From a business standpoint, art dealers do not run charities. They buy, sell, trade works and objects of art to make money, and, hopefully, lots of it. The dealer’s instinct is—you guessed it—to look for opportunities, expand networks of informants and clients, make deals, and jump on them before the competition does. As a result, the oftentimes legendary rivalries that arise between art dealers shape and transform the art world as well as the business of art. Every now and then, their acquisitions and sales influence the taste of current and future generations. A thrilling wave to ride but one that comes with a heavy price.
For those dealers who are willing to go all the way, they may assign ethics and History to a backseat in order to unleash their thirst for acquiring unique, expensive and (maybe) transformative objects wherever they can be found hopefully at a low enough price. During the Nazi era (1933-1945), dealers made a pact with the Devil by ignoring the heinous nature of hate-based political systems rising across the European continent and elsewhere. They saw how the discriminatory policies unfurled by the New Nazi/Fascist Order could generate immense opportunities for them as a result of the involuntary disgorgement of valuable works of art on the art market by the victims of Nazi/Fascist violence and persecution.
The dealers, collectors, agents, cultural officials and brokers who invested themselves in acquiring and selling Nazi victims’ cultural property did so willingly, eyes open and focused on the prize. And it so happens that even dealers who fell victim to the rapacity of Nazis’ covetous seizure of their inventories between 1933 and 1945 also saw opportunities for themselves and their colleagues as the genocidal dust of the Nazi-driven Holocaust was barely settling across war-torn Europe. Even if their desire to acquire such works might have been guided by the best of intentions…as art dealers.
To wit, Paul Rosenberg, an iconic figure of the international art world in Europe and the United States, had a keen visionary eye for high-quality art. He exercised his skills with brilliance on both sides of the Atlantic. On December 12, 1946, Rosenberg penned a two-page proposal to the Foreign Division of the US Treasury Department in Washington, DC, regarding the disposition of works of art located in the US zone of occupation of Germany (viz., Bavaria) which belonged to impoverished collectors. Here are the relevant portions:
“There are, in Germany, many great art collections…which include internationally famous French paintings…there might be a possibility that the owners of these paintings, due to lack of funds, might be interested in selling their collections. [Some] are celebrated masterpieces…We, as art dealers, are interested in these pictures…If this is possible, many of these great masterpieces would be acquired..by American collectors and…be donated to American museums or artistic institutions, thereby adding to their greatness.”
The “we” refers to a group of art dealers and their galleries based in New York who shared Rosenberg’s feelings and agreed to contact the US government and encourage the US military occupation authorities in Germany to enact policies that would loosen up export restrictions from the former war zone and allow art dealers and collectors to resume business as usual. The desire to “liberate” heaps of cultural objects from the shackles of Allied military policy and (re)fuel the engine of the international art market appears to be the main motivator behind this proposal. It is unclear whether this proposal was accepted, but it would not have sat well with American cultural officials who were working around the clock in Washington and in liberated Europe to ensure that art collections and individual objects located in liberated areas would be prioritized for restitution and not be offered for sale.
In June 1946, the celebrated Roberts Commission committed harakiri and put itself out of business, confident that, to a large extent (although the proof for this has always been elusive) its leaders opined that very little looted art had entered the United States. Before doing so, almost to legitimize its own demise, the Roberts Commission had successfully revoked Treasury Directive TD 51072, a key instrument in the fight against illegal imports of looted property into the United States. The directive was issued on June 8, 1944, two days after D-Day, under sections 3(a) and 5(b) of the Trade with the Enemy Act. Its aim was to restrict the importation into the US of any art object with a value exceeding 5000 dollars or is of artistic, historic and scholarly interest irrespective of monetary value.” The method of restriction was sequestration of objects falling under the aegis of the Directive. The Roberts Commission's job was to review the documentation accompanying these sequestered objects and either approve or refuse their release under a license issued by Treasury.
It should come as no surprise that Paul Rosenberg's proposal came at a time when some parts of the US government were no longer focused on restituting victims' property but on returning to business as usual as quickly as possible even if it meant releasing art objects from Europe into the United States with no filters and no way of vetting imports for evidence of loot.
Source:
Paul Rosenberg to Foreign Department, US Treasury Department, Washington, DC, 12 December 1946, 2 pages, Enclosure III, Box 28, Lot 62D4 (Ardelia Hall files), RG59, NACP, College Park, MD.
On Day 3 of the year 2020, please allow me to reiterate the age-old idea that plunder in all its forms, regardless of who or what orders, orchestrates and implements such an act, has existed for a very long time as an extension of military, political, and economic power over “the others.”
The act of plunder reached its apogee, so we have been taught, in the 20th century, at the hands of the Nazi German State. The geographical scope of that act of plunder extended throughout most of the European continental mass. Although largely minimized and marginalized in the post-1945 period because nothing could compare to the astronomical loss of human life at the hands of the Nazis and their local agents, plunder remains stuck as a sideshow of the Holocaust, which entailed the loss, under the most galling and frighteningly horrific conditions, of six million men, women and children of the Jewish faith.
I’d like to propose that we expand plunder and its nauseating consequences to other exercises of military and economic power exercised across the globe which have accompanied mass slaughter and genocide, and consider, for a minute or two, whether those acts of State-sponsored thievery constitute crimes against humanity, crimes against culture, violations of the most basic human rights that every man, woman and child is entitled to from birth to death.
Here is a brief recapitulation of these extraordinary events that have littered the fabric of humanity for the past several hundred years.
1/ Imperial Japan vs. Korea, China and the rest of the Asian mainland, from the close of the 19th century to the unconditional surrender of Japan in August 1945.
2/ White settlers from European States (regardless of their make-up—autocracies, kingdoms, empires, etc.) vs. indigenous populations and communities in the Americas (North, Central, and South), Oceania (New Zealand and Australia), the many islands of the Pacific Ocean—forgive me if I have omitted some. Over time, intra-continental plunder by the "new" States founded by "white settlers" against their indigenous populations and minority groups.
3/ Western European nations vs. indigenous communities of what we know as the continent of Africa, Asia (to include the "Middle East"), the “Indian sub-continent,” and South Asia.
4/ “market nations” vs. “source nations”: I hesitate here but must acknowledge the fact that this particular dyad encapsulates all that is wrong, unethical, and contemptible about how resource and capital-rich States have wielded military and economic power against those nations less equipped to fend them off and exploited, extracted, and stole outright anything of value held in those “source nations” either above or under ground.
In short, the act of plunder has provided the fuel and the infrastructure necessary to supply and nurture art markets far away from the point of extraction, the precondition for such an operation being that anything coming from “source nations” must be commodified as “art”, as “culturally-significant”, as "valuable" and as “museum-worthy.” The growth of the international art market marched in lockstep with plunder. One part of the world abuses the rest of the world to satisfy selfish, materialistic ends, which, I admit, have fostered astonishing institutions called museums, but at an unacceptable cost.
We are at a point in the narrative of history where the cost of such policies and their wonderful products--museums and galleries--must be accounted for and dealt with in an unremittingly honest and truthful way by those who hold, peddle, profit from, and “care” for the objects that have found their way against the will of their rightful owners to commodity markets for the appreciation and enjoyment of individuals who will, likely, never visit the “source” of those objects except as a tourist.
This process cannot succeed without the active participation of those who have been subjected to such acts and found their claims for recovery minimized, marginalized, and, in many cases, transformed into commercial and strategic negotiations which, under the guise of benefiting the victim, actually work in favor of the culprits.
Who is courageous enough to take the first step and fix this endemic global problem?
My New Year's resolution is for these "other" acts of plunder to be granted their just space and to be addressed ethically and truthfully so that our concept of culture and cultural rights can adapt to the new reality which requires the truth-telling of how objects enter market nations and their prized institutions. We owe it to ourselves, the public, this and the forthcoming generations, as well as to that thing called "humanity." Anything less is an act of inhumanity.
Since the first Holocaust memorial was built in Europe, soon followed by dozens of others, the story line that these venerable institutions have conveyed to a global public has been exemplified by the Holocaust is not about property but about people.
Put another way, the vast majority of the six million Jewish men, women and children who lost their lives in the Holocaust were so downtrodden that all they owned were pots and pans and the clothes that they wore. Or so the conventional story goes. Those lucky enough to collect art were people of means who hailed for the most part from Central and Western Europe. The facts speak for themselves: 75 per cent of Jews lived in Eastern Europe; 90 per cent of them were murdered. In other words, the Holocaust is for the most part an Eastern European Ashkenazi story.
This stale stereotyping of Jews as living in substandard poverty across Europe has gone hand in hand with a stubborn refusal by Jewish communities worldwide to address the more complex question of property loss as one of the keystones of 20th century anti-Jewish behavior. If we follow this line of reasoning, there were only two classes of Jews-on top, the wealthy who had enough disposable income to collect fineries of all sorts including lavish furniture and expensive art, and the “shtetl” Jews, the peddlers, the pieceworkers who lived “on the other side of the tracks”, the inhabitants of the Jewish Pale in Eastern Europe. Forgotten or ignored are the lower middle class, artisans, skilled workers, cultural and intellectual workers, the midde class whom we find in every community, town, city, region of Europe. What of them? Do they fit in this story? They do but their property does not count. It’s not part of the Holocaust story. Or so we are told.
Fast forward to November 15, 2019, to the 20th anniversary celebration of the Paris-based CIVS—Commission for indemnification of Victims of Spoliation during WWII. Participants to that conference heard from some speakers that most Jews living in France were of “humble backgrounds” and did not collect any art. They were more about “pots and pans.” That did not stop the Vichy authorities and their Nazi friends In the Paris region alone, from confiscating and transferring to non-Jewish owners (a process known as “Aryanization”) the intangible and tangible property of 31000 owners. Moreover, close to 70000 residences where Jews lived were literally emptied during the so-called “M-Aktion” between March 1942 and the summer of 1944 in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. I doubt that those responsible for this wholesale campaign of ransacking Jewish dwellings would have committed so many resources and logistics if it were just about “pots and pans.”
You do not have to be an “art collector” or “art dealer” to amass works and objects of art. There are multiple tiers of value in the art world and the art market whereby individuals can amass an impressive amount of esthetic objects of small value---paintings, works on paper, even sculpture, decorative objects, books, musical instruments, Judaica, produced by talented artists and craftsmen whose names are not Bellini, Tintoretto, Fragonard and Rembrandt.
In short, it is too convenient and shameful to oversimplify in order to deflect attention from the real problem:
-Culture is an integral part of the discussion on National Socialism, anti-Jewish policies and the Holocaust;
-Jewish culture was thriving in the interwar years;
-The Nazis and their local Fascist allies nearly extinguished it;
-Human beings—Jewish and non-Jewish alike—are attracted to objects that please them and, if they can, they acquire them so that they can live with them, appreciate them and share them with family, friends, acquaintances and complete strangers.
Thousands of artists, writers, poets, musicians, craftsmen from close to twenty nations lost their livelihood and their lives between 1933 and 1945, their property was seized, never to be seen again. The cumulative impact of those losses triggered a lessening, an impoverishment of the cultural heritage of Europe from which we have not fully recovered.
These losses were part of a well-orchestrated State-sponsored attempt (2/3 successful) by the Third Reich and its allies to erase all traces of Jewish life and activity across Europe—a continental form of “Aryanization” which witnessed a multi-billion dollar transfer of property from Jewish ownership into the hands of non-Jews and their businesses which powered the wartime and postwar economies of European countries.
So, no, it was not about “pots and pans.” It was about much more. To deny this fact is to deny and rewrite history.
The time is long overdue for these longstanding revisionist trends in the teaching of the Holocaust to come to an end.
[Editor's note: Due to the momentous nature of the upcoming international conference in Berlin, Germany, entitled "20 years Washington Principles: Roadmap for the Future," it would be worthwhile to revisit these Principles and to put them through a linguistic, methodological and substantive meat grinder, and see what comes out of this critique. There will be eleven articles, each one devoted to one of the Principles enacted in a non-binding fashion in Washington, DC, on December 3, 1998.]
Principle #4 IV. In establishing that a work of art had been confiscated by the Nazis and not subsequently restituted, consideration should be given to unavoidable gaps or ambiguities in the provenance in light of the passage of time and the circumstances of the Holocaust era.
In view of the number of legally-trained individuals who are involved in international diplomatic negotiations and the drafting of complex documents for submission to representatives of many foreign nations, one would think that better care would be paid to vocabulary.
“work of art”:
The definitions vary for this word grouping. For some, “work of art” is interchangeable with “art piece” or “artwork” or “objet d’art”. For others, it has a narrower and more elitist meaning: “an object made with great skill, especially a painting, a drawing, or a statue.” One way or another, high quality is synonymous with those words. And those words exclude all other “objets d’art” which, ironically, serve as synonym for “works of art.”
“consideration”:
Another way of saying “Careful thought” or “deliberation.”
“unavoidable gaps” in provenance:
As there are no uniform standards that define what an “unavoidable gap” is in the history of ownership (provenance) of a cultural, artistic or ritual object, let’s give this our “consideration.”
It is a well-established fact that we will never know everything about the history of an object. The older it is, the less likely it is that we can reconstruct a detailed path of ownership for the object in question. However, the obverse is equally true. The more we search for information about the history of an object, the more likely we are to develop a clearer history of that object, notwithstanding the “unavoidable” gaps. But one important function of research is to narrow these “unavoidable gaps.” If Principle III is properly put into effect, chances are that researchers can fill these gaps. But to what extent can they? It all depends on access to materials (Principle II) in public and private archives that can shed light on their owners and the objects they owned.
If we follow the dicta of global museums such as the British Museum, the provenance will contain only “relevant” and “important” information. Another layer of complexity, another filter of information added to the task of “filling the unavoidable gap.”
Quite clearly, this principle was written with a Museum association in mind which rails constantly against those who demand that their provenances be impeccable and gap-free. No one has and will ever make such a request from a museum or gallery or auction house.
Gap-filling (not like at the dentist’s) pertains mostly to the 1933-1945 period. It would be good practice on the part of museums, and the rest of the art world, to exercise enough diligence so as to include as much “relevant” information as possible in the provenance of an object under their care and ownership.
Gaps are unavoidable because no one has paid enough attention to them and considered them to be “normal.” If the art world changes its behavior towards the writing of a provenance, the gap issue might wither away naturally. But, being the optimist that I am, it will take at least twenty years for such behavior to change on a systematic, industry-wide scale across continents.
“Ambiguities”:
That word can only be addressed through careful research. The structure of the provenance itself allows its author or anyone else for that matter to use footnotes in order to address the “ambiguities” inherent in the provenance. That strategy has been in force for quite some time and appears to work very well.
“passage of time”:
Time is elusive and so are record-keeping and people’s memories. Passage of time is a non-issue and should not even be included. In fact, when one reads that expression, one can only see a veiled threat by a museum invoking “latches” and flinging it at the claimant for not having “done enough” to research the fate of his/her object.
“circumstances of the Holocaust era”:
A lovely historical misnomer which reduces the relevant domain of inquiry to the period 1940-1945. In other words, it is a misreading of history and is inconsistent with the phrasing “Nazi era” which lasted from 1933 to 1945.
In June 2011, we noted that “Principle IV is the kiss of death for claimants. No one follows this Principle because provenance is everything. If there is a gap in the provenance, it is because the information is not available. If the information is not available, it is because access is being denied to the relevant information.” Hence, Principle IV is wishful thinking at best and utter diplomatic cynicism at worst. It can only be salvaged if action is taken to enforce Principles II and III.
Principle #4 could be rewritten and expanded as follows:
In establishing that a cultural, artistic and/or ritual object has been confiscated, misappropriated, been subject to a forced sale and/or other acts of illicit dispossession by the Nazis, their supporters, profiteers and Fascist allies across Europe between 1933 and 1945 and not subsequently restituted, every diligent effort shall be made to produce as complete a provenance as possible by filling gaps and resolving ambiguities produced within and/or facilitated by a context of racial persecution, warfare, and genocide during the entire period of the Third Reich, the Holocaust, and the Second World War, across Axis-controlled Europe between 1933 and 1945.
This is an opinion piece and you—the reader—are always free to disagree with what you are about to read. Perhaps, after having spent two decades in the trenches of the art restitution movement, if there ever was such a thing, my glasses have become tinted. Still, the inability and/or unwillingness of art market players, whether they be gallerists, auctioneers, private collectors, buyers, and brokers alike to be more forthcoming about publicizing the history of the objects with which they come into contact, remains to this day perplexing, in defiance of any reasonable argumentation, save for the old yarn that there is no law that compels one to disclose a full provenance for an art object, regardless of its origin.
In 1912, Gustav Klimt, the renowned master of the Austrian Secessionist movement, painted several portraits of a delicate, frail, wan, Jewish woman named Adele Bloch Bauer, the heiress to a sizeable fortune amassed by her husband, Ferdinand Bloch Bauer, one of the leading Jewish bankers of Vienna. Adele Bloch Bauer died in 1925.
The National Socialist German Reich absorbed Austria in an “Anschluss” in March 1938, a geopolitical act which served overnight as a suspended death sentence for the several hundred thousand Jews living in Austria at that time. The Nazification of Austria led to a systematic campaign of persecution targeting Austria’s Jewish community, punctuated by mass arrests, torture, evictions, expropriations, outright plunder of Jewish assets and later on, deportations, slave labor and extermination.
Those who could escape sought refuge in other parts of Europe and in the Americas; they managed to save themselves at great risk. Those who did not faced certain death. When the Holocaust and the Second World War ended in May 1945, three fourths of Austria’s Jews had been massacred and all of their property confiscated, either absorbed by non-Jews in Austria or dissipated, as art and other fungible assets, through domestic and international market outlets. Postwar efforts to recover expropriated property proved mostly futile for surviving Jewish family members. The Bloch Bauer paintings remained where they had been sequestered with the able assistance of pro-Nazi Austrian and German art historians and museum officials—in a Viennese museum. They hung on the walls of the Belvedere Museum for all to view and became associated with the rebirth of Austria, drawing tourists to Vienna from around the world. Gustav Klimt’s star rose until he earned a posthumous recognition as a world-class artist much like his younger colleague, Egon Schiele.
Decades later, Maria Altmann, a niece of the Bloch Bauer family who resided in California, filed a restitution claim to recover her family’s cultural property, including the two portraits of her aunt, Adele Bloch Bauer, commissioned from Gustav Klimt.
Her lawyer, E. Randol Schoenberg, fought a lengthy and protracted battle for her claim to even be heard in an American court. Her case went all the way to the US Supreme Court where Mr. Schoenberg prevailed in his bid to sue the current possessor of the paintings, the Republic of Austria, in an American court. In the end, the Austrian government was compelled to restitute five Klimt works to Maria Altmann. By 2005, the commercial value of the paintings had accrued to more than 300 million dollars, a staggering sum of money by anyone’s standards.
Once restituted, Ms. Altmann sold the paintings in November 2006 through the Christie’s auction house in New York. An anonymous buyer aggressively pursued by telephone the “Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer II” starting at 74 million dollars and pressing upwards until 87 million dollars capped the anonymous bidder’s quest to acquire Adele II.
In 2014, Adele II was on loan to the Museum of Modern Art in New York where it hung on the 5th floor.
The global art dealer, Larry Gagosian, spotted the painting.
One of his clients, a wealthy Chinese investor, offered 100 million dollars for the Klimt masterpiece. The anonymous owner countered with 150 million dollars. as an acceptable sales price.
The deal was consummated, thus doubling Adele II’s value in ten years. News of the transaction revealed that the anonymous buyer in 2006 was none other than Oprah Winfrey, global talk show maven, personality and role model. Oprah Winfrey’s desire for anonymity is consistent with standard practices in the art world whereby it is considered to be no one’s business who buys what from whom. Unfortunately, such built-in opacity, disguised as a respectful quest for privacy, casts a lasting cloak of mystery over most art transactions which produces a shield that enables trafficking in illicitly acquired objects and trading in objects whose provenance is highly questionable.
Every private buyer, in an unregulated market such as the art market, has the right to treat his/her acquisitions of art, even high-priced art, as he/she sees fit. Nevertheless, it would have been a historical moment had Ms. Winfrey announced that she had acquired the Bloch Bauer portrait in 2006. Perhaps I am making the wrong assumption here, whereby the history of the painting moved her and fueled her quest to acquire this Klimt masterpiece, regardless of the cost. It may be that she merely viewed "Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer II" as a beautiful art object for which she was determined to spend as much money as it took to make it hers and to profit from its resale a decade later in an astute business transaction involving a Chinese buyer. It could very well be that the painting’s history was not the motivating factor in her decision to acquire Adele II. However harsh that may sound, it is a real possibility. Her silence in this matter makes it difficult to weigh in on either side of this conundrum.
Looted works of art, regardless of their value, function as perennial esthetic symbols of and silent witnesses to a painful history tainted by genocide which engulfed millions of lives over a twelve-year period; the tragic destinies of the victims are forever intertwined with and embodied in these objects.
When these looted objects are traded on the international marketplace, sometimes for substantial sums of money, the sale itself becomes the event and supplants the history of the object, thus stripping it of its painful past. The plundered object loses its context, much like an antique piece illegally removed from its matrix. The sale works like an anesthetic; it deadens history, it whitewashes like cleanser the oftentimes twisted and tragic context through which the object evolved before reaching us.
It makes me wonder: why should I care so much about the history of these objects which, oftentimes, are reduced to---objects without a past, adornments, some more extraordinary than others?
Why teach history? Why share knowledge? why the urge to contextualize works and objects of art, to restore their history, their stories?
Will the Chinese buyer who has spent 150 million dollars to own the “Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer II” even care about the history of this object? Will it remind him, however remotely, of the millions of art objects which suffered a similar, if not worse fate, as they were plundered by Japanese Imperial forces on the Chinese mainland between 1931 and 1946? Does any of this matter?
A teachable moment has once again vanished like sand flowing between one’s fingers, sacrificed on the altar of money.
Rest assured, however, that 87 million dollars, 150 million dollars, do not, cannot and will not erase the taint of persecution and genocide from these looted objects.
by Ori Z. Soltes, President, the Holocaust Art Restitution Project, Inc. (*)
Protest outside Hotel Drouot auction house in Paris
The Holocaust Art Restitution Project (“HARP”) was founded in 1997 to perform research pertaining to cultural property that was plundered during the Nazi period and never recovered by its original owners. This was by definition a mandate with expandable parameters. The contexts of plunder and its aftermath prove variable: while most works were stolen by the Nazis, the Soviet “Trophy Brigades” notoriously plundered from the Germans without concern as to whence the Germans had gotten such loot—for the USSR, which suffered quantitatively and qualitatively beyond what most others, certainly Americans, can imagine, whatever they brought back to their own museums was small compensation for what they had lost in lives and cultural property destruction—and allied soldiers more than occasionally walked off (or in the most egregious case, that of Joe Tom Meador, sent home in plain-wrapped boxes) with important artifacts, most often from German sites. Objects ended up not only in museums, but—thanks to an art market that flourished throughout the war without thought as to the fate of those individuals, families, galleries or museum collections from which the objects had come—in private galleries and in turn private hands and homes.
42nd "Rainbow" Division in all its glory
The common denominator in all of this is the manner in which greed can and did blind so many plunderers and their accomplices, both during and for decades after the war. It offers a parallel to the larger truth regarding the human species: that we can be and have historically been immeasurably destructive, that we alone turn torture into an art and killing into a science. We who can be so extraordinarily creative—who produce drawings and paintings and sculptures and edifices, as well as poetry and music, theater and dance—have an intensely dark side; the Taliban and ISIS destroy cultural property; Hitler and his minions destroyed, but also hoarded, traded and sold unprecedented quantities of it—and there was a host of enablers both then and since then for whom the possibility of direct or indirect profit or simple selfishness means that the issue of Nazi-plundered cultural property continues to be before us 70 years after the last wartime guns were fired.
For HARP, the common denominator in our research has been the desire, during the past 15 years, to offer some counterweight to these forces, to push the scales of justice toward some balance in the manner of continuing the sort of work—done in the immediate aftermath of the war, but with insufficient resources and for too brief a period of time—that can restore cultural property to those individuals from whom and those institutions from which it was forcibly taken, whether at gunpoint or at pressure point. It has been and always will be a daunting task; the issue is scaled as biblical Goliath was said to have been facing David, here HARP.
Our taste for justice, however, is not limited. There is a peculiar logic to our having taken up a cause that apparently has nothing to do with the Holocaust, but everything to do with that taste, inherent in a mandate such as ours. Sacred objects belonging to the Hopis and, as the issue has expanded, to Navajos and Zunis—and no doubt other Native American groups—have, like other sacred objects from diverse cultures across the planet, been plundered, destroyed, transferred, sold, purchased by museums and private individuals motivated by the same sort of impulses that motivated Nazi plunderers and their gallery and museum accomplices during and after World War II, Soviet hoarders and American GI thieves. The emergence during the past two decades of an awareness of this unsolved problem has followed a growing awareness of the importance of recognizing the integrity of indigenous peoples everywhere and of protecting their cultural and religious rights. Thus the two “types” of plunder injustice have finally become linked. They are linked, too, by a common principle: those with the power and experience to hold onto what they have taken (or others have taken on their behalf) use that power and experience to maintain a tenacious hold on their booty against the attempts of the plundered to regain possession of their property.
Twice now, within the past six months, an auction house in Paris and its regulatory oversight body, have ignored history, justice and the ethics that they pretend to uphold as civilized champions of culture, placing scores of sacred objects plundered from the Hopis and other American Indian tribes up for sale. The auction house ignored the question of provenance, (in the second auction going so far as to deliberately mislead would-be buyers by announcing in its catalogue that no objects up for sale had any provenance questions or problems attached to them), the issue of the indigenous peoples’ cultural and religious rights—and in the case of its regulatory oversight body, the French Conseil des Ventes, (“Board of Auction Sales”) offered its ruling on this matter, in favor of the auction house, by denying the standing, i.e. the legitimacy and indeed the very existence, as such, of the Hopis and other American Indian tribes as other than a vague group with a name apparently not found in the French dictionary.
That HARP should have taken up this cause on behalf of the Hopi tribe, to use our experience and our expertise to argue on their behalf that the auction of such artifacts not take place—the first time as an advocate, the second time as an advocate with the Power of Attorney to represent the Hopis and their Chairman—falls well within the bounds of our larger mission of seeking justice for those whose cultural property (and in this case, religious property) has been plundered and never returned to them. The same greedy motivation impelled and impels the auction house and the participants in its process, including the French Government, of continuing to despoil a particular group of its possessions and its heritage, without concern for how and when and why such artifacts were taken from their original locations in Arizona. The same desire to offer some balance to this stance that impels HARP’s interest in Nazi-plundered art has motivated HARP’s participation in fighting to get the artifacts off the market and on a trajectory back to those who made them and use them for cultural and religious purposes.
There is a particular and somewhat ironic feature in this: the French have a rather spotty, if not appalling record with regard to returning Nazi-plundered cultural property to families from which it came when holes in the national museum collections could be nicely filled by some of that property. That they have, in this latest instance of moral blindness, twice ignored their own stated position as part of the Western world regarding the reality and rights of indigenous peoples and instead have stood on the edge of legal technicalities to avoid pursuing an ethical course echoes the perspective that led so many Holocaust-era objects—from Louis XIV furniture to paintings—to remain in state museums.
HARP will continue, when asked to do so, to push those who pretend that cultural and religious property taken from its original owners ceases to have a connection to those owners simply because it has passed from hand to hand and now hangs in a public museum or is displayed in an auction house or has been purchased by a buyer who chose and/or chooses not to ask questions as to where his or her prize came from and how it left its original home.
(*) Ori Z. Soltes teaches at Georgetown University across a range of disciplines, from theology and art history to philosophy and political history. He also is the former Director of the B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum in Washington, DC, where he curated exhibitions on a variety of subjects from archaeology to ethnography to contemporary art. He has taught, lectured and curated exhibitions across the country and internationally. He also is the author of over 230 articles, exhibition catalogues, essays and books on a range of topics. Recent books include The Ashen Rainbow: The Arts and the Holocaust; Our Sacred Signs: How Jewish, Christian and Muslim Art Draw from the Same Source; Searching for Oneness: Mysticism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam; and Untangling the Web: A Thinking Person’s Guide to Why the Middle East is a Mess and Always Has Been. Ori, along with HARP’s team, was also involved in a number of restitution matters, such as providing the historical research and background with regard to Egon Schiele’s “Portrait of Wally” case, as well as the restitution of “Odalisque”, a painting by Henri Matisse, to the Paul Rosenberg family.
Yellow badge made mandatory by the Nazis in France Source: Wikipedia
There is a prevalent feeling that we trivialize the Holocaust if we emphasize material losses. We are told repeatedly that the Holocaust was not about property, it was about people and by seeking restitution of looted assets, whatever they may be, we end up reducing the Holocaust to a great train robbery. Well, my reply to this criticism is very simple. The Holocaust is far more than a wholesale continent-wide massacre of six million men, women, and children. It was an undertaking whose aim was to erase their culture, their religion, their faith, their aspirations, their ideas, their wants, their ambitions, their intellectual, economic, political, spiritual, social, presence on earth. The eradication of these six million men, women, and children led to a traumatic impoverishment of human society on a scale never seen before. To fully grasp the significance of the Holocaust, it was a gargantuan enterprise to remove their ideas, their visions, their opinions, their accomplishments, their friendships, their loves, their legacies, from human society. Most importantly, one of the prime features of the Holocaust was the vast and complex transfer of the property of these six million men, women, and children to non-Jewish Aryan possessors who found themselves enriched sometimes overnight by the illegal misappropriation of the personal, corporate, and intellectual assets of an entire group of individuals in 19 nations across Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Every object is but one infinitely small grain of sand on that beach of death called genocide on which we walk every day.
The Holocaust Art Restitution Project and other organisations aiming to restitute Holocaust-looted art to its rightful owners justifiably propose restitution to be a positive thing in this context. However, my research has shown that not all cultural groups want to re-possess their cultural heritage.
I recently spoke at the Association of Research into Crimes Against Art’s 5th Annual Conference, where I compared these two objects:
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I by Gustav Klimt. (1907). Neue Galerie, New York. Source: Verity Algar
Malanggan, from Northern New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. Collected in 1890. Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, Cambridge Source: Verity Algar
Why would I compare a twentieth-century European painting with a nineteenth-century wood carving from Melanesia, I hear you say?! Well, by comparing these different objects, I wanted to point out that their original owners take vastly different approaches to the restitution of these objects. Let me explain.
In Jewish communities, generally, the original owners of the cultural objects and/or their heirs, feel the need to re-claim their objects in order to gain a sense of closure on a traumatic past. As the following excerpts demonstrate, the language of restitution claims suggest that the Holocaust is not truly over until looted art objects have been restituted:
“The return of stolen art may be one of the last acts of the Shoah”
(Dellheim 2000 cited in Glass 2004: 117)
“museums … are dealing with the unfinished business of the Holocaust”
(editorial, Seattle Times 16 June 1999)
“Austria will move closer to closing the book on a somber chapter in 20th-century history”
(Czernin 1998 cited in Glass 2004: 118)
The people of New Ireland in Papua New Guinea, on the other hand, do not wish for the malanggan which they themselves created, to be returned to them, despite malanggan being essential to their culture. This may initially seem puzzling because they can often take more than three months to carve (Küchler 2002: 1). Yet they are not made to be displayed, treasured and revered as much of the art confiscated by the Nazis was. Malanggan are displayed for a few hours during mortuary ceremonies, before being left to the elements to decompose (Küchler and Melion 1991: 29). As money became increasingly important in New Ireland, the sale of malanggan to Western collectors became an attractive alternative (Küchler and Melion 1991: 29). More than five thousand malanggan have been collected by Western museums (Küchler and Melion 1991: 27). As other indigenous groups began to claim the objects that constituted their cultural memory from Western museums, the museums considered restituting the malanggan too.
This illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the significance of malanggan to Melanesian culture. During the carving process, the sculpture is imbued with life force, which is “symbolically killed” when ownership of the malanggan is transferred from the deceased’s family to related kin in exchange for money (Küchler and Melion 1991: 32). The image of the malanggan, however, is preserved as cultural memory and is reproduced in future sculptures (Küchler and Melion 1991: 32). Susanne Küchler and Walter Melion refer to the conflicting status of memory surrounding malanggan practice as “strategic remembering and deliberate forgetting” (1991: 30). To restitute these objects to the people of New Ireland would be to rekindle a specific aspect of their cultural memory, thus interfering with the process of “deliberate forgetting”.
Whilst it is fundamentally important that organisations such as ARCA and HARP continue to support research into Holocaust-era looted art, it is equally important that we understand why restitution can be incredibly problematic for some groups of people. Far from interrupting or countering my pro-restitution tendency, the argument against the restitution of malanggan can run alongside this tendency. As a concept, restitution is neither good nor bad. Rather, decisions about whether or not to restitute cultural objects need to be made on a culture-specific basis.
Verity Algar is a second year BA in History of Art student at University College London, where she minors in Anthropology. She recently spoke on ‘Cultural memory and the restitution of cultural property: Comparing Nazi-looted art and Melanesian malanggan’ at the Association of Research into Crimes Against Art’s 5th Annual Conference. She is hoping to complete the ARCA Postgraduate Certificate before working in a field relating to cultural heritage protection.
As we say in the United States, ‘them’s fightin’ words’! True, they are. Perhaps, they deliver more bang than bite. But they emerge from the deepest recesses of my fractured soul, enraged at the inability of our leaders, our representatives, our specialists, our experts, all of them, no exceptions made, to come up with solutions that make it possible for the victims of the Holocaust and the Second World War and the Third Reich and the Axis powers in Europe, North Africa, the Near East, and Asia, writ large, to find some measure of justice in the aftermath of global genocidal and ethnocidal conflict, to recover what was ripped from the bosom of so many as the extensions of their souls and likes. After all, it is said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If this is true, the loss of cultural assets feels like the forcible removal of light from the eyes of the victims to benefit those who feel anointed to possess what is not rightfully theirs. At a larger scale, one can argue that the rights of individuals are trumped by the arrogance of groups and the States that lend succor to their racial and expansionist ambitions by which they impose their ideological and political will through force of law and arms. In short, the victims of cultural plunder—Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, atheist, agnostic, Buddhist, e tutti quanti….—are united in theory and principle under a single banner. Unfortunately, the trauma of loss through confiscation, requisition, outright theft, incarceration, and exploitation, was not sufficient to bring the victims under one flag, regardless of origin, race, ethnicity, creed, and belief.
The cynics tell us that this is what makes us human, that division is a prelude to conquest. Divide and conquer has always been the motto of those who wage war against their own people and those of other nations. Divided, we were at the end of the Second World War, made to rely on our communal groups, political parties, and national governments, to “do the right thing” for us all. By the way, the “we” and the “us” are used symbolically since my parents had not even met at V-E Day while I was an errant molecule in search of a home. The “we” and the “us” reverberate across generations, starting with the unmarked graveyards and mass burial pits of the former Soviet Union, the ash piles of Birkenau, the burial mounds of Katyn, the massacred villages of Northern Italy, Yugoslavia, and the thousands of unnamed places of death and destruction that pockmark the map of a warring planet.
Divided…. Why should we be divided in the first place? That is my question to all of you who read these pages. What is the benefit of arguing from one’s narrow communitarian interest? Better, more effective representation? Some of you might feel that there is nothing else that can be done and we should simply move on. That is definitely an option. But, if moving on is an option, then we should shutter down these pages and no longer discuss restitution as a basic human right of the victims of cultural plunder. As some cocky military leaders have repeatedly stated on the battlefields of history, surrender is not an option.
Not surrendering is an acknowledgment of a will to fight, to struggle, to advocate, to press, for something as vague and ambiguous as “justice.” Is it to be justice for all ? Or will it be justice for me? How about justice for you? Or is it really justice for them? Should justice be meted out in equal measures or in proportionate measures? Justice that is proportionate to the crime? How much is too much? How much is too little? What does it take to sate a broken soul and allow it to “move on”, to “find closure”?
Reality is altogether different. As history shows us repeatedly, the scars of trauma induced by all forms of violence are transmitted from one generation to the next. The degree to which the successive generations absorb and internalize the legacies of abuse and cruelty wrought upon their parents and grand-parents can determine whether or not they will act to avenge them or “act out” these inherited scars—to wit: most internal civil conflicts can be linked to the absence of meaningful settlements between members of divided communities. This is as old as history. But does it have to continue to be that way?
Looking ahead at the advent of 2012, how do we ensure that the crime of cultural plunder is appropriately punished and its victims fairly treated, across the board, regardless of who they are and where they live and what they represent? Yes, indeed, regardless of social class, status, rank, socio-economic standing, color-blind, community-blind, religion-blind, idea-blind. Blind to division and schism, solutions that are for all, not for the few, or the select.
I must tell you that nothing will be accomplished without an explicit recognition that cultural thefts cut across all boundaries, because the end result is the same—the rape of culture, way beyond that of “Europa” as Lynn Nicholas has postulated. We have to recognize that cultural theft violates the basic rights of all human beings living in a social and cultural matrix. Once we can recognize this basic fact, we can actually get to the next level. Cultural crime is a universal crime against all peoples, it is a crime which drives deep stakes into the specificity of what makes us who we are, which targets our identity as members of specific groups. Depending on the severity of the crime, it can result in an outright attempt at genocide or ethnocide. To acknowledge and accept the specificities of these crimes as bounded by cultural, social, and oftentimes religious matrices, is vital to our ability to move forward if we are to unite under one flag and fight for what is legitimately ours, that is the right to culture, our cultural rights, our right to own and display cultural assets without the fear of taking, without fear of forcible removals, because of who we are and what we are and where we live and for whom we vote or do not vote and what we speak or pray to, especially during times of internal or external conflicts.
The next level consists in agreeing that cultural plunder is a crime against humanity, perpetrated against individuals and the groups to which they belong.
Once we reach this particular point, the big question emerges: what is to be done?
What next? In all cases, national governments will endorse but not enforce the explicit righting of cultural crimes against individual citizens, arguing that these are the facts of life, and their citizens should settle for what they can. Moreover, statutes of limitations, problems associated with current possession of stolen cultural assets which are condoned as inalienable aspects of life in a civilized society—to the current possessor go the spoils!—will prevent or forestall any possible semblance of justice.
Hence, the only conceivable strategy to address the crime of cultural plunder is the international community of nations and groups that have a vested interest in righting the wrongs wrought against their cultural rights and to press for restitution of ill-gotten cultural assets.
I will leave you with this thought. As the strategy for global redress unfurls, you will hear more in these pages. Stay tuned as 2012 might become a very interesting year. After all, we have not much to lose and everything to gain.
A commentary by Ori Z. Soltes, chair of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project (HARP)
Ori Z. Soltes
Source: The Great Courses
In the aftermath of the Holocaust, a peculiar sort of discussion emerged eventually that, in some corners, continues to this day. That discussion pertained to the idea that the victims of the Holocaust, primarily the Jews, went “like sheep to the slaughter,” instead of fighting back. Accusing the victim for being victimized has long been an instrument with which humans who were in a position to help the victim but did not, assuage their guilt for their own failure. Blaming those who were herded and branded and slaughtered like cattle for not responding to the program of Nazi deceptions until it was too late might assuage and has alleviated that guilt for many, as they sought a return to normal lives.
It is always easy to blame someone else, and in this case, the guilt has run particularly deep and wide—not just those Germans or Austrians or French who stood idly by or contributed actively to the slaughter, but the British and the Americans who famously refused to bomb the train tracks to the killing centers, and who kept their immigration quota doors closed tight or made the paths to Palestine all but impassable. For it was one thing to be fighting the Germans and their allies in World War II, and another altogether to be fighting the Nazis in the Holocaust.
The numbers of Jews who did fight back remained, for the most part, unheralded and forgotten until the last few decades. Inevitably, those who fought did so with very little in the way of armaments and with very little reliable support from—even, at times, finding themselves betrayed by—the various non-Jewish underground forces who were themselves fighting the Nazis. Conversely, the myriad times and places in which well-armed or at least militarily experienced forces failed to resist or, in captivity, to rise up against their captors has typically been ignored.
Moreover, as in any large lie there may be a smaller element of truth, it is true that many (perhaps most) Jews did not resist. A perfect storm combined the Nazi genius for willful deception—to simplify the process of extermination by encouraging their victims to believe that they were not on the verge of victimhood—together with the victims’ desire to believe, and therefore to be deceived, that this was a storm that, like so many others in Jewish history, would pass. Physical resistance, in any case, had not been the primary means for a fragmentary minority to survive over the centuries in the face of hostility from the majority population.
For German and Austrian Jews in particular, the sense of having arrived at a point of truly being part of that majority mainstream—socially, economically, culturally, even to some extent politically—militated against believing that what was happening was happening. In the discussion of this issue it has often been pointed out that the very fabric of the late nineteenth/early twentieth-century Austrian and German communities was so interwoven with Jewish threads that, had the Holocaust not followed, historians would be constantly waxing about the Golden Age for Jews in those countries in that era. The photograph of which Sigmund Freud—to name one Jewish luminary among many within the Viennese firmament—was proudest, showed him with his two sons, both of in Austro-Hungarian military uniform; they were among myriad Jews who served in the Hapsburg and Prussian armies between the end of the eighteenth century and the end of World War I.
On the other hand, the Golden Age was by no means free of anti-Semitism (in fact the very term was a coinage of that era, as the Prussian pamphleteer, Wilhelm Marr, was the first one to label the Jews “Semites” in 1878—but that’s another story for another day). But this is part of what made the Nazi era so inexplicable as it gradually unfurled its full fury against the Jews. Who could imagine that such a definitive exterminationist intention would be directed toward a population so integrated into that world?
Marc Masurovsky and I uncovered one of the most extraordinary proofs of this a few years back as we were systematically studying the property census forms that every family with even an oblique Jewish component or connection was required to fill out for the Nazis after Austria fell before—or rather, embraced—the Anschluss. Our interest was in the cultural and similar property that the Nazis confiscated based on these on-demand listings of everything from silverware, desk lamps and jewelry to paintings, drawings and sculpture.
But along the way, we noted three other, unexpected features. One was the prevalent tone assumed by a good number of those who filled out the forms: little jocular side notes, as if submitting a report to a long-time superior with whom one has a warm, friendly relationship—as opposed to filling out what would amount to one’s death warrant. A second was the fact that a number of these forms were filled out and sent in from places as far away as Ankara and even New York City. This might have been out of fear for family members still in Austria, but may well have been out of a Teutonic sense of duty: one is required by the authorities to fill out a form as a Jew, then as a Jew more Viennese than the Viennese, one fills out the form—because regardless of where one lives one remains emphatically a Viennese.
Most intriguing is the third feature: virtually every form indicated the possession of real estate—from the partial ownership of an apartment to that of multiple apartment buildings and factories. The fact is that one does not invest in real estate if one has the slightest inkling of needing to leave a place quickly—it is too difficult to liquidate with alacrity. All of these Jews who bought real estate to live in, work in or employ others in, had to have been powerfully certain that they were in Vienna (after more than eight hundred years) to stay. When the Anschluss arrived and, as often happened, their neighbors turned against them, they could neither understand nor believe what was happening; it would not have occurred to them to “fight back.” That once-golden world disappeared before their eyes, never to be restored.
by Marc Masurovsky This presentation was delivered during the Prague Conference of June 26-30, 2009. Although somewhat strident, it captures a number of basic points regarding the present state of affairs regarding the handling of art looted during the Second World War.
First, I would like to dedicate this presentation to the memory of Officer Stephen Johns who lost his life on June 10, 2009, at the hands of an American neo-Nazi, while protecting the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.
Second, I regret the absence of a number of veterans of art restitution like Willi Korte, Ori Soltes, Konstantin Akinsha, Randy Schoenberg and many others.
Third, I would like to restate the obvious:
The Holocaust is a very personal matter. It engulfed the lives of six million Jews and five million non-Jews across continental Europe and North Africa. Those men, women, and children died in a network of 20000 prisons, ghettos, camps and extermination centers, stretching from the Channel Islands to the far reaches of Estonia and the shores of Tunisia.
The Holocaust, in particular, and the Second World War, in more general terms, went hand in hand with the forcible transfer and seizure of property of all kinds belonging to the victims of Nazi/Fascist persecutions.
These forcible transfers and seizures reshaped the wartime economies of Europe and laid the foundations of a new economic order that stretched into the postwar era.
The highly selective punishment of collaborators and war criminals prevented the victimized populations from achieving a badly-needed measure of justice and closure, which is one reason why we meet here in Prague, 64 years later.
All in all, after war’s end, 55 million people were dead, one third of Europe’s infrastructure lay in tatters, in some countries, like the Soviet Union, a third of the male population had been decimated, creating a multi-generational trauma with severe consequences on the social, cultural, economic and spiritual life of the survivors.
The artistic legacy of all nations under Nazi/Fascist occupation or control was amputated, embodied in the loss of creative power of thousands of visual and performing artists, most of them Jewish or belonging to groups targeted for special treatment by the occupiers and their collaborators. Those left to survive were for a large part either collaborators themselves or whose styles conformed to the needs of the regimes in place.
The works of art stolen by the Nazis and their local henchmen belonged to these persecuted artists, as well as to collectors, dealers, and institutions. If we look only at the Jewish community and accept a broad definition of cultural property, several million objects were looted. If we add cultural property forcibly removed from all other victimized households across occupied Europe, we can easily think of at least 5 million objects, excluding books, silverware and accessories.
Where are those objects? What are those objects? Who owned them? Who took them? Where did they go? Were they sold? Who acquired them? For those seeking restitution of their cultural losses, the answers lie in part in historical archives. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that restitution and documentation are organically linked. Ultimately, no one can argue against the fact that open access to historical archives can only facilitate the reconstruction of a racially- and politically-motivated criminal act associated with mass murder, genocide and persecution on a continental scale. Restricting access to those records would thus signal an avowed reluctance to come to terms with an obvious historical reality, an attempt to rewrite history through concealment of documentary proof of crimes which occurred over a twelve-year period.
Every nation on the continent of Europe is implicated because it is in the very nature of bureaucratic societies to build walls of silence and secrecy around the historical truth.
What is there to hide that is so dangerous after 64 years? For starters, the names of collaborators, their ties to ruling elites, their illegal and immoral transactions on wartime art markets, the protections they sought then and in the postwar, murky tie-ins with intelligence agencies, government bureaucrats, war criminals seeking refuge in safe havens. Cynical dealers, museum curators, and directors, politicians from right, left and center who profited from illicit acts. In sum, the many facets of a highly corrupt art world and its attendant coterie of politicians, businessmen and oddities from fading aristocracies.. I guess that might pose a problem, although it is a historical problem, but it might resonate today only because the sins of the fathers, mothers and uncles are transferred to their progeny and subsequent generations. It is true then: access to information is dangerous, at least for those who have built their careers on deceit, secrecy and the protection of their privileges.
Let’s go back to the end of the Second World War.
Although we’re not here to debate the pros and cons of Allied restitution policies, I would argue that, all in all, Allied officials—American, British, French, Soviet and others—were unable to address the full extent and scope of the plunder, despite valiant attempts by individual officials to mitigate the horrors of the war. For the Soviets, the solution was relatively simple. Faced with massive destruction at home, their armed forces resorted to wholesale removals of property under their care with some notable exceptions and they proceeded to appropriate those items manu militari. However, what was true on the west bank of the Oder River equally applied to the east bank of the Oder River. Cultural property from Russia, Poland, and Latvia ended up in the Western Allied zones of occupation, while Dutch, Belgian, and French collections found their way into Slovakia, Silesia and as far as the Ukraine, deep within the Soviet sphere of influence and control. Similarly, German and other administrative records pertaining to the special handling of cultural property in occupied territories ended up in hundreds of depots, administrative buildings, and bunkers scattered about battlefields. Those documents either went east or were apportioned like a deck of cards among the Allied powers. One could spend half a lifetime untangling the tortured path of those archives seized by military units, and my colleague, Pat Grimsted, is an extraordinary living example of such an endeavor.
When searching for information on stolen cultural property, Allied transfers and removals of property and records have only complicated the task of restitution-minded individuals to find the evidence needed to facilitate the return of stolen objects to their rightful owners.
And yet, documents in governmental archives only provide us with a partial understanding of how objects were seized, where they may have ended up, and who might have been their owners after war’s end. The rest of the story is buried in the records created by private owners, gallery directors, museum officials, art historians, insurance executives, corporate officers, foundations, auction houses and so forth.
When we speak of access to archives we must emphasize all archives, public as well as private.
In retrospect, the postwar era was characterized by the wholesale recycling of millions of stolen cultural objects, through private hands, institutions and corporate entities. Each transaction produced some kind of record, however flimsy, at some point in time. And yet, nothing has really been done to demand an accounting of such transactions since 1945.
Those who bought, sold, traded stolen cultural property in the immediate postwar years, did so oftentimes knowingly with the consent of public officials in all countries involved in the Second World War. The double standard which has shielded the art market from inconvenient scrutiny in the postwar era prevails even today with the silent consent of public officials, even those who clamor for restitution. It is a type of hypocrisy that should end here in Prague, but for that to occur, decision-makers need to display a modicum of courage.
I spoke about a new paradigm for restitution. A paradigm is a fancy way of saying that a number of conditions have to be met in order to produce a tectonic shift in the way we approach restitution.
For starters, there has to be a willingness to engage in such a process. Rather than using concerns over privacy rights of individuals as an excuse for denying access to historical records that are over 64 years old, each national government present today must examine ways in which historical research on racially and politically motivated thefts of cultural property can proceed without viewing these efforts as infringements on the rights of individuals who, for the most part, are long dead.
As hinted earlier, most of the negative fallout from any opening of archives pertaining to stolen property may result in embarrassment and red faces for those who are implicated in thefts that occurred two generations ago, assuming that they are still alive.
Added to a willingness to engage in such a process, there needs to be a recognition and acceptance that access to specific archival collections is inextricably tied to restitution
Any movement to open an archive must go hand in hand with a national commitment to enact laws to permit restitution or to enforce existing laws or establish new mechanisms to return stolen objects to their rightful owners.
An arrangement needs to be reached with the players—major and minor—of the private art market whereby access to information pertaining to the present whereabouts of a stolen object can be guaranteed without compromising sources.
Where institutions are the custodians of stolen cultural property which their governments view as war reparations, another discussion needs to take place between consenting adults who are mature enough to hold such a discussion. After all, 64 years have elapsed since the Allied victory brought to its knees the National Socialist behemoth and its fascist cohorts. For 64 years, an untold number of objects have been sitting in a netherland of omission, neither exhibited nor destroyed, just sitting. Once in a while, some surface. What does it take to obtain the release of these objects so that they can be identified, and returned to their rightful owners whoever they might be, Jew, non-Jew, private individual, institution?
The first baby step or Level 1 towards such an ambitious goal is the inventory. Inventories are important documents because they tell us something about content and scope of cultural property, sometimes value, identification of the work, and perhaps even something about an owner. Inventories also help recreate itineraries of works of art forcibly removed from homes, offices, display cases, walls.
If the inventory of the objects sitting in netherland exists, we should discuss ways of making that inventory available for consultation and study so that we can all understand what we are dealing with here. Without the inventory, we won’t know what is in storage, thereby continuing to deny restitution to someone and preventing that someone from achieving a painful closure after so many decades. If the inventory does not exist, then I would like to propose that a mechanism be put into place by impartial, fair-minded people to draw up such an inventory under the watchful eye of the current custodian, with the proviso that the contents of the inventory can be carefully studied with a view to matching works with owners.
It’s a baby step, but a necessary one if we are to engage in an irreversible process of putting the past behind us and moving on. We cannot move on without justice.
Such an inventory becomes a powerful tool, the basis for level 2—a discussion amongst fair-minded, pragmatic individuals who seek only to do the right thing, acknowledging past wrongs and traumas, founded on mutual empathy and desire to move forward in the name of justice for all. In other words, a dream. Level 2 consists in drawing up a plan of restitution of those objects that have been readily identified as rightfully belonging to someone, somewhere. Level 3 consists in drawing up a plan to dispose of property that is not identifiable. And there is the rub. Traditionally, back in the late 40s and early 50s, organizations responsible for heirless property took the simple way out and said: let’s sell! And assign proceeds to needy survivors. However, we might run into some serious opposition here since the custodian might want some type of compensation for having ‘held on’ to those objects for 64 years. This task might best be left to lawyers to hash out, but then, we might never get out of the barn, that’s assuming that we can even enter the barn… But, as in all dreams, we are in the barn, and we are discussing among individuals who may or not become friends, how best to handle so-called heirless or unidentifiable property. In today’s mercenary, hyper-materialistic and insensitive world, one approach is to share the proceeds of sales of heirless property along carefully delineated lines. It’s just an idea, but the issue of looted cultural property from the Second World War will never, and I mean never, go away without some form of global political and financial settlement of those stolen works that have been left in netherland.
So, when I speak arrogantly of a new paradigm for restitution, that paradigm requires the following elements before we even register a semblance of a tectonic shift on our restitution seismograph:
A will to act
Giving exclusive primacy to ethical and moral considerations, laying all legalistic and bureaucratic considerations aside.
Unfettered access to private and public archives that are directly relevant to the thefts of which we speak.
Cooperation with the private sector to locate and confirm the present whereabouts of stolen objects
Negotiated solutions with custodian institutions holding stolen works of art as war reparations, which might include financial or other incentives.
Cooperation of law enforcement agencies, national and international, in locating and recovering stolen cultural property
Creation of an international entity responsible for the return of such objects to their rightful owners and to dispose of so-called heirless objects in a manner that is of ultimate benefit to the families of victims, and which underwrites and promotes further research into the fate of such objects.
The least attractive solution is the one that no one dares to contemplate:
Regulating the art market to ensure cooperation in locating, identifying, and returning stolen cultural property to rightful owners.
I work for an institution in Washington, DC, called the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Its archives hold more than 120 collections of documents pertaining to the persecution of the Jews and other groups. These documents come from Europe, North Africa, Central Asia, and even Shanghai. There is no other institution of its kind in the world today which provides access to so much information under a single roof.
Why can’t such a similar but far more modest establishment exist that is solely devoted to the documentation of Nazi-Fascist plunder and spoliation of cultural property? If it were to be created, the history of plunder could be easily rewritten, the pace of restitutions substantially accelerated, as well as giving a quantum boost to badly-needed scholarship in an area stymied by continual obstructions on all fronts.
That is my dream and I hope that part of it will unfold before my dying breath.
Remember, historical archives help us write the story of wrongs committed against people as much as they help us right the wrongs committed against people.
