Max Emden’s heirs to revive Nazi loot claim against the National Gallery of Victoria

When Jewish merchant Max Emden farewelled Hamburg, he left behind him a sprawling retail empire and a priceless art collection that would be sold off or seized by the Nazis.

Max Emden with his lover, Renata Jacobi. Picture: Emden Collection

When Jewish merchant Max Emden farewelled Hamburg at the end of the 1920s, he left behind a sprawling retail empire and a priceless art collection that would be sold off or seized by the Nazis over the next decade, some of it taken by Adolf Hitler himself for his personal museum.

Yet it was the fate of a painting by Dutch master Gerard ter Borch, Lady with a Fan, that would come to haunt the National Gallery of Victoria 85 years later, in a legal dispute set to be revived by the heirs of the retail magnate.

For two decades, Emden’s ­Chilean-born grandson, Juan Carlos Emden, has been on a mission to recover his grandfather’s prized art collection which, he says, was stolen by the Nazis in the late 1930s during Hitler’s vast campaign to loot Europe of its greatest cultural treasures.

He did not, however, anticipate his quest would reach as far as Australia.

When Juan Carlos received an unlikely tip-off in the early 2000s from a US art contact, he became convinced Lady with a Fan once belonged to his grandfather.

“As soon as I looked at the NGV’s provenance online, I knew it was wrong,” he tells The Australian. “The record listed the name Bromberg, which was connected to my family through my great-grandparents … It was the same family and they co-financed part of the art collection.”

Instead of Emden, the NGV listed a Dr Grunden of Hamburg.

The 75-year-old wrote to the gallery claiming “Dr Grunden” had been written in error when the painting’s provenance should display the name of his grandfather, “Dr Max Emden”.

“They really thought I was a mad clown. But when they went back to their records, they realised I was absolutely right. There had been a typographical error. It should have read ‘Emden’.”

Juan Carlos Emden at the site where his grandfather was buried. Picture: Emden Collection

In 2004, the NGV was quick to amend its record, but the gallery’s leadership rebuffed the Emden claimants on the grounds they could not prove Lady with a Fan had been loot or part of a forced sale by the Nazis.

In correspondence from the time, they maintained the Hamburg merchant had sold his painting under the strain of Germany’s hyperinflation and depression, not because of the Third Reich.

The painting’s provenance, they insisted, remained unblemished by the taint of Nazism until it could be proven otherwise through documentary evidence.

The family says it is now preparing to revive its claim against the NGV, buoyed by a new expert legal team and a different restitution strategy.

“My grandfather, and later my father, were persecuted for being Jewish. The family art was sold off or seized because of the Nazis,” Juan Carlos says.

“The art came through these dark channels into the museums and galleries. They must understand these are not theirs. And now we are getting ready to fight this again in Australia.”

Before the war, Max Emden lived two lives: first as a powerful retail magnate, then as a Kimono-wearing aesthete devoted to art and nature.

His department store empire stretched across central Europe, and his philanthropy enriched scores of institutions throughout his native Hamburg, but his art collection sustained him most.

By the late 1920s, Emden had grown tired of city life and the demands of his business. In a move that incensed Hamburg’s elite, he divorced his Chilean wife, liquidated much of his retail empire and departed for Switzerland.

Max Emden's palladian villa on the Brissago Islands, Switzerland.

In 1927, he bought the Brissago Islands – an idyllic retreat in the middle of Lake Maggiore – and set about fashioning his own vision of Arcadia. Inside his grand palladian villa, he covered his walls with fine paintings, including Renoirs, Monets and Canalettos. Outside, he pursued an even more extravagant agenda, cultivating a botanical garden and installing a 33m Roman-style bath.

After renouncing the vices of modern materialism, the former retail baron-turned-bon viveur embraced a new lifestyle, throwing lavish parties, hosting royals, socialites and writers and keeping a harem of young women who danced and cavorted naked across his islands.

By the late 1930s, his fortune was vanishing. In Hamburg, his remaining properties were defaced with swastikas and seized by the Nazi state during its policy of “Aryan­isation”, which sought to expel Jews from economic life.

It was then, according to Juan Carlos, that his grandfather was forced to relinquish his collection.

“I think people can’t believe Max Emden eventually became a poor man before he died [in June 1940] because of the Nazis.

“His business life was so successful,” he says.

“But the truth is he really did lose everything. My father [Hans Erich] had no money when he migrated to Chile … The only person who had money was my mother.”

Inside Emden's villa on the Brissago Islands. Picture: Emden Collection

Since their original NGV claim, the Emden heirs have been locked in high-profile restitution battles across Europe and the US, one of which saw the family reclaim two pictures by the 18th-century Italian master Bernardo Bellotto that had been obtained for Hitler’s personal collection and recovered by the Allies from an Austrian salt mine at the end of the war.

A German restitution panel ­ordered the return of the paintings in 2019 after it determined Emden was the victim of the “systematic destruction of people’s economic livelihoods by the Third Reich as a tool of National Socialist racial policy”. A third Bellotto, held by Houston’s Museum of Fine Art, was denied the family four months ago after a US federal court ruled there was no evidence to suggest the painting had been stolen, seized, or confiscated by the Nazis.

Bernardo Bellotto’s The Marketplace at Pirna hangs at Houston’s Museum of Fine Art.

Further claims have been launched for Claude Monet’s Poppy Field near Vetheuil and two pieces by the 16th-century German painter Bernhard Strigel in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

“So far the approach has been to focus on the larger paintings before returning to Lady with a Fan,” says Olaf Ossmann, who was recruited by the Emden family this year as their new lawyer.

“We’ve had some urgent restitution cases that needed attending to … but I will be making contact with the NGV soon to renew the claim. The painting is definitely back on the agenda.”

Mr Ossmann, who spearheaded Australia’s first successful Nazi restitution claim against the NGV in 2014, said Lady with a Fan’s provenance was clear and he could provide new evidence that it belongs to the family.

Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels inspecting looted art destined for the proposed Fuhrermuseum in Linz, Austria.

The case, according to Mr Ossmann, bears all the familiar hallmarks: an exiled Jew purged of his assets at home; conspicuous gaps in the painting’s provenance; and the suspect role played by Ali Loebl, whose function within the Nazi’s looting network has been well established.

Add to that the involvement of art house Wildenstein & Company, whose research institute was the subject of a police raid in 2011 after Jewish families claimed it was harbouring artwork looted by the Nazis.

An NGV spokesman said the gallery “would welcome the ­opportunity to review” any new information on the provenance of any art work.

NGV director Tony Ellwood declined to comment.

For Juan Carlos, “The painting is part of my family’s collection and history; I won’t give up on it.”