La collection disparue

by Pauline Baer de Perignon

« Tout a commencé avec une liste de tableaux griffonnée par un cousin que je connaissais à peine. Sur ce bout de papier, des chefs-d’œuvre impressionnistes, Renoir, Monet, Degas, exposés aujourd’hui dans les plus grands musées du monde, qui ont tous appartenu un jour à mon arrière-grand-père, Jules Strauss.
Je ne connaissais rien de sa histoire, ni de sa collection disparue. Ces quelques mots notés à la hâte allaient changer ma vie, me conduire du Louvre au musée de Dresde, des archives de la Gestapo au Ministère de la Culture.
Pendant trois ans, avec pour tout bagage ma curiosité et un goût prononcé pour les énigmes, je me suis lancée sur la trace de mes ancêtres, à la recherche de Jules Strauss, et d’une histoire qui ne m’a pas été transmise. Que s’est-il passé en 1942 ? Que restait-il de sa collection lorsque l’appartement familial fut perquisitionné par les nazis ?
Je ne suis pas historienne de l’art, j’ai simplement voulu mener une enquête, policière et sentimentale, sur les traces de ma famille, juive, spoliée. »

Un témoignage personnel où l’émotion grandit page après page : le lecteur accompagne Pauline Baer de Perignon dans ses découvertes, ses batailles, ses déceptions, et une forme de réconciliation. La démarche qui fonde ce récit, de l’Occupation à aujourd’hui, soulève des questions nombreuses et complexes : que faire des œuvres qui ont traversé le chaos de l’Histoire ? Comment agir, lorsqu’on est simple citoyen, face à des législations sourdes ? Que comprendre du silence des générations qui nous ont précédé ?
Enfin, et surtout, que nous transmet une œuvre d’art à travers le temps, par sa grâce et sa fragilité ?

Un premier livre captivant et nécessaire.

Genres: Nonfiction, Art, History, Memoir, France, True Crime, World War II

304 pages, Pocket Book

Published March 10, 2022

About the author

Directrice littéraire dans l’audiovisuel pendant dix ans, lectrice et coauteur de scénarios, Pauline Baer de Perignon a animé de nombreux ateliers d’écriture. La collection disparue est son premier livre.

Reviews

[Kalliope · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was both a fascinating and exasperating read.

Pauline Baer is the great-granddaughter of Jules Strauss (1861-1943) and Marie-Louise Kahn (1873-1960). Jules was originally from Frankfurt but when young moved to Paris where he became a notable art collector and philanthropist (his name figures in the list of donors in the Louvre). He died during the occupation, in his home in Paris, of old age and faltering health. His wife continued to live there. They had three children, but out of the whole family only one, their son-in-law Roger Sorbac, was deported and assassinate in Auschwitz. As one of their sons, André, died of cancer before the war, his wife, the well-known Aline de Gunzburg, left France and lived in the US and the UK (where she later married Isaiah Berlin). Aline’s son with André was the famous art historian Michel Strauss (1936 – 2021) who wrote these memoirs Pictures, Passions and Eye: A Life at Sotheby's (and died of Covid, after this book was published in France).

There are other prominent members in Pauline’s family. Her brother Édouard is a well-known actor both in film and drama. In this account one of the narrative threads is how Pauline, a striving writer who teaches creative writing but has not yet published anything, is looking for her place in the world.

She begins to find it when by chance she is made aware, in 2014 (soon after turning forty), that her great-grandfather had been robbed of part of his art collection. And thus begins her quest to find out more about this collection and what happened to it.

The tale is tragic, but also confusing. It is never very clear which works belonged to this collection, and even less which ones would have been stolen. Certainly, her task is not easy. Part of the confusion comes from the fact that Jules Strauss auctioned his collection at least two times before the war - in 1902 and in 1932. His widow also sold works in 1949 when she moved to a smaller apartment. There is also the suspicion that Jules may have negotiated artworks for permits (which already blurs the limit between a good faith and a forced sale). The difficulties in tracing dispersed archives, facing cover ups, and engaging with officials unwilling to admit responsibilities or to lose precious objects in their custody, made Pauline’s hunt even more enervating.



In the end she, and her family, did strike gold. They found and pursued Nicolas de Largillière’s portrait of Madame de Parabère as Ponoma. This Madame was the mistress of Philippe II, Duc d’Orléans and Regent during the minority of his nephew Louis XV. After disappearing for a couple of decades, the painting appeared in a basement of an East German institution in 1953 and from there found its way to the Dresden Art Gallery. The Strauss recovered it from this museum, after a long and arduous negotiation. It is now advertised in Sotheby’s web at Usd 1,5 mm.


What I found irritating, apart from the convoluted narration, was Pauline’s attitude. Her megalomania, which got very close to hypocrisy, got on my nerves. I also found I could not take her very seriously. In one chapter she tells us how she went to a voyeuse – it was difficult for me not to laugh at this episode. But what was serious was how daring she is, in her self-righteousness, in accusing someone she meets in the Louvre archives, whose identity the reader can easily trace. She is making strong accusations without proof. this is Jacques Foucart, a former curator, author of the article, of sabotaging the dossiers of the museum.

https://www.persee.fr/docAsPDF/rvart_...


She has no qualms about including her conceited fantasies:

On my way home, I imagined the episode as a scene in a movie: a former curator returns to haunt the Louvre archives, destroying compromising documents and tearing up evidence against him, with me as the heroine, a modern-day Rose Valland, chasing him down the corridors in hot pursuit, hoping to catch him in the act, and thus to save the archives of families whose art collections had been confiscated and whose pictures were languishing in the Louvre sacks.

How did she dare writing this? Comparing herself to Rose Valland, who risked her life for the protection of the art works that the Nazis were looting, for entirely altruistic reasons – with no monetary shadows. For I am l left with the question, why haven’t the Strauss emulated their great-grandfather and donated the recovered painting to the Louvre?

Still, the account is worth reading. It presents one more vignette to the, unfortunately, rich compendium of stories of looted art – there is the Klimt portrait of Ada; the Gurlitt collection; the Camondo and Ephrussis stories (much better accounted by Edmund de Val). One interesting aspect in Pauline’s story is the help that she received from Patrick Modiano, since he had investigated what had been requisitioned and from where.

As a final Coda, I found one aspect of Jules Strauss’s collecting and philanthropism fascinating. I remember seeing in my last visit to the Louvre, a few galleries in the top floor dedicated to empty frames. It seems it was Jules the first to draw the attention to the museum that they had to get rid of the frames in Empire style in many of their paintings and seek ones near contemporary to the art works. About sixty of such precious frames were donated by Strauss.



https://scribeaccroupi.fr/louvre-expo...

[Richard Derus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating: 4* of five, for the message if not the messenger

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
Note that the blogged review has links to citations that I have not transferred here.
My Review: Well, this review went through some changes. A lot like me as I read this book. I think the world needs to attend to the huge, stinking pile of denial in the center of Culture Inc. What happened to the art collected by Jews? It was stolen by the Nazis. Those bad Nazis!

...and then what happened? *blank stare*

In Author Baer de Perignon's tale of family, legacies, and fairness denied, you will learn that the reality is...nothing happened. Museums bear extraordinary responsibility for the nothing that happened. They don't want to give their ill-got gains back to the families whose rightful property it is. The whole raison d'etre of "the Museum" (in its broadest cultural-institution sense) is thus opened to serious question.

This isn't a small issue. The 2003-2011 Iraq war resulted in *appalling* levels of art and antiquities being looted or damaged, often destroyed. There is some tut-tutting over this. Not a lot, given the scale and value of it. Why? Because that leads to lots of awkward questions about how "the Museum" got the stuff in the first place. "Provenance" and "spoliation" in other words. Then that opens lots of graves "the Museum" wants to leave closed.

This isn't the first time that this issue has been raised, or wrestled with. Read a book called Goldberg's Angel: An Adventure in the Antiquities Trade (it's excellent, BTW, highly recommend it to you). The topic simmers along, looted antiquities are topics of concern on slow news days around the world. For a minute. They don't rate high on most folks' outrage meters. But the Impressionists and Academicians and Old as well as other Masters aren't talked about in media or entertainment almost at all (pace George Clooney's lukewarm The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History, which did poorly at the box office). Because people love them, come to see them in their hallowèd homes, are inclined to buy tat with the (profitably licensed) images on them (from "the Museum"'s store). The fact that many were looted from Jews by the Nazis is bad. But whatcha gonna do.

Nothing, for as long as possible, until the heirs of the murdered millions forget (I was *astonished* at the number of people Author Baer de Perignon met who just knew nothing about what had been looted, spoliated, from their ancestors!) or give up. "The Museum" will still be there, after all, taking in cash from ill-got gains they should've given back most of a century ago.

It is a scandal but no one wants to bring up the solution: restore spoliated property to its proper owners, or otherwise their descendants. As I read this book, I realized the case for this is unassailable. But I realized also why I had such trouble writing this review: I dislike the author.

She's quite sarcastic, very judgemental, has a serious oh-poor-me attitude. She snarks, in the text, about people she fawns over in the Acknowledgments. One assumes she thinks these people won't read the actual book.... Her scattered, disorganized research method draws criticism she fobs off as passing...but I promise you that her "mentors" did the real heavy lifting. I read this between the lines, I recalled many author Acknowledgments from when I was an agent that left out lots of realities not to the Author's Taste. And I realized that I support the message of repatriation, restitution, and acknowledging the harm done to generations of people simply because they were Other...but I dislike this messenger.

It's a shallow, personal response, and it shouldn't prevent anyone from picking up this book for its message of ma'at, fairness, justice, and the value of saying "I'm sorry."

Postscript: Sotheby's has auctioned the painting the author worked so hard to reclaim. Watch her conversation with the auction house's staff. In the end, it brought $1.23 million hammer price.

[Elizabeth Rynecki · Rating 5 out of 5]

I know this story because I see portions of my own Chasing Portraits story in these pages…
In the case of Pauline Baer de Perignon, it started with a list of paintings — Renoir, Monet, Degas, Tiepolo — artists her great-grandfather, Jules Strauss, collected. See what I mean? A great granddaughter searching for her family’s lost art collection! Each of our stories is important and must be told. The Vanished Collection (out in January - translated from French) offers a candid look at the complexities of provenance archival research, family history, and asking difficult questions about the past. The answers sometimes lead to further questions and often uncover messy emotions. My favorite sentence is a quote from an unnamed art historian: “The work of a historian is a plea for love.”
This book is a loving ode to the author’s great grandfather and his passion for fine art.

Thank you New Vessel Press for the Advance Review Copy!

[Melody Schwarting · Rating 4 out of 5]

Truth is only possible when history is acknowledged. (143)

Pauline Baer de Perignon, as an adult, discovered that her great-grandfather's renowned art collection had been looted by the Nazis. Thus began a long and arduous quest to seek restitution of her family's treasure. Many obstacles sought to end her efforts, from bullying Louvre guards to tight-fisted museum curators to the complexities of international diplomacy, but she continued in her quest to seek restitution for the Strauss family.

The Vanished Collection is often frustrating to read, because even with reams of evidence, no one wants to divest their museums of art by acknowledging that it was stolen in a time of cruelty and disgrace. Baer de Perignon is quite honest about her feelings, too, even when they are less than flattering, but that added a level of realism and made me empathize with her even more. She was not in it for the money--though she does admit to dreams of spending it, as anyone would--and even turns down what must have been millions of euros to keep the final painting in the family.

Overall, I found this an engaging and thought-provoking read. I knew beforehand how unwilling European nations and museums are to return looted art to rightful owners (though, as Baer de Perignon demonstrates, they are more willing to make grandiose statements than gestures). Unlike other stories about quests for looted items, however, The Vanished Collection shows firsthand how lengthy and difficult the process is to even get a hearing about it. In some cases, all the information about provenance and ownership was readily available on official websites, but commissions didn't bother to look for descendants of the original owner. Yet, that didn't keep Baer de Perignon from spending hours upon hours in various archives, plumbing the depths of Paris and beyond for information on her great-grandfather's collection.

The translation was quite good, as the prose was easy to read yet still retained a French flavor. A section with photographs of the family and reproductions of the art in question would have been appreciated, though a family tree at the beginning of the book was a handy reference.

[Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to the librarians at the Kansas City Public Library for curating a list of recommended books for the summer reading program. I don’t think I would have run across this book otherwise. The author, without any formal training in art history or provenance research, explores whether or not portions of her great-grandfather’s extensive art collection might have been stolen by the Nazis.

The author makes an excellent point about the issues with artwork being restored to a family several generations down the line. “It is not uncommon for curators to criticize Jewish families who sell their inherited works, accusing them of caring only about the money—the ultimate anti-Semitic slur—but what are families supposed to do when several descendants find themselves joint owners of a valuable work of art?”

[Kristine Hall · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I read the premise of The Vanished Collection by Pauline Baer de Perignon, I was immediately enticed. Even the cover blurb promised a nonfiction story that would read like fiction with elements of intrigue and mystery as the author researched and uncovered long-buried family secrets. Did the Nazis seize her Jewish great-grandfather’s art collection? Did her great-grandfather, Jules Strauss, make a deal to keep himself and family from deportation during the German occupation of France? Were national museums intentionally holding paintings from their rightful owners?

The story was translated from the French (by Natasha Lehrer – bravo!), and the Francophile in me delighted at the mostly Parisian settings, the sprinkling of French words, and naturally, the general French way. (I liked it so much that I’m considering buying the original version, La collection disparue , just to have a re-read with a slightly different spin.) Not only is there French appeal, but the librarian in me also rejoices in how various librarians give the author the tools and information to find what she needs.

“The truth was I worked with a blend of instinct, enthusiasm, and curiosity … the truth was, I was making it all up as I went along.”

One of the endearing qualities of The Vanished Collection is how readers will connect with author Baer de Perignon. Her drive – or is it a calling? An obsession, even? – is just there. Her instinct tells her that there are things just waiting to be uncovered. At times, she seeks inspiration and direction from the long-dead Jules, almost channeling him to hear his cryptic words. At other times, she is pumping relatives for information, and it’s clear that not everyone wants to remember what she’s asking them to recall. And she even seeks answers from the artworks themselves, staring and studying and listening to their quiet messages.

I consider myself an art appreciator, but by no means am I well-educated in art history. Even so, I know the value of the various pieces Jules owned is staggering – as is the notoriety of the artists whose works he possessed: Monet, Degas, Renoir, Sisley, Tiepolo, and more. I found learning the process of uncovering a piece of art’s provenance fascinating, and it also angered me to be reminded of how often the Nazis took what wasn’t theirs to take and destroyed lives in the process. It further angered me to see that reparations are still slow to happen (if they happen at all), even with overwhelming evidence of wrongdoing in hand.

The Vanished Collection is an engaging book, easily read in one sitting, but whose story lingers long after the final pages are turned. The author’s journey into the past, along with her unexpected journey of self-discovery into the present, create a not-to-be-missed story.

Thank you to France Book Reviews for providing a print ARC in exchange for my honest opinion -- the only kind I give. This full review and other special features on Hall Ways Blog.

[Amy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disjointed and weird. There are so many interesting directions this could have gone in:

--middle-aged aspiring writer repeatedly ambushes famous novelist Patrick Modiano with random questions
--woman bonds with her great aunt, who is a character straight out of an Edith Wharton novel
--woman learns that her art-world-insider cousin is not to be trusted
--woman learns how major moving companies in Paris shed their collaborationist histories
--bored with research in suburban archives, woman starts having visions of her ancestors, consults a psychic, and tangles with an ex-curator who lives like a troll in a library underneath the Louvre

Instead, it's a book that can't decide what it wants to be.

I felt no sense of mystery or even stakes--she's the only one who cares about what happened to her great-grandparents' art collection.

I got no sense of the author's personal growth, even though she researched this story for years. I can appreciate a story of developing from incompetence to moderate proficiency (story of my life!). But she seemed to just get messier, and to my discomfort, started to wander into vague ideas of her and her cousins "feeling" Jewish (they're not, not at all). There are deep ideas to explore on that topic, but as presented, it was dinner party nonsense at best, just trying on outfits.

I was left with no solid critique of The Establishment and how, generations later, it still has not made things right for the families of these wealthy Jewish citizens. She is angry about this, and rightly so, but she doesn't offer anything coherent.

I wish she'd turned to fiction. The most interesting part was when she read her great-grandfather's highly detailed journals. His story strikes me as a fascinating meditation on beauty and collecting and legacy. What do we leave behind when we're gone? But instead of centering him, the author centers herself. She may be right in her decision to not publish his journals, because that's not what he intended. That's why fiction, especially for someone who teaches creative writing, could have been a better vehicle for whatever she was trying to express.

Fortunately it's short. And I learned something about picture frames.

[Paulita Kincer · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I read The Vanished Collection by Pauline Baer de Perignon, I couldn't help comparing the differences between a book written for a French audience versus a book written for an American audience. In France, the subtleties count. In the U.S., we want the mystery laid out and the answer hinted at throughout so we can feel that sense of accomplishment at the end.
t the beginning, the conflict was unclear. The author's cousin had hinted that perhaps her great grandfather's painting had been confiscated by the Nazis. Confiscated seems too tame a word. Stolen, taken, ripped from his grasp. But the family thought he had sold his collection. They thought her great grandfather and grandmother voluntarily moved from their Paris apartment. They didn't even think about the Jewish roots of their family and the dangers the ancestors faced living in occupied Paris. Slowly, the author reveals the research she did and how she discovered her great grandfather's life during World War II.

Having researched the topic of stolen art during World War II for my novel The Summer of France,
I was already enthralled by the idea of looking back at undiscovered thefts by the Nazis and the effort it takes to try to redeem the crimes committed in the 1940s. This book was set within the past five years. I enjoyed The Vanished Collection and the peek into the French mind, where no one wanted to discuss the atrocities of the Nazis during the war, preferring not to remember that neighbor turned against neighbor. But the author needed to knock on each door and dredge up each memory to search for the truth of her great grandfather's life.

[Karen Siddall · Rating 5 out of 5]

The fascinating story of one woman's search for her great-grandfather's lost art and true-life story.

When a cousin mentioned that the Nazis might have pillaged their great-grandfather's art collection during their occupation of Paris in World War II, author Pauline Baer de Perignon was caught entirely off-guard. At no time in her life had she ever heard a whisper of such!

Intrigued, she began to research her great-grandfather's collection and, in the process, discovered the truth about her great-grandparents' lives during the occupation. She'd always understood they'd come through that dark time in history pretty much unscathed, and that just wasn't the case at all.

The Vanished Collection is a wonderful tribute to the author's great-grandfather, renowned collector of Impressionist art, Jules Strauss. It is also an exciting tribute to perseverance and dedication to researching the truth. I found the author's recounting of her experiences easy-to-read and absolutely fascinating. I was so caught up in her story that time flew by. I was immersed in her search.

The difficulties she ran into getting the museums responsible for preserving and reuniting the stolen art with their rightful owners or their heirs was eye-opening. So little concerted effort appears to have been put into the process of returning these sentimental, not to mention priceless, items to where they belong.

Also, the story is a heartbreaking, sobering reminder of the Jews who lost everything: their property, possessions, families, and lives. I hope this book spurs other descendants to question what family treasures may be locked away in some museum, safe yet forgotten. I know that I want to read more about this topic now.

I voluntarily reviewed this after receiving an Advanced Review Copy from the publisher and France Booktours.

[Em__Jay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Full marks to Pauline Baer de Perignon for her tenacity. It’s only one of many works once owned by renowned art collector and banker, Jules Strauss, a Jewish man who found himself living in Nazi-occupied Paris during World War II, but Baer de Perignon’s persistence and determination has resulted in the restitution of one painting to Strauss’ heirs (Baer de Perignon being one of them). The painting in question - Portrait of a Lady as Pomona by seventeenth-century French portrait painter Nicholas de Largillière – was sold at Sotheby’s in January 2022 for USD1.23million.

I love a good intrigue. I love learning something when I read a book, be it fiction or other. THE VANISHED COLLECTION certainly ticks these boxes. I am aware Nazi’s looted a lot of art, both from individuals and institutions, but obviously, I am not familiar with the specifics.

In this memoir, Baer de Perignon charts her journey starting with a random comment made by an elderly relative about the low prices some of the Strauss collection was sold for at the time. Further, Baer de Perignon later discovers a list of paintings that her grandmother (if my memory serves) kept, and which at one time was actively investigating their whereabouts and possible return to the family. This is all news she has never heard before.

With so many of the relatives now deceased, Baer de Perignon relies on the (at times) unclear memories of her great Aunt, plus a large amount of research she herself discovers. It is clear her journey was an incredibly personal one, and at times, done without the help or interest of other family members.

What stopped me from loving this book is that when you take a step back, there are not many solid facts. The story often relies on repetition of information we’ve read before. There is also lots of conjecture. Trying to paint a narrative that’s imbued with, at times, fanciful guesses, doesn’t really contribute to a great story.

2.5 stars

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75. I have read many books about art looted during the Holocaust so I was interested when I came across this. The story is interesting, yet the writer herself had me gnashing my teeth. This would have read better if she’d stuck to the information about her great-grandfather, his art, her efforts to track down his collection…but it was all interspersed with a whiny, snarky, self-absorption that I found annoying, to say the least (I do wonder if I had read it in the original French whether she would have come across differently). Still, this is both an important and fascinating topic and one that needs to be addressed more widely. There are better books on the subject but, in the end, the more books the better.

[Cara Putman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was an engaging look at one women's hunt for her family's missing art and in the process learning more about her family.

[Kerry · Rating 2 out of 5]

Great topic, but the book is not well written. It's inconsistent, confusing in its chronology, full of ideas that seem apropos of nothing and non sequiturs, and just overall a mess.

As one reviewer noted, it does not show "character development" or growth. It's haphazard, with the reader feeling bereft at poorly administered explanations, unresolved questions, and incoherencies.

For example, towards the end, the family members clamor for information about an item's worth. When it's recovered, it's not sold so the proceeds can be shared, and yet we have no idea how that decision was come to or what the consequences were. It's as if those concerns ceased to exist, and we don't feel it's because they actually ceased to exist but because it was just one more in a long list of details necessary for the story to make sense that was left out.

[Julie Stielstra · Rating 2 out of 5]

I always appreciate the works brought out by New Vessel Press, and am interested in art-looted-by-the-Nazis books. However, I am also always leery of writers who have never had anything published who run creative writing workshops. This rambling, self-involved effort rather justified my hesitancy.

Pauline Baer belatedly discovers that her great-grandfather, Jules Strauss, was a prominent art collector before WW2, amassing an impressive (pun intended) collection of paintings by Impressionists like Sisley, Renoir, Degas, and many others. He also became a connoisseur of frames, finding and donating splendid historical picture frames to suit major works in the Louvre by Raphael, Leonardo, Titian, and more. Those paintings are still in the frames he gave for them. And, alas, his collection was - by various devious means - appropriated by the Nazis during the Occupation. Pauline sets out to document the works in Jules’s collection, what became of them, where they are now, and how to go about getting them returned to her family. She admits having no particular interest or education in art prior to embarking on this project (in spite of having worked for the auction house Sotheby’s in past years). But she becomes obsessed by the quest, starting with Google, and ending up haunting archives and libraries, seeking the infinite tiny details and tattered records in dusty boxes that will substantiate her claims. She contacts every expert, every family member, everyone anywhere who might shed any light on her family history. Yet, she doesn’t manage to make the process very interesting. Her narrative careens in all directions, from drawings to paintings, to cranky curators, to family minutiae, to old apartments… which may well reflect the disorganized, impulsive, random way her researches were conducted, but it can be hard to follow, repetitive, and even tedious. Too much of the story focuses on her personal obsession with Jules Strauss, imagining and longing for a close relationship which had never existed and never would, which had abruptly sprung into being after she had almost accidentally learned of his collection and its fate.

She manages to unearth a Tiepolo drawing and a large portrait of a satin-clad noblewoman, and get them restored to her family possession - it takes years of testy negotiations with two major art museums. After this book was published, they sold the portrait for a million dollars, to be divided among all 20 remaining family members after the auction house took its cut.

Useful in its description of how such an investigation takes place, what would be required to establish a claim, and the roadblocks to fruition. Her persistence is admirable; the way she tells the story less so.

[Featherbooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not sure how I came across this fascinating account of the author's painstaking research to track down her art collector great grandfather's looted works which disappeared in Paris under the WWII occupation of Paris. It hums right along like one of the Art and Crime series on TV ending with a cliffhanger climax.

[Riton · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pas mal. Histoire intéressante mais assez lente. L'autrice est obsédée par son arrière grand-père ce qui empêche parfois l'histoire d'avancer. Les mêmes questionnements reviennent souvent et on rame un peu pour arriver à la fin.

[Bryant Whelan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I whipped through this book quickly. The author, a great-granddaughter of renown art collector Jules Strauss, learns important pieces from his collection were looted by Nazis. The family seems to have little knowledge about the theft or the history of Strauss’ collection as the author seeks answers and goes on the journey to uncover the truth. I enjoyed reading about her story, the research, and the museum responses to requests for answers and efforts for restitution. Nice read.

[Ellen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn’t really get on with this. May have been the translation but found it disjointed and rather boring. 🥱

[Eb Mcdermott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sadly this book didn’t live up to my expectations. It would have been a “3” rating except the subject is fascinating and in the end a painting returns home

However the book reads like a journal, with a feeling of stream of consciousness. Family relationships are fraught - cousins in the art field fare really badly in this telling, as do the the brothers, honestly. Kudos to Henri, Pauline’s husband. He is the hero of this story

[Lilianne Milgrom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading The Vanished Collection is like having a front row seat to Pauline Baer de Perignon’s internal discourse. We are privy to the insecurities, secret ambitions, triumphs and disappointments that she experiences as she embarks on a journey to uncover a particularly distressing chapter in her family’s history. This book does not provide earth shattering revelations or edge-of-your-seat intrigue. Rather, it is a slow-moving train. Pauline Baer de Perignon does not spare the reader the painfully sluggish pace that accompanies historical research as she sifts through mountains of archival material looking for a needle in a haystack. I particularly liked the significance that the author lends to seemingly insignificant encounters, snippets of conversation and serendipitous moments that together helped her piece together at least a part of the mystery of her great-grandfather’s art collection. Indeed, it was a random comment by her cousin that sparked her decade-long quest. The author insists throughout that she never asked to take on this enormous task, but it seems clear to the reader that she was the right person at the right time. She possesses a spiritual bond with her great-grandfather, without which she would have long given up her quest. The Vanished Collection does not conclude in a neat bow, but it does give the reader the satisfaction of knowing that an individual’s passionate persistence can overcome insurmountable hurdles–with a posse of helpful guides along the way.

[Enchanted Prose · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seeking justice to prove and reclaim 18th century art masterpieces stolen by the Nazis – a true art detective story (France, Germany; 2014 – 2019): Had it not been for a chance encounter and a whispered word, Paris’ Baer de Perignon would not be picturing her great-great grandfather’s “imaginary museum.” Nor absorbing us into her impassioned, all-encompassing, deep dive into researching ten of Jules Strauss’ paintings, an “early collector of Impressionist art”:

“If I close my eyes, I see walls hung with paintings. Portraits of lords and ladies of the eighteenth century court rub shoulders with Degas’ dancers, Monet’s glowing landscapes, Sisley’s snow-covered gardens.”

The Vanished Collection is a fascinating inside look at one family’s “paradise lost” because of a madman’s obsession and looting of 600,000 paintings during WWII, with 100,000 paintings yet recovered. A hidden maze of a “small underworld of the art world intermediaries and scavengers.” The theft of Jewish art is yet another aspect of Hitler’s atrocities, profoundly emotional, stealing “paintings of happiness” – the only possessions left connecting a family to its ancestors.

Reading like an engrossing international art detective procedural without any method other than following every lead, this complex quest sought to dig up the truth about ten of Jules’ masterworks her great-great grandmother Marie-Louise claimed were stolen by Hitler’s regime. “When it comes to art, only one thing counts: the pursuit of truth,” Jules Strauss wrote in 1931. A “hunt for the truth” that plunged Baer de Perignon into the “abyss of the past, where everything is opaque and complicated.”

Although Baer de Perignon co-wrote the screenplay for a documentary on the Nuremberg Trials and teaches writing workshops in Paris using art to elicit emotions, she tells us she knows “nothing about art history or painting.” Not anymore after what she goes through.

Genealogy plays a role in this daunting puzzle, which raised questions as to how Jules and Marie-Louise managed to stay alive, speculating trading art for survival. A helpful family tree going back four generations prefaces the narrative.

How did this journey start? By accident, when the author bumped into her “elegant” cousin Andrew born in England she hadn’t seen in twenty years at a concert by a Brazilian composer and guitarist (and political activist) both are fans of, Caetano Veloso. The song mentioned is Cucurrucucú Paloma, a melancholy ballad of memories and loss that evokes the mood of the memoir except for splashes of excitement when Baer de Perignon stumbles onto something. Veloso’s music is sentimental:

https://youtu.be/wFdy9d9ajik

Although the author’s ancestors were Jewish, she was raised Catholic. Her father, gone twenty years, converted to Catholicism when war broke out and married a Catholic woman. Until she went down this art detective tunnel she hadn’t thought about her Jewish roots, particularly because no one talked about the war.

Meeting Andrew is not the whole meant-to-be story of how the author became emotionally invested in what happened to her great-great grandparents and their precious art. Words matter! When Andrew whispered into her ear about a “shady” Strauss auction the word led her into the art world’s essential work: provenance research, pouring through a mass of documents in archives and reaching out to art historians, dealers, gallerists, other provenance researchers, and drawing on family and friends to enlighten and fill in the blanks. Proving with “hard facts” the ownership of art is dense, intimidating, messy, disorienting, chilling, painstaking, exhausting, heartbreaking – and fascinating work. A few days after meeting Andrew, he sent the list of ten paintings that were the focus of her research. Including, I believe, these four:

Roses in a Vase by Renoir
Portrait of Jacques de Nottis as a Child by Degas
The Star: Dancer in Pointe by Degas
Stone Pines, Cap d’Antibes by Monet

It’s logical to start by talking to your relatives to see what they know. Andrew’s father, Michel Strauss, Jules and Marie-Louise’s son, was a legendary figure having headed Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Art department at its London headquarters for forty years. Retired, eighty, and still living in London, initially she feels intimated by who he is, later discovering he was as discrete as his father, so she doesn’t approach him first. Michel comes alive so discovering he passed away in October 2021 adds another level of loss to this moving story.

Baer de Perignon began by asking her father’s sister, Aunt Nadine, also eighty. She lives close to her, has lived in the same Paris apartment for sixty years presumably seeing a lot, and she’s close to this dear soul but her memory needs jogging and her niece is sensitive to bringing up painful memories.

Baer de Perignon is the mother of three young children. For a while, she finds herself dropping them off at school and then taking the train to a suburb outside of Paris, La Courneuve, to the Looted Art Archives at the Musée des Cultures Légumières Foreign Ministry’s Diplomatic Archives Center. Twice a day, she passes Drancy, the site of the main concentration camp in France where 70,000 Jews were slaughtered. (Total of 26 camps in France.)

She also searched the archives of “the world’s largest museum in the world” – the Louvre – where she meets and befriends Emmanuelle Polack, whose father was an influential French art dealer whose collection was also looted by the Nazis, Paul Rosenberg. Polack’s influential too as she identified ten paintings in the Louvre the Nazis stole. Polack travels with Baer de Perignon to help her conduct research at the La Courneuve archives, reminding her that “research takes time.” When the author ventures to the German Federal Archives the process is even more tedious, since she doesn’t speak German, nothing is digitized, and the old handwriting is written in a nearly unintelligible “Gothic-style.” The archives in the Musée d’Orsay, once a palace in Paris, were also consulted. All in such imposing buildings, they elicit a sense of hopelessness given their grandeur and so few researching. The most “painfully slow and arduous” among them all are government roadblocks and museums not wanting to let go of their masterworks.

Along the way you’ll learn more Nazi history than you knew before. A striking example is a French resistance heroine most of us never heard of: Rose Valland. She worked at the Jeu de Paume art gallery Hitler turned into a massive warehouse, secretly recording everything stolen. What comes as a surprise is how key Valland was to the discovery of an enormous cache of Nazi art looted that you may have seen in the movie, perhaps read the book, Monuments Men. The Monuments Men Foundation is committed to the restitution of what should rightfully be returned to families. Not surprising is the wealth of information in the Rose Valland archives.

https://youtu.be/wuWT9rDrRvE

Two other persons of note who helped: Patrick Modiano, the French writer whose novels are set during the Occupation. He lives near the author and they’re friends. In 2014, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation.”

Award-winning translator Natasha Lehrer also deserves mention since she brought this remarkable story of one family’s paradise lost to us.

Lorraine (EnchantedProse.com)

[Marie-Hélène · Rating 2 out of 5]

Très déçue par ce livre, que certains journalistes avaient comparé avec l'excellent "la carte postale" d'Anne Berest. Il est bien question, ici aussi, d'une histoire de famille et de la quête de ses origines mais ce récit est très brouillon, décousu. L'auteure nous décrit une accumulation de faits qui manquent de liens entre eux. Il y a beaucoup de redites et j'ai trouvé le style assez pauvre ce qui, pour quelqu'un qui anime des ateliers d'écriture est surprenant !
Je suis également surprise que Pauline Baer semble découvrir la terrible réalité des spoliations pendant la guerre. Il est vrai que ce sujet a été peu traité dans la littérature, l'histoire était donc prometteuse et je reconnais un beau travail de fourmi. Par contre, elle aurait pu nous épargner le côté parisien, bobo, intello, qui connaît untel et untel, c'est un peu crispant et le passage de la voyante limite risible.
Il doit être bien difficile de se faire une place dans la famille Baer, mais Édouard reste sans discussion mon préféré.

[Jrwest · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book. The author of the book is the granddaughter of Jules Strauss who was a Jewish banker/art collector who lived in Paris until his death in 1943. The author realizes that there are several very valuable pieces of art from his collection that were unaccounted for. The German government during WW2 ran an organized looting of European art and theft of Jewish citizens possessions. She starts a very disorganized search for his art given that she has no real training in history or archival work. She is able to locate 2 of her great grandfather's pieces and the book revolves around her research and attempts to reclaim these 2 pieces. The book is written in a terribly disorganized and disjointed fashion perhaps as this was how she conducted her search. I have read much better books about the pillaging of art from Europe by the Nazis and about Jewish families attempts to recover it.

[Richard Odier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Livre passionnant à la fois de famille mais aussi de l’histoire de l’art et des spoliations pendant la seconde guerre mondiale.
Les livres sur les familles sont nombreux mais celui ci vit autour des tableaux .
Un très beau premier livre dont un des héros cachés n’est autre que le grand Patrick Modiano

[Jill Shunk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting memoir written in a fast, engaging narrative style. A good follow-up read for Monuments Men, or any book related to stolen artworks during WWII.

[Caterina Pierre · Rating 4 out of 5]

As an art historian, I try to read as much as I can about the history of looted art and lost objects, so my interest in Pauline Baer de Perignon’s book, The Vanished Collection, was related to my work. I am pretty sure I had seen the name Strauss in connection with works by Courbet that I had worked on for my MA thesis; there was a time when I knew the catalogue raisonné for Courbet like the back of my hand. But there was more to learn about the collector Jules Strauss, things that even his great-granddaughter did not know. Perignon is that great granddaughter.
A chance meeting with a cousin who works for Sotheby’s leads Perignon down a long research track lasting five years. Jules Strauss, a Jewish banker turned art collector, was believed to have sold much of his collection in 1932, before the Second World War. So one would think that there was nothing lost or stolen, and nothing for his descendants to seek out to have restored to them. But then why did Jules’s wife, after the war, attempt to have ten paintings restored to her, in a claim that they were stolen by the Nazis?
Perignon admits that she has no art historical training, and she has to really develop the history of the locations of the ten artworks, from at least her great-grandfather’s collection to the present day. This type of research is no walk in the park for an art historian, let alone for someone who seems to have never used an archive in their life. She really seems to have never researched a single thing before writing this book. She complains at one archive that the room is too cold, and actually goes up to the librarian to complain about it, not having any idea why the temperature has to be kept at a certain level for the documents. She thinks 40 minutes is a long wait to get called items brought to your desk. Sometimes it’s painful to follow her to these archives, her naïveté is so profound. She goes to Germany to do research but is somewhat surprised that she can’t do the research, because she doesn’t speak or read German. She doesn’t know what “Sammlung” means, but she’s working on a collection. And in moments of desperation she visits a clairvoyant, and at least twice “talks” to photographs and a painting, expecting them to “speak” something of their past to her. I am sure a lot of this will be funny or endearing to the general reader. For an art historian, it’s excruciating.
But: she really does have to do the work for herself, as she is one of the few surviving members of the family still young enough to do the leg work and the research travel and the document collection. And though she gets thrown into the baptismal fires of art history, she does a pretty impressive job. It took me two years to get my MA, four years to get my MPhil, and another four years on top of that to get my PHD. She had to do it all, write this book and pull off a great art historical story, with no professional training, in five years. So, hats off to her for accomplishing that feat.
I don’t like to give spoilers, so you’ll have to read this if you want to find out if Perignon is successful at getting any paintings returned to the Strauss descendants. There are a lot of unanswered questions at the end of the book, but I think it was really a great story about honoring your family, that is, the people you know and the people you never met in your family. It’s an easy read and I think it would make for a good read with young adults. I could see this being used in classrooms, even in my own. It picks up speed after page 80, and then I couldn’t put it down.

[E_F_S · Rating 4 out of 5]

Warning: If you are at all familiar with the Third Reich's campaign of forced sales and looted art, this book with be a huge disappointment. If you are merely dipping your toe into such a complex historical crime, this book may be simply tedious to read.

**Cue Le temps de l'amour**

The mythical Strauss collection, put together by Jules Strauss in the early 1900's, is the subject of "The Vanished Collection". The collection contained multiple works by Impressionist masters and high Renaissance Italian Masters, which was torn apart by by forced sales during the Nazi Occupation of Paris. There are photos floating around the web of Strauss' gorgeous apartment dripping with priceless works of art... all in black in white... capturing what must have been a sight to behold.

**Music abruptly cuts out**

The premise of this book, as promised by the author, Pauline Baer de Perignon, is the search for this art collection. Why did her great-father, Jules Strauss, sell? Who purchased it? Where are the works now? All fascinating, if not tragic, questions longing to be answered some 70 years later.

At best, TVC is a two star read for passionate art lovers and history buffs. It isn't even a beach read. However, the author does discuss a beach vacation in Brazil where she didn't enjoy herself because of deep thoughts and fears about her failures in life. So why a 4 star rating? No, I wasn't paid for my time (if only).

I'll break it down:

2 stars - Mme de Perignon spends a good amount of paper and ink detailing all of her shortcomings and her family's tacit oppression of women. Great. Chic stuff. I hear it from friends, colleagues, and strangers alike daily via social media. Insert contemplative sentence about reading to escape. The majority of the book contains these frankly stereotypical negative musings.

3 stars - I added the third star because of a fun fact: Jules Strauss donated something 60 antique frames to The Louvre Museum, which were from time periods associated with the works they frame. If you have been to the museum, and stopped to absorb a work by say DaVinci, you've seen one of his frames. Personally selected by Jules Strauss, which IMHO is pretty cool.

4 stars - I did have doubts about adding the forth star because the majority of the text is useless, almost petty emotional blathering. However, the one thing Mme de Perignon does convey is the absolute travesty of dealing with the German government over restitution of looted or forced sale property by any surviving family member. This section is brief, but her overwrought style of writing actually does convey the murky process and German Government lip service/zero action of art restitution. The Museums holding onto hundreds if not thousands of stolen art works, use a method of equal parts determined deception and obstinate silence to avoid restoring art to the descendants of Jewish families.

[Lynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Today's nonfiction post is on The Vanished Collection by Pauline Baer de Perignon and Natasha Lehrer (Translator). The audiobook is 5 hours and 41 minutes long and it is published by Dreamscape Media. The cover is an illustration of a Paris apartment with an empty picture frame. The intended reader is someone who is interested in looted art, World War 2 history, and family memoirs. There is no foul language, no sex, and no violence in this book. There Be Spoilers Ahead.
From the back- It all started with a list of paintings. There, scribbled by a cousin she hadn't seen for years, were the names of the masters whose works once belonged to her great-grandfather, Jules Strauss: Renoir, Monet, Degas, Tiepolo and more. Pauline Baer de Perignon knew little to nothing about Strauss, or about his vanished, precious art collection. But the list drove her on a frenzied trail of research in the archives of the Louvre and the Dresden museums, through Gestapo records, and to consult with Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano. What happened in 1942? And what became of the collection after Nazis seized her great-grandparents’ elegant Parisian apartment? The quest takes Pauline Baer de Perignon from the Occupation of France to the present day as she breaks the silence around the wrenching experiences her family never fully transmitted, and asks what art itself is capable of conveying over time.

Review- An interesting memoir about family and discovering history. De Perignon learned that before the second world war, her family owned some very precious art and after the war, everything was gone. Then she starts to research what her family had owed and where it could have gone. This became more than just an interest in family history but a search for justice. De Perignon takes the reader from the beginning of her search all the way to a happy ending but this story is more than just about stolen art. It is about De Perignon learning about her family and herself. She had never thought about many things around her family or herself, like did she identify as Jewish or not. The translation is good, the narrator is good, and this is a very nice book to listen to. I would recommend this book both in audiobook and print version.

I give this book a Four out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this audiobook from my local library.

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

So many people, so many possessions, so much was lost during World War II. The Vanished Collection is the very interesting story of one woman's search for the traces that may be left of her great grandfather's extensive pre war collection, a body of work consisting of art, furniture, and antique frames, that he spent half a lifetime accumulating. Jules Strauss was a well known banker turned art connoisseur in Paris who focused his energy and passion into selecting, buying, and selling the treasures of the era, names well known in the international art world. Pauline Baer de Perignon is a sometimes writer with three small children looking for more purpose in her life, when purpose comes knocking on her door. After some offhand remarks by her cousin at a musical concert that they both attended about some "mystery" surrounding Jules' collection and that they may have been stolen and not sold, she begins to investigate. This is one of those tasks that if you ever knew at the beginning what you were getting yourself into, you would run or maybe collapse. Over the period of several years she followed clues discovered deep in the boxes of old documents in extensive archives, and she met many helpful and not so helpful historians, curators, librarians, and so on. She made some significant progress in unraveling the mystery and finding out a lot about her family that she never knew in the hunt. It is astounding what people have to go through to get some of their family treasures back. The process is grueling, painstakingly detailed, and deliberately riddled with roadblocks. The museums don't want to give this work up and aren't afraid to say so. Ms. Baer de Perignon made some progress in locating and acquiring her family legacy, but there is much more out there. This book seemed to go on and on, not because I thought it was boring or poorly written. On the contrary. It well illustrates the years' long time line and emotional toll that solving this tragic mystery takes.

[Yvonne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful and such a captivating book about a lost, or I should say. a Vanished Collection of artwork. The author, Pauline Baer de Perignon has written such an absorbing account of her research into her family and a missing art collection.

The collection belonged to Jules Strauss, a well-known collect0r of famous painters, artists and furniture collections. During her research that was initiated by her cousin, she discovers that there are paintings that were lost and have yet to be returned.

The paintings were taken during World War II. There were a lot of German collectors, Hitler himself was one and there were no qualms at the time as to how certain masterpieces ended up in the wrong hands. Trying to discover the provenance of stolen and looted paintings is the only way of returning them to their rightful owners. This is a difficult and long process, and not guaranteed.

The author of this book has written a story of her family's history as she tracks down information about lost artefacts. It brings several things to light and also makes you realise how things have changed over the years. Documents are lost, destroyed or still need to be catalogued.

This is such an absorbing book to read, it is a fabulous journey into a family's history and through to its present. This is one for those who like their history and also mysteries as it does become the author's challenge to piece together all the information she discovered.

After finishing this book I immediately went to the internet to search for the paintings mentioned and also for Jules Strauss himself. This was great as I was able to see the artwork. A brilliant book and one I would definitely recommend.