| Justice and Decency
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5 April 2004
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Goering's Loot Returned to Rightful Owners
Francoise Boucher's "Les Jeunes Amoureux" belonged to Andre Jean Seligmann, a Jewish art dealer in Paris. When the jackboots of the Third Reich tromped down the Champs Elysee, it and 400 other paintings wound up in the hands of Herman Goering, a man whose personal habits and greed made in a more dislikable individual than his sociopathic boss, Adolf Hitler. Last week, Boucher's work went back to the heirs of Mr. Seligmann through luck, persistence and in the end, the kind of simple human decency the Reichsmarshal and his crowd tried so hard to destroy.
In the late 1930s, Fat Hermann visited Mr. Seligmann's gallery, and upon finding out who the visitor was, the owner had the Nazi thrown out. In May 1940, the Reichmarshal returned in the wake of the Wehrmacht to find that Mr. Seligmann and his family had gone to America. So in part to avenge the indignity and in part because he was a degenerate and a thief, Fat Hermann loaded "Les Jeunes Amoureux" and a great many other painting onto a train and shipped it to his hunting lodge near Denmark, and then tried to stash in Bavaria as the war drew to a close.
The painting turned up in New York in 1967, and Val Browning, of the Browning firearms fortune, bought it. In 1993, he donated it to the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. Once on public display, it took a short time for researchers to discover what it was and to whom it belonged in the 1930s. Thus, the stage was set for a long and ugly legal fight.
Except there was no such dispute. The museum, upon learning that the heirs were alive and well in the US, turned it over to Mr. Seligmann's daughter, Claude Delibes, and Suzanne Geiss Robbins, Mr. Seligmann's daughter-in-law. Ms. Robbins used words that ought to matter very much, but don't seem to count in 21st century America, in describing the actions of the museum -- "honor" and "integrity." Indeed.
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