Many books have been published about Rose Valland, the unsung French heroine of WWII in her quest to recover and protect France’s cultural heritage. One might ask if her idea of cultural heritage also included works produced on French territory by Jewish artists who elected to live and work in France before ending up in the crematoria and gas chambers of the Final Solution. The answer to that question lies in the copious notes she left behind.
Regardless of how she felt (the subject of another text), it might be instructive to give you a quick overview of the many volumes and visual productions that have created a "persona" for Rose Valland as a creature of the French museum world who rose above the fray to do the unimaginable in times of war—put her life on the line to document the plunder of art collections during the Nazi occupation of France (1940-1944). She was passionately devoted to a certain idea of the cultural heritage of her nation, ready to defend it at any cost, even if it meant sacrificing her own life. Truly admirable.
Here is a brief recap of monographs published in French and English since 1961 when the “Front de l’Art (Art Front)”, Rose Valland’s account of her wartime defense of French cultural heritage appeared in its original French edition at Editions Plon. There followed two updated French editions of the “Art Front” in 1997 and 2014. The first English-language edition of the “Art Front” came out in 2024.
Books
1961
Le front de l’art, défense des collections françaises, 1939-1945 Rose Valland, Plon, 262 pages
1997
Le front de l’art, défense des collections françaises, 1939-1945 Rose Valland, RMN 262 pages
We cannot cry over spilled milk. Strong-willed women (Evelyn Tucker, cultural advisor to the US zone of occupation in Austria, and Ardelia Hall, cultural officer in the US Department of State (1944-1961), Rose Valland, cultural officer in charge of recoveries of French cultural treasures) fought an uphill battle to implement Allied restitution policies so as to provide some measure of justice to the victims of National Socialism.
Life is what it is. Words are one thing. Deeds are quite another. Something that these three outstanding women found out and fought through in order to assert a policy that was quickly reneged by the very people who shaped them. Alea jacta est.
We haven't forgotten them and we honor them. Role models. We need them now more than ever.
Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat, special envoy on Holocaust affairs for the US Department of State, was one of the most prominent speakers at the 20th anniversary colloquium of the CIVS in Paris on November 15, 2019.
From year to year, the Eizenstat narrative on looted art and restitution has morphed and been rewritten, not for stylistic reasons but perhaps because Mr. Eizenstat has had a decades-long love/hate relationship with the whole idea of restituting art objects to plundered victims of the Nazis. And he simply does not know how to address it. After all, you cannot package art the way you bundle insurance policies, gold bars and coins, bank accounts and so forth, something that he excels at, which has yielded billions of dollars worth of settlements for Jewish victims and their families. For that reason alone, Mr. Eizenstat's legacy as a reliable and devoted advocate and champion of Holocaust victims' rights is uncontested and admirable.
Here are some of his many statements which were oftentimes punctuated by occasional spurts of ire:
-“France is going from being a laggard to being a leader” on questions of art restitution. That elicited some giggles including from Mr. Eizenstat who appeared pleased by his joke which was not really a joke.
He reminded us of his infinite capacity to repeat “fake news” about cultural losses during WWII. Unverified, the numbers put forth by Eizenstat are the same ones he has repeated since 1998.
According to him, 600000 paintings were looted during WWII, of which 100000 are still missing. In 1997, Philip Saunders of Trace database had made this unfounded assertion. (Mr. Eizenstat went on record with those numbers in 2006). The Polish government alone claims that half a million cultural objects were removed from its territory during WWII. Which irresponsible historian or advocacy group came up with these fictitious numbers? Not even the Monuments Men could be bothered to audit the cultural losses of each nation victim of Nazi aggression. The more accurate estimates situate cultural losses in the millions.
Speaking of the Monuments Men, Mr. Eizenstat delivered a paean in their honor, citing their bravery and courage (smoking pipes and sporting tweeds) in Munich and Wiesbaden, while recovering 5 million works of art! No kidding! He forgot to mention that this figure mostly accounts for books, decorative objects and State-owned art. Not much room left for Jews, is there? Moreover, 5 million might be just a tad exaggerated. But who’s counting? You get the idea. Lots of looted stuff was repatriated to countries of origin.
Mr. Eizenstat was on a roll. He posited that it was impossible to identify owners at the end of the war. If so, how did so many objects get returned? The heirless asset problem must be staggering.
Let us now enter fantasy land. In December 1997, Mr. Eizenstat came up with the brilliant idea for a conference on looted art or so he says. That’s really strange because he was firmly opposed to the inclusion of looted art in any international convening dealing with assets during the Holocaust. It was the seizure of the two Schiele paintings at the Museum of Modern Art in January 1998 that provoked the inclusion of looted art in what became the Washington Conference on Holocaust-era Assets.
Speaking of the 1998 conference, Mr. Eizenstat, since November 2018, has changed his tone regarding the 11 Washington Principles that he penned which were supposed to frame an international strategy to identify looted art in public collections (not private) and suggest ways for victims to settle their grievances with current possessors.
Well, as it turns out, these non-binding Principles were mostly based on a set of guidelines developed by American museums earlier in 1998 when faced with mounting criticism over their indifference to the presence of stolen objects in their collections. A funny way of helping claimants by seeking inspiration from the very institutions that are firmly opposed to any form of restitution.
Mr. Eizenstat went on to honor the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) for setting up a task force to address the question of looted art in their collections. To that end, the AAMD issued a set of guidelines in June 1998 which served as the benchmark for the Washington Principles, of which Mr. Eizenstat is the uncontested author.
Mr. Eizenstat proffered adoring words for Philippe de Montebello. The flamboyant former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art was a fierce opponent of restitution but a very savvy museum official who understood the value of pre-emptive strikes on issues of looted art and artifacts. To wit, he promoted the drawing up of guidelines for American museums to follow when confronted with objects in their collections that might be of dubious provenance and negotiated creative settlements with the Italian government over the presence of looted antiquities in the Met’s collections.
Mr. Eizenstat was particularly combative in upholding his legacy and defending his record against critics who have blasted him for “doing nothing” and uttering mere “words.”
Seizing the opportunity in a fiery tone, he shared a long list of recommendations and critiques in Uzi-like fashion. It was hard to keep up. Some of the more notable ones follow:
1/ he denounced the impossibility of de-accessioning restitutable objects from French museums as “a French problem.”
2/ He went on to skewer Dutch museums for having reneged on their commitment to the Washington Principles by equating the cohesiveness of their collections with the interests of Holocaust claimants—the notorious “balance of interest” doctrine approved by Dutch museums in 2016? Verify.
4/ Once again, he congratulated the Metropolitan Museum and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts for showing the way on how to handle looted objects in their collections.
5/ Quoting the AAMD and the AAM, he observed that the NEPIP portal was worthless and “outmoded”, in other words, unusable.
6/ He criticized US museums for being so aggressive towards claimants by resorting to technical legal defenses in order to dismiss their claims.
7/ He applauded the HEAR Act as the antidote to summary judgments petitioned by museum lawyers against claimants, whether meritorious or not.
8/ He thinks highly of the JUST Act which requires countries to publish annual reports on the state of restitution in their midst.
9/ he took partial credit for launching “provenance research as a new profession.” As if it was not performed prior to 1998.
10/ He congratulated France for acting as a coordinator between the five standing restitution committees.
Then, Mr. Eizenstat pulled out his foggy crystal ball and peered inside it, noting:
1/ Forced sales and flight sales (fluchtgut) are to be included as part of the Washington Principles (the former are mentioned explicitly in the Terezin Declaration and the latter are suggested implicitly therein);
2/ provenance research is expensive and requires resources.
3/ Public museums should publish on the Internet a detailed provenance for all of their objects.
4/ research should be conducted in all museums—private and public.
5/ De-accession laws need to be changed in order to accommodate restitution of looted objects.
6/ The Washington Principles apply to private collections
7/ Every country should designate a point of reference for claimants
8/ there should be no time limits on claims.
9/ he denounced the European Union as being “behind the curve.”
10/ with regards to so-called heirless assets, Eizenstat reiterated the need for “just and fair solutions” which amount to selling off these unclaimed assets after giving research one more try. Meanwhile, the institutions holding such objects should educate their public about how they ended up in their collections. As an aside, Eizenstat lauded the Austrian solution to the heirless assets question, embodied in the National Fund run by Hannah Lessing. In short, if Austrian federal museums identify objects in their midst for which there are no identifiable owners, they are transferred to the National Fund which follows up with its own research and posts the objects on its website. After a period of time has elapsed, the Fund sets aside those objects for sale, the proceeds of which are disbursed amongst needy families of survivors. Ms. Lessing begged to differ during the question and answer period.
In the spirit of an on-going "think-aloud" pertaining to the nature of provenance research and the art restitution movement, here are some additional thoughts for discussion.
There are no official statistics regarding: a/ the total number of art objects claimed, b/ the total number of art objects restituted, c/ the total value of art objects sold after restitution, and d/ the total value of so-called “art restitution litigation.”
a/ the total number of art objects claimed:
By May 1945, somewhere between 15 and 20 million art objects of all sorts, from masterpieces to portraits of your favorite saints and relatives, had been misplaced due to civil unrest, persecution, war, genocide, and theft.
Of those misplaced cultural objects, a small number fit the moniker of “culturally-significant” or “national treasure” or both, depending on who was defining those two very odd expressions. For the sake of the argument, let’s just say 1 to 5 per cent of the misplaced objects fit those categories, or 100,000 (lowest number) to 1 million (highest number). The rest fell into the general bucket of culturally not so significant or insignificant, again, depending on who is expounding on this odd categorization.
Postwar Allied restitution policy ended up focusing on the 1 to 5 percent of objects lost or missing due to State-sponsored mischief between 1933 and 1945. For the rest, compensation schemes were foisted onto shell-shocked survivors and their kin due to an institutional absence of interest amongst postwar governments to aid those victims in locating and recovering their missing cultural property for reasons mentioned above. Many of the culturally significant objects and those earning the label of “national treasure” came from State collections plundered by the Axis and from private collections owned by wealthy individuals with close ties to State museums in countries dominated by the Axis. Those items received favored treatment in the eyes of the Allies and their representatives, referred to as “Monuments Men”.
The Allied powers’ prime directive was the economic, political, social and cultural rehabilitation of Europe (read that part of Europe not occupied or influenced by the Soviet Army and its government) especially as the incipient Cold War became a full-fledged game of geopolitical antipathy between former wartime allies.
As a consequence of the aforementioned factors and those tied to the inevitable human condition—people over property—most survivors did not file claims in the immediate postwar period and only did so after deadlines had passed and the only chance of physically recovering most if not all of their lost property was close to 0.
By 1956, the US State Department had estimated that approximately several hundred thousand cultural objects of all kinds and shapes and value were still being claimed through its good offices by individuals from more than 30 nations.
From the mid-1990s to today, in the absence of any concerted international effort to tally the total number of claimed objects registered as such with national governments, we can only guess that, perhaps, the aggregate total figure of claimed cultural objects is in excess of the number declared by the State Department in 1956.
Moreover, there is no available as to the number of claims filed against museums and other institutions that hold or trade in art objects. The number of objects claimed might well be in the thousands but proof being in the pudding no one can be sure of anything at this point in time.
Recommendation: nations that are signatory to international compacts known as the Washington conference of 1998 and the Terezin Declaration of June 2009 should conduct a census of all outstanding claimed cultural objects registered as of now in their care and publish those results for public consumption and analysis. The same appeal can be made to the members of the art market and ask that it provide figures representing the number of objects in their custody which are subject to claims without giving out names out of a concern for data privacy.
b/ the total number of art objects that have been restituted since the Washington Conference:
Historically, the most accessible statistics are repatriation figures from various postwar governments and official statistics regarding actual physical restitutions up to the early 1950s. Since then, there is very little public information that can be found about how many art objects were returned to rightful owners between the mid-1950s and the beginning of the 21st century.
Those nations that have established restitution committees (the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Austria) have compiled figures regarding the number of objects that have been claimed through their auspices. But no statistics are tallied pertaining to the number of objects returned through direct negotiations with museums, auction houses, institutions, corporations, and private individuals.
c/ the total value of restituted art objects is directly dependent on the answer to the aforementioned.
The recipients of restituted art objects are usually driven to sell them because they cannot afford to keep them in their possession as a result of their inflated value and the ensuing insurance and other expenses that accompany their maintenance as one's newly found property. Other successful claimants part with the restituted objects because there are a multitude of individuals who have a rightful claim to a share of the value of the restituted object(s). There can be as many 50 or 60 individuals who can benefit from the monetization of restituted objects, thus significanly diluting the actual amount earned from the sale of the restituted object(s). And then, there are those folks out there who have recovered their objects and prefer to sell them for their own personal reasons which are theirs only to be treated as a private matter, free of outside commentary.
The only indication of value comes from press reports about items being auctioned after restitution. It can safely be assumed that the objects with an Austrian provenance—mostly oil paintings by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele—have fetched the highest prices at auction following their restitution, mostly due to the infatuation by the upper tiers of the global art market for such works, regardless of their inherent and implicit esthetic value. Those works alone have fetched in toto more than half a billion dollars. It might be safe to conservatively estimate the total value of restituted objects at slightly more than a billion dollars since the late 1990s. But that figure needs to be carefully verified through an elaborate survey of the field of art restitution.
d/ the total value of so-called “art restitution litigation”:
Although this question is unfair and unjust, it still needs to be answered out of a desire for transparency. We can only surmise how costly litigation efforts can be once we fuse the fees earned from those seeking restitution and those working to prevent restitution. Usually, museums and art dealers will recruit fairly well-heeled law firms as outside counsel in order to safeguard the integrity of their collections and rebuff attempts by claimants to assert title. On the plaintiffs’ side, there is an odd mix of solo practitioners and small and large firms involved in art restitution. All told, there are not more than 100 or so attorneys—yes, you read it!—who work on art restitution cases as an integral part of their legal practice if we combine North America, Europe and Israel. Since most plaintiffs cases are adopted on a contingency fee basis, usually 30 per cent, you should take the estimated value of restituted objects and divide that figure by three in order to get an idea of the estimated value of the litigation for plaintiffs’ lawyers since the late 1990s. Likewise, for those lawyers defending their clients against outside claims, the fees can easily rise into the millions of dollars for each claimed object. Most of the claimed objects that are subject to intense years-long litigation hold values in excess of 1 million dollars.
Where does all of this leave the bewildered field of provenance research?
The two main incentives underlying provenance research since the late 1990s are to 1/ safeguard art objects which are part of a private or public collection or held by an individual collector or 2/ obtain the restitution of such an art object.
What does this mean in terms of the objective and empirical integrity of the research being conducted on the history of an object? How do these legal undertakings affect the very nature of provenance research as distinct from its initial intent as an art-historical practice?
What is the future of provenance research and can it be salvaged as an objective, scientific field of inquiry?
by Elizabeth Karlsgodt, Associate Professor of History, University of Denver
Elizabeth Karlsgodt Source: University of Denver,
Arts Humanities & Social Sciences
George Clooney’s latest film, The Monuments Men, offers audiences an action-packed adventure set in Europe during the final days of World War II. The film is based on the true story of American and European art experts who became officers in the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives (MFAA) section of Allied forces and recovered several million cultural objects from castles and salt mines that had become Nazi art repositories. It is a feel-good saga about American heroes who outsmart Hitler, the ultimate villain. The actual history of the Monuments Men is riveting in its own right, but without the happy Hollywood ending.
Franklin Roosevelt charged the MFAA officers with protecting European cultural heritage from the ravages of war. They initially focused on preserving churches, palaces and other historic buildings but ended up recovering the art found in Nazi caches as the Allies moved into Reich territory. The repositories held objects evacuated from museums in the Third Reich and stolen from German-occupied territories across the continent, such as Belgium’s famed Ghent altarpiece and the Bruges Madonna by Michelangelo. Most tragically, the Nazis had plundered much of the loot from Jewish
art collectors across Europe, while agents working for Hitler, Göring
and other Party leaders had bought thousands of pieces relinquished by
Jews under duress.
Madonna, by Michelangelo
In Clooney and Heslov’s version of events, the Monuments Men race against time as the Third Reich is crumbling, trying to find art repositories before the Nazis destroy the hidden treasures. The Nazis, the story goes, would rather obliterate masterpieces than let them fall into Allied—especially Soviet—hands. The Germans are implementing Hitler’s Nero Decree of March 19, 1945, which ordered the demolition of infrastructure that could be useful to the Allies—railways, bridges, factories. In the film, the Germans include works of art as potential enemy assets and systematically burn paintings in the Heilbronn salt mine as the Monuments Men race through Germany to stop them.
In reality, Minister of Armaments Albert Speer largely thwarted implementation of the Nero Decree and the Germans did not carry out an eleventh-hour demolition of looted art. In Berlin and Paris, they had burned thousands of paintings they considered “degenerate”—Cubist, Surrealist, and Expressionist works they considered harmful to the Aryan mind and spirit—but they did not methodically destroy art they valued. On the contrary, Hitler aimed to preserve all the art the Nazis had accumulated, using it to glorify himself and the Third Reich.
Why would Hitler, the man who had wrought such destruction across an entire continent, preserve art? He was building the world’s greatest museum in his childhood hometown of Linz, Austria. His planned display of the continent’s masterpieces would symbolize his military power, much as Napoleon had done with the Louvre collection before him. Hitler’s last will and testament written the day before his suicide states that all works of art in his possession should go to the Linz museum: “It is my most sincere wish that this bequest be duly executed.” His drive to preserve fine art, however, was directly connected to the Nazi destruction of people who had owned it. Seizing and profiting from Jewish assets, including artworks, was central to the Nazi Final Solution.
It is true that Hitler ended up endangering the seized works of art by issuing the Nero Decree and feeding a climate of fear and uncertainty among German leaders as Allied forces advanced into Reich territory. In Austria, the fanatical Gauleiter August Eigruber intended to carry out Hitler’s orders and placed explosives inside the Alt Aussee salt mine, repository for 6500 works of art, including the Belgian treasures and works from Vienna museums. In early May 1945, Austrian mine officials received authorization from SS officer Ernst Kaltenbrunner to seal the mine and protect the art inside. Two MFAA members in the Third U.S. Army, Pfc. Lincoln Kirstein and Captain Robert Posey, arrived at the mine on May 16, 1945, a week after V-E Day, and oversaw work by Austrian miners to dig through the rubble and regain access to the mine, locating the cultural treasures.
In the film, we see the Monuments Men organized into a platoon. They survive boot camp in England together, land on the Normandy beaches, and develop a sense of camaraderie in their hunt for looted art. But such a platoon never existed. Instead, the military command scattered cultural officers across Allied armies and they most often worked alone or with one partner, meeting occasionally to share information and avoid duplicating efforts.
The challenge of working in isolation is illustrated by the work of Lieutenant James Rorimer, future director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the inspiration for Matt Damon’s character, James Granger. A curator at the Cloisters Museum in civilian life, Rorimer landed with French troops at Utah Beach on August 3, 1944, two months after D-Day. He immediately began surveying the damage to churches and other historic buildings nearby, documenting in painstaking detail the destruction inflicted by German and Allied bombing.
While maintaining contact with superior officers, Rorimer mostly worked alone in Normandy, without a vehicle or assistant. Determined to inspect damage at the grandiose medieval abbey of Mont Saint Michel, he hitched rides on Allied military vehicles and with French civilians. When those vehicles veered from his destination, he walked. Alone. One Air Corps MP Captain suspected he was a German spy, incredulous that a U.S. officer would travel in Normandy without his own transportation. Rorimer and his MFAA colleagues used cunning and imagination to make up for the dearth in personnel, equipment and preservation supplies. Fogg Museum preservationist George Stout, the inspiration for Clooney’s character, managed to secure a beat up German Army Volkswagen without a roof, and New York architect Bancel LaFarge, after weeks of hitchhiking and walking, procured a small British car to navigate country roads.
The terminology “Monuments Men” itself elides a rich part of this history: the role played by remarkable women. One was Rose Valland, a French museum official who inspired the Claire Simone character in the film, played by Cate Blanchett. In the film, Simone shows Granger the extent of Nazi looting by taking him to Paris warehouses filled with everyday objects plundered from Jewish homes, much as Valland did with Rorimer in December 1944. Romantic tension between the film characters is pure Hollywood invention, but in real life the two were a powerful team, as Rorimer used Valland’s records of Nazi art looting to track down the treasures of France stashed in Neuschwanstein castle and other repositories. Valland later became a Captain in the French Army and from 1945 to 1953 worked in Germany to help return the collected art to countries of origin. A recipient of the Resistance Medal, the French Legion of Honor, and the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom, she remains one of the most decorated women in French history.
Rose Valland at the Jeu de Paume
Edsel’s non-profit foundation includes Valland and several other women on its list of more than three hundred “Monuments Men” from thirteen countries. Among them was Captain Edith Standen, a Canadian-born art expert who became a U.S. citizen in 1942, joined the Women’s Army Corps, and in June 1945 became director of the Wiesbaden central collecting point. Ardelia Hall was a cultural officer at the U.S. State Department from 1946 to 1962 and worked tirelessly to promote restitution of looted art to rightful—mostly Jewish—owners.
The Monuments Men should be seen as an entertaining entry to a far more complicated history embedded in the Holocaust. The recent international controversy surrounding the revelation of Cornelius Gurlitt’s art hoard in Munich shows how difficult the work of restitution remains. In the chaotic postwar years, restitution was defined in national terms, to countries of origin that would determine rightful owners, despite the fundamentally international nature of the art market. Over the past seventy years, works seized from Jewish collections or sold under duress during the Nazi era have been resold across territories with varying statutes of limitation for illicit trade, even within the United States. For this reason, the central mission of many Monuments Men and women, restitution to rightful owners, is not yet accomplished.
Leon Wieseltier, Literary Editor of The New Republic, Source: Brandeis University
by Marc J. Masurovsky
Why did it take so long for the "New Republic" to write about cultural plunder and restitution of looted art? Is it really because of the incongruous convergence of the so-called “Gurlitt Affair” and the global release of that “trashy and supercilious film”—the Monuments Men? Or put differently, why the silence for so many decades despite the fact that “restitution [is] as much as the next child of the dispossessed”? There are probably no easy answers to those questions and perhaps they are best left alone. Still...
“The obsession with restitution” is an obsession with justice, as exemplified by restitution of lost cultural assets, those items, those objects, those artifacts, regardless of value or museum worthiness, those parts of ourselves that serve as our extensions and our means of expressing non-verbally our deepest sentiments, longings, loves, and aspirations.
It is not just about Fragonard, Bellini, Tintoretto, van Dyck, Rembrandt, Leonardo and countless other “masters”. It is not just about the finest silver and the finest gold and the finest stones set in the finest settings. It is not about those rarest of rarest of books and incunabulae, or textiles carefully woven with the most precious fabrics for that most precious person. Actually, we are talking about something that makes you and I and our friends, our children, our relatives, and those around us whom we do not know, it is what makes us human, it is about culture. And culture is what Hitler and his henchmen and collaborators across Europe sought to uproot wherever it was deemed to be “Jewish” and “degenerate”, in order to substitute something clean, tasteful, that was Judenrein.
A crime against humanity.
In order to proceed with the uprooting of culture and the mass of objects encapsulated under that moniker, Hitler’s henchmen and collaborators across Europe committed an act of genocide. That makes Hildebrand Gurlitt, Cornelius Gurlitt’s father, an accessory to genocide, together with all other art dealers, collectors, museum officials and curators, art historians, auctioneers, and appraisers who found opportunity in State-sanctioned mass displacement of property that accompanied the slaughter of millions.
The dispossessed lost their homes, their property, their sense of self, the beauty around them was extinguished and they were only left to wonder why such horrors had befallen them.
There exists a significant emotional and spiritual linkage between people of all ages and backgrounds and ethnicities and creeds and the objects that surround them, that populate their lives. It could be a candelabra, it could be an incense burner, it could also be a small drawing by Edgar Degas, or a satirical piece by Georg Grosz or even a surrealistic painting by Felix Nussbaum, or a ditty scrawled on a napkin. It doesn’t matter what it is; it is the meaning that it embodies which is precious to us all. The crime consists in rending that object from our bosom, as if part of our soul had been ripped to shreds, and for what? For being Jewish, for being “different”? for being “unacceptable”? “undesirable”?
We certainly do not place objects above people. We place objects in the constellation of people, much like satellites circling planets. And when the satellite leaves its orbit, all hell breaks loose and we are released into the wilderness of space, aimless.
Fighting for restitution does not weaken our loss, it acts as a vital reminder of the world that was consumed in flames and gas, not completely, but almost. Obtaining restitution is but a small step to establish the cardinal principle that justice does exist and that with resolve and perseverance and belief in ourselves and in our kin and in higher principles, even if the outcome is hopeless much like it was for those young fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto, my personal heroes, we can assert the value of justice and reaffirm our right to exist while honoring the loss of those who came before us and cannot be with us due to a crime against humanity.
For myself, I am the single child of two artists, two artists who sought out the famed “School of Paris” and bought a one-way boat ticket from New York to experience it all in the City of Lights, poor as could be, rich as could be. Miserable but filled with the soul and spirit of what they embraced and lived—art and culture. Breathing it, in and out, every day, as pure as the driven snow, which drove them into the ground, because, as you know, the art market is unforgiving, cruel, and indifferent to human plight. By the way, Lincoln Kirstein and his ilk are part and parcel of that market, that cultured elite which enjoys driving artists into the ground in the name of Kultur. I make no apologies for being so fiendish and cynical but that is the cold reality that artists must endure. By extension, the “Monuments Men” would not have given the time of day to most artists incinerated in the Nazi apocalypse. Sad but true.
Where are we now? Most people think that the excitement today is about money. It always has been. People are what they are. A cheap headline always includes money. Journalists do not write about a restituted collection if the word “million” is not included in the header. That state of affairs comes from ignorance and intellectual opportunism, the flip side of “pornographic journalism.” It is no different today than it was in the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s. Yes, it is true that high-priced restitutions are good for the art market. There is a certain twisted logic in the way that the press, comforted by today’s elites, creates a perverse and distorted linkage between the restitution of looted art and the staggering values derived from those objects that have been returned to rightful owners. As if the only objects that were stolen by the Nazis were of museum quality and affordable only to the 1 per cent. Let's not forget that the 99 per cent are ignored by the press and whose clamor for justice is never heeded? Why then claimants to give up and simply “remember"?
Once again, it is not just about Gustav Klimt or Egon Schiele. It is about those thousands of artistic minds and creative spirits from dozens of nations who produced all kinds of works, in all sorts of media, as extensions of their spirit. It is up to us to appreciate them or ignore them, but their sum constitutes our cultural and artistic patrimony, like it or not. As to your quip about rescuing a piece by Damien Hirst, he occupies a space in our culture, even if we do agree here that his work might not be worth saving. But, if I did not save Hirst, why should anyone save my parents’ works? Who am I to judge what is worth saving and what is worth abandoning to a hellfire? Such flawed reasoning puts us square in the lap of the Monuments Men whose mission was to rescue the “cultural treasures” of Western civilization, worshipped in countless museum studies programs, institutes of art, and revered temples of culture, at the expense of the lesser-known, the lower tiers of cultural and artistic output. Cost-benefit analysis correlates with the rarefied air of high-priced recoveries and restitution of stolen art.
Now that we are barely three weeks into 2014, the unfolding of the Gurlitt saga has turned into an international circus, one part media, one part international organizations, one part German government and one part other governments.
The people recruited to sit on the distinguished Gurlitt Task Force do not appear to be doing research. And even if they were, we would not know about it. That is the classic definition of opacity and the administrative definition of “classified information.” In other words, a gag order binds all members of the task force to secrecy. Can’t blame them, after all. All of those items in the Gurlitt collection are State secrets, right
If the Gurlitt Task Force is not responsible for actually conducting research, WHO IS? Where are the funds coming from to conduct such research? Is there enough money to undertake thorough research that might entail travel to different cities, extended stays in archival repositories, or to put it in professional terms, budget for significant billable time? Speaking of budgets, is there a budget to address that particular aspect of the research effort?
If there is an intention to research each and every item systematically, does that mean that no item from the Gurlitt collection will be released before such research is concluded? From what we gather, it does not really matter what the Gurlitt Task Force think or does, since the fate of the Cornelius Gurlitt collection remains in the hands of the prosecutor in Augsburg, Germany. So, what are we dealing with here? A public relations stunt?
Due to the sheer opacity that cloaks the Gurlitt Task Force, no one in their right mind should trust any statement coming from the German government and from any member of the Task Force on this and related matters because, much like NSA officials and other individuals working for organizations cloaked in secrecy, they are not paid to tell the truth, only what they are authorized to disclose, which is a shambles of a reflection of the truth. We should wonder what the truth is these days…
and the Claims Conference, represented by Ruediger Mahlo, director of its Frankfurt office.
Ruediger Mahlo
Source: Google
The only provenance researcher on the Task Force whose name has been made public is Sophie Lillie, who is based in Vienna, Austria, and a specialist in researching acts of cultural plunder in Nazi-occupied Austria.
Sophie Lille
Source: Google
Where are the representatives of countries which hosted visits by Hildebrand Gurlitt and where he indulged himself in shopping sprees worth tens of millions of Reichsmarks? Or have those countries forgotten that they were actually victimized by the National Socialist government of Adolf Hitler, his Wehrmacht, his SS, his Gestapo, and all other relevant emanations of the Third Reich specifically geared to oppress, suppress, arrest, confine, deport, exterminate, retaliate, steal, plunder, requisition and do all sorts of other things that ideological conquerors do when wishing to establish a New Order by force?
France and Holland?
Maybe the Dutch could take a pass on this one, but the French, well, the French cannot afford to take a pass on the Gurlitt Task Force. That’s tantamount to saying: we do not need to repatriate any additional works of art that were removed from French territory to the years of German occupation from June 1940 to August 1944. According to the international agreements of the time, that is, those enforced at least through the immediate post-1945 years, France and any other country occupied by the Nazis could repatriate any object that could be proven to have been removed from its territory by the German authorities. If that is the case, the French government should abolish the MNR category and return all items to those from whom they were either acquired or stolen. Why not? Or this is a flippant remark?
Hildebrand Gurlitt paid regular visits to German-occupied France within months of the arrival of German troops on parade along the Champs-Elysées. He consorted with dozens of art dealers who were only too willing to sell their paintings, works on paper, furniture and other cultural objects to covetous agents of German museums, institutes, galleries, agencies, dealers and collectors. Many of those sellers in happy Paris were also recycling art looted from countless Jews who had fled the capital so as to avoid capture, internment, and deportation. Most did, some could not, and the fates were sealed. Is that important to the Gurlitt Task Force? Or does it consider that there is no blood soaking the art that the son of Hildebrand Gurlitt possesses?
Hildebrand Gurlitt
Source: Google
We do know that an invitation was issued to France for it to send at least one representative to the Gurlitt Task Force. But, as of now, France has not replied. Will it ever? Or is it too concerned about President Hollande’s growing harem? Or maybe the French government does not really care about what its own citizens did between June 1940 and August 1944 to a quarter million Jews and as many, if not more, men, women, and in some cases children who expressed their discontent with Vichy and the German occupation force? In the current atmosphere that plagues French citizens, the antisemitic, racist, and immigrant-hating National Front is expanding its reach amidst a disenchanted electorate, a not insignificant segment of France’s revered intellectual class shows its increasingly corrupt ways and cannot even think straight about what its recent history means for today and tomorrow, preferring to muddy the waters of antisemitism. We are not too surprised, therefore, if the current mood among French museum officials and government bureaucrats and cabinet members is simply to forget Vichy and to pretend that it is now just another “incident de parcours.” By the way, those very same French museum officials are not too happy with anyone asking questions about the provenance of many items in their collections that they hold sacred, as indelible pieces of the French cultural geist, organic components of the “patrimoine culturel de la nation.” An irrevocably untouchable part of France’s hallowed treasures.
Poor France! How easy it is to flush the truth down the proverbial toilet of selective amnesia!
Hildebrand Gurlitt was a major presence on the Paris art market, regardless of what one reads in historical monographs about Nazi art looting. That is the objective truth and the objective reality, however one wishes to measure it. One art dealer in Paris had a special room set aside where paintings were stored for Mr. Gurlitt to pick up, pay for, and have shipped to Germany. Mr. Gurlitt had regular customers throughout the Left Bank and the Right Bank—in those days, it did not matter where you shopped as long as there was someone willing to sell to you. Mr. Gurlitt is mentioned fairly regularly in postwar testimonials provided by Goering’s people like Walther Andreas Hofer, Gustav Rochlitz and others. Mr. Gurlitt was a significant player in the Nazi art trade. Period. Since the historical evidence is overwhelmingly compelling in this regard, why is no one doing anything to explain to the general public the true extent of Hildebrand Gurlitt’s reach into the fruits of Nazi plunder, starting from the purging of German State Collections, the hundreds of forced sales that brought to Mr. Gurlitt and his ilk truly fascinating and collectible works by German Expressionists, those “degenerates” so lovingly purged by Goebbels, himself a secret admirer of Expressionists, and his henchmen.
If one had to summarize Hildebrand Gurlitt, he was one of many dealers and eminent members of the German museum and gallery world who profited from the Nazi hypocrisy regarding modern art and the Nazi hierarchy’s lust for cultural assets that did not belong to it. More importantly, Hildebrand Gurlitt is the quintessential member of the cultural establishment in Axis-occupied Europe and the poster child for a postwar successful career in the arts and culture, both in Germany, but also in other parts of Europe and even in the United States and Latin America. How quickly everyone forgets especially when “Europe’s cultural treasures” are involved!
Hildebrand Gurlitt’s pedigree as a former museum director, gallery owner, and internationally known dealer, collector, and art specialist, made him nearly untouchable by the time Allied troops entered into Germany in spring of 1945 and liberated it from those Nazi scoundrels. Indeed, in the eyes of American conservative officials at the Departments of State and War, in the upper reaches of the American military, especially in the central office of the Occupied Military Government United States (OMGUS), he represented the future of a redeemed Germany, despite the fact that his best friends were all Nazi collaborators. He had Jewish blood, did he? So he said. God, that sounds vaguely “Aryan” in its resonance. A bit like other Nazis who had “Jewish friends” whom they protected and shielded from an inevitable fate. A cynical calculation to look like saints in an ocean of sinners…
Gurlitt, center, at the Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf, Germany, 1949, completely rehabilitated by the Americans
Source: Google
Why does having a Jewish relative make you a saint or someone unlikely to do “bad things”? As Theodore Heinrich, the former director of the Wiesbaden Collecting Point and “Monuments Man extraordinaire”, argued when asked about how he vetted “bad” Germans from “good” Germans, if a German art official was not a member of the Nazi Party and had a Jewish relative in the family, he had to be acceptable. No questions asked, please. Otherwise, you’ll insult the poor man, he’s suffered enough, hasn’t he? In the name of Kultur!!!
That’s how easy it was to get a clearance with the American cultural advisory group known as “Monuments Men.”
Let’s not get lost here.
Nickolsburg Castle
Source: Wikipedia
As the French so lovingly say it, Hildebrand Gurlitt refashioned himself a whole new virginity—il s’est refait une virginité. Like a savvy marketing guy who knows his brand better than anyone else, he knew how to sell himself and to whom he should address himself, whose protection he should seek and… voila. Guess who fell for it? American and British art connoisseurs, those heroes who waltzed into cities and towns ravaged by twelve years of racially-motivated dictatorial follies, many of them almost razed to ground level. From the cultural side, many museums barely kept their walls standing, those very museums that the American and British art connoisseurs were tasked to put back together, reopen and restock with “Europe’s cultural treasures.” Most of those treasures were safe and sound deep inside mine shafts and in the cellars of countless castles that were not bombed. Of course, there always are exceptions like that poor castle at Nikolsburg, in today’s Czech Republic. But again, it was an exception. German museums recovered most of their goodies, except for those that were stored in eastern portions of the Reich which Soviet troops overran.
Basically, unless you had blood on your hands and you gave the Nazi salute every five minutes, you were likely to get a job with the American cultural advisory group in the US zone of occupation in Germany … as an expert! Obviously you were an expert since you were directly involved in partaking in the recycling of loot all parts of the Reich for close to a decade! Priceless experience!! If I had been a Monuments Man, why, I would have hired folks like Hildebrand right there, on the spot!! Made my job a lot easier, believe me, and, best of all, he could point me to all of his other expert buddies so that we could ask them for their expert opinions. How much fun was that! Why waste time looking for a pedigreed anti-Nazi art specialist.
Last December, Miami Beach hosted a massive art bash called Art Basel Miami Beach. Everyone and anyone who was anyone showed up for the pre-, during, and post-festivities. Fun was had by all who could afford it, those who were invited to the chic, ultra-chic, and out of this world fiestas, and who had deep enough pockets to even consider acquiring what was referred to here as ‘art.’
In a New York Times article that appeared on December 12, aptly titled, “on the billionaires’ flyway’, the author wondered whether this ‘art’ fair was just another ‘pre-Christmas break for global millionaires.” A real estate mogul, Mr. Rosen, let out a massive cliché, “art has tremendous asset potential. Art is the one thing that has the potential to appreciate.” More relevant was Mrs. Fendi’s erudite commentary: “contemporary art collecting is ‘the new shopping’ [read, for billionaires and those who can afford it]. Even more to the point, the startlingly honest assessment given by one of many globe-trotting, fair-hopping ladies: “everybody wants to be a follower, to have the same collection, and to follow the trends.” Joke aside, the sub-text of the event is unsettling.
Peel the layers and this is what you could find at Art Basel Miami Beach 2010: of the several hundred galleries that exhibited their wares at premium prices, serving bubbly all day and night to keep their potential clients ‘happy,’ more than half hailed from the US which makes perfect sense, while 36 came from Germany, 19 from the UK, 14 from France, 12 from Italy, 9 from Spain, 8 from Switzerland, and a smattering of others from Latin America, and Asia. Should it exist and be available, a looted art sniffer dog would have focused its finely-tuned truffle at Art Basel Miami Beach on 10 galleries, 90 per cent of which were homegrown, and more particularly, from New York. The few others came from Canada, Switzerland, and Germany. But, there was no such sniffer dog at Miami Beach, nor is there one in any other art fair in the world except perhaps at the annual Maastricht Art Fair which, once a year, harbors the highest concentration in the world of pre-1945 works and where one expects to pick up at least several looted items.
Earlier this week, I went on a quick virtual tour of the art market in Florida and this is what I found:
In the Miami area, four museums house works and objects which require greater scrutiny as to their origin. Of those four museums, three indicate on their websites that they have put in place a provenance research program consistent with the recommendations of the American Association of Museum Directors, something that they should be lauded for. By chance, those three institutions are affiliated with public and/or academic institutions, like Florida International University, the University of Miami and Miami-Dade County. The lone recalcitrant in the group is the Bass Museum of Art, which received significant donations of works of art that once belonged to John and Johanna Bass. These works cover all periods from Antiquity to the 20th century. Unfortunately, no provenances of any kind are offered to the public and visitors are left to wonder if these centuries-old objects on display might have a history prior to the time that the Bass family made their donation. Please do not feel put upon here because, in the Nation’s capital, my current place of residence, the same absence of information dominates the Hirschhorn Museum where all provenances begin with Mr. Joseph Hirschhorn himself. There, an object might be hundreds of years old, but there will be no information whatsoever prior to the mid-1960s.
Be that as it may, we find throughout the private art trade in Florida the same level of opacity that surrounds the works at the Bass Museum. The few galleries in and around Miami which house works by artists who were active on the European continent before 1945 are few, like Evelyn Aimis Fine Arts, Arcature and Wally Findlay. Neither of them provides any information about the source of the works that they stock other than to inform us whether or not they were sold.
The good news is that the art trade in Miami, and, by extension, in Florida, behaves no differently than in any other city or state in this country, and, for that matter, in the rest of the world. And there lies the problem: sustained opacity in the way objects of art are traded, staunch and inbred refusal to provide historical information about works being presented and/or sold to the public. With some notable exceptions, like Monica Dugot at Christie’s in New York, not much has changed in the international art trade since the brouhaha over looted art laid a claim for headline space in the US and Europe starting in the mid-1990s.
Take for example, the San Telmo neighborhood in Buenos Aires, which offers more antique stores per square block than in Paris. There, no questions are asked, no answers are provided, pieces are offered for sale, where galleries don’t record the owners’ names. Less or close to nothing is really best. And, yet, the greats of this world including famous American and European actors and politicians routinely shop in San Telmo for Aubusson wallhangings, Dutch old masters, genuine and fake, and French or Italian objets d’art, those very types of objects targeted for plunder by Nazi and Fascist dignitaries in the 1930s and 40s. More often than not, the best pieces are sent to Miami, Los Angeles, and New York for sale there at premium prices. If at all indicated, the provenance listing in a sales catalogue for these objects will begin with the name of the antique or art dealer in San Telmo.
Why does this state of affairs persist year after year, decade after decade? One explanation might be that the art-loving public does not see fit to ask questions about objects that it covets for its personal enjoyment or for investment reasons. Neither do the sellers feel compelled to tell you anything about what they sell save for what ensures the sale. In some respects, the art market continues to behave like one big bazaar, a refined version of San Telmo on a global scale.
The art trade thrives on complacency, apathy, and a general disregard for transparency. Those who nurture it are addicted to their own delusional sense of belonging to an elite which lives by its own set of rules, a fantasy that comes to a temporary halt whenever a US Customs agent handcuffs you or your dealer for partaking in trading of looted cultural property. These corrective measures are few and far between, but, when they occur, they do make an impression, not enough though to stanch the flow of stolen cultural property across borders.
How does one even begin to address this perennial problem?
Almost 90 years have elapsed since Benito Mussolini seized power in Italy. 78 years have passed since Adolf Hitler took control of Germany.
After 12 years of murderous rule and racially-motivated expansionism across Europe, at least 55 million people had died, millions of households destroyed, millions of objects of art belonging to persecuted civilians had been reshuffled like a mad deck of cards across the face of the European continent, and that’s not even factoring in the exactions and widespread thefts committed by the Japanese Imperial Army in Southeast Asia. In other words, a global mess!
Nearly a century has gone by, scarred by Fascism, National Socialism, Rexism, all other forms of racial, ethnocidal, genocidal authoritarian regimes that could be hatched by civilized men and women. US policy towards those right-wing and far right isms had always been skeptical but never to the point of requiring the severing of commercial and financial ties. After all, business has traditionally dominated the instrumentalities of American foreign policy almost since the founding of the Republic. A JP Morgan banker once said in 1941 to an American lawmaker: the interests of the house come before those of the State. This is the same bank that tripled its profits in wartime, German-occupied France by trading in stolen Jewish property and which was never held accountable for its war crimes owing to the bank’s intimate connections to the Washington establishment and especially to the US military. So, there you go. Our businessmen were busy trading with the Axis Powers way into the Second World War when it wasn’t so patriotic to do so. Once the conflagration ended in May 1945, the question of what comes after became suddenly urgent. Added to that the crushing reality of systematic, wholesale, plunder in 20 European countries was far more than any self-serving politician or civil servant could grasp. An overriding sense of outrage nevertheless prevailed long and deep enough in Washington and London to produce the contours of a righteous postwar policy that would recommend as one of its cardinal principles, the restitution of looted property to its rightful owners. It didn’t take more than a year, though, for the victorious powers to become so embroiled in the day-to-day scramble to manage liberated territories, stabilize the frontlines, feed starving millions, figure out what to do with millions more refugees displaced by so many fronts, that, by the end of 1946, the liberators were incapable of staying focused on upholding justice for the victims of the Holocaust and world war. They prosecuted in a symbolic and highly effective forum a handful of perpetrators at Nuremberg. In a fitting irony, the four powers in charge of the International Military Tribunal and of Allied restitution policy writ large engaged in a reckless and mercenary race to recruit thousands of former war criminals and anti-Semitic civil servants and businessmen to help them fight the next big one, but more importantly, to assert a competitive edge in the New Postwar Order.
Restitution, the physical return of the stolen object to the aggrieved party, soon gave way to reparations, the check is in the mail substitution for the actual object. By 1948, the United States government and its European allies had lost interest in the cumbersome process of locating, identifying, and restituting stolen cultural property to rightful owners. What’s more, customary international law precluded governments from doing door to door delivery of restituted property. The identified object had to be sent back to the place whence it came, and let the government of that country handle its physical return to the rightful owner.
We can argue all day and night about numbers—how many objects were actually looted across the Reich and Axis-occupied Europe, how many did the Allies find, how many did the Soviets bring back home as trophies, how many did the Allied Powers actually repatriate or send back correctly or incorrectly to the presumed countries of origin, how many were restituted to their rightful or not so rightful owners. And finally, how many objects and works still remain unidentified in private and public collections around the world as cultural property looted against a backdrop of wholesale persecution and extermination.
Moi? I, for one, certainly won’t play that game, not now, not ever. Nor would I ever attempt to provide you or anyone else for that matter a guesstimate—what an ugly accounting word!—of the value of those stolen objects.
Suffice it to say that an overwhelming number of cultural objects changed hands by the use of force and duress over the course of 12 years of Nazi rule in the Reich and occupied Europe and more than 20 years of Fascist rule in Italy, against the will and consent of the rightful owners. A very small subset of those misappropriated objects fell into the hands of the victorious Allied powers, and an even smaller subset of those discovered objects was repatriated, and a subset of that subset was restituted to the few families and owners who filed claims at the end of the war. If my subset algebraic algorithm is correct, a very small percentage of stolen cultural objects has ever made it back to their rightful owners.
What of the rest? Postwar officials, art historians, museum directors, and other like-minded folks nurtured the fiction that most had been destroyed in raging fires produced by Allied air raids, or during pitch battles between opposing forces along the various front lines, or more romantically, that the Nazis and fascists and other chauvinistic ignoramini of all sorts had slashed, maimed, and otherwise destroyed umpteen works of art because of their so-called degenerate or objectionable nature. The truth can be found in another constellation outside of the Milky Way. I will grant you this much, close to 10,000 works of art were in fact destroyed by the Nazi regime, because of their Judeo-bolchevik, prurient, dark, depressing, oversexed and pacifistic themes. We get closer to the historical truth when we examine the international art market and realize that most works and objects were sold or exchanged either person to person, or through intermediaries, in galleries, auction houses, or museums. across Axis-occupied Europe and the countries not at war with either side. In short, the vast majority of stolen works of art, and furniture and accessories and antiquities and tribal art and religious objects were recycled through the private art market. The system was extremely sophisticated, refined at a time when most of Europe was under military occupation and the subject of genocidal policies. The Nazi administration and its local collaborators provided the needed infrastructure to supervise and oversee the activities of thousands of agents, middlemen, museum officials, art historians, appraisers and experts, gallery owners and collectors, opportunists of all sorts who sought and curried favors to the occupiers. They all found extraordinary opportunities to build art collections that would have been unthinkable had the Nazis and the Fascists not come to power and ripped those collections from the bosoms of the victims whom they persecuted, confined, deported, and exterminated for what they were not for whom they were.
After the war ended, US and European officials acted in concert to restore the free and open trade of goods, including works and objects of art regardless of their origin. They removed all wartime barriers that would have allowed Customs officials to identify looted cultural property. In that regard, many of the same individuals responsible for helping to locate those works on the liberated European continent like the famous Monuments Men, turned around and became senior figures of the postwar art market, with insider knowledge of where stolen property could be found. Even some claimants unfortunately deprived of any moral compass thought it would be great to bring to the United States all looted works that had not been restituted so that they could be sold on the New York market.
As you probably have surmised by now, the international art trade has been engaged in a continual recycling of stolen cultural property since the advent of Fascism and Nazism in Europe. Especially telling is the fact that many of those objects were stolen from individuals who had either been burned to death or gassed nach dem Osten or whose lives had been so dislocated by the events of the war that they were in no position mentally or physically to lay claims on their cultural property for years and oftentimes decades.
These recycled objects have ended up in private hands or in public collections, When owners discover the present whereabouts of their missing property, they are faced with cynical bureaucratic obstructions and a near absence of any basic mechanism to redress this historical wrong.
You might be interested to know that there are some similarities with Japanese Americans who had been interned by the American government from 1941 to 1945. After their release, they returned to what they thought was home and found out that their cultural property had been looted and resold by local and State authorities while they languished in remote desert camps across the American West. In 1948, the Federal Government signed an agreement with Japanese American groups pledging to restitute this property. Nothing came of it and it took another 35 years for the Supreme Court to rule in their favor and give them a sense of redress, however symbolic it may be.
It is fascinating to me to see how our government, busily extricating itself from a restitution policy that it had produced, articulated and endorsed for victims of genocide in Europe, was making false promises to US citizens of Japanese extraction that it had oppressed and confined and looted while waging war against the Axis.
How could such a government ever do justice to hundreds of thousands of impoverished Holocaust survivors who had reached our shores and become citizens? The American government, the government of my parents, which is now my government and that of my children, has repeatedly failed in its duty to safeguard the rights of these individuals dispossessed by the enemies of our nation in their attempt to recover their looted property, which our troops were busy locating and recovering, and especially when such property might have landed on US territory. The same can be said with equal fervor of all governments of postwar Europe who have seen fit for over 60 years to deny most victims of the war years the return of their property which sits in government warehouses and storage areas. An unknown percentage of this property was sold on private markets through State-sponsored auctions.
There is ample evidence of these institutional, systemic lapses way into the 1960s. In the United States, Ardelia Hall, a one-woman army at the US department of State, did her very thankless best for 16 long years to repair the historic wrongs wrought by the Nazis and Fascists and effect the return of thousands of objects to their rightful owners who had relocated to the US. She encountered numerous and frequent roadblocks placed before her by her own colleagues at State, and domestic agencies which were outside her jurisdiction and who would not cooperate with her inquiries. US museums stymied her every attempt to recover items that she had located in their collections, except for a notable few like the Detroit Museum of Fine Arts. More often than not, faced with museums’ refusal to cede title, she had no choice but to persuade the victim to accept a measly financial settlement as in the case of the Krakow-based Czartoryski family against the Wildenstein Gallery in New York and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. One of her signature accomplishments was the so-called Tripartite Agreement which brought together 12 nations in an agreement to compile lists of stolen objects and distribute them to hundreds of cultural and educational institutions in the United States and Europe, including museums, colleges, universities, and galleries, to facilitate the identification and return of looted objects. Copies of these lists have gathered multi-generational dust, abandoned on bookshelves, unattended, never consulted. Ardelia Hall retired from the US government in 1961 and died alone in 1974 in her home town of Amherst, Massachusetts.
For the past thirty years, the US State Department has received numerous inquiries from law firms representing American museums or individuals holding looted property or from museum directors themselves. All sought advice about what to do with these items in their collections. In the case of the late Eli Maurer who had worked at the Legal Advisor’s office at State, he would repeat over and over again the US government’s 1945 stance on restitution: “THEFT DOES NOT CONVEY TITLE.” Looted items in your collections must be returned to their rightful owners, Period, no discussion. Thank you very much. To no avail.
The Cold War did not help matters much. Governments on both sides of the Atlantic used it as an excuse not to pursue even symbolic efforts at restitution. Needless to say, there was no desire on anyone’s part to continue a policy that could only lead to embarrassment about past misdeeds and paint the cheeks of guilty officials tomato red. The art market had taken off in exponential numbers, museums were reshaping their raison d’etre, the Kennedy years came and went, a whole new generation was in the streets and in boardrooms, while a senseless war was being fought in Southeast Asia, civil rights and reform-minded leaders were being harassed and occasionally gunned down in American cities. The genocidal past of recent memory was on the verge of being forgotten.
Back to the Kennedy years. They were glamorous. They gave Washington a je ne sais quoi of importance, thanks to John and Jackie and Bobby. While John made history, Jackie remade the White House as is so often the case with a new administration. New politics, new furniture. Jackie loved 18th century French furniture and decorative items. She placed innumerable orders for such frivolous items in New York, with firms that, as fate should want it, had been fingered by Ardelia Hall as suspected of recycling loot from Nazi-occupied France. Since no central registries of looted property existed then and do not today, to aid in looted art investigations, it would not be easy to pinpoint whether Federal acquisitions of 18th century French items from New York interior decorating and antique businesses included Nazi loot.
By the time the looted art returned to the fore in the late 1990s, the Federal government had forsaken its past role as herald of restitution for the victims of Nazism and Fascism and had retreated into the wings, we should say disappeared, to let the market and the courts decide who should recover and who should not. There was and there is not a Federal policy on matters of restitution of looted cultural property. There are no Congressional mandates to safeguard the rights of Holocaust survivors and to mandate stricter due diligence on the part of actors in the art market. There are no fiscal consequences for dabbling in looted cultural property. No one will lose their tax exempt status if caught doing so.
And that’s the way it’s been.
Feeble attempts have been made to re-center the debate and show how forceful governments in the Americas and Europe can be when a cure must be found for injustice. International conferences are organized, much handwringing and backdoor squabbling at all hours permeates these assemblies of wise men, few women, from here and there, who come together to find a solution to the problem of restitution. The only good news about these conclaves is that they are the few opportunities available for officials and researchers and activists from across the globe to hobnob for several long days and nights and ‘keep the conversation going’ on matters of restitution. At a landmark conference in Washington, DC, in the early days of December 1998 these same officials, led by the US government, came up with a great proposal: a set of principles—the Washington Principles--that were non-binding but merely expressed the will of those who had gathered from here and far to do the right thing and see to it that justice should somehow prevail when next a looted item should appear at the doorstep of a museum or a gallery or some other entity. Do the right thing, we urge you. Do what is ethically and morally responsible but you won’t suffer if you don’t.
That was in December 1998. No sooner had the delegations of those 50-odd countries gone home, that everyone apparently forgot about what had actually been agreed to in Washington. Since then, there have been a plethora of conferences, symposia, colloquia, roundtables, square tables, meetings, conclaves, workshops, and, more importantly, court cases, one after the other, involving a wronged good faith purchaser against an aggrieved Holocaust survivor or her heir claiming property back after so many decades. Little by little, case law has developed in support or not of restitution while a small army of committed researchers has emerged in the Americas and in Europe to tackle in very modest and limited ways the massive amounts of historical research needed to untangle the web of complicities and dubious ownerships of looted works so as to ascertain who has the right to own them. They are underfunded, understaffed, overworked, in a very, very labor-intensive field where records and evidence are scattered about, even with all that is available on the Internet, including the database that I recently assembled of 20000 objects stolen in German-occupied France and Belgium.
Restitution or justice for the victim has been left to lawyers and judges. History has taken a back seat to the rule of law, a bit like taking a square peg and shoving it into a round hole. Not practical, not efficient, but there we are. Genocidal crimes distilled to fit into the strictures of a legal system unaffected by such traumatic events.
We’ve been operating like this for close to 20 years, in the name of justice. To be fair, justice has been done in a number of instances--at last count, not more than 50--where survivors or their heirs have prevailed in the courts, after years of battle against hardened, cynical, and self-righteous defendants, whether they be wealthy individuals, museums or galleries. Sam Dubbin and Tom Kline are perfect examples of lawyers using the courts to effect such justice.
Permit me to indulge in a now familiar and tiresome lament. Holocaust survivors are dying in growing numbers every day, their children and grandchildren have very little connection to their issues, sometimes they know, most times they don’t. The only ones who seem to be riding out the storm well and even better are the dealers, the collectors, the museums, the individual owners, the institutions that buy, sell, trade, display, and harbor these works and objects, which are visual and three-dimensional reminders of past genocidal and ethnocidal plunder. In at least 90 per cent of the cases, the crime of plunder has paid off and very well at that with handsome returns on the investment.
Where is our government today in all of this? I can actually tell you where it is. It’s standing behind the curtain. Hamlet, where are you when I need you most?
It prefers to hide its cowardly head in the sand of amnesia and indifference. It invokes non-binding, high-falutin’ principles, first uttered in Washington, then reiterated in Vilnius, and other European cities, to feel better about not doing much of anything for a dying generation of victims of genocide. The Prague Conference of June 2009 spelled disaster, not relief, for the remaining Holocaust survivors and their chance at getting any additional redress for their decades-old losses, especially when it comes to lost art and Judaica. To be perfectly cruel, I could sense in the hallways of the Prague Conference that there would be an immense sense of relief amongst the participants when the day would come that their business would turn exclusively to memorializing and remembering, not to recovering and returning.
It takes an act of courage, an act of will, an act of honest to goodness desire to do the ethically and morally right thing to make a small difference in this god forsaken world. There are no rewards for such behavior, the streets will not be paved with gold, but, if I have one wish today, it is for all of you to attempt a mitzvah in favor of restitution. It can take many forms, small, medium, large, depending on your capacity to endure and to do something thankless and altruistic.
That’s all we have today. What are our weapons of choice against government officials, well-to-do owners, many of them in our own community, museum directors and curators, college and university presidents, library directors, foundation chairs, retired military officers, so that they might do the right thing without putting up a senseless and unneeded fight?
Public embarrassment in the press, on blogs, on facebook, tweat them into the ground, or any other way of sending messages round the planet in a flash. Continual disclosure and exposure of looted objects in collections wherever they may be, held by whomever. The historical truth is what counts with no sugar coating. The object is either stolen or it is not. There is no in-between.
The truth, the historical truth, has to be told about the fundamental inequities of this system under which we operate, in the United States, in Europe, at the United Nations, at UNESCO, in al great fora of international justice and human rights. A system that forsakes ethics and morality and reinforces the immense capacity of elected and appointed officials here and everywhere to remain indifferent in the face of historic crimes that have never been properly redressed, that highlights their callous surrender to the foreign relations of their respective nations, which relegates the interests of an aggrieved class of traumatized, scarred individuals, the last living witnesses to a half century of genocide, to the peanut gallery of foreign policy establishments.
In my country, your country, our country, I would go as far as saying that, if I were to place some type of blame in front of anyone’s door, I would lay it squarely at the door of the leadership of our community, our Congress, our State Department, and the White House. Republicans, Democrats, no difference at all.
There is a point at which we have to wonder: what does it take to gain closure on this question, this problem of looted art? What does it take to feel good the next day and say: we’ve done it. We’ve gone as far as we could possibly go and we can live with ourselves, with the full knowledge that those who died for nothing except for what they were and not for who they were, can sleep at last. What will it take?
