series. To make it happen, it really needed so many factors to coincide: resurfaced work 25 years ago, its identification and re-discovery, ideas and possibilities of exhibiting all three parts together, multiplied circumstances related not only to the two main cultural institutions  in question, the UK National Gallery in London and the Finnish National Gallery, but also to plans and activities of several more leading and very busy international museums in Italy, Russia, Sweden and Denmark.

Domenico Tiepolo. Three-part series on the theme of the Trojan Horse. 1773-1775. Shown together in public for the first time in 203 years at the Tiepolo: Venice in the North exhibition in Helsinki, Sinebrychoff Art Museum. With kind permission of the Museum. Photo: Hannu Pakarinen.

It needed that essentially important research of the work’s provenance – and when one embarks on the journey of this sort, it is extremely time consuming, especially if the case is the work which is 245-years-old. It also depends on resources, the will of your counterparts all over the world, existing – or not – documentation, and , very importantly, luck. And the most importantly, I would add inspiration and a team spirit to that. There are few natural forces in this world which are comparable with the drive of inspired art historians, take it from me.

From this perspective, perhaps, it is not that surprising that the way of the Tiepolo’s re-discovered piece in Helsinki took almost 25 years to be united at the exhibition with the other two parts from the same series. It was a dizzy feeling to look on those works all together, in the way in which they were conceived by Domenico Tiepolo in Venice back in 1773-1775.

The staggering fact of the display in Helsinki in 2020-2021 is that it was the very first museum exposition of the series since  Domenico Tiepolo created it 245 years ago. It is known that the three modelli were shown to various patrons of arts, privately, at the time. It is also known that the only public demonstration of the modelli together had occurred 42 years after the series creation, in St Petersburg, at that famous public auction of the Niccolo Leonelli’s possessions in 1817 conducted after his death. The series were demonstrated to the public during the day of auction sales then.

For the following 203 years, the three parts of the series were never shown to the public again. Until the exhibition Tiepolo: Venice in the North at the Sinebrychoff Art Museum in Helsinki.

In the mirror of 245-year old  artwork

The art curator who re-discovered the Domenico Tiepolo’s masterpiece in Helsinki in 1996, Kai Kartio has told me recently: “Ever since the moment when I knew for sure what the work was, and what it went through during all those years in the past century, since the Bolshevik revolution in Russia onward, I was thinking so very often that the case is incredible from the point of view of how the one not large work of art has reflected the tragedy of the whole  century, and what a tragic century that was”.

Similar thoughts and reflections are shared by everyone among my colleagues art historians in Finland, Italy, Great Britain, Russia, Germany, Austria, France, and the United States who were involved in tracing the destiny of this work at different times and in different contexts of their works.

Inna Rogatchi (C). History Pages XII. History Pages series. Watercolour, wax pastel, oil pastel, lapice pastel, crayons Luminance, encre l’alcool, Chinese red paste, perle le blanc, perle d’or on authored original archival print on cotton paper. 50 x 70 cm. 2012-2020.

We all came out of this enriching and rewarding experience with the prevailing thought on how tightly our history is connected to art. How unexpectedly it could turn, how closely it does reflect. There is one thing to know about  it in theory, and it is quite another phenomenon to experience it in real life, step by step, putting together a complicated puzzle piece by piece, in what I call art historical detective, or cultural investigation, in practice. What can be more convincing than reconstructed history in faces and destinies? When the art is in question, there is nothing more real than the reflections in its mirror.

Both Domenico’s father Giambattista Tiepolo, his brother Lorenzo and himself were quite a travellers, unusually for the time they lived and created in. I was wondering what they would think of the adventures of the Domenico’s mid-size modelli which has encapsulated not only much of the history well beyond the time when it was  created, but most importantly, the pain and drama of it.

Tiepolo: Venice in the North exhibition at the Sinebrychoff Art Museum – Finnish National Gallery. Helsinki. 2020-2021. Photo Hannu Pakarinen. With kind permission of the Museum.

The three parts of the original series on Trojan Horse created in Venice in 1775 had been reunited after more than 200 years in our days, in an elegant way. But it was so much more in this unexpected story.

This Venetian modello depicting the Trojan Horse in the flamboyance and superb craft of Italian masters, has become a witness of unspeakable horrors and tragedies of a totally different period of time. Our  newly obtained knowledge on that  has come thanks to the work of the group of dedicated art historians. Their efforts and our perception of it has made this mid-sized Venetian artwork a bearer of our awakened conscience.  Not a small achievement at all.

© November 2020 – April 2021.