[MSN] Museums' Research on Looting Seen to Lag

[Museum Security Network Mailinglist]

July 25, 2006
Museums' Research on Looting Seen to Lag 
By RANDY KENNEDY
A major survey of American museums has found that many have not yet done
significant research to determine whether works in their collections were
looted during the Nazi era, despite a collective agreement seven years ago
to make such work a priority.

The survey of 332 museums, to be released today, was conducted by the
Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, known as the Claims
Conference, a New York-based organization created after World War II to help
restore Jewish property to Holocaust survivors and their families.

The group decided to become more involved in the question of looted art last
year after concern arose that the American Association of Museums, which
adopted guidelines in 1999 urging its members to examine their collections
and later created a special Internet site for such information, was not
doing enough to monitor museums' progress. 

According to Gideon Taylor, the executive vice president of the Claims
Conference, the museum association said that it was not its job, as a
voluntary organization, to examine the extent to which its members were
following the guidelines. 

"It was an unknown," Mr. Taylor said. "There was no way to evaluate or judge
what individual museums or museums collectively were doing to implement
those principles to which they had all agreed."

But the museum association, while conceding that it does not collect the
kind of detailed information that the Claims Conference was seeking,
disagrees strongly with the conclusions of the survey. It contends that the
conference cast too wide a net, seeking information from many museums whose
collections probably have no works that could have been looted.

"I think the thrust of their survey was in many ways asking the wrong
questions," said Edward H. Able Jr., president and chief executive of the
museum association. He argued that most American museums have made such
research a priority and that the 18,000 artworks now listed at the museums'
special Web site, the Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal (www.nepip.org),
represent "a major, major portion of the material that meets the criteria"
of work that could possibly have been confiscated by the Nazis.

The new survey found that while some museums with major holdings of European
art - including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston - have made substantial headway in provenance research, others have
done little beyond identifying which of their works fall within the
parameters that might mean they were looted. 

The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art
in Hartford, for example, reported that they were spending no money on
provenance research and had no staff members devoted to it. Houston said
that its collection included 61 paintings and sculptures that fell within
the parameters, and the Wadsworth said it had 70 paintings that did.

Of the 332 museums that were sent questionnaires by the conference in
February, 214 responded before a deadline of July 10. Of those,
approximately 114, or slightly more than half, said that they were actively
conducting provenance work. The remaining 100 museums either said they were
not doing such work or did not provide enough information for the Claims
Conference to be able to make a determination.

The association's guidelines specify that museums should focus on objects
created before 1946 and acquired by museums after 1932, and that underwent a
change of ownership between those two dates and might reasonably be thought
to have been in Europe during that period.

While the vast majority of those objects are not assumed to have been taken
illegally, the only way to know is to pin down their provenance and publish
as much information as possible for potential claimants, a job that can be
very difficult because ownership histories are often murky and documentation
nonexistent. 

Exact numbers are impossible to determine, but some experts believe that the
Nazis seized 600,000 important works from 1933 to 1945. As many as 100,000
pieces are still thought to be missing, and some have undoubtedly been
destroyed. 

Estimates of the number of seized works that ended up in the United States
vary widely. In the last eight years, as more provenance information has
been made available, only 22 works have been returned to owners or their
heirs, and another 6 cases are pending, museum officials said. In addition
to museums, some private galleries and collections could also contain looted
art, but information about those works is even more difficult to come by.

American museums began to focus seriously on the issue only in the 1990's,
and the effort to make information available on the Web site was delayed for
more than a year by lack of financing. Eventually, several groups, including
the Claims Conference, provided funds.

Among the larger museums that did not respond to the conference's survey in
time were the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the J. Paul Getty
Museum in Los Angeles. 

The Guggenheim, which has taken part in the museum association's Internet
portal since the site's founding, said it had completed the survey but that
it was delayed in the museum's legal office. The museum sent its responses
to the conference on Friday. 

The Getty has also long conducted provenance research, and its grant program
provided money for the association's Web portal. But in a statement, the
museum said it was simply unable to complete the survey before its deadline.
"I do not want to excuse our tardiness, but the many issues we have been
dealing with distracted us," said Ron Hartwig, the museum's spokesman. "We
take this issue very seriously and truly regret not being included in the
survey results."

The museums that responded to the survey collectively listed 140,000 works
that fall within the period in question, considerably more than the 18,000
works that are now listed on the museums' Internet portal. Of the museums
that clearly responded that they were conducting provenance research, the
survey found, 52 percent had completed work on less than half of the
relevant items in their collections, and most research was being conducted
on paintings and sculpture, not on drawings and prints. The survey also
found that only 10 percent of the museums conducting provenance research
employ or have ever employed a full-time researcher.

"There has been progress, but there is still a lot to do," Mr. Taylor said.
He added that the conference, which conducted the survey in association with
the World Jewish Restitution Organization, was "disappointed that some
museums declined to report at all on what steps they have or have not
taken."

"We believe that this is an issue that is not only important; it is also one
that must be resolved quickly if it is to be effective," he said. "The
generation who survived the Holocaust is slipping away. This may be a last
chance for them to be reunited with a tangible connection to a family that
was lost."

http://www.nytimes.com/