Arthur Beesley looks at the controversy surrounding the Hunt Museum art collection
The award-winning Hunt Museum in Limerick is at the centre of allegations by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Paris that parts of its multi-million-euro collection may have been looted by the Nazis.
While the children of the couple who donated the collection to the State insisted yesterday that the allegations were without foundation, the museum has promised to co-operate with any investigation.
The allegations concern the vast collection of art and antiquities amassed from the 1930s onwards by Mr John Hunt and his late wife Gertrude, who were dealers in art and antique experts. Mr Hunt died in 1976 and his wife died in 1995.
Known to have a keen sense of the aesthetic merits and financial value of artwork, the couple moved in the upper levels of the international art world for much of the last century.
They came to Ireland in 1940, and settled first at Lough Gur, Co Limerick, before moving in 1956 to Howth in Dublin.
They worked as advisers to Sotheby's and to wealthy private collectors such as the US newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst and the Aga Khan.
Mr John Hunt also worked for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Cluny Musuem in Paris.
The allegations levelled by the Wiesenthal Centre concern the couple's private collection, which includes paintings by Renoir, Picasso and Gauguin, and is said to be on a par with the collections given to the State by Sir Hugh Lane, Sir Alfred Beit and Sir Alfred Chester Beatty.
The collection has been on public display at the museum in Limerick since 1997. The museum, which receives €250,000 a year from the State, is located in the old Custom House building, whose €3.81 million refurbishment was paid in part by the State.
The Hunt family have transferred about 95 per cent of the collection to the State. The remainder is on loan from the couple's children, Mr John Hunt jnr and Ms Trudi Hunt, who together received €762,000 in tax relief for a donation of artefacts in 1999. Mr John Hunt jnr said yesterday that the rest of the articles would be transferred to the State "in due course", once outstanding business on his mother's estate was concluded.
While the Wiesenthal Centre has called on the Government to initiate an independent inquiry into the collection, it did not identify any specific artefacts as being under suspicion.
The claims surfaced in a letter on January 26th to the President, Mrs McAleese, from the centre's international liaison director, Dr Shimon Samuels, in which he drew her attention to an "Irish-related Holocaust-era issue".
Dr Samuels referred to Mrs McAleese's "eloquent praise" for the museum when it won the Irish "museum of the year" award last November.
He said the award should be suspended, arguing that "to do otherwise would impugn the good name of this prestigious award and deny justice, after 60 years, to eventual Holocaust survivor heirs, before it is too late".
Mrs McAleese responded three days later, saying her constitutional role prevented her from making any remarks on such a matter.
She sent the letter to the Department of the Taoiseach, which has sent it on to the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism. But a spokesman for the Minister for Arts, Mr O'Donoghue, said yesterday he had not received the letter.
Dr Samuels cited "allusions" in an Irish Arts Review article last year "to the extensive pre-war Nazi connections of John Hunt and Gertrude, his German-born wife". He said "further sources" indicated that the Hunts had "intimate business relationships with notorious dealers in art looted by the Nazis" and "close personal ties" to Adolf Mahr, an Austrian Nazi who was director of the National Museum of Ireland in the 1940s.
In addition, he said the sources indicated that the Hunts' arrival in neutral Ireland from London in 1940 was "one step ahead of British suspicions of their alleged espionage activity".
These claims were dismissed as "hearsay" yesterday by the chairman of the museum, Mr George Stacpoole. He said it was "extraordinary" that the Wiesenthal Centre did not notify the museum of its concerns.
"As far as I am aware there are no problems whatever. If anyone comes up with any concrete facts, we'll accept that."
But while the Wiesenthal letter has pushed the allegations about the collection into the open, The Irish Times has seen a report commissioned by the museum board which refers to an extended visit that the Hunts made to Germany in the late 1940s. The report, in the form of an essay, was written by by Judith Hill, an art historian.
She wrote that it was common after the war for German families to sell heirlooms for much-needed income. "Wide-scale Nazi thefts and the looting endemic in war exacerbated the hazards of art dealing, causing many items to lose provenance: this too coloured the environment in which art changed hands in the mid-20th century. The Hunts fitted seamlessly into this world."
The essay was never published by the board. While an informed source said it was never formally discussed by the board, the source said that board members would have been aware of its contents. The museum's director, Ms Virginia Teehon, would not comment yesterday when asked whether the board should have ordered further investigation of the Hill essay. She said it was not so that the board had done nothing to study the collection's provenance, saying that the museum had done valuable work in documenting the collection and encouraging research.
"I have been very seriously developing proactive strategies of dealing with this rather than being merely reactive," she said.
Mr John Hunt jr said he was aware that the essay had been commissioned but had not read it. "My parents collected over a period of time in totally good faith. The collection was given to the people of Ireland in totally good faith," he said. "I have never heard of any possible basis for anything being dodgy."
Ms Trudi Hunt said there was "absolutely no foundation" to the allegations. "Really this is very, very cruel to my parents, who are both dead."