A Nazi Baby Shower

After reading about the history of the painting, I was a little surprised to learn that it was actually rather small, about fifteen inches wide and only 22 inches tall.  After reading about the two decades of legal battles concerning ownership, I expected something bigger. 

I guess we should start at the beginning.  The painting, Madonna and Child, was painted by Edward Cranach the Elder, in 1518.  Of that we are certain, since the artist signed the work with his winged-serpent mark, and dated å Mary half-length in a landscape, her reddish-blond hair falling over her shoulders, holding a green velvet cushion on which the naked Christ Child lies.

We do not know who commissioned the painting, or even who its first owners were.  X-rays show that the underlying design was traced, suggesting that the work began in Cranach’s workshop rather than as a wholly freehand original composition.  It would be too much to say that Cranach “mass-produced” such paintings in the modern sense, but Madonna and Child images were certainly a workshop staple.  Even after five centuries, some 189 related paintings survive or are catalogued as works by Cranach, by his workshop, by his son, by his followers, or by later imitators.

Who owned the painting, where it was displayed, how often it changed hands…. none of that is known.  Due to the cost of such a painting at the time it was done, we can guess that whoever commissioned it (and all the subsequent owners) were probably the kind of people who had very nice jewelry and lived in castles.  The kind of people who might commission a painting for a church or to buy favor from another aristocrat.

Before the City of Cologne got its municipal mitts on Cranach’s Madonna and Child, the painting had already enjoyed the sort of mysterious, well-traveled life that makes provenance researchers reach for coffee, aspirin, and possibly confession.  Cranach painted it in 1518, but who ordered it, paid for it, prayed before it, or first showed it off to dinner guests remains unknown.  It simply appears out of the mists of art history with Mary, the Christ Child, and a very old habit of not leaving paperwork behind.

The first halfway solid clue is that it may have belonged to Samuel Graf von Festetics, although even that comes with the scholarly equivalent of a raised eyebrow and a question mark.  By 1859, it was respectable enough to show up at an Artaria auction in Vienna, where it was sold as lot 124.  From there, it entered the collection of the Grand Duke of Saxony/Weimar, which gave it a suitably aristocratic home and probably better manners than it would encounter later.

The Grand Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach ceased to exist after World War I, and there was a frantic post-monarchy garage sale.  Eventually, the picture made its way into the hands of Theodor Fischer, the Swiss art dealer in Lucerne. Fischer, doing what art dealers do, sold it in 1937 to the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum / City of Cologne.  At that point, Cologne had acquired a lovely Renaissance Madonna.  Unfortunately, Cologne was about to demonstrate that owning a masterpiece and exercising good judgment are two entirely different things.

The city fathers of Cologne didn’t buy the painting for a museum, they bought it to give to Edda Göring, the newly born daughter of Hermann Göring.

Cologne did not suddenly develop an urgent civic need to place a Renaissance Madonna in a bassinet.  What Cologne wanted was favor. Hermann Göring was not merely Edda’s proud papa; he was one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany.  Giving his newborn daughter a Cranach was the sort of municipal flattery that says, “Please remember us kindly when contracts, favors, grants, honors, and political survival are being handed around.”  Officially, it was a christening gift to little Edda.  In reality, it was a gold-framed curtsy to her father.

The city fathers knew that the Nazi leaders liked the paintings of Cranach, a German Renaissance painter.  Hitler alone stole 16 by the artist he considered Aryan, and an extra one by the son, Lucas Cranach the Younger.

The problem was that Cologne did not simply have a spare Cranach lying around in the mayor’s desk drawer.  The city acquired the painting from Theodor Fischer, the Swiss art dealer in Lucerne, for about 50,000 Reichsmarks. Then came the awkward part: paying a Swiss dealer required foreign currency, and Germany’s currency controls made that difficult.  So, Cologne solved the problem in the grand old tradition of public officials spending public treasure for private political advantage.

The city compensated Fischer not simply with cash, but by letting valuable artwork from the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum go out the door.  The most famous piece in that exchange was Van Gogh’s Portrait of Armand Roulin (left).  In effect, Cologne turned part of its public art collection into the purchase price for a private gift to the Göring family.  A Renaissance Madonna went to Edda, a Van Gogh went into the international art market, and Cologne got the warm glow of having pleased a Nazi.  As civic transactions go, it was less “public service” than “municipal groveling with museum-quality accessories.”

Hermann thanked the city fathers, on behalf of his daughter, of course, and took the painting to his retreat, Carinhall where it fit right in with the other 1,374 paintings he had “acquired” from some of the best families of Europe.  The painting stayed at Carinhall until 1945, when Göring discovered that there are few decorating problems more urgent than the Red Army approaching your country estate.   So, he packed up the art collection at Carinhall — paintings, sculptures, tapestries, loot, purchases, gifts, and assorted masterpieces of extremely flexible provenance — and sent much of it south toward Berchtesgaden, where Nazi grandees hoped the Alps might provide both scenery and plausible deniability.

Among the treasures caught up in this grand retreat was Edda’s Madonna and Child.

Göring then had Carinhall blown up, lest the Soviets get the satisfaction of walking through his private museum of acquisitive vanity or playing with his model trains.   Unfortunately for him, moving a stolen-and-semi-stolen art collection by train during the collapse of the Third Reich was not a model of orderly logistics.  Some works ended up in rail cars, shelters, depots, and local hands.  Then the Americans arrived, followed by the Monuments Men, who gathered the collection, sent it to the Munich Central Collecting Point, and began the long job of figuring out which “gift” was really a bribe, which “purchase” was really theft, and which Madonna belonged back in Cologne.

After the war, Edda Göring’s Cranach Madonna and Child entered that peculiar postwar category of objects best described as “artworks with lawyers attached.”  The painting had traveled south with Göring’s collection and ended up in Allied custody, not in Edda’s bedroom, drawing room, or hope chest.  Cologne, understandably sobered up after its earlier bout of municipal bootlicking, wanted the painting back.  Edda, meanwhile, argued that a gift was a gift, even if the gift had been a Renaissance masterpiece handed to a dictator’s baby by officials eager to curry favor.

The legal fight dragged on for years.  Edda even won an important round in the 1950s, when a court accepted the argument that Göring had not forced Cologne’s hand so much as Cologne had enthusiastically offered its hand, arm, and public art collection.  But the authorities kept pressing. In 1968, the German courts finally ruled for Cologne, holding that the gift was improper, and the Madonna went back where it belonged: the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum.  Today, it is in the collection of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud in Cologne — a Madonna rescued from the world’s worst baby shower.