[MSN] Restitution roulette. It's been a decade since the art world was thrown into a tizzy about Nazi-looted art. It began when an exhibition of artworks by Egon Schiele was just about to close at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

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Restitution roulette
MARILYN HENRY , THE JERUSALEM POST 	Jan. 5, 2008

It's been a decade since the art world was thrown into a tizzy about
Nazi-looted art. It began when an exhibition of artworks by Egon Schiele was
just about to close at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

Two families claimed that two artworks, on loan from the Leopold Foundation
in Vienna, had once belonged to Austrian Nazi victims.

MoMA told the families that it was obliged to return the paintings to the
Leopold Foundation. Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau stepped
in, turning two families' claims into an international incident when he
issued a subpoena on January 7, 1998, to detain the paintings until
ownership could be resolved.

It was a dramatic, if largely unpopular, move. The Wall Street Journal, for
instance, said the DA had taken "momentary leave of his senses." But he got
everyone's attention. International conferences were organized, while some
nations - notably Austria - began to review the Nazi-era history of
paintings in their museums.

In New York, the museums seemed less concerned about the origins of artworks
than whether Manhattan would lose its status as an international cultural
venue. Morgenthau's actions, they feared, would cause museums abroad to stop
lending art to New York exhibitions. There is no evidence, however, that
foreign lending has diminished to any appreciable extent in the last 10
years.

If museums' fears did not materialize, neither did most Nazi victims' dreams
about recovering family paintings.

EVENTS IN the last decade seem to show how far we have not come despite the
frenzied focus on Nazi-looted art. Take the Schiele case: Although one of
the two paintings claimed during the MoMA exhibition has been returned to
the Leopold Foundation, the second - called "Portrait of Wally" - is at the
center of a federal lawsuit in US District Court in Manhattan, dragging on
some 10 years after the art was due to leave the city.

Although there have been some settlements and blockbuster returns, for the
most part, the recovery of Nazi-looted art proceeds at a snail's pace, and
the burdens generally remain on Nazi victims and their heirs.

In 1998, 44 nations made a moral commitment to resolve matters of
Nazi-looted art. However, no standard procedures or mechanisms have been
established to locate and return art that was looted or displaced during the
Nazi era. Claimants get aid and sympathy, in part, based on an unfortunate
"restitution roulette," in which the chances of recovering artworks depend
on the arbitrary location of the objects so many decades after the war. A
claimant, for instance, has far better prospects if the object is in a
British institution than one in Spain. Germany, with great fanfare, five
years ago created a blue-ribbon "ethics commission" to make recommendations
on art claims. Chaired by Jutta Limbach, the former head of the Federal
Constitutional Court, its members included Richard von Weizsäcker, the
former German president, and Rita Süssmuth, the former head of the
Bundestag. They lent their prestige to a structurally flawed plan. The
Limbach commission can hear claims only if both sides agree; if a German
museum declines to participate, the claim dies for lack of a forum to
resolve it. The commission's first case exposed its doom. The panel was
expected to hear the claim of the Israeli heirs of a Breslau attorney and
art collector, Ismar Littmann, who were seeking an Emil Nolde painting at
the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg. No such luck. The Duisberg museum
refused to participate, stranding the claim in perpetual limbo.

Sweden, which in 2000 was host to the third international conference on
Holocaust-era issues, has a languishing claim for a painting, also by Nolde,
in the Moderna Museet. Although the museum must defer to the government for
decisions about de-accessioning, the government dumped the claim in the
Moderna's lap. The heirs located the Nolde in 2003; one has to wonder how
seriously the museum or Sweden takes the restitution commitment if a claim
requires so many years of review.

IF IT TAKES a legal maneuver to shake up the art world, the latest is likely
to be a ruling last month by US District Judge Mary Lisi in Providence,
Rhode Island. She ruled that a German baroness living in the US should turn
over a small painting by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, called "Girl from the
Sabiner Mountains," to the estate of Max Stern. A German Jewish art dealer,
Stern fled the Nazis, resettled in Montreal and bequeathed his assets to
Concordia and McGill universities in Canada and the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem.

Because the Nazis compelled Stern to liquidate the artworks in his
Dusseldorf gallery in 1937, the sale was involuntary, Lisi ruled.

Stern's surrender of the painting "for auction was ordered by the Nazi
authorities and therefore the equivalent of an official seizure or a theft,"
she wrote.

Lisi's ruling effectively expands the definition of "looted art," which
often was understood as referring to objects specifically taken by an agent
of the Nazi regime.

Although the ruling concerned one painting, it should apply to more than 200
additional Stern paintings sold under the same conditions, said Willi Korte,
an investigator in Silver Spring, Maryland, who assisted the Stern estate.
Further, it is expected to be cited in other claims where Nazi victims lost
artworks through extortion or duress, if not outright confiscation.

Of the recent cases of Holocaust litigation, the federal court in Providence
may be the first to acknowledge the persecution the Jews endured before
World War II was declared. "Judge Lisi's decision recognizes how the
majority of German and Austrian Jews lost their artworks during the early
years of the Nazi regime," Korte said. "These were not taken at gunpoint,
but lost through forced sales."

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