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.”

Where should art be, and how does it often get where it is?

Ingrid D. Rowland in the New Republic writes a terrific review and critique of Who Owns Antiquity?: Museums and the Battle over Our Ancient Heritage, by James Cuno. Cuno’s publisher describes the book like this:

Whether antiquities should be returned to the countries where they were found is one of the most urgent and controversial issues in the art world today, and it has pitted museums, private collectors, and dealers against source countries, archaeologists, and academics. Maintaining that the acquisition of undocumented antiquities by museums encourages the looting of archaeological sites, countries such as Italy, Greece, Egypt, Turkey, and China have claimed ancient artifacts as state property, called for their return from museums around the world, and passed laws against their future export. But in Who Owns Antiquity?, one of the world’s leading museum directors vigorously challenges this nationalistic position, arguing that it is damaging and often disingenuous. . . . The first extended defense of the side of museums in the struggle over antiquities, Who Owns Antiquity? is sure to be as important as it is controversial.

As Rowland explains in her review, “Noting that modern laws about the import and export of antiquities did not exist when Napoleonic troops discovered the Rosetta Stone, Cuno suggests that under modern conditions British soldiers might not have been able to . . . spirit it away to the British Museum, with the result that Jean-François Champillon might not have been able to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphic script. The point of this exercise . . . is to demonstrate a larger point, which is that antiquities laws as currently drawn impoverish rather than enrich the global level of culture.” In addition, Cuno argues that nations who retain and reclaim their archaeological heritage are advancing harmful nationalistic agendas, not the preservation of cultural artifacts with global relevance:

The emotional, “national cultural identity” card played by some proponents of nationalist retentionist cultural property laws is really a strategic, political card. National museums are important instruments in the formation of nationalist narratives; they are used to tell the story of a nation’s past and confirm its present importance. That may be true of national museums, but it is not true of encyclopedic museums, those whose collections comprise representative examples of the world’s artistic legacy.

Rowland will have none of it. First, she points out that the “encyclopedic museums” whose interests Cuno is advancing are themselves the products of nationalism. As she puts it, “[t]he founders of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Art Institute of Chicago [where Cuno is museum director] imperiously took it for granted that those cities belonged to a United States of America that stood as beacon to the world–the land of the free and the home of the brave. It is either naive or tendentious to argue that those institutions were founded instead to serve some great multicultural vision of human fraternity.” She also goes to some length to counter Cuno’s criticisms of Italy, the source of so much of the looted art spread through museums throughout empires past and present.

Rowland also points out that, while the “encyclopedic museums” might have preserved some of the antiquities they obtained over the years, they have also taken away a lot:

It is a different thing to see the ancient statue called the Spinario right there in Rome where Pope Sixtus put it in 1471, where many of the great artists of the Renaissance drew it, where Winckelmann and Goethe saw it, than it is to see an ancient bronze in the Met. It is one thing to stand in the theatre of Ephesus, right there where the riot broke out among the silversmiths who made votive trinkets for the Temple of Artemis, who feared the impact that a wandering preacher named Paul of Tarsus might have on their business–and it is quite another matter to see a column from that temple in the British Museum. The Elgin Marbles have been spared the foul air of modern Athens, but they were not spared a good British scrub down with soap and water when they arrived in the early nineteenth century, and neither fate has been kind to the polished surface of the Parthenon’s sculpture.

With respect to moveable antiquities, Rowland emphasizes that their removal from their geographic origins robs their audience of an appreciation for their true significance. We see Greek pottery in the Metropolitan Museum, for example, without realizing it came from Italy and reflects the market demands of the ancient Etruscan culture that imported it as much as it does the culture of the Greek exporters. She also wonders why Cuno focuses on the value of one donor’s contributions to the Metropolitan Museum of Art while ignoring that donor’s landmark agreements to return some of her collection to Italy. Rowland, in short, reads Cuno’s book “as a brief for outright possession–that we own antiquity as much as the Italians, Greeks, Chinese, and Iraqis do, and therefore we have an equal right to their archaeological wealth–rather than as some abstract idea of respect for a shared human cultural tradition.”

Rowland also has her own problems with the system that passes antiquities to “encyclopedic museums,” including the fact it is dominated by organized crime.  She also questions whether nationalism is such a bad thing. It has allowed Italy to modernize and become the home of the best experts on antiquities from the Italian peninsula. And with respect to Egypt, she writes, with some sharpness:

[A] growing number of modern Egyptians are no longer illiterate fellahin. The new Library of Alexandria stands across the street from the University of Alexandria, with its 140,000 students; its alumni include the Nobel laureate Ahmed Zewail, now at Caltech and one of the most imaginative chemists working today. Zahi Hawass may be a baron in his position as head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, but he serves notice to the barons who dwell in the world’s encyclopedic museums that they must now take the bright, eager young people of Egypt into account.

Rowland acknowledges that Cuno represents a new generation of museum directors who improve significantly on their predecessors’ arrogant destructiveness. But she begs for squarely addressing the problems posed by “the hubris, greed, and lust for possession that beautiful things have always exerted on our own breed of gregarious primate.”

She’s certainly right about the greed and lust for possession of beautiful things. The London TimesOnline reports that”[a]rt theft is big business. The FBI estimates that it is a global industry worth $6 billion (£3.3 billion) a year. In France it is reckoned the fourth most lucrative criminal activity.” Reviewing Stolen: The Gallery of Missing Masterpieces, by Jonathan Webb and Julian Radcliffe, Rachel Campbell-Johnston explains:

The art world is a rarefied place. Discretion is prized. Dealers prefer not to discuss client lists. Collectors can be very secretive. On top of that, art works are usually whisked out of the country a few days after being stolen. Often they will not emerge again for years. When they do they may well be in the hands of a bona fide person. . . .

Art theft, as Stolen makes clear, is frequently connected with the crimes with which it competes for police attention. . . . Criminals in Dublin, for instance, pulling off a spectacular heist in a country estate, corralled Rubens, Vermeer and Goya into providing venture capital for a drug-dealing ring. In Buenos Aires at the time of the Falklands conflict, Cézanne helped a brutal dictatorship to pull off an illicit arms deal.

To get a sense of what’s been lost, you can read the Guardian’s descriptions of the greatest art you’ll never see.

Ruling Imagination: Law and Creativity

Distributing the Art of a Dead Thief (and matters of attribution)

The death of William Milliken Vanderbilt Kingsland, born Melvyn Kohn, is rife with questions of law and art. Mr. Kohn, it was discovered, was a fraud, neither once married to French nobility, educated at Groton or Harvard, nor living on Fifth Avenue.

And while his small apartment on East 72^nd Street was full of art, he appears to have stolen most of it. The New York County Public Administrator’s Office, which handles the estates of people who die without wills, put the art up for auction through Christie’s and another auction house. But it was only after the buyer of one of the pieces looked into it’s provenance that he discovered it had been stolen. Experts at Christie’s soon discovered several other of the pieces had been stolen.

Mr. Kohn apparently really did own a few of his pieces; the receipts were found in his apartment. But there are still 105 pieces unaccounted for. If no one comes forward to claim them, they will be auctioned and the proceeds will go to Mr. Kohn’s heirs, several of whom seem to have turned up.

So what has the FBI done? Just what any fifteen year old would in 2008: posted a website containing images of all the contested works, hoping their true owners will turn up.

Needless to say, however, return of the works to their rightful owners will be no easy task. The FBI agent in charge of the case described the conversations with potential leads as discussions of “prehistoric history.” And then, of course, there’s that old bugaboo: authenticity. The agent said of a drawing listed in the collection as a Corot: “Well, you know what they say about Corot, don’t you? He did 500 pictures and there are 2,0000 of them in the United States.”

I’m sure this isn’t one of the paintings that ended up in Kohn’s collection: