Jacques Goudstikker (1887‱940) was the preeminent art dealer in Amsterdam between the First and Second World Wars. Goudstikker maintained a gallery on Amsterdam’s elegant Herengracht, but his charmed life was cut short when he was forced to flee Amsterdam with his family just ahead of the Nazi invasion in May 1940. Goudstikker was Jewish, so he had to leave with his wife Desi and their young son Edo; he left behind approximately 1,400 works of art and extensive properties.
On May 10 the Bruce Museum will open an exhibition of rarely seen Old Masters’ works and other paintings titled “Reclaimed: Paintings from the Collection of Jacques Goudstikker,” which features approximately 40 of the most representative of the collection that have at last been returned to Goudstikker’s heirs. The exhibition emphasizes the importance of both the artworks and their historic restitution; it will remain on view through September 7.
The Goudstikker assets were looted by Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring with a forced sale of the gallery’s inventory at a fraction of its value to Göring; the gallery’s other assets were taken by Göring’s longtime associate Alois Miedl, who ran the gallery as his own throughout the war under the Goudstikker name.
When the war ended, the Goudstikker paintings that were recovered by the Allies in Germany were returned to the Netherlands with the understanding that the Dutch government would give them back to the original owners. Desi, who had settled in America, tried unsuccessfully to recover the artworks. Eventually, she returned to her beloved Holland, where she died in 1996. Her son Edo survived her by only a few months.
Edo’s widow, Marei von Saher, initiated the claims process for restitution after the fate of the Goudstikker Gallery was given fresh attention by Dutch journalist Pieter den Hollander in 1997. A crucial piece of evidence was a small notebook inventorying most of his collection that Jacques had with him when he died as they fled Holland by sea, and which Desi had kept.
In February 2006, after more than eight years, the Dutch government agreed to restitute 200 of the paintings looted by the Reichsmarschall. Von Saher, a Greenwich, Conn., resident, then contacted Bruce Museum Executive Director Peter C. Sutton to seek his assistance in preparing an exhibition of the works being returned to the family.
The show features many of the finest examples of the art restituted to the family, including works that have subsequently been sold and were borrowed back for the exhibition.
“Reclaimed: Paintings from the Collection of Jacques Goudstikker” and its catalog celebrate Goudstikker’s achievement, expose the atrocities of the Third Reich, and tell the story of the protracted fight for the restitution of Goudstikker’s art.
Goudstikker’s inventory ranged from Italian gold grounds and Renaissance works of art to early German and Netherlandish paintings, Dutch art of the Golden Age, French and Italian rococo, and Nineteenth Century French and other European paintings. Although his offerings became increasingly diverse, his specialty remained Northern Baroque art.
Highlights in the exhibition include the first painting of the New World by European master Jan Mostaert, Jan Steen’s dramatic “Sacrifice of Iphigenia” of 1671, two splendid river landscapes by Salomon van Ruysdael, a rare early marine painting by his uncle Jacob van Ruisdael, an atmospheric “View of Dordrecht” by Jan van Goyen, Jan van der Heyden’s “View of Nyenrode Castle” †the country estate that Goudstikker himself owned and opened to the public each summer in the 1930s.
The goals of the show are to reveal the quality of Goudstikker’s offerings, to explore how his tastes influenced patterns of collecting, to tell the story of the criminal theft of his art by the Nazis and to recount the protracted legal battle that bought its restitution.
The Bruce Museum is at 1 Museum Drive. For information, www.brucemuseum.org or 203-869-0376.
