Odyssey in Oils

In turbulent post-World War I Germany, two German soldiers sliced three paintings from their frames in the Grand Ducal Museum of Weimar. Last week the paintings were up on walls again, this time in Washington's National Gallery. On view were a Rembrandt 1643 self-portrait (worth upwards of $750,000), a Gerard ter Borch, one of Rembrandt's contemporaries, and a work by the 18th century German, Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein. Their strange odyssey bespeaks of both the awe and the ignorance that surround great art works. It also suggests that masterpieces, like people, can be D.P.s.

A dozen years after the 1922 theft, a German-born plumber named Leo Ernst, now 59, on a visit from Dayton, Ohio, to New York, went aboard a German steamship--he believes it was the Hamburg. One of the sailors told Ernst that he had some art works to sell, claimed they would be confiscated on his return to Germany, and asked $10,000 for them. Ernst offered far less, but left with the oils rolled up under his arm.

In 1937 Ernst married an American girl who had attended the Dayton Art Institute. When she happened on the oils stuffed in a trunk, her husband assured her: "They're nothing--just some junk I got gypped on." Unable to dismiss them from her mind, Mrs. Ernst spent seven years trying to identify them in art books and libraries. Finally, in 1945, she convinced her husband that they should take the paintings to New York. Art dealers there declared the badly cracked canvases to be worthless fakes or copies. But by searching in the New York Public Library, the Ernsts found the clue they needed, a newspaper account of the 1922 theft. The facts jibed. And there was a reward offered by the German authorities.

Hoping he could still collect, Ernst took the paintings to the Dayton Art Institute, where the director, Siegfried Weng, asked for advice from the FBI and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The paintings were declared genuine, but technically they were enemy property, and the U.S. promptly impounded them. In fact, they were nearly sold at auction until the State Department intervened, pointing out that as the property of a public museum, they belonged to the German people. The works were then deposited in the National Gallery--in ground floor vaults.

To return the paintings to Germany required a special act of Congress last September, but no proviso was made for Ernst, who now hopes to recoup something eventually from the Bonn government. But even when the paintings leave the National Gallery next month, they will still not be safely home. Weimar lies in East Germany, so Congress has handed Bonn the responsibility of ultimately returning them to the museum from which, almost half a century ago, they were taken.

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