Discoveries at art museums usually are happy occasions, but during the last year a new kind of bringing to light introduced an unexpectedly threatening element.
Two canvases by Egon Schiele shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and one by Henri Matisse in the collection of the Seattle Art Museum were alleged to have been confiscated or stolen by Nazis from Jewish families during World War II, and descendants took legal action to regain the paintings.
This immediately raised fears of collectors refusing to loan major paintings to large international exhibitions or, less likely, queues of claimants dramatically reducing the number of the nation’s European masterpieces.
Within months of the first salvo in Manhattan last fall, the Association of American Art Museum Directors, representing 170 of the country’s largest institutions, appointed a task force on how to approach future claims of ownership, and a mid-February hearing of the Banking Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives was devoted to their legal and emotional complexity.
James N. Wood, director of the Art Institute of Chicago, participated in both events as well as an AAMD session that introduced guidelines for member museums. So, on the most vexing new problem facing American art museums, it’s appropriate to paraphrase the maxim once applied to General Motors: What’s good for the Institute is good for the rest of the country.
“We (on the task force) tried to balance legitimate claims of the families with the legitimate museum responsibility of holding artworks in a public trust,” Wood said. “One of our biggest concerns was to slow down the process (that has been quickened by emotion).
“The guidelines state unequivocally that if a piece can be demonstrated as stolen, it should go back to the owner. But it’s a long way from making the claim to having the work returned.
“Most claims seldom can be articulated with enough evidence so one can form a binding conclusion. There also is not much of a sustained track record; no case has gone through the entire legal process for us even to know all the kinds of evidence. And every case is different. So the way toward resolution clearly is complicated.”Nonetheless, AAMD guidelines advocate a pro-active approach that begins with each museum reviewing the provenance, or ownership record, of works in its collection to ascertain if any were unlawfully confiscated during World War II without subsequent restitution.
This recommendation is not, however, binding — which means some museums will act on it more quickly than others, and others may not act at all. Two months after receiving the guidelines, the Institute is proving itself a leader.
“We’ve always had accession and decaccession policies,” Wood said. “They’re not something new. But we have brought in four new researchers to start looking at the provenance of works during the troublesome years.
“We eliminated some departments — photography, prints — fairly quickly because the work exists in multiples or editions, and it would be extremely difficult for anyone to prove edition numbers. Other departments we targeted according to what we know about the Nazis’ collecting patterns. Would they have taken Asian material? Unlikely. Fine European decorative arts? Possibly. Twentieth Century art, European paintings, drawings? Most probably, because they were of the greatest (financial) value.
“It’s the rare object where you know everything. The art world — buyers, sellers, dealers — has always been secretive. But the first step is to see if we can find holes in the provenance before, during or after World War II. Then we’ll try to go to greater depth and pinpoint every detail (of ownership) we can.”
Such research will proceed from the museum’s own records to established outside sources, such as archives, databases, art dealers, auction houses, historians and researchers in the period. But no database linking previous findings now exists for North America, much less the world; and while stolen artworks obviously traveled East with Russian soldiers as well as West with Americans, more time will have to pass before anyone determines what sort of artistic information is in newly accessible Russian archives and if it can shed light on questions of ownership.
National and international claims may be centralized sooner, thanks to the Commission for Art Recovery, formed last September under the sponsorship of the World Jewish Congress in New York. Its director, Constance Lowenthal, will oversee the creation of a database that will accept the recollections of victims of Nazi looting who have no written documentation. Such accounts then will be cross-referenced with records on insurance policies from the ’30s and ’40s that covered works of art. The findings may well give a concreteness to claims of ownership in a way that hitherto had been unimagined.
Both the Commission and the AADM are in favor of mediation between claimants and museums once a legitimate instance arises.
Lowenthal has said: “That certainly is a possibility, because these cases — which keep arriving with an alarming regularity — and the laws that have been made with them, particularly those involving World War II, are not well-known by most judges. It’s an unusual circumstance. And one of the reasons we would like mediation to be considered is that then the people who are guiding the negotiations are really familiar with the constraints, the needs, the ethics, and the ways of the art world — which most judges are not. It is very specialized. And while many judges would love to have such a case, it’s almost always their first.”
Wood added: “These cases are tremendously emotional. They often get tried in the press. When that happens, it introduces other aspects and positions harden. If either party really feels he could win (a lawsuit), mediation will not help. But most cases are pretty gray. And those are the kind of situations that can be resolved through mediation, skillfully applied. With a jury trial, who knows?”
Late last year two families claimed ownership of Schiele’s “Portrait of Wally” and “Dead City,” which were loaned to an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art by a foundation in Austria. The show closed on Jan. 4, but the Manhattan District Attorney issued a subpoena to detain the paintings until ownership was determined. MOMA fought the detainment until mid May, when a State Supreme Court ruled the museum could return the works to Vienna. The District Attorney is appealing the decision. The paintings remain in New York.
The Seattle lawsuit, the first against an American museum over art stolen by the Nazis, was filed on Aug. 7, nine months after claimants asked the museum to give proof of rightful ownership of Matisse’s “Odalisque” or return the painting. A lawyer for the family was reported as saying he did not know what the museum wanted to mediate.
The Art Institute of Chicago has no claim against it, though one of its trustees, Daniel Searle, does — for a pastel monotype, “Landscape With Smokestacks,” by Edgar Degas. Searle acquired the work in 1987. Claimants filed suit for its return in 1996. A number of newspaper and television reports have wrung from the case all the easy emotion they could; everyone doubtless will be back for more when the trial begins on Sept. 9.
As for other art museums in the United States, it’s as Wood said: “We have a beginning. Now we’ll see what we’ll learn from (AADM) members. Will there be more claims? More cases? There will be some. But the idea we’ve tried to counter is that American museums are packed with things (awaiting claimants). No American museum knowingly accepted stolen art, and if we find it, we also will act quickly and responsibly to determine the legitimate owners.”
