If Adolf Hitler had realized his childhood dream of becoming an artist, he might have had a different outlet for his particular madness.
And Claude Cassirer might have a 19th-century French Impressionist painting worth millions hanging on the wall of his La Mesa home instead of a reproduction.
But Hitler twice failed the entrance exam to art school and wound up looting more canvases than he painted. Some 600,000 pieces of museum-quality art were seized by the Nazis as they rolled through Europe during World War II. About 100,000 are still missing.
One of the paintings was a masterpiece done in 1897 by Camille Pissarro, a pioneer of Impressionism. It depicts a Paris boulevard on a rainy afternoon, alive with pedestrians and carriages.
Cassirer’s ancestors, who were wealthy industrialists and art patrons in Germany, bought the painting from Pissarro’s agent the year after it was finished. For the next four decades, it was passed from heir to heir.
Cassirer, born in Berlin in 1921, first remembers seeing the painting as a child in his grandmother Lilly’s apartment. He has a photograph showing it hanging in the parlor there.
In 1939, his grandmother, like a lot of Jews, was scrambling to get out of Germany and away from the Holocaust. Jews had lost their citizenship rights. Their synagogues had been smashed. Death camps were waiting.
According to the family’s account, the only way Lilly Cassirer could get exit visas was by agreeing to leave the Pissarro behind in exchange for $360. She took the deal and fled with her husband to England.
She sued to reclaim the painting after the war, but it couldn’t be found. The family was told it went missing in the Allied bombing of Munich, Cassirer said. In 1958, the West German government paid them about $13,000 for their loss.
And that, Cassirer figured, was that.
He, too, had fled Hitler — to Prague, to Marseilles, to Morocco and then, in 1941, to New York.
“I was sick, I had no profession and no money,” he said. “Otherwise, everything was fine.”
When a cousin offered him work at a department store in Cleveland, he accepted. He switched to commercial photography and built a career out of capturing images of babies, graduations, weddings and anniversaries.
“I learned it was more important to click with the people than to click with the camera,” Cassirer said.
He fell in love with Beverly, a woman he met on a train. They’ve raised two children and been married 66 years.
Lilly Cassirer came to live with them in Cleveland and died in 1962. Claude Cassirer was her only heir.
Ten years ago, a friend of his who lives in New York was in a bookstore, leafing through an art catalog that included Pissarro paintings. She called him in La Mesa, where he and his wife had retired in 1970, and asked if he remembered the name of his family’s lost artwork.
He told her: “Rue St.-Honore, Apres-Midi, Effet de Pluie.”
It was in the catalog.