Restitution is an elite sport

by Marc Masurovsky

The post-1945 years have shown that State intervention in the treatment of restitution claims arising from wholesale plunder of Jewish-owned property ensured that the playing field would be somewhat level, allowing victims of modest income to have equal access to State officials as did members of elite and well-connected families, by reason of rank, status, and income.

This illusion of equal access did not last long. The vast majority of restitution claims were converted into compensation requests. In other words, the message to claimants was clear. Unless we think that your loss lessened the cultural patrimony or heritage of the Nation, you are better off asking for some form of financial compensation. Goodbye!

We can actually date this change of mind, somewhere between 1946 and 1947, not more than two years after the most destructive war devastated most of the European continent.

Jewish groups have behaved in similar fashion. Rushing to declare all unidentified Jewish cultural losses as “heirless”, they lobbied postwar officials and Allied military authorities in Germany and Austria across Western and Central Europe to turn over to them hundreds of tons of unclaimed Jewish property so that they could be sold off to benefit displaced persons and refugees. Choice pieces were transferred to Palestine/Israel where they were inevitably incorporated into Israeli cultural institutions.

Without a lawyer, an accountant, and one or more friends in “high places,” if your name was not Rothschild, Zuckerhandl, Seligmann, Bernheim, Rosenberg, Mannheimer, and so forth, your loss as a result of Nazi/Fascist anti-Jewish persecution and plunder was your problem, no one else’s.

Fast forward to the last 20 years…


The US government, at the outset of the Washington Conference on Holocaust-era Assets of December 1998, issued 11 principles, most of which shaped and framed by American museum officials, to guide the future behavior of museums and governments alike when faced with restitution claims. As soon as the conference ended and the Principles were announced to great fanfare, everyone went home and the 42 governments that had sent representatives to what was supposed to be a watershed moment in the postwar treatment of Jewish losses, forgot why they had attended the conference and business resumed as usual in some kind of amnesia-driven haze which had characterized their behavior since 1945 when confronted with Jewish losses-human and material.

Enter the private sector to fill the yawning void left gaping by governmental neglect, indifference and absenteeism. Private lawyers, consultants, researchers, treasure hunters and other glory seekers, entered the fray to “help claimants” with their quest for justice. The catch? If your loss was not “interesting”, viz., if your objects did not fetch a high enough value on the art market, your claim was dead. If, on the other hand, your objects, if found and recovered, could yield several hundred thousand dollars or euros and up to the tens of millions of dollars, sometimes hundreds of millions, you could easily find enough logistical and political support to carry you through the tedium of a restitution claim. High-value objects signed Schiele, Klimt, Pissarro, Picasso, Kirchner, Grosz, Modigliani, and many others, have shaped th public’s understanding of cultural plunder. Why would anyone steal something other than a “masterpiece”? It’s as if there were only a hundred artists in the entire world whose works the Nazis coveted. Wrong again. Still, the restitution game has fueled that perception which, in its very essence, is a-historical and a profound lie.

In the end, the top 1 to 5 percent of the claimant class can afford to obtain support for their quest for justice in the shape of a “solution” to the adverse ownership of an object looted and recycled on the international art market. For the beleaguered rest, go fish!

Justice is elusive for those who cannot afford it.

As of today, there is no mechanism, twenty years after the Washington Principles, 74 years since the end of WWII, which allows claimants to achieve measurable justice that rises above the word “imperfect” so perfectly touted by Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat and his ilk.

What’s worse is that wealthy claimants do not feel any compunction to come to the aid of the less fortunate amongst them. Not one, not a single one, and their lawyers, after recovering millions of dollars from the sale of restituted objects, has thought to support the less fortunate claimants with research and legal support. It is dog eat dog out there, no room for solidarity, compassion or commonality of interest, just like during the Holocaust. If you were of modest income, you were on your own and you definitely could not rely on your wealthy neighbors to bail you out. Too bad. Life’s not fair. Far more worthwhile to plant trees and give to your favorite animal rescue effort. History? Who cares? Culture? Who cares? Cultural rights? Yeah, right. Justice? Get over yourself.

Mainstream Jewish organizations have taken the greater part of 70 years before paying attention to victims of plunder. In so doing, they have continued to ignore individual claimants who seek the return of cultural objects from museums, auction houses and private collectors, except for the Claims Conference, the Commission for Art Recovery and the Holocaust Art Restitution Project.

Organizations established to promote the cause of restitution and aid in recovery efforts found themselves blurring the lines between justice and profit.

Holocaust memorials around the world pretend that the word “plunder” does not apply to their mission and should not be taught to their visitors. Selective ignorance is bliss.

The State of Israel has had a very ambivalent attitude towards the victims of plunder, preferring to ignore them rather than helping them, with the exception of Hashava, a State agency set up to assist in recovering looted objects and property located in Israel. It unfortunately closed its doors last year, therefore, Israel has no mechanism by which to assist claimants whose families endured the worst cataclysm to befall the Jewish people.

The only state agency in the United States that gives claimants a glimmer of hope is the Holocaust Claims Processing Office (HCPO) which has been in existence for over 20 years.

In the end, the 95 percent of claimants have been on their own since 1945. No wonder so many of them have chosen to forgo the torture of seeking the return of their lost property, to the great relief of those who own their property. After all, what are laws for except to protect the interests of those who own property even if looted during an act of genocide?

Plunder pays for itself. It is a crime against people, against communities, against culture which the international community has decried but done nothing measurable and concrete to prevent and to punish. Ownership of private property is more important than restorative justice for losses incurred during genocidal acts, objects ripped out of the ground of source nations, or forcibly removed from indigenous communities worldwide, powerless to oppose the white devils and their fire-breathing sticks.

Why should we expect museums, galleries, auction houses, art dealers and collectors to behave any differently? There is no incentive for them to be more “ethical”, no rewards for good behavior and no measurable consequence for bad behavior resulting in the acquisition and possession of looted cultural assets. They keep on doing what they do best—aid and abet the plundering ways of our fellow brothers and sisters around the world across generations. Catch us if you dare!

Arnold Toynbee summed it up beautifully when he declared that our species, Homo sapiens, should be renamed Homo cruellis.

It has been 15 years since that fateful year of 1998: what do we have in 2013?

The American government prefers to let the market decide on what is fair and just for Holocaust victims of cultural plunder.

European governments are loath to challenge the cultural institutions that they subsidize directly and indirectly. By so doing, they legitimize the misappropriation of untold numbers of art objects and they prevent an impartial and scientific examination of the history of these objects which “ended up” in their basements and depots during and after the Second World War.

On the brighter side…

A growing number of curators and other art professionals have changed the way they work in American and European institutions when faced with problematic ownership histories for objects being accessioned or already in their collections—that’s reason enough to be guardedly optimistic.

“Art market players” are more aware than in the recent past regarding the complications arising from the trade in looted cultural assets. But that is all relative. Outside of Paris, London, and New York, that statement becomes moot. Moreover, the absence of verifiable statistics makes it nigh impossible to measure the result of such “increased awareness” because of the near impossibility of coming up with even a gross estimate of restitutions triggered exclusively by the art market’s due diligence efforts. Something to work towards for the sake of “transparency.”

Back to the dark side…

Fewer than five—yes, a number between 0 and 5—institutions of higher learning in the world—as far as one can tell—offer either intermittent or regular academic programs focused solely on provenance research. If universities, colleges, institutes—private and public—continue to be obstinate in their refusal to satisfy a growing demand for such programs, the only possible remedy is to create alternative programs that specialize in provenance research and its interdisciplinary corollaries. Where there is a will, there is a way!

There is no public policy--national or international—with which victims of plunder can assert their interests in seeking the recovery of their stolen cultural property.  It’s time to shame international non-governmental organizations that have repeatedly ignored calls to meet the needs of individuals, entities, and groups whose cultural assets have been and continue to be the targets of theft and plunder.

Some lawyers who call themselves “restitution lawyers” have never recovered anything on behalf of their clients, and yet… they command the respect of their peers in the legal profession.

After all these years, claimants still cannot rely on the international Jewish community to support their quest for restitution of stolen cultural assets. Exceptions are few and duly noted: the New York-based Claims Conference—although the Claims Conference does not handle individual art claims, it stands out as the principal advocate on a global scale for laws and policies that favor the return of looted cultural assets to their rightful owners. Oh yes! In Israel, there is a parastatal organization called Hashavah whose mandate for recovery of looted art only pertains to objects that are located in Israel proper. . And that’s about the size of it, folks.

Left standing are the Holocaust Art Restitution Project and the Commission for Art Recovery, both American-based organizations devoted in their specifically different ways to securing some measure of justice for claimants and to documenting cultural losses during the Holocaust. In the United Kingdom, the Commission for Looted Art in Europe marches on.

What is to be done?

Hashava Poster, Source: Federation of Jewish Men's Clubs

In praise of future collaborative endeavors through provenance research training workshops

Preparations are currently under way to organize a third provenance research training workshop (the first two were in Magdeburg, Germany, and in Zagreb, Croatia) under the aegis of the Prague-based European Shoah Legacy Institute (ESLI) and the New York-based Claims Conference. It is scheduled to take place in the first week of December 2013.

Lostart.de of the Koordinierungsstelle Magdeburg, Source: Aachener Zeitung

Until then, it is worth reviewing some of the more unusual by-products of bringing together for one intensive week thirty or so men and women of all ages who hail from more than a dozen countries… to discuss provenance research, art looting, restitution problems, collections management, forensic methods, Kultur, and any other topic that stimulates one’s interest in such a fulcrum of debate and exchange…:

Hrvatski drzavni arhiv, Source: HDA

Dialogue

This international workshop allows participants, instructors, and specialists to exchange, discuss, argue, disagree, lament, applaud, question, and otherwise engage in dialogue for approximately 50 hours spread out over six days.

Greater awareness

Participants report how the provenance research workshop has influenced the way in which they approach the history of art objects. Others have indicated the need to modify the questions that they ask when faced with problematic provenances. Still more have recognized the importance of historical context when trying to answer that nagging question: who really owns the object?

New paths of research and inquiry

This category applies mostly, but not exclusively, to the undergraduate and graduate students from universities and colleges on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean who attended the Magdeburg (June 2012) and Zagreb (March 2013) workshops. Some indicated how the workshop encouraged them to re-think basic assumptions that they had held about their various lines of inquiry pertaining to the displacement of art objects during the Nazi years. Others chose to examine new topics when they returned to their respective institutions of higher learning. In short, the stimulus produced by a week’s worth of intellectual discourse and exchange hit the mark.

Muzejski dokumentacijski centar, Source: MDC

Networking

The international provenance workshops do provide a unique moment to “network” in close quarters under controlled conditions. What is the end result? New chemistry, different bonds, yielding fruitful outcomes, new friendships, new sources of information, new knowledge… novelty and renewed commitments to make things better… as in proposing amendments to existing laws, facilitating recoveries of art objects, keeping current on on-going investigations into art crimes, assessing future possibilities to cooperate, realizing that research interests overlap, working together, sharing information...across cultures and disciplines, whether from North America, Western Europe, Central Europe, Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, other parts of Europe and the Middle East.

Canadian problematic

The New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany,Inc. (also known as “the Claims Conference”) collated the following information on Canadian institutions and their commitment to provenance research into works and objects of art misplaced and stolen during the Nazi era, the Holocaust, and the Second World War. For further information about the Claims Conference survey, please go to http://www.claimscon.org/index.asp?url=artworks/national.

Note that in 2012 the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal suppressed on its website the link to provenance research and that the CanadianHeritage Information Network (CHIN) does not display any provenance information on the cultural objects for which it provides basic information—namely an image and a descriptive summary.

You be the judge…

Country Information

2001: The Canadian MuseumAssociation (CMA) and the Canadian Jewish Congress organized the Canadian Symposium on Holocaust-era Cultural Property (http://www.museums.ca/media/Pdf/holocaustsymposium.pdf).

2006: In part due to the initiative taken by the Claims Conference, the Department of Canadian Heritage commissioned the Canadian Art Museum Directors Organization (CAMDO) to conduct a survey of its members by seeking information about the state of provenance research. The report can be accessed here: http://www.pch.gc.ca/pc-ch/org/sectr/cp-ch/p-h/publctn/camdo/camdo-eng.pdf.

Online Databases
a) National Gallery Provenance Site: http://cybermuse.gallery.ca

b) Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Provenance Site: http://www.mmfa.qc.ca/en/provenance/index.html

c) Art Gallery of Ontario Provenance Site: http://www.ago.net/spoliation-research

d) Beaverbrook Art Gallery, New Brunswick, Provenance Site: http://www.beaverbrookartgallery.org/collections-research.asp

The plan was for the on-line Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) to add a field to the Artefacts Canada national database that would allow participating institutions to note whether individual cultural objects have a gap in provenance. As it turns out, that was wishful thinking. The Canadian government is committed to complete opacity on the question of looted art in its Federal, Provincial and Municipal collections.

The CHIN database can be found at: http://www.pro.rcip-chin.gc.ca/sommaire-summary/humaines_bases-humanities_database-eng.jsp.

What lies at the heart of HEART?

In a great fanfare of trumpets blasting that no one could ignore, the Jewish Agency, through its spokesperson, Bobby Brown, announced the creation of Project HEART—the Holocaust Era Assets Restitution Taskforce. The headlines were unmistakable: “Project HEART to take over restitution issues”; “Israel, Jewish Agency launches global effort to locate lost property”; “Project HEART to coordinate restitution efforts for Holocaust survivors.”

You’d think that no one had ever bothered in the past 65 years to do anything concrete for Holocaust survivors in any measurable sense? By the way, those screeching headlines all came from the Diaspora press, which, usually, is not well-informed and in fact ignores the complexities of searching for and restituting looted assets, except only when there is a convenient political moment to belt out thoughtless slogans.

The tone of this article blends necessarily an ounce of sarcasm with a pound of outrage, all of this thrown into the pan so that something mildly reasonable can come out.

At the heart of Project HEART lie the Jewish Agency, Bobby Brown, and the conservative government of Benjamin Netanyahu. Those three institutions are no strangers to controversy when it comes to reclaiming the residual losses suffered by millions of Jews during the Nazi era.

It is important to note that Benjamin Netanyahu believes fervently that he is the Prime Minister of all Jews in the world—regardless of whether folks endorse him or not—which gives him license to speak on behalf of all Jews in the world on matters pertaining to looted assets, their recovery and, most importantly, their disposal—do we sell them, do we actually return them, do we give some back and keep the rest, what do we do? The fact that these questions get even asked is a reflection of the true intent underlying projects such as HEART, which is to appropriate the lost property of deceased or surviving Jews and to become kingmakers in the way in which they get allotted.

Bobby Brown, by his own admission, is a man with a divine mission. He not only has taken personal credit for bringing the Israeli government into all global reparations discussions but he has also engineered the warm ties between the Christian Far Right and evangelical movement in the United States and the Israeli government. One of his mentors is Avigdor Lieberman, the severely nationalistic foreign minister of the current Netanyahu Administration. For Bobby Brown, the State of Israel should be at the center of any decision governing the distribution and allocation of recovered assets belonging to persecuted Jews. Hence, the inevitable rancor and divisiveness resulting from such an extreme position and the justification for Project HEART which is in direct response to the failure of the Israeli Government to impose its will on the Claims Conference and its allied organizations.

Restitution is not a game, but they make it into one, a game of power and influence in the rather incestuous world of asset recovery and reparations, a game that has lasted now for more than 5 decades.

We’re getting ahead of ourselves here.

Why now? Why does the government of Israel suddenly say: enough is enough! We’re taking charge now. As if no one is in charge… It may have more to do with the bitter quarrels between Jewish organizations in the Diaspora and the government of Israel over the management of recovered Jewish assets and where the locus of effort should be placed. It is not news to announce that groups such as the Claims Conference have been racked by internecine fights pitting those on its board who wish to either dismantle the Claims Conference or move it to Israel, and those who wish to continue the reparations campaigns independently of the Israeli government and rightfully so.

As in any bad marriage, the ones who suffer most are the children and in this instance the children are the survivors and their families. Bounced around from one reparations program to another--and they come by the bushels, believe me!, hanging on to endless promises that yield only recovered peanuts and tooth brushes, these poor people, once, twice, thrice traumatized by persecution, enslavement, and failed restitution efforts, are now having to get their hopes pumped by yet another arrogant headline-grabbing effort at making right with the wrongs of the past. HEART-breaking!

Incidentally, Bobby Brown is an expert on recovery of Jewish assets. Seriously, this is the same person who cooked up a scheme to recover the property of Jews who had been forced to leave Arab lands and settle in Israel. His thinking was and continues to be that if Palestinians want to return to lands controlled by the Israeli Government, Israel, in return, can ask for compensation for all property that Jews had been forced to abandon to flee from persecution. Hence, Bobby Brown’s reach is universal and centers exclusively on the inalienable right of the Israeli Government to assets owned by persecuted Jews worldwide, past, present, and future.

What does any of this have to do with the restitution of looted art?

Like all sales organizations, Project HEART is presenting itself as the most well-oiled machinery yet which will inventory all assets lost by Jews during the Nazi years, list them in a massive database that is supposedly going to hold upwards of three million items, from lost cows and sheep to 17th century Dutch masters. According to Anya Verkhovskaya, Project Director at Project HEART, from her base in Milwaukee, Wisconsin: “It is not necessary to have evidence of property ownership to be eligible to apply. If individuals believe they owned or were beneficiaries of such property, they should fill out the questionnaire.” Mere belief in loss is sufficient to list a lost asset into the database.

One needs to understand, based on this statement, how HEART will lead to the restitution of looted art when the mere belief of a loss of cultural property suffices to register the item in the HEART database. Perhaps, what is at work here, like in so many class action lawsuits, is not the actual description of the asset but the listing of the asset so as to be able to come up with an algorithm that produces a figure from which one can derive an estimated valuation of the extent of the loss and enter into negotiations with foreign governments over the sums to repay as reparations. In other words, restitution is not part of this game. If a survivor lists his or her lost cultural asset with HEART, and an agreement is reached between HEART, the Jewish Agency, the State of Israel and the negotiating government or entity, all assets listed in the agreement are folded into the settlement against a promise that no future claims will be filed for those assets from which reparations have been obtained. In other words, if you want to recover a drawing by Fragonard and you list it with HEART, and HEART and its sponsors negotiate a lump-sum settlement that includes the value of your drawing, you can forget about ever recovering the drawing, regardless of where it is and settle for the two bags of peanuts that you will receive as thanks for listing your property with HEART.

In sum, Project HEART is the Israeli Government’s response to a series of failed maneuvers aimed at re-centering the debate over Jewish reparations away from the Diaspora and into the bosom of the State of Israel, at the expense of Jewish survivors and their families. For those survivors who believe fervently that HEART can help them, we wish you the best of luck. For anyone with a reasonable amount of skepticism who can see through the designs of HEART, stay away and continue your fight for restitution!

The Hemer case or how a claimant does not want to be a claimant

It does happen. After all, we are what we are. Above all, human and highly imperfect, motivated by an infinity of whims and desires and concerns. Sometimes, what seems to be the right thing to do—restitution—is not perceived that way at all by the person who should be the happy recipient of such good fortune—the successful claimant.

In this case, as reported by Bloomberg News, Thomas Hemer, a current resident of the state of Nevada in the United States, lost a lengthy legal battle against the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, Inc., (Claims Conference) over a set of Egyptian antiquities which his grandfather, a renown Egyptologist by the name of Georg Steindorff, had been forced to sell after the Nazis swept into power in Germany. Out of concern for the safety and preservation of his precious collection of antiquities, Steindorff agreed to sell his delicate cargo to the University of Leipzig.

That being what it is, the sale, under any circumstance, was a forced sale. In other words, Steindorff’s heirs were—and continue to be—the rightful heirs to a wrongful removal of their cultural property during the Nazi years.

After 1945, Leipzig ended up in the territory of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Decades later, when the GDR broke into little pieces and was absorbed into the larger Federal Republic of Germany, all looted property for which claims had been filed that were located in the former territory of the GDR were transferred to the Claims Conference. And, awkwardly enough, not having ever wanted to be the custodians of restituted cultural property, the Claims Conference found itself embroiled in cultural claims, something it has always insisted does not fall within its purview. And yet…

Fast forward to this past month of legal wranglings and decisions in Germany over the Hemer/Steindorff hoard of antiquities housed at the University of Leipzig.

The Claims Conference, being what it is and doing what it must do, felt obligated to assert its claim over the cultural goodies which had been the subject of that forced sale in the late 1930s, regardless of Mr. Hemer’s feelings about it.

How weird can this be? This is not a novel occurrence since over the past decades Jewish organizations and their constituents have locked horns over the recoveries of looted assets and whose interest must prevail.

Now that the court decisions have come in, the Claims Conference is the club-footed current possessor of these antiquities which should have been in Mr. Hemer’s possession. That’s the point: he does not want them and he wants the University of Leipzig to have them so that they can continue to be studied and researched.

Think what you may here but there must be a rule of exception by which the claimant’s desires must be respected and abided by. After all, this is not like international law where the rights of nations supersede those of individuals. Must the interests of Jewish organizations supersede those of individual Jewish claimants? I should hope not.

The best possible way out of this Gordian knot is for the Claims Conference to restitute the items to Mr. Hemer and for Mr. Hemer to return them to the University of Leipzig if that’s what he wants to do. If the Claims Conference decides to sell the objects or to invoke even a partial return, it’s slipping down the slippery slope of no-return.  Hopefully, there is more to this story than meets the eye and has been revealed as of yet.  On the face of it, though, until proven otherwise, another measure of justice needs to be meted as outlined above.

A gentle reminder here: ironically and ever so gratefully, at a time when not a single Jewish organization expressed any interest or desire to invest in the creation of a looted art database, the Claims Conference did step in, threw its hat in the ring and agreed to launch into an adventure that has changed the face of looted art research forever.  Go to http://www.errproject.org/jeudepaume.

Lessons of the May 6-7, 2011, World War II Provenance Research Seminar

An event such as this one does not happen very often, especially not in Washington, DC.

Co-sponsored by the National Archives and the two leading museum associations in the United States, partially underwritten by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, this seminar promised to deliver a hefty dose of knowledge and information culled from the provenance research experience of American museums.

Who came?

In attendance were representatives from over 50 American museums, including Hawaii and Puerto Rico, and one museum from Zurich, Switzerland. The two global leaders of the auction market were on hand, Christie’s and Sotheby’s, as well as a handful of American restitution lawyers, representatives of claimants’ organizations, the New York-based Holocaust Claims Processing Office (HCPO), the Holocaust Art Restitution Project (HARP) and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany (Claims Conference).

The director of the archives at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs decided to show the flag for France, one can only presume that it was a last-minute decision but a good one at that. Only one claimant was in attendance: the heirs of Paul Rosenberg whose archive is being offered for research via the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A number of independent researchers were in the room, from Canada, France, the United States, Austria, and the United Kingdom. The US Department of State sent a delegation as well, perforce.

However, no scholars of the Second World War and the Nazi era were invited, except for yours truly, a strange feeling since the Holocaust is, well, a historical event that engulfed tens of millions of individuals on a continental scale for 12 long and painful years.

What’s new?

The field of provenance research has not evolved in substance, only in numbers. The training programs are seriously flawed since they are not equipped to provide contextual and forensic content to those who are not familiar with this line of research.

The emphasis of the conference has been heavily weighted, almost untenably so, towards resources in Germany and Holland. Not a bad thing in and of itself, in fact, those resources are extraordinary and growing by leaps and bounds, but they are solely and exclusively focused on market disruptions within the former Reich and German-occupied Holland. There is no novelty here, simply additional layering of information. And, yet, as was pointed out by several individuals, not many, the thefts of art plagued 19 countries. Should sought objects have entered the Netherlands and Germany, one can only be so lucky, resources are available to garner information about them, assuming, of course, that these objects fit within a specific art-historical mold.

Discrimination through art history

Not to make a big deal about this, but…

The bias of art historians and museum experts remains as pronounced today as it has always been ever since the issue of looted art entered into popular consciousness. From the forlorn days of recovery in the post-1945 world to the present, research remains limited to the great masters of Western culture who have entered the pantheon of US museums. There still is no room for the thousands of artists whose works were the subject of misappropriation but the appreciation of which never extended into the collecting habits of Tier One and Tier Two museums in the United States as well as objects produced by other cultures, three-dimensional objects and decorative pieces. As one curator indicated from the Harvard Museums, provenance research is limited to works in their collections. Ergo…

What is to be done?

Unbeknownst to the organizers of this two-day provenance fiesta, or if they do know, they simply cast it aside, many attendees moped about the crying need for international coordination of research into looted art, including some of our colleagues from Germany. They request federated or unified resources on-line and human in order to strengthen and broaden research talent and resources. Training is sorely lacking as most acknowledge that they are overwhelmed by the level of complexity inherent to conducting research into the whereabouts of works that changed hands illicitly over decades. And yet, there is no recognizable effort by the Museum associations to promote the kind of training that is essential if one is to harness the complexities of art thefts that occurred within a genocidal context over 60 years ago.

What can be the answer to such striking levels of inaction and institutionalized passivity? Independent efforts that lie outside the museum community are our only hope, fueled by organizations, foundations, and perhaps even research institutes in Europe and the Americas whose interest lies in providing utmost transparency in the revelation of the myriad ways in which art works and objects have been mishandled until today. For instance, there is a glimmer of hope in Prague where the European Shoah Legacies Institute (ESLI) is finally coming together and may in fact one day find ways of encouraging and promoting what precisely the US museum community is loath to do—training and contextualized historical research into the wartime and postwar fate of looted objects of art. Also, in Munich, the Central Institute for Art History possesses over 8000 photographs of objects that include many which were forcibly removed from France and Belgium. The Institute appears to be willing to promote such international exchanges of ideas and resources and its invitation is most welcome.

Last but not least…

For once, US museum officials have acknowledged that their attention has been too focused on Old Masters and Impressionists and must extend to three-dimensional objects from Asia. This is good since the Freer Gallery in Washington, DC, appears to be leading the charge, albeit modestly.

A parting shot

The future lies in full transparency of resources and the revamping of thousands of so-called provenances so that they reflect accurately the sinews of ownership that go along with objects that are hundreds of years old or even simply seventy years old. Museums must promote the accurate labeling of those histories so as to inform their public of the extraordinary journeys that those objects have taken in order to reach their walls. Until such time, opacity will reign supreme, intellectual dishonesty will veil the truth behind the histories of those objects and the ensuing lapses in ethical behavior will dominate a field that ought to be celebrating its resources and contributions to world knowledge about art.

Updates on the ERR database of art objects looted in German-occupied France

by Marc Masurovsky

This is the first of a series of updates on additions and changes made to the database of art objects looted in German-occupied France and Belgium by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR).  Most of the objects in this database, which can be found at www.errproject.org/jeudepaume, were processed through the Jeu de Paume in downtown Paris.  Once processed, they were either shipped to the Reich, sold on the art market, or set aside to be 'destroyed.'

Background

The database was officially released to the general public on October 18, 2010, as a project underwritten by the Conference of Jewish Material Claims against Germany and technically supported by programmers working for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC.  The project itself began in 2005.  Core data from 20,000 cards typed up by ERR staff between 1940 and 1944 were digitized into the database.  Scanned images of the cards were attached to each dataset and, where available, photographs of the objects were also linked to the individual datasets.

The project resumed in 2009 after a hiatus of several years.  For technical reasons, it was parked at the USHMM in Washington, DC.  There, I supervised the effort, largely staffed by enthusiastic volunteers from a dozen or so countries scattered over three continents.  Fortunately, the ERR database project, as it was known, lends itself perfectly to such a decentralized structure since it is web-based and all updates could be done from very remote locations.

Since the release of the database, there has been a crying need for updates to the data now available for everyone to see and scrutinize.  Since the purpose of the database is to provide a wartime and, when possible, a postwar history of the stolen objects, it becomes essential to ascertain whether or not these objects were found, and returned to their rightful owners.  That information resides in the archives of the Foreign Affairs Ministry in Paris, France--also known as the Ministere des affaires etrangeres.  These records, in a discreet record group referred to as the Fonds Rose Valland, are located at the new archival repository of the Courneuve in the northern suburbs of Paris.  This archive contains the restitution files of the families and individuals whose objects were confiscated and taken to the Jeu de Paume for 'processing.'  In most instances, we can verify if the objects in the database correspond to the objects mentioned in these restitution families.  That is not always the case, but the world is a very imperfect place.

The restitution information is now being added to the database, an effort that will be on-going for months to come.

Part of this blog will be devoted, therefore, to indicate which parts of the database have been updated so that you can consult the records as you see fit.