New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced last week that she had signed new legislation introduced by Senator Anna Kaplan and Assemblywoman Nily Rozic to ensure younger generations have a greater awareness of the events of the Holocaust. One element of this legislation specifies that museums in New York must “prominently” display a placard on some other type of signage indicating when a work of art was stolen by the Nazis.
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Discovered at the Arkell Museum in Canajoharie, a Nazi looted painting has finally been returned to its rightful heirs after almost 90 years. This recent recovery is part of an international effort involving the FBI to restitute more than 1,000 artworks and artefacts seized in 1933 from the Mosse family, who were prominent Jewish residents of Berlin.
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On Tuesday, the appeals court in New York upheld a 2018 ruling that returned two Nazi-looted drawings to the heirs of a Holocaust victim. This decision ends a years-long dispute between London art dealer, Richard Nagy, and the descendants of Fritz Grünbaum. Continue reading
Yesterday (30 April 2019), a federal U.S. judge ruled that a Spanish museum was the rightful owner of a Nazi-looted painting, rather than the survivors of the Jewish woman who relinquished it to flee the Holocaust. Continue reading
“We want our looted work back. Full stop”, the descendant of Jewish art dealer and victim of Nazi spoliation, Paul Rosenberg, has told the New York Times. Continue reading
The buyer of a Nazi-looted painting claims Christie’s auction house did not research the work’s provenance thoroughly enough before it sold it to him. Continue reading
A new US art restitution law is being put to the test by the heirs of a Holocaust victim to recover two watercolours by Egon Schiele.
‘Woman in a Black Pinafore’ (1911) and ‘Woman Hiding Her Face’ (1912), which have a combined estimated value of US$5 million (£4.04 million) are said to have been among 449 artworks confiscated by the Nazis from the collection of Fritz Grünbaum during World War II. An Austrian Jewish entertainer, Grünbaum was murdered at Dachau concentration camp in 1941. Continue reading
Two works from the Gurlitt treasure trove of art have been restituted to the descendants of their Jewish owners.
A painting by Camille Pissarro and a drawing by Adolph Menzel are two of four works to have been returned to their rightful owners since investigations into the collection’s questionable provenance began in 2012. A German government team tasked with researching the Gurlitt collection have suggested that a further 91 artworks are suspected of being looted from, or sold under duress by Jewish families fleeing Nazi persecution during World War II. Continue reading
In one of the longest-running art restitution disputes in the US, the descendants of Lilly Cassirer, who fled Nazi Germany with her husband in 1939, are fighting tooth and nail against Madrid’s Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum to reclaim Camille Pissarro’s ‘Rue Saint-Honoré dans l’après-midi. Effet de pluie’ (1897).
The Cassirer family claims that Lilly and her husband were forced to trade the £24 million French Impressionist work for their exit visas in order to escape persecution. The painting changed hands between numerous art dealers and collectors over the course of a decade before finally arriving in Spain in 1993. When the Cassirers finally found the painting in a museum catalogue in 1999 they requested its return. The Museum refused and the family filed suit, commencing legal proceedings which have ensued for the past 16 years. Continue reading
A 16th century painting, restituted to the heirs of a Jewish couple forced to sell it when they fled Nazi Germany, could pave the way for many other works to return to their rightful owners.
Attributed to Joos van Cleve or his son Cornelis, the portrait was reunited with the family of Hertha and Henry Bromberg in a ceremony in Paris on Monday (28 November). Presenting the work to the Bromberg’s grandchildren, the French culture minister, Audrey Azoulay, acknowledged that its return was “quite belated”. She told those in attendance that the French government had only recently begun to step up its restitution efforts and become more “proactive” in seeking the original owners of works confiscated by the Nazi regime during the Second World War.
Instead of relying on claimants to come forward, the French government is now actively seeking out the descendants of those whose artworks were stolen or forcibly sold. “It was no longer possible to merely wait for the rightful beneficiaries to come ask for the restitution of what is theirs,” Azoulay said. As a result of these efforts, a further 27 objects are set to be returned after French authorities identified their rightful owners.
The Bromberg portrait was purchased by Henry Bromberg’s father Martin in 1912 at auction in Berlin. Characteristic of Flemish portraiture from the 1530s to 1540s, it depicts a man dressed in black with a brown fur coat holding a pair of gloves and the pommel of a sword. Upon fleeing Germany before the outbreak of the war the Brombergs were forced to sell the work in Paris in 1938. It passed through the hands of several art dealers and was eventually sold to the Reich Chancellery for Hitler’s proposed Führermuseum in Linz.
When the war drew to a close, the portrait was one of over 60,000 works of art confiscated from France, which were recovered by Allied troops. Discovered in mines near Salzburg, the painting was returned to France in 1949. One of more than 2,000 works of art deemed to be orphaned, it was stored at the Louvre Museum from 1950-1960 and finally sent to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Chambéry. Only 107 of these orphan works have been reunited with their owners and the French government has been criticised for dragging its heels.
For the Bromberg family, the restitution process is imbued with more emotional than financial meaning. According to one relative, “the painting doesn’t even have to have any monetary value… It’s about connecting us to our past and the story of our family that was lost”.
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