Silences that are Hardly Golden

by Ori Z Soltes

edited by Marc Masurovsky

With the untimely passing of Elie Wiesel, my mind wanders back to issues that, over the years, I discussed with him, and things that I wrote about him. A consistent subject of both processes was the kind of responsibility Jews have to make the world a better, more justice-ridden place—in general, given the rabbinic and particularly Lurianic mystical imperative of tikkun olam (“repairing the world”), and in particular given what we as a group endured during the Holocaust. I confess that I confessed to him my disappointments at times in the failure of the Israeli or American Jewish communities to do this or that where they might have responded more positively or aggressively to a given situation. 

In one conversation with Mr. Wiesel I mused over what it is that too often prevented Jews from doing what I thought was the right thing. On the other hand, in one article that I was asked to write on “Who Speaks for the Jews?”—in which one of the figures I discussed was Elie Wiesel—the assertion that I offered was that there is nobody, per se, who plays that role in the Jewish world—there is no Pope or universally embraced political leader. One of the things that has historically prevented Jews from engaging in religious or political wars with each other on anything approaching the scale of the Crusades or the age of Religious Wars in Europe was the widespread diaspora—a thirteenth-century Jew in Germany would have been unlikely to know much about the gastronomy on Passover of Jews in Morocco, and therefore to have objected to it, much less spilled blood over it.

We remain a fractious community of communities today. Depending upon whom you ask and his/her spiritual and/or political affiliations, a given Jew may see his rabbi or his rebbe or the Prime Minister of Israel or the President of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) or the American Jewish Congress (AJC) —or a charismatic speaker, writer and Nobel Prize winner like Elie Wiesel—as the most appropriate figure to whom to turn for guidance regarding how to think, speak and act as a Jew. Non-Jews might think it’s the President of B’nai B’rith where few Jews are likely to think so. So it would be a surprise if we all agreed on what constitutes the “right thing” in a given situation.

There is some irony that one of Elie Wiesel’s first divergences, (following his memoir, Night), from writing novels, was his work—a personal journalistic reportage—regarding the plight of Soviet Jewry, called “The Jews of Silence.” Published in 1966, it was one of those important literary sources for inspiring Jews in America to speak up and speak out, because their oppressed co-religionists in the USSR could not. American Jews have not always been afraid to speak up, it seems.

The questions of contemporary Jewish silence in the face of injustice reminds me of another signal instance, more than fifteen years ago, when the same queries might be proffered. I refer to the attempt by the then District Attorney of Manhattan, Robert Morgenthau, to hold back two Egon Schiele paintings—“Dead City III” and “Portrait of Wally”—that had been on display at MOMA as part of a loan exhibition from the Leopold Museum in Vienna. Morgenthau sought to keep them from immediately heading back out of New York with the rest of the collection when the exhibit ended so that the claims put in by two Jewish families that these two paintings had been plundered from them by the Nazis—and that Dr. Kurt Leopold had acquired them with full knowledge of that fact—could be explored and adjudicated.

The museum community was up in arms: amicus briefs, both formal and informal flew fast and furiously. The museums challenged the validity of government interference in cultural matters. They argued the threat that the economic base of New York City would be deleteriously affected by this: that base, the assertion went, was heavily dependent on culture, specifically large-scale tourist visitation to New York’s art museums, and if the government was successful at holding back these two works, museums across the world would cease and desist from lending objects to New York museums, causing a dynamic shrinkage in loan exhibition quantity and quality, and thus of museum visitation and thus of the New York City economy.

All the museums joined this doleful chorus. My colleagues, Willi Korte and Marc Masurovsky and I, who had joined together to create the Holocaust Art Restitution Project (HARP) in September 1997, were on the other side of the fence. Willi had done and continued to do an enormous amount of research to validate the two families’ claims. Marc and I met with Robert Morgenthau to explain it—and to argue that the very assertion of the museum community was the proof of its fallaciousness: that art is big business, and that, unless one is pretty certain that one’s painting or sculpture is an ill-gotten good, one will not to hesitate to lend it to the Met or MOMA or the Guggenheim, knowing that art that has been on display in such places will exponentially increase in value.

All of the museums joined the chorus, including, of course, the doyenne of Jewish museums, the Jewish Museum of New York. Moreover, nobody among the “leadership” of the New York Jewish cultural and political communities spoke up on behalf of the claimants. The WJC really couldn’t, since its then vice-president—who in establishing the Committee on Art Recovery, announced that they would be “taking paintings off museum walls,” and might have been expected to speak up but could not—was the vice-president of MOMA’s Board and had put half a million of his own dollars into the project of bringing the Leopold Museum exhibition to MOMA. His quadruple conflict of interest—his role at MOMA vs his role at CAR vs his role in the WJC vs his earlier ambassadorship to Austria, shortened by the Austrians’ objections to his purchasing and carrying away the likes of Schiele paintings that they considered part of the Austrian patrimony, by diplomatic pouch—certainly explains his silence.

But why the Jewish Museum? What of the rest of the Jewish world? It was clear that, having spent so many decades trying to define itself as both a museum of Jewish history and culture and of art, and closer than ever since the 1960s to being accepted as part of the art museum world without alienating the Jewish world (in the 1960s it had managed the first but not the second), the Jewish Museum did not want to oppose that art world and re-isolate itself—two paintings and two Jewish family claimants seemed a small price to pay for amicus brief acquiescence. (I am not even going to raise the question of provenance in the museum’s own collections).

And the Jewish community in general?

A pundit well over a century once observed—as Emancipation was gradually breaking down ghetto walls throughout Western and Central Europe and Jews found themselves more welcome into the mainstream of culture, socio-economics and even, almost, politics, between 1780 or so and World War I—that “you can take the Jew out of the ghetto, but you cannot take the ghetto out of the Jew.”

He meant the extreme care with which a Jew feels he must operate, in words and actions, not because a riot might sweep through the now-gone ghetto, but because full acceptance into the larger community and all of the advantages of being mainstream might be denied or retracted. Is that what the Jewish “leaders” of New York City were and still are afraid of, in an America whose principles of eschewing anti-Christian sentiment have always been under assault from some quarters? Where Jews could not run for political office in some places (the state of New Hampshire) until late into the nineteenth century? Are we still faced with fear of what the non-Jews will think about us—or has it resurfaced after a period, in the 1960s and 1970s when Jews marched in Selma, Alabama on behalf of Blacks and marched in New York City on behalf of Soviet Jews?

The question is not who speaks for the Jews these days, but how many and which Jews speak up when the situation is potentially awkward but when silence is acquiescence to the miscarriage of justice. We have justifiably become fond of pointing out—it was one of Elie Wiesel’s important contributions to our thinking about the Holocaust, and the specific subject of his third novel, The Town Beyond the Wall—that silent acquiescence is a form of passive collaboration. There is a particular irony when this issue falls into the context of Nazi-plundered art, when one considers the disturbing datum that Jewish dealers like Georges Wildenstein were often more than willing to see harm done to other Jewish dealers, like Paul Rosenberg, if it served art-dealing business needs—or that perhaps the key dealer on behalf of Hitler, Hildebrandt Gurlitt, was half-Jewish.

If the Jewish role in history and art history is a complex one, and if the role of art within the context of the Holocaust was complex (another long story for another time), then the failure of Jews to speak now, so many decades later, in too many contexts where the matter of restituting Nazi-plundered art to victims’ heirs is also complex, perhaps. Or perhaps simple: fear. Whatever the reasons, that failure would have rabbis like Isaac Luria—and no doubt Elie Wiesel—rolling in their graves.

Thoughts about provenance research, 1995-2016

by Marc Masurovsky

It has been almost twenty years, yes, 20, two times 10, 4 times 5, since “provenance research” entered the public sphere in the context of Holocaust-related matters.

Up to that time, no one uttered those two words who was not an art historian or an art expert and only in the most guarded ways. Provenance research had always been the exclusive province of art historians and, by extension, museum professionals and stewards of art collections.

Several events, when viewed cumulatively, can be blamed for upsetting the apple cart of provenance.

1/ the January 1995 “Spoils of War” International conference sponsored by the Bard [College] Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts. Although focused in part on Soviet “takings” of cultural objects which were located in their zone of military occupation in the waning months of WWII, the conference was an opportunity to revisit the massive looting of art objects by all sides, mostly by the Axis powers, during the Nazi era, the Holocaust and WWII. Implicit was the understanding that the provenance history of these mislaid, stolen, plundered, displaced art objects had been severely disrupted as a result of war, occupation, and genocide. In attendance were art historians, lawyers and government officials from a variety of countries.

2/ The Swiss bank crisis regarding Jewish dormant accounts emerged in 1995 initially pitting the World Jewish Congress and its president, Edgar Bronfman, against the Swiss Bankers Association. It exploded into a series of landmark hearings organized by Republican Senator Alfons d’Amato, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, and the launching of a class action suit by 22 American lawyers representing Holocaust survivors and their heirs whose assets were on deposit in Swiss banks. What did this have to do with provenance research? Writ large, the Swiss bank crisis paved the way for a more public discussion of the fate of Jewish assets held in various parts of Europe by institutions, financial and cultural, which had no business holding on to them. If anything, the debate over Swiss banking misdeeds called into question the illicit ownership of tangible assets misappropriated from their rightful owners, Jewish victims of Nazism.

3/ The “Eizenstat reports” of 1996 and 1997 on the (mis)handling of gold looted by the Nazis, sold and/or deposited in Swiss banks and in financial institutions in other so-called “neutral countries” during WWII. Although not focused on art, we can argue that the "provenance" of the gold looted by the Nazis lay at the center of the US government study of "looted gold" and the Swiss role in recycling it.

4/ the September 1997 international conference in Washington, DC on the “legal and moral consequences of art restitution” organized by Ori Z. Soltes, director of the Klutznick Museum of B’nai B’rith in Washington, DC, placed looted art and the challenges of postwar restitution squarely in the forefront of public debate over looted art. That conference witnessed the birth of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project (HARP).

4a/ The World Jewish Congress (WJC) announced the establishment of its own looted art project, the “Commission for Art Recovery", chaired by Ronald S. Lauder.

5/ the seizure of “Portrait of Wally” and “Night City III” by Egon Schiele at the Museum of Modern Art in January 1998 opened wide the doors on how looted art is able to travel, claimed and unrestituted, for decades and end up on loan at an eminent New York cultural institution.

6/ the Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets of December 1998 which produced the much heralded and reviled non-binding “Washington Principles”, acting as guidelines for handling “looted art”. Provenance research lay at the core of these principles.

7/ the legislating of a Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets (PCHA) which saw the light of day in June 1998, and opened its doors in spring of 1999. Art was one of three “assets” to be investigated by an executive commission until 2001. Excluded from consideration were looted art objects in the United States, a critical failure of the PCHA.

8/ the American Association of Museums and the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) enacted their own guidelines on how to handle art objects in their collections.

9/ the AAM published a “Guide to Provenance Research” co-authored by Nancy Yeide of the National Gallery of Art, Amy Walsh of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Konstantin Akinsha, author of “Beautiful Loot.”

In the space of five years, art historians found themselves “sharing” provenance research and with attorneys, government officials, non-art historians, researchers, Holocaust claimants and their advocates, and NGO’s concerned with the location, identification and restitution of art objects misappropriated between 1933 and 1945.

Once viewed as a discrete task limited to the scholarly documentation of the history of art objects, provenance research became politicized overnight with battle lines drawn over how far such research would go and what the ultimate goal of provenance research should be. Is it really about documenting and verifying who has good title to an object? Or should such questions not haunt an art historian’s quest for information about an object?

The debate still rages, the camps have solidified, alliances between American and German museum professionals are the latest incarnation of this struggle as museum professionals and “provenance researchers” on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean cement their strategic partnerships within the museum world. Outside that sphere are those who advocate a more ecumenical and interdisciplinary approach to provenance research, closely connected with political, economic and social history, the upheavals that they document, and using such research to right some wrongs and inject ethics into the stewardship of collections while shedding light on the mechanics of cultural plunder and helping to (re)write the history of art as seen through the distorted prism of mass conflict, dictatorship and genocide. Not pretty but necessary.

HARP and the Hopi Tribe

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.

Revisiting Senate Bill 2212—Part One

By Nikki Georgopulos, special to “plundered art”

There has been a great deal of opining and sounding off recently among lawyers, professors, art historians, and art-related organizations as to whether the Foreign Cultural Exchange Judicial Immunity Clarification Act, otherwise known as Senate Bill 2212 (S.2212), should be passed into law. Currently stuck in the Senate Judiciary Committee, the fact that no decision has been made has seemed only to increase the agonizing among those concerned.

The bill, introduced to the 112^th Congress in its second session in March 2012, would amend the judicial code concerning property rights and the protections of objects of “cultural significance” that is imported into the United States for the purposes of “temporary exhibition or display.” The key to understanding this relatively brief bill (it consists of less than 500 words) is to examine the other sections of US law with which it interacts. The most notable instance of this is the Immunity from Judicial Seizure Statute, otherwise known as Section 2459 of Title 22 of the US Code (commonly referred to as 22 USC 2459). Under the jurisdiction of the State Department, 22 USC 2459 “protects from seizure or other judicial process certain objects of cultural significance imported into the United States for temporary display or exhibition.”

The statute acts to guarantee foreign lenders (such as museums, private collections, educational institutions, etc.) that if they loan a cultural object to an institution within the United States, the lender is protected from any other claims of custody. That is to say, the object in question is protected by US law and granted immunity from seizure. The perceived benefit of 22 USC 2459 is that it encourages foreign lenders to send their cultural objects to the United States for exhibition, insofar as they can feel secure in the guarantee that the objects will be safely restored to their custody. This benefits museums and the American public in many obvious ways, and appeals to the “art as ambassador” argument that holds that the exchange of cultural objects supports cross-cultural understanding and cooperation. The problem, as many have pointed out, is that this protects objects that were obtained illicitly, whether by theft, looting, or illegal trade.

The proposed bill would act in accordance with the Immunity from Judicial Seizure Statute, but with one condition that has come to be known as the “Nazi exception.” The bill declares:

‘(2) NAZI-ERA CLAIMS- Paragraph (1) [which reiterates the protections provided under the Immunity from Judicial Seizure Statute] shall not apply in any case in which—

‘(A) the action is based upon a claim that the work was taken in Europe in violation of international law by a covered government during the covered period;

[…]

‘(3) DEFINITIONS- For purposes of this subsection--

‘(A) the term ‘work’ means a work of art or other object of cultural significance; and

‘(B) the term ‘covered government’ means--

‘(i) the Nazi government of Germany;

‘(ii) any government in any area occupied by the military forces of the Nazi government of Germany;

‘(iii) any government established with the assistance or cooperation of the Nazi government; and

‘(iv) any government that was an ally of the Nazi government of Germany; and

‘(C) the term ‘covered period’ means the period beginning on January 30, 1933, and ending on May 8, 1945.’.

To summarize, the so-called Nazi exception allows for suits to be filed that are based upon claims that the work in question was illegally obtained by the Nazi government or any Nazi-affiliated government during what the bill would define as the “Nazi Era” (January 30, 1933 to May 8, 1945). In other words, victims of Nazi theft and their heirs ostensibly retain the right to file a claim against a foreign lending institution in order to obtain their object.

Upon first glance, this would seem to not only make sense, but also be beneficial to those victims of the Nazi-era and their heirs who are seeking restitution. As it turns out, this is where things become seriously problematic. Many, such as cultural heritage lawyer Rick St. Hilaire, believe that S.2212 sufficiently protects both claimants and lending institutions, reaffirming the US’s commitment to protecting the cultural objects of foreign lenders. St. Hilaire’s points about the need to reassure foreign lending institutions, thus encouraging further lending, are well taken, and are commonly expressed in the art world today. However, other figures in the cultural heritage protection community are not so sure. According to a post on the website of the organization Saving Antiquities for Everyone (SAFE), the bill “sends an awful message that is in complete opposition to the U.S. commitment to cultural protection and preservation.”

SAFE rightly points out that the bill does not protect antiquities that were illegally excavated and exported from their countries of origin. This might be overlooked if there wasn’t staggering evidence that illicitly obtained antiquities have permeated the licit art trade in large quantities (Part Two of this article will cover this aspect in more detail), such as the recent scandal that overtook the J. Paul Getty Museum.  

Another concern is one that strikes many as ethically questionable, as the bill seems to create a sort of hierarchy of atrocities. In a post by Catherine Sezgin on the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art’s blog, HARP co-founders Marc Masurovsky and Ori Z. Soltes both expressed concern that while the bill seemingly protects against Nazi-era claims, other instances of wartime looting are overlooked. Masurovsky further expressed his frustration in a New York Times piece, asking, “How can you excuse 28 different kinds of plunder and only outlaw one subset of one subset? What is the point here? The only people who have anything to gain are the museum directors. So we’re basically saying it’s fine to plunder?” Indeed, to say that losses sustained during the Second World War are the only ones worth protecting is not only ethically remiss, but also legally problematic.

Setting aside the concerns of many about the exclusive nature of the bill, one is forced to ask, how effective is the bill in protecting Holocaust-era victims and their heirs? The language of the bill allows for many loopholes and exclusions that would prevent those seeking restitution from successfully filing claims. Reading through the bill, the first and perhaps most consequential item of concern comes in section A of Paragraph 2: “[Judicial immunity] shall not apply in any case in which […] the action is based upon a claim that the work was taken in Europe in violation of international law […].” The problem here is that while many of the thefts committed by the Nazis and related bodies have been deemed in violation of international law, there remains a gray about which national governments cannot seem to reach an agreement: that of forced sales.

While the bill covers property confiscations and estate seizures, there remains the question of those objects that were sold under duress by those trying to flee Europe for fear of persecution. The history is clear on this account; many prominent Jewish business people, particularly art collectors, dealers, and gallerists, had to sell off their belongings and collections in order to garner the funds necessary to escape Nazi Germany, France, and other Axis-controlled countries. Additionally, this extends to those who were not involved in the art community. Many German Jews, for example, faced serious economic hardship due to forcible exclusion from participating in the local economy. As a result, they were forced to sell family heirlooms in order to raise money for leaving the country and to provide for themselves and their families.

One possible explanation for why the forced sales question is so difficult to pin down is that it is difficult to provide evidence for what constitutes a sale under duress versus a normal sale. Because of this perceived ambiguity in cases of forced sales, there is no unifying policy that would fall under the category of “international law” to protect the rights of claimants filing for restitution of objects lost to forced sales.

The other major red flag in the bill comes directly after the aforementioned clause: “[Judicial immunity] shall not apply in any case in which […] the action is based upon a claim that the work was taken in Europe in violation of international law by a covered government during the covered period […]” (emphasis added). Paragraph 3 provides the definitions of the covered governments and period:

‘(B) the term ‘covered government’ means--

‘(i) the Nazi government of Germany;

‘(ii) any government in any area occupied by the military forces of the Nazi government of Germany;

‘(iii) any government established with the assistance or cooperation of the Nazi government; and

‘(iv) any government that was an ally of the Nazi government of Germany; and

‘(C) the term ‘covered period’ means the period beginning on January 30, 1933, and ending on May 8, 1945.’.

The bill makes it very clear that it is targeting those affected by the Nazi or otherwise Axis-associated governments. This overlooks a key group of claimants: those whose possessions were taken by Allied military agents. The unfortunate truth is that while the Allies, specifically the US, were responsible for preserving many of the art objects looted by the Nazis and related organizations, so too were they responsible for thefts of their own. Many soldiers took home what they may have considered to be harmless keepsakes. Some scholars posit that Jewish soldiers took Judaica as an act of protest or anger. In any case, a vast number of art objects were poorly protected and were easily targeted. Due to the fact that S.2212 specifies that only those claimants who will be considered are those who were affected specifically by Axis governments, Allied-looted objects remain protected. Additionally, there is evidence that looting by Axis forces continued after May 8, 1945 as German troops were returning home (particularly from Italy). This further weakens the bill’s claim to protecting victims of World War II-era losses.

Though ostensibly well intentioned, S.2212 has obvious weaknesses and carries immense consequences for not only claimants but also the rest of the art community. Part Two of this piece will feature multiple voices who will chime in to help tease out those consequences. It will also examine more closely the antiquities market and how S.2212 will interact with it if passed into law, as well as the potential interaction of the bill with the State Department’s application system for judicial immunity for cultural objects. Among the most troubling of these consequences is the potential for obfuscation of provenance of art objects that are crossing US borders under the aegis of this bill.

In the meantime, if you find yourself in the D.C. area, there is a discussion that is scheduled to take place tomorrow, October 19, 2012, that will cover S.2212 and related legislation featuring Marc Masurovsky. He will give a lecture entitled “Art, Antiquities & War: Is Our Obsession to Possess Art Above the Law.” The lecture and discussion will also be covered in Part Two of the article. For more information and advance ticketing, visit the event page.'

Wild Weekend with Wally—Part One

Self-Portrait, by Egon Schiele, 1912
Source: Google Images

No, it’s not what it sounds like. I did not spend a wild weekend with Wally. 

Portrait of Wally, by Egon Schiele, 1912
Source: Google Images

The Wally in question is “The Portrait of Wally”, a new documentary which was screened at the TriBeCa Film Festival in New York, on April 28 and 29, 2012, and directed by Andrew Shea and co-produced by David D’Arcy and Barbara Morgan. Morgan and Shea hail from Austin, TX. D’Arcy is a veteran reporter, formerly affiliated with National Public Radio (NPR) who has filed many stories about the international art market especially in regard to looted art in American collections.

The Wally of which we speak is the now-iconic portrait of a Viennese woman, Walburga Neuzil, who was the mistress of the man who painted her, Egon Schiele. The painting dates from 1912. Schiele created it as a pendant to a self-portrait executed that same year, six years before his untimely death caused by the Spanish flu. Both works currently hang on the walls of the Leopold Museum in Vienna, Austria.

And that is the end of the story.

There would have been no “Wally Story” had this Schiele painting not been stolen from its rightful owner, Lea Bondi Jarai, a Viennese Jewish gallery owner.

Lea Bondi Jarai
Source: ArtsJournal

The thief was a self-avowed Nazi art collector and dealer, Friedrich Welz, who had become emboldened by the March 1938 Anchluss-the willing absorption of Austria into Hitler’s Greater German Reich. This would have been yet another story of Nazi thefts of cultural assets belonging to Jews had it not been for an unscrupulous art dealer and collector named Rudolf Leopold, who with his wife, Elisabeth, built up one of the world’s largest postwar collections of works by Egon Schiele, a collection that verges on idolatry and self-aggrandizing fetishism. By the time the Leopolds had “acquired” Wally through an illegal exchange with a leading Viennese museum in the 1950s, Lea was living in exile in London where she had resumed her art trading activities. She died in 1969, heartbroken at not having recovered the painting which she continually sought in the postwar years, pleading with Leopold to help her. Unbeknownst to her, Leopold now possessed it, despite the lies that he had spewed at her to disguise his machinations aimed at deceiving her so as to be able to acquire Wally and make her his to possess forever.

Rudolf Leopold
Source: The Arts Newspaper

Elisabeth Leopold
Source: Google Images

The story could have just ended there in all of its sordid details, a story of unremitting greed and lust displayed by a Viennese couple enraptured with Schiele’s works, who had openly flirted with and benefited from the Nazi years and the postwar continuum of Nazi influence in Austrian society, taking full advantage of the plight of Viennese Jews to build up their Schiele collection, revered the world over, in particular by American collectors and dealers, most explicitly those centered in New York City.

The official story of what we have come to know as the Wally Case entered its prelude in October 1997 when the Leopold Museum exhibited its treasures at the Museum of Modern Art, whose chairman, Ronald Lauder, was a self-admitted Schiele fan and collector. Needless to say, the exhibit was a success but the presence of Wally on its walls ruined it all for MoMA, for its director, Glenn Lowry, for Leopold, and especially for the Bondi family, next of kin of Lea Bondi Jaraj, who had discovered that the painting was in the United States exhibited under their very noses, with a provenance worthy of a second-rate work of fiction—no mention of Lea’s true ownership of the work, a fictitious sequence of individuals who had nothing to do with the painting’s pedigree. But, as we know, provenances, more often than not, are mere adornments, however fanciful they might be.

Willi Korte
Source: Zimbio

The “Wally case” began after the Bondis attempted to clarify the true ownership of the work and failed to convince MoMA’s leadership and Leopold to engage in a dialogue over the ownership of the painting so as to determine its fate. After numerous futile attempts, MoMA invited the Bondi heirs to sue them in order to prevent the painting from leaving the US and returning to Vienna where there would have been no “fair hearing.”

Willi Korte,  veteran researcher, historian, jurist and investigator of looted cultural property and a co-founder of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project (HARP) helped Henri Bondi get his research ducks in order to prepare for a full-frontal campaign to get Wally back. Others like Marc Masurovsky, Ori Soltes and their legal counsel, Jeanine Benton, also of HARP, were urging Senate Banking Committee staff, Jewish organizations and law enforcement agencies to step into the breach and do “something” to keep the painting in the US.

By early January 1998, it didn’t look good. After Senator D’Amato demanded the seizure of the collection, he recused himself almost as dramatically, having received a phone call from one of his most ardent campaign donors who asked him to reconsider his rash statement. And so he did. US Customs—now ICE—in the person of Special Agent Bonnie Goldblatt were ready to pounce but were left out in the cold because of D’Amato’s sudden withdrawal and the equally callous abandonment by other Federal officials at State and Commerce who had ruled that this was indeed a private matter which should not require official American governmental interference that might intrude on the good relations between the United States and Austria.

Special Agent Bonnie Goldblatt
Source: ArtsJournal

Robert Morgenthau
Source: Google Images

All this to say that all five of us were rather alone that first week of January, dismayed at the cowardice displayed by elected and appointed officials alike, the cynicism of the art world, and the apparent indifference of American Jewish groups including the World Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Committee, who refused to lift a finger on behalf of the Bondis, the legitimate heirs of a victim of Nazi persecution. Is it a coincidence that the chairman of the board of MoMA was also the secretary-treasurer of the WJC? We’ll leave that alone for now…

The last hope was Robert Morgenthau, District Attorney of Manhattan. He emerged as the ultimate mensch of the Wally story, consistent with his lineage—a grandfather, Harry, who had blown the whistle on Ottoman massacres of Armenian civilians in 1915 before resigning as a foreign service official during President Wilson’s tenure; a father, Henry, Treasury Secretary under Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) and the most ardent anti-Nazi member in FDR’s government—its only “cabinet Jew.”

HARP forwarded a set of documents to Morgenthau’s office before and after New Year’s of 1998 outlining the weaknesses of MoMA and Leopold’s position—in their haste to exhibit the Schiele works, MoMA and Leopold had forgotten to “immunize” or shield the collection against any possibility of legal challenges arising from claims to rightful ownership while the works were on display in the United States—a foreshadowing of the proposed Senate Bill 2212 currently stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee. The paintings were thus vulnerable to any legal action taken against them on US territory, especially arising out of a claim of rightful ownership. For Morgenthau, the presence of stolen property in his jurisdiction was, in his own words, “unacceptable.”

During that first week of January 1998, the skies were bleak, the prospect of a fair hearing for the Bondi heirs seemed more like a remote fantasy than an impending reality. With no one left to uphold their interests, MoMA and Leopold were about to breathe a sigh of relief, except that they did not factor in the unlikely and outrageous possibility that something drastic might just prevent the paintings from leaving the United States. On January 7, 1998, Morgenthau obtained the necessary legal instruments by which to order the seizure of Wally and another painting, Dead City III, until the ownership of these works could be clarified. The men in blue entered MoMA’s front doors on 53rd Street and made arrangements to have Wally and Dead City III sequestered. For the first time in recent memory, an American official had directly intervened with a cultural event in an American museum by ordering the seizure of works on loan for display there.

End of Part One.

Jeudi 4 septembre 1997: colloque sur les conséquences juridiques et morales des restitutions d’oeuvres et d’objets d’art, Washington, DC

Un extrait de la conférence/colloque qui s'est tenue le jeudi 4 septembre 1997 à 9h30 sur les conséquences juridiques et morales des restitutions d’oeuvres et d’objets d’art dans la grande salle de l’Hôtel Ritz-Carlton, 2100 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, à Washington, DC.

C’est Ori Z. Soltes, directeur du Musée national juif du B’nai B’rith qui ouvre la conférence. Marvin Kalb, célèbre journaliste et commentateur de la télévision américaine, que l’on peut reconnaître instantanément par la cravate rouge vif qu’il porte, présente les différents interlocuteurs invités à participer à ce colloque. Ils sont :

Konstantin Akinsha, journaliste et conseiller à la rédaction du magazine ‘Art News’ et titulaire d’un doctorat de l’Institut d’histoire de l’art de l’Université d’Etat de Moscou

Monique Bourlet, directrice du bureau qui gère les collections des musées de France, dont 2000 œuvres qui ont fait l’objet de nombreuses discussions récemment.

Stuart Eizenstat, sous-secrétaire d’Etat aux questions économiques, agricoles et commerciales et envoyé spécial du Président Bill Clinton sur les demandes de restitution de titres de propriété en Europe de l’Est et centrale.

Hector Feliciano, auteur du ‘Musée disparu’, fruit d’une enquête de sept ans sur les pillages artistiques du Reich.

Robert Fohr, directeur de la communication pour les musées de France

Michael Hausfeld, avocat de la partie civile contre les banques suisses.

William Honan, correspondant national du New York Times pour les questions de l’enseignement supérieur, et auteur d’un livre qui vient de sortir, intitulé « Treasure Hunt » [Chasse au trésor]

Willi Korte, juriste allemande, spécialiste des restitutions d’œuvres spoliées

Jim Leach, député républicain, président de la Commission bancaire de la Chambre des Représentants

Constance Loewenthal, administratrice de l’International Foundation for Art Research [IFAR]

Nita M. Lowey, député démocrate, circonscription de Westchester, NY

Marc Masurovsky, chercheur et auteur du rapport du Ministère des Finances américain sur le rôle de cette agence durant et après la Seconde Guerre Mondiale dans la quête et l’élimination des biens nazis à l’étranger. Il sert également d’interprète pour les deux délégués du gouvernement français, Monique Bourlet et Robert Fohr.

Lynn Nicholas, auteur du ‘Rape of Europa’

Ori Z. Soltes, directeur du Musée National Juif Klutznick, au B’nai B’rith.

Thomas E. Starnes, avocat qui travaille gratis pour les demandeurs d’œuvres spoliées

Gary Vikan, directeur de la Walters Art Gallery à Baltimore

La séance commence officiellement à 9h40. Ori prend la parole :

« Cinquante ans après la fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, l’Europe continue de se refaire en posant des questions troublantes qui ressurgissent des pages jaunies de la mémoire de l’Holocauste.

Les victimes, juives et non-juives, l’or volé en dépôt dans les coffres des banques suisses, font partie d’un cadre plus large portant sur les complicités et les expressions d’innocence, d’un côté, et les vénalités, de l’autre.

La Suisse a occupé pendant un certain temps l’avant-scène médiatique, sur les questions de l’or volé… Néanmoins le public devient de plus en plus conscient des spoliations d’œuvres d’art, qu’il s’agisse de toiles provenant de collections françaises retrouvées en Allemagne, ou de toiles provenant de collections allemandes repérées dans l’ex-Union Soviétique… Ces dossiers nous obligent à définir ce que constituent les responsabilités morales et juridiques des gouvernements et des individus—commissaires d’expositions, marchands de tableaux, directeurs de musées, journalistes—face aux mouvements d’œuvres d’art spoliées il y a plus de cinquante ans.

Il faut que l’on définisse la portée historique de ces vols, qui s’étendent bien au-delà de la Shoah et de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. S’applique-t-elle aux antiquités du British Museum à Londres qui furent expédiées de la Grèce il y a plus de 190 ans ? S’applique-t-elle aux œuvres confisquées par la Corée il y a 50 ans, ou à une mosaïque qui fut retrouvée à Chypre il y a 20 ans ?

Est-ce que les lois actuelles suffisent pour fournir des réponses à ces questions ? Est-ce qu’un musée doit être tenu responsable pour produire une provenance absolument parfaite pour chaque œuvre qui se trouve dans ses collections ?

Kalb demande pourquoi se pose-t-on aujourd’hui la question des conséquences morales et juridiques des restitutions d’œuvres spoliées pendant la Shoah. Selon lui, les raisons en sont multiples : le siècle achève son cycle, les survivants et témoins de la Shoah se meurent. Peut-être la Shoah a redéfini les normes qui délimitent l’amoralité de l’homme—un phénomène qui doit être appréhendé, compris, et isolé, à moins qu’on ne lui permette de se répandre tel un virus de la haine au 21ème siècle.  Ou bien nous ressentons maintenant le besoin d’obtenir des réponses à des questions épineuses.

Kalb donne la parole à Monique Bourlet, pour laquelle je sers d’interprète. Elle explique le statut des quelques 2000 œuvres d’art qui bénéficient d’un statut particulier au sein des musées français : ces œuvres leur avaient été livrées à la fin de la guerre, et les autorités françaises examinèrent leur statut jusqu’en 1950. « J’ai dû examiner le statut juridique de ces œuvres d’art bien spéciales. Il est évident qu’elles peuvent être récupérées tant que l’on présente un document qui certifie que la personne demanderesse possède un droit de propriété légitime pour l’œuvre en question. » Elle poursuit : « Sur les 70 000 œuvres d’art découvertes en Allemagne qui furent spoliées en France, nous avons pu en rendre 45 000. En 1949, il y en avait pour lesquelles il était impossible d’établir un titre de propriété. Les musées décidèrent de les vendre en demandant que certaines soient mises de côté en raison de leur valeur. Il y en avait 2000 dans cette catégorie, les soi-disant MNR. » D’après Bourlet, les recherches s’intensifient dans les fonds d’archives pour établir l’identité des propriétaires de ces œuvres, en vue de leur restitution éventuelle. Ces œuvres, il s’avère, avaient été vendues pendant la guerre. »

Robert Fohr, directeur de la communication pour les musées de France, ajoute :

« On nous a accusé d’avoir caché ces œuvres, ce que contredisent les faits. On a fait tout notre possible pour les restituer. »

Kalb demande à Feliciano d’intervenir sur la question des MNR :

« En dépit de ce qui a été dit, il était très difficile d’obtenir un inventaire de ces objets et une provenance détaillée pour chacun. Enfin de compte, j’ai dû tout faire moi-même et j’ai pu retracer le parcours de certains tableaux. Au Centre Pompidou, par exemple, il y a 40 tableaux qui doivent être restitués. Environ 90 pour cent de ces tableaux ont été spoliés. L’un d’eux appartient à la famille Kann. C’est tout ce que je voulais dire pour le moment. Mais je ne sais pas si j’aurai le temps de parler d’autre chose. »

Kalb : « Ne vous en faites pas. Vous en aurez l’occasion. »

Feliciano : « Ah bon ? »

Kalb : « Mais, oui. »

Feliciano : « Ah ! Ce n’était qu’une discussion. Je comprends… »

La parole est maintenant à Konstantin Akinsha qui se spécialise dans les évènements d’Europe de l’Est. Il décrit une exposition d’art spolié qui s’est tenu au Musée Pouchkine de Moscou en 1995, intitulée « Sauvés deux fois. » Akinsha note que ces œuvres ont été volées, tout d’abord, par les Allemands aux juifs hongrois, puis par l’Armée Rouge et expédiées derechef en Union Soviétique à la fin de la guerre. Donc, il propose un nouveau titre pour l’exposition : « Spoliées deux fois » ce qui fait rire l’audience.

Akinsha maintient que des squelettes existent dans toutes les armoires de l’Europe sur la question des restitutions d’œuvres spoliées. A ses yeux, toute solution au problème des restitution se trouve ancrée dans le droit international et au niveau des Etats européens.

Puis Kalb se tourne vers moi, me remercie de servir comme interprète. Toutefois, il me rappelle que je suis présent parce que j’ai quelques mots à dire sur la restitution des œuvres d’art spoliées. Je prends donc la parole.

J’insiste surtout sur le fait que des milliers d’œuvres d’art spoliées ont traversé l’océan et intégrées aux Etats-Unis de nombreuses collections particulières, y compris celles tenues par des musées. « J’apprécie les commentaires de M. Akinsha, mais puisque ces œuvres se trouvent aussi aux Etats-Unis, le problème incombe également aux tribunaux américains où les demandeurs ont le droit de se faire entendre et obtenir gain de cause. C’est tout ce que je vais dire pour l’instant. »

Akinsha : «Vous dites que des milliers d’œuvres d’art ont fait leur apparition sur le marché américain. Est-ce que vous pouvez le prouver ? »

Masurovsky : « Pour l’instant, les preuves sont circonstantielles, mais ce que je peux vous affirmer, c’est que toutes les flèches pointent vers l’est, selon de nombreux documents d’archives. »

Akinsha : « Quels documents ? »

Masurovsky : « OSS, Ministère des Finances, Département d’Etat, documents émanant du gouvernement français. »
Kalb : « C’est très bien que vous puissiez vous interviewer mais ce serait préférable que cela se fasse à la fin des premières interventions. »
La salle s’esclaffe.

Masurovsky : « Avec plaisir. »

Kalb se tourne vers Lynn Nicholas qui remémore ce qu’elle perçoit comme des acquis positifs sur la question des restitutions. Tout d’abord, la résistance de nombreuses personnalités du monde de l’art face aux déprédations nazies, en particulier les administrateurs de musées européens, y compris ceux de certains musées allemands. « N’oublions pas aussi les efforts sans égal des forces armées alliées et des commissions de récupération artistiques organisées par les pays libérés. Leurs activités durèrent près de vingt ans après la fin de la guerre. Tous ces efforts produisirent des milliers de restitutions à leurs propriétaires attitrés. Bien évidemment, les procédures de restitution n’étaient pas toujours équitables, mais pensez donc aux complications résultant du déracinement de ces œuvres et de leur mobilité. Ces jours-ci, on appelle cela, « le phénomène du déracinement mobile. »

Nicholas remarque que le marché de l’art fut en pleine efflorescence pendant la guerre. « Des milliers d’objets étaient achetés et vendus et troqués dans tous les pays occupés, par toutes sortes de gens…Ces œuvres circulaient partout… Beaucoup d’objets ont fini dans les Amériques dès la fin des années trente, et ont été vendues ici, la plupart du temps légalement par leurs propriétaires, mais de temps en temps les mandataires ont trahi la confiance des propriétaires. Des objets ont survécu dans des cachettes improvisées comme les toiles d’une Rothschild qui furent enterrées dans une dune de sable sur une plage française. On ne sait plus laquelle… »

Pour finir, Nicholas met en garde ses collègues avec lesquels elle partage le podium : « En général, lorsqu’on découvre un objet que l’on suppose être spolié, il est trop facile de conclure qu’il doit être restitué sans savoir si son propriétaire légitime l’a récupéré après la guerre et les circonstances de ses déplacements. » Elle conclut en mettant en garde contre les chasses aux sorcières dénuées de fondement.

Tom Starnes, avocat, membre du cabinet d’Andrews et Kurth à Washington, DC, représente les héritiers Goodman contre M. Searle, milliardaire détenteur d’un pastel de Degas qui appartenait à leur grand-père ? ou grand-oncle, Fritz Gutmann, et qui refuse de le rendre. Néanmoins, Starnes pense que les tribunaux américains sont favorables à un règlement des contentieux concernant les restitutions d’œuvres d’art. La doctrine fondamentale à la base de ces procédures stipule que l’acte de spoliation n’accorde aucun droit de propriété au spoliateur, donc le possesseur d’un objet spolié non-restitué n’est pas le propriétaire légitime de l’objet spolié. Par contre, en Europe, les droits de l’acheteur de bonne foi prévalent souvent et accordent au détenteur d’un objet spolié les mêmes droits qu’à un propriétaire légitime.

C’est au tour de Constance Loewenthal, directrice de l’International Foundation for Art Research, future directrice de la Commission for Art Recovery, présidée par Ron Lauder, dont l’annonce surviendra trois semaines plus tard. Selon Melle. Loewenthal, « les vols d’œuvres d’art durant l’Holocauste peuvent être remédiés parce que les chefs-d’œuvre ont l’habitude de survivre aux pires calamités puisque leur valeur ne cesse d’augmenter. »

Le journaliste américain, Bill Honan, nous rappelle tous que 20 millions de personnes sont mortes pendant la Deuxième guerre mondiale (un chiffre bien trop conservateur, puisque le chiffre officiel se rapproche des 55 millions de morts) et qu’il ne faut pas mettre sur le même plan les vols commis par les troupes américains lors de la libération de l’Europe et les spoliations nazies. C’est lui qui dénicha, avec l’aide de Willi Korte, le fameux trésor de Quedlinguen au domicile d’un ancien combattant américain qui s’était retiré au tréfonds du Texas.

Quant à Gary Vikan, directeur du Walters à Baltimore, il s’attarde longuement sur les difficultés qu’éprouvent les dirigeants des musées lorsqu’il s’agit d’acquérir un objet pour leurs collections. Conscients de l’origine de l’objet, doivent-ils le rejeter parce qu’il provient d’une source douteuse ? ou devraient-ils l’intégrer dans leur collection en raison de sa beauté et de son importance historique et esthétique, quitte à embraser certaines personnes ?

Mon camarade, Willi Korte, se veut modeste. Néanmoins …. Affichant un certain scepticisme, Korte prend ses distances eu égard à Akinsha et sa foi en un règlement des restitutions par application du droit international. Comme l’indique Korte, la plupart des pays européens préfèrent invoquer leur code civil pour résoudre les questions de restitutions, ce qui favorise l’acquéreur de bonne foi. Donc, selon lui, il faut faire pression sur les gouvernements eux-mêmes pour qu’ils modifient leurs lois afin que les spoliés puissent se faire entendre dans leurs tribunaux.

Pour la première fois depuis le début de la conférence, Korte fait état des spoliations de biens juifs bien avant le déclenchement de la guerre. D’après lui, documents à l’appui, les ressortissants allemands d’origine juive se voient contraints de céder leurs biens à des prix cassés ou de les abandonner purement et simplement par crainte de représailles ou d’arrestation. Il admet que, depuis qu’il travaille sur ces questions depuis près de dix ans, il est inondé de requêtes d’aide venant d’anciens déportés ou d’héritiers de familles qui avaient fui le Reich, puis l’Europe nazie, laissant toutes leurs possessions derrière eux. Il espère qu’un organisme international puisse prendre en charge les demandes qui affluent sur son bureau pour que la petite vieille dame bien aimable du quartier soit en mesure de récupérer son bien après plus de 60 ans.

Entre en scène M. Stuart Eizenstat qui nous flatte de sa présence car il faut qu’il nous quitte presqu’aussitôt. Son calendrier, voyez-vous, est très chargé. Après un échange de plaisanteries avec Kalb, Eizenstat entame son petit discours qui, je dois le dire, n’a rien à voir avec le sujet de notre colloque, excepté vers la fin lorsqu’il mentionne les spoliations de biens culturels. Mais il saisit l’occasion pour nous rappeler ses travaux laborieux concernant les mouvements de lingots et de pièces d’or monétaire saisis par les Nazis et qui contiendraient les restes des bijoux que possédaient des centaines de milliers d’hommes et de femmes juives anéanties dans les camps de la mort.

Il mentionne les travaux de la Commission Mattéoli concernant les biens spoliés en France. D’après lui, « Il est certain que des œuvres d’art appartenant à des personnes juives ou à la communauté juive se trouvent dans les musées de France, dont le Louvre » et que le gouvernement français s’engage à restituer ces œuvres ou «prendre les mesures nécessaires pour que ces œuvres soient identifiables. »  Ici règne une certaine ambiguïté. Après tout, soit on restitue soit on ne restitue rien. Il est vrai qu’en France, la direction de la communauté juive favoriserait une restitution morale, autrement dit, la reconnaissance du pillage, l’admission du crime, peut-être un acte pédagogique qui commémore la mémoire des victimes, sans qu’il n’y ait de cession de biens favorisant le spolié. Le commentaire d’Eizenstat me laisse coi, car je me demande ce qui se passe dans les coulisses du Département d’Etat et ce que mijote le groupe Mattéoli. Enfin, il faut que je continue d’interpréter pour Mme. Bourlet et M. Fohr.

Tout le monde applaudit le discours élongué de M. Eizenstat qui nous quitte, comme prévu. Kalb annonce la suppression de la pause-café de 15 minutes dans l’intérêt du colloque qui entre dans sa phase de discussion ouverte.