From The Philadelphia Inquirer
September 5, 1997

http://www.lostart.org/press2.htm

Restitution for looted art is discussed
By David Goldstein

WASHINGTON -- On Feb. 2, 1942, a truck driven by Nazi soldiers pulled away from a warehouse in Berlin carrying a cache of paintings that included 41 oils by the German expressionist Max Pechstein.Then they vanished.For more than a half century, Hans Heymann has been searching for them. They were the core of his father's art collection, he said, left behind when the Heymanns fled after Adolf Hitler rose to power and "it became clear it was going to be very unhealthy to stay."Like so many other works of art owned by European Jews during the Nazi era, the paintings were seized. Some were sold or destroyed. The fates of many others were unknown -- until recently.More and more famous artworks are embarrassingly turning up in prominent museums and private collections. Works by Picasso, Degas and Monet have recently become the source of tension between their current owners and the heirs of Jewish collectors from whom they were taken -- many of whom perished in the Holocaust.And as the paintings' cloudy history becomes revealed, troubling questions are being asked about the legal and moral implications over the ownership of looted art.Amid the splendor of a Washington ballroom in the heart of Embassy Row, an international group of historians, curators, lawyers and lawmakers met yesterday to discuss the issues surrounding restitution to the victims of Nazi plundering.The experts talked about imposing a new ethical "yardstick" to assure that ownership of an artwork is scrupulously verified before purchase."The hear no-evil, see no-evil dilemma is really at the heart of it," said Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore.Members of Congress talked of enacting laws to let people sue foreign nationals in federal courts. And everyone talked of heeding an overriding moral imperative to compensate a rapidly vanishing generation of survivors."Art theft from the Holocaust is one of the few things from the Holocaust that we can make right," said Constance Lowenthal of the International Federation of Art Research. "Art has a tendency to survive many calamities because it is prized." The conference was sponsored by Washington's National Jewish Museum. Through its Holocaust Art Restitution Project, the museum is trying to develop a database for locating art stolen by the Nazis from Jewish collections in Europe. It is no easy task. Besides resistance from museums and galleries that are protective of their collections, the trail of ownership is often shrouded in World War II intrigue. "You are dealing with shadowy areas and mysterious persons," said Thomas Kline, a Washington lawyer involved in recovering lost art. "Putting a case together is difficult."Sometimes heirs have proof for their claims, like the shipping documents Heymann has from the truck driver who hauled away his father’s collection to Nazi offices. Sometimes heirs just have yellowed photos of a painting above the mantle. And sometimes, all they have are memories. Scholars say the Nazis stole vast amounts of Europe’s art treasures, with the goal of building a huge museum in Hitler’s hometown of Linz, Austria. They estimate that the lost artworks number in the tens of thousands. Many may have spirited away by Soviet troops, smuggle onto the black market, and into the hands of private collectors and museums."They could be anywhere," said Hector Feliciano, author of The Lost Museum, a book that detailed how the Nazis plundered European art. It was Feliciano's research that brought to light the likelihood that a 1921 Picasso Head of a Woman, hanging in the Rennes Fine Arts Museum in Rennes, France was looted from a French Jewish collector. It may soon be returned to his heirs.In this country, a Degas landscape remains in storage at the Art Institute of Chicago while pharmaceutical titan Daniel C. Searle, a benefactor echo purchased it for the museum, tussles over ownership with the heirs of Dutch Jews who died in the concentration camps.Searle has said he checked to make sure he had clear title to the painting, but he apparently counted on the art institute to do that. Testimony in the case shows that the curators apparently ignored or otherwise disregarded evidence that the painting had been Nazi plunder.Simon Goodman, grandson of the Degas' wartime owner is involved in several claims to recover art from his grandfather's collection."The paintings," Goodman said, "are all that is left of my family."