Forget Nazi-loot databases. Marei von Saher, the daughter-in-law of the Dutch dealer Jacques Goudstikker, is giving her claim a higher profile: She has compiled a catalogue of the works he was forced to sell to Hermann Göring and Göring’s dealer in 1940. Goudstikker, who was Jewish, died on a ship while fleeing Amsterdam for Great Britain during World War II.
This volume, to be published next month, will be sent to museums, “to see if they have any of the works of art,” according to a report in Ynetnews, an Israeli website, which referenced a Dutch-language article in the newspaper NRC Next.
As reported in the NY Times last February, the Dutch government agreed to return 202 old-master paintings to von Saher of Greenwich, Conn., after her eight-year legal struggle. Some 1,000 works from the Goudstikker collection are still missing, von Saher’s attorney, Lawrence Kaye of New York, told the Times.
The Times also published an an image of entries in the notebook that Goudstikker possessed when he died: “It lists 1,113 of the paintings he left behind, with titles, sizes and, in code, prices paid.”
Righteous indignation breeds persistence: “It’s about a historical injustice put right,” von Saher’s daughter Charlène told Alan Riding of the Times.