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Showing posts with label Nazi-era looted art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nazi-era looted art. Show all posts

March 13, 2011

Sunday, March 13, 2011 - ,,, No comments

Nazi-looted Art Provenance: Emily Blyze on Museum Guidelines

by Emily Blyze, ARCA Alum 2009
Part three of a five-part weekend series

The crucial purpose of the European Shoah Legacy Institute in Terezin (Terezin Institute) is to follow up on the work of the Prague Conference and the Terezin Declaration. Initiated by the Czech Government, the Terezin Institute is a voluntary forum that facilitates an intergovernmental effort to develop non-binding guidelines and best practices for restitution and compensation of wrongfully seized immovable property. The priorities of the Terezin Institute will be to publish regular reports on activities related to the Terezin Declaration, develop websites to facilitate sharing of information, particularly in the fields of art provenance, as well as maintain and post lists of websites useful for Participating States, organizations representing Holocaust (Shoah) survivors and Nazi victims, and other non-governmental organizations (NGO).

Working Groups (WG) are composed of representatives of institutions with fundamental activities, field experience and research results related to the principal topics of the WG agenda. Each WG has two Co-Chairs (one from the Czech Republic and one from abroad) who are responsible for the overall planning and management of the agenda and schedule. The WGs established are Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research, Immovable Property (Private and Communal), Looted Art, Judaica and Jewish Cultural Property, and a Special Session – Caring for Victims of Nazism and Their Legacy. Responsibilities of a WG are to prepare the agenda of the expert portion of the Prague conference, discuss the important focal points of their agenda, suggest the framework for presentations at the Prague conference, and draft recommendation for the final declaration.

The Looted Art Working Group prepared expert conclusions that acknowledges the Washington Principles, but “affirms the urgent needs to broaden, deepen and sustain these (Washington Principles) efforts in order to ensure just and fair solutions regarding cultural property looted during the Holocaust era and its aftermath."

March 12, 2011

Saturday, March 12, 2011 - ,, No comments

A Primer on Nazi-Looted Art Provenance: Emily Blyze on the Guidelines Established by Museums

by Emily Blyze, ARCA Alum, Class of 2009

Legal claims by heirs of Holocaust victims whose art works were looted by the Nazis, and claims by foreign “source” countries for objects they believe were exported in violation of patrimony or export laws, have raised awareness of the need for provenance research in regard to due diligence in acquiring works of art. Provenance research has now become the concern of many persons inside and outside the museum profession. This article will discuss the doctrines that have been created and established as common practice to guide museums to the proper handling and protocol for Nazi-looted art. The focus is on the guidelines of Nazi-Era provenance research, specifically addressing the 1998 Washington Principles and the more recent Terezin Declaration, as well as concentrating on the steps museums have taken as a result of the established guidelines. This is the first of a five part series.

In 2009, a Roman newspaper reported that two fingers and a tooth removed from the corpse of Galileo Galilei had been found and would be displayed in an Italian museum.  In 1737, three fingers, a vertebra, and a tooth had been removed from the astronomer’s body 95 years after his death as his corpse was being moved to a monumental tomb opposite that of Michelangelo in Santa Croce Basilica in Florence. One of the fingers recovered is part of the collection of the Institute and Museum of the History of Science (IMSS), in Florence. The vertebra is kept at the University of Padua where Galileo taught -- until the Vatican branded him a heretic for proposing that the Earth revolved around the sun. The tooth and the other two fingers from the scientist's right hand (the thumb and a middle finger) were coveted by an Italian marquis, enclosed in a container, and passed down from generation-to-generation, until it turned up at auction and was purchased by a private collector, intrigued by the contents but not sure they were Galileo’s relics. The relics were inside an 18th-century blown-glass vase within a wooden case topped with a wooden bust of Galileo. The buyer eventually contacted Paoloa Galluzzi, Director of the IMSS, and other Florence culture officials. Using detailed historical documents, as well as documentation from the family who had owned the body parts, they concluded the fingers and tooth had belonged to Galileo.

This story is an example of how the use of detailed documents from the museum and the family helped identify the ownership history of Galileo’s literal travel through time. The technical museum term for ownership history is “provenance.” When associated with a painting or other work of art, provenance means the history of ownership. Tracing the provenance of a painting traditionally has been a responsibility of museum curators. But that has changed in recent years, with the growth of the Internet, the availability of records from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and publicity surrounding high profile cases of Jewish-owned art stolen by Nazi officials. Legal claims by heirs of Holocaust victims whose art works were looted or otherwise misappropriated by the Nazis, and claims by foreign “source” countries for objects they believe were exported in violation of patrimony or export laws, have raised awareness of the need for provenance research in regard to due diligence in acquiring works of art. Provenance research has now become the concern of many persons inside and outside the museum profession.

Doctrines have been created and established as common practice to guide museums in the proper handling and protocol for Nazi-looted art from 1933 to 1945. The museum community has met over recent years to provide guidelines for Nazi-Era provenance research include the 1998 Washington Principles and the more recent Terezin Declaration. Why now? Awareness through articles, books and conferences during the early 1990s focused attention on this topic. The reunification of Germany, collapse of the Soviet Union, and the declassification of archival documents in the United States, together brought about a major resurgence of interest in Nazi looted art. Books such as Lynn H. Nicholas’s The Rape of Europa published in 1994 and Jonathan Petropoulous’s, Art as Politics in the Third Reich (1996) and The Faustian Bargain (2000) left readers with in-depth research of details and unflinching accounts of the art world during World War II.

A conference on January 19-21, 1995, “The Spoils of War – World War II and Its Aftermath: The Loss, Reappearance, and Recovery of Cultural Property,” organized by the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, provided the first forum on the subject. The conference dealt with the art and other cultural property that was looted, damaged, and destroyed in vast quantities by the Nazi armed forces and confiscation agencies and the consequences that ensued. Approximately 70 speakers and guest participants representing more than 15 countries discussed publicly their concerns about World War II recovery and restitution. The outcome was the 1997 publication of The Spoils of War by Elizabeth Simpson which reproduces the papers presented at the conference. Seventeen key legal documents that are often referred to, but rarely reproduced, have been added as appendices. The appendices contain relevant provisions of all major international treaties, laws, conventions, protocols, and official statements relating to wartime plunder, restitution, and repatriation.

Part two will be posted later today.

March 4, 2011

Friday, March 04, 2011 - , No comments

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.

February 1, 2011

Tuesday, February 01, 2011 - ,,,,, No comments

The Journal of Art Crime: Contributor Minton on Art Restitution of Nazi-era Looted Art

by Catherine Schofield Sezgin

Jennifer Ann Minton wrote an article titled “Art Restitution of Nazi-era Looted Art: A Growing Force in Art and Law” for the fourth issue of The Journal of Art Crime. According to Ms. Minton’s abstract:
“Art restitution is one of the few ways to make reparations to the many victims of the treacheries of World War II. Victims of Nazi-era art theft and their heirs should be able to successfully bring actions in the United States to recovery their possessions as this is usually one of the last options available for recovery. Claims concerning art restitution should be heard in U. S. courts and the statue of limitations and the U. S. Department of State’s Statement of Interest should not be used to preclude adjudication on the merits of these cases. The Court should assert their independence and refuse to dismiss these cases. Recent art restitution settlements and the U. S. Supreme Court’s current involvement shed light onto this topic and help the victims of art theft reclaim what rightfully belongs to them.”
Jennifer Ann Minton is a transplant from Southern California, who decided to make Washington, D. C. her home after graduating from the University of Texas at Austin in 2000. She has worked at the White House and various U. S. departments. She received her J. D. from Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law.

ARCA blog: How would you explain to a layperson – someone who is only conversationally knowledgeable about art law – whether or not claimants have been successful in European courts in recovery Holocaust-looted art and why the American courts seem to be the answer for so many cases?

Ms. Minton: In 2010 the World Jewish Restitution Organization found that out of many named Eastern European countries including Belarus, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia and the Ukraine, only the Czech Republic and Slovakia had both enacted restitution laws governing art and were conducting provenance research. This is an important point as the former Soviet Union indirectly looted the Jews of their art which was confiscated and collected by the Germans during World War II. In many cases there are no records or unreliable records to prove provenance. With artwork now popping up in the United States with more frequency (whether on the auction block, in a museum or in a private collection) rightful claimants are able seek restitution in the U.S. Courts where the statute of limitations may have run out in European countries. Historically the European courts have sided with those that could prove they acquired looted works in “good faith”. Because of the complication in these legal cases involving issues such as the statute of limitations, international law and provenance determination, I believe you will see a general rise of interest in art law from the public. I first became fascinated by the procedural problems in my International Litigation class at Catholic University of America Law School in Washington, D.C. and continued my research after graduation.

ARCA blog: In your article, you discuss Malevich v. City Amsterdam, the facts of the case stretch back to the 1920s when Malevich was forced to leave an exhibition in Berlin and return to St. Petersburg. When the artist died in 1935, was the art he left behind still unsold? And then it was ‘on loan’ to various friends and institutions such as the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York until his heirs began suing for recovery of the art after the collapse of the Soviet Union?

Ms. Minton: In 2003, fourteen of Malevich’s works appeared for the first time in the U.S. On loan from the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, they were part of an exhibition at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. How did this happen? Malevich became a Master of “Suprematism” in Moscow in 1915. In 1927 the Soviet government demanded he return to St. Petersburg when he was exhibiting his work at the Great Berlin Art Exhibition. The works were left behind with friends and he never returned to Germany, dying in 1935. Little is known how these works were scattered across Europe and then to Canada and the United States except that dozens of pieces were sold by a German architect to the museum in Amsterdam. So, yes, some of the art left behind was sold, at least a portion of it. Where and when these and other looted works will appear is part of the larger story of art restitution and its eventual rise in art law.
To seek out this piece, and many others, consider a subscription to the Journal of Art Crime—the first peer-reviewed academic journal covering art and heritage crime. ARCA publishes two volumes annually in the Spring and Fall. Individual, Institutional, electronic and printed versions are all available, with subscriptions as low as 30 Euros. All proceeds go to ARCA's nonprofit research and education initiatives. Please see the publications page for more information.

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