Swiss foreign cultural policy?

by Marc Masurovsky

At a time when one French Jewish family is beating its head against a brick wall to recover a painting by John Constable, “Dedham from Langham”, from the Museum of Fine Arts in La Chaux-de-fonds, in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, a country whose officials revere Good Faith on the altar of Neutrality. A joke, by any stretch of the imagination. 

Dedham from Langham, by John Constable

This is the only known claim today submitted by a non-Swiss citizen of Jewish descent for a work of art sold under duress in German-occupied France in 1943 because its owners—the Jaffe family—were of Jewish descent.

In the mean time, the Swiss government has been returning a host of antiquities to foreign nations requesting them:

May 27, 2014: The Swiss government returned to Serbia a trove of 150 coins dating back to the Roman era. The crime? Illegal importation into Switzerland by a Serb national in 2011.

December 2014: The Swiss government returns a Han Dynasty terra cotta to China.  The crime? Forged customs declaration. The item had been shipped from the United Kingdom to the county of Vaud. This restitution was hailed as a major step in the fight against the illicit traffic in cultural assets.

November 2015: The Swiss government returned to the Iraqi government two cuneiform tablets on the pretext that they had not been properly registered as “cultural goods” when entering Switzerland. The crime here? False registration in violation of a June 1, 2005, law governing the transfer of international cultural goods.

July 2016: The Swiss government returned to Italy nine antiquities including five fresco fragments from the 6th century BC. The fresco fragments which come from Pompeii resulted from a voluntary restitution by their current possessor. Swiss cantonal police seized the other items.

Pending: a request by the Bolivian government for a statuette representing the deity, Ekeko, removed from Bolivia in 1858, the result of a drunken swap, a statuette for a bottle of brandy. The statuette currently sits at the History Museum of Bern.

It is remarkable that the new minister of Culture of the Swiss Confederation, Isabelle Chassot, is so committed to the return of cultural objects that are illegally in Switzerland.

One wonders whether these returns fit into a larger policy of maintaining cordial relations with source countries—a commendable goal in and of itself. 

What does it take to show a similar regard towards the heirs of Jewish victims whose looted cultural assets ended up in Swiss cultural institutions and private collections? Why is it that Jews have to fight like hell to recover what is theirs while source countries just have to ask for their objects?

This is not a whining session.

We know what the stark differences are. There are no laws covering the return of looted Jewish cultural assets. But there are a myriad of laws enacted in the last 20 years that make it very difficult to sustain the presence of looted cultural assets on Swiss territory.

Hopefully, Isabelle Chassot will figure out a way of making an ethically grounded exception to facilitate the return of looted Jewish cultural assets.

Mark my words: where there’s a will, there’s a way.

First anniversary of "plundered art"

Happy holidays!

The “plundered art” blog just passed its first anniversary.

This might be a good time to revisit its reason for existence.

It’s not that simple to decide one day: “Oh! Let’s write about the restitution of art objects looted by those Nazis and Fascists during the 1930s and 1940s and how so much of it was never returned to the rightful owners and why the current owners of those objects look for every way under the sun not to return those objects and why governments pretend that there is no problem.”

This blog is certainly not about settling scores, old and new.

It’s actually a complicated beast.

At first, I was very shy about putting anything in writing about an issue that has already absorbed several decades of my life. Truth be told, the initial motivation for this blog was to share the story of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project (HARP), how it came into existence and what it was able to accomplish.

The telling of HARP’s story has not been a simple affair and is still incomplete.

It runs afoul of important and enduring taboos:

• the unwillingness of postwar Jewish organizations in the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East, to press for a complete accounting of the cultural losses suffered by Jewish owners during the 1930s and 1940s;
• the unwillingness of State-controlled cultural institutions across the globe to produce a complete inventory of cultural assets that entered their collections since the 1930s which might have been acquired illegally;
• the unwillingness of governments to come clean about the extent, scope, and breadth of cultural plunder in their respective nations and their efforts to produce complete inventories of those looted cultural assets in State-owned collections;
• the unwillingness of governments to come clean about the total number of looted cultural assets present in State-owned collections;
• the unwillingness of national and international groups to address the question of cultural rights, the sovereign right of individuals to culture and to the ownership of cultural assets over those of States, the question of cultural patrimony, cultural property, and cultural heritage, and how those abstract notions interfere with and are used against the right of individuals to recover and own looted cultural assets which are rightfully theirs. Those non-governmental organizations include but are not limited to: the United Nations, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the International Council of Museums (ICOM) and many other organizations and agencies, supranational and national which are specifically concerned with cultural rights, and the protection of cultural assets;
• the unwillingness of law enforcement, police and security agencies—civilian and military—to repress and suppress the illicit international trade in looted cultural assets, including and especially the millions of objects that changed hands illegally against the backdrop of genocide, mass conflict and slaughter in the 1930s and 1940s and beyond;
• the unwillingness of cultural institutions, universities, colleges, institutes, foundations, and other cultural establishments to teach and educate young and old about the phenomenon of cultural plunder, the cultural rights of individuals, and ask the fundamental question as to who owns culture when discussing the illicit removal of art objects from the hands of their rightful owners and the attempts of the latter—mostly vain—to recover them as their own.

As of now, the following items remain unanswered, more than sixty-five years after plunder was denounced at the International Military Tribunal at Nurnberg as a crime against humanity and a war crime:

• the true extent, scope, and breadth of thefts of cultural assets during the 1930s and 1940s for racial, political, and other reasons;
• the actual number of lost cultural assets, by type, by owner, by country;
• the actual number of cultural assets recovered;
• the actual number of cultural assets restituted to their rightful owners;
• the actual number of cultural assets that were recovered but never restituted;
• the actual number of cultural assets that were looted and never restituted—by type, by owner, by country.
• the identity of the thieves;
• the identity of those who agreed to trade in these looted cultural assets;
• the identity of those who currently own these looted cultural assets.

To make a long story short, for now, the telling of HARP’s story ran afoul of these unanswered questions and the overwhelming taboo that endures today as strongly as it did two decades ago of venerable institutions that seek to educate the world about the Holocaust and genocide and yet refuse out of principle—yes, OUT OF PRINCIPLE!—to avoid at all costs any discussion, any debate, any addressing in any way, shape or form, of the question of cultural plunder, despite the fact that millions of members of the Jewish community suffered unspeakable losses, physical, material, and spiritual—among them, the loss of objects that tied them to culture—their own and that of others.

Let’s be clear about one thing: it is far easier to ignore the problem than to address it. And for those who seek to address it absent any filters, any caveats, any disclaimers, any compromises, the road is long, steep, and lonely. But every time progress is made, however small, even the mere existence of this blog, justifies the desire to induce even the slightest change in society’s approach to the question of cultural rights, cultural ownership, and cultural restitution.

The second year of the “plundered art” blog opens on a renewed commitment to speak, document, critique, applaud, proclaim, advocate and document, document, and document more. Because transparency is the only way by which we can grasp the full breadth and scope of the problem, a problem made so complicated by those who oppose restitution. Those who refuse to address it are simply acting as accomplices, aiding and abetting in the crime of rewriting history by denying its existence.

I wish to thank you, our readers, listeners, observers, and critics alike, for checking into “plundered art.” I invite you to continue.

Year two promises to explore cultural plunder in other realms, like the Far East, the universality of cultural rights and its nemesis, cultural plunder; and the search for enduring, long-term solutions to remedy the ills of cultural thefts anchored in mass conflict, genocide, ethnocide, and other forms of wholesale persecutions perpetrated by a State or a group against individuals because of who they are and what they are.

Works and objects will be discussed with dubious ownership histories which are displayed, bought, and sold, across the globe.

And, of course, there is no shortage of historical information on plundered objects that have either been restituted or remain out of reach of their rightful owners.

Until next time…

Confessions of an art looting “expert” (I)

by Marc Masurovsky I must apologize for not having contributed anything to this blog in over two months. The reason is simple: a generic failure to think that there was anything meaningful to write about after having hatched more than 110 pieces for you to peruse at your leisure.

Why expose myself in this way to perfect strangers? It’s the 21st century thing to do, I guess. But in my case, I feel the urge to ‘out’ my private self enough so that you know with whom you are dealing. Writer’s block has not been the issue these past few months; instead, I have been bruising my head time and time again against a philosophical rock—to wit, the rock of restitution of cultural assets looted during the Nazi/Fascist years and recycled over the past seven decades through private hands and State-controlled entities with no likelihood that these objects will ever be identified, located, recovered, and returned to their rightful owners.

Why bother? The “mission” to locate and restitute looted cultural assets stolen during the Nazi years is so thankless at times that it is even painful to muse over its future. Our past is indeed our prologue but our present might just be our future unless we do something radical to transform it from complacent indifference and lethargy into a dynamic machine fueled by ethics, transparency, search for truth, a truth, a historical truth, the truth about these thefts, about the deliberate misappropriation of millions of cultural objects from the hands and homes of tens of millions of people during twelve long years of oppression, persecution, ostracism, incarceration, exploitation, impoverishment, eviction, expropriation, and more often than not, physical liquidation.

Why bother? That is the question that I ask myself every day when I wake up from a frazzled sleep. There are databases to expand and complete, there are new files to read and analyze, from which information must be gleaned, synthesized and shared with others. There are students to educate, there are faculty members to enlighten out of their impoverished understanding of cultural plunder, the complexities of the illicit trade in looted art and the perplexing paradoxes inherent to the quest for restitution. There are government officials to shake out of their slumber who are too afraid to move their limbs in a forward motion to make some progress, any progress, even infinitesimal progress, just enough progress so that we can say that there is progress in the international arena, of course, where else. Because in the United States, just as an example, there is a continuing state of stasis that makes it so convenient for the so-called “experts” to do the strict minimum and claim that “alles gut”—all is well—that we are making progress, geostationary progress that is—this is true across the board whether it be in the art world writ large, or among well-connected art historians with deep ties in private museums and elite circles who have claimed to be such experts in “Nazi confiscations” and “restitution” and other well-established academics, pundits and political pinheads, bureaucrats of all stripes spanning all agencies and institutions—for the most part, they are well-meaning but fundamentally ignorant and passive, always living in fear of the people upstairs whose scythes might sweep their heads off their fragile shoulders as soon as they make some progress forward on issues which should simply be ignored. The exception is the Office of Holocaust Issues at the US Department of State under new leadership. Most importantly and urgently, there are the rightful owners, the heirs and descendents of the victims themselves who seek an accounting by way of restitution.

Worst of all, there are those specialized bureaucracies that are finely tuned to the cause of remembrance, memory and education about the Holocaust and which are outspokenly silent about the taboo, the unspeakable, unmentionable, untouchable, mystifying topic of cultural plunder. God forbid that any such institution might wish to put a timid foot in front of the other and venture into the dark abyss of Nazi confiscations, Aryanizations, forced sales, expropriations of property, and the recycling of Jewish-owned wealth into ‘Aryan” hands as the fundamental pre-requisites of the dehumanization of entire Jewish communities, the final step before mass annihilation. God forbid that anyone would want to share that thought with the general public. My goodness, where would we be? What would happen to us? Would the sky fall on our heads? Would anti-Semites come crawling out of the ground and scream bloody murder against the Jews? Not really. It’s a bit like the story of Henny Penny, the hen who was convinced that the sky was falling on her head. It’s all in her head. It’s all in their minds. But until the Holocaust education and remembrance community of specialists and administrators signs up for mass therapy sessions, please do not hold your breath. Their august institutions are not likely to promote any programs that would enlighten the general public as well as themselves---they know so much already!—about the economics of the Holocaust and the fundamental tenet which declares unabashedly that one of the root causes of anti-Semitism is economic resentment of the ‘other.’

Did you ever stop and wonder why there are fewer than ten attorneys—yes! Ten attorneys in the entire nation of the United States of America who agree to represent victims of Nazi/Fascist cultural plunder. TEN! Not eleven, not twelve, not twenty. TEN…

Did you ever stop and wonder why there is not a single law firm in the United States that has a pro bono practice (free legal assistance) specifically aimed at Holocaust claimants who wish to reclaim looted cultural assets regardless of the monetary value of the looted asset proper?

Did you ever stop and wonder why there is not a single academic program in the United States which teaches students about plunder, economic crimes against persecuted populations during times of war, especially when acts of genocide accelerate the elimination of millions of men, women, and children from the face of the earth thanks to the active collaboration of countless individuals who see in the disappearance of the Jews a crime of opportunity, an opportunity for personal betterment, improvement and enrichment?

Did you ever stop and wonder why the museum community has not seen fit to establish professional training programs to enhance, refine, and improve the critical research skills of museum professionals in the esoteric arts of provenance research—the investigation into ownership histories of objects in their collections—rooted in a historical understanding of the displacements of cultural assets between 1933 and 1945?

Well, I’d be curious to know if you have answers to the aforementioned questions. If I have erred, I hope—no, I insist—that you point out my deviant ways so as to edify our reading public. But if you cannot correct me, then ask why we are at this stage of the game, two years after the Prague Conference of June 2009 on Holocaust-era assets, thirteen years after the Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets of 1998 and the subsequent formulation of the sacred texts known as the Washington Principles?

There is no easy answer, is there? I didn’t think so. And I don’t blame anyone for not finding an easy answer.

Here I go again wondering: what to do? Is there an end in sight? Are we really going to achieve some modicum of progress, some truly measurable result which fosters research and restitution, transparency and ethics, higher learning and understanding, so-called “best practices” in the cultural arena? After all, the whole point of this ‘mission’ or ‘campaign’ is to close the books on the Second World War and the Nazi years, to clean up the mess left untended by thousands of officials and administrators in the Americas and in Europe who were focused precisely on recovering stolen objects and returning them, more often than not, to nations, not rightful owners. And yet, why should we care? Well, we do. Just like others care about climate change, the plight of penguins in the South Atlantic Ocean or polar bears in the Northern regions, we care about historical wrongs anchored in cultural plunder and the righting of those wrongs. C’est la vie….