LOS ANGELES — In 1922, Johann and Lisbeth Bloch, a Czech Jewish couple, acquired a painting by the 17th-century German Baroque artist Johann Carl Loth titled “Isaac Blessing Jacob.” The painting, depicting a scene from the Old Testament, was the most significant work in their collection of art and antiques, and hung in a prominent place in the dining room of their fashionable Brno home. Shortly after the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939, they seized the Bloch’s home and anything of value, including the painting. In 2020, over 80 years later, “Isaac Blessing Jacob” was located and returned to Johann and Lisbeth’s heirs, now living in Los Angeles.
That painting is the centerpiece of Reclaimed: A Family Painting, an exhibition now on view at the Skirball Cultural Center that chronicles the decades-long struggle of three women — Johann and Lisbeth’s daughter Hedy, her daughter Liz, and Liz’s daughter Cheryl — to retrieve the lost artwork. Weaving together a forensic story of art restitution with one family’s tale of loss, displacement, and new beginnings, the show offers a specific, personal account of a tragedy that affected millions of Jews and others targeted all over Europe.
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“The Nazis took everything, and that’s not just the most valuable paintings and antiques and furniture but it’s photo albums and Judaica and wedding rings and silverware,” exhibition curator Alissa Schapiro told Hyperallergic. “Those are objects that are never going to come back.”
Reclaimed begins by providing a glimpse of the Blochs’ life in pre-war Brno through photographs, furniture, and artworks, the only things that Hedy was able to ship out of the country before the German invasion. They tell the story of a cosmopolitan, fairly assimilated Jewish family who was able to acquire an impressive art and antiques collection due to Johann’s success as the owner of his family’s leather goods business, E. Bloch & Sons.
After the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Johann requested an export permit to send the rest of his collection abroad. The Czech government agreed, provided he donate four paintings to Prague’s National Gallery. Despite his donation, his export request was never granted, and his entire collection — as well as the family home — was seized soon after. After it was confiscated, the Loth painting was sold by the Nazis in 1939 at the Dorotheum Auction House in Vienna, where Johann and Lisbeth had initially purchased it in 1922.
A film on view taken at the Blochs’ country house in 1937 shows a quotidian family scene that takes on a sense of tragedy in hindsight. Johann and Lisbeth’s granddaughter Liz pedals by on a tricycle while extended family members play ping-pong in the background. By 1943, six of those pictured would be dead. Johann died of heart complications soon after. His second wife Erna (Lisbeth had died in a car accident in 1928), his brother Felix, his sister-in-law Luise, and other relatives were murdered in concentration camps.
Meanwhile, Hedy, Johann and Lisbeth’s daughter, had married a Catholic man named Leo Schenk, and had herself and her daughter Liz baptized to ease their passage out of the country. A newspaper clipping from the Daily News depicts a four-year-old Liz arriving in New York in 1940, with the photo caption downplaying the horrors she escaped, referring to her trip as “a lark.” The family of three settled in Santa Monica.
According to Liz’s daughter Cheryl Bernstein, her mother was raised Catholic, coming to terms with her Jewish heritage only as an adult. But there were signs: After the death of a family friend, Liz’s mother Hedy covered all the mirrors in the house, a common practice during the Jewish mourning period of shiva.
“My grandmother held that faith in her, but was so afraid for any of it to come out,” Bernstein told Hyperallergic.
Hedy, then Liz, and finally Cheryl fought for the Loth painting’s restitution for decades with little luck, despite detailed ledgers of Johann’s estate and photographs of the family home that clearly showed the work hanging in the dining room. Part of the problem was that the painting had been misattributed to Italian artist Luca Giordano with the title “The Deception of Isaac” when it was auctioned at the Dorotheum in 1939.
In the early 2000s, Cheryl enlisted the help of the New York State Department of Financial Services Holocaust Claims Processing Office (HCPO), which helps Holocaust survivors and their families reclaim looted objects and assets. A break in the case finally came in 2020, when an Austrian man contacted the Dorotheum Auction House seeking to sell his later father’s art collection, which he said he had begun amassing in the 1970s. The Loth painting was part of that collection.
Since Cheryl had filed an active claim for the artwork with the HCPO, it was returned to her. In Reclaimed, the Loth painting hangs in front of a blown-up image of her great-grandparents’ dining room, accompanied by a period dining table at which visitors can sit.
For curator Schapiro, the reclamation and exhibition of the painting brings up larger questions about institutional responsibility. The root of the Skirball’s collection began with 154 objects that were looted and recovered after World War II but could not be returned.
“What I wanted to think about in this exhibition is: What happened to the millions of objects that had no one left to fight for them to bring them home? What is our responsibility as stewards of these objects? What stories do we tell about them?” she said.
For Cheryl, the exhibition has a more personal message.
“The monetary value of this is all minimal. You don’t seek restitution to get money back. The journey is very cathartic, it provides answers to questions you didn’t even know you had,” she said. “My mom, who is 87, you can see this weight lifted off her, she’s a different person. It says: ‘The Blochs are still here. You didn’t win.’”
Source: Hyperallergic.com