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Showing posts with label Marc Masurovsky. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Marc Masurovsky. Show all posts

February 25, 2015

Provenance Research Training Program To Be Held in New York This Spring


In Washington, DC: Marc Masurovsky, (00) 1 202 255 1602 , plunderedart@gmail.com
In New York, NY: Pierre Ciric (00) 1 212 260 6090, pciric@ciriclawfirm.com


The Holocaust Art Restitution Project, (“HARP”), based in Washington, DC, chaired by Ori Z. Soltes, and the Ciric LawFirm, PLLC, a law firm based in New York City, has announced the first art-related provenance research training program to be held in the New York area between April 16, 2015 and May 01, 2015 at New York Law School.  This unique professional training program, a collaboration effort between HARP and the Center for International Law at New York Law School will be held on:

     April 16-17 2015
     April 23-24, 2015
     April 30-May 1, 2015

The training program, taught by Ori Z. Soltes and Marc Masurovsky, has been designed to assist the legal community and art market professionals who are currently affected by the presence of artistic, cultural, and ritual objects which have been displaced through acts of war and genocide between 1933 and 1945, with an emphasis on those items misappropriated during the Third Reich, the Holocaust, and the Second World War. Led by experts in the fields of historical and provenance research, this training program will assist participants in assessing the lawful or illicit ownership of these objects. 

A detailed program flier of the three, 2-day workshops can be found below. The cost of the program is $3500. 

Applications can be submitted here.

May 8, 2014

Gurlitt Art Collection: Switzerland's Kunstmuseum Bern announces that Cornelius Gurlitt willed his art to them; art restitution expert Marc Masurovsky weighs in

by Catherine Sezgin, ARCA Blog Editor-in-Chief

Although Cornelius Gurlitt's legal team has not posted on its website news of the disposition of their client's art collecting following his death yesterday, Switzerland's Kunstmuseum Bern (Museum of Fine Arts Bern) issued this media release:
Today, May 7, 2014, Kunstmuseum Bern was informed by Mr Christoph Edel, lawyer to Mr Cornelius Gurlitt, who died yesterday, May 6, 2014, by telephone and in writing that Mr Cornelius Gurlitt has appointed the private-law foundation Kunstmuseum Bern his unrestricted and unfettered sole heir. Despite speculation in the media that Mr Gurlitt had bequeathed his collection to an art institution outside Germany, the news came like a bolt from the blue, since at no time has Mr Gurlitt had any connection with Kunstmuseum Bern. The Board of Trustees and Directors of Kunstmuseum Bern are surprised and delighted, but at the same time do not wish to conceal the fact that this magnificent bequest brings with it a considerable burden of responsibility and a wealth of questions of the most difficult and sensitive kind, and questions in particular of a legal and ethical nature. They will not be in a position to issue a more detailed statement before first consulting the relevant files and making contact with the appropriate authorities.
Kunstmuseum Bern describes itself as the oldest art museum in Switzerland with a permanent collection. Videos highlighting the collection include works by Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, Amedeo Modigliani, Gustave Courbet, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, and Pablo Picasso. The museum's website does not included any information about provenance or collecting history for works of art in its collection.

I asked Marc Masurovsky, an art historian and an expert on Nazi-era looted art and restitution, for his comment on the news that Cornelius Gurlitt has willed his collection to the fine art museum in Switzerland; this is his response via email:
The will still has to go through probate, if I am not mistaken. Then, one might ask: can the German authorities challenge its authenticity? its validity? As for the claimants, Switzerland is as inhospitable a place where one wishes to gain satisfaction as Germany. Look at what Mr. Monteagle has to go through to try and get his Constable painting back from La Chaux-de-Fond. Civil law covers claims and they rest in part on the good faith of the recent acquirer or possessor of the work in question. Does the fact that the Kunstmuseum is aware through international publicity of the dubious origins of some of the works in the Gurlitt collection grounds for challenging its good faith? Does this concept also apply to donations from people one does not know? Can the Bern Kunstmuseum reject the gift since it is definitely a poison pill? I certainly do not have the answers. But I do have tons of questions, much like everyone else.
In The New York Times, Doreen Carvajal reports in "Wooing the Public to Recover Art" (March 18, 2014) that Alain Monteagle is resorting to public referendums in his attempt to recover the John Constable painting, "Deadham from Langham", which he claims was taken from his family during World War II:
Swiss museum officials do not dispute that the painting was looted — they acknowledge the fact on a plaque below it. But they say that the museum accepted it in good faith, and that Swiss law does not require restitution in such circumstances. So Mr. Monteagle and his relatives have taken to the soapbox. They are using the local Swiss system of popular referendums — which require the signatures of at least 10 percent of registered voters, 2,500 in this case — to bring the issue before elected officials, since the museum is owned by the town. And they are taking the early, tentative steps required to force the local legislature to put an issue to a vote; if the legislature were to approve, more signatures could be gathered for a communitywide vote.

November 9, 2013

Saturday, November 09, 2013 - , No comments

Gurlitt Art Collection: HARP Calls on the German Government to Immediately Disclose a Detailed and Complete Inventory of the Cornelius Gurlitt Collection and Set Up a Commission to Hasten Restitution of Nazi-Looted Artworks to Holocaust Victims and Their Heirs

Washington, DC, USA – November 8, 2013 - The Holocaust Art Restitution Project ( HARP), based in Washington, DC, chaired by Ori Z. Soltes, has called on the German Government to immediately publish a full, detailed and complete inventory of the Cornelius Gurlitt art collection, and to set up a Commission to hasten the restitution process of Nazi-looted artworks to Holocaust victims and their heirs.

Following the disclosure by the weekly magazine Focus that the German Government has been in control of the Cornelius Gurlitt collection for several years, HARP, through its legal counsel, sent a letter to the German Ministry of Finance, Wolfgang Schäuble, calling on the German Government to immediately disclose a full, complete, and detailed inventory of this collection, and to establish a Commission to hasten the process of identification and restitution of any Nazi-looted artwork found in this collection.

Any delay in implementing these steps would constitute grave injury to both the art market which requires that full and complete diligence be performed on any transaction, and to Holocaust survivors who have been looking for their artworks since 1945,” the letter states, which was also shared with Reinhard Nemetz, the Head of Augsburg State Prosecutor’s Office in charge of investigating Cornelius Gurlitt.

HARP is a not-for-profit group based in Washington, DC, and chaired by Ori Z. Soltes, dedicated to the identification and restitution of looted artworks require detailed research and analysis of public and private archives in North America. HARP has worked for 16 years on the restitution of artworks looted by the Nazi regime.  HARP was notably involved in the "Portrait of Wally" case, where a Schiele painting was seized by the U.S. Government, as well as in the restitution of an “Odalisque”, a painting by Henri Matisse, to the Rosenberg family.

HARP is advised and represented by the Ciric Law Firm Firm, PLLC in New York, USA.

September 12, 2013

HARP (The Holocaust Art Restitution Project) and HARP-Europe Sign A Collaboration Agreement Involving Research in Artworks Looted by the Nazis

Press Contacts:
For HARP Europe: Elizabeth Royer, 06 13 17 44 70 , elizabeth.royer@wanadoo.fr
For HARP: Marc Masurovsky, (00) 1 202 255 1602 , plunderedart@gmail.com

Paris, France - Washington, DC, USA - September 12, 2013 - The Holocaust Art Restitution Project ( HARP), based in Washington, DC, chaired by Ori Z. Soltes, and HARP-Europe, founded by Elizabeth Royer, both nonprofit organizations, announced today the signature of an exclusive collaboration agreement involving  research in artworks looted by the Nazi Regime.

For twelve years, Hitler’s Third Reich orchestrated a campaign of persecution, plunder and annihilation of millions of people, resulting in the seizure and expropriation of countless assets, including works of art. Due to the inertia from governments and the art market since 1945, and as Holocaust victims or their heirs continue to seek their stolen property, these artworks move freely around the world with impunity, and continue to be exhibited, exchanged or sold.

This is why HARP, based in Washington, DC, and chaired by Ori Z. Soltes, announced the signature of an exclusive collaboration agreement involving historical research of looted artworks, with HARP-Europe, a French association incorporated under French no-for-profit laws, and founded by Elizabeth Royer.  In fact, the identification and restitution of looted artworks require detailed research and analysis of public and private archives, either in Europe or North America.

HARP-Europe is a not-for-profit entity created and led by Elizabeth Royer, and headquartered in Paris. HARP is a US not-for-profit entity founded in 1997, which has worked for 16 years on the restitution of artworks looted by the Nazi regime. HARP was notably involved in the "Portrait of Wally" case, where a Schiele painting was seized by the U.S. Government, as well as in the restitution of an “Odalisque”, a painting by Henri Matisse, to the Rosenberg family. The purpose of both entities is to conduct archival research on artworks looted by the Nazi regime, to assist claimants in obtaining their restitution, to seek improvement of the legislative and political framework in favor of restitution of looted artworks, to develop and promote educational programs designed to facilitate historical research in property losses resulting from the Nazi regime.

HARP is advised and represented by the Ciric Law Firm Firm, PLLC in New York, USA, and Europe 

HARP is advised and represented by law firms Dauzier & Associés and Antoine Comte in Paris, France.

Elizabeth Royer, President                                                           
HARP-Europe, Paris, France

Ori Z. Soltes, President

HARP, Washington, DC, USA

December 13, 2012

Provenance Research Training Program Workshop to be held in Zagreb, Croatia, March 10-15, 2013

The second Provenance Research Training Program workshop is scheduled for March 10-15, 2013, in Zagreb, Croatia.

"This an international workshop is open to scholars, students, professionals, collectors, dealers, and anyone interested in subjects related to cultural plunder, the ethics of collection management, cultural rights and heritages, as well as methodologies of research and analysis into the ownership histories of cultural objects misappropriated during mass conflicts," according to Marc Masurovsky, director of the program.
The inaugural workshop of the Provenance Research Training Program was held June 10-15, 2012 in Magdeburg, Germany, with the co-sponsorship of the Koordinierungsstelle für Kulturgutverluste (Coordination Office for Lost Cultural Assets), a public institution jointly financed by the Federal Government of Germany and all the German Länder (States) and housed within the Ministry of Cultural Affairs in the Land of Saxony-Anhalt in Magdeburg.  Please see the Report on the Magdeburg Workshop.

The deadline for applications for the March 2013 workshop in Zagreb, Croatia, is January 4, 2013.

Here's a link to the website for more information: http://provenanceresearch.org/prtp/schedule.

March 30, 2012

Senate Bill 2212: Foreign Cultural Exchange Jurisdictional Immunity Clarification Act Aims to Prevent Seizures of Nazi-era Looted Paintings on Loan to American Museums

by Catherine Sezgin, ARCA blog Editor-in-Chief

The proposed Senate Bill S. 2212, the Foreign Cultural Exchange Jurisdictional, is the biggest threat to date of making legal claims for stolen art, according to Marc Masurovsky, a Washington, DC-based historian and a former researcher director for the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust-era Assets.

The bill was sponsored by Senator Dianne Feinstein (1992-2012), a Democrat from California, who introduced the bill on March 20th to "clarify the exception to foreign sovereign immunity set forth in section 1605 (a)(3) title 28, United States code.

"S. 2212 will immunize most looted art coming into the United States," Masurovsky wrote on a message on Facebook.

According to Govtrack.us, the bill is in the first stage of the legislative process:  "Most bills and resolutions are assigned to committees which consider them before they move to the House or Senate as a whole ... The sponsor [Feinstein] is a member of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, where the bill has been referred." The bill is co-sponsored by Senator Orrin Hatch (Republican-Utah), another member of the senate's judiciary committee. Govtrack.us also identifies this bill as related to another in the House of Representatives: H. R. 4086 of the same name.


"The backers of these two bills have asked Jewish groups, claimants and other interested parties, to make a choice: by opting for a limited category of art objects to be claimed in US courts that would come in from abroad for "cultural display," Masurovsky wrote in an email.  "They will allow all other looted art objects to enter the US without any possible legal recourse to seek restitution of those objects in a US court of law."

According to the bill submitted by Feinstein and Hatch:
If a work is imported into the United States from any foreign country pursuant to an agreement providing for the temporary exhibition or display of such work entered into between a foreign state that is the owner or custodian of such work and the United States or 1 or more cultural education institutions within the United States;
Last November, a Florida U. S. Attorney seized a 16th century painting (Girolamo Romano's Christ Carrying the Cross Dragged by a Rogue (1538) from the permanent collection of Italy's Pinacoteca di Brera in Milano loaned for an exhibit at the Mary Brogan Museum of Art and Science in Tallahassee. In February, a U. S. judge ordered the painting to be returned to the heirs of Frederico Gentili di Giuseppe, an Italian Jew who died in Paris before the Nazis invaded France.

"The case in Tallahassee could never have occurred had the bill been passed last year," Masurovsky explains.  "The question remains also whether Wally could have been made possible had the bill existed in 1997 as well as the Altman v. Republic of Austria and all of the Max Stern Estate seizures in the US."

The bill distinguishes that the artworks is a cultural object and not to be considered to be a commercial activity.  "NAZI-ERA CLAIMS. -- Paragraph (1) shall not apply in any case in which -- (A) the action is based upon a claim that the work was taken in Europe in violation of international law by a covered government during the covered period; (B) the court determines that the activity associated with the exhibition or display is commercial activity; and (C) a determination under subparagraph (B) is necessary for the court to exercise jurisdiction over the foreign state under subsection (a)(3)."

The "covered government" involves the Nazi's Third Reich regime and the "covered period" is specified as January 30, 1933, through May 8, 1945."

This S.2212 aims to prevent seizures such as the one in the Florida case above.

The ARCA blog asked Ori Z. Soltes, co-founder of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project, for a comment:
"I have three basic comments: the first is to acknowledge that the intention on the part of Feinstein and Hatch comes from the right emotional place and even to laud their intention, but to suggest that they are simply being misguided; to wit (and here is my second comment, which is essentially to repeat virtually what Marc has said with regard to the danger of so narrowing the focus on Nazi-plundered art): that the result is to make the coming of all other kinds of plundered art into the United States immune not just from seizure, but from being recognized as plundered; the effect for archaeological artifacts in particular is potentially disastrous. 
"My third comment, related to the second, is that the narrowing of focus that the bill proposes adds another aspect of looking at the Holocaust as an event specifically Jewish or specifically European or specifically whatever, which enables people to ignore the larger issue, the human issue, of which it is part, and which "largeness" is evidenced by the depressing number of Holocaust-like events to which one can point across the planet both before and after World War II -- which is analogous to the broad range of culture plunder both before and after. If, with all of its unique aspects (of which are plenty) we simply view it as an aberration, we no longer have to ask as many questions about ourselves, we no longer have to think as much--and that is a profound danger particularly to the American people, with ramifications beyond this issue."

Christ Carrying the Cross Dragged by a Rogue/FCN




November 7, 2011

Art Restitution: Klimt painting sold for $40.4m after being returned to owner's grandson

Klimt's "Litzlberg on the Attersee" 1918
by Catherine Schofiled Sezgin, ARCA Blog Editor-in-chief

BBC News (online) reported 'Klimt painting fetches $40.4m' when a 1915 landscape of a lake in western Austria ("Litzlberg on the Attersee") by Gustav Klimt was sold by Sotheby's in New York City.

In July the Museum of Modern Art in Saltzburg in Austria returned the painting stolen from Amalie Redlich in 1941 to her 83-year-old grandson, Georges Jorisch, now living in Montreal.

"The Austrian law calls for restitution," Marc Masurovsky, co-founder of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project, responded in an email.  "That means the object is physically returned to the rightful owner.  The position of the Salzburg Museum, much like that of the Leopold Foundation in Vienna, is to reject outright restitution in favor of financial settlements, which allow them to retain title to the claimed object. Ideologically speaking, that stance runs counter to the principle of restitution.  Hence, I would not hail this moment as a victory for restitution but rather as the outcome of an arduous negotiation between an auction house, a claimant, and an Austrian museum, which led to a financial settlement."

You may read more about this case as reported by the CBC, "Nazi-looted Klimt sells for $40" which includes a video and an image of the only descendent of the painting's owners sitting down in his chair at the painting's auction.  CBC concludes it's segment by mentioning that many of the proceeds from the painting's sale will be used to build a new wing at the Saltzburg museum to be named after Amalie Redlich who was murdered after her deportation from Vienna.

November 3, 2011

Marc Masurovsky provides perspective on Lawsuit regarding disputed Modigliani painting "Seated Man with Cane'

Modigliani's "Seated
 Man with Cane" (1918)
by Catherine Schofield Sezgin, ARCA Blog Editor-in-Chief

Most of my art crime news comes to my email box from Ton Cremer's Museum Security Network. As I suspect most of our readers on this blog also subscribe to MSN, I don't often repeat the news, but a particular article today intrigued me and I sent the link over to my mentor on Nazi-looted art restitution, Marc Masurovsky, co-founder of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project (HARP).

Journalist Bill Hoffman of the UK's Daily Mail reported online yesterday that "Billionaire art dealer refuses to return $25m Modigliani masterpiece stolen by Nazis from Jewish art dealer." Hoffman reports that the Nazis sold the 1918 painting, "Seated Man with Cane", at an auction in 1944 and that the grandson of the Parisian Jewish art dealer, Oscar Stettiner, alleges that the painting is at a gallery in New York City.  Hoffman quotes the lawsuit filed in the U. S. District Court of Manhattan that the family was unable to stop the sale during the war and unable to recover it afterward because the painting was then inaccurately labeled.

Masurovsky offers his professional perspective: 
"Due to the paucity of information released to the public, there is potentially conflicting reporting on the story of the allegedly illicit sale of the Stettiner Modigliani in 1944. Artinfo states that Oscar Stettiner placed the painting in the care of Marcel Philippon before he fled to the unoccupied zone of France. If that is so, why would other articles allege that the Nazis appointed him as the administrator of Stettiner's assets? That makes no sense. Vichy was responsible for appointing non-Jewish overseers of Jewish-owned property. Sometimes, it was for liquidation purposes, other times to facilitate the transfer of ownership of those assets to an Aryan. The real question becomes: did Stettiner leave instructions to Philippon to dispose of the property or did Vichy instruct Philippon to do so? I am curious to know why it took 3 years to sell the painting after it had been placed under Philippon's management. Once the full historical docket is released, we can make a more informed decision about who's right and who's wrong in this instance."

October 23, 2011

Marking the First Anniversary of the launching of the Cultural Plunder Database

This week marked the first anniversary of the October 18, 2010, launching of the Database of Art Objects that transited through the Jeu de Paume from 1940 to 1944. The ARCA Blog wrote about the Database here, here and here.

Marc Masurovsky, the Project's director, sent out an email to supporters that he has permitted the ARCA blog to publish here:
In order to celebrate 12 months of global usage of the contents of this historical database, here are some generic statistics that give some idea about the people who visit and use it. 
Thanks again to the Conference of Jewish Material Claims against Germany, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Commission for Art Recovery, the interns, technicians, programmers, and volunteers who made this database a reality.
He provided the following information:

Number of pageviews: 377,715

Number of user source countries: 137

Top 10 user languages:
1/ English
2/ French
3/ German
4/ Dutch
5/ Spanish
6/ Italian
7/ Polish
8/ Danish
9/ Japanese
10/ Russian

Top 10 user countries (in decreasing order of importance):
1/ United States,
2/ France
3/ Germany
4/ Netherlands
5/ United Kingdom
6/ Spain
7/ Italy
8/ Belgium
9/ Canada
10/ Denmark

Top 10 user States in the US (by decreasing order of importance):
1/ New York
2/ California
3/ District of Columbia
4/ Massachusetts
5/ Texas
6/ Florida
7/ Virginia
8/ Illinois
9/ Pennsylvania
10/ North Carolina

The most popular artist queries were (in decreasing order of importance):

Picasso, Monet, van Gogh, Rembrandt, Rubens, Eugène Carrière, Greuze, Renoir, Chagall, Sisley, Teniers, Degas, Léger, Nattier, Modigliani, Sèvres vase, Pissarro, Manet, Rodin, Dali, Braque, Goya.

The most popular collection queries were (in decreasing order of importance):
Hugo Andriesse, Alexandrine de Rothschild, Louis Louis-Dreyfus, Rothschild, Arthur L. Mayer, Princess Colloredo, Adolphe Weiss, Frederic Unger, Riesener (Ball), Flavian.

The most viewed items were (by ERR number, name of artist/type of object and source user country):
1/ Unb 55/Salvador Dali (Spain),
2/ A Le 1/bronze of Napoleon (United States),
3/ Unb 326/Picasso (United States),
4/ KAP 21/Picasso (United States),
5/ A Le 32a/clock (United States),
6/ AD W1/Raphael (United States),
7/ Unb 30/Picasso (United States),
8/ Unb 327/Picasso (United States),
9/ Fla 39/Monet (France),
10/ Wbg 128/van Gogh (United States),
11/ Li 35/Renoir (United States),
12/ Li 38/Monet (United States),
13/ R 905/van Gogh (United States),
14/ R 1505/van Gogh (Germany),
15/ Unb 348/Monet (United States),
16/ Heilbronn 4/Monet (United States),
17/ Ha 1/van Ostade (United States),
18/ Wbg 127/van Gogh (Netherlands),
19/ Unb 39/Picasso (United States).

You may access the Cultural Plunder Database here.

March 4, 2011

Videos of Marc Masurovsky of the Cultural Plunder Database Speaking in Florida on the unfinished work of returning Nazi-looted art to the rightful owners some 65 years after the war

Marc Masurovsky
Last year I had the privilege to volunteer on the U. S. Holocaust Museum's Cultural Plunder Database of Nazi-looted art out of the Jeu de Paume in Paris.  My mentor, Marc Mazurovsky, the Project Director, recently spoke passionately and unapologetically in Florida at the Jewish Art Museum here on this video about the lack of transparency in the art market about the re-sale of art stolen from private collections.  After the devastation of millions of lives and households during the 12-year reign of the Nazis, the Allies became too distracted with the Cold War to continue prosecution of war criminals and to complete restitution of property and art to the surviving victims.  However, today, art works have been reappearing on the secondary market with total disregard for their status as stolen property.  In the second video here, Mr. Masurovsky discusses the U. S. government's failure to compensate Japanese-Americans interned in camps from 1941 to 1945 in their own country and stripped of cultural and real property.  "There is not a federal policy of restitution of looted cultural property... to safeguard the rights of Holocaust survivors [who have become American citizens]," Masurovsky says.  "There are no fiscal consequences for dabbling in looted cultural property. No one will lose their tax-exempt status if caught doing so."

He later says, "Restitution, or justice for the victim, has been left to lawyers and judges, history has taken a back seat to the rule of law, a bit like taking a square peg and shoving it into a round hole: not practical, not efficient, but there we are."

To be fair, justice has been done in a small number of instances, Masurovsky says, after years of battle against "hardened defendants" whether they be wealthy individuals, museums, or governments:

"Holocaust survivors are dying in growing numbers every day, their children and grandchildren are not intimately connected to their issues, for obvious reasons, sometimes they know, most times they don't.  Those who seem to be riding out the storm well and even better are the dealers, the collectors, the museums, and the institutions that buy, sell, trade, display, harbor these works and objects which really are three-dimensional reminders of past genocide and ethnocides. In at least 90% of these cases, the crime of plunder pays off very well with handsome returns on the investment."

He encouraged his audience (and now our readers): "If you do own or buy or receive works of objects produced before the early 1940s, you have the same duty to ask the same questions as if you were buying a car: who owned it before? is it kosher? do you have good title? was it ever stolen?"

Listen to the videos now for a compelling and passionate argument for returning stolen art to its rightful owners and the steps we can all take to participate.

October 18, 2010

Cultural Plunder by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg: Database of Art Objects at the Jeu de Paume

By Catherine Sezgin

During World War II in Nazi-occupied Paris, more than 20,000 art objects were systematically looted from over 200 Jewish families, and either sold or transported to Germany. Seventy years later, at least half of the objects have not yet been restituted to the owners, or their heirs, in accordance with the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. The Claims Conference and the United State Holocaust Museum have just released an online database of art objects that were processed from 1940 to 1944 in the center of Paris at the Jeu de Paume on the Place de la Concorde.

As the Nazis’s special task force the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) confiscated paintings, sculptures, objets d’art, and antiquities from private collections. More than sixty people at the Jeu de Paume inventoried, photographed, and arranged for the transportation of the artworks on 120 railways coaches from France to Germany. Every looted painting was registered and stamped by the Nazis. The French national, Rose Volland, a volunteer at the museum before the war who observed the operation, kept a secret account of everything the Nazis stole and where they planned to deliver the art. Using secret couriers during the war, she notified the Allied Forces of the Nazis’s activities. After the defeat of the Third Reich, much of the stolen art was found and returned to their countries of origin to be reunited with their owners. However, many families, who were devastated by the Holocaust, did not have the records to identify or claim artworks.

Now the Claims Conference, working with the technical support of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, has transferred the information from the index cards, or inventory lists, to a database “Cultural Plunder by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg: Database of Art Objects at the Jeu de Paume.”

“Decades after the greatest mass theft in history, families robbed of their prize artworks can now search this list to help them locate long-lost treasures,” said Julius Berman, Claims Conference Chairman [in a press release]. “It is now the responsibility of museums, art dealers, and auction houses to check their holdings against these records to determine whether they might be in possession of art stolen from Holocaust victims. Organizing Nazi art-looting records is an important step in righting a historical wrong. It is not too late to restore art that should have been passed down within Jewish families instead of decorating Nazi homes or stored at Nazi sites.”

The public can access the newly released online database on Nazi looted art from Paris through the URL: www.errproject.org/jeudepaume. Users can search by collection, owner, artist, and type of art object (paintings, works on paper, sculpture, decorative arts or antiquities). Information in the database will be regularly updated, according to Project Director Marc Masurovsky, a consultant to the Holocaust Memorial Museum. Masurovsky used some ARCA graduates to assist in the inputting of the datasets.

Masurovsky, the co-founder of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project (HARP), which began in 1997, spoke about documenting and recovering Nazi looted art last March at the National Museum of Crime & Punishment for ARCA’s exhibit “The Dark Arts: Thieves, Forgers and Tomb Raiders” in Washington, DC this past February. He also spoke about “Nazi Plunder of Looted Cultural Property and Its Impact on Today’s Art Market” at ARCA’s International Art Crime Conference in July in Amelia, Italy.

In the future, users will be able to find individual datasets through Google by typing specific artists’ names in the search box, Masurovsky wrote in an email. Each object in the database is described based on the information from the card that the Nazis filled out and includes any images that may have been taken. The database also provides information about whether or not the artwork was returned to France and if it was restituted to its owner. For example, Arthur Levy’s collection of 125 artworks has not been returned to the family. Database users can even search by Artist. For example, a landscape by Vincent van Gogh from the collection of Alfred Weinberger in Paris was photographed and measured (60 x 100 cm) when it was brought to the Jeu de Paume in 1941 on December 4.

The Jeu de Paume as a looted art center was of particular interest to the German army’s second-in-command, Hermann Göring who spent two days there during the war looking at the art. He then asked that photographs of the art be sent to Hitler for him to make selections from the spoils of war. Unfortunately, in July 1942, the Jeu de Paume collection center was overburdened. Paintings declared unfit for German collections and too degenerate to be sold on the art market were burned in the garden. Rose Volland was said to have cried at the destruction of works by Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Max Ernst, Jean Míro and Salvador Dali.