[CPProt.net] Putin Says Trophy-Art Return Is Negotiable - The St. Petersburg Times. General news from St.Petersburg and Russia]

[museum-security (FTP)]

Putin Says Trophy-Art Return Is Negotiable

By Robin Munro
STAFF WRITER

President Vladimir Putin on Friday showed some readiness to negotiate
Germany's pursuit of the return of cultural objects removed by the Soviets
at the end of World War II.

Speaking after a meeting with German president Horst Koehler in St.
Petersburg to mark the end of a two-year German-Russian cultural exchange,
Putin described the so-called tropy art as a sensitive issue.

"We would like to resolve it in a way that does not harm relations, but
makes them better," he said, adding that Hitler's armies had destroyed or
stolen many works of art in Russia.

Putin said that an exhibition in Russia of art that has been returned to
Germany, including Raphael's Sistine Madonna from Dresden's State Art
Collection, as has been proposed by Lidia Ievleva, director of the
Tretyakov Gallery, could be held.

Such an exhibition would create an atmosphere that could allow further
progress on the matter of trophy art. All events related to the 60th
anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany should be symbols of
European-wide reconciliation, Putin said.

The Dresden collections are well known to Russians. They were removed
after the war, restored and exhibited before being returned to Dresden,
then part of East Germany, in 1955.

The German Press Agency reported German Culture Minister Christina Weiss
as saying after Friday's talks that the silver collection of the Anhalt
family will be returned soon. The move would be made as a goodwill
gesture, she said.

"There are good grounds to believe that this will take place before or
during the celebrations of the 60th anniversary of the end of the war,"
she was quoted saying. Moscow is to celebrate the anniversary on Victory
Day on the May 9 in the presence of international leaders.

No comment was available from the Russian Federal Culture and
Cinematography Agency.

Art experts consider the 18-piece collection, mainly of mugs and dinner
plates, assembled since the 17th century as very valuable. Stored in the
Dessau castle, it was removed to Russia after the war and is kept in St.
Petersburg's State Hermitage Museum, the report said.

The collection had, unlike most of the art claimed by Germany, been
private property before its removal and therefore is not subject to State
Duma approval for its return. This should ease the handing over, the
report said.

Putin and Koehler, who hailed the cultural exchange as a success, attended
the inaugaration of a restored German-built Walcker organ at St.
Petersburg's Shostakovich Philharmonic Hall. The restoration was Germany's
gift to St. Petersburg for the 300th anniversary of the founding of the
city in 2003.

"Relations with Russia have never been as good as they are today," Koehler
said.

The German president said he had met Putin, who speaks fluent German, many
times in Moscow. It was his first visit to St. Petersburg and he was
impressed.

Koehler, the director general of the International Monetary Fund from 2000
to 2004, said Russia had been making significant economic progress.


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