Date: Fri 21-May-1999

Publication: Ant

Author: LIZAM

Quick Words:

slander-Nazis-AP-Wildenstein

Full Text:

Slander Suit Shows Art Market's Collaboration With Nazis

PARIS, FRANCE (AP) -- An American writer whose book suggested that a prominent

French-Jewish art dealer collaborated with the Nazis went to court May 12 in a

slander suit that sheds light on the secretive dealings of the flourishing

wartime art market.

A lawyer for writer Hector Feliciano, accused of slandering the late Georges

Wildenstein, produced official US documents listing the prominent dealer among

France's top 2,000 Nazi collaborators.

The list, compiled in 1946 by the US Office of Strategic Services, also showed

that an employee of Wildenstein who took over the renowned Paris gallery after

Wildenstein fled to New York, had regular commercial dealings with the Nazis.

The document is among evidence to be weighed by three French judges who will

decide whether Feliciano slandered Wildenstein in his 1997 book, The Lost

Museum . The book suggests that Wildenstein maintained commercial ties with

the Nazis during the Occupation.

Wildenstein ran the family business from 1910 until his death in 1963. He fled

France in January 1941, and settled in New York.

Wildenstein's son, Daniel, along with grandsons Alec and Guy, and their New

York gallery, have sued Feliciano, an art historian, for $1 million in

damages.

They claim the book has tarnished the family name and scared away major

Jewish-American clients, causing "considerable commercial damage."

"Some passages in the book are horrible and unacceptable," Wildenstein's

lawyer, Jean-Luc Chartrier, told the court.

"What could be worse for a Jew deeply attached to France than to be associated

with treason, with collaborating with the Nazi occupiers ...?"

The book, translated into eight languages, mentions Wildenstein only in

passing. It focuses primarily on the Nazis' organized pillaging of thousands

of paintings belonging to wealthy French Jews.

The writer's lawyer, Antoine Comte, told the court that the book treated

Wildenstein with prudence.

"If you read the book, you won't find the words `collaborator,' `treason' or

`traitor,'" he said.

Feliciano said the case, which spotlighted complex transactions between

Parisian art dealers and the Nazis, has begun to lift the veil of secrecy on

France's thriving wartime art market.

"It's a can of worms and nobody wants to talk about it, even today, 50 years

later," he told the Associated Press after the hearing. "I request classified

files, and the ones I want, the sensitive ones, turn out to be missing."

Wartime Paris was an art dealer's dream. The Nazis flooded the market with

works by artists they considered degenerate -- Picasso, Matisse and Chagall

among them -- trading them or buying classical art for a museum to glorify

Nazi ideals.

Under the anti-Jewish measures passed by France's pro-Nazi Vichy regime

banning Jews from owning businesses, Wildenstein's gallery was transferred to

Roger Dequoy, a faithful, non-Jewish employee who appears to have done

business with the Nazis.

Court documents show Wildenstein remained in contact with Dequoy, who

conducted business with Karl Haberstock, a Berlin-based dealer and fervent

Nazi who had close contact with Wildenstein up to 1939. Haberstock was

Hitler's private dealer and later developed the theory of degenerate or

morally corrupt art.

The Wildensteins contend that Dequoy, who worked at the gallery for nine years

after the war, was acting on his own.

Numerous telegrams and letters from Wildenstein to Dequoy, produced in court,

seemed to suggest otherwise.

Wildenstein's lawyers mocked Feliciano's credentials as a historian.

"What he writes is pure fiction, sheer calumny," Chartrier said. "There are

few footnotes, no context, no commentary. This constitutes pure intellectual

fraud."

Feliciano has counter-sued, seeking $180,000 in damages for "an abusive

action" to discredit him.

A ruling on both suits was expected on June 23.

--MARILYN AUGUST