Nazi Art

From The Scotsman:

IT HAS become a familiar story. The heirs of a Jewish art collector discover that paintings seized by the Nazis during the Second World War were never returned to the family. They start searching and, occasionally, they are lucky. A work is traced to a museum or spotted at an auction and, after lengthy negotiations, the rightful owners recover it or receive compensation.

The Jacques Goudstikker case is different. Goudstikker was Amsterdam's leading prewar collector and dealer in Dutch and Italian old masters before being killed in an accident while fleeing to a new life in the United States. Now leading art detectives have been hired by his heirs to track down more than 1,000 missing paintings which together are worth millions of pounds.

His descendants are just one of many families seeking belated justice for wartime looting. But only a handful of the depleted collections - among them, those of Alphonse Kann in France, the Viennese Rothschilds in Austria, the Herzogs in Hungary - are of a size comparable to that of Goudstikker.

The detective is Clemens Toussaint, a 45-year-old German art sleuth who is known in the trade as "Mr 50%", referring to his share of every art find.

This is an interesting story; proving once again that even sixty years later there is still plenty of unfinished business from the Second World War.

However, for me at least, the most interesting thing is this:

So far, he and his team have located around 100 works, and 32 cases have been resolved. Most have been found in either Germany or the US. "In Germany, we've had many restitutions, from museums in Cologne, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Dresden, and Stuttgart," Toussaint said.

"But no American museum has returned a Goudstikker yet. We've approached at least 10. They think we can't run 10 lawsuits at the same time, so they just sit and wait. That's my analysis."

I can understand why German museums would give up the stolen art as quickly as they could. After all they want to put as much distance between themselves and their nation’s Nazi past as possible. However note the fact that American museums are holding on to their stolen artworks hoping that the rightful owners will not have the resources to press their claim.

Am I the only one who finds this reprehensible? It is one thing to have a piece of stolen property and not know it. Even though you would think that a museum would have the resources to research the provenance of its own collection. However once they have been made aware of the fact that they are in possession of a painting that had been looted by the Nazis and that the heirs of the rightful owner still live and want it back, to still cling to it is to willingly make yourself an accessory after the fact to the Nazi’s crimes.

American museums give back your stolen property and do it right now!