[MSN] Museums disagree with Nazi-era art survey

[Museum Security Network Mailinglist]

Posted on Tue, Jul. 25, 2006

Museums disagree with Nazi-era art survey

VERENA DOBNIK
Associated Press
NEW YORK - Despite a survey showing that many U.S. museums have not yet
researched claims of stolen Nazi-era art, two museum organizations say that
most looted art has been identified.

"We don't think there are a lot more," Mimi Gaudieri, executive director of
the American Association of Museum Directors, said Tuesday. "Most of the
museums have been working diligently on researching these works with a gap
in provenance and, in most cases, have been able to fill the gaps."

The works include a painting of Mary and Jesus by Lucas Cranach the Elder
from the North Carolina Museum of Art, a Matisse painting from the Seattle
Art Museum and a 17th-century Dutch painting from the Denver Art Museum.

The Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany reported Tuesday
that 118 out of 332 museums, or 35 percent, have not reported on their
progress to determine whether their collections contain works that might
have been stolen during the Holocaust. Among museums that did meet a July 10
deadline, 33 percent provided incomplete information, the organization said.

Gaudieri, whose association represents 170 museum directors, said that some
of the museums that did not respond do not own collections dating back to
World War II or before, and others are too small to devote a significant
part of their budget to researching Nazi-era art.

The New York-based Claims Conference was established after World War II to
help Holocaust survivors and their relatives reclaim property. In 1998, the
Claims Conference asked U.S. museums to research "covered objects," defined
as artwork created before 1946 that changed ownership after the Nazis came
to power, possibly in Europe. The museum directors' group issued guidelines
in 1998, urging museums to dedicate resources and personnel to find such
art.

The Claims Conference, with the U.S. government and others, provided initial
funding for the creation of the American Association of Museums' Nazi-Era
Provenance Internet Portal, a search engine covering tens of thousands of
museum objects that might have been looted.

The Internet Portal also strongly disagrees with the Claims Conference
survey, saying that the survey was too broad and some museums have no works
that could have been stolen by Nazis because their collections contain art
created after 1946.

Of the museums surveyed, 20 reported that they faced a claim against them,
from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Art Institute of Chicago to
Washington's National Gallery of Art.

The survey, conducted in cooperation with the World Jewish Restitution
Organization, found that only a third of the museums had a separate budget
for researching provenance (the history of an artwork's ownership), only a
tenth employed a full-time researcher and at least a third said they did not
conduct such research.

Besides art in museum collections, an unknown number of Nazi-looted works
may still be privately owned, said Gaudieri and Gideon Taylor, executive
vice president of the Claims Conference. They both said that other works are
in the hands of foreign museums and owners.

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Associated Press writer Ula Ilnytzky contributed to this report.

ON THE NET

American Association of Museum Directors: http://www.aamd.org

Jewish Material Claims Against Germany: http://www.claimscon.org

Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal: http://www.nepip.org