[Editor's note: Due to the momentous nature of the upcoming international conference in Berlin, Germany, entitled "20 years Washington Principles: Roadmap for the Future," it would be worthwhile to revisit these Principles and to put them through a linguistic, methodological and substantive meat grinder, and see what comes out of this critique. There will be eleven articles, each one devoted to one of the Principles enacted in a non-binding fashion in Washington, DC, on December 3, 1998.]
Principle #3
III. Resources and personnel should be made available to facilitate the identification of all art that had been confiscated by the Nazis and not subsequently restituted.
“Resources and personnel”:
The only way to ensure that a principle is enacted properly is to allocate resources and personnel which are dedicated to ensuring its viability. In the case of “identification of all art”, the “art” in question is located in a myriad places, both public and private, accessible and inaccessible. Even if archives are open, someone has to do the research and be paid for it. If museums grant access to their records, someone has to be able to consult them and be paid for that task. If we ask art institutions to cover those costs, little will be done, that’s for certain. Hence, external sources of funding have to be made available in the form of grants, fellowships, project funds, to allow institutions to recruit the personnel needed to conduct relevant searches into relevant records so as to “identify all art”. The only country that has done so, and to a limited extent truth be told, is Germany. After Germany, we have Austria. And that’s about the extent of it, with scattered efforts to work on discrete projects with no immediate consequence on the ability to “identify all art that had been confiscated” and displaced by other means. The United States, case in point, has turned out to be a miserable failure in this department, its government providing neither resources nor personnel to make good on its own dicta stemming from the Washington Conference on Holocaust Assets of December 1998.
But in order to “identify all art”, one must know what one is searching for. The widespread lack of understanding of the crime of plunder is staggering and impedes any large-scale at identifying the relevant objects that may fall under the category of “confiscated,” “dispossessed”, “sold under duress,” “looted”, “plundered,” etc.
In June 2011, we noted an inconsistency in language between Principles I and III: “Principle III embraces the notion that “all art” confiscated by the Nazis should be identified, as opposed to Principle I which just discusses “art.” Did the diplomats of the Washington Conference intend to maintain this inconsistency for any particular reason? Principle III is a massive failure.”
On a more positive note, we note that the Gurlitt exercise (since 2013) has forced the German government to reassess its provenance research funding priorities with a view to increasing funds allocated to German museums. A side effect of the Gurlitt exercise has been to compel the Swiss government to acknowledge that there has never been any systematic effort in Swiss museums to conduct research into their holdings. The Gurlitt collection’s presence at the Kunstmuseum of Bern is changing this dynamic as basic funds are being allocated for a limited study of Swiss institutions to survey their collections for any item falling under the rubric of “confiscated” or “displaced” during the 1933-1945 period. Of course, these objects would have been misappropriated in another country and then brought into Switzerland.
Likewise, an international conference recently convened in Jerusalem on October 4 renewed a call from Jewish groups worldwide to focus on provenance research as a way of identifying so-called “heirless” property.
And the regional provenance research project, TransCultAA, recently funded by the European Union, has shown the way to create historical research projects addressing the “translocation” of Jewish-owned cultural assets at the regional level, in this case the area flanked by Austria, Italy, and the Western Balkans.
For research to take place, it requires capital and people. It won’t happen without them. We’ve been twenty years for Principle #3 to be implemented on a systematic scale and it has not happened to date. The failure lies with the signatory governments to the Washington Conference of December 1998 who essentially made a deceitful commitment to provide such resources and personnel. Hence, Principle #3 is a failure.
Principle #3 should be rewritten and expanded as follows:
Resources and personnel “grants, fellowships, project funds and other financial allocation mechanism, shall be made available to facilitate the identification of all artistic, cultural and ritual objects confiscated, misappropriated, sold under duress and/or forced sales, subjected to other forms of illicit acts of dispossession by the Nazis, their supporters, profiteers and Fascist allies across Europe between 1933 and 1945 and not subsequently restituted.