Museums Press Hunt for Art Nazis Stole

The director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art testified Wednesday that curators so far have been unable to authenticate ownership during the Nazi era of 393 paintings from its vast European collection, raising the possibility some of the masterpieces have been looted.

“I would like to emphasize here, and to do so emphatically, that this list is not a list of suspect pictures,” Philippe de Montebello, the museum’s director, told a hearing of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States. “The inclusion of a painting on this list indicates that only more information is required to complete our knowledge of its ownership during the Nazi era.”

The list includes work by some of the museum’s most prominent artists, including Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse and Rembrandt van Rijn.

De Montebello cautioned against a “rush to judgment.” The museum’s director said he didn’t expect many of the pictures would be found suspect once ownership could be traced but added, “Even if only one work were demonstrably suspect, that is one too many.”

The World Jewish Congress called the testimony of four museum directors a “milestone” first step but noted it took two years for the institutions to make public their lists.

“There is now a burden on museums to clarify their title or relinquish it,” said Elan Steinberg, the executive director of the organization, which has been pressing banks, insurance companies and other institutions, including museums, to return assets stolen during the Holocaust.

“They want to keep it. Let me unequivocally and absolutely reject that,” Steinberg said in an interview. “It is already the precedent under international law and practice that Jewish art and plunder under the Holocaust must be returned to the Jewish people.”

De Montebello said the Metropolitan remained committed to the principle that any legitimate claim by an owner whose property was taken by the Nazis must be recognized and redressed. But he stopped short of spelling out specifics of museum policy.

Lawrence Wheeler, director of the North Carolina Museum of Art, told the commission how his institution recently gave back a small devotional image of the Madonna and Child attributed to the 16th century German master Lucas Cranach the Elder to a Viennese family from whom it was stolen by the Nazis.

Malcolm Rogers, the director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, testified that more than 200 paintings in his institution had sketchy or incomplete ownership records from 1933 to 1945. Before the hearing, the museum posted seven artworks on the Internet whose history suggested they might have been looted by the Nazis. They include a 17th century oil painting by Domenico Fetti that was handled by a notorious Nazi art dealer.

Rogers said the 200-plus paintings were being further researched. “There are many reasons for gaps in provenance ranging from the past owner’s desire for anonymity to an absence of records of transactions,” he explained. “Furthermore, resolving provenance gaps in the period in question is often quite complicated, as many records were lost in the war.”

Researchers in Boston found connections with people implicated in improper trading or looting of artworks during World War II and the Holocaust. Other paintings were apparently traded in Germany, Austria or France during the period of Nazi rule, appearing on the art market from 1933 to 1945. Rogers said the paintings were posted Monday on the Boston museum’s Web site because their histories were suspicious.

New York’s Museum of Modern Art also released a list of 15 paintings whose records are incomplete. “We have no reason to believe that any of these pictures were looted by the Nazis before or during the Second World War, but we have included them because we do not yet know where they were during all or part of the Nazi period,” said Glenn D. Lowry, the museum’s director.

De Montebello said the Metropolitan Museum of Art had not received any claim from a victim of Nazi looting or had been asked to search for a missing work by a victim or an heir, but it was posting on the Internet all the paintings whose ownership during the Nazi era is incomplete.

In their search, institutions are examining paintings created before 1945 that changed hands from 1933 to 1953. The Met has 2,700 European paintings in its collection.

The major Los Angeles museums whose collections include works that fit the criteria for investigation--the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Getty Museum, the Norton Simon Museum, and the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens--all are going through their collections, completing inventories and researching ownership and dealer histories.

So far, the results have not been made public except in the case of one painting at LACMA. In early March, it was revealed that a tempera panel, “Madonna and Child” by the 15th century Master of the Bargello, had been red-flagged because it passed through the hands of Hans Wendland, a known dealer in looted art. The work was donated to the museum in 1947 by the late New York financier Robert Lehman, who gave extensive gifts to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“We are about three-quarters through the review of the paintings,” said LACMA spokesman Keith McKeown, “and a number of paintings have been flagged [because] there’s a problem in terms of adequate records, a contradiction [in the record] or something suspect, like the dealer associated in some way with the Nazis. [That] doesn’t mean that the work is confiscated.” LACMA expects to finish its “first cut” at the records by the end of the year, at which time they will make the findings public.

The Getty also expects to have the results of its initial research completed soon. “We will be publishing the findings in June on our Web site,” said Sylvia Sukop, a spokeswoman for the museum.