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Julius Priester

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El Greco's Portrait of a Gentleman, looted by Nazis from the collection of Julius Priester, was restituted to his heirs in 2015

Julius Priester (born 4 September 1870 in Wolschy, Bohemia; died 6 February 1955 in Acapulco de Juárez, Guerrero, México) was a wealthy Jewish industrialist and art collector in Vienna whose properties and art collection were looted by the Nazis.[1]

Early life

Julius Priester, born on 4 September 1870 in Wolschy, Bohemia, was an art collector, a banker, an industrialist and President of the Petroleumgesellschaft Galizin GmbH, also known as the Anglo-Galician Company.[2][3][4] A collector of Old Master paintings, he displayed them in his office and in his home in Vienna in the 1920s.[5]

Art collection

Priester's art collection included El Greco, Cranach, Rubens, Van Dyke and many other important artists.[6]

Nazi persecution

Austria joined Nazi Germany in the Anschluss of 1938. Persecution of Jews began immediately. Priester fled to Mexico Camilla Priester (née Robicek). Everything in his apartment was packed up and stored with Speditionsfirma Max Föhr.

On 11 May 1939 the contents of the apartment were valued and inventoried under the supervision of the Gestapo and the Customs Investigation Office, in the presence of civil servants of the Zentralstelle für Denkmalschutz (Austrian Heritage Office) and three appraisers from Vienna's Dorotheum auction house, one of them named Bernhard Wittke who was also an SS officer and agent of the Gestapo.... On 11 February 1944 the Priester collection was forcibly removed in six trucks by the Gestapo[7]

In February 1944, Mr. Priester's possessions including paintings were seized by the Gestapo from Max Föhr's depot in Vienna.The Austrian Nazi looting organization, the VUGESTA, the "Verwertungsstelle für jüdisches Umzugsgut der Gestapo", is thought to have been involved in the seizure of Priester's collection.[8]

Lawsuits and restitutions

As soon as World War II ended, in 1945, Priester started trying to recover his stolen art collection.[9] The process was exceedingly slow and difficult. On 20 May 1947 Max Föhr, through Mr. Priester's solicitor Dr. Erich Goglia, filed a report with the Austrian authorities which included a list of 51 paintings still in Priester's possession as of 4 May 1937.[10]

Mr. Priester had sent photographs of his paintings to his secretary Mrs. Geiringer and his solicitor Mr. Hunna after the war. Together with the photographs, Mr. Priester also sent them a list of his paintings. They brought this matter to the attention of the police in Vienna, who as a result published pictures in a police circular dated 21 May 1954.[11]

In 1953 the Rubens painting, Man with a fur coat, was found by the Vienna police in the ownership of Julius Strecker, a former appraiser for the Gestapo, who had bought it from Vienna art dealer Josef Hofmann-Altenheim in the summer of 1951. Swiss customs seized it from the shipping company Weltifurrer in Zurich.[12]

Other paintings from Priester's collection that were located in the 1950s include the Cranach Madonna with veil and child, among others.

In 2005 the Brouwer was discovered for sale at Hampel auction house in Munich, and in 2006 'Portrait of a man' by the Master of Frankfurt was identified for sale at Christie's London. In 2013 the Van Orley was located for sale at Christie's New York attributed to Sittow[13]

In 2004, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond restituted Corneille de Lyon's Portrait of Jean d'Albon (1539) to Priester's heirs.[14][15][16][17] In 2015 El Greco's Portrait of a Gentleman was restituted, after its false provenance was discovered to conceal the Nazi looting of Priester.[18][19] Priester's name had been omitted and the name of a collector who never owned the painting, Ritter von Schoeller, had been inserted in the owership history of the painting, which had, in reality, transited via the Gestapo appraiser Bernhard Wittke to Sanct Lucas gallery, owned by art dealer Frederick Mont, Rudolf Heinemann's Pinakos Gallery, the Knoedler Galleries and a Swiss Trust company before reaching a dealer in New York.[20]

Many artworks from the collection have not been located, including those by Rubens and Van Dyck.[21]

Philanthropy

According to ANA GARDUÑO, Julius Priester donated several paintings to the Museo Nacional de San Carlos.[22]

See also

References

  1. ^ "HCPO Gallery: Julius Priester - biography". Holocaust Claims Processing Office (HCPO). 2015-09-11. Archived from the original on 2015-09-11. Retrieved 2021-03-28.
  2. ^ FRANK, Alison Fleig (2009-06-30). Oil Empire. Harvard University Press. p. 159. ISBN 978-0-674-03718-2.
  3. ^ Petroleum review. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. London. 1896.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  4. ^ "Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia (Harvard Historical Studies) - PDF Free Download". epdf.pub. Retrieved 2021-03-28. Piwocki reported that the general director of the Anglo-Galician Company, Julius Priester, had confirmed that this was indeed the strategy of the larger companies. Piwocki suggested that the large companies' ultimate goal was to provoke an amendment of the oil laws along the lines of the recently passed changes in the wax industry, which had introduced regulations that all but mandated the shutting down of small companies.
  5. ^ "Report of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies 2014–2015" (PDF). OXFORD CENTRE FOR HEBREW AND JEWISH STUDIES. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2021-03-28. Julius Priester, a banker and industrialist and President of the Petroleumgesellschaft Galizin GmbH. He had assembled a notable collection of Old Master paintings in the early 1920s which he displayed both in his office and apartment in Vienna, and which included works by Van Dyck, Van Orley, Hals, Rubens, Tintoretto, Pinturicchio, Cranach and El Greco.
  6. ^ Frank, Lisa. ""... unabhängig vom Schicksal des Originals... Der Fotobestand in der Kommission für Provenienzforschung"" (PDF).
  7. ^ "Report of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies 2014–2015" (PDF). pp. 87–91.
  8. ^ "HCPO Gallery: Julius Priester - biography". 2015-09-11. Archived from the original on 2015-09-11. Retrieved 2021-03-28.
  9. ^ "El Greco Nazi Loot Returned—artnet News". 2016-08-07. Archived from the original on 2016-08-07. Retrieved 2021-03-28.
  10. ^ "HCPO Gallery: Julius Priester - biography". 2015-09-11. Archived from the original on 2015-09-11. Retrieved 2021-03-28.
  11. ^ "HCPO Gallery: Julius Priester - biography". 2015-09-11. Archived from the original on 2015-09-11. Retrieved 2021-03-28.
  12. ^ "Report of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies 2014–2015" (PDF). p. 93.
  13. ^ "Report of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies 2014–2015" (PDF). p. 94.
  14. ^ Writer, ERIK STETSON Associated Press. "Virginia museum to return painting stolen during Nazi years". Tulsa World. Archived from the original on 2020-12-01. Retrieved 2021-03-28.
  15. ^ "N.Y. Gov. Reports Second Holocaust-Era Art Recovery". Claims Journal. 2004-05-25. Retrieved 2021-03-28.
  16. ^ "LEGAL AND ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN THE REPATRIATION OF ILLEGALLY EXPORTED AND STOLEN CULTURAL PROPERTY: IS THERE A MEANS TO SETTLE THE DISPUTES?" (PDF). pp. 10–11.
  17. ^ "BEYOND MANAGEMENT". app.pch.gc.ca. Retrieved 2021-03-28.
  18. ^ "El Greco Looted by Nazis Returned to Owner's Heirs". Observer. 2015-03-24. Retrieved 2021-03-28. Over the past several decades, the family and heirs of Mr. Priester continued investigations into the whereabouts of the stolen artwork. As early as 1951, an investigation located the El Greco painting in New York, but at the time, further efforts to contact the dealer and retrieve the painting proved unsuccessful. For the next 60 years, the painting would be sold several more times to dealers in New York and London, until reemerging again in Switzerland in 2003 in the possession of a private art collector. The owner's identity was masked by a trust, making recovery of the famous painting impossible.
  19. ^ Genoways, Hugh H. (2006-06-08). Museum Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century. Rowman Altamira. p. 42. ISBN 978-0-7591-1425-8.
  20. ^ "Looted Art Commission - 2015-03-24". www.lootedartcommission.com. Archived from the original on 2015-09-07. Retrieved 2021-11-07.
  21. ^ "HCPO Gallery: Julius Priester - biography". 2015-09-11. Archived from the original on 2015-09-11. Retrieved 2021-03-28.
  22. ^ GARDUÑO, ANA. "El coleccionismo decimonónico y el Museo Nacional de San Carlos" (PDF). Si bien a lo largo del siglo xx las donaciones se caracterizaron por su irregularidad, conviene destacar que en su mayoría no se trata de donativos de mexicanos, sino de extranjeros. Aunque algunos de ellos eran refugiados, otros recurrieron a esa práctica como estrategia para fortalecer las relaciones político-culturales entre sus naciones de origen y México. Por ejemplo, de la colección del acaudalado empresario judío-vienés Julius Priester, se donaron a mediados de los años sesenta dos cuadros importantes, atribuidos a Franz Hals y a Peter Paul Rubens; otro caso fue la donación de una pintura con motivo de la Exposición de la Colección Armand Hammer realizada en el Palacio de Bellas Artes en
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