A detective story, this certainly is.
Driven by a quest to reclaim his family stolen legacy, leads Simon Goodman on a profound journey through the personal, historical and legal miasma that art restitution involves. It’s a story of how a stubborn man takes on the cultural bureaucrats with its labyrinth of tangles and twists; his relentless pursuit is more than a search for a lost masterpieces, it’s a dedicated fight for Justice and Remembrance set against the background of one of history’s darkest periods.
Anyone who’s seen the film Woman in Gold about Maria Atman’s similar struggle to find looted family art, will have a good idea where this book is heading from chapter One. Simon’s memoir is a gripping account of his decades-long quest to recover his family’s art collection, looted by the Nazis during World War Two. After the war much of the collection vanished into private hands and museum collections.
It’s an extraordinary tale of the rise and fall of a German Jewish banking dynasty as Goodman discovers old family documents and art catalogues after the death of his father and he s is spurred on a sleuth’s Odyssey across continents to reclaim the stolen treasures and honour his family’s legacy whilst seeking justice. The story is alternately poignant and chilling but intriguing and inspiring to the end. It echoes unspeakable horrors, family devotion, and art as a symbol of hope.
Goodman movingly portrays his family’s victimisation by Nazi looters aided by an unscrupulous art world and the post-war repercussions of those events while combining a modern day detective story, with nuanced context for its importance. The author uses the theft of his family’s art collection as a lens through which to view the Holocaust, family secrets and a quest for both justice and to the considerable measure of the work done by the Monument Men.
The plundered artworks make for a compelling narrative that not only illuminates the resilience of the family torn- apart but also poses deep probes about morality, cultural restitution and the impact of historical crimes. We are talking a collection that includes works by Sandro Botticelli, Fra Bartolomeo, Monet, Degas, Renoir and many others as well as, Guardi, Cranach the Elder and a stunning new work by Franz von Stuck.
Which leads us to the Orpheus
Clock, named after the relief of Orpheus on its side. The Clock created in the 16th century by German Goldsmith Wenzel Jamnitzeri, an heirloom that took Simon Goodman, a British music executive two decades to establish the provenance of the clock wrested from his grandfather Fritz by the looting Nazis. It takes a while to get to the clock’s final resolution, but the travails retrieving the looted art treasures from unsympathetic post war governments, unethical art dealers and resistant museums, mounting legal obstacles, make for a gripping and important reading
Simon’s efforts to reclaim the art collection began when he learned of its existence after his father’s death. Goodman raised in London, writes how he painstakingly pierced together the story of what happened to all those paintings, which by then were dispersed across Europe.
While thumbing through an art catalog in 1995, he was stunned to catch sight of a Degas, one of many paintings the Nazis lifted off his grandfather which had never been returned, now in a possession of an American billionaire. That battle to get the Degas recognised as part of the family’s lost collection forms part of an extraordinary tale of the rise and fall of a German dynasty, one of the number of wealthy Jews hovering on the edge of the old Prussian Elite.
This extraordinary journey highlights Simon’s battle against cultural bureaucrats and their culture of amnesia and his fierce impulses to right wrongs. In part THE ORPHEUS CLOCK is a saga of an immensely successful Jewish banking family, the high society they mixed with, and the fate that awaited them in the concentration camps.
Dogged by facing skepticism, contempt and frustration, this story documents the Goodman Brothers’l Simon and Nicholas’s struggle with the art establishment, to locate the stolen Aatworks and have them returned. its a breathtaking page turner, for sure, meticulously researched, plumbing a deep emotional well.
