Photo taken by Nazi authorities during World War II showing a room filled with stolen art at the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris

Recognizing that reclaiming looted cultural assets can feel like a Sisyphean task, and that restitution cannot be accomplished without the practical knowledge of how to conduct critical research, the Association for Research into Crimes against Art (ARCA) and the US-based Holocaust Art Restitution Project, [Inc.] (HARP), have teamed up to offer its 4th annual stand-alone provenance course which tackles the complex issues of cultural plunder.

Course Title: “Provenance and the Challenges of Recovering Looted Assets,”
Course Dates: June 26 - 30, 2023
Course Location: Amelia, Italy

Exhibition in the library of the Collecting Point, summer 1947 © Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte

Open to applicants interested in exploring the ownership history of looted cultural objects, their trafficking and their restitution/repatriation, this 5-day course will provide participants with exposure to research methodologies used to clarify and unlock the past history of objects likely to have been displaced in periods of crisis. It will also examine the complex nuances of post war and post conflict restitution and repatriation, as well as its ethical underpinnings.

This course is taught by Marc Masurovsky, who cofounded HARP in September 1997 and currently serves as its Director of Research. 

Since 1980 Marc has examined the general question of assets looted during the Nazi era and has worked as an expert historian on a class-action lawsuit filed by Jewish claimants against three leading Swiss banks, accusing them of having expropriated the property that their families had deposited in their safes and bank accounts. 

As a consultant and historian for the Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigations, Masurovsky, has investigated alleged Nazi war criminals living in the U.S. and post-war relations between former Nazi officials and Allied intelligence agencies. Mr. Masurovsky earned his M.A. in Modern European History from American University in Washington, D.C. For his Master's thesis, he researched "Operation Safehaven: the Allied response to Nazi post-defeat planning, 1944-1948". He is also the co-author with Fabrizio Calvi of Le Festin du Reich (Editions Fayard, 2006).

This course will provide participants with the opportunity to engage in an intensive, guided, dynamic exchange of ideas on research methods while highlighting the multiple diplomatic, political and financial challenges raised by restitution and repatriation claims. Special emphasis will also be placed on the contextual framework of provenance research in an era increasingly reliant on digital tools.

With an emphasis on an interdisciplinary and comparative approach, this provenance course will benefit anyone with an interest in art, art history, art collecting, the global art market writ large, museum and curatorial studies, art and international law, national and international cultural heritage policies.

As an added bonus participants accepted into this 5-day course will automatically registered be registered to attend ARCA’s Amelia Conference, the weekend of June 23-25, 2023.  This weekend-long forum of intellectual and professional exchange which explores the indispensable role of research, detection, crime prevention and criminal justice responses in combating all forms of art crime and the illicit trafficking in cultural property. 

For more information on the course, course fees and how to apply, please see this link.

I’m not sure whether it makes more sense to say that we’re only halfway through with the ARCA postgraduate program or that we’re already halfway through with the program. On the one hand, we have had the good fortune of hearing from six expert professors and have covered all sorts of ground—academic and professional terrain alike—in the study of art crime: from heritage law to art insurance, from art policing to forgery, and from museum security to war crimes. We’ve practically memorized most of the UNESCO conventions at this point, we’re capable of sketching out the infamous Medici trafficking organigram at the blow of a whistle, and we’re all pretty used to having revenge-fantasy dreams about prosecuting certain museums with less-than acceptable collection ethics and repatriating all of their loot.

On the other hand, however, it feels like we’ve only just arrived in Amelia and that there’s still a whole lot more for us to learn in the coming weeks about cultural heritage protection. We’ve yet to encounter the international art market or art criminology head-on, and we’re not quite sure whether we believe the Spanish or the British are more entitled to Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington. Moreover, we still don’t know how we would actually steal the Ghent Altarpiece or Munch’s The Scream and this makes me wonder: can anyone really fashion him or herself an art crime expert without knowing how to pull off a major museum heist? It’s probably a good thing that we’re only halfway done with the ARCA program, but I’ll share with you what we’ve covered in the courses so far since we are, after all, already halfway finished with the program.  

Following Duncan Chappell’s course our studies shifted from the subject of art law to its not-too-distant relative, art insurance. Dorit Straus, art insurance veteran and board member at AXA Art, served as the instructor for this course. Straus has had a lengthy and exciting career with all sorts of cinematic turns and climaxes. Its major plot twist: Straus began her career studying Near Eastern Archaeology and only later in life migrated into the world of art insurance. For those of us trained in the humanities—which is to say, with little to no background in the fine arts market—Straus guaranteed a convenient point of entry into the study of art insurance. Pairing her formal explanations with fascinating anecdotes, Straus shaped and colored the art insurance industry with remarkable and stunning mastery. By the end of the week Straus had students map out the entire process of acquiring art insurance coverage in role-play exercises—a form of evaluation that was, I am sure, most entertaining for Dorit herself.

We then heard from Richard Ellis, founder of Scotland Yard’s Art and Antiques Squad, who covered lessons on the dark, seedy underbelly that is the black market. Ellis did a solid job explaining the ins and outs of INTERPOL and clarified the issues that police forces deal with in an event of art theft—issues that are quite distinct from the ones that insurers, collectors, or museums address. One of the recurring lessons that Ellis repeated over and over again was the importance of knowing one’s enemy.  Understanding the motives that animate an episode of art crime, Ellis stressed, is always integral to the investigation process. At the conclusion of his course Ellis held a charming cocktail gathering that was, I would hold, much needed after a tense week studying some pretty serious material.

ARCA founder Noah Charney took the reigns for our next course on forgery. Charney launched his weeklong course with an art history lesson in which students were asked to perform visual analysis on a set of Caravaggio paintings. This exercise offered an exciting opportunity for students to truly interface with the very objects that had been broached in previous courses but perhaps not formally or materially addressed. It was a delight to work through Caravaggio’s endlessly fascinating visual puzzles, and Charney’s thorough guidance and insightful explanations proved to be especially useful in our brief art historical investigation. The rest of the week was spent differentiating (conceptually) fakes from forgeries, discussing the psychological profile of art forgers, and reviewing some of the major historical cases that constitute Charney’s sector of the art crime world. With Charney still in town, ARCA held its annual interdisciplinary conference—an exciting three days of panel discussions that another student, Cate Waldram, will  be posting on in greater detail.

After a weekend of conference talks and cocktail parties ARCA students met with security pundit Dick Drent. Following 25 years in law enforcement, Drent joined the staff at Van Gogh Museum in the Netherlands and continues to provide security advising through his consulting group, Omnirisk. Though Drent’s energy and countenance might feel as formidable and high-stakes as his work, the Dutch professor’s instruction was often light and playful—much like the goofy videos he would screen at the beginning of class too lighten the mood, especially since his course covers everything from everyday threats to Active Shooter incidents.

At the end of Drent’s class students carried out a security audit at a museum. In this exercise students set out to observe surveillance cameras, security guards, museum layouts, fire prevention strategies, smoke detectors, alarm systems, and so on. The exercise gave ARCA students a unique opportunity to spend a day at a museum not admiring precious artworks but instead observing the very security systems that attempt to protect these objects.

At the conclusion of Drent’s course students delved headfirst into “Art Crime During War” with Judge Arthur Tompkins. Tompkins’ hefty lesson plans and near-impeccable knowledge of world history made for an information-rich crash course in our study of art crime during conflict. At the outset of his first lesson Tompkins traced the origins of art crime all the way back to the ancient world.

The looting of what might be anachronistically termed “cultural property” often went part and parcel with military combat and imperial campaigns in the ancient world—thus giving birth to the lengthy history of what we now study as art crime. Tompkins then traversed the entire chronology of war—passing through the Middle Ages and early modernity until reaching the late twentieth century—and identified the various renditions of art crime that have plagued nation-states and peoples during times of conflict. By the end of the course students were asked to submit a paper detailing one particular episode of art crime that took place in the midst of combat. Students wrote about everything from plunders during antiquity to more recent art theft in the Middle East to the destruction of libraries in the American Civil War. 

So there you have it! We have covered vast terrain in the world art crime and are already halfway experts in the field. I’ll get back to you with more storytelling and info when we’re only a few short steps away from calling ourselves full-on, to-the-core certificate-ready professionals!

By:  Christopher Falcone

Clay tablet from the Library of Nineveh,  excavated by A.H. Layard.  Courtesy of the British Museum

Image from Hutchinson’s ‘Story of the Nations’

Hamilton, New Zealand

Judge Tompkins

Waikato University

ARCA is accepting applications for the 2011 Postgraduate Program in International Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection Studies until January 3, 2011. ARCA's blog will be interviewing instructors in December and today spotlights a returning lecturer.

New Zealand Judge Arthur Tompkins’ relationship with ARCA began in 2009 when he travelled to Amelia for the first of a two-part presentation at the International Art Crime Conference to discuss the possible pathway to creating an International Art Crime Tribunal. Last summer, in addition to presenting the second part of his proposal for the Tribunal at ARCA’s annual conference, Judge Tompkins taught a course, Art in War, at ARCA’s Postgraduate Program in International Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection Studies. He is returning to teach the same course again in Italy in July 2011.

Judge Tompkins has been a District Court Judge in New Zealand for nearly 14 years. His appointment as a Judge, in 1997, followed 10 years in private practice in Auckland as a commercial barrister. He gained his Bachelor’s degree in Law from Canterbury University, in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1983, and subsequently graduated Masters in Law, with First Class Honours, from Cambridge University, England, in 1984. He has taught the Law of Evidence, and presented at numerous conferences and workshops on a variety of topics, including expert evidence, the intersect between law and science in the Courtroom, and most extensively in relation to forensic DNA and forensic DNA Databanks, in New Zealand, China, England, Ireland, France and Mauritius. He is an Honorary Member of Interpol’s DNA Monitoring Expert Group.

ARCA blog: Judge Tompkins, welcome to ARCA’s blog. First, we’d like to start off with an easy question – what brings you away from your court in New Zealand to travel halfway around the world to teach Art in War to graduate students? It can’t all be about the pizza and gelato.

Judge Tompkins: The pizza and the gelato – and especially the latter – is certainly a part of it! How I came to be involved with ARCA is a serendipitous tale of chance meetings, leading to contact with Noah Charney in relation to the chapter that I wrote for the Art and Crime volume he edited. Then, when I visited Amelia in July 2009 for the Conference, Noah offered me the chance to return to Amelia to teach. I made a considered decision (it took me, I seem to recall, less than a second to decide!) to leap at the opportunity both to develop the course, and then to escape the New Zealand winter for the summer in Umbria amid the company of a wonderful group of enthusiastic staff and students.

But perhaps most importantly, the course I teach allows me to combine on a longstanding interest in history (from my distant youth I have three-quarters of a BA majoring in European History, which some day I might just get around to finishing) with the work I have done with Interpol and others concerning the cross-border operation of the criminal law, and my interest in the way, over the years, public international law has developed and matured. I am not an art historian, so I leave that side of things to others!

ARCA blog: Have there been any recent events in the past six months that have refined your concept of an International Art Crime Tribunal?

It is not so much something that has happened, as what has not happened. In my paper to the ARCA Conference in 2009, I talked about, in relation to confronting the many issues raised by art crime, there being islands of excellence amid a sea of indifference. And I think that is still accurate – there are many people in many different places doing great work, including of course ARCA. But realistically they are islands, and there are lots of bridges still to build between them. It is happening, slowly – the availability now on the internet of the Jeu de Paume records left behind by the ERR is one recent example – but I still believe that a single bright focus would bring numerous benefits, not least of which would be the continued development of the durable and lasting culture of interdisciplinary scholarship that ARCA has done so much to reinvigorate and foster.

ARCA blog: In your course, what are some of the areas that you focus on and what do you find the most challenging?

Part of the challenge for both me and the students is that, in the first two days of the course, we cover a little over 3000 years of history – starting with the taking of the Stele of Hammurabi following the sack of Babylon in 1160 BCE, right through to the looting of the Iraqi National Museum and Library in 2003. On the way we stop off at, among many other things, the Thirty Years’ War and, inevitably, both the Napoleonic era and the Second World War. Because I seek to examine, with the students, the various art crimes we look at in their historical context, it is often challenging to summarise major historical events in a very short time – World War I in two paragraphs, anyone? Inevitably, I have many favourite parts of the course, but a couple stand out as particularly interesting. The story of the carrying of a large part of the Palatine Library over the Alps in 1622, on the backs of 200 mules who each wore a silver collar inscribed in Latin is an evocative image. The Vatican Library was closed for renovations this year, but next year I will arrange a reader’s pass to visit and, I hope, inspect some of the volumes, most of which are still in Rome. The astounding heroism of Rose Valland, who worked at the Jeu de Paume on behalf of the French Resistance for four tumultuous years during World War II, recording and identifying the numerous looted art shipments to Germany, to ensure that the Resistance did not inadvertently blow the trains up is a remarkable tale of sustained courage. And, in the second half of the course, presenting the sometimes complex subject of the public international law of treaties and the like presents its own challenges! Using actual examples, like the shelling of Dubrovnik by the Yugoslavian forces and the prosecution and conviction of two senior officers in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, helps bring the international criminal law to life in a real and tangible way – especially as Dubrovnik is not all that far from Italy, just across the Adriatic Sea.