When Victims Rule (pdf)

MODERN ART
wanted to own the armor so passionately that he paid $3.2 million for it at auction,
outbidding both the Tower of London and the Louvre.” [GAINES, S.,
1998, p. 231]
How about the works of French poet, artist, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau?
In 1995 Jewish business mogul Severin Wunderman shut down his “Severin
Wunderman Museum” in southern California and donated “the world’s largest
collection of works” by Cocteau to the University of Texas. Wunderman
planned to move to France to live in his restored 15th century castle.
[HOWLETT, p. E1] The works of artist Andrew Wyeth? In the 1980s, Hollywood
producer Joseph E. Levine sold the world’s largest collection of Wyeth
paintings. [ARONSON, S., 1983, p. 187]
Jewish TV personality Allen Funt (of Candid Camera fame) began buying
relatively cheap paintings by artist Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912) to
“decorate his apartment.” Ruskin had once described Alma-Tadema as “the
worse painter of the nineteenth century.” “Funt,” says Karl Meyer, “proceeded
to acquire more and more of the artist’s work; soon enough, publicity being
what it is, there were newspaper features describing his hobby, and Funt had become
the unlikely agent of Alma-Tadema’s rehabilitation.” After the Metropolitan
Museum put on a show of Funt’s collection, Funt sold it all (“In all
fairness,” says Karl Meyer, “he needed the money since he had recently been defrauded
of $1,200,000 in Candid Camera profits by his longtime accountant,
who later committed suicide.”) [MEYER, K., 1979, p. 184-185]
Native American art? In 1998 Stanley Marcus, chairman emeritus of the Neiman
Marcus luxury store, put his American Indian art collection up for auction
at Sotheby’s. In charge of the sale was Ellen Taubman, the head of Sotheby’s
Indian art department for 25 years, and the daughter of Sotheby’s board chairman,
Jewish real estate mogul Alfred Taubman. Picasso? In 1998, Victor and
Sally Ganz put up for auction their art stash, including “the most important
privately-held collection of works by Picasso in America.” Expected sales figures
ranged from $125 million to half a billion dollars. [HANDWERKER, 11-10-97]
In 1999, an auction of art (returned after confiscation by the Nazis decades ago)
netted the Rothschild family $90 million.
Art from Germany? Going to auction in 2000, Marvin and Janet Fishman’s
properties were worth an estimated $16 million. It was “a collection of some
160 works, one of the most comprehensive groups of early 20th century German
art ever to be formed in private hands.” [RONNER, M., 7-30-2000, p. 16]
Anything else? Jewish dealer Ronnie Darvick has, over the years, even sold
the gun that killed Lee Harvey Oswald (for $220,000), Marilyn Monroe’s certificate
of conversion to Judaism when she married Jewish playwright Arthur
Miller in 1956, the writings of mass murderer Charles Manson, and Adolf Hitler’s
autograph. “My mother had her whole family wiped out in Poland,” says
Darvick, “Her attitude was, he’d be turning over in his grave if he knew a Jew
was making money off his autograph.” [THOMAS, p.G8]
In 1981 Charles Hamilton, an art and documents dealer, wrote about his
auction world experiences:
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