By Edgar Tijhuis 

This year, the ARCA Postgraduate Program in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection will be held from May 29 till August 12 in the heart of Umbria in Amelia, Italy. In the months leading up to the start of the program, this year’s professors will be interviewed. In this one, I am speaking with Marc Masurovsky, co-founder of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project. 

I was born and raised in Paris, France, of American artists, one figurative, the other abstract. I took an early interest in history and especially in the politics and economics of fascism and national socialism. My interest further increased as I was able to work at the Office of Special Investigations in Washington, DC, investigating the past of suspected Axis war criminals who acquired US citizenship. Then I was hooked. My independent research focused on the economics of genocide and the recycling of all kinds of assets looted from Jewish victims and the near-absence of postwar justice against those who executed, abetted and profited from those crimes against humanity. I eventually found myself involved with class action lawsuits against Swiss banks which led, inevitably, to the looted art issue with which I have been associated for the past two decades. I am a co-founder of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project and have taught a number of workshops focused exclusively on provenance research as it applies to Nazi/Fascist-era dislocations of Jewish-owned property.

What do you feel is the most relevant aspect of your course?

I teach one course, provenance research. I view it more as a training than as an academic exercise.

What do you hope participants will get out of the course?

I hope that those who take the provenance research workshop, (that’s really what it is), never look at an artistic, cultural, or ritual object, again with the same eyes as they had before they took the course. I want them to become skeptical of everything that they read about the history of those objects and to develop an insatiable curiosity for understanding where those objects come from and the what/where/when/why/how of their pasts by whom and with what.

What would a typical day be like in your classroom?

Every day is different but a main component of the workshop is to ask questions, remain inquisitive and be able to think outside of the proverbial box.

While each year participants are very enthusiastic about your courses, is there anything you learn from them in class?

Each participant comes from a very different background and he/she has his/her own unique relationship towards art objects, culture and history. The gift they bring me is their story, and the way they apprehend the topics that we tackle each hour of every day and, hopefully, be part of the transformation that they go through when confronted with evidence, inquiry, and research.

In anticipation of your courses, what book, article, or movie would you recommend to participants? 

There is no real way to get ready but it would help if participants were a bit savvy about the history of modern Europe, the basic dates, times, and places of major events that provoked these displacements of property. Lynn Nicholas, Hector Feliciano, Jonathan Petropoulos, are some of the authors who produced significant monographs on Nazi plunder, but there are also special investigative reports produced in the early 21st century in the UK, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, and Italy, on Nazi looting. HARP's own Plundered Art blog will provide a more argumentative and polemical approach to the issues of plunder and restitution, while suggesting how research can be conducted on objects with dubious pasts.

Which other course in the program would you love to follow yourself and why?

I enjoyed sitting in on Dick Drent’s course because it humbled me on my ignorance of security issues in museums. Perhaps Christos Tsirogiannis’ course would interest me because of his fierce approach towards the art market and his ability to ferret out looted antiquities. But, seriously, I don’t have any favorites out of fairness to the other professors.

Is there anything you can recommend for future participants to do in Amelia or Umbria?

They should leave their prejudices and assumptions at home and come prepared to be challenged in a small town in central Italy. The structure of the workshop allows them to grow. But they can only grow if they allow themselves to be vulnerable, to listen and to question. The questioning is only credible if it is anchored in evidence. As you know, it’s too easy to say: Why? You need to justify your questions and to challenge based on your own research and be prepared to hear that perhaps you are wrong and be prepared to realize that perhaps you are right. That is part of learning and growing...

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For a detailed prospectus and application materials or for general questions about the 2020 postgraduate program please contact us at education@artcrimeresearch.org 

In addition to the postgraduate program, the provenance course is also offered as stand-alone course. ARCA and the US-based Holocaust Art Restitution Project (HARP) have teamed up to offer its 4th annual stand-alone provenance course which tackles the complex issues of cultural plunder. More information can be found here on our website.

Attended by Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel and former US-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, the 1998 Washington DC conference, hosted by the US Department of State and the Holocaust Memorial Museum, in order to develop a statement concerning the restitution of art confiscated by the Nazi regime in Germany before and during World War II.  This statement, sometimes referred to as "The Washington Declaration" or the "Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art", was developed to address the issue of assets and provided eleven non-binding principles on dealing with material confiscated by the Nazis.  The document specifically dealt with art and insurance, as well as communal property, archives, books, and built on remaining gold issues following the Nazi Gold conference which had been held in London in December 1997.

To commemorate the 20th anniversary of this meeting, the Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste [DZK or German Lost Art Foundation] will be sponsoring an international conference scheduled to take place in Berlin, Germany from November 26 through November 28, 2018.

The conference is being organized with the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz  [the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation] and the Kulturstiftung des Bundes [the Cultural Foundation of the German Federal States].

Please see the Holocaust Art Restitution Project for more details as they become available. 

by Emily Blyze, ARCA Alum 2009

Part four of a five-part weekend series

Principles 3, 4, and 5 of the Washington Principles are worthy of attention compared to the equivalent recommendations in the Terezin Declaration Looted Art Working Group (which happen to be 3, 4, and 5 as well). The Washington Principles address the issue of resources and personnel being available to facilitate identification of a Nazi confiscated work not restituted (3). If established that a work was confiscated and not restituted, consideration should be given to unavoidable gaps or ambiguities in the provenance in light of the passage of time (4). Efforts should also be made to publicize the work of art in order to locate its pre-War owners or heirs (5). By contrast, the WG recommendations state that export, citizenship, inheritance and cultural heritage laws should not be used to prevent the restitution of cultural property to claimants. The Principles make no mention of legal issues, whereas the recommendations from the WG that the 46 states modify restitution legislation and establish national claims procedures create a stronger point to be considered.

The WG Looted Art recommendation 7 asserts that Participating States should actively support the establishment and operation of an international association of all provenance researchers. The association should encourage cooperation between researchers, the exchange of information, the setting of standards, and education. The proposal to create an association is the first of its kind. It begs the question of why this has not been done before now.

A notable difference between the Washington Principles and the Terezin Declaration is the availability of information via the Internet. Relevant records and archives should be open and accessible to researchers, in accordance with the guidelines of the International Council of Archives, reads Principle 2 of the Washington Principles. Keep in mind the technology of 1998 was very sparse and the material that was recommended to be open and accessible was primarily documents and books. However, the openness and accessibility of the Internet today has offered up a whole new dimension. This is particularly significant with regard to Principle 6, which states that efforts should be made to establish a central registry. This conjures the questions of how it would be accomplished and by whom.

The guidelines that have been created are an initiative to address and bring awareness to the Nazi World War II era plundering of art. A practical mind would ask whether these guidelines are achievable. Museums have asked how effective and economical steps might be made towards correctly addressing their collections with proper provenance research. Specifically stated, the AAMD Commission recognizes that provenance research is difficult, expensive and time-consuming, often involving access to records that are hard or impossible to obtain, and that most museums lack the resources to accomplish this. The Washington Principles recommended that art confiscated by the Nazis and not subsequently restituted be identified. Terms in the Principles such as “should,” “encouraged,” and “fair and just solution” can be ambiguous and leave room for interpretation. Language with such vagueness is hard to define and leads to the question, how to proceed with the principles presented. Furthermore, the mechanics of conducting provenance research is a topic that has been mostly neglected in both art-historical literature and in academic programs, especially at a time when the museum profession is being required to draw increasingly upon a variety of disciplines in order to adapt and survive. Legal proficiency can surely occupy no lower a priority than the more general skills of economic literacy, resource management and commercial enterprise that have become so substantial a part of contemporary museum and gallery administration.

Museum professionals today are in need of a transferable and interdisciplinary skill set. Knowledge of art history, politics, the history of collections, and the locations of archival materials that document the movement of art, in addition to provenance research, (a fairly specialized methodology in its own right), are all essential.

From 1998 to 2009, the recognized guidelines have plotted out scenery of what provenance research should look like. However, has this been accomplished? Have museums taken a direction that is suitable? On September 3, 2003 the AAM created a website aptly named the Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal (NEPIP). The Internet Portal provides a searchable online registry of objects in U.S. museum collections that changed hands in Continental Europe during the Nazi Era (1933-1945). Since the website was established, more than 28,000 objects have been posted by 165 U.S. art museums.

In 2001, The AAM Guide to Provenance Research was written by Nancy Yeide. The comprehensive AAM Guide is divided into two parts. Part One is an overview of basic provenance research and principles. Instruction is given on how to gather information from the work itself and how to use primary and secondary sources. It also has a template on how to write a provenance record used by several major museums such as the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Part Two discusses Holocaust-Era provenance research and how research should be prioritized. A significant aspect of the AAM Guide is the appendix and a list of selected bibliographies on the history of collecting, research resources, dealer archives and locations, resources for auction sales and exhibitions. “Red-flag” names from The Art Looting Investigation Unit (ALIU) are present, as well as a list of consolidated and detailed interrogation reports and Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) codes. The ERR was the Nazi organization that carried out confiscations of Jewish property in occupied countries. Confiscations by the ERR in France alone total almost 17,000 objects from more than 200 families. The meticulous cataloguing of the collections confiscated was organized by codes assigned to the families from whom the objects were looted.