[MSN] Heirs pursue families' stolen treasures. People whose families had their art collections seized by the Nazis turn to the Internet and the courts.

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Sunday, June 18, 2006 

Heirs pursue families' stolen treasures
People whose families had their art collections seized by the Nazis turn to
the Internet and the courts. 

By TARA BURGHART 
The Associated Press 

One area where provenance standards have certainly changed over the past
decade concerns art stolen by Nazis, often from Jewish families, in the
years leading up to and during World War II.

Several Internet portals now exist that provide searchable registries of
objects in museum collections that changed hands in Europe during the Nazi
era. Many museums link to these registries on their Web sites or list on
their own sites artworks with gaps in ownership.

Last year, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts returned to Poland a
16th-century Flemish painting seized by Germans during the war.

A museum official, doing provenance research on works in the collection that
may have been in Europe between 1933 and 1945, found Jan Mostaert's
"Portrait of a Courtier" on a catalog of wartime losses listed on the Polish
Embassy's Web site.

But not all cases related to wartime looting are handled as smoothly.

Maria Altmann of Los Angeles fought a seven-year legal battle to recover
five paintings by Gustav Klimt stolen from her family by Nazis in 1938 that
eventually ended up in an Austrian government gallery. They including an oil
and gold-encrusted portrait of her aunt Adele Bloch-Bauer.

The works were returned to Altmann, 90, earlier this year, and Austrian
officials said they are developing a Web site to help owners track down
works they contend were confiscated by the Nazi regime.

Meanwhile, Florida resident Peter Sachs is trying to recover from a German
history museum thousands of posters taken from his father by the Gestapo in
1938. Museum officials say Hans Sachs was compensated for his loss more than
40 years ago; his son said he does not think the Germans have any ownership
claim "considering the circumstances under which they were stolen."

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts has about 40 artworks listed on
Holocaust-era art portals, said chief curator Joseph Dye. That doesn't mean
all are suspect, just that there are records missing or gaps in ownership.

Dye said his museum "steers clear" of any objects without airtight
provenance records.

"That's always been the policy here, but it's probably more acutely felt
because of the Getty (Museum in Los Angeles) and the Met (Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York) and so forth," he said. "In our case, there are
so many works of art with good provenance, there's no reason to take a risk
like that."

Dye said that while it was somewhat hard to say goodbye to Mostaert's
painting, which had been in its collection since 1952, museum staff are
happy it is now with the rightful heirs, at the Princes Czartoryski Museum
in Krakow.

"We're all temporary owners of these objects - museums, art collectors," he
said. "The question of ownership is an important one, but ultimately we're
saving these works of art for the future. They'll last until infinity,
hopefully. It's part of our job as museum curators to be temporary
custodians."

http://www.ocregister.com/