STERN SHOW CANCELLED
‘Restitution claims’ cited
The city museum in Düsseldorf, Germany, has abruptly cancelled its upcoming exhibition of art dealer Max Stern’s life and work, leaving those devoted to his legacy in Montreal heartbroken and perplexed.
The exhibition, Max Stern — From Düsseldorf to Montreal, was scheduled to open in four months. It was to be the first on a world tour, passing through Haifa, Israel, before culminating at the McCord Museum in 2019.
But Tuesday, three years into the project and on the day the catalogue for the exhibition was to be sent to the printer, the Stadtmuseum announced it was cancelling the show.
This, it said on its website, was because of “current requests for information and restitution in German museums in connection with the Galerie Max Stern.” (Restitution refers to efforts to recover art works taken from Holocaust victims and return them to their rightful owners.)
“I’ve never heard of an exhibition being cancelled on such short notice for any reason, let alone because of restitution claims,” said Clarence Epstein, the director of the Max Stern Art Restitution Project, based at Concordia University.
“This exhibition was not centred on restitution, but on Max Stern. His family was effaced from Düsseldorf records because of the persecution of Jews. Now the city has decided to efface this man once again from their history.”
Stern grew up in Düsseldorf and took over his father’s successful art gallery upon his death in 1934.
But the following year, Nazi laws came into force, prohibiting Stern, a Jew, from selling art. In 1937, he was forced to sell more than 200 paintings at the Auktion 392 held by Nazis at the Lempertz gallery in Cologne. With the proceeds, he was able to buy a way out of Germany for his mother.
Stern escaped in 1938, leaving first for England, then for Canada.
He eventually rebuilt a successful gallery in Montreal, the Dominion Gallery, and was instrumental in propelling the careers of Canadian artists Emily Carr and Goodridge Roberts, to name just two examples, while he also represented international artists like Auguste Rodin and Wassily Kandinsky.
Upon his death in 1987, Stern left most of his estate to McGill University, Concordia University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Together, they launched the Max Stern Art Restitution Project in 2002 to recover some of the art that was initially stolen from Stern in Nazi Germany and subsequently sold and re-sold.
Of the 16 works that have since been recovered, two were returned by German museums — including the self-portrait of Wilhelm von Schadow from the Stadtmuseum in Düsseldorf.
The Restitution Project has also claimed another painting by von Schadow, The Artist’s Children (1830), which after the war hung in the mayor’s office and is now on display in another Düsseldorf museum, Epstein said.
Frank Chalk, a history professor at Concordia and a founder of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, believes it was the current mayor of Düsseldorf’s decision to cancel the exhibition, which he called a total reversal on his part and the growing influence of “anti-restitution politics.”
“There are very influential people in Germany who don’t want to see art returned to Jews,” Chalk said. “There’s an element of antiSemitism in this. But we never suspected the mayor could be vulnerable to this kind of pressure.”
Max Stern’s collection was a prime target of the Nazis, who confiscated and plundered art across Europe, Chalk said.
“So they took away his profession, they forced him to sell his art, then forced him out of Germany,” Chalk said. “Then when Düsseldorf was on track to remember Max Stern and to restore and acknowledge his existence, the mayor’s office without consultation cancels the exhibition . ... Düsseldorf could not have done anything worse.”
Instead of the exhibition, the city of Düsseldorf will hold a symposium on Max Stern’s life and work in the fall of 2018, it said in its statement Tuesday.
That is little consolation to the Grade 5 children in Montreal and Düsseldorf who were going to contribute to the exhibition. The 10-year-olds at JPPS school in Côte-St-Luc were working on projects to express their reactions to what they learned about Max Stern’s experience, Chalk said.
It is unclear how the cancellation of the exhibition will affect the shows in Haifa and Montreal. The McCord Museum did not respond to requests for comment.