What do we know for sure about Jonathan Petropoulos, Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College, former head of CMC’s Centre for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights, expert on Nazi art looting, and my colleague?
We know that he and a German partner located a Pissarro stolen by the Nazis and approached the Jewish owner asking for a cut of the sale price amounting to about 400,000$ to tell them where it was. We know that when the Jewish owner had her lawyer bring suit against the German partner (leaving Petropoulos alone because he was American) Petropoulos wrote emails to his partner saying “if [they] choose not to engage us, then we cannot say what will happen to the painting,” and “she needs us,” and “we… hold all the cards right now.” We know that, soon afterwards, the Pissarro was discovered by police in a vault belonging, through a trust, to a recently dead Nazi known to have been an art looter. We know that Petropoulos had met this Nazi many times, and was writing a book about him.
We also know that when the whole story threatened to break, Petropoulos went to his dean, who had a team of lawyers perform an investigation exonerating him. What, then, is his defense? The lawyers’ report has not been released, so some speculation is necessary, but it would appear from the evidence on hand that it rests on two points. First, it is common practice to charge an exorbitant “recovery fee” for looted art. Petropoulos was originally involved in the case as a freelance expert hired by the Art Loss Register, a for-profit London-based organization, which was intending to charge the owner of the Pissarro even more than was asked by Petropoulos and his partner – before Petropoulos and partner cut them out and went directly to the client with their own deal. Second, Petropoulos claims he didn’t know the Pissarro was in the Nazi’s vault. His partner knew it was in the vault of this man – this man with whom Petropoulos admits he, like his partner, had close association – but he himself had no knowledge of the piece’s whereabouts or new owner.
What we don’t know is how much truth there is in the second and crucial claim. Was Petropoulos fronting for a Nazi in the return of the Pissarro? Would the Nazi have received some of the recovery fee? Or were Petropoulos and his partner intending to betray the Nazi, to force him to give up the piece and take the money themselves? Or is it rather the case, as Petropoulos seems to suggest, that while his partner knew where the piece was, he himself was in the dark, that when he told the Jewish family that the new owner was a “foundation created by the heirs of the person who purchased [the painting] in 1957,” a foundation which wished to remain anonymous, he was speaking from a position of ignorance rather than the knowledge these words seem pregnant with? Was Petropoulos indeed satisfied not to know? Had he entered into a don’t-ask-don’t-tell bargain with his partner? Given his long association with the Nazi, it seems so unlikely as almost to be laughable. And yet even if it is true, what a sordid business! In the end his defense comes down to exactly that: he is a naïf, involved over his head in nastiness he couldn’t comprehend. He has resigned from his position as Director of the Genocide Centre not, he says, because he has done anything wrong but because the perception that he has done something wrong might reflect badly on the institution. His resignation lends even greater weight to the sub-heading of the story that broke the news on this side of the ocean: “Firm clears Petropoulos of wrongdoing; ethical questions remain.” They remain all right. And they stink up the house.
There is much of interest in this story. For instance that the reporter who broke the story in the US, writing the piece I’ve just mentioned and from which I glean all my information, was a CMC undergraduate, Elise Viebeck. Her article, appearing in a student newspaper, is now the main English news source on the matter; what is more, she appears to have done her own investigative reporting to work out the story. But for me the main thing, and the ugliest thing, is that I had no idea any of this had happened. It all took place a year ago but it was so well hushed up by CMC that no one on the Pomona campus – a campus that abuts CMC and is part of the same consortium — had any idea of any of it. My students have taken Petropoulos’s courses since this happened. I didn’t know to tell them about it, as nobody told me — until someone happened to mention last week how confused he was about how to approach this fellow he saw continually on his campus. And that we do not know the story means not only that we cannot use our resources – those of gossip and other social tools – to shun Petropoulos. It also means that there has been no call publicly to celebrate the remarkable Ms. Viebeck, whose stellar job reporting the story has been sacrificed to the whitewashing machine.
Read her story here. It’s well done.
