Who was Emma Budge?
In the foreword to the auction catalogue, the Director of the Berlin Kunstgewerbemuseum wrote: 'The Collection Emma Budge is one of the last collections of works of decorative art of truly significant quality that still exists in Germany'. On the following 182 pages, the catalogue provides detailed descriptions of the items on offer – ranging from paintings to sculptures, tapestries to furniture, silver to ceramics. In sum, over a thousand items are meticulously described, and there follows a further 152 pages of lavish photographs of the collection's highlights.
We can learn a lot about Emma's collecting and the objects she cherished from this catalogue, but it tells us nothing of who she was. In fact, Emma Budge was not just a sophisticated collector but also a prominent philanthropist. Born in 1852, she lived in the bustling port city of Hamburg in Germany. In 1879 she met and soon married Henry Budge. Henry was originally named Heinrich, but had Anglicised his name in the 1860s after moving from Frankfurt to America where he worked as a banker and later amassed great wealth as a financier of the railway boom. After they married in Germany, Emma accompanied her husband to New York, where they lived in a property near Central Park.
In 1900, they returned to Germany and took up residence in a high-class villa in Hamburg which would, under their management, become an important centre of the city's social and cultural life. Henry and Emma devoted their energy to charitable causes, establishing organisations to support the poor and making generous donations to educational and cultural institutions. They also began to build an art collection together, proudly adding labels to the objects they acquired which carried their joint initials. In developing their collection, the two enthusiasts were able to draw on the advice of the distinguished Director of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg. Emma and Henry were great supporters of the museum and they ultimately intended to bequeath their villa and collection to the city. After Henry's death in 1929, Emma continued to collect art and to support charitable causes.
Nazi persecution
In 1933, the Nazis seized power in Germany. At the heart of their ideology was a profound hatred of the Jews. Like her late husband, Emma Budge was Jewish. The charities that carried their names were devoted to supporting the poor, irrespective of their religious backgrounds, and to promoting mutual understanding between Jews and Christians. Such a mission could scarcely have been more opposed to the Nazis' racist agenda. They were determined to exclude Jews from German society and, to this end, issued antisemitic laws and decrees and unleashed waves of direct violence against this minority.
In spring 1933, Nazi stormtroopers brutalised Jews across the Empire, including in the streets close to Emma's home. Museum directors and curators were removed from their posts for the sole reason that they were Jewish. The same happened to Emma’s nephew who was stripped of his professorship at the University of Frankfurt, a university whose very existence had been enabled by a large donation from Henry. Indeed, Henry had been such a prominent philanthropist that multiple streets in Germany had been named after him; his name was now being erased by the new rulers. Henry and Emma's charities came under enormous pressure not only because the pair were Jewish, but because they promoted a vision of the peaceful coexistence of Jews and non-Jews in Germany.
All of the Nazi regime's measures were designed to send a powerful signal to Jewish people: they were no longer wanted, and that there was no future for them, in Hitler's Reich.
Emma's will
In 1933, as Hitler came to power, Emma was 76 years old. She and Henry did not have any children and had intended to leave their villa and art collection to the city that was their home. Now, however, that city was ruled over by the Nazi Gauleiter (Governor) Karl Kaufmann. As new antisemitic order took root, Emma revised her will, explaining that 'the political situation in Germany (…) make[s] it illogical for me to continue to uphold a stipulation I made in favour of the city of Hamburg'. She appointed four executors, all of whom were Jewish. This was clearly very important to her: in a later amendment, she further stipulated that all executors had to be Jewish – hoping that, even if her chosen representatives fled or were imprisoned, her estate and legacy would be protected.
The executors were authorised to donate items from Emma's collection to museums. As German museums removed Jewish directors and curators and increasingly became sites that promoted Nazi ideology, Emma was no longer thinking of them as deserving beneficiaries. Instead, she mentioned in her will the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as a potential recipient. Knowing that it was unlikely that every object would find a home in an international museum, Emma authorised her executors to sell other items from the collection and to add the proceeds to the inheritance that would be paid out to her relatives. In 1935, in the shadow of the 'Nuremberg Racial Laws', Emma made a final amendment with respect to her collection: 'The sale of all these objects within the borders of the German Reich is unlikely to be advisable.'
The 1937 auction
After Emma Budge's death in February 1937, her executors found themselves in a difficult situation. Emma had hoped that it would be possible for certain items from her collection to find a new home in museums outside Hitler's Germany. However, the Nazi regime had now put severe measures in place to prevent Jews from transferring property abroad. It was clear that the regime would not allow such an important and valuable collection to leave the country.
This left the executors with only one option: to sell the collection in Germany and to channel the proceeds to Emma's relatives, many of whom were preparing to leave the hostile environment of the Nazi racial state. It is unsurprising that the Jewish executors turned to an auction house whose owner – Paul Graupe – was also Jewish. However, before the auction could take place, Graupe went into exile and his auction house was 'Aryanised', meaning that it was transferred to a non-Jewish employee and later renamed.
In the months leading up to the auction, curators from the Berlin Kunstgewerbemuseum meticulously catalogued Emma's collection. The auction did not take place as planned in September, but was moved to 4 – 6 October 1937 (the auction catalogue shows the original September date). As the auctioneer called for order, he would have looked out upon a salesroom filled with representatives of German museums, as well as various art dealers and private collectors. Among them was the unknown person who scribbled the names of the successful buyers in the margins of the auction catalogue, which is now held by the V&A.
Although the auction house also recorded the names of the successful buyers in a protocol for the Reich Chamber of Culture, this is only accessible to researchers in the reading room of the Landesarchiv Berlin. Among the items that were sold were three Meissen porcelain pieces that the 1937 catalogue described as 'Dame mit Mohrenknaben' (Lady with a Moorish Boy, lot 783), 'Harlekin mit Affen als Drehleier' (Harlequin with Monkey as Hurdy-Gurdy, lot 813) and 'Fleischhauer' (Butcher, as part of lot 827). The annotated sales catalogue identified the buyers as 'Weiss' (lot 783) and 'Veeck' (lot 813 and 827); in time these objects would be acquired by the V&A.
Dispossession
Emma wanted her wealth to pass to her relatives, but her and Henry's fortune would soon vanish into the coffers of the Nazi state. The Nazi regime put pressure on Jews to leave the country and developed sophisticated legal mechanisms to simultaneously make this financially ruinous. Bank accounts were blocked and would-be refugees were presented with extortionate tax demands which had to be paid before they were granted leave to exit Germany. Passports were held hostage and Jews were placed in what was described as 'protective custody' until the regime had extracted as much wealth from them as possible. To facilitate the seizure of Emma's wealth, her Jewish executors were forced to resign. Her former tax advisor was installed in their place, but he was by now fully committed to serving the Nazi state.
Although some of the extended Budge family managed to escape Nazi Germany, this was not possible for all of them. Emma's nephew Siegfried, who had been stripped of his professorship at Frankfurt University, remained in Germany where he was increasingly pushed to the margins of society. After his death, his widow Ella was arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Theresienstadt ghetto, where she perished.
Acquisitions
The 1937 sale dispersed Emma's collection, scattering it across German museums but also, in time, bringing it into the international art market and into private collections. In 1980, the Keeper of the V&A's Ceramics Department, J.V.G. Mallet, went to Rome to visit the art collector Josa Finney, who shared Emma's passion for Meissen porcelain. Before Mallet left Rome, Josa Finney mentioned 'a small problem on her mind', namely that 'she has no obvious heirs, as to who might receive the collection by the terms of her will'. Mallet gently encouraged her to consider the V&A. He must have made a favourable impression, as two years later Finney donated her collection to the museum, prompting Mallet to exclaim: 'this is the most splendid gift we have ever had in the Department'. Mallet had asked Finney about the provenance of her collection and learned that, 'The Meissen figures […] were acquired between the wars from a dealer called Popov. Some pieces were previously […] in the Emma Budge Collection'.
So it was that, in 1984, Finney's collection arrived at the V&A and the curators catalogued a 'Harlequin with pipe & monkey as a hurdy-gurdy' and, in the language of the time, 'Seated Lady with pug dog & blackamoor'. Another item with a Budge provenance arrived at the Museum nine years later: the 'Figure of a butcher', from the collection of B.W. Potts, a former V&A gallery assistant who spent many years working in the Ceramics galleries.
Restitution
To J.V.G. Mallet, the Budge provenance was nothing more than a testament to the excellent quality of the pieces. Like so many curators of the time, he did not ask any questions about the circumstances surrounding the sale of Emma's collection in Nazi Germany. Years after these items had entered the V&A's collections, a US government initiative drew public attention to the fact that many artworks extorted and confiscated by the Nazis had not been recovered and restituted after the war. In the UK, it was the then director of the V&A, Alan Borg, who, in his capacity as Chair of the National Museums' Directors Council, placed this issue high on the agenda for a museum sector that had never deeply considered the possibility that they might be the indirect beneficiaries of Nazi looting.
In 1998, a British delegation attended the Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets where representatives from 44 countries together endorsed a statement that called for 'just and fair solutions' for such items. In time, the Washington Conference led to the creation of a UK committee – the Spoliation Advisory Panel – which adjudicates all questions of Nazi-era restitution.
In 2009, the V&A placed its collections online in order to increase transparency and to facilitate research. Soon, researchers working on behalf of Emma Budge's heirs discovered that one of the Meissen pieces depicted in the 1937 auction catalogue also appeared on the V&A's online collections database. They contacted the museum whose ceramics curator, Hilary Young, confirmed that this item had once been part of the Emma Budge Collection: it carried the collection's label on its base. Alarmed by this discovery, Young reviewed the V&A's entire Meissen collection and, in the process, identified two other Meissen pieces which also carried Henry and Emma's initials. This enabled the heirs to submit a restitution claim for all three Meissen pieces to the Spoliation Advisory Panel, which in turn asked the V&A for its views on the sale. The V&A curator Heike Zech carried out research into the circumstances surrounding the auction, reaching the conclusion that it could only be described as a 'forced sale': it would not have happened in this form if the Nazis had not seized power in 1933 and made the persecution and dispossession of Jewish people official state doctrine.
As there was complete agreement between the representatives of the heirs and the museum, the Spoliation Advisory Panel readily recommended the restitution of the three Meissen pieces. The Secretary of State accepted this recommendation and therefore the V&A was able to return the works under the terms of the Holocaust (Return of Cultural Objects) Act 2009, notwithstanding the prohibition on disposal of objects in its collection contained in the National Heritage Act 1983. In 2014, 77 years after the Berlin auction, the items were restored to Emma's heirs.
View the full catalogue online.
The V&A is grateful to Martin Levy, who serves on the UK Spoliation Advisory Panel, for donating the important Emma Budge catalogue to the National Art Library.
Dr Jacques Schuhmacher (Senior Provenance Research Curator, supported by The Polonsky Foundation) and Dr Richard Espley (Chief Librarian, V&A Research Institute, National Art Library and Archives).
