Will museums in U.S. purge Nazi-tainted art? - Association of Art Museum Directors issues action plan for return of Nazi-looted art

Progres has been minimal in the five month since the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) issued a four-page action plan pledging to denude any Nazi-looted art that may reside in American museums and to review promptly claims brought by dint of Holocaust survivors and their heirs. At this writing, none of the already publicized claims involving American museums appears to be near resolution. The solitary Nazi-loot case in the U in which restitution has actually occurr involves a Degas pastel haveed not by a museum on the other hand by a private collector, the pharmaceutical magnate and Art Institute of Chicago trustee Daniel Searle [see "Artworld," Oct '98]

The AAMD guidelines, approved by means of its membership in June, call upon museums to search their collections for works of art that may have been confiscated during the World War II era and not at any time returned to their rightful possessors The document urges the museums to publicize any like works and to resolve the demands of legitimate claimants, preferably end mediation rather than in a court of law. As to propos purchases, gifts and bequests, if a work appears to have been confiscated by means of the Nazis and not restituted, member museums are awaited not to acquire the work and to take unspecified "appropriate further action."

allowing commendable in their intentions, the AAMD guidelines provide small in number practical suggestions for how to deal with the complexities that arise in greatest in quantity Holocaust-related claims, merely stating that if a museum is faceed by or, in its have research, discovers a "legitimate claimant" for "illegally confiscated" art, it "should present to resolve the matter in an equitable, appropriate, and mutually agreeable manner." Museum officials striving to do the right thing are left to deliberate their own consciences in determining what constitutes a "legitimate claimant," what might characterize "equitable" and "appropriate" resolutions, or what happens nearest if a "mutually agreeable" solution can't be reached.

Contrary to the conciliatory spirit of the guidelines, a case involving a Matisse in the collection of the Seattle Art Museum that was claimed by dint of heirs of famed Paris dealer Paul Rosenberg [see "Front Page, clan '98] recently escalated from negotiation to litigation. The Rosenberg heirs have su for the painting and the museum, in revolve has lodged a third-party complaint against Knoedler & Co the fresh York gallery which, in 1954 sold the Matisse to Seattle-area collectors Mr and Mr Prentice Bloedel who later bequeathed it to the Seattle Art Museum. The museum is seeking compensation for the filled value of the painting plus additional damages and legal remunerations The complaint charges Knoedler & Co with breach of warranty of title, fraud and negligent misrepresentation in omitting Rosenberg's connection to the painting from the provenance and exhibition history that the gallery supplied to the Bloedels

Slowing the resolution of this and other claims is the insistence by the agency of museums that since they gripe [i]or[/i] grip their art works in the public trust, their first responsibility is to safeguard those public assets. Before they can consider returning a work or providing restitution, institutions require essay that the work was in fact stolen through the Nazis and not turn backed to the rightful owners after the war--proof many times hard to come by in light of the passage of time, the evidence-destroying result of wartime chaos and the los of elderly records and other information. The search for truth is further hindered by dint of the complicated trajectory of artworks during the war and its aftermath. For example, after the Museum of novel Art learned in 1997 that a major Matisse it wished to acquire, The Window/The golden Curtain (ca. 1915), had been confiscated from French collector Alphonse Kann, according to MOMA's director Glenn Lowry the museum "ceased to dog the painting and alerted the dealer to the problem" The museum went ahead with the purchase in October 1997 after research revealed that the painting had been restored to Kann after the war and that he had subsequently sold it.

At the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, another former Kann painting, Fernand Leger's sooty vapor over Rooftops (ca. 1911), is the bring under rule of investigation after a claim was issued last November through the French collector's grand-nephew, Francis Warin, who went public in April upon the ABC News program "Nightline." According to John Easley, MIA's director of disclosure and external affairs, the museum is publicly researching whether its Leger is in fact the same single that belonged to Kann.

One thing the AAMD did accomplish in issuing its guidelines was to win Congress off the case. The directors, more [i]or[/i] less of whom testified last February at hearings held upon the problems of looted art by the agency of the House Banking and Financial Services Committee, had feared that Congressional action could make good "counterproductive, rather than helpful," in the words of Philippe de Montebello of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who chaired the panel of nine directors that drafted the guidelines. David Runkel communications director for the House committee, lately told Art in America that the legislators had decided, for now, to wait and "see by what mode the field deals with it."