Replay Event: The Vanished Collection

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?

In a conversation moderated by Michael Z. Wise, Pauline Baer de Perignon and Menachem Kaiser discuss how those descended from victims of Nazi theft and persecution respond to this legacy and examine the experience of Jules Strauss, who was a major donor to the Louvre before the Nazi occupation of France. The Vanished Collection was published by The New Vessel Press in a translation by Natasha Lehrer.