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.

Washington Principle #8: A Critique

by Marc Masurovsky

[Editor's note: Due to the momentous nature of the upcoming international conference to be held in Berlin, Germany, on November 26-28, 2018, and 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 #8

"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."

On October 5, 2000, a declaration came out of an international forum 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 Principles but did not specify what constituted 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. What constitutes reasonable effort?

On June 30, 2009, at an International Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets in Prague held under the auspices of the Czech Republic, its participants issued a declaration, called the Terezin Declaration . Among other things, the declaration reiterated the implicit value of the Washington Principles, whereby looted art and cultural property should be “returned to victims or their heirs” but added that such returns be framed “in a manner consistent with national laws and regulations to achieve a just and fair solution.” The ambiguity remains since it is not clear whether restitution is a “just and fair solution” or if “restitution” is a stretchable concept that includes the non-physical return of the claimed object in exchange of a financial settlement with the claimant.

If the return of cultural assets looted during the Nazi years should be consistent with national laws and regulations, most of the signatory countries in Washington, DC in 1998 and in Prague in 2009 have not yet passed any laws or decrees framing the process of restitution of Holocaust-era looted cultural assets. In fact, their courts and legislatures have repeatedly upheld the rights of current possessors against such claims. Moreover, those nations’ cultural policies share one thing in common: the de-accession of objects from State collections is not feasible. If it must be considered as a "just and fair solution", that decision must be brought up before the legislature and/or the competent ministries. In that context, a fair and just solution does not work in favor of a claimant but rather it upholds the sanctity of State-owned or controlled cultural property over the individual rights of claimants. Put simply, the claimants have no control over what is fair and just.

Another way of looking at the logic behind the Washington Principles is that its framers could never have reached a consensus over their issuance without gutting them from the outset, thus protecting the art market, private and public museums alike at the expense of the claimant class, perhaps viewed even in 1998, as a nuisance which already riled governments with legal assaults against the Swiss banking sector over the misuse of private Jewish assets on deposit in Swiss financial institutions.

In retrospect and in anticipation of future discussions, a Holocaust claimant seeking the physical return—restitution—of his/her lost property from the possessing institution, be it public or private, would never have agreed to the notion of ‘a just and fair solution’, if it were to be anything but restitution. On the eve of the November 26-28, 2018 Berlin Conference on the Washington Principles, it is fair to ask whether current possessors, for whom the Principles were framed, have been fair and just to Holocaust claimants? Current possessors are public and private entities

Principle #8 could be rewritten as follows:

If the pre-1933 owners of 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, or their heirs, are identified, steps will be taken expeditiously to initiate restitution proceedings or any other solution deemed just and fair by all parties concerned, according to the facts and circumstances surrounding a specific case. In each and every case, the interests of the claimants will be placed on an equal footing with those of the current possessors.


Update dated 5 July 2025:


Aside from the preposterous assumption that there is a system in place in each country that allows information about the location of Nazi looted art to circulate freely to its intended audience (as of now undefined), the past 27 years have demonstrated convincingly that most governments which sent delegations to the Washington Conference on Holocaust-era assets of 30 November 1998, did nothing to facilitate communication of vital information on the location of Nazi looted art to potential claimants and their families, wherever they may be. Local organizations, agencies and interested groups as well as religious centers (synagogues and yeshivas), continue to be largely ignorant of the real scope of Nazi anti-Jewish plunder from 1933 to 1945 and its postwar consequences and are generally misinformed about restitution processes and the way that potential claimants submit claims and the expectations laid on them by governments and current possessors alike

Washington Principle #8 should be rethought. The so-called Best Practices released to great fanfare in March 2024 under the aegis of the US Department of State, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, and the World Jewish Restitution Organization to name a few, should also be revised to reflect the complex nature of any outreach and information dissemination campaign designed to sensitize Jewish claimants and their families about the existence and whereabouts of looted art objects which might have belonged to to them. The only agency capable of advising claimants is the Holocaust Claims Processing Office (HCPO) in New York City. Theory aside, who is going to pay for such an outreach and information dissemination campaign?

Justice for most families of Nazi victims of plunder and persecution remains elusive.

The economics of restitution battles

by Marc Masurovsky

In an ideal world, the cost of seeking restitution of a Nazi-looted art object should not be a hindrance to achieving justice. The government, writ large, a State agency, a non-profit organization, domestic or international, would take on the burden of recovery of a looted cultural object, from the first notification to the current possessor that she holds title to property stolen during the Nazi era, to the final act of recovery, the physical transfer of the object to the rightful owner’s heirs complete with a transfer of title.

In the real world, the aforementioned scenario simply does not exist, and, if it does, it is as rare as the Hope Diamond.

There are no public or charitable organizations which have the resources to manage the restitution of a looted object from a to z, soup to nuts, from identification to recovery or settlement. However, there are many consultants both in the Americas and in Europe who are available to assist you in the recovery process, for a fee and not an insignificant one at that.

The Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets of December 1998 failed to put in motion the procedures by which to assist claimants in their bid to recover their looted cultural assets at little or no cost. There was no political will amongst the participants at the conference to go beyond speeches and do the heavy lifting, as we call it, to convince their kinsmen back home to pass laws that would establish the appropriate mechanisms for expeditious and systematic restitution of looted assets. It never really happened. Austria might be an exception since it did pass a restitution law in 1999, partly as a reaction to the physical seizure of two paintings by Egon Schiele on display at the Museum of Modern Art of New York. Their possessor at the time was the Leopold Foundation, based in Vienna.

With no structure, no organization to fall back on, claimants have had few places to turn to. The Holocaust Claims Processing Office in New York is the only viable State-level agency (not Federal, a big difference!) which facilitates the claims process for Holocaust victims and their families.

The restitution process is a tedious and laborious affair fraught with emotions and riddled with obstacles. Hence the tendency among lawyers to recommend financial settlements that, in their view, at least address the moral dimension of the claim while leaving the object and title to the claimed object in the hands of the current possessor whose sole defense rests on arguing that she acted in good faith when purchasing the claimed object. In today’s parlance, this approach to the resolution of a cultural claim for Holocaust-era thefts and all of its variants is referred to as a “just and fair” solution, something that presumably should work for everyone but really does not.

In a world where most attorneys command high fees, there is little chance that, at those rates, a claimant can receive a modicum of legal advice unless the value of the object(s) that she wants returned exceed the hundreds of thousands or even reach millions of dollars or euros. And if she does recover, she needs to sell the object in order to settle her debts for legal representation predicated on a contingency fee arrangement, which usually runs at about one third of the market value of the claimed object.

The failure of the public sector to create effective, credible, and humane legal and administrative mechanisms to provide a forum for some form of justice for victims of cultural plunder, has relegated the resolution of these claims to the market place.

Technically, there is nothing wrong with that concept, except that the price tag is steep and out of reach for most people seeking restitution. The most popular works earning legal representation in restitution proceedings through private firms are works by Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt which were at the bottom of the art world’s food chain until the 1970s and those produced by German Expressionists (Kirschner, Grosz), Impressionists and their progeny (from Monet and Pissarro to Cézanne and van Gogh), and, yes, Cubists (Pablo Picasso and Braque, most notably) and its variants (Fernand Léger). There is some room, of course, for top-flight Old Masters. When it comes to value, why discriminate?

The absence of political solutions to restitution claims—in the form of laws passed by national legislatures aimed at simplifying and/or fast-tracking claims for looted cultural objects, eliminating technical defenses (latches, statutes of limitations) used by possessors not to return claimed objects, thus driving legal expenses through the roof—has helped drive up the cost of justice, hence, the price of restitution of an object stolen during the commission of an act of genocide.

If the value of the claimed object falls below several hundred thousand dollars or euros, it complicates a lawyer’s commitment to achieve restitution (yes, this is an unfair statement but it is close to the reality that many claimants encounter) since mounting legal fees will quickly surpass the value of the object and thus drive into the negative the cost-benefit of restitution. Thus, if your family lost works and other objects now scattered across the globe, whose individual value may not rise past 50,000 to 100,000 dollars or euros, you might not be able to find a top-ranked lawyer to represent you. If your family lost a substantial collection of more than 50 or so “secondary” works produced in 17th century Europe, a lawyer might consider representing you to obtain restitution for those objects—they would be viewed as a “lot”-- that have been identified in present-day collections. Hence, we fall into the same logic—cost and benefit. Rightfully, a lawyer must ask: what’s in this for me besides the ephemeral headlines tied to “doing the right thing”? She runs a business, not a charity, so the saying goes. Mouths to feed, people to pay, rent, insurance and other costs add up. Time is also a factor: these cases tend to take an average of three to ten years to resolve, some stretching out over several decades, others ending miraculously quickly, as in two years or less.

Since the vast majority of objects stolen during the Nazi years were not “treasures” worth hundreds of thousands or millions in today’s currencies, the vast majority of the victims have not obtained restitution of their objects. As the years and decades go by, their stolen object are sold at auctions, displayed in galleries or museums, or, worst of all, hanging in a stranger’s living room.

The postwar restitution machinery was never designed to help the average victim. It was designed to recover treasures and high-end cultural objects thus restoring a country’s “greatness” from which those “treasures” were forcibly removed while offering substantial returns to their possessors and handlers. Is it mere coincidence why so much emphasis has been placed on the recovery of paintings by Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Camille Pissarro, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Antonio Canale, Caspar Netscher, Romanino, Amedeo Modigliani, Max Liebermann, Georg Grosz, Ernst Wilhelm Kirchner, etc., etc.?

The press, incidentally, is partly to blame for this state of affairs because it is so quick to respond to restitution claims involving big name artists fetching hefty price tags on the global art market. If you peruse the few public looted art databases that are currently available for consultation, such as lostart.de and www.errproject.org, you will note that there are thousands of artists whose works have been stolen and yet the world only focuses on a handful.

The chances of recovering 90 per cent of the world’s stolen art are close to zero because the world in which we live rewards only the “great ones,” those who produce “masterpieces” which become a nation’s “cultural treasures” coveted by those who can afford them. The rest?

Our collective loss, someone’s private gain.

Sometimes It Takes a Village to Correct a Historical Wrong

Madonna and Child in a landscape

by Ori Z. Soltes

No two cases that deal with Nazi-plundered art are identical. There always seems to be some twist or turn to one situation that hasn't manifested itself in other situations. And what leads to rectification can be complicated and also sometimes surprising.

Back in 1999, HARP was made aware of a 1518 painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder that was at the time (and remains) in the collections of the North Carolina Museum of Art. It appeared that the painting, a small, beautiful Madonna and Child in a Landscape, had been plundered from the collections of Phillip von Gomperz, a successful Jewish businessman from Vienna, Austria. His surviving heirs were, at the time of its discovery in North Carolina, two grand-nieces in their 80s, Marianne and Cornelia Hainisch, who were not Jewish--a reminder that this issue is not by any means always a simple Nazi-Jewish matter, since the Nazis plundered from others as well, but also since the vagaries of life can and sometimes did lead Jews after the Holocaust to abandon the faith that was the primary object of Nazi hostility.

One of the founders of HARP and a key figure within it, Willi Korte, did the exhaustive research that showed unequivocally the provenance chain of the painting, from Gomperz’ acquisition of it to March 10, 1938 when the Nazis officially arrived into Austria (the Anschluss) and the Gomperz family was forced to flee (Gomperz himself would survive until 1948, dying in Switzerland); from the 1940 Nazi confiscation of the Gomperz collection, including Cranach’s Madonna and Child, which was then acquired by Baldur von Schirach, the Nazi Gauleiter of Vienna; to its appearance in the New York art market in the 1950s, where it was purchased by a California collector primarily of medieval German art, Marianne Khuner; to her passing on the painting to the North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMofA) in 1964 on a long-term loan that, through her will, became an outright gift in 1984, at the time of her death.

Baldur von Schirach

One can find a brief resume of this chronology if one goes to the site, ArtThemis, operated by the Art-Law Centre at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. There are, however, several things missing from what is presented as the official account. If one references Emily Yellin’s February 4, 2000, NY Times article, as the ArtThemis website does, there are, not surprising, the same omissions. One absence is the far greater chronological detail that Willi Korte had provided than what is presented on the website. This is fair enough: the website is presumably designed to give a thumbnail summary of the case and not an exhaustive history of it. A second absence, however, is the lack of any reference to Mr. Korte at all. Aside from writing him out of history these two omissions also contribute to what is a fairly widespread failure to realize how tedious and time-consuming the tracking down of such a provenance history often is—and in this case, certainly was.

Willi Korte

There is another matter that is lost if one reads an account as limited as that on the ArtThemis website, or the NY Times article, both of which merely jump in their chronology to 1999 and credit the Commission for Art Recovery with sending a letter to the Director of the NCMofA. The letter is simply credited in the website, without comment, with “detailing evidence of the painting’s history... it also indicated the names of the two sisters” who were the claimants; the ArtThemis entry and the article present the Museum as simply deciding to investigate the provenance claim and the following year restituting the painting to the sisters who agreed, in gratitude, to sell the painting back to the museum at well below its market value.

What is missing are a number of key details, key players and key complications—aside from the enormous lacuna of credit to Willi Korte. The fact is that Korte himself could certainly not have induced the Museum to restitute the painting on his own. He turned to the NY Holocaust Claims Processing Office (HCPO) and its then-Associate Director, Monica Dugot, who corroborated Willi’s research and spearheaded the initial attempt to ask the Museum to consider the claim, with the hope that, as a government institution, albeit from another state, the HCPO might carry weight that would be more substantially felt by the Museum and its Director. For the fact is that, faced with letters from both CAR and HCPO, the Museum was recalcitrant about even entering into a discussion about the matter.

By that point, the Holocaust Art Restitution Project (HARP) was also involved beyond Korte’s initial efforts. HARP wrote to the Museum Director, offering its expertise and assistance in coming to some resolution of this issue, and received a minimal response—that the matter was “being looked into” and that no help was needed. At that time HARP was also able to view correspondence between the North Carolina Governor and the Museum Director—for the Museum is, by definition, a state-governed institution. The governor made it clear that the Museum need not feel obliged to abide by the proposals taking shape in the American Association of Museums (AAM) and the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) and that had also been articulated by the so-called Washington Principles—these came out of a December 1998 conference sponsored by the State Department that HARP was instrumental in helping to organize—with respect to provenance in general, and specifically as it pertains to art concerning which there might be suspicion that it had been plundered by the Nazis due to provenance holes between about 1930 and 1945.

HARP was also aware of another chain of correspondence. The Museum had galvanized key members of the Jewish community of Raleigh-Durham to write letters to the Hainisch sisters, telling them how important the painting was for the museum and specifically how it could be an important instrument for Holocaust education, with an augmentation of its label and a series of programs built around it. (That campaign was apparently carried out with complete unawareness that the sisters were not Jewish!)

With the encouragement to the NCMofA to ignore the threefold—HCPO, CAR and HARP—request, together with its own strategic pushback against responding effectively to that request, the Museum remained far from forthcoming. But, in the end, it did come to the very sort of agreement suggested at the end of the ArtThemis chronology. How? Both because the Museum Curator (as opposed to the Museum Director) came to see the importance of facing the claim head-on, and because another member of the HARP team, Janine Benton, knew a very active and interested reporter in North Carolina, and spoke to him. He in turn wrote a serious and excoriating article about the matter in the local Press.

It was, more than anything, the embarrassment that the Museum experienced as a consequence of the media discussion—and criticism—that built on that initial article that pushed the Director finally both to “investigate the claim” and ultimately to reach out to the Hainisch sisters through Monica Dugot. They, in their graciousness and their gratitude that the situation had not come to a legal confrontation, agreed to the terms that are now part of the historical record—and in the end did set an example to the American Museum community with regard to non-legal discussion/negotiations in the face of this sort of claim . A far cry, however, from the ArtThemis summary that refers to “the swift friendly settlement of this case was possible thanks to the Museum’s refusal to rebuff the restitution claim”—which summary is also found in the NY Times article. The painting remains in North Carolina. Its label presumably tells some of the story of its ownership, plunder and wanderings until it arrived into the Museum, and one might suppose that there are indeed education programs that use it as a starting point for a discussion of a range of Holocaust-related subjects, particularly appropriate to a location that has a fairly long history of racial, if not religious oppression.

North Carolina Museum of Art

There is an epilogue to this narrative that arrives at its denouement through the power of the Press and in this case the ability of the Press to shame a public institution into righting a wrong in spite of itself. Currently, an elderly French woman struggles to regain possession of a small Pissarro painting, stolen from her father by the Nazis—that has, through a chain of sales and purchases similar to those of the Gomperz Cranach in which, at least in the 1950s, the gallery that was doing the selling ignored the obvious clues regarding its Nazi-era provenance, and misled or outright lied to the American purchaser who, perhaps, asked a few too few questions—that ended up two decades ago in the hands of the Fred Jones Museum of Art at the University of Oklahoma (OU) in Norman, Oklahoma. Its discovery there within the past two years by the claimant has led to an ugly battle. The President of OU apparently knows no shame, and even in the face of enormous adverse publicity, including vociferous excoriation on the part of state politicians, has refused to consider her claim.

What in the end will induce justice to arise in Oklahoma? That remains to be seen and is another story for another day with its own twists and turns. The outcome at this point is certainly not that of the outcome in North Carolina 15 years ago, in spite of the pressure of the Press—and in any case, no two of the many stories pertaining to Nazi-plundered art are identical.

1998: Year Zero of Art Restitution?

Highlights from that fateful year include, but are not limited to:

-the seizure of two paintings by Egon Schiele at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which prompted some soul searching in Austrian government and museum circles, the outcome of which was the world’s only Art Restitution Law;

Logo, Source: PCHA

-Congressional hearings in Washington, DC, on the role of the US government in facilitating or hampering the restitution of assets looted from Jews and other victims of the Third Reich;

–the establishment of a Presidential Commission to examine the role played by the US government in the recovery and return of property stolen from Jews between 1933 and 1945,

–the recently established Holocaust Claims Processing Office (HCPO), a component of the New York State Banking Department broadened its mandate to include looted art claims,

–the organization of a landmark international conference aimed at creating a new consensus regarding the dispensation of justice in matters of plunder against Jews and other victims of Nazi and Fascist persecution,

–passage of the Holocaust Victims Redress Act and the aborted introduction of legislation to tighten due diligence practices in American museums (an attempt that was scuttled by then Congressman Schumer’s ambition to become Senator or his close relationships with New York museums, hard to say…).

What a year!

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.