September 2024
David Carson
It began with an email. “Was your father Andrew Carlebach? I saw his name on the UK Commando website.”
So began a chain of discovery that led to new relatives, and to my daughters inheriting a share of a valuable painting by Claude Monet.
My schoolboy father and his parents fled to England from Berlin in 1936. Like many German Jewish refugees to England in 1940, he was first interned as an enemy alien but then freed to join the British Army. His story as an army commando is only relevant here in that his entry on their website enabled researchers to contact me.
Andrew’s grandfather Eduard Posen was the son and grandson of luxury leather goods manufacturers from Offenbach, near Frankfurt. With his brother Sidney, they had inherited the business started by their grandfather Eduard Hirsch Posen in 1811.
Eduard and Sidney had two other siblings, Eugenie and Theophil, who have all figured in my discoveries through this story.
But let’s jump to the present day (almost). In 1998, a conference was hosted by the United States Department of State and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum which established the Washington Principles. These principles described how art that had been looted by the Nazis should be treated. One stated, “If the pre-War owners of art that is found to have been confiscated by the Nazis and not subsequently restituted, and they, or their heirs, can be identified, steps should be taken expeditiously to achieve a just and fair solution, recognizing this may vary according to the facts and circumstances surrounding a specific case”
Back to that e-mail. It was from a Swiss historian and genealogist, Jürg Nobs, who worked with an Israeli expert in art provenance, Eyal Dolev, and Berlin based lawyer, Lothar Fremy. Together, they work on art restitution cases.
Linking me to my great grandfather Eduard Posen, they told me that his brother Sidney and wife Anna had been the owners of many paintings and art objects. Here is how they are described in the German Lost Art database. “Their Frankfurt villa was furnished in a grand manner. The rooms were furnished with antique furniture, carpets, tapestries and paintings. Over the course of their marriage and thanks to the income from Posen’s flourishing leather goods company, Anna and Sidney Posen were able to put together a large collection. The collection’s paintings include German paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries and a particular focus on French art, especially impressionist paintings (Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, etc.)”.
Sidney died in 1938, his beneficiaries being his wife Anna, and the families of his brother Eduard and sister Eugenie, both of whom had pre-deceased him. He left one other valuable item, his Swiss citizenship. It’s not clear how he had acquired this, having been born in Offenbach, but it enabled Anna to flee to Switzerland.
What happened to all the items in their art collection is not known, but for the painting in question, Nazi documentation is clear. Sotheby’s provenance record shows that “on March 3, 1942, the Secret State Police informed the foreign exchange office that the “Jew Posen, who has Swiss citizenship,” would soon be leaving the country and that she was to be denied permission to take the oil painting “Total View of Amsterdam” by Claude Monet with her “and was to be ordered to deposit the painting in the Municipal Gallery, Frankfurt am Main (...). it was handed over to the Städel Art Institute for “safekeeping” by the company H. & C. Fermont in March 1942.”
Anna left for Switzerland in April 1942.
The painting next appears in provenance with Gallery Aktuaryus in Zurich. It seems Anna was able, though a strong lawyer, to recover the painting and bring it to Switzerland. But she had to sell it to raise living expenses. An important Aktuaryus client was arms manufacturer and art collector, Emil Georg Bührle, who acquired the painting from them in 1943. Bührle was the owner of the Oerlikon Armaments company. Wikipedia notes “Between 1940 and 1944 his arms dealing increased his fortune which he used for art-buying sprees in Nazi-occupied Paris, forming the core of his collection”.
Now to the present day. The descendants of Emil Bührle, owners of this painting, also titled “View of the Tour Montalban”, were required by Sotheby’s to address any provenance and ownership issues in order to sell it.
After much genealogical work and legal agreements, the painting was auctioned by Sotheby’s on May 15, 2024, and sold for $US 3.8/ $CDN5.2 million. The owners had agreed to a settlement which gave a portion of the sale price to the Posen heirs and successors.
You can imagine the family excitement. But hold on. How many descendants of Sidney’s beneficiaries are there? And how is it shared?
The selling owners take a large share, the trio of researchers mentioned above take a fee. The many descendants then received their share based on calculations involving their place in the family tree and conditions that had been made in various wills.
I told my daughters not to buy a yacht until this was finalized. This was good advice. Their dividend, more than 80 years after the painting had been seized by the Nazis, was $8,500 CDN each. A nice surprise, but not yacht territory! But there are another 80 of Sidney and Anna’s paintings in the Lost Art database, so who knows what the future holds if they are found?
A postscript to this story; Sidney closed the Posen business in 1930, but today the Eduard Posen 1811 brand name continues to sell luxury leather goods. Armin Johl, whose forbears were friends of Sidney Posen, so admired the brand that he re-established it to sell high end leather goods, though it is no longer under his control. A fine tribute to my ancestors, the Posens of Offenbach.
David Carson is retired after a career in IT and spends his time working with local groups on sustainability and the climate crisis. He’s learned to make pottery at the local school of art, fights weeds in his vegetable plot and enjoys researching and writing family history stories.
Image: Claude Monet, Vue de la tour Montalban, Amsterdam
