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Tempus-Magazine.com Holiday 2014 / 2015 89 malevolent, barbarous men in history also pioneered efforts to safeguard art in modern warfare," says Pet- ropoulos, noting that they were attentive to conser- vation issues such as humidity. "Te top Nazi leaders were briefed in detail on measures to safeguard art." In the Netherlands, a nationwide effort to rectify past lapses set Schavemaker and the Stedelijk on its course to this winter's exhibition. After an initial years-long study in the early aughts was deemed too narrow, the museum undertook a second investiga- tion from 2009 to 2013. "We need to start doing our homework again," Schavemaker says. "We feel it's too late. We are sorry for that." Schavemaker was rather shocked by her own conclusions: "We found works with complicated provenances, and most did not belong in our collection." In one case that the curator calls "troublesome" and "sad," a textile trader named Albert Stern es- caped Germany to the Netherlands, bringing with him three canvases—by Munch, Van Gogh, and Matisse. Te Stedelijk's Sandberg agreed to secure the Matisse, a circa-1921 painting of a reclining dark-haired woman titled Odalisque, in the bunker. Later, Stern's Dutch business partner claimed the painting and sold it to the museum for fve thousand guilders, a small sum. "You can imagine this money was necessary to buy a ticket and fee," Schave- maker says. Stern did not survive the war. Only re- cently were the Munch and the van Gogh restituted to his heirs. Te Matisse remains at the Stedelijk, but Schavemaker said the research will be presented to the national restitution committee. "It's a key piece in our collection, so it hurts a lot, but at the same time we want to do justice." Several works that Schavemaker's team identifed as suspect were not entrusted to the museum for safekeeping but were acquired through shady trans- actions. Jacques Goudstikker, a prominent Jewish second-generation art dealer from Amsterdam, dealt primarily in old masters but also collected some modern art. After Goudstikker died in an accident while feeing the Germans in 1940, Göring pilfered some fourteen hundred of his old masters in a forced sale but left behind the modern works not to his taste, which were sold off by dealers. After the war, a trove of Goudstikker old masters was returned to the Dutch government, which kept the works for the national collection. Goudstikker's widow, Desi, fought to reclaim them, but it was not until 2006, a decade after her death, that the government fnally handed over more than two hundred paintings to the Goudstikkers' daughter-in-law. In its last round of research, Schavemaker says, the museum dis- covered that it had purchased six 1905 Jan Toorop pastel drawings of a candle-making factory and determined they had come from the Goudstikker collection. Te Stedelijk is now in dialogue with the heirs about restitution, be it a fnancial settlement or outright return of the drawings. Te Stern Matisse and the Goudstikker Toorops are, in a sense, the simpler cases: Stedelijk research- ers were able to uncover their buried histories. One of the most hopeful developments of the new centu- ry, Fisher and Petropoulos assert, is the digitization of records. Te website errproject.org, for instance, has put scores of documents from the ERR online. Still, seventy years after the end of the war, the sto- ries of far too many artworks have been lost. "We have some works that really bother me now, that I suspect—" Schavemaker says before cutting off her thought. "Some are so pricey, but the most impor- tant thing is to do justice. "If it doesn't belong at the Stedelijk," she says frmly, "it shouldn't be there." P O S T E R A R T A poster promoting modern art exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in 1942 in the midst of WWII.