Beyond ethnic minority rights

by Marc Masurovsky

[The following presentation was delivered at the annual conference of the Lawyers' Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation (LCCHP), which took place in Washington, DC, on April 13, 2018. This presentation was part of a panel on ethnic minority rights to recover their looted cultural property and how States oftentimes interfere with those rights.]

I would like to thank the Lawyers Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation for having invited me to speak today. I am grateful for their support and I thank this panel’s members for letting me sit among them.

I am neither a lawyer nor an art dealer. Neither do I collect indigenous or archaeological objects. Although I am identified as a co-founder of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project, the views that I hold today are my own.

I have been a lifelong student of the economics of genocide and more particularly of cultural plunder and the trauma that it has engendered and continues to inflict on its victims.

My first professional encounter with these crimes against humanity occurred while working for the Office of Special Investigations of the US Department of Justice. Three years in those trenches brought me into intimate face to face contact with Nazi collaborators living quiet lives in the United States. They owed their freedom to a cynical calculation by Western politicians, military strategists and intelligence agents that it was better for them to recruit Axis war criminals to be deployed in the event of an impending global conflict against the Soviet Union than handing them over to face justice in the countries where they had plundered, tortured and murdered untold numbers of Jews and local enemies of Nazism and fascism, real or imagined. A number of those whom I met were personally responsible for the forced dispossession of thousands of Jews in far-flung corners of Eastern Europe and the Aryanization of their holdings.

I have spent the greater part of my adult life, with mixed results, advocating for the restitution of looted art objects to their rightful Jewish owners. I have always viewed restitution, as part of an overall healing process, a salve on a trans-generational traumatic scar. I had thought that restitution or the physical return of a stolen object to its rightful owner would be as simple as removing the claimed object from a wall, a cupboard, a safe, a table, a library shelf, and handing it over to its rightful owner. As it turns out, I was quite naïve; I fell off that horse long ago as restitution is the most complicated and twisted process that I have ever encountered.

The reasons for this are manifold. They are ensconced in legal concepts and value systems that, in my view, place the private property rights of current possessors outside the realm of question. Those who possess the claimed item invoke good faith as a defense as if it was an accepted religious dogma. In most nations, good faith is accepted on faith in cult-like fashion and is upheld by State officials, museum personnel, their lawyers and those businessmen who currently own those objects. Good faith is an extremely difficult shield to pierce. Ethical and moral arguments alone cannot even dent its armor. A recent illustration of this problem comes from Switzerland where it took nearly two decades for a single Frenchman of Jewish descent with lots of pro bono help, creativity and chutzpah, to force a Swiss museum to return to him a painting which his family had lost in 1943, the first such restitution to a non-Swiss Jewish claimant since 1949.

In a world which hides behind good faith and heralds private property rights as sacred, even in the face of horrors committed against entire populations, one has to wonder: is justice an empty word?

It is partly in this context that I can discuss how ethnic minorities can recover their looted cultural assets. Their rights have been routinely trampled in the nations where they have dwelt for generations. To put it bluntly, human beings have been socialized for millennia to display very low levels of tolerance towards the “others”, those who do not think, look, and believe in the same way as those who belong to the dominant group wielding local, regional or State power. Too often, dominant groups will solve these differences through marginalization, dehumanization, persecution, incarceration, deportation, and outright extermination. Every corner of the globe is tainted with the blood of the “others”. And every corner of the globe is host to the displaced possessions of the “others.”

There is a system of international laws, charters, covenants, and conventions, which has been in place for decades that seeks to address these egregious acts of persecution and dispossession. International organizations tend to recognize those rights, countries around the world have signed international conventions recognizing the rights of indigenous peoples, the United Nations boasts of charters that uphold those rights. One cannot even count how many NGOs exist which are there to protect and safeguard the rights of ethnic minorities. And yet…

In practical terms, we need to address how dispossessed objects which are located in foreign markets or displayed in museums or galleries, far away from the scene of the crime, can be restituted to their rightful owners, be they cultural groups, religious minorities, ethnic communities whose members are scattered across many continents.

As indicated earlier, the physical return of these objects to rightful owners is the most difficult and yet, in my view, the clearest expression of how to counter a State-sponsored theft: by transferring title to the aggrieved party. The more likely scenario to unfold involves some form of compromise on the part of the victim or the victim’s heirs and representatives. Either the victims are compensated financially or some other arrangement is reached which upholds the rights of the current possessor while providing some form of relief to the claimant. Is that fair and just? In 1998, the Washington Conference on Holocaust assets produced a list of 11 non-binding principles which were designed to guide nations and institutions where looted objects were identified on how to either return them or seek some form of “just and fair solution.” Victims of plunder did not initiate the idea of just and fair; the current possessors, in most cases State-owned museums and institutions, pressed for that idea, one that diplomats embraced as an acceptable resolution of the treatment of objects looted during the Third Reich in the context of a genocidal enterprise.

If we apply the logic of the Washington Principles to the treatment of objects forcibly removed from ethnic minority groups around the world, the outcome would be nothing short of catastrophic since it would imply that no one could recover their lost property. Why return objects when the current possessors are given the opportunity to seek a compromise arrangement with the aggrieved parties? In the case of antiquities, source nations would never abide by these Principles because they would prevent the repatriation of their cultural heritage. A just and fair solution rarely entails the actual return of the object, unless the source nations accept that these objects be loaned to them without actually recovering them in the same way that the Victoria and Albert Museum has agreed to loan objects to Ethiopia on a long term basis.

When cultural objects are considered to be a nation’s cultural property, and are viewed as part of that nation’s patrimony, the questions of ownership become even more complex and require political solutions. Nations repatriate to other nations, not to individuals or local groups. Much like after the Second World War, Allied cultural advisers repatriated looted art to the nations where the thefts had taken place, leaving it to those governments to restitute the items to individuals and to aggrieved communities. All nations indulge in this duplicitous approach to culture, some are worse than others. Governments can and will impose their inalienable right to ownership of repatriated objects at the expense of victimized groups and individuals if they are allowed to do so.

Those who deal, collect, exhibit, trade, lend, donate cultural objects across borders bear a unique responsibility in the treatment of objects illicitly acquired and recirculated through private and public channels across borders. Although looting is an unacceptable crime, it is also universal, as is the acquisition and trade of looted cultural and artistic objects. Many of these looted objects come from nations governed by autocrats, where democracy is a dirty word. Many nations today have fallen prey to nationalist parties and movements which believe strongly in the cult of the nation as an incarnation of a certain ideal of citizenry. Culture is treated accordingly. In a peculiar way, those nations are anxious to recover their looted cultural property but they are not eager to return those objects to their citizens especially when they are members of ethnic minorities. While the nationalist wave is gaining ground across Europe and even in the United States, it has been a reality for decades in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia.

From an ethical and moral standpoint, the repatriation of looted objects to autocratic and dictatorial nations can be viewed as problematic. But what is the alternative? Prevent those objects from returning to their source? Under what pretense? That we are morally and culturally superior? If we follow those arguments, we are no better than 19th century colonial adventurers who viewed the “others” as inferiors and whose assets should best be handled by the Western world. We cannot allow ourselves to think that we are morally superior to anyone. Although I am not at all religious, I find that there is something to be said for the biblical adage: let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

Ultimately, this discussion should go beyond the rights of ethnic minority groups to recover their looted cultural assets. It should encompass all victims of cultural plunder. The solutions are manifold and delicate. They require careful coordination at the policy level, nationally and internationally. At the core, these solutions must reconcile the interests of the art market, the interests of governments, the interests of those who possess and display, the interests of those who have been victimized by acts of expropriation and dispossession and outright thievery. Art objects are an integral part of our individual and collective memory of the past and the present. They are an extension of who and what we are. For those reasons, it is as important to transcribe faithfully and truthfully the story of these objects as it is to recover them. Every cultural object, regardless of origin, deserves a thoroughly fleshed out provenance before it is displayed or traded. Ignorance, arrogance and greed are the enemy.

One way to forestall future acts of State-sanctioned plunder is to ensure that the history of these objects and their owners is written, published, disseminated and taught to as wide a public as possible.

Provenance research—now and later (Third Installment)

In the spirit of an on-going "think-aloud" pertaining to the nature of provenance research and the art restitution movement, here are some additional thoughts for discussion.

There are no official statistics regarding:

a/ the total number of art objects claimed, b/ the total number of art objects restituted, c/ the total value of art objects sold after restitution, and d/ the total value of so-called “art restitution litigation.”

a/ the total number of art objects claimed:

By May 1945, somewhere between 15 and 20 million art objects of all sorts, from masterpieces to portraits of your favorite saints and relatives, had been misplaced due to civil unrest, persecution, war, genocide, and theft.

Of those misplaced cultural objects, a small number fit the moniker of “culturally-significant” or “national treasure” or both, depending on who was defining those two very odd expressions. For the sake of the argument, let’s just say 1 to 5 per cent of the misplaced objects fit those categories, or 100,000 (lowest number) to 1 million (highest number). The rest fell into the general bucket of culturally not so significant or insignificant, again, depending on who is expounding on this odd categorization.

Postwar Allied restitution policy ended up focusing on the 1 to 5 percent of objects lost or missing due to State-sponsored mischief between 1933 and 1945. For the rest, compensation schemes were foisted onto shell-shocked survivors and their kin due to an institutional absence of interest amongst postwar governments to aid those victims in locating and recovering their missing cultural property for reasons mentioned above. Many of the culturally significant objects and those earning the label of “national treasure” came from State collections plundered by the Axis and from private collections owned by wealthy individuals with close ties to State museums in countries dominated by the Axis. Those items received favored treatment in the eyes of the Allies and their representatives, referred to as “Monuments Men”.

The Allied powers’ prime directive was the economic, political, social and cultural rehabilitation of Europe (read that part of Europe not occupied or influenced by the Soviet Army and its government) especially as the incipient Cold War became a full-fledged game of geopolitical antipathy between former wartime allies.

As a consequence of the aforementioned factors and those tied to the inevitable human condition—people over property—most survivors did not file claims in the immediate postwar period and only did so after deadlines had passed and the only chance of physically recovering most if not all of their lost property was close to 0.

By 1956, the US State Department had estimated that approximately several hundred thousand cultural objects of all kinds and shapes and value were still being claimed through its good offices by individuals from more than 30 nations.

From the mid-1990s to today, in the absence of any concerted international effort to tally the total number of claimed objects registered as such with national governments, we can only guess that, perhaps, the aggregate total figure of claimed cultural objects is in excess of the number declared by the State Department in 1956.

Moreover, there is no available as to the number of claims filed against museums and other institutions that hold or trade in art objects.  The number of objects claimed might well be in the thousands but proof being in the pudding no one can be sure of anything at this point in time.

Recommendation: nations that are signatory to international compacts known as the Washington conference of 1998 and the Terezin Declaration of June 2009 should conduct a census of all outstanding claimed cultural objects registered as of now in their care and publish those results for public consumption and analysis.  The same appeal can be made to the members of the art market and ask that it provide figures representing the number of objects in their custody which are subject to claims without giving out names out of a concern for data privacy.

b/ the total number of art objects that have been restituted since the Washington Conference:

Historically, the most accessible statistics are repatriation figures from various postwar governments and official statistics regarding actual physical restitutions up to the early 1950s. Since then, there is very little public information that can be found about how many art objects were returned to rightful owners between the mid-1950s and the beginning of the 21st century.

Those nations that have established restitution committees (the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Austria) have compiled figures regarding the number of objects that have been claimed through their auspices. But no statistics are tallied pertaining to the number of objects returned through direct negotiations with museums, auction houses, institutions, corporations, and private individuals.

c/ the total value of restituted art objects is directly dependent on the answer to the aforementioned.

The recipients of restituted art objects are usually driven to sell them because they cannot afford to keep them in their possession as a result of their inflated value and the ensuing insurance and other expenses that accompany their maintenance as one's newly found property. Other successful claimants part with the restituted objects because there are a multitude of individuals who have a rightful claim to a share of the value of the restituted object(s). There can be as many 50 or 60 individuals who can benefit from the monetization of restituted objects, thus significanly diluting the actual amount earned from the sale of the restituted object(s).  And then, there are those folks out there who have recovered their objects and prefer to sell them for their own personal reasons which are theirs only to be treated as a private matter, free of outside commentary.

The only indication of value comes from press reports about items being auctioned after restitution. It can safely be assumed that the objects with an Austrian provenance—mostly oil paintings by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele—have fetched the highest prices at auction following their restitution, mostly due to the infatuation by the upper tiers of the global art market for such works, regardless of their inherent and implicit esthetic value. Those works alone have fetched in toto more than half a billion dollars. It might be safe to conservatively estimate the total value of restituted objects at slightly more than a billion dollars since the late 1990s. But that figure needs to be carefully verified through an elaborate survey of the field of art restitution.

d/ the total value of so-called “art restitution litigation”:

Although this question is unfair and unjust, it still needs to be answered out of a desire for transparency.  We can only surmise how costly litigation efforts can be once we fuse the fees earned from those seeking restitution and those working to prevent restitution. Usually, museums and art dealers will recruit fairly well-heeled law firms as outside counsel in order to safeguard the integrity of their collections and rebuff attempts by claimants to assert title. On the plaintiffs’ side, there is an odd mix of solo practitioners and small and large firms involved in art restitution. All told, there are not more than 100 or so attorneys—yes, you read it!—who work on art restitution cases as an integral part of their legal practice if we combine North America, Europe and Israel. Since most plaintiffs cases are adopted on a contingency fee basis, usually 30 per cent, you should take the estimated value of restituted objects and divide that figure by three in order to get an idea of the estimated value of the litigation for plaintiffs’ lawyers since the late 1990s. Likewise, for those lawyers defending their clients against outside claims, the fees can easily rise into the millions of dollars for each claimed object. Most of the claimed objects that are subject to intense years-long litigation hold values in excess of 1 million dollars.

Where does all of this leave the bewildered field of provenance research?

The two main incentives underlying provenance research since the late 1990s are to 1/ safeguard art objects which are part of a private or public collection or held by an individual collector or 2/ obtain the restitution of such an art object.

What does this mean in terms of the objective and empirical integrity of the research being conducted on the history of an object? How do these legal undertakings affect the very nature of provenance research as distinct from its initial intent as an art-historical practice?

What is the future of provenance research and can it be salvaged as an objective, scientific field of inquiry?