Museum worthy : Nazi art plunder in postwar Western Europe

"A central component of the Nazi Final Solution was the seizure of Jewish assets, including cultural property. Agents of the Third Reich and their collaborators in occupied Europe scoured Jewish homes, galleries, and bank vaults for coveted objects, and manipulated art sales from persecuted owners. All told, they plundered millions of works of art, quality furniture pieces, archives, rare books, musical instruments and other cultural items. With the defeat of the Third Reich, cultural officers in western Allied forces, popularly known as "the Monuments Men," tracked down the plunder in castles, churches and salt mines, and by the mid-1950s returned thousands of items to despoiled individuals. While restitution success stories have been told in books and films such as The Monuments Men and Woman in Gold, less known is the fate of thousands of objects that were repatriated to countries of origin but never returned to rightful owners. In France, Belgium and the Netherlands, postwar governments selected the most coveted unclaimed works for public use, and distributed them to state-run museums and other public buildings. Museum Worthy examines the origins of these art custodianships built with so-called "heirless" art, justified in each case as a restoration of national cultural patrimony--at the expense of private Jewish owners. The quest to recover these items, carried out by descendants of Nazi-era victims, continues today"-- Provided by publisher Art looting is commonly recognized as a central feature of Nazi expropriation, in both the Third Reich and occupied territories. After the war, the famed Monuments Men (and women) recovered several hundred thousand pieces from the Germans' makeshift repositories in churches, castles, and salt mines. Well publicized restitution cases, such as that of Gustav Klimt's luminous painting featured in the film Woman in Gold, illustrate the legacy of Nazi looting in the art world today. But what happened to looted art that was never returned to its rightful owners? In France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, postwar governments appropriated the most coveted unclaimed works for display in museums, embassies, ministries, and other public buildings. Following cultural property norms of the time, the governments created custodianships over the unclaimed pieces, without using archives in their possession to carry out thorough provenance (ownership) research. This policy extended the dispossession of Jewish owners wrought by the Nazis and their collaborators well into the twenty-first century. The custodianships included more than six hundred works in Belgium, five thousand works in the Netherlands, and some two thousand in France. They included paintings by traditional and modern masters, such as Rembrandt, Cranach, Rubens, Van der Weyden, Tiepolo, Picasso, and Matisse. This appropriation of plundered assets endured without controversy until the mid-1990s, when activists and journalists began challenging the governments' right to hold these items, ushering in a period of cultural property litigation that endures to this day. Including interviews that have never before been published, Museum Worthy deftly examines the appropriation of Nazi art plunder by postwar governments and highlights the increasingly successful postwar art recovery and restitution process. Cover Museum Worthy Copyright Dedication Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction: Plunder and Patrimony 1. Nazi Art Plunder in Western Europe 2. Allied Victory and Art Recovery 3. Negotiating Cultural Restitution 4. Recovered Art as French Patrimony 5. National Heritage in the Netherlands 6. Restoring Belgian Artistic Heritage 7. Contested Patrimony Conclusion: A New Age of Museum Ethics Notes Selected Bibliography Index