[MSN] Handbook helps Jewish families claim stolen art

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Handbook helps Jewish families claim stolen art

AFP, BERLIN
Monday, Apr 23, 2007, Page 6

In the wake of sensational sales of art that was seized by the Nazis,
German authors have published the first handbook to help Jewish families
win back masterpieces that are still in the wrong hands.
The 528-page tome Nazi Looted Art -- Art Restitution Worldwide is sold as
a do-it-yourself law manual for heirs of Holocaust victims hoping to
confront museums and collectors in different corners of the world in a bid
to recover lost canvasses.

Co-author Gunnar Schnabel makes an educated guess that "there are still
thousands of masterpieces and tens of thousands of lesser paintings that
should be returned to the rightful heirs.

"For example, some 30,000 art works were taken out of France, but 16,000
never resurfaced. It is the museums' policy to keep all of this top
secret. There are works in basements and vaults," Schnabel, a lawyer who
handles restitution claims, said.

Even before it hit the shelves last month, the book he wrote with
historian Monika Tatzkow was adding to pressure on the German government
to return a painting from the Biedermeier era featured on its cover.

The work, Fiat Justitia by Carl Spitzweg, formed part of the German
government's art collection for decades after World War II.

But it originally belonged to Jewish trader Leo Bendel, who died in the
Buchenwald concentration camp in 1940.

In February, as articles about the book appeared in most Austrian and
German newspapers, the German finance ministry announced it would return
the painting to the Bendel heirs.

Schnabel and Tatzkow said they hope to force museums to investigate the
provenance of their works and come clean on art they obtained thanks to
the Nazis' systematic seizure of Jewish collections that peaked in the
early 1940s.

German museums panicked last year when Berlin's Bruecke Museum had to part
with Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Berlin Street Scene, a prized Expressionist
painting looted from a Jewish shoemaker.

When the claimant let Christie's auction the work and it was bought by US
cosmetics magnate Ronald Lauder for US$38 million, curators began bracing
for a flood of claims from heirs hoping for a windfall from a buoyant art
market.

Lauder is famous for collecting restituted art and an obvious target for
criticism that a moral issue is being commercialized.

His first piece was a Van Gogh drawing discovered by Tatzkow which he
bought for 7 million euros (US$9.5 million), but in 2005 he paid a record
US$135 million for Adele Block Bauer I, an iconic portrait by Secessionist
-- the Austrian name for Art Nouveau -- artist Gustav Klimt, after it was
restituted to the sitter's niece.

"It's only about money and speculation," Martin Roth, the director of
Dresden's State Art Collection, complained recently.

Museums such as the Bruecke say they cannot afford to follow the example
set by Vienna's Leopold Museum, which invited scrutiny of the origins of
its unrivalled Egon Schiele collection.

It has also spent millions contesting a claim for the Austrian artist's
Portrait of Wally.

But ahead of an international conference on looted art taking place in
Potsdam near Berlin next week, historian Julius Schoeps said: "I think the
museums also lack the will."

He advised museums to loan out works to raise funds to pay out claimants
as a way of keeping their collections intact.

Schnabel thinks there "is not enough money to buy back all the paintings
the Nazis stole," but said in his experience museums are not prepared to
pay even modest reparations.

"Initially, with the Kirchner painting, the granddaughter was happy to
accept a sum below the market price but the museum refused," he said.

Tatzkow has accused museums of playing for time in the knowledge that the
generation of Jews whose parents perished in the Holocaust will not be
around forever.

"They are trying to sit the problem out, to wait for time to pass," she said.

"The story of a missing artwork will eventually get lost in a family. The
children will know something but once they are dead, restitution becomes
more difficult," she said.

Published on Taipei Times
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2007/04/23/2003357875