Washington Principle #5: A Critique

by Marc Masurovsky

[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 #5:
V. Every effort should be made to publicize art that is found to have been confiscated by the Nazis and not subsequently restituted in order to locate its pre-War owners or their heirs.
“Every effort should be made to publicize”:

Whose job is it in the first place to do so?

It’s a nice idea but effort takes …. effort on the part of those who are expected to make such an effort.

Historically, governments, their ministries and agencies, have taken on the mantle of outreach in order to inform targeted populations and communities about the possibility for them to claim looted objects which may belong to their relatives, close or distant, so that they could consider a claim for restitution.

Decades after the crime of plunder has stripped millions of people of their belongings, it’s not so clear who or what is responsible for displaying such an effort.

Individual museums built web pages that contained images and descriptions of objects which they had selected as falling within the broad category of having “unavoidable gaps” for the period 1933-1945. Then the American Alliance (ex-Association) of Museums (AAM) built a website called the Nazi-era Provenance Internet Portal (NEPIP) whose aim is to bring together all of the objects identified by American museums as displaying a provenance gap for the relevant period (1933-1945)

Auction houses have no reporting responsibility. Galleries have no reporting responsibilities and, therefore, are not required to make an effort in identifying these kinds of objects which they buy and sell.

Are Jewish organizations responsible for this publicity effort? The Christian world always expects Jews to take care of their own issues as displayed fervently after the end of WWII when the US Army wanted to extricate itself of the business of caring for objects looted from Jewish victims and in 1946 when the international community designated two organizations—which happened to be Jewish—to oversee the looted asset question as it applied to Jewish victims, of course.

With such lack of specificity, it is difficult to understand what the framers of the Principles had in mind when they called for “every effort”.

Even if the co-authors of the Washington Principles thought that Jewish organizations would handle the publicity effort around objects that could be claimed, they still had to be coaxed into it, considering that no single Jewish organization was even remotely interested in assisting Jews with their restitution claims for looted art.

With all of this in mind, is Principle V a diplomatic expression of wishful thinking on the part of its framers? Did they give this issue much thought before they sat down and vaguely announced that “every effort should be made”? It’s good to remember that, without Principle I—identification--, Principle II—access to archives—Principle III-resources and personnel--, Principle V has no reason to exist.

By all accounts, Principle V does not rise to the standard of a self-governing principle. It requires crutches and other aids so that the average reader can understand it.

In June 2011, we noted that “Principle V is a double-edged sword and the dull edge of the sword is on full display.”

Principle #5 could be rewritten and broadened as follows:

In order to facilitate the location of pre-1933 owners and/or their heirs, every effort shall be made to draw up and disseminate to as wide a public as possible all information regarding 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.

Provenance research: what to do?

by Marc Masurovsky

The fault lines around contrasting views and understandings of provenance research might appear to be subtle to the uninitiated but, in reality, the fissures are brought about as a result of the legal implications of provenance research.

In the view of this writer, a provenance is the history of ownership or possession of an object from the time of its creation to the present days. The older the object, the more likely it will be difficult to account for every movement and place where the object was situated once it left the studio of its maker. But as you all well know, even so-called modern works can have elusive provenances such as “private collection, Zurich”.

The contrast in approach, in my view, stems from the fact that one school, mostly articulated by museum professionals, which we will refer to as “traditional” is not necessarily interested in injecting economic, political and social history into the documentation of the fate of an object, especially as it pertains to the 1933-1945 period. For some strange reason, that entire period remains a taboo subject, difficult to express even in the literature that museums and galleries develop around the objects that they display. This same school also argues that one will never know exactly what happened to an object, maintaining that there is no concrete evidence that something “bad” happened to the owner of the object and, even it did, it might not have affected the legal title to that object. After all, the object might have been sold “legally” and we just don’t know about it. Hence we can never ascertain that the object was in fact misappropriated for racial or political reasons, and therefore should not be restituted to its purportedly rightful owner. This view remains the favorite weapon of individuals who work for those who are best described as the “current possessors” of the object being claimed, namely cultural institutions—public and private.

The other school to which this writer belongs argues that context plays a very important role in determining the fate of an object. One might call it the “organic” school, for lack of a better word. It argues that the object, the place where it is and the person in whose possession it is, represent the three cardinal points around which the history of the object is articulated against the matrix of history which evolves over time and space. Put simply, an object that changes hands in Munich, Germany, and which belonged to a person of the Jewish faith may be moving around for reasons compelled by the change of regime in Germany on January 30, 1933, thus signaling a potentially violent and illegal transfer of ownership after Hitler’s rise to power.

A research training program takes on vastly different features if it follows the “organic” school or the “traditional” school that warrants that the actual fate of an object will never be exactly known, raising the possibility that there could be a document out there that could prove that nothing untoward occurred and the object changed hands legally even in the context of racial and political persecution and genocide.

You would be surprised, but this “traditional” school of thought has led to negative outcomes for claimants more often than not.

When we think about establishing provenance research training programs in colleges and universities, we realize that some schools might adopt one or the other approach. A balanced program would offer both approaches to future practitioners, advising them of the pitfalls and benefits inherent to either approach.

Some participants at the Columbia Conference were very adamant about promoting their own views of how provenance research should be conducted, whether “traditional” or “organic” which is a good thing because it gave those in attendance an opportunity to weigh both in their own minds.

Any museum-guided provenance research training program will likely promote the “traditional” view that provenance research is first and foremost about documenting the itinerary of an object from creation to the present day, with history being relegated to a back seat.

Any provenance research training program guided by the notion that it is essential for the provenance to document who the actual owner of the object is promotes the “organic” view and will assign greater weight to history and the environment in which the object evolved, beyond the narrow confines of conventional art history.

These contrasting views have become an integral part of the landscape of provenance research, influenced and skewed by decades of litigation and legal wrangling between current possessors—in most cases, museums and galleries—and claimants.

The geography of “traditional” vs. “organic”
Where do we find “traditional” views as opposed to “organic” views of provenance research?

In my view, the “traditional” approach is upheld in the hallowed halls of cultural institutions of a certain size located in large metropolitan centers. It can also be found among those who teach in museum studies programs and art history programs. One can even argue that the “traditional” view suffuses the curriculum of these academic programs that train future curators, art historians and other cultural professionals.

The “organic” view, strangely enough, finds its strongest advocates among archaeologists and cultural heritage specialists who take seriously the matrix from which objects are extracted. They are joined by those who research the fate and history of objects lost by claimants and their families. Some government officials, mostly in Europe, have eased their way into an “organic” view of provenance research, especially in the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria.

The future of provenance research

There is no game plan right now. The most important next step is to institute formalized academic offerings in colleges and universities that introduce students to both methodologies—“traditional” and “organic”—as well as in specialized workshops organized by non-profit organizations.

The now-extinct Prague-based European Shoah Legacy Institute (ESLI) offered a Provenance Research Training Program (PRTP) from 2012 to 2015 through a series of five workshops staged in five different cities—Magdeburg, Germany; Zagreb, Croatia; Vilnius, Lithuania; Athens, Greece; and Rome, Italy. Both approaches were offered to participants although most workshops tended to lean towards an “organic” view of provenance.

By contrast, the Washington-based American Alliance of Museums (AAM) and the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) have offered half-day and day-long seminars characterized as workshops in which they introduced curators, librarians, archivists and art historians to the mechanics of working with objects and documenting their history. These programs fit into the “traditional” mold and will likely continue. Likewise, the Smithsonian Museums appear to be thinking about developing some kind of “traditional” provenance research training program of their own.

Proposals abound about how to produce a more structured approach to training. Some efforts are taking shape in France. Provenance research is now being introduced to universities in select cities—Angers and Paris. The Free University of Berlin continues to offer a curriculum on “degenerate art” which tends to steer away from controversy and thus finds comfort in a more “traditional” approach to provenance research. This is perhaps due to the fact that funding comes from the government. On the other hand, in Munich, the Zentral Institut für Kunstgeschichte (Central Institute for Art History) promotes through its research projects a more “organic” vision of provenance research that gives extra weight to the mechanics of the Third Reich, the relationships of power and interest between various groups in the art world, into the understanding of an object’s pathway through the 1933-1945 period. These relationships and “interests” , it is argued, shape the fate of the object.

There is talk about asking the European Union to establish a Europe-wide entity with EU funds that would coordinate research into the history of objects under review for possible taint of looting or misappropriation. The idea makes eminent sense since national governments have skirted the issue rather successfully for the past 70 years. It might just require such a supranational effort to compel provenance research and training of practitioners. For such an effort to even get off the ground, entities and individuals with an “interest” in these matters of restitution, looted art, provenance research, will have to work together, coalesce their strengths and assets in order to lobby successfully for the creation of a funded unit at the EU level.

And still others argue that the only way to provide training is through some sort of international association of provenance researchers. According to this position, this association (which does not yet exist) will be responsible for coordinating at the national and international level all activities pertaining to provenance research and training. For this to happen, national chapters have to be established and more importantly, a clear definition of provenance research has to be adopted. If we follow this duality of “traditional” vs. “organic”, will the association try and reconcile these two approaches or will it favor one over the other? Who will make that determination? Without a clear understanding of what provenance research is, how can such an association see the light of day?

Maybe several associations are required if the two approaches cannot be reconciled. That might not be the worst thing to do. The only organization of provenance researchers that exist today is in Germany, the Arbeitsstelle für Provenienzforschung (AfP) and includes mostly German researchers who are for the most part working for municipal, regional or federal museums and cultural institutions. Expand this idea and we are talking about fundamental different outcomes and approaches shaped by the employer. In most of Europe, the employer is the government. In the United States, the main employer is a private non-profit or profit-making cultural institution, with the exception of municipal, State and Federal museums. Hence, an international association would become a cacophony of conflicting interests, because some researchers would be government civil servants, others would be working for the private art market, while others would be working for claimants and advocacy groups.

Define your terms

Before anything concrete can happen to transform provenance research into an internationally-recognized profession with its requirements, methods and approaches, its licensure procedures, we all must be clear about exactly what provenance research really is, and how it is practiced. Failing that, there is nothing to talk about. Instead of an association and its bureaucratic pitfalls, let’s instead establish a strong global network of individuals and entities interested in the history of ownership of artistic, cultural and ritual objects, a network that would be inclusive and not exclusive, one with a maximalist understanding of the idea of research. That approach might help shape the contours of a generic definition of provenance research on which everyone could agree without feeling as if they betrayed their principles and ideals.

S. 2763: Restitution kabuki

an opinionated piece by Marc Masurovsky

Note: The title was inspired by a close friend who is intimately involved in art restitution matters.

The authors of Senate Bill 2763, the “Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act” (HEAR Act), have as a major sponsor Republican Senator and former presidential candidate Ted Cruz. Another Republican co-sponsor is Senator Cornyn. Neither of them has been known to utter a word or express a single public thought about Holocaust claimants and/or about Nazi looted art. Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York, who is no friend of art restitution advocates, is a co-sponsor of S.2763 with Senator Blumenthal from Connecticut.

On the afternoon of Tuesday, June 7, 2016, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a public hearing regarding Senate Bill 2763. The witnesses included Ron Lauder speaking on behalf of the World Jewish Restitution Organization (WJRO), Monica Dugot of Christie’s, Agnes Peresztegi of the Commission for Art Recovery, Dame Helen Mirren, actress noted for her role as Maria Altmann in “The Woman in Gold”, and Simon Goodman, one of the heirs to the collection and property of the late Friedrich Gutmann.

Let’s deconstruct the title of the proposed bill:

Expropriated Art: is “expropriated” a legal term or just an evocative word to denote forcible removal without the owner’s consent? It might have been selected so that an acronym could be used to publicize the bill—in this case, HEAR. What if we had used displaced or misappropriated as substitutes for “expropriated”? Then we would get HDAR or HMAR. Not very elegant.

Does this proposed legislation cover all acts of illegal misappropriation of Jewish-owned cultural assets between 1933 and 1945? Or does the proposed legislation only cover those instances where a “public agency”, writ large, orders the “taking” of private property from Jews? Depending on how you answer these questions, the field of objects covered by this proposed legislation could change rapidly.

Recovery: it’s a word like any other, but does it actually mean “restitution” or simply the act of “recovering”? Merriam-Webster defines “recovery” as “the return of something that has been lost, stolen, etc.” What would have occurred if the Act had been called the “Holocaust Expropriated Art Restitution Act”? It would have been far more specific and more claimant-friendly. Then, the framers of the act could not be accused of playing footsy with the art market by keeping the wording ambiguous, because “recovery” is an ambiguous term, much as recovering from addiction leaves room for a relapse. Why ambiguous? Well, US troops “recovered” looted art throughout "liberated" Germany and Austria. Did it mean that it was “restituted”? No, it simply meant that it had to be shipped to countries where local officials would then “restitute” the objects to their rightful owners, or not.

Why the ambiguity? Is S. 2763 really a hat tip to the art market, a flirty wink to indicate that, no worries, your interests will be taken into account when this law finally passes?  In other words, “recovery” might also mean “just and fair” which usually means “financial settlement” where the seller or current possessor of the claimed looted item gets to hang on to the prized ownership title to the looted object.

“Recovery” is another way of saying that the art market continues to hold tremendous sway on how restitution works for Holocaust-era claimants.

At the end of the day, so the expression goes, it is always a business decision how a looted object gets "returned” and “recovered.”

Are claimants’ rights genuinely protected by S. 2763? Or is this bill a subversive sop to the art market and a gift to the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) and to the American Alliance of Museums (AAM)? These two groups have fought for years to put an end to the claims process, callously indifferent and disdainful about how cultural objects are stolen, misappropriated, expropriated, displaced, whatever the word is to connote illegality.

As currently drafted, S. 2763 might be nothing more than a final attempt to address art restitution in the United States, offering the art market the equivalent of a social peace during a six-year period of claims hopefully unimpeded by statutes of limitations and laches (assuming that the final version of S 2763 keeps out laches, no guarantees given!). Claimants would presumably get a « fair day in court » where their claims may be assessed solely on their merits, again within a six year framework or less, depending on when the claimed item had been located and identified and the evidence garnered to back the claim.

S. 2763 is looking more and more like a thinly disguised message to claimants,.a last opportunity to file for restitution assuming that they know where their object is and they have the proper documentation to support their claim. If not, how will they obtain the evidence in the time allotted to them? How will claimants afford a court action against a current possessor especially if it is a museum or a billionaire collector with access to a well-supplied war chest ?

S. 2763 stacks the cards against claimants, however which way you look at it. Even if they do manage to garner the documentation, claimants will not be able to afford the hefty litigation fees associated with a proceeding to obtain restitution.

It is not possible to endorse S.2763 if a mechanism is not explicitly created which ensures that claimants will be supported in their attempt to recover their lost property. The Federal government should subsidize this commitment for at least ten years to ensure that claims are properly addressed and have a fair chance of being heard, by minimizing research and legal costs to claimants.

S. 2763 favors wealthy claimants with access to significant means to support research into their claims and legal action to recover identified objects which sit either in public or private collections. It is clearly not designed to help the vast majority of claimants, who lost cultural assets that are not museum-worthy. It provides succor to the very few, those who are familiar with the claims process and are able to demand the return of high-end items which their lawyers are willing to recover for them at rates the average claimant cannot possibly afford.

The claims process has always been skewed towards those who have lost cultural assets considered of great value in today’s market and towards whom gravitate most lawyers as well as market players.

When is “just and fair” fair and just?

by Marc Masurovsky

(updated on 5 July 2025)

It is difficult to pin down precisely the genesis of the concept known as “fair and just” or “just and fair” solution in matters pertaining to the restitution of art objects looted during the Holocaust. Who and when are almost impossible to trace.

A valid starting point is principle #8 of the “Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-confiscated art”. The “Washington Principles” were passed on December 3, 1998 at the close of the Washington Conference on Holocaust-era Assets.


“If the pre-War owners of art that is found to have been confiscated by the Nazis and not subsequently restituted, or their heirs, can be identified, steps should be taken expeditiously to achieve a just and fair solution, recognizing this may vary according to the facts and circumstances surrounding a specific case."

Two years later, on October 5, 2000, a declaration came out of an international forum on Holocaust issues held in Vilnius, Lithuania, which placed heavy emphasis on the search for fair and just solutions “to the return” of looted art and cultural property. It went a bit further than the Washington conference without getting into any specifics, diplomatie oblige, as to what would constitute a just and fair solution to a claim for restitution. Forum participants did ask that “every reasonable effort be undertaken" to “achieve the restitution” of looted cultural assets. Hence restitution {again, without being properly defined] was invoked in the same breath as “just and fair solution.”

Eleven years after the Washington Conference of December 1998, a similar conclave of 40 odd nations and international NGOs gathered in Prague under the auspices of the hosting government of the Czech Republic. The International Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets issued a declaration, called the Terezin Declaration on June 30, 2009. In it, one can find multiple references to “just and fair solutions” without understanding at all what they are and how to achieve them. They do stipulate, however, that the Washington Conference of December 1998 established the moral (and non-binding) principle whereby looted art and cultural property should be “returned to victims or their heirs in a manner consistent with national laws and regulations [emphasis added] as well as international obligations, in order to achieve a just and fair solution.” Unless I am completely mixed up here, I read this as meaning that the restitution of looted cultural property achieves a “just and fair solution.”

In the years following the 1998 conference in Washington, DC, where the Principles were formulated, the tendency was to sharpen the link between restitution and “just and fair” or “fair and just” solutions. And yet….the word “restitution” was not defined in these declarations. If it was to mean the physical return of the looted object to the rightful owner and thereby transfer of legal title away from the current possessor to the rightful owner, many art market players like auction houses and museums, as well as governments, have violated the principle of what is just and fair by insisting that “just and fair” in all likelihood means upholding the good faith of the current possessor and asking—no, convincing—the claimant that financial compensation of some sort or another is the best result that can be achieved in the spirit of the Washington Principles of 1998. Best to invoke the trinity of Washington, Vilnius and Terezin in order to enshrine the physical return of the object.

Is that really what was meant or inferred at Vilnius in 2000 and at Prague in 2009? The answer is inconclusive, because most of the drafters and endorsers of these declarations were well aware that “national laws and regulations” would interfere with the actual physical restitution of the claimed object, especially in areas where the Idol of Good Faith rules all.

Hence, the apparent contradiction between settlements and the various declarations of Washington, Vilnius and Terezin disappears by stressing that the return of the object should be consistent with national laws and regulations. The emphasis of "fair and just" shifts in favor of the rights of the current possessor at the expense of those of the claimant.




"Dedham from Longham", by John Constable

An interesting twist to the Washington Principles involves a painting by John Constable being claimed by Alain Monteagle, representative of the Jaffe family’s restitution claim. The painting is presently located in the Fine Arts Museum of la Chaux de Fonds which is in the canton of Neuchatel in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. Historically, the Swiss federal government has always deferred to local governments’ discretion in the way that they manage or dispose of their cultural assets. If one should apply to the letter the principles enshrined in Washington and reiterated in Vilnius and Terezin, the museum at La Chaux de Fonds, which is municipal, should return the painting to Mr. Monteagle. However, if the return is subject to the “national laws and regulations” of Switzerland and the canton of Neuchatel, as well as the municipality of La Chaux de Fonds, Mr. Monteagle does not stand a chance, because civil law in Switzerland worships the good faith of the current possessor and no foreigner can come into Switzerland and claim what he/she feels is his/her rightful property, at least not since 1949, with a notable exception last year. At least, that is the impression that we are left with, if history serves as a valid reference point.




La Chaux de Fonds 

Interestingly, in a 3-page report issued in January 2014, the Swiss Federal Office of Culture commented that “just and fair solutions must be sought—both when it has been possible to trace the victims and when identification has proved impossible.”

Hence, the principles of Washington, Vilnius and Terezin are not helpful in the real world and, more often than not, municipal governments and their national representatives heap scorn on them so as to safeguard their “cultural property.” If Mr. Monteagle wants his painting back, he has to wage total war against the Swiss government, the city council of La Chaux de Fonds which has oversight of its fine arts museum and the cantonal authorities in Neufchatel. To be successful, the battle for restitution must involve all aspects of civil society and should be waged inside and outside the legal system in order to "achieve a just and fair solution" consistent with Washington, Vilnius and Terezin.

Update of 5 July 2025

Since 1998, the concept of "Just and Fair" as applied to the resolution of Holocaust-era claims for Nazi looted art (encompassing losses suffered from the advent of Hitler to power on 30 January 1933 to the unconditional surrender of the Third Reich on 9 May 1945) has been embraced by governments, lawmakers, auction houses, museums (public and private), dealers and collectors, and many lawyers involved in looted art cases. It has become what lawyers and lawmakers describe as "soft law."

When "just and fair solutions" are invoked, they pave the way for a financial settlement allowing the current possessor to explain why it is not fair and just to them to relinquish the claimed object to the heirs of the victim who lost them. Moreover, these solutions undermine our understanding of the trauma of duress as experienced by those who lost their cultural goods as well as the rest of their belongings and assets.

As a historical footnote, the concept of just and fair was wholly concocted by Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat, organizer of the 1998 Washington Conference on Holocaust-era Assets and the US Government's chief negotiator and diplomat on matters dealing with reparations for Holocaust victims and their families. The American Alliance of Museums (AAM)--at the time known as the American Association of Museums--played a role in guiding Ambassador Eizenstat to formulate this concept which ended up being a gift to the class of current possessors at the expense of the interests of the claimants in their quest to obtain restitution (the physical return of their property).

Is it fair to ask whether Ambassador Eizenstat and his colleagues in major Jewish organizations involved in Holocaust reparations ever thought to sit down with claimants and restitution advocates about the implications of a "just and fair" approach to their request for restitution?

As for the Swiss government, it is on the brink of creating a Swiss commission inspired by those already in place in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, Germany and Austria.

Memorial Day Ruminations

by Ori Z Soltes

Three related issues interwove themselves in my mind thanks to a serendipitous catching up with emails on this sunny Memorial Day weekend. Since "memorial" derives from the same Latin root as "memory" then it is particularly appropriate that, on a weekend when we are reminded to remember our war dead, the singular human capacity for memory and its verbal, visual and other articulations direct itself to related matters pertaining to the dead--and the living--from a range of different kinds of wars.

I was impressed by the youtube record of a brief speech by Eric Sundby, president of the student-run Holocaust Remembrance and Restitution Society at Oklahoma University in Norman, OK. The speech was in support of a resolution before the Oklahoma State legislature, HR 1026, that would call on the Fred Jones Museum of Oklahoma University to engage in a full process of provenance research.

In his speech, Sundby observed that, in practical terms, this means that the museum must both research the ownership history of objects in its collections that were acquired without the benefit of that research at the time of acquisition, and for which there is the possibility that they were stolen; and that it must commit itself to rigorously research the ownership history of potential acquisitions in the future.

The specific issue that prompted the legislation and Sundby's speech is the claim by Leone Meyer, in France, for the small Pissarro painting, La Bergère ("The Shepherdess"), which was stolen (together with dozens of other works of art) from the Meyer family, by the Nazis, under the aegis of the Alfred Rosenberg-guided task force whose purpose it was to plunder cultural property from the Nazis' victims. (Rosenberg's earlier claim to fame had been his orchestration of the Nazi theory that differentiated "Aryans" from Jews, Slavs, Roma and others, physiologically, mentally and morally).

La Bergere, by Camille Pissarro

As anyone who is interested in the issue of Nazi-Plundered cultural property is aware, the President of Oklahoma University and the Director of the Fred Jones Museum have steadfastly refused to consider restituting the painting to Ms. Meyer, based on a remarkable combination of pseudo-legal technicalities and egocentric obtuseness. Sundby referred to the Museum's assertion that restitution would set "a bad precedent" and that "the history of [the painting's] ownership history is not known." Sundby held up a document from the US Archives, stamped with Alfred Rosenberg's ERR Task Force stamp, indicating unequivocally that  La Bergère was item #13 plundered from the Meyer family.

Meyer 13-RG 260 M1943 Reel 15 NARA

ERR labeling on photo of Meyer 13

The Museum's refusal to accord justice and pursue an ethical path in the face of remarkably clear evidence as to the Nazi theft of the Pissarro from the Meyers, and its cynical use of an earlier failed effort by Meyer's father to gain restitution in Switzerland, (due, at the time, to what is now universally regarded as a faulty legal issue: the time limits within which claims might be made and to the Swiss judiciary's refusal to call into question the "good faith" of art dealers suspected of recycling art looted in Axis-controlled Europe) as a legal precedent, is profoundly disturbing. This is what has prompted virtually the entire state of Oklahoma, from students and ordinary citizens to State legislators, to rise up in protest and demand restitution.

Almost equally troubling is the documentary evidence suggesting that well over a decade ago a colleague from a different museum had alerted the Fred Jones museum curators of a potential provenance problem with this painting--and perhaps with some 30 others that had come from the same source--and that the Museum staff chose to minimize the alert at that time. That is to say, they chose not to engage in provenance research (and in this case, that research would not have been overly complicated), as if they had hoped that the issue would disappear.

Instead, it has returned, with a vengeance. Which leads me to the second issue that has been bothering me this weekend. The verbiage of HR 1026 is virtually drawn, in its entirety, from statements made well over a decade ago by Museum Directors in both the American Association of Museums (AAM) and the Association of American Museum Directors (AAMD) in response to a concatenation of public events that began with an all-day conference at the B'nai B'rith Klutznick National Jewish museum and the founding of HARP (September 4, 1997); and led to the HARP-inspired State Department conference that produced the so-called Washington Principles (in December 1998), signed by nearly four dozen nations at that time.

The august statements made by both AAM and AAMD pledged strong new efforts toward provenance research and a concerted effort to restitute works in their collections that had been plundered by the Nazis, where victims or their heirs could be found. Alas, the track record has meandered gradually downhill for the most part since then, as, with some noteworthy exceptions, American museums preferred to downplay the demand for provenance research and in many cases resisted the requests of claimants for judicious consideration of their claims, for their plundered works and for justice.

More subtly, museums still offer remarkably little information about works of art to their visitors, with respect to the narrative of plunder within the narrative of ownership. Where bona fide art historical enquiry should crave every bit of information about a work of art--who made it and when and where, and also who first and then who next owned it, and indeed what the entire trail of ownership up to the present has been--for this last sort of datum is essential to the larger story of culture and within it, economics and cultural patronage--the available information to the staff, by the staff and to the public (that the museum presumably wants to educate and edify and not merely entertain), remains remarkably limited.

In part this is because of the apparent limits on museum-staff skill at engaging in provenance research--at reading and understanding the documents that offer information on ownership history. (How else could the Fred Jones Museum argue that the provenance of La Bergère is unknown, when the archival documents are so clear?) Mind you, the museum and gallery community has continued to mouth its interest in understanding all of this better, but when seminars and short courses have been made available to it, the classroom remains devoid of participation from that community. If the museums don't understand or cannot tell the story of objects that have been plundered, they certainly cannot be expected to understand why restitution even matters, much less be sympathetic to the process; they cannot be expected to share a story that they don't know with their audiences. The trail from 1997 to 2015 and from Washington, DC to Norman, Oklahoma is a rugged one, with very uneven footing.

The contexts of history and art history are large ones. I noticed while watching Sundby's youtube-recorded speech that, in the background, behind him, there stood a life-sized bronze statue of a Native American. From my viewing angle it appeared generic: a non-specific American Indian. But then I thought--this is Oklahoma, after all--that the sculpture may well have been of a Cherokee. And I thought: how ironic! In 1838 in what is known as the Trail of Tears, tens of thousands of Cherokee, native to Georgia and surrounding areas were force-marched all the way to Oklahoma. The reason: white Euro-American settlers wanted access to the rich farmland and forests that the Cherokee had inhabited for generations. The outcome: a small-scale genocide. Thousands of Cherokee perished along the way to Oklahoma, where those who survived the journey were forced to take up residence in an area reserved for them--a reservation--that offered nothing like the land from which they and come, nothing that would be conducive to living lives anything like those they lived back east.

North America, then, and the United States in particular, has a lamentable history with regard to the treatment of Native Americans by whites and by the white federal government. So--and this is third part of my interwoven Memorial Day rumination--there on youtube is a functional symbol of that horrific past, a past which the United States is still in the process of trying to shape toward a happier present. And before that symbol a speech is being offered to support legislation intended to push an American museum to restitute a painting to the heir of a family that was part of a different tale of tears.

And meanwhile, in Paris, in the country from which that Jewish claimant comes, the EVE auction house is about to offer up, for the third time in barely a year, objects sacred to various Native American tribes--in this case, specifically the Hopis, from Arizona. The French have apparently completely forgotten that they are signatories to acts that recognize the rights of indigenous peoples world-wide with regard, among other things, to their cultural and sacred heritage and property. American dealers who know that they cannot hope to unload others' sacred property anywhere in the United States have turned to France to help preserve and extend this particular tale and trail of tears.

Mr. Sundby, in his elegantly concise speech with that statue behind him and the ERR document before him observed that his organization supports the legislation of HR 1026 because "we stand for our community, our nation and our fellow human beings." As students at Oklahoma University, his organization would prefer their tuition dollars to go toward, well, education, and not toward lining the pockets of lawyers defending a classic, unethical case. But it seems that the Fred Jones Museum has forgotten about moral education, as have most of the American museum staffs who remain uneducated with regard to provenance research and its role in larger historical and cultural contexts, and as the French and their auction houses seem to have forgotten about the meaning of community and of humanity. Memory is an important human instrument but a flawed one indeed, particularly when it is embedded so deeply in ego and arrogance.