Feb. 22



CROATIA:

Croatia probes Hitler likeness, jokes on sugar packets


Small packets of sugar bearing the likeness of Adolf Hitler and carrying
Holocaust jokes have been found in some cafes in Croatia, prompting an
investigation, the office of the state prosecutor said on Monday.

"The local district attorney in (the eastern town of) Pozega has opened an
investigation and is currently looking at the matter," said Martina
Mihordin.

The Novi List daily newspaper reported that officials at a small factory
in Pozega have confirmed the sugar packs were produced on their premises.
The incident will embarrass the government which has been keen to play
down the country's past links with Nazism.

Croatia's Ustasha regime sided with the Nazis in World War Two and
enforced ethnic laws under which thousands of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies, as
well as anti-fascist Croats, were killed in local concentration camps in
1941-45.

The Jerusalem-based anti-Nazi Simon Wiesenthal Center said in a statement
it had protested the matter to Croatia's authorities.

Its director, Efraim Zuroff, expressed his "revulsion and disgust that
such an item could be produced these days in a country in which the
Holocaust not only took place, but was for the most part carried out by
local Nazi collaborators."

"If nothing else, this is a disgusting expression of nostalgia for the
Third Reich and a period during which Jews, Serbs and Gypsies were
mass-murdered (in Croatia)," it said.

Zuroff urged Croatia to force the factory owners to recall the sugar
packets immediately, in line with a law against racial, religious or
ethnic hatred.

Under President Franjo Tudjman, who governed Croatia from its 1991
independence until 1999, some of the Ustasha symbols were tolerated and
their crimes often dismissed in public, which strained relations with
Israel.

Subsequent Croatian leaders, who set the country on the road to European
Union membership, apologized publicly for the Ustasha crimes.

(source: Reuters)






USA:


Recovered Artworks Heading to Auction


A year ago the settlement was hailed as one of the largest restitutions of
art seized by the Nazis. Now about 170 old master paintings returned to
the heirs of Jacques Goudstikker, a prominent Dutch dealer who fled
Amsterdam in 1940, are to be offered at Christies in three sales,
beginning in April in New York. The auction house says the paintings, many
on view in Dutch museums and government buildings since the 1950s, could
fetch from $22 million to $35 million.

It was a hard decision, said Marei von Saher, the widow of Edward, the
only son of Desire and Jacques Goudstikker. I was in Holland a few days
ago and saw the paintings for the first time. Some hit my heart right
away. It was overwhelming.

Among the stars in the April sale are Ferry Boat With Cattle on the River
Vecht Near Nijenrode, a Salomon van Ruysdael landscape with a luminous
blue sky, estimated at $3 million to $5 million. A work by the great
Haarlem portrait painter Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck is expected to
fetch $700,000 to $1 million.

While the heirs Mrs. von Saher of Greenwich, Conn., and her two
daughters, Charlne and Chantal finalize exactly how many paintings
Christies will auction, they are also working with Peter C. Sutton, an
expert on Dutch old master paintings and the director of the Bruce Museum
in Greenwich, to organize an international traveling exhibition.

Which museums will take the show has yet to be determined, but it will
include paintings that the family is not, for now at least, selling
including works by Jan Steen, van Ruysdael and Jan van der Heyden.

We are hoping this show will symbolize his connoisseurship as a dealer,
Mrs. von Saher said of her father-in-law. People have forgotten him. We
want the public to recognize his legacy.

Even more important, her daughter Charlne said, the traveling exhibition
would tell the world about a historical injustice put right.

The story of Jacques Goudstikker and his heirs eight-year legal battle to
wrest some of his paintings from the Dutch government is a complex tale
of scholarship and tenacity. Mr. Goudstikker, his wife and their son fled
the Netherlands on May 14, 1940, as Amsterdam was invaded by the Nazis,
leaving behind his gallery business and some 1,400 artworks.

A second-generation art dealer, Mr. Goudstikker was unable to take any of
his prized paintings with him, but he did carry a small black notebook
containing meticulous records of more than 1,000 works in his inventory.
That notebook, which his wife retrieved after he died in a fall on the
blacked-out freighter carrying them to safety, became crucial decades
later when his widow and son began searching for the collection.

At one point many of the best works were owned by Hermann Gring. After the
war, nearly 300 paintings from the Goudstikker collection were returned by
the Allies to the Dutch and, despite the familys protests, placed in the
national collections. But in February 2006 the Dutch government agreed to
return 202 paintings it had recovered after the war.

Hundreds of works are still missing. We have researchers working round the
clock, said Lawrence M. Kaye of the New York law firm Herrick, Feinstein,
who represents Mrs. von Saher and her daughters. So far we recovered over
30 works, including a Degas drawing.

News of the three auctions comes just a week after a Dutch court granted
Mrs. von Saher permission to ship the 202 paintings from the Netherlands
to the United States. Roelof van Holthe tot Echten, a lawyer, had asked
the courts to block the release of the art until he was paid the fee he
claims for helping to recover the art. The judge, however, ordered Mrs.
von Saher to put down a $10.4 million bank guarantee as a security deposit
until the lawyers fee is settled by the court.

Asked if Christies was advancing her the $10.4 million, Mr. Kaye replied:
Clearly shes getting the money from somewhere. I cant discuss her
financial arrangement with Christies.

Mr. Goudstikker, who was 42 when he died, had produced shows with lavishly
illustrated catalogs of art by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Velzquez, Goya, Rubens
and Hieronymus Bosch.

He was a very international dealer who sort of styled himself as the Dutch
Duveen, said Nicholas Hall, an international director of Christies old
master paintings department, referring to the renowned art dealer Joseph
Duveen, from the early 20th century. He had sophisticated and wide-ranging
taste and dealt in everything from early Italian paintings to 17th- and
18th-century French and Italian works.

Mr. Goudstikker placed paintings in museums throughout Europe, Mr. Hall
added, and also sold to institutions and collectors in the United States,
including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Samuel H. Kress, the
department store owner who was an early donor to the National Gallery of
Art in Washington.


It was Mr. Hall who helped the family decide which paintings to auction at
Christies. There are many works by the same artists six by van Ruysdael,
four by Jan van Goyen, six by David Teniers the Younger so to avoid
saturating the market, Christies recommended three separate sales. The
first is April 19 in New York; the next, July 5 in London; and the third,
in November in Amsterdam.

There are paintings that have great historical significance that would
resonate better in Europe, Mr. Hall said. A five-panel altarpiece from the
1520s, The Last Supper, by the Dutch painter Jacob Oostsanen, will go to
auction in London because early Dutch painting is more appreciated in
Europe, he said.

Other works, especially less religious subjects like landscapes, still
lifes and portraits, appeal more to American taste. Wooded Landscape With
a Cottage by the 17th-century Dutch painter Philips Koninck is one of the
stars in the April sale.

There have only been two works by Koninck to come to auction in the last
20 years, Mr. Hall said, noting its estimate of $1.5 million to $2
million.

Winning the property was a highly competitive effort; for weeks before
Christies confirmed it had won, there had been rumors that the sale was
going to Sothebys. Asked how the family decided, Mrs. von Saher would say
only, It was a business decision we made as a group.

Christies has handled several celebrated restitution properties. Last year
it negotiated the sale of the five Klimt paintings relinquished by Austria
after a long legal battle, selling four at auction in May and helping
arrange the $135 million sale of the fifth, Adele Bloch-Bauer I, to Ronald
S. Lauder for his Neue Galerie in New York. A year after the Austrian
government returned some 250 works to the Viennese branch of the
Rothschild family in 1998, Christies auctioned more than 200 of them for
nearly $90 million at a landmark sale in London.

Mrs. von Saher never knew her father-in-law, and her husband was not yet 3
when his father died. But she said that in 1946 her mother-in-law returned
to the Netherlands and went back to the gallery.

Everything was gone, Mrs. von Saher said. But a person from the gallery
came out with a big blanket under his arm and in it was a painting of two
young girls by Berthe Morisot.

That painting now hangs in her Greenwich home, Mrs. von Saher said, and is
one of her favorite possessions.

(source: New York Times)






UKRAINE:

Holocaust Memorial Vandalized in Ukraine


Vandals in southern Ukraine defaced 240 Jewish graves and a monument
dedicated to Holocaust victims with swastikas, according to a Tuesday
statement provided by an activist from a local Jewish community.

Red swastikas and the phrase "Congratulations on the Holocaust" desecrated
the Holocaust Monument on Sunday, and 240 Jewish graves were vandalized
with painted swastikas, reported a Jewish community spokesman in Odessa.

The desecration was considered awful by the spokesman, who believed it to
be an insult to Ukrainians and a disparagement to the nation.

From 1941 to 1944, thousands of Jews were killed and burned by Nazis at
the site of the monument.

A police investigation into the vandalism is underway, said the spokesman.

Approximately 100,000 Jews currently reside in Ukraine.

(source: Associated Press)