One of the main obstacles to art restitution is the difficulty in tracing the provenance and proving the ownership.
Gunnar Schnabel, a German lawyer and author of Nazi Looted Art, said museums often “hold back any information they might have” about the murky wartime past of some of their works.
The unique nature of the Nazi regime also makes it difficult to legally define whether art was looted or not.
“The Nazis were very inventive, and thought up lots of ways to expropriate someone of their belongings,” said Christoph Bazil, head of Austria’s art restitution committee.
For example, Jews were sometimes coerced into selling their art to Nazis and Nazi sympathizers, or forced to sell paintings to fund day-to-day living because they had been forced out of work or because they had to pay discriminatory taxes.
Some people argue that in cases where the original owners of the artworks received money for them, it was a legally valid transaction, while others say the discriminatory Nazi policies imposed on Jews mitigate that validity.
Even when claimants are successful in proving their ownership of an artwork, they have often been unable to retrieve it due to rigid export bans on cultural patrimony.
A Jewish American heiress won a court battle with Hungary in 2000 for the return of art looted by Nazis, including works by Cranach, Van Dyck and El Greco. But the outcome was a Pyrrhic victory, as the works were not allowed to leave the country.
BACKLASH
As art restitution speeds up and returned works of art fetch record sums at auctions and private sales, there are the beginnings of a backlash against the claimants who some say are tracking down their inheritance to sell it for profit.
One of the five Klimt artworks returned to the Bloch-Bauer family a few years ago was sold for US$135 million, believed to be the highest price ever paid for a painting.
Yet art restitution experts say most looted artworks are worth more sentimentally than financially and are in some cases the only remaining possessions of murdered relatives.
“The few examples of restituted paintings then sold at auctions are of course the ones that everyone talks about, but there are many that stay in the families,” said Monika Tatzkow, 54, historian and provenance researcher.
Some say it is time to close the chapter on looted art.
Norman Rosenthal, a former curator at London’s Royal Academy of Arts whose own family fled Nazism, has suggested that the issue of Nazi-looted art must now be confined to history, just as with other cases of looted art, during the Bolshevik Revolution, for example, or the Napoleonic Wars.
Supporters of art restitution, however, say Nazi-looted art is unique because it was part of the process of genocide, starting with the elimination of peoples’ professional existence and their possessions, and ending with their murder.
Expert Lillie argues museums that benefited from Jewish expropriation and then dragged their feet on art restitution for decades have a moral responsibility to address the issue.
“This is their last chance to try to atone for past wrongs.”
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