More on restitution in postwar Italy

by Marc Masurovsky

Reviewed and updated on 4 November 2025

Renewed attention is being given to the scope and breadth of objects of art plundered by the Nazis and their allies which entered the art market in Italy during the fateful years of the Third Reich and beyond. An upcoming seminar to be held in Milan on 23 June 2011 is being co-sponsored by the global auction house, Christie’s, and the Art Law Commission of the Union Internationale des Avocats (UIA). It will bring together international specialists and lawyers adept at working on art restitution cases including the New York law firm of Herrick, Feinstein, and the Commission on Art Recovery (CAR).

The goal is to paint a broad picture of the state of affairs in postwar Italy regarding the restitution of Holocaust-era looted art, what can be done about improving the climate of restitution in a country that has long prided itself for having taken the lead in the search for and recovery of works of art forcibly removed from its territory.

And therein lies the rub…

Successive Italian governments—and there have been a great many of them!—have focused their attention almost exclusively on the plunder initiated by Nazi Germany when it sent its troops deep into Italy after the removal of Mussolini in 1943. Hence, the official window of plunder in Italy has always been considered to be a ‘foreign’ affair, the responsibility for which must be laid at Germany’s feet between 1943 and 1945. Moreover, in a cynical move to prevent plundered art from leaving the country, the Italian government appears to be commingling all plundered art as 'cultural property.' Should that be the case, this signals an ominous turn against the possibility of recovering Holocaust-era cultural goods found in Italy.

Convenient… 

In 1922, Benito Mussolini led a March on Rome which heralded the rise to power of Fascism, an authoritarian, one-party system. It remained firmly entrenched in the Italian boot for 21 years until German troops invaded their Fascist ally and forced Mussolini out of power. 

In 1938, the Fascist government edicts the so-called “Manifesto of Race” which defines who is a Jew, aping the Nazi government and foreshadowing Vichy’s contribution to anti-Semitic legislations by two years. From that time on, Jews are no longer safe in Italy, nor is their property. 

After the Germain invasion of summer 1943, Mussolini became the nominal head of the Salo Republic, governed by hard-core dye-in-the-wool Fascist unrepentants who spent most of their time plundering and fighting the Partisans, Meanwhile, the Nazi occupiers went to work deporting thousands of Jews from Italy to concentration and extermination camps in Eastern Europe.

Republic of Salo, 1943-1945

During that time frame, the Fascist Party ran amok against its opponents, harassing them, arresting them, imprisoning them, and when it deemed fit, murdering them “while trying to escape.” Many others were forced into exile or confined to the ‘villeggiatura’, a semblance of house arrest in the deep rural south of Italy for anti-Fascist intellectuals. All the while, opponents’ property was seized, stolen, and reincorporated into the economy of Fascist Italy, if it didn’t end up in the homes of prominent Fascist dignitaries.

Hence, the questions that should be asked at this seminar bear especially on the 21 years of Fascist rule, including 5 years of Fascist Italian anti-Jewish persecutions and expropriations.

The art market

Italy remained an open market, regardless of Fascist strictures, importing and exporting and doing business with countries around the globe. The Italian art world continued to maintain good relations with its neighbors, buying, selling, and trading. As it turns out, Italy was a convenient place for Nazi dealers and museum officials to meet up with their counterparts in Italy and from other countries.

During the height of the anti-Jewish persecutions in German-occupied Europe, Italian art dealers were more than happy to accept as payment, in lieu of cash, works of art which Nazi officials did not deem suitable for their collections, especially modernists. Where did those works go?

As importantly, Northern Italy was a hotbed of smuggling and contraband of all manners of commodities, including art, during the period of German occupation, activities often supervised by Nazi intelligence operatives, the most notorious being Freddy Schwend, based in Merano.

And one should not forget the Vatican, which curried favor to all sorts of authoritarian, racialist regimes in the 1930s and 1940s, enabling safe passage in the late 1940s and 1950s for untold numbers of Axis collaborators and plunderers on their journeys across the Mediterranean Sea and into the Americas, under the pretext that they had solid anti-Communist credentials.

On a final note, Italy came up during the May 6-7, 2011, World War II Provenance Research Seminar in Washington, DC, within the framework of an ambitious project overseen by the National Gallery of Art to fully document the acquisitions made by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.  The Count Contini-Bonacossi had been Mr. Kress' 'art advisor'.  Contini-Bonacossi's credentials placed him as a major Italian art dealer with privileged ties to Hitler and Goering's minions as well as with their intermediaries operating in German-occupied France, Belgium, and Holland.  Something to keep in mind...

Sources:

Map of Republic of Salo courtesy of https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Italian_social_republic_map.png

Photo of Benito Mussolini courtesy of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini

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

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

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

Who came?

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

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

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

What’s new?

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

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

Discrimination through art history

Not to make a big deal about this, but…

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

What is to be done?

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

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

Last but not least…

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

A parting shot

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