Is Switzerland changing the way it views Nazi looted art?

by Marc Masurovsky 

Here we are in the early days of 2022, looking back at 2021 and wondering if anything good came of it, notwithstanding the pandemic, the million plus deaths from COVID-19 alone, the repeated closures of public and private institutions, the inability to travel safely, the high-stakes gamble everyone of us faces when we go shopping, mingle in public places, take public transportation in order to escape from our confinement at home while we dodge the wily virus. It knows no borders, harbors no partisan bias and treats everyone equally without due regard to age, gender, occupation, faith and political affiliation.

What’s going on in Switzerland? 

In December 2021 alone, a number of developments have reshaped the restitution map in Switzerland as reported in the Swiss and international press. Two names have largely taken over center stage in the Nazi looted art story and the way it permeates life in Switzerland: Gurlitt and Bührle. The former has been ubiquitous since the transfer to the Kunstmuseum Bern of the estate of the late Cornelius Gurlitt who bequeathed his collection to the Bern Museum—the remnants that he had inherited from his father, Hildebrand Gurlitt. The estate consisted of more than 1400 works, mostly on paper, which Gurlitt, Sr., had amassed throughout the Nazi era and in the immediate postwar years (he died in 1956). Gurlitt, Jr., gradually dissipated its contents as his sole source of income with which he eased himself into old age.

Kunstmuseum Bern

Cornelius Gurlitt

Since 2014, the Kunstmuseum Bern has weathered international criticism over its acceptance of the Gurlitt estate. Could it have turned down the bequest? The Gurlitt collection, it must be said, has been a toxic affair from the get-go as Bern has had to learn to coexist with the indelible Nazi taint that accompanied the works. Its only way out was to take the bull by the horns and to make a conscious and very public attempt at researching the origins of each work—an exercise in due diligence, something we expect from any museum, large or small. Even more frightening was the possibility that tainted items had to be restituted, something that Swiss museums have been loath to do since the late 1940s, with few notable exceptions, using the stale but highly effective of “good faith” to justify the non-return of loot. 

Emil Georg Bührle

December 2021 has turned out to be a very busy month in the Swiss world of museums and art restitution. First off, a Social Democratic lawmaker, Jon Pult, introduced a parliamentary motion to establish an independent commission in Switzerland that would make recommendations on Nazi-era claims. A cross between the UK’s Spoliation Advisory Panel and France’s CIVS with a smidgeon of Austria’s Provenance Research Commission. This motion was prompted (the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back) following the news that the Kunsthaus Zurich had agreed to put on display 203 works from the collection of Emil Georg Bührle, a Swiss arms manufacturer who owed his fortune to his wartime dealings with the Axis powers and who frolicked on the international looted art market, buying up choice pieces confiscated from Jewish dealers in Western Europe. 

Kunsthaus Zurich

Several days after the announcement of Pult’s motion, the Zurich museum garnered headlines which should have prompted its director to hit the schnapps bottle. The Bührle incident triggered an international storm of disapproval and at least one Swiss Jewish artist demanded that her works be removed from the museum. Once the winds subsided, the museum ordered a group of experts to look into the wartime history of the paintings in Bührle’s collection. The kind of effort that had already been conducted in part or in whole by numerous researchers over the past several decades, including the New York-based Commission for Art Recovery. Will their findings be shared with the Kunsthaus experts? We don’t know but we sure hope so. 

Before Xmas 2021, the Kunstmuseum Bern announced that it would part with 29 works from the Gurlitt collection with a view to returning them to the rightful owners. Will it actually restitute them? Or will the museum seek a “fair and just solution” in order to retain custody of the objects under contention? 

As we get used to the humdrum of 2022 which strikingly resembles the din of 2021, let’s hope that Bern and Zurich come to their senses and forge an irreversible path towards a more ethical treatment of their collections.

Sunflower oil for paintings

by Marc Masurovsky

Art is a commodity which can be traded like widgets. On January 17, 1944, a French company called “Compensex” [Compagnie commerciale d’exportation et de compensation] had the bright idea of proposing to the Vichy government an exchange of commodities to benefit Vichy France and the French export economy. Compensex was a subsidiary of the Banque Worms whose intricate intertwining financial and commercial interests with the French wartime economy and outlying investments in Axis-occupied Europe have been well-documented. [See in particular "Industriels et banquiers francais sous l'Occupation, by Annie Lacroix-Riz, Armand-Colin]

The exchange involved 200 tons of Hungarian sunflower oil worth about 12 million francs (1944 value) for an equivalent amount of paintings allegedly owned by the Galerie Charpentier in Paris, known for its intensive commercial activity during the German occupation of France. The works would be exported to Switzerland. They included paintings by Albert Lebourg, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro and other well-known modernists. The French ministry responsible for supplies and agriculture [ravitaillement et agriculture] notified the Ministry of Finance of its support for the proposed importation of the sunflower oil. The question remained whether the 50 or so paintings would be allowed to leave France.

On January 28, 1944, the French Fine Arts Administration gave its conditional support to the project as long as it could review the list of paintings offered for export.

It is not known, pending further research, whether the exchange actually took place. But it is worth noting that Switzerland was the favored destination for the paintings, thus guaranteeing their absorption in the Swiss market.

At the exact same time, Bruno Lohse, deputy director of the ERR in France and Martin Fabiani, leading collaborationist art dealer in wartime Paris, had hatched an elaborate plot to sell 54 paintings, mostly executed by 19th and 20th century artists officially reviled by Nazi doctrine, which had been confiscated from Jewish collections in and around Paris. Those paintings allegedly were removed from the Jeu de Paume where they had been stored for further disposition.  The plot fell apart in February 1944 when Robert Scholz, administrative overseer of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) operations in occupied countries, personally intervened by traveling from Berlin to Paris to put a stop to what he perceived to be a barely disguised attempt by local officials to profit from confiscated Jewish cultural assets with the help of a notorious art dealer already implicated in the recycling of such property in France and abroad.

The moral of this story is that, once high-value cultural items are available for disposal following their misappropriation by State agents, their dispersal might be facilitated by the commercial and economic interests of the occupation forces and their local vassals, in this instance the German military administration as an extension of the Third Reich in France and the Vichy government and its complex relationship with financial institutions like the Banque Worms.

It is not clear whether Galerie Charpentier’s owners were aware of the Fabiani-Lohse arrangement, but their capacity to participate in complex commercial transactions with Vichy, the Germans and the so-called neutral countries is duly noted.

Revisiting the Martha Nathan loss of a Gauguin painting

by Marc Masurovsky

Martha Nathan was the wife of a prominent German Jewish collector, Hugo Nathan. He died in 1922. After inheriting his wealth and his art collection, Martha Nathan continued to live in Germany. She eventually fled to France in 1937 settling down in Paris, much like Hugo Perls and countless other German Jews had done before her. Meanwhile, she had shipped for safekeeping some of the works that she owned to Basel, Switzerland. Mrs. Nathan sold one of those paintings, “Street scene in Tahiti,” by Paul Gauguin, to three Jewish art dealers, Justin Thannhauser, Alexander Ball and Georges Wildenstein. These three dealers were later plundered when the Nazis invaded France in May 1940, one of the ironies of Nazi-sponsored cultural plunder.

'Street scene in Tahiti, by Paul Gauguin

The Toledo Museum of Art (TMA) acquired the Gauguin painting in May 1939 where it remains to this day.

When the Nathan heirs asked for the restitution of the painting in 2004, the TMA demurred and fought back. The TMA’s lawyer went on the offensive, accusing the Nathan family of not having pursued a claim for restitution of the Gauguin painting after 1945 and maintained that she had not been forced to sell it under Nazi pressure. In 2006. the TMA “quieted” the Nathan claim in an unusually aggressive blowback strategy. In a move that would have made Clausewitz proud, the best defense being an offense, the TMA had filed its own lawsuit against the Nathan heirs, contending it held legitimate title to the painting. The Detroit Institute of Art joined the lawsuit, arguing that a van Gogh painting, which also had belonged to Martha Nathan, was its legitimate property.

In hindsight, the Nathan claim was the first claim to reach an American museum for the restitution of a “flight asset.” In the years following the Washington Conference of December 1998, no one had developed a clear notion of what “flight assets” were and especially whether or not they amounted to a restitutable loss as a result of Nazi persecution. Neither historians of the period nor Jewish officials involved in restitution matters nor, for that matter, politicians and civil servants had ever considered the possibility that “flight assets” could occupy the same space as “forced sales” or “looted assets”. The Washington Principles did not address them, a key element of the defense put forth by the Toledo Museum of Art to oppose restitution.

In the eyes of the TMA’s lawyers, the Gauguin painting did not smack of persecution, there was no evidence of force exerted upon Martha Nathan; in their view, she had not lost control of the painting at the time of its sale. Moreover, they restated the fact that the sale had occurred outside of Germany, involved Jewish art dealers, had not been instigated by the Nazi regime, nor did the Nazis profit from the sale. At stake in the Nathan complaint against the Toledo Museum of Art was Martha Nathan’s status as Jewish victim of Nazi persecution, inside and outside the Third Reich. In other words, as long as Martha Nathan had property and other interests left in Nazi Germany, she remained a target of Nazi persecution, regardless of where she lived.

Was the Gauguin painting a “flight asset”?

“Flight assets” were fungible assets whose short-term realization helped the assets’ owners to survive in their chosen country of exile after fleeing from Nazi Germany.

Our litmus test for validating the “flight asset” label involves asking the following questions:

Would Martha Nathan have sold the painting in the first place had she not been forced to flee first to France and then to Switzerland where she died in 1958?

Would she have fled to France or Switzerland, had there been no immediate threat to her person?

Did she need to sell the Gauguin painting in order to survive in exile?

The Toledo Museum of Art contended that Martha Nathan had obtained a fair price for her Gauguin painting at the time of the sale, consistent with what the market could bear in Western Europe in the late 1930s.

Once again, the price that a Jewish victim of Nazi persecution obtains for a work of art is of no consequence and should not be relevant to determining duress and persecution. It is the circumstance under which the sale takes place which matters the most and the reasons driving it.

It is disheartening to see how a Jewish victim of Nazi persecution is not allowed to obtain fair price for an asset and claim duress. In the minds of those who currently possess such works, fair price is a telltale sign of being free and unencumbered by any form of persecution or harassment. This mischaracterization of “duress” and “forced sale” continues to poison the historical narrative of Jewish plight in the face of Nazi persecution, even in exile, an issue that no one has bothered to clear up definitively through scholarly writing and forceful policy statements.

The acceptable standard trope for a Jewish victim is for her to live under an unremitting regime of terror and intimidation. There is a general reluctance to accept that persecution can be “experienced” outside the borders of the territory in which it originated. This contention has all the hallmarks of a double standard since it is widely accepted nowadays that victims of persecution, torture, rape and other forms of human debasement, continue to live in fear and display behavior akin to being persecuted even in exile, far away from the scene of the crime. It is called “trauma.”

The Toledo Museum of Art refused to acknowledge that Martha Nathan’s decisions to sell works of art during the Nazi years were guided and influenced by Nazi racial policies and their impact on her corporate presence in Nazi Germany (real estate, and other assets). US courts and museum lawyers have had wide license to pontificate as to when one is persecuted and one is not, especially if the victim’s property came to them as a direct result of an act of Nazi persecution. Why should lawyers and judges take on the charge of (re)writing certain aspects of Holocaust history?

Plaintiffs’ lawyers bear a huge responsibility when they propound facile arguments that would lead us to believe that an item was plundered when, in fact, it might not have been thus allowing the current possessors’ lawyers to tear asunder historical facts tied to cultural plunder. Historians have a professional and ethical duty to set the record straight on these matters.

Pondering “flight assets”-Fluchtgut

by Marc Masurovsky

Not to be flip, but “flight assets” is an odd expression. Its more appropriate use applies to aviation, airplanes, anything related to a state of being in the air, hopefully in a steel structure with wings, a tail and engines.

Assets that fly…

Assets don’t leave by themselves. They require human conveyance. And the implication is that they have to cross a border, otherwise why would they be “flight assets”?

The question then becomes: where are they coming from and where are they headed?

Assets can consist of very different elements, but the word connotes value. If we are speaking in historical terms, the expression has been almost exclusively applied to the Nazi era, from 1933 to 1945.

The word “flight” also embodies the notion of “fleeing," of running away from something terrible, something that is sure to cause the owner great harm and distress. Assets fleeing? Well, they have no soul so they cannot “flee”, but they can be made to cross a border quickly in the context of a distressing set of circumstances for their owner.

In 1933 Europe and subsequent years, there were valid reasons to flee from National Socialist Germany. We do not know the exact numbers but before Hitler came to power there were those who smelled something rotten taking hold of the body politic in the dying Weimar Republic. And they left with more than their shirt and coat on their backs. So, the expression “flight assets” does not apply to them.

Come January 30, 1933, the situation changed dramatically. An anti-Semitic, racialist government had just reached the pinnacle of political power in Germany. It took some time to enforce nationwide an ideological program that was meant to exclude entire swaths of the populace. In the chaos that ensued and enveloped millions of lives, those born in the Jewish faith and those virulently and explicitly opposed to the Nazi movement, felt the noose tightening around their necks. If you had the means to flee, you did so. If you had valuables that you wanted to place in a safe place, you packed them and shipped them to a safe destination. In 1930s Europe, there were a fair number of places that were considered safe. Switzerland was one of them. It’s next door to Germany, its financial institutions welcomed all kinds of assets. The newly-established Banking Secrecy Laws made it possible to cloak one’s identity away from prying eyes.

We have now framed the contours of “flight assets” as they apply to valuables belonging to people in distress, fearing for their safety and well-being, aware of the restrictions preventing them from functioning as empowered citizens of a country-Germany-that is now denying them the right to earn their livelihood and live a good life as Germans. They are of Jewish descent, the victims of a virulent anti-Semitic program that aims to rid the new Germany of “Jewish influence”, whatever that might entail, but in the initial years after Hitler’s ascent to power, hundreds of thousands of German citizens of the Jewish faith wondered what lay in wait for them.

For those who sought asylum elsewhere, like in Switzerland, they needed to survive. Fired from their jobs, losing their homes, forced to sell belongings at any price, they secured some valuable assets and shipped them abroad where they would use them as sources of badly-needed income until they could relocate and live in relative peace, restart their broken lives.

These German citizens of Jewish descent were fleeing a desperate and threatening environment to their persons. Are the valuables that they sold in Switzerland to support themselves to be considered as “flight assets”? In other words, had they not been threatened by the New Order/Neue Ordnung in Nazi Germany, would they have shipped those valuables abroad, including to Switzerland, not as long-term investments, but as short-term fungible assets to be realized so as to sustain the equivalent of a subsistence wage while reflecting on an uncertain future? Doubtless, the answer is negative. “Flight assets” are short-term fungible assets whose realization helped the owners to survive.

So, here’s the rub: there are many people, especially in the art world and in government circles in European countries and even in North America, who honestly believe that persecution stops when the fleeing refugee crosses the border into some kind of nirvana. There is this notion that “flight assets” do not exist because the refugee sells them without any immediate pressure from the authority that propelled her to flee in the first place. Hence, there is no reason why a valuable, in this case, a work of art, should be returned to the person who sold it as a “flight asset” because she did not have a gun pointed at her head in order to sell it.

To that assertion, one might respond: would she have sold the painting in the first place had she not been forced to flee to such a haven as Switzerland? Would she have fled in the first place, had there been no immediate threat to her person? The same argument, by the way, applies to all neighboring countries—Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, even the United Kingdom, Austria (for a short time only), the United States? Canada? What about Italy? And Spain? And Portugal? Anywhere?

Let’s suppose that our Jewish refugee shipped in an understandable panic several valuable works of art, expensive jewelry, stocks and bonds, bearer shares, and other fungible goods, to the United States. She was able to make her way west with the little that she could carry with her. If she left right after Hitler’s rise to power, she would have been able to take more than the clothes on her person and a suitcase packed with goodies. But that did not last long. Soon thereafter, crates were stuck in freight forwarding houses on orders from Reich authorities, bank accounts were frozen, excessive levies were imposed on departing German citizens. One had to resort to very creative scenarios to send out “flight assets” to foreign havens. Scenarios that often involved accomplices, non-Jewish accomplices. In many instances, these go-betweens, if motivated by lucre, could earn significant sums helping to smuggle these “flight assets” into safe havens outside of Nazi Germany.

What if our refugee sold her “flight assets” once she reached New York, Boston, or even Toronto, or Montreal? Would we still consider these assets as “flight assets” and therefore restitutable? If we are faithful to the definition that we laid out above, it does not really matter where those “flight assets” ended up because it does not alter the circumstances under which they were shipped in the first place.

If we decide that “flight assets” belong in the same category as “duress” and “forced sales,” we are obligated to consider them as items subject to restitution or compensation for the same reason as assets sold under “duress” in Nazi Germany or in territories occupied or annexed by the Third Reich.

Last but not least, price should have nothing to do with the realization of a “flight asset” or a sale under “duress” at a “forced sale” and cannot be used as a reason for denying restitution to the aggrieved party seeking the return of the “flight asset.” It is the circumstance under which the asset is sold which should determine whether or not this asset should be restituted to the person or her family, obligated to sell it in order to survive.

In the constantly contentious debate over restitution of Nazi looted art, a “flight asset” is a fungible asset which has been shipped across state borders to a safe place by an individual under severe distress in her place of residence whose government has imposed threatening, discriminatory, restrictive measures upon her as a result of her faith and beliefs. This dire state of affairs has compelled this individual to seek refuge outside the borders of her native land and to use whatever valuables she was able to ship or transfer to her new home as a short-term source of revenue to allow her to survive until she figured out what her next move would be.

Switzerland is not the only country that received “flight assets.” That thought is absurd through and through. The “flight asset” could end up anywhere, and could be sold anywhere as long as it served the purpose of providing critical means of subsistence to the persecuted owner.

When is “just and fair” fair and just?

by Marc Masurovsky

(updated on 5 July 2025)

It is difficult to pin down precisely the genesis of the concept known as “fair and just” or “just and fair” solution in matters pertaining to the restitution of art objects looted during the Holocaust. Who and when are almost impossible to trace.

A valid starting point is principle #8 of the “Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-confiscated art”. The “Washington Principles” were passed on December 3, 1998 at the close of the Washington Conference on Holocaust-era Assets.


“If the pre-War owners of art that is found to have been confiscated by the Nazis and not subsequently restituted, or their heirs, can be identified, steps should be taken expeditiously to achieve a just and fair solution, recognizing this may vary according to the facts and circumstances surrounding a specific case."

Two years later, on October 5, 2000, a declaration came out of an international forum on Holocaust issues held in Vilnius, Lithuania, which placed heavy emphasis on the search for fair and just solutions “to the return” of looted art and cultural property. It went a bit further than the Washington conference without getting into any specifics, diplomatie oblige, as to what would constitute a just and fair solution to a claim for restitution. Forum participants did ask that “every reasonable effort be undertaken" to “achieve the restitution” of looted cultural assets. Hence restitution {again, without being properly defined] was invoked in the same breath as “just and fair solution.”

Eleven years after the Washington Conference of December 1998, a similar conclave of 40 odd nations and international NGOs gathered in Prague under the auspices of the hosting government of the Czech Republic. The International Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets issued a declaration, called the Terezin Declaration on June 30, 2009. In it, one can find multiple references to “just and fair solutions” without understanding at all what they are and how to achieve them. They do stipulate, however, that the Washington Conference of December 1998 established the moral (and non-binding) principle whereby looted art and cultural property should be “returned to victims or their heirs in a manner consistent with national laws and regulations [emphasis added] as well as international obligations, in order to achieve a just and fair solution.” Unless I am completely mixed up here, I read this as meaning that the restitution of looted cultural property achieves a “just and fair solution.”

In the years following the 1998 conference in Washington, DC, where the Principles were formulated, the tendency was to sharpen the link between restitution and “just and fair” or “fair and just” solutions. And yet….the word “restitution” was not defined in these declarations. If it was to mean the physical return of the looted object to the rightful owner and thereby transfer of legal title away from the current possessor to the rightful owner, many art market players like auction houses and museums, as well as governments, have violated the principle of what is just and fair by insisting that “just and fair” in all likelihood means upholding the good faith of the current possessor and asking—no, convincing—the claimant that financial compensation of some sort or another is the best result that can be achieved in the spirit of the Washington Principles of 1998. Best to invoke the trinity of Washington, Vilnius and Terezin in order to enshrine the physical return of the object.

Is that really what was meant or inferred at Vilnius in 2000 and at Prague in 2009? The answer is inconclusive, because most of the drafters and endorsers of these declarations were well aware that “national laws and regulations” would interfere with the actual physical restitution of the claimed object, especially in areas where the Idol of Good Faith rules all.

Hence, the apparent contradiction between settlements and the various declarations of Washington, Vilnius and Terezin disappears by stressing that the return of the object should be consistent with national laws and regulations. The emphasis of "fair and just" shifts in favor of the rights of the current possessor at the expense of those of the claimant.




"Dedham from Longham", by John Constable

An interesting twist to the Washington Principles involves a painting by John Constable being claimed by Alain Monteagle, representative of the Jaffe family’s restitution claim. The painting is presently located in the Fine Arts Museum of la Chaux de Fonds which is in the canton of Neuchatel in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. Historically, the Swiss federal government has always deferred to local governments’ discretion in the way that they manage or dispose of their cultural assets. If one should apply to the letter the principles enshrined in Washington and reiterated in Vilnius and Terezin, the museum at La Chaux de Fonds, which is municipal, should return the painting to Mr. Monteagle. However, if the return is subject to the “national laws and regulations” of Switzerland and the canton of Neuchatel, as well as the municipality of La Chaux de Fonds, Mr. Monteagle does not stand a chance, because civil law in Switzerland worships the good faith of the current possessor and no foreigner can come into Switzerland and claim what he/she feels is his/her rightful property, at least not since 1949, with a notable exception last year. At least, that is the impression that we are left with, if history serves as a valid reference point.




La Chaux de Fonds 

Interestingly, in a 3-page report issued in January 2014, the Swiss Federal Office of Culture commented that “just and fair solutions must be sought—both when it has been possible to trace the victims and when identification has proved impossible.”

Hence, the principles of Washington, Vilnius and Terezin are not helpful in the real world and, more often than not, municipal governments and their national representatives heap scorn on them so as to safeguard their “cultural property.” If Mr. Monteagle wants his painting back, he has to wage total war against the Swiss government, the city council of La Chaux de Fonds which has oversight of its fine arts museum and the cantonal authorities in Neufchatel. To be successful, the battle for restitution must involve all aspects of civil society and should be waged inside and outside the legal system in order to "achieve a just and fair solution" consistent with Washington, Vilnius and Terezin.

Update of 5 July 2025

Since 1998, the concept of "Just and Fair" as applied to the resolution of Holocaust-era claims for Nazi looted art (encompassing losses suffered from the advent of Hitler to power on 30 January 1933 to the unconditional surrender of the Third Reich on 9 May 1945) has been embraced by governments, lawmakers, auction houses, museums (public and private), dealers and collectors, and many lawyers involved in looted art cases. It has become what lawyers and lawmakers describe as "soft law."

When "just and fair solutions" are invoked, they pave the way for a financial settlement allowing the current possessor to explain why it is not fair and just to them to relinquish the claimed object to the heirs of the victim who lost them. Moreover, these solutions undermine our understanding of the trauma of duress as experienced by those who lost their cultural goods as well as the rest of their belongings and assets.

As a historical footnote, the concept of just and fair was wholly concocted by Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat, organizer of the 1998 Washington Conference on Holocaust-era Assets and the US Government's chief negotiator and diplomat on matters dealing with reparations for Holocaust victims and their families. The American Alliance of Museums (AAM)--at the time known as the American Association of Museums--played a role in guiding Ambassador Eizenstat to formulate this concept which ended up being a gift to the class of current possessors at the expense of the interests of the claimants in their quest to obtain restitution (the physical return of their property).

Is it fair to ask whether Ambassador Eizenstat and his colleagues in major Jewish organizations involved in Holocaust reparations ever thought to sit down with claimants and restitution advocates about the implications of a "just and fair" approach to their request for restitution?

As for the Swiss government, it is on the brink of creating a Swiss commission inspired by those already in place in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, Germany and Austria.

Training the current and next generations of provenance art research specialists

by Marc Masurovsky

The most important aspect of any inquiry into looted works and objects of art lies in the quality of the research required to demonstrate the facts underlying the theft or misappropriation of the object and especially if it was returned to its rightful owner before entering into the hands of a current possessor. The work is laborious and necessitates, more often than not, creative use of documentation and resources found in a multiplicity of archives and collections in order to cobble together the often complex story of an object together before ascertaining what exactly happened to it.  An inevitable consequence of lack of expertise in these complex historical and forensic matters has been shoddy research in the context of art ownership disputes that have gone to trial over the past decade, especially as pertains to the resolution of disputes stemming from duress sales (or forced sales) in the period between 1933 and 1939.

Sadly, there is a near-absence of formal training programs in colleges, universities, art institutes, museums and other facilities which have a direct stake in the debate over looted and plundered art objects. Curiously, although many academic centers are associated with a museum which have undertaken provenance research into their collections, that activity has not produced any academic interest to teach the subject matter or to provide training to the student body.

Once the exclusive province of art historians, the dysfunctions inherent to past and present debates over provenance research stem largely from a lack of desire to do anything concretely measurable in the area of training, which is to say:

• initiate programs at the undergraduate and graduate levels in degree-granting academic institutions;
• expand the availability of internships both quantitatively and qualitatively to afford new talent a chance to do serious hands-on research and investigative work into museum collections. Incidentally, there has been notable progress made in museums where provenance research efforts have been under way. Although opportunities for provenance work through internship have increased, the corollary access to training has not necessarily followed suit, except perhaps in the most established museums. A background in art history is simply not enough for undertaking solid provenance research.
• just as importantly, provide specialized training to museum and art market professionals aimed at sharpening their forensic toolkit when researching complex ownership histories.

Issues of provenance and questionable ownership of art objects have taken on greater significance in the past five years to the point where they require serious attention from policymakers, grant-making institutions, not just in North America but in Europe as well.

It is fittingly ironic, however, that the first undergraduate program to focus on issues of cultural plunder did not see the light of day in the United States, but rather, in Germany, at the Free University of Berlin.

Pleas for training have come from all quarters, including Switzerland, Germany, Austria, the United Kingdom, Canada, and, to a lesser extent, the United States. In Canada, following a gathering of specialists in Ottawa in November 2001, the assembled participants recommended, among other things, to the Canadian authorities that there was a “need for significant support of staff training” which could only be financed by public monies. Since then, the same recommendations have been made in a report dated February 2008.

In 2004, a survey of American museums conducted by Edward Luby and Meagan Miller revealed the need for training amongst museum professionals to whom they sent questions. Especially affected were the mid-sized museums with very little resources to commit to staff training on provenance-related matters. Some proposed using advanced educational technology to provide training workshops when physical attendance is fiscally impossible to justify. Moreover, they lamented the fact that the Museum associations organized too few events focused specifically on provenance matters.

A recent Swiss governmental working group formed by the Federal Department of Home Affairs and the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs completed a survey of 531 domestic cultural institutions and recommended, among other things, “training courses” in provenance research.

Recent pronouncements at the Holocaust Assets Conference in Prague in June 2009 brought the issue of training for improved provenance research back to the fore, albeit temporarily. Those recommendations were again echoed at the May 6-7, 2011, Washington, DC, World War II Provenance Research Seminar. As usual, proof is in the pudding. Who will be the first one to undertake such a program? Or, how much longer do students, researchers, investigators, specialists, museum professionals, cultural workers, need to wait before such programs come into being?