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Terrie Wilson and I received a response regarding a recently published review.  Per policy we are posting the comments to the listserv and have asked for the reviewer’s response.

 

Please note that the reviewer’s response follows that of the publisher

 

Doug Litts & Terrie Wilson

Editors, Arlis/NA Reviews

 

I am writing in response to Lee Sorensen's review of Nancy H. Yeide's Beyond the Dreams of Avarice: The Hermann Goering Collection in ARLIS/NA Reviews. As publisher of the book, I am compelled to correct some fundamental misunderstandings on Mr. Sorensen's part.

 

First, it is simply incorrect to state that with the exception of Rorimer there have been no publications on looting and repatriation from the vantage point of a ‘trained art historian.’ In the years following World War II, numerous books and articles were written by members of the Monument, Fine Arts, and Archives section, most of whom were art historians and museum professionals. Mr. Sorensen is also apparently unaware of the wealth of publications from ‘trained art historians’ within the past several years – Sopie Lillie's Was Einmal War and Birgit Schwarz's Hitlers Museum and Geniewahn: Hilter und die Kunst come to mind, not to mention the efforts of art historians including Katja Terlau, Angelica Goernandt Enderlein, Victoria Reed, Laurie Stein and others. In fact most research on the topic conducted in the United Sites today is done by art historians and art museum professionals, including Ms. Yeide herself. Underlying Mr. Sorensen's review is a lack of recognition that provenance research is an integral element of scholarly inquiries into the history of collecting and advances critical inquiry. His implied dismissal of the core of Ms. Yeide's research as non-academic reflects an opinion that is contrary to the current climate.

 

Despite Mr. Sorensen's presumption, Ms. Yeide's book was never intended as a history of Goering's collections, a topic which has been covered previously in several books (not merely the two to which Mr. Sorensen refers) and within larger scholarly studies of Nazi collecting (by, for example, Jonathan Petropoulos, Lynn H. Nicholas, Anya Heuss, Hanns Christian Löhr and other authors too numerous to mention). Yeide's book is the first comprehensive and authoritative presentation of the specific contents of Goering's collecting, and was conceived as a complement to the extant scholarship and a catalyst for future analysis on the subject.

 

Concerning Mr. Sorensen's opinion of the book's layout, matters of 'taste are naturally personal. However he does seem to have misunderstood the point of the layout, which was not to reference a military inventory but rather to emulate the Salon style display of Goering's collection at his residences. The layout underscores the quantity of objects and, by extension, the quality.

 

Fundamentally I am shocked by the apparent necessity of having to explain to Mr. Sorensen, an art librarian, the value of this type of reference book or, for that matter, to apologize for its cost, driven, as he should surely understand, by the multitude of reproductions. For what it is worth, I can assure you that the sales price of the book doesn't approach our company's cost to produce it. That said, it is an important subject written by the world's leading authority on Goering’s collection. For that reason, even in the abyss of these difficult financial times, we never wavered on its publishing.

 

I would be grateful if my position regarding Mr. Sorensen's review were made known to the ARLIS/ NA Reviews readership. If the opinion of a more neutral party, the distinguished scholar Lynn H. Nicholas, would be appreciated, her review of Ms. Yeide's book is published in this month's Art & Antiques and available online at:

http://www.artandantiquesmag.com/Books-A-Kleptocrats-Collection.

Sincerely,

Robert M. Edsel

President [Laurel Publishing]

__________________________________________________________

 

Lee Sorensen responds:

 

Mr. Edsel’s defense of his company’s book is understandable.  ARLIS/NA Reviews reviews are necessarily limited to 450 words, hardly enough to cover a history of the literature of the topic and evaluate the book itself.  His response changes none of the facts of the review, however.  Books (as opposed to articles) on Nazi looting and repatriation—the subject of my review—are almost exclusively written by non-art historians.  To use his own examples, the author Jonathan Petropolis, whose excellent book on the Reich and art is a major text, is an English professor with a degree in literature.  Ms Yeide, the author in question, though a provenance researcher, holds neither a terminal degree nor any in art history. I think it’s Mr Edsel who’s missed the point: the issue is not what constitutes an “art historian,” but rather that the literature on Nazi art thieving has mostly been approached from the archival side or the swashbuckling approach, as in Mr Edsel’s own Rescuing Da Vinci [sic], and not as an art-historical phenomenon.  The penetrating questions of art history haven’t been considered in this field.  For example, Göring’s collection, rather than an odd mish-mash based upon availability, appears to have been carefully assembled to both endorse the fickle Party line and assert difference.  As to his dispute about the book’s layout, usefulness to researchers and cost, ARLIS readers, many of whom, like myself have twenty years professional experience in teaching, academic- and art-museum libraries, are better judges than the book publisher.  I leave it to them.  Regarding his protest about the review’s assessment of the text, it is unusual, I think, that someone could research and compile a detailed catalog of Göring’s collection and come up with no insight on the Reichsmarschall’s collecting, a fact of the book which Mr Edsel himself concedes.  That clearly seems relevant to a review.  Finally, the “neutral” review he instead refers readers to was written by Lynn Nicholas, who has close ties both to Mr Edsel (she wrote the forward to his 2007 book) and Ms Yeide.  I can claim no such intimacy with the authors of books I review.