Seeking Moral Justice by the Return of Looted Art

Claims over two paintings by the Austrian Expressionist painter Egon Schiele, exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, are the latest pieces found from the enormous puzzle that Nazi art plundering created during Wold War II. It is society’s duty to reconstruct it.

“Portrait of Wally” and “Dead City” were both on view until last Sunday in a traveling Schiele exhibit at MOMA in New York. In two separate claims, the American heirs to these paintings argued that they were seized by the Nazis from their Jewish owners after the annexation of Austria in 1938. Both works were acquired after the war by Dr. Rudolf Leopold, whose collection in Vienna is now a government-financed foundation, which organized the traveling show.

The two families asked MOMA to hold on to the paintings after the exhibit closed, until their provenances, or ownership history, could be rightly identified. But the museum, citing a contractual obligation to return the pictures, and federal and state laws that forbid the seizure of cultural properties on loan in New York, said it had to ship the pictures to the show’s next destination, the Picasso Museum in Barcelona. At the families’ insistence, a last-minute court subpoena, issued by the Manhattan district attorney on Wednesday, stopped the paintings from leaving the country until an investigation could be completed.

An increasing number of legal claims and major public disputes concerning Nazi wartime art plundering have recently emerged. As in the Schiele case, looted works have turned up in major as well as mid-sized U.S. museums, art galleries and private collections, triggering national and international demands and accusations.

For the past two years, Europeans have also encountered the same unexpected situation. French state museums, for example, are under strong public pressure to find the owners of the more than 2,000 unclaimed artworks they have been holding on to since the end of World War II.

Unlike in Europe, many Americans have reacted strongly and positively to this complex matter, including several American museum directors and curators, the Art Dealers Assn. of America and many art history and law professors.

Looted art claims will continue to expand now that an increasing circle of American and international readers, viewers and art lovers is growing aware that many of the hundreds of thousands of artworks taken by the Nazis from Jews, Freemasons and political opponents were never returned to their rightful owners. Since the end of World War II, these missing works have, in a manner comparable to laundered money, quietly found their way into the art world, where they are now surfacing. We must find a solution to this problem without making every looted owner’s claim a potentially criminal situation for an artwork’s current holder.

In one recent U.S. case, a looted Henri Matisse painting, “Oriental Woman Seated on Floor,” was located last October at the Seattle Art Museum. A reader looking at the illustrations in my book, “The Lost Museum,” recognized the painting and informed the heirs. In 1940, the painting was plundered by the Nazis from French art dealer Paul Rosenberg, taken to their stolen-art depot at the Jeu de Paume in Paris and traded into the French art market. The Matisse was subsequently brought into the U.S. in the 1950s by a New York art dealer who sold it to the Bloedel family in Seattle. The Bloedels, in turn, donated it to the museum. The painting is now being claimed by Rosenberg’s American and French heirs.

Another highly publicized case, in September, concerned eight rare medieval illuminated manuscripts, looted by the Nazis from the Alphonse Kann collection in Paris and found at the renowned Wildenstein & Co. gallery in New York. The Kann heirs quickly claimed the works, but discovered that, soon after their written claims were sent, the gallery had tried selling the disputed manuscripts to a book dealer. The Kanns have vowed to recover their missing works.

Finally, a trial scheduled in Chicago this spring should decide the fate of an Edgar Degas work, “Landscape with Smokestacks,” looted from the Gutmann family in Paris. The painting was found in the collection of Daniel Searle, former chairman of G.D. Searle Pharmaceutical Co. and a trustee of the Art Institute of Chicago. Searle has rejected the claim. The Gutmanns, husband and wife, died in the concentration camps of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, but their daughter and grandsons are standing by their long, costly two-generation family search.

Hence, art plundered by the Nazis has surfaced not only in Europe but in collections throughout the United States. What can we do to close, once and for all and with fairness, this unfinished chapter of World War II and the Holocaust?

The most reasonable solution would be the creation of a permanent independent arbitration commission made up of knowledgeable members from different fields in the U.S. and Europe. After rigorously studying each case, the commission members would make a final decision--accepted as definitive by all parties involved. This commission would try to achieve justice while avoiding the sometimes astronomical legal fees and juridical technicalities that do not take human reason into account. This type of arbitration commission also possesses the advantage of acting quickly--in any case, quicker than the courts--and in a more amicable way. It will also protect the art and cultural worlds from hysterical witch hunts that usually lead to much mangling and mauling but few results.

At all times, art plundering has been an essential aspect of war. Victors have always tried to annihilate their enemies not only physically but morally. We saw this most recently during the war in the former Yugoslavia.

The Nazis, for their part, wanted to exterminate their enemies, but also to destroy their souls, personalities and memories. Art reflects the soul and personality of its owner. The works you own are usually a projection of your personality and constitute part of your dreams, values and family memory. Moreover, the Nazis considered many of these art collectors usurpers of the highest aesthetic values in Western culture.

Unlike Napoleonic booty found today in the Louvre Museum or the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum, art looted by the Nazis still affects people alive today. Many surviving heirs intimately knew these works, which had hung in their homes before being confiscated by the Nazis. For others, their families’ lives have been indelibly shaped by their long search for their missing artworks.

Returning plundered art will, undoubtedly, be a complicated legal and social matter, entangling many persons, institutions and reputations. For decades, few in the art world--auction houses, art dealers, museum curators, collectors and experts--cared about the provenance of these paintings, drawings, sculptures and manuscripts. But, today, more than 50 years after the war, we have one of the last opportunities to right a wrong from that era. Returning looted art is, fundamentally, a matter of moral justice and memory. Our chance to do today that which we will not be able to do even a few years from now--to gather all the pieces of the puzzle.

We should not lose sight of the fact that the story of Nazi art plunder and the puzzle that came out of it cannot be told from the point of view of the looters, nor from the point of view of the unknowing and unwitting museums or current owners. It can only be told from one point of view: the victims.