Germany: we’ll still return art stolen by the Nazis.

In connection with yesterday’s post regarding art looted by the Nazis, the Art Law Blog announces “that Germany has rejected Sir Norman Rosenthal’s call for an end to Nazi restitution cases.”

Is it time to get on from where we are and stop returning art stolen by the Nazis to the heirs of its original owners?

My friend and former student John Kelley — who now is Compliance Manager for Baystate Health but has had extensive experience in the art market — points me to an article in the German magazine Spiegel Online, which discusses British art connoisseur Sir Norman Rosenthal’s call for an end to the return of artworks looted by the Nazis to the heirs of the original owners. Although it was not until the late 1990′s that an international consensus was reached that artworks should be restored to the families of the people from whom the Nazis had stolen them, since then, according to the article, the idea has ” seemed undisputed”; after all, “[w]ho would challenge the legitimacy of the claims of the heirs of Nazi victims to their family property?”

But, as the article points out, Museums have at times disputed their obligation to return such works on the grounds that “they acquired the works in question legally and in good faith.” Individual owners have made the same argument. More recently, though, at least one prominent German member of the art world has argued that the practice of returning the art to the families of the original owners should stop because the families have been motivated by money, not by their love of the artworks:

The best-known opponent of restitution in Germany is Bernd Schultz, 67, the director of the Berlin auction house Villa Grisebach. In a speech at the Chancellery two years ago, Schultz accused the heirs of having a purely financial interest in looted art: “They say Holocaust, but they mean money.” He has never retracted the statement.

That argument seems on its face, to me, a bit disingenuous. The works that are fought over, of course, are works that are worth an enormous amount of money. If they weren’t, the issue would not be the huge one it’s been. Why shouldn’t a family who, but for the Nazis, would have had a work of art or the right to dispose of it as they had seen fit not have a better claim to it than someone who succeeded to the claim of someone who succeeded to the claim of the original thieves and murderers?

But Sir Norman’s argument is different: “[h]is motives include the desire for reconciliation” and the desire to settle issues that leave current owners who have no reason to doubt the legitimacy of their ownership rights subject to claims. It does indeed seem that at some point the sheer passage of time ought to settle one’s rights. But have we reached that point? And are we really at a point at which the vast majority of current owners have no reason to doubt the legitimacy of their rights?

The fact Sir Norman, who is himself the child of survivors and has no desire to downplay the importance of Nazi crimes, may well mean where getting closer to the day when, in his words, we must get on from where we are and “[w]e can no longer wipe history clean.”