Restitution vs. Washington Principles

by Marc Masurovsky

How have the Wahington Principles on Nazi-confiscated Art of December 1998 reshaped the landscape of restitution of art objects suspected of having been illegally displaced and looted between 1933 and 1945?

The purpose of the Washington Principles has not been to promote actual restitution—the physical return of a looted and displaced art object to its rightful owners and their descendants. It is to provide a framework by which art museums (and by extension the art market) may find solutions to ownership disputes over these contested objects and help them settle or dismiss claims filed against them by the purported rightful owners. The key to the Washington Principles lies in the expression “just and fair solutions” coined by Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat, then an Under Secretary for Economic, Agricultural and Business Affairs, and currently the chair of the Washington, DC-based US Holocaust Museum’s Memorial Council. That expression is enshrined in Washington Principle #8.


8. 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.

When repeated daily for 28 years, the expression “seeking just and fair solutions” becomes embedded in the human psyche (much like a bad summer beach song that you can’t shake off). This expression constitutes in effect the substrate of a current possessor’s playbook with which to resolve ownership disputes submitted by purported rightful owners of contested art works and objects. The goal is to seek a reasonable solution where, one hopes, all parties will be more or less satisfied by the outcome.

The reality is a bit starker: like in a boxing match or a sports competition, only one person remains standing, regardless of what anyone tells you. There is nothing kumbaya about negotiating for the recovery of a looted art object. It sucks. More often than not, the process, the envisioned collegial dialogue with the possessing entity generally turns into a legal slug fest that can stretch on for years if not decades where appeals to moral and ethical norms fall by the wayside and the holder hides behind well-heeled legal defenses. When the just and fair solutions are invoked as a guide to resolving the dispute, you know that the claimant may not recover the physical ownership of the contested object but instead will have to accept a financial settlement that extinguishes the claim. In some sense, the just and fair solutions behave like a glorified fire extinguisher directly pointed at the claimant’s quest for justice (restitution).

If I sound derisive about the Washington Principles, it is precisely because they were never designed to help claimants, the victims of the act of plunder. They were framed to provide a shield behind which current holders could fend off claimants’ assaults on their beloved collections.

Still, let’s try to be positive.

Do the Principles actually help in any way in the recovery process? The results are mixed. Since the decision to restitute rests ultimately in the hands of the current possessor, lest it is ordered by a court to hand over the object, claimants must appeal to the possessors’ moral and ethical sense of justice and plead for it to “do the right thing.” A classic domination/ submission scenario where the cards are invariably stacked against the claimant who is forced to play the role of a submissive and solicitous creature.

Nevertheless, the Principles have decidedly left their imprint “with the passage of time” on the behavior of certain museums and auction houses. Assuredly, this evolution represents genuine progress. It has not led to a one-for-one relationship between claim and restitution. Instead, it has helped convince governments and cultural institutions to accept a dialogue with claimants and to pave the way for negotiations towards a settlement of the restitution claim.

Restitution lawyers routinely invoke the Principles as they seek restitution on behalf of their clients. Likewise, current holders’ lawyers invoke the principles to establish their right to maintain their ownership of the contested object. The temptation for some restitution lawyers to secure a settlement is always there instead of aspiring to an actual restitution which may trigger an extended tussle with the current possessor. An easy way out? Lengthy legal battles are very costly and most claimants cannot afford them.

The Washington Principles are “soft”. They are guidelines to be interpreted as one sees fit. A growing number of current holders nowadays realize that these Principles are here to stay (28 years later) and that they have become part of the landscape. They also are keenly aware that the keywords “just and fair” are not synonymous with “restitution” but instead signal that they can find an equitable outcome that is acceptable to their interests. Ultimately, the “just and fair” approach swings in favor of a current possessor not surrendering an object to the claimant. The Washington Principles have achieved their aim.

Claimants, on the other hand, have to make their peace with the fact that the laws of supply and demand combined with the absence of effective government regulations override the impact of genocide on decisions affecting the ownership of works and objects of art. If they wish to prevail against a current possessor, they must seek unconventional approaches and adopt unorthodox strategies that fall outside the established framework of a restitution negotiation. Claimants’ rights have a greater chance of success outside “the box” rather than inside “the box.”

Justice in the face of genocide continues to be elusive, performative and symbolic. In that sense, the Washington Principles are “performative.”

The monetization of recovered Jewish assets

by Marc Masurovsky

The idea is not new and evolved at the end of WWII, when Allied forces and local resistance and partisan units stumbled on mountains of looted Jewish property, consisting of household goods, decorative objects (including furniture and textiles), musical instruments, libraries, works of art (paintings, works on paper, sculpture, etc.), precious stones and jewelry, precious metals, and financial instruments.

These recoveries across Central and Western Europe created an urgent need to identify who the despoiled owners were, find out if they were alive, if family members and relatives could be identified and located to claim the property. This part of the story is well-known as it involves civilian and military efforts to oversee the collection, identification, and repatriation of this found property with a view to its restitution to rightful owners. These procedures were mostly carried out in zones of Europe not occupied or dominated by Soviet military and civilian authorities.

The burdensome aspect of the mission as outlined above soon proved to be too much for the agencies responsible for overseeing this massive task of identification, cataloguing and shipping of recovered Jewish property. In order to make this problem go away, why not sell it all off? The question was reasonable in light of the chaos and confusion reigning in recently-liberated European countries, the desire of survivors to get on with their lives, and the need for governments to rehabilitate their destroyed nations and stimulate the economy by whatever means possible.

If one were to sell off this property, who would administer the process? Who would receive the funds? In what capacity? The answer was fairly simple: if the property was known to have come from Jewish owners, whether or not they could be identified, then Jewish organizations would oversee the sale of these assets and redistribute the proceeds to those who needed the funds most—survivors and their families who were dispossessed of everything that they owned.

The monetization of looted Jewish property recovered by Allied forces started in earnest in mid-1946 after the Paris Reparations Conference where Jewish organizations and agencies would oversee the disposition of recovered Jewish property for the benefit of surviving Jewish communities and their members. It was one thing to sell household goods, clothes, linens, furniture, musical instruments with no apparent artistic value, books and jewelry. But what about works of art and artistic objects with market value that belonged to collectors, dealers and businesses steeped in the art world of the interwar years? Should they be treated as bulk items regardless of who owned them and what importance or value they held? For efficiency’s sake, it was cost-effective to presume the owners dead, which eliminated the onerous and time-consuming task of actually finding them so they could collect their recovered property.

Governments got in on the act, especially in Western Europe—the Netherlands, Belgium, and France—where public sales were held from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s during which more than 100,000 works of art and objects were sold off, a number of which were traceable to victims of Nazi persecution. Local government officials sometimes concocted elaborate schemes by which to divert thousands of works of art from Allied-run depots under the pretext that their owners had not been identified, label them as “heirless property” and sell them through a network of auction houses and businesses in Europe and the United States, the proceeds of which would benefit the organizations and individuals overseeing this effort as well as local public agencies and the victims’ heirs and relatives. The architect of one such a scheme, denounced by the US Department of State, was Dr. Philip Auerbach, a Bavarian official whose portfolio included reparations and restitution of looted Jewish property.

Since then, the physical restitution of individual art objects to their rightful owners has coexisted somewhat uncomfortably with the pressure exerted by Jewish groups to treat these objects as “wholesale items” to be disposed of expeditiously for the benefit of Holocaust survivors and their kin.

Over time, this duality in treatment of recovered Jewish property looted by the Nazis has shaped the cross-generational debate on restitution of looted art vs. reparations. The end result of this duality has been a general indifference across Jewish communities towards repeated efforts by individuals and entities to recover their looted cultural property once it was identified in a particular location. Since the 1950s, the absence of support and lack of empathy towards individual claimants seeking the return of their looted art has been nothing short of astounding.

One can only speculate that unsuccessful claims filed against current possessors of looted Jewish cultural property might have had more positive outcomes had Jewish groups and communities lent their active and vocal support to these claimants as part of a general movement to seek justice and closure for crimes committed against Jews during the Nazi era.

Solidarity is an aspiration devoutly to be wished

by Marc Masurovsky

If you search for a definition of the word “solidarity”, this is what you find:

“Unity or agreement of feeling or action, especially among individuals with a common interest; mutual support within a group.”

In other words, “solidarity” requires unity of feeling or action amongst individuals and entities that share a common interest and support one another. It also implies that they all work together to achieve a common objective. Let’s apply the concept of “solidarity” to the interwoven notions of cultural plunder, art looting, and the restitution, repatriation, return of those plundered cultural goods to their rightful owners, be they individuals, groups, entities, or governments.

Past history teaches us that governments, entities, groups and individuals have systematically deprived others of their artistic, cultural and religious objects for a variety of reasons, ranging from greed and avarice to naked hatred of the rightful owners for reasons of race, gender, creed, and/or ethnicity. The international community, in all of its wisdom and desire to improve the lot of people around the globe, has agreed that it is wrong, illegal, and immoral to steal artistic, cultural and religious objects. If one does this, justice needs to prevail in part through the recovery, restitution, repatriation of these objects to their rightful owners.

Colonial expansionism unleashed cultural and other heinous crimes against communities living in areas coveted by the colonialists, resulting in the deprivation of life, identity, and culture for millions of people around the world. Successive wars fueled by racial and ethnic hatred of others have provoked the deaths of tens of millions of individuals and the outright theft of the property of those who were targeted for physical elimination and removal from the surface of Planet Earth. Make no mistake, these conflicts are still with us today and they are always accompanied by crimes against the culture, identity, and beliefs of the victims (case in point: the 1990s wars in the Western Balkans, and currently in Libya, Ukraine and Yemen.)

Since the 1990s, individuals and entities have come forward to hasten the restitution and/or repatriation of these looted objects wherever they may have ended up, either in private hands or in State-controlled collections and institutions. They focus separately on:

-the confiscations of Jewish-owned property displaced by the Nazis and their allies between 1933-1945;

-the expropriations of indigenous cultural objects through colonial conquest and occupation;

-the systematic illegal extraction of archaeological objects from source nations; and

-the plunder of Native American communities and First Nations in North America.

We have identified four categories of looted or plundered cultural goods:

1/ goods forcibly removed from geographical areas targeted for seizure and exploitation by colonial powers;

2/ goods forcibly removed by State authorities, with the help of military, police, and parastatal forces, from communities living within State borders;

3/ goods forcibly extracted from the territories of nations for ideological or commercial reasons under the cover of military conflicts or civil strife;

4/ goods forcibly removed from their rightful owners during acts of genocide, most notably during the Nazi era, the Holocaust and World War II.

Until the early years of the 21st century, there was no perceptible dialogue between the advocates of justice and restitution representing these four groups of looted cultural goods.

Archaeologists and so-called source nations worked in their corner, denouncing the irreparable loss of antiquities which ended up inevitably in private and public collections. Mainstream domestic and international Jewish organizations were never keen on seeking the actual physical restitution of objects plundered from Jewish victims between 1933-1945, preferring instead global schemes by which victims and their families would receive the equivalent of a “check in the mail.” Indigenous communities plundered during periods of domestic territorial expansionism and national unification (some call it “progress”) were left to their own devices for decades before there was widespread outrage at their plight. The systematic and on-going looting of their communities continues to benefit private collectors and cultural institutions worldwide. Advocates and organizations representing these four categories have worked separately in their silos, competing against one another for the attention of private donors, foundations and governments to enlist their aid in furthering the cause of their “clients.”

It is difficult to find instances of “solidarity” between these four categories and their respective communities, although, in theory, they agree on the common goal of restitution, repatriation, and return of looted objects to their rightful owners. Their professed mutual interest does not seem to include the possibility of reaching out to representatives of the “other categories.” Doing so would lead to a greater good by merging their separate agendas under the larger umbrella of a unified approach to the restitution, repatriation, and return of these objects to their rightful owners.

The Holocaust Art Restitution Project (HARP) was created in September 1997 to document Jewish cultural losses between 1933-1945 and the postwar fate of unrestituted looted objects. Our concern has always been to address in an open public discussion the question of cultural plunder in all its forms, regardless of when and where it occurred. More than 13 years ago, HARP crossed the bridge to get acquainted with the cultural heritage community, including archaeologists, anthropologists and other professionals documenting ancient cultures and the damage and destruction wrought upon them. One group stood out at the time—the Lawyers’ Committee for Cultural Heritage and Preservation (LCCHP). An instant synergy evolved between HARP and LCCHP over issues of plunder and restitution. Our representatives participated in and attended seminars, workshops, and fora organized by LCCHP. This cooperation has since extended to the Antiquities Coalition. 

Since 2013, HARP has forged ties with the Amelia (Italy)-based Association for Research into Crimes against Art (ARCA). HARP has been teaching a one-week provenance research workshop during ARCA’s three-month annual certification program focused on Holocaust-era losses and postwar restitution, a novelty in an environment mostly populated by cultural heritage specialists, archaeologists, and art law/art crime professionals.

HARP took interest in the continuing thefts of sacred Hopi artifacts from their communities in Arizona and New Mexico, the smuggling of these objects to France where certain auction houses sold these objects, in some instances, for tidy sums. All this under the nose of US Federal authorities. HARP advocated for the Hopi nation before an administrative court in Paris, not once, but six times, in a vain effort to stop these sales and return the sacred objects to their rightful owners. Although these battles were thankless, they helped make a point that, just because HARP specializes on Jewish cultural losses, it should not ignore the pain of other groups constantly subjected to similar forms of cultural plunder, largely unpunished. For the past ten years, HARP has forged ties with the Amelia (Italy)-based Association for Research into Crimes against Art (ARCA). HARP has been teaching a one-week provenance research workshop during ARCA’s three-month annual certification program focused [use gerund] on Holocaust-era losses and postwar restitution, a novelty in an environment mostly populated by cultural heritage specialists, archaeologists, and art law/art crime professionals.

HARP’s pivoting to a more ecumenical approach towards plunder and restitution has attracted some critics. A major Jewish organization once told HARP to remove the word “Holocaust” from its organizational name –HARP­­­–because of our defense of the Hopi nation. That senseless comment signaled an unhealthy parochialism and reaffirmed our resolve to pursue a path towards a more universal approach towards cultural plunder. HARP defines cultural plunder as a universal crime against humanity and promotes an interfaith, inter-ethnic, inter-cultural, global discussion on how to prevent future acts of cultural plunder and protect all cultures from commercial and ideological predation while prioritizing Jewish cultural losses from the Nazi era.

No other Jewish group seems willing to invest itself in an all-embracing dialogue about plunder and restitution. It reminds me of reports and correspondence written in 1940-1941 by officials of Jewish relief groups in France, pleading for assistance from non-Jewish organizations to help stranded, starving, interned Jews. The answer was always the same: you take care of your own, we take care of ours.

We are now in the Fall of 2023. Why do we continue to live in our separate corners, looking askance at the “others”? What will it take to bring these four categories under one big tent and forge a common strategy whose sole purpose is the restitution, repatriation and return of these objects, regardless of where they were forcibly removed, regardless of who or what instigated these crimes, and regardless of when these crimes occurred?

The lack of solidarity will spell the long-term failure of these restitution and repatriation campaigns to the immense relief and delight of those who currently hold these looted objects and continue to acquire them despite the general outcry of such behavior. It’s a bit like the movie “Catch me if you can!”. Unfortunately, this is not a game. It’s about the destruction of society (and humanity) to the great benefit of the perpetrators and at the expense of you, me and them.

Review: Pauline Baer de Pérignon: The Vanished Collection

by Ori Z. Soltes 

Every time one might be inclined to suppose that the last page has been turned on the vast narrative of the Holocaust—and certainly of that chapter that deals with the Nazi plunder of cultural property—another book, and not merely another page, appears that adds another nuance or issue. 

One of the truisms of the multi-aspected genocide engineered by the Nazis is its complexity and its internal paradoxes, which magnified the characteristic of paradox that is endemic to humanity. The Nazis offered inherent contradictions between the mud-and-excrement chaos of the pre-death world that they prepared for their victims and both the carefully ordered manner in which that world operated and the spit-polish cleanliness that obsessed Hitler and his inner circle who shaped and governed it. 

One paradox resonates from the manner in which the population designated for extermination was defined—from whom property and particularly cultural artifacts were confiscated directly (for they had ceased to possess the right to own anything, according to the laws articulated in and beyond Nuremberg in 1935) or indirectly (by forced sales of art and other possessions at a fraction of their value). The same Alfred Rosenberg who would be put in charge of defining racial categories and their features (eyes, hair, nose, lips, intellect, emotion, and the like) in order to decided who would suffer which particular fate, when, and why, was subsequently charged with organizing an effective and far-reaching system of art plunder. Among the racial determinants for Jews was the clear conclusion that having a single Jewish grandparent was sufficient for one’s polluted bloodline to yield a one-way ticket to Auschwitz. 

Yet apparently—paradoxically—the Fuehrer might make exceptions if it served his needs: so the most successful art plunderer on Hitler’s behalf, Hildebrandt Gurlitt, in spite of his paternal grandmother’s having been Jewish, flourished. Hitler also gave a survival pass to his Jewish barber (who never took the opportunities he must have had to slit his master’s throat). And on the other hand, while the most concerted Nazi efforts directed toward cultural appropriation were aimed at Jews and Slavic states, survivors or their offspring and descendants (some of whom become claimants of cultural property) are sometimes not Jewish.

Pauline Baer de Perignon grew up in France as a Catholic. The engrossing book authored by this journalist, film-script writer and writing instructor began by happenstance: a passing comment from a cousin engaged in the art world, whom she hadn’t seen in years, followed by a piece of paper on which he had written down the names of a handful of works by great masters that had once belonged to her great-grandfather, and which—her cousin rather casually noted—had probably been stolen from him.

The narrative that unfolds interweaves two main issues. One is the story itself that begins to take shape: yet another case of a French collector—in this case, Jules Strauss was particularly well-known for his generous contributions to the Louvre of exquisite and suitable frames for a good number of its masterpieces—dispossessed of his cultural property; and how easily and conveniently that datum and its accompanying details were obliterated from the communal memory of the French art and culture world in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust.

The other is the process through which, inch by inch, the author scaled the double territory of trying to understand what had happened to her great-grandfather’s collections—how to begin and deepen and broaden her research—and came to a deeper understanding of her own family identity and heritage.

Jules Strauss, we learn, while he directed pointed if quantitatively modest efforts to building his own art collection, devoted unique amounts of energy to providing the Louvre with frames more consistent with the paintings hung within them than had previously been the case: he innovated both the very idea of taking the framing of a painting seriously and directing serious efforts to providing the right one for a given work, subtly enhancing its appearance. Yet (to repeat) Strauss also possessed some interesting and valuable works of art—such as a small drawing by Tiepolo that ended up in the collections of the Louvre and an intriguing painting by Largillière, a Portrait of a Lady as Pomona, which ended up in the Dresden Gemaeldegalerie Alte Meister (Old Masters Picture Gallery) in former East Germany.

These works emerge in Baer de Pérignon’s narrative as a focus within what also evolves: a realization that they had not made the journey from Jules Strauss’s walls to the storage facilities of these museums along a legitimate path, but as part of the often obscure and unstraightforward process of cultural-artifact depradations in which the Nazis were so particularly skilled. Among the ironic—or galling—aspects of the Jules Strauss story was that his home, 60 Avenue Foch, also confiscated by the regime, was requisitioned by senior members of the SS specialized in black market operations and the seizure of Jewish property.

Pauline Baer de Pérignon’s own journey includes a number of interesting turns and twists as she also evolves, to become a knowledgeable and comfortable denizen of the archives in which she would eventually uncover the documentary proof that these works did not leave her great-grandfather’s possession simply because—as the director of the Dresden museum would cynically ask her during the first round of her attempts to regain that piece of her family patrimony—“perhaps Herr Strauss was happy to have sold his painting for a decent price?”

Differently—but equally important in stature and intangibility to her quest to reclaim these tangible connections to Jules and her family past—is her arrival to a point of wondering how, exactly, and why, precisely, her father and two of his first cousins converted, in 1940, to Catholicism. A whole other aspect of the world of Nazi confiscations emerged for her, regarding layered and interwoven aspects of her family—and her own—religious identity.

This last extended detail is ultimately shaped around the peculiar and willful amnesia of which, she comes to recognize, her family has been suffering during the two generations since the Holocaust had come, uprooted and destroyed so much, and gone, like a devastating typhoon. That amnesia set in, more specifically, after Jules’ widow, Pauline de Baer Pérignon’s great-grandmother, had filed several claims with her government—the French government—regarding the works of art that that government and its museum bureaucracy refused to acknowledge as having come into their possession along the illegitimate path of Nazi spoliation.

The amnesia that set in for the family, which involves its own heritage, both cultural and spiritual, and the amnesia of the French government and museum world, are part of the larger amnesia from which those who struggle in the trenches of art restitution are trying to help the Western world recover, as the decades since the Holocaust spread out and we continue, as a species, to repeat the sorts of actions that bought such grief to so many in such a range of different ways over 75 years ago. That is why this book—aside from its flowing style, compelling storyline and intriguing twists and turns—adds such an important chapter to the Holocaust narrative and its culture-centered subset. Its ultimate theme is really about restituting memory—that most significant of characteristics that makes humans human. 

“Happy” New Year 2021

By Marc Masurovsky

 

[This opinion piece reflects my own views and does not necessarily represent those of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project and its members.]

 

The word “happy” should be framed with heavy quotation marks.  In year two of a worldwide pandemic triggered by the seemingly unstoppable spread of a deadly virus popularly known as COVID-19, our everyday routines have been permanently upended. Each and everyone of us has had to rethink how to make ends meet in a largely virtual world. Millions of lives have been cast into disarray and oftentimes shattered, as a confluence of factors generated and fueled by self-centered human behavior has exarcerbated an already terrifying daily reality:

-inadequate and sometimes cynical government responses to the health crisis—that’s putting it mildly!—and their lukewarm initiatives to stanch the damage they have unwittingly stoked;

-citizens’ extraordinary expressions of self-righteous entitlements about not taking even the most elemental hygienic precautions—mask-wearing, social distancing, limiting involvement with and participation in group events and gatherings—just because they can…;

-illogical and irrational politicizing of basic civil and civic behavior aimed at curbing and neutralizing a deadly virus… just because…

 

Our exit from 2020 allowed us to breathe a sigh of relief with hopes of return to some kind of “normalcy”. That wish was quickly interrupted by the State-sponsored right-wing populist assault on the Congress of the United States on 6 January 2021. The product of decades of discontent and radicalized feelings of alienation, disempowerment of a large segment of the American populace, mixed in with ignorant and uneducated fantasies of Aryan supremacy and profound dislike for the “other” whom these elements have routinely blamed for their own suffering and sense of hopelessness in a fast-moving, rapidly-evolving world. A lethal cocktail that American politicians and elected officials, including the outgoing president, have stoked and manipulated for their own base motives, themselves nurtured by idealizations of what it would be like to be in charge of a largely monolithic, authoritarian, violent and very “white” system.

 

Knowing all of this, is it still possible to continue discussing crimes against culture resulting in the massive displacement of cultural objects owned by individuals or entities targeted for their “otherness”?

 

The answer is a resounding “YES.”

 

The victims of cultural plunder are resoundingly the “others” who don’t fit into a white supremacist, nationalist, monolithic view of a world bereft of difference.

 

Advocating on their behalf means that we uphold their essential humanity, their inalienable right to exist, thrive and create in this world of ours which is theirs.

 

Fighting for the restitution of objects displaced and plundered during the Nazi era, or during conflicts around the world, or resulting from attacks against indigenous communities worldwide, means that we fight for our collective and individual rights to culture, regardless of place and context.

 

Encouraging and promoting a broad-based and democratic approach to the documentation of these displaced objects by acknowledging the stories of their creation and their creators as well as their tumultuous movement occasioned by displacement, theft, misappropriation, and recycling on the international art market.

 

We are all equal and we are all in this together—regardless of race, creed, religion, ethnicity, and belief.  And together, more than ever, we shall prevail, if not for our sake, for the sake of our children and grand-children and their progeny until the ends of time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some frequently asked questions

by Marc Masurovsky

a/ What is the total number of art objects claimed?

One should place the ultimate answer to this question in its proper context. By May 1945, somewhere between 15 and 20 million art objects of all sorts, from masterpieces to portraits of your favorite saints and relatives, had been misplaced due to civil unrest, persecution, war, genocide, and theft.

Of those misplaced cultural objects, a small number fit the moniker of “culturally-significant” or “national treasure” or both, depending on who is defining those two very odd expressions. For the sake of the argument, let’s just say 1 to 5 per cent of the misplaced objects fit those categories, or 100,000 (lowest number) to 1 million (highest number). The rest fell into the general bucket of culturally not so significant or insignificant, again, depending on who is expounding on this odd categorization.

Postwar Allied restitution policy ended up focusing on the 1 to 5 percent of objects lost or missing due to State-sponsored mischief between 1933 and 1945. For the rest, compensation schemes were foisted onto shell-shocked survivors and their kin due to an institutional absence of interest amongst postwar governments to aid those victims in locating and recovering their missing cultural property for reasons mentioned above. Many of the culturally significant objects and those earning the label of “national treasure” came from State collections plundered by the Axis or from private collections owned by rather wealthy individuals with close ties to State museums in countries dominated by the Axis. Those items received favored treatment in the eyes of the Allies and their representatives, referred to as “Monuments Men”.

The Allied powers’ prime directive was the rehabilitation of Europe (read that part of Europe not occupied or influenced by the Soviet Army and its government) especially as the incipient Cold War became a full-fledged game of geopolitical antipathy between former wartime allies.

As a consequence of the aforementioned factors and those tied to the inevitable human condition—people over property—most survivors did not file claims in the immediate postwar period and only did so after deadlines had passed and the only chance of recovering anything was close to 0.

By 1956, the US State Department had estimated that approximately several hundred thousand cultural objects of all kinds and shapes and value were still being claimed through its good offices by individuals from more than 30 nations.

From the mid-1990s to today, since there is no concerted international effort to tally the total number of claimed objects that are registered as such with national governments, we can only guess that, perhaps, the figure is close to or in excess of the number declared by the State Department in 1956, since most of the claims were never satisfied.

Nations that are signatory to international compacts known as the Washington conference of 1998 and the Terezin Declaration of June 2009 should conduct a census of all outstanding cultural claims registered as of now in their care and publish those results for public consumption.

b/ what is the total number of art objects restituted?

Historically, we only have repatriation figures from various postwar governments and official statistics regarding actual physical restitutions up to the early 1950s. Since then, there is very little public information that can be found about how many art objects were returned until the late 1990s.

Those nations that have established restitution committees (the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Austria) have compiled figures regarding the number of objects that have been claimed through their auspices. But no statistics are tallied pertaining to the number of objects returned through direct negotiations with museums, auction houses, institutions, corporations, and private individuals.

c/ what is the total value of art objects sold after restitution?

The only indication of value comes from press reports about items being auctioned after restitution. It can safely be assumed that the objects with an Austrian provenance—mostly oil paintings by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele—have fetched the highest prices at auction following their restitution, mostly due to the infatuation by the upper tiers of the global art market for such works, regardless of their inherent and implicit esthetic value. Those works alone have fetched in toto more than half a billion dollars. It might be safe to conservatively estimate the total value of restituted objects at slightly more than a billion dollars since the late 1990s. But that figure needs to be carefully verified through an elaborate survey of the field of art restitution.

d/ what is the total value of so-called “art restitution litigation?

This question is unfair and unjust but it does capture the collective imagination that impugns all sorts of evil motives to lawyers who seek opportunities wherever they can. We can only surmise how costly litigation efforts can be once we fuse the fees earned from seeking restitution and preventing restitution. Usually, fairly well-heeled law firms are recruited as outside counsel by museums in order to safeguard the integrity of their collections and rebuff attempts by claimants to assert their claims to title. On the plaintiffs’ side, there is an odd mix of solo practitioners and small and large firms involved in art restitution. All told, there are not more than 100 or so attorneys—yes, you read it!—who work on art restitution cases as an integral part of their legal practice if we combined North America, Europe and Israel. Since most plaintiffs cases are adopted on a contingency fee basis, usually 30 per cent, you should take the estimated value of restituted objects and divide that figure by three in order to get an idea on the estimated value of the litigation for plaintiffs’ lawyers. Likewise, for those lawyers defending their clients against outside claims, the fees can easily rise into the millions of dollars for each claimed object. Most of the claimed objects that are subject to intense years-long litigation hold values in excess of 1 million dollars.

Where does all of this leave the bewildered field of provenance research? You guessed it. The two main incentives underlying provenance research are to 1/ safeguard art objects which are part of a museum’s collection or that of an individual collector or 2/ obtain the restitution of such an art object.

What does this mean in terms of the objective and empirical integrity of the research being conducted on the history of an object? How do these legal undertakings affect the very nature of provenance research as distinct from its initial intent as an art-historical practice?

What is the future of provenance research and can it be salvaged as an objective, scientific field of inquiry?

Teaching plunder to children Part Two

by Marc Masurovsky

This is the continuation of a set of slides developed for children ages 9 to 13 who attended a Jewish middle school in Michigan.  Feel free to use them!

The end... for now.

Different shades of recovery

by Marc Masurovsky

The process of recovery of looted cultural, artistic and religious objects is daunting for several reasons:

If action is not taken right away to recover a looted object, it becomes exponentially difficult to identify its current location. In the case of losses during the Third Reich, “recovery” was an absurd notion since the perpetrators of the thefts controlled the reins of political, legal, and economic power. Hence, the process of tracing the object could only occur after a regime change and with rules in place that would facilitate such searches. Moreover, if the works confiscated or plundered by the Nazi regime ended up in neighboring countries, what rights did the claimants have to recover such works, since Nazi Germany was a recognized nation in the community of nations, for better or for worse? What rights do they have now? Since most of the domestic losses suffered by Jews living in Germany were State-sponsored, there was no mechanism in place in other nations to deem the actions of the Nazi state illegal and the confiscated property subject to restitution. Therefore, if you lost your property in 1934 and if you survived all of the subsequent events provoked by the Nazis’ fury against the Jews and others, you would have to wait for at least 12 years to assert a claim of restitution.

If your missing object is located in the hands of a new owner, regardless of how that person or institution acquired the victims’ property, the laws governing property rights and title to “legally acquired” property prevent the plundered owner from obtaining restitution of his/her looted property without going through a complex tangle of legal and political maneuvers. In the absence of explicit mechanisms put in place by the national governments of nations where such looted objects have ended up, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to recover them. This state of affairs endures to this day and has been a continual source of frustration for victims of plunder with minimal accommodations made by governments and courts to facilitate the process of recovery.

If the looted object is declared part of the cultural patrimony of the nation from where it ended up, the recovery process involves a direct negotiation with that nation’s government, a very laborious discussion which usually ends in utter failure. What is the word of a dispossessed Jewish owner against that of an official who upholds the notion of cultural patrimony and inalienability of art objects located in State collections, whether those objects were looted during genocidal acts? Culpable countries hiding behind such imperialistic arguments are: France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, to cite the worst, Eastern European nations, all of the nations that once formed the Soviet Union.

When source nations seek the return of their looted patrimony which usually consists of antiquities illegally extracted from archaeological sites or illegally removed from religious and other sacred edifices, the wait can last for an eternity; it can also be circumscribed to anywhere from a year to several decades if the aggrieved nation is willing to compromise, accept trade offs like offer commercial advantages to the withholding nation, or agree to symbolic returns with a promise never to come back and ask for anymore as in the case of South Korea and the shabby treatment it received from France over a set of priceless manuscripts.

Aggrieved source nations include but are not limited to Greece, Turkey, Italy, South Korea, China, Egypt, Nigeria, Mali.

In other words, we have not made much progress in the past several decades. As provenance continues to become optional in art market transactions and most nations do not encourage their cultural institutions to be more forthcoming in publicizing the history of the objects that are part of their “patrimony,” nothing short of a cultural revolution will sway them to change course and become, god forbid, ethical.

So I Have Been Thinking…

[Note: The following text is a reaction/thought piece to a recent query. Since this blog page is about thinking, these are things to think about. The raising of questions can be as important as having absolute answers.]

by Ori Z. Soltes

A recent question prompts me to think: When Dina Gottliebova-Babbitt found herself in Auschwitz as a 17-year old, she probably did not expect her or her mother to survive (her father and fiance did not). But fortunately not only did she have significant talent as an artist but in an odd turn of fate, Josef Mengele, the notorious primary physician-in-residence at the camp, noted for his horrific experiments on his limitless supply of patients, had an interest in her art. Not because he was an art devotee, mind you—although many of the Nazi brass were, infamously enjoying Beethoven by night while beating prisoners to death by day, or ingathering Rembrandts and declaiming Schiller’s poetry in between consigning victims to the gas chambers. No, Mengele’s interest was more practical: he felt that the black and white photographic possibilities available to him could not capture the emotion sliding across the faces of his patients, to say nothing of their skin tones, and he hoped that Dina’s portraits of these victims (particularly Roma victims) would serve that purpose. Apparently they did—well enough, in any case, for her to use her skill as a bargaining chip not only for her own survival but that of her mother.

By now Dina Gottliebova’s story is known to some: that she came to the United States, ending up in California where she also married a fellow artist, Art Babbitt, and both of them had successful careers as cartoonists. It was only many decades after the war, when the issue not only of the Holocaust but of Nazi-plundered art surfaced in a world that had been in a deep slumber regarding such issues, that Gottliebova Babbitt began to wonder if those portraits had survived. It turns out that seven of them had. She sustained a long legal fight with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum authorities regarding ownership of the works—at one point the director of the museum opined that the real owner was Mengele, since he commissioned and, one might say, paid for them. That Director was fired shortly thereafter, but in the end little satisfaction for Gottliebova Babbitt was achieved by the time of her death from cancer in 2009.

The Museum refused restitution, although they required her authorizing signature every time one of these images was used. They also offered her financial compensation, which she refused, but instead asked that the money the museum paid for the right to exhibit the works be donated to organizations that assist the Roma. To me the issue has always seemed almost uniquely soluble among the myriad issues that form part of the ongoing saga of Nazi-plundered art and its restitution or non-restitution. Since there are multiple works in this case—seven, to repeat—it seems to me that they could be shared between the artist and the museum, with perfect copies of those in the hands of the one while the originals are in the hands of the other (the technology of this is a no-brainer in this day and age)—cycling them every, say, three or five years, so that both sides are always in possession of three (or four) and over a complete cycle each side has had possession of all of them.

I propose this, since the most substantial ground upon which the Museum stands in refusing restitution is that they require the images as part of the exhibition-cum-educational program in which they are always engaged. So in fact they would always have some, just not all of them in their possession. (And do they exhibit all seven at once anyway? No paper conservator would advise that). Were there only one of these paintings I admit that the solution would be more difficult—although one could even propose a similar back-and-forth between original and copy over a prescribed period of time with a single work at issue. In any case, the question of the artist’s rights as opposed to an educational institution’s rights remains problematic—and it does not become simpler once the artist is gone and the question moves on toward the artist’s survivors. And then the issue of how many survivors and how many works of art muddies things further. I don’t claim to have a one-size-fits-all answer to the question—appropriately enough, since time is continuing to demonstrate that the number of Holocaust “stories”—whether regarding art of other matters—is endless.

But the question pushes my thoughts in two further, somewhat related directions. One is this: Recently a colleague from Iraq—who manages to continue her work, with little pay under unimaginably difficult conditions, of trying to document and protect all of the antiquities that are at risk in that country the tearing to shreds of which was facilitated by our own country—asked one of my American colleagues: “why don’t you return our material?” Having asserted that “you” should not include him, but the American government, he also clarified what she meant by “our material.” As some may know, our troops were empowered to remove, among other things, many objects relevant to the long-gone Jewish community from Baghdad. These are mostly manuscript-type material, documents, mostly only one or two centuries old, although the Jewish community in Iraq traces itself back to the Judaean exile following the Babylonian destruction of the First Jerusalem Temple in 586 BCE.

I myself got to see this material. From the description leading to what I saw in our National Archives I expected thousand-year-old Torah scrolls, at least, and was sort of disappointed, frankly, that the collection was so much tamer than I had hoped. On the other hand, the work being done by the archives’ conservationists was extraordinary—spectacular, really—and there is something enormously intriguing even about report cards from schools of a few generations ago, with their names, grades, comments and photos of the students; it brings to life a community that has since vanished in a unique manner.

So what was my Iraqi colleague’s beef? That these documents are part of state-owned material, kept and carefully preserved until the Americans swept in and carried them off. The American claim—including certain important members of the American Jewish community—is that this material records a community that, mostly gone, is and will further be forgotten if we don’t preserve its memory by adequately conserving, protecting and presumably at some point displaying the documents (here’s a question: when? where?). The implication is, of course, that none of these activities was happening or can happen in Iraq.

My colleague disagrees: the documents were being cared for by the state, by dedicated state employees like her, because they recognize the importance of Jewish communities in the history of Iraq, and how important it is to preserve that part of their history—and not just that part represented by substantial ancient monuments. So we find ourselves in the crossfire of a question parallel (not identical, for various reasons) to that raised by Gottliebova Babbitt’s paintings and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum. Who owns this odd collection of “Judaica” since there is no longer a Jewish community in Iraq? That question cannot be disentangled from the question of who is best equipped to preserve and display these items.

We have, of course, loaded the dice by tearing apart that country, but the amazing thing is that there continue to be people like this colleague who continue to do their preservationist jobs. So if we refuse to return the material to the Iraqis, are we merely being the British Museum redux vis-à-vis the Parthenon Marbles: asserting with the superiority of a colonial power that we can take care of their heritage better than the natives can? Could we return some of it and mount a serious exhibit on the Jewish community of part of it—or an exhibit of all of it that travels for a few years before the whole thing goes back to a Baghdad where we even help assure that adequate facilities are there to receive it? I think once more of a parallel: we Americans exhibited art from Germany after the war, and when some members of the government and art community wanted us to keep it, other, wiser voices prevailed, arguing that if we did that, we would be no better than the German art-plunderers—or, as the Cold War took shape, the Soviet Red Army Trophy Squad thieves.

We always come back to the first question: what are we-as humans, as Americans, as whatever subsets of either of those categories we want to throw into the rhetorical hopper? And that leads me to a second offshoot of the Gottliebova-Babbitt question that is also very current, albeit having nothing to do with either the Holocaust or art plunder, but having everything to do with the role of art as an educational instrument—which was the main basis for the Museum’s argument against the artist’s claim for restitution. I recently led a study tour to Russia, and my group and I visited a number of smaller towns not far from Moscow—part of what is known as the “Golden Ring” for their importance with regard to churches, cathedrals, monasteries and kremlins—including Suzdal, Vladimir, Yaroslavl and a few others. I was struck in these places how—in spite of the sense one received in the early 1990s of a tearing down of public monuments; statues of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin in particular; in a repudiation of nearly 75 years of Soviet history and oppression—there remained in very town, in the main square, some statue of Lenin, standing, declaiming, striding.

It was clear—and I discussed this with local guides and others—that a decision was made to keep these images intact, since they are part of the history of Russia, and not to tear them all down as symbols of an oppressive Soviet regime that ruled Russia for a period of time. It is essential that people remain aware of their history—the bad parts so that they are not repeated, the good parts so that they may be emulated. This is an idea particularly connected to a dictum associated with the philosopher Santayana, and the Russians seem in this case to get the idea.

Should we not get it, as well? I could not be more disgusted by the American history of slavery or the recent extraordinary upsurging reminder that racism, antisemitism and a host of other forms of bigotry still prevail in our country. But I strongly believe that tearing down public statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson is not only not the answer, it runs contrary to the educational potential of art, especially public art. Do we, by the way, also tear down statues of other slave owners, like Washington and Jefferson? Or do we use all of these images as a stepping-off point to remind and educate ourselves to what we were when not at our best and to what we still need to do to make ourselves better—as individuals, as communities, and as a country?

Was Lee’s sin that he owned slaves or that he saw Virginia first and the Federal Union second—or both? The point is: it doesn’t matter. What matters is that we need to ask about these things, try to understand them and use them to better our world. Instead of tearing down or covering up these statues, or carting them off to museums, why not use them as the basis for an annual, dynamic program (have schoolkids take part in a kind of American Passion Play!) in which the story of what was wrong—and also what was right—about these people will encourage us to work actively to improve our communities.

Talking points

by Marc Masurovsky

From 1933 to 1945, millions of cultural and artistic objects changed hands illegally as a result of Nazi persecutions. Many objects were recycled on the international art market while others were sent to the Reich. After the defeat of the Axis Powers, looted art objects were found in organized and improvised depots scattered across Europe but mostly concentrated in Central Europe. They also ended up in the hands of private individuals, businesses and government institutions, in vacant dwellings, the cellars of apartment buildings, in other words they could be found everywhere. Axis plunder turned the European continent into a veritable cave of Ali Baba.

Armed with a host of international declarations and commitments to return, recover, and restitute looted objects, the victorious Allies worked hard to locate these objects so that their rightful owners could enjoy their possession once again.

Those were heady days indeed, they did not last long. The wear and tear of administering these restitution programs frayed the nerves of Allied military authorities and their civilian counterparts busy with the task of propping up and rebuilding the defeated Axis powers as the incipient Cold War settled in like a bad case of the flu. Yesterday’s ally, the Soviet Union, became the new old adversary.

So, why did restitution fail most victims of Axis persecution?

-Short filing deadlines to submit claims to governments;
-Shock and trauma from years of confinement and persecution;
-Inability to come up with documentation as a result of expropriations, evictions and physical destruction of their property;
-Lack of interest shown by officials involved in the location and recovery of looted cultural assets.

How does that work?

Personnel responsible for the recovery of looted cultural objects, were mostly drawn from cultural bureaucracies, museums, and art historical circles. They carefully examined the claims filed by victims or their next of kin, and decided which items were worth looking for and which ones not. In many cases, claimants were told that their collections did not contain objects that were culturally significant and did not contribute to the cultural heritage of the nation. Why? Because most liberated nations wanted to replenish their cultural heritage or patrimoine which, they argued, had been impoverished as a result of Axis policies.

The quality of the object became the most significant deciding factor as to whether recovery officials would invest their resources to locate it and effect its return to the claimant. Cultural significance played a key role in assessing claims. We can only infer that the art collected by most Jewish owners was culturally insignificant and did not contribute to the cultural heritage of the nations in which they lived.

Objects favored for recovery came from the Western canon of Classical culture, which most if not all cultural advisors to Allied forces responsible for locating these objects had internalized prior to their tour of duty in Europe. Their esthetic biases led them to favor objects viewed as “masterpieces”, “treasures”, “culturally significant”, objects whose absence impoverished the cultural heritage of formerly occupied nations. Who owned those objects? Members of the elite, the upper strata of society, the 1 percent. Restitution rates were much higher amongst the 1 per cent than the 99 per cent who more often than not were forced to seek compensation in lieu of restitution.

No systematic audit of cultural losses was performed in the years following the end of the war, something that was deplored by a number of our famous “Monuments Men” who moaned about the continued absence of a central list of cultural losses from which they could do their work and be more efficient. Formerly occupied nations did publish lists of looted objects based on claims that they processed, but again, when you compare the claims to the listed objects, the “registries” reflect a small percentage of the actual losses suffered by the victims. Hence, they are grossly incomplete.

How does that affect the claims process? 

The answer is obvious.

We are here today because of the built-in prejudices that shaped the postwar policies of recovery of looted cultural objects. The justice that eluded most of the victims of cultural thefts lay in the hands of art historians, museum officials, and civil servants who imposed an elitist conception of culture on the recovery politics of the postwar era.

5 countries have standing commissions dealing with art claims. The international community came together twice once in 1998 and again in 2009 to address among other things issues of cultural losses, in vain. On both occasions, public policy failed the claimants since the 49 countries that signed on to the Washington Principles and again to the Terezin Declaration failed to put into place adequate legal mechanisms that would assist the victims of cultural plunder. This absence of State support for dispensing with a modicum of justice to victims of cultural plunders produced a political and ethical abyss into which the private sector injected itself and countless lawyers were only too eager to represent those who had been denied justice…. For a fee. The failure of the international community to address the problem of cultural restitution produced the business of restitution, the commercialization of claims, and the search for profits through the recovery of looted art. Not just any looted art. Focus was placed again on high end items, so-called treasures and masterpieces where the margins were impressive if recovery was successful. There has been an unusual concentration of restitutions centered on art objects seized in Austria after 1938 which produced half a billion dollars’ worth of revenue in the last decade and, yes, the recovery of ‘masterpieces’ from the Austrian secession. The same emphasis again on ‘masterpieces.’ Can you imagine what provenance research would look like with even 1 per cent of that amount?

How many works by lesser known artists and craftsmen are making their way through auction houses, galleries, even hanging in museums, without our knowledge? Here ignorance is bliss. The less we know, the better off we are. There are no incentives for the private sector to become transparent about the objects that it brokers. Opacity continues to reign supreme even if small successes have been recorded in several leading auction houses and a nexus of galleries and museums.

How do we achieve justice?

There are those who argue that enough is enough, let’s end these claims. Get over it, move on. Enjoy art for what it is.

On the other side of the spectrum, people such as myself who enjoy art, consider genocide and the plunder that comes with it to be an abomination that make a Bosch painting look like a tea party. We want to make sure that justice is served even if it takes us another two or three generations to achieve it.

Is that realistic? I don’t know.

Is that reasonable? I don’t know.

Genocide does not take into account what is realistic and what is reasonable. It is a total extinction event that knows no borders, no boundaries, that feeds on blood and property.

And yet, there won’t be any survivors of the Holocaust left in the next ten years. Only their heirs, and their heirs’ children and grand children, and distant relatives far removed from the crime, who clamor for restitution. Should they?

Should restitution be viewed as an inalienable right? 

Part of me thinks so, part of me hesitates. Why?

One of the single tragedies of the restitution movement is the inability of institutions to mobilize their resources to educate the public about the crime of cultural plunder and its impact on society, the traumatic nature of the loss of the coveted, cherished possession. 

Art is about being human. 

Art is an extension of our souls, isn’t it? 

To remove it by force is to rend our spirit, to deprive us of something essential.

Some call it identity.

Research into the origins of art objects is a way of restoring to the object a life, a geist, a history, a story to share with all. Without provenance research, we are poor. The public and private sectors must mobilize the needed resources nationally and internationally to enhance research on objects in collections, make research results available to all. Museums should enshrine provenance research, due diligence practices into their daily rituals, free from the strictures imposed by their legal departments who live in fear of the dreaded claimant. Yes, provenance research should be as automatic as having breakfast in the morning.

Justice comes from being fair to all. True, we can’t ascribe blame all of the time to the current possessors. But neither can they hide behind their presumptive good faith. In theory, we are intelligent creatures and should be able to ask questions about the history of objects that we buy, borrow, display. Where contention develops over the ownership of a looted item, new mechanisms should be put into place on an international level that provide an impartial forum to the victims’ heirs and to the current possessors. These mechanisms should be linked to a systematic research effort into the histories of the objects. Such an institution should be impartial and answer to the highest standards of ethical and professional conduct. Dialogue amongst nations, institutions, and individuals, in my mind, is the only way to pave the way to a proper settlement of restitution claims anchored in a desire for justice.

The international community should elevate the crime of plunder to a crime against humanity at the same time as it reinforces the cultural rights of all peoples, especially indigenous peoples. Doing the former without the latter is absurd and hypocritical. How can you talk about plunder when you don’t discuss the fundamental cultural rights of people?

Failing the above, we are doomed to decades of bitter litigation and implementing every legal and political recourse possible, including outright seizures and confiscations of objects in order to bend the will of administrations into effecting the safe return of looted objects. Governments should stop invoking arcane, obsolete, arrogant, elitist notions of culture and patrimony to deny justice to the victims of cultural plunder, regardless of who you are and where you live, and which country you hail from. Nationalistic, chauvinistic approaches to cultural patrimony help no one except the bureaucrats who refuse to acknowledge that culture belongs to everyone and not just to the select few.

Thank you.

Why oppose the physical restitution of looted cultural objects?

by Marc Masurovsky

When a claim is filed for the return of an object that was allegedly misappropriated during the Nazi/Fascist era and especially as a result of anti-Jewish persecutions, the current possessor who receives the claim can either be an individual, a private entity, an entity controlled or owned by a public agency, and/or the public agency itself and its overseer (usually referred to as “the government”).

Individual possessors are mostly private collectors who have invested in the art market and whose main occupation is not necessarily the buying and selling of art. Objects in private collections are, by definition, the most difficult to trace because, unless there is a public record of all private transactions involving art objects of any kind, the chances are close to nil for a victim of cultural plunder or his/her heirs to locate the object unless several conditions are met:

1/ the person who took possession of the looted object dies and his/her estate is put up for sale. In this instance, the catalogue will list the item being claimed. If it is not deemed as important or “interesting” (whatever that actually means), there may not be a reproduction of the object in the sales catalogue, only a description. But if the object rises to the occasion and is worthy of being photographed, the process of identification is facilitated by the publication of a photograph. This does not mean that the claimant remembers what the object looked like but he/she might have a photo of it hanging or displayed in a room of the residence from which it was wrongly removed.

2/ the looted object is featured in a catalogue of a particular artist’s production. For instance, if you have lost a work by Degas, chances are that you will consult major publications pertaining to the artist who loved to paint young ballerinas and race horses. Catalogues raisonnés, exhibition brochures, specialized monographs, are all part of the arsenal of the claimant to locate the lost item. That does not imply that victims of cultural plunder spend eight hours a day, five days a week, looking for their stolen property. This should be a shared burden, whereby the current possessor should exercise reasonable multi-source due diligence before acquiring or displaying an art object.  In all cases, the onus is placed on the claimant to do her "homework" and search, and search.  Thankfully, judges have weighed in favor of victims when harassed by the current possessor's lawyers for not consulting art historical sources on a regular basis to prove that they were being diligent in the search for their lost property.

3/ the unimaginable: a claimant or a friend of hers walks into a residence, or a museum, or any building harboring works and objects of art, and recognizes (or thinks she recognizes) the lost item. It does happen, it has happened, and once over the shock, with some time elapsing from the initial (re)viewing of the lost object, the claimant initiates the process of confirming that it is in fact the same object and must decide whether to ask for its restitution. That can be the hardest decision to make. Since no statistics are kept about art claims resulting from Holocaust-era and Nazi/Fascist misappropriations, it is impossible to know how many individuals have mulled the idea of filing a claim and decided not to, in the end, because of financial and emotional cost associated with a long and burdensome legal entanglement.

Looted objects also end up with privately-held businesses whether or not these businesses base their commercial activity on the trade in cultural objects. Private entities that are most likely to hold and display works and objects of art are corporations, professional services firms which dispense legal, financial, and other types of specialized counsel for a fee and whose office spaces (including but not limited to hallways, lobbies, atria, enclosed gardens, and meeting rooms) are adorned with objects of art from all corners of the world. The theory goes that a visitor feels at ease in the presence of so much beauty on display and can only surmise that he/she will be encountering “cultured” individuals.

And of course, art and/or antiquities galleries, auction houses, flea markets, bric a brac stores, emporia.

Amazingly so, government offices do get decorated with important works of art and decorative objects either borrowed from state-owned museums or from government-run warehouses and storage depots where untold numbers of objects belonging to identifiable and heirless victims sit in limbo, the playthings of government-appointed civil servants and cultural officials.

When faced with a claim, there are numerous defensive postures that are used to repel the attempt to recover. What you will read below has been told to claimants more than once:

1/ you must be confused, it’s not the same object;

2/ do you have any proof that it is actually yours to claim?

3/ how dare you? I am insulted.

4/ I bought it fair and square.

5/ my parents gave it to me.

6/ I inherited it.

7/ I didn’t steal it. And in any case, even if it was stolen, it happened a long time ago. So go away…

8/ finders keepers losers weepers. In any event, we won the war. [the trophy art argument ad reductionem]

9/ It belongs to our museum. It will never leave.

and many more…

None of those responses are particularly inviting.  They discourage moral and ethical solutions leading to restitution so that the claimant can close the book on a very upsetting moment in history which affected her and her family very deeply. The knowledge of the presence of the un-restituted object reopens old wounds, brings back memories left to be forgotten, re-awakens ancient emotions that no one wanted to “feel” again. The process of restitution can be a very jarring emotional experience.

To make matters worse, most often, the claimant is forced to press her claim through a body of laws and legal theories that are better suited for recovering a stolen car. How do you compare a stolen car to a painting looted by Nazi henchmen? Unfortunately, the law is highly reductionist and lawyers retained to represent claimants or to defend against them, must take a traumatic historical event, shove it through a sieve, and reduce its complex components, to a simpler distillation of facts that can match one or more legal theories or strategies which were not designed to incorporate extraordinary human failures resulting in mass death and genocide.

After half a century of litigation involving Nazi thefts of art owned by Jewish victims, no country has frayed a clear path to aid victims and survivors of genocide recover their property without the humiliation and stress associated with years of litigation that might lead to defeat and huge costs.

It makes one wonder whether government officials, members of the art trade and their sycophantic allies would just wish "bad" history to go away so that they can enjoy the fruits of cultural plunder. and not have to incorporate THAT history into the retelling of the story of art. 

Or is that unfair?

In my view, they are the original revisionists, choosing to omit History from the history of art objects.