While I was preparing for my talk at the Bowers Museum on the Nazi confiscation of art and my book, Deadly Provenance, I came across the following link about a battle between a museum in Norway and a family demanding the museum return a Henri Matisse painting, said to have been seized by the Nazis under the direction of Hermann Goering during WWII.  http://bigstory.ap.org/article/matisse-norwegian-museum-was-once-nazi-loot

Almost seventy years after the War, art pieces are still being recovered, and, hopefully, being restored to the original owners or descendants thereof.

You might consider this situation a no-brainer.  The painting winds up in museum, which believes they bought the piece legitimately from a collector or dealer.  Paperwork seemed in order.  And then suddenly a family or individual fights to reclaim it.  What’s really going on?

Let’s back up.  The Nazis looted about twenty percent of all Western art during the Second World War.  Today, more than tens of thousands of items remain displaced, destroyed, or missing.  At the end of the War, many of these confiscated pieces were found and returned to nations Germany had occupied, with stipulations that they be returned to individual pre-war owners.  However, after the first few years, instead of continuing to track down the owners (many of whom died in the war) or their families, (many of whom died in the war,) some governments and museums chose to keep the works in storage or on display, effectively appropriating them as their own.

Despite a number of world and national “conferences” on this issue, there is a wide array of outcomes from restitution claims ranging from decade-long legal battles to resolution through mediation or arbitration.  Why all this confusion?

Probably the easiest answer is “provenance.”  Defined, provenance is a list of the previous owners of a work of art, tracing it from its present location and owner back to the hand of the artist.  Think about this.  How often and for how long do you keep receipts for items you purchase?  Even important, high-priced items.  Now consider — your country is at war.  You and your family are arrested, taken from your home.  Your home is then ransacked and used for enemy purposes.  What would have happened to those receipts?

In many ways, it’s fortunate that the Germans (here the ERR or Einsatzstab Reichsletter Rosenberg, the agency in charge of confiscating the art and cultural objects from undesirables) kept such immaculate records.  Lists exist of the items they hoarded, from whom they were stolen, when and where they were stored ie: the Jeu de Paume in Paris, etc.  Without these documents and lists from heroines like Rose Valland, (photo of Rose and of Cate Blanchette who played Rose in The Monuments Men) a French curator who kept track of the plundered works of art, this work would have been lost forever.

More and more lost pieces of art are being recovered every day around the world.  It remains to be seen, whether the original owners or their descendants will ever get them back.