A work of art painted by a Dutch Master was not only owned by a couple living in Austria on the eve of World War II, but it also caught the attention of Adolf Hitler. Dr. Leon Lilienfeld and his wife, Antonie, fled their country when the Nazis annexed Austria during the Anschluss in March 1938.
Victoria Reed, the Senior Curator For Provenance at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, talks about “Portrait of a Man” a 17th-century work by Frans Hals.
The painting was acquired by the Lilienfelds but was prevented from being exported when they fled to Italy in 1938. And the Nazi dictator wanted the painting for his proposed Führermuseum in his childhood home of Linz, Austria.
Dr. Lilienfled died of natural causes there and Antonie Lilienfeld moved to Switzerland before immigrating to the United States. The “Portrait of a Man” was returned to her in 1948 in Winchester, Massachusetts, and in 1966 she gifted the artwork to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1966.
Antonie Lilienfeld died in 1972. The story behind the painting during the mid-20th century is one of intrigue, as Reed unravels a gripping tale.
Here is a conversation with Reed. The full interview can be found here.
Dutch paintings sparked interest
Victoria Reed says that Leon Lilienfield was Jewish and his wife, Antonie, was of Czech origin. The couple fled Austria, and Antonie Lilienfeld attempted to export their belonging.
“For the most part, she was successful. But there were eight Dutch paintings that the Austrian export authorities said were of particularly high value, that they would not allow to leave the country,” Reed says. “Austria had export legislation on the books since the end of the First World War. And it was basically, if you wanted to export a work of art, you had to apply to the export authorities.
“They could prevent export if they said anything was a particularly high historical or artistic value, which is a very broad, and frankly, very subjective category. So while it was intended to really protect the country’s cultural heritage, particularly during the Nazi period, these export laws were used as instruments of expropriation. Because basically the Nazi state prevented certain works of art from leaving the country. Now, why were eight Dutch paintings held back, when the rest of the collection could be exported?”
One reason was that the Third Reich attached a great deal of importance to art. Hitler, himself a failed artist, was rejected twice from Vienna’s Art Academy. Hitler did not like modern art but he treasured the classics.
"(Hitler) had very, very strong opinions about what kind of art was acceptable in the Third Reich, and what kind of art was unacceptable,” Reed says. “So he really despised modern abstract avant-garde art, which he considered degenerate. But he really valued Northern art in particular, Dutch, Flemish, and German works of art, which he considered to epitomize an Aryan aesthetic.”
By the late 1930s, Hitler was building a collection for the proposed Führermuseum. Nazi authorities wanted the eight Dutch paintings, which were left in the care of the Lilienfelds’ estate attorney, Emmerich Hunna — who is not Jewish.
Hunna argues that by the letter of the law, the painting cannot be taken from Antonie Lilienfeld because she is not Jewish.
“Amazingly, (Hunna) kept it out of Nazi hands for quite a few years,” Reed says. “However, the Hals in particular, was really of interest. And what I have are letters actually written in the early 1940s between one of Hitler’s art advisers and his personal secretary, specifically about this painting.”
Hitler tried to buy the painting for Antonie Lilienfeld. The work had an estimated value of up to a million Reichsmarks, but his advisers “tried to figure out ways to offer her far below market value,” Reed says. They started under 180,000 Reichsmarks, and then they offered to export the rest of her collection if she would sell “Portrait of Man.”
Attorney was a pawn star
To protect the painting, Hunna takes “Portrait of a Man” and another painting attributed to Garrett Dow that was blocked from export to the Dorotheum, the state-owned auction house.
“And he basically pawns them there for a nominal fee. What he does in depositing them at the state auction house is he binds them up in a kind of pawn contract, right?” Reed says. “So the auction house cannot release these paintings until that fee has been repaid. This turns out was very smart of him, the other six paintings, which were less valuable, he put into a bank vault, but even while it’s at the Dorotheum, Hitler’s art advisers are still trying to find ways to buy it.”
But why the Hals painting?
“Hals was really a renowned portraitist. His work had been studied and appreciated for a long time,” Reed says. " And with artists like Rembrandt and Vermeer, he was sort of seen as the apogee of the kind of Northern schools of painting.”
In 1944, Hunna received a “threatening” telephone call, Reed says.
“They said we’re taking the paintings out to the salt mines (out in the countryside, where works of art were stored). So on paper, they were still Mrs. Lilienfeld’s property. But at that point they had been effectively expropriated,” Reed says.
Meanwhile, Antonie Lilienfield contacted the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and spoke with
W.G. Constable, the facility’s curator of European art.
“And she’s like, ‘Can you help me get my paintings back? I have no idea what happened to them. I don’t know what this lawyer is doing, et cetera.’ And W.G Constable assents, adding that a former student of his from London’s Courtauld Institute of Art is stationed in Vienna.
The student, Andrew Richie, located the Hals painting and repaid the pawn fee. The painting was then shipped to the United States, where it was reunited with Antonie Lilienfeld.
“If you look at the back of the painting, and one of my favorite parts of my job is looking at the backs of paintings because if provenance is a work of arts biography, the back of a painting is like its passport because it shows you where it has been,” Reed says. “And so ... on the back of this painting, there are still Nazi era stamps labels, inscriptions, and there are similar marks and labels on the back of the other.
“We know this because Mrs. Lilienfeld was so grateful for our assistance in getting her paintings back, that she donated the painting that had been attributed to Dow. It’s now given to an artist named Pot to the MFA immediately in 1948, and then the Hals she gave to us in 1966 in memory of her husband on the occasion of our centennial.”
The painting that once was forbidden to leave Vienna is now a highlight of the Boston museum.
“Why was this particular painting so valued at a particular time? And you have to get into the art historiography of Hals to really understand that,” Reed says. “So you really can’t extricate the history of the object from the object itself as (an) art object. And that’s, I think this is a perfect illustration of that. I think.”
