According to New York law firm Kaye Spiegler, which facilitated the painting’s return, museum officials raised flags internally over the painting’s ownership record after uncovering a label with Goudstikker’s surname on the painting’s back frame. Provenance researchers concluded that the work was one of more than a thousand paintings illicitly taken from Goudstikker’s art holdings, according to a statement.

The painting’s donors, whom the firm declined to name citing confidentiality, were unaware of the work’s suspect ownership record. After conducting internal research, officials of the French museum, which is host to a collection ranging from archaeological artifacts to 20th-century paintings, contacted Goudstikker’s sole heir, Marei von Saher, to notify her that the painting had resurfaced from a private collection.

The date of the museum’s message to Von Saher has not been disclosed. A representative for Kaye Spiegler declined to provide details about the insurance value for the Van Haarlem work.

The latest case is one of only a few returns that Goudstikker’s surviving relatives have secured. Last year, officials of the German city of Trier restituted a 17th-century Dutch painting by Adam van Breen titled Ice Skating to Von Saher, following a legal claim. The painting had circulated at auction in the late 1980s. In 2019, Von Saher attempted to appeal to the United States Supreme Court a lower court ruling that allowed the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California, to keep two paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder once owned by Goudstikker that were illegally taken by Nazis. The appeal came after a long legal battle with the museum for their return, but the Supreme Court declined to take up the case.

The Goudstikker Art Research Project, which oversees restitution claims related to Goudstikker’s property, is currently seeking the return of 800 remaining works illegally exported from Amsterdam to Germany by Nazi officials.

Around 1,100 works looted from Goudstikker’s holdings were taken in Amsterdam by Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, a high-ranking Nazi official. A portion of the stolen works were eventually returned to the Dutch government, which facilitated the restitution of 200 paintings to the family in 2006, eight years after the family’s initial claim seeking their legal return was denied.

New York authorities will facilitate the respective return of the objects to government officials of their origin countries, the museum said in a statement. The works include a bronze statue of an Etruscan warrior dated from the 5th century BCE, a terra-cotta Italian wine flask from 330 BCE and an ancient Egyptian cosmetics vessel.

VMFA director and CEO Alex Nyerges emphasized that the museum’s leadership “fully supports” the repatriation decision. In a statement, a museum representative said that no evidence linked current employees to unlawful activity related to the initial acquisition of the 44 returned objects, which it stated had entered the museum’s collection between the 1970s and 1990s.

In May, officials of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and the Department of Homeland Security began an inquiry into 28 objects in the Virginia museum’s 50,000-item collection suspected of having been looted or improperly removed from their countries of origin, requesting documentation related to their ownership records.

In a statement, the museum said that following the May inquiry it provided federal and state officials “extensive” records related to the objects’ provenance histories and acquisitions. In June, officials expanded the initial inquiry to include a total of 61 works. The investigation extended into mid-October, when authorities presented “irrefutable” evidence that more than half the objects had been looted, stolen, or displaced, the museum stated.

The move follows a widening push for Western museums to fill provenance gaps for objects sold and donated in previous decades, a period when standards around the sales of antiquities housed in private collections were far laxer.

The Virginia museum has repatriated only six works of art since 2004, including three with links to the Indigenous North American Tlingit tribe that were returned under the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

According to The Chronicle, less than a week after its investigation was published, the museum removed an ancient plate and a plate fragment from the online catalog and marked them for repatriation. Three pieces of pottery it once owned were also reassigned as works on loan from the Italian government. 

No announcement was publicly made as to why the works were relabeled. Still, two academics who had been tracking the museum’s collection, discovered the changes and on Monday, October 30 posted the news to the blog Looting Matters.

“All five pieces arrived at the Carlos by way of people with documented ties to the illicit trade,” The Chronicle reported, and despite the absence of a public announcement, gallery labels have been placed next to the three items that remain in the museum’s collection identifying the change in ownership mean their illicit histories.

“Recent and ongoing research in collaboration with foreign government officials has confirmed that several objects in the museum’s Greek and Roman collection were looted and illegally exported,” the label says, according to The Chronicle. “Some of these objects have been repatriated to their countries of origin, while others remain with the museum as loans from those countries.”

While the newly placed signs say a full list of repatriated works would be available on the museum’s website, as of the publication of this article the list of repatriated works did not include the five Italian works.

Laura Diamond, an Emory spokeswoman, declined to answer The Chronicle’s questions about when or why the museum chose to relinquish ownership of the five works, but said the process would be made clear in forthcoming press releases. The museum did not immediately return a request for comment.

For years, museums across the United States have been forced to reckon with a long history of purchasing and displaying looted antiquities. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has been the target of calls from both activists and government officials to return allegedly looted artefacts and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has seized dozens of artefacts worth millions of dollars from the museum.

The calls for repatriation extend far past the United States. In France, a court case involving an antiquities dealer who purchased of a rare mask from Gabon from an elderly couple for about $157 then sold the artefact for $4.4 million at auction has been met with demands from activists that the work be repatriated.

The Baden, Switzerland-based institution said it has since reached out to the heirs of Jacob Goldschmidt, a Jewish art dealer who jointly acquired the painting in 1929, and reached a restitution settlement agreement with the assistance of Christie’s. The terms of the agreement were not announced, but the painting carries an estimate of between $35 and $55 million.

Dr. Sidney Brown, father of the Langmatt’s founder, John Alfred Brown, purchased Fruits et pot de gingembre in 1933 from its then-owners, Goldschmidt’s Galerie M. Goldschmidt & Co in Frankfurt and the Lucerne-based L’Art Moderne, which was an affiliate of the Paris-based Bernheim-Jeune gallery.

However, according to the museum, Goldschmidt’s life and livelihood were under constant threat after Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party took power in 1933. In April of that year, the Nazi party instituted a boycott of Jewish-owned businesses. In 1934, after the Nazi Party banned Jews from joining the German Labor Front, effectively making it impossible for Jews to find work in the private sector, Goldschmidt was no longer able to work as an art dealer. Like many Jews who were encouraged to leave Germany in the 1930s, Goldschmidt was forced to pay an exorbitant emigration tax, known as the Reich Flight Tax, when he fled Germany in 1936. According to the Centre for Economic Policy Research, the effective emigration tax rate that year was 85.8 percent.

Until recently, there was no suspicion that Fruits et pot de gingembre was purchased under duress, and there was no mention of the possibility of a restitution claim when Christie’s announced the sale in late September. The document calling the masterwork’s provenance into question surfaced after Christie’s announced the sale, according to the museum.

“It wasn’t until very late in the process, as it often is, that a piece of evidence came up that made us think best course of action was to approach the heirs,” a spokesperson for the Langmatt told ARTNews.

“While the historical documents are unclear, the context was obvious,” Langmatt director Markus Stegmann told ARTNews. “Goldschmidt wasn’t able to operate as he normally would have in years prior. While there may not for certain be a case for restitution, the Foundation Langmatt and the museum thought the most respectful way to move forward with the sale was   to locate the heirs and, with Christie’s, reach an amicable solution.”

The museum said the settlement was reached “in the last few days” and the sale will move ahead as planned. In a statement, Christie’s said they were “committed to the vital research which informs our cataloguing process, with the goal of ensuring the fullest possible access to provenance information for the property in our auctions,” and thanked Foundation Langmatt and the heirs of Jacob Goldschmidt “for their committed collaboration, engagement and consideration in this matter.”

Fruits et pot de gingembre is one of three Cézanne paintings the museum is selling at Christie’s so that the Foundation Langmatt can raise $45 million to bolster its endowment fund. According to Christie’s, the works will be sold in order, Fruits et pot de gingembre (estimate: $35 million-$55 million), Quatre pommes et un couteau (1885, estimate: $7 million – $10 million), and La mer à l’Estaque (1878-1879, $3 million–$5 million) until the total bid reaches or surpasses $45 million, at which point any works that remain will be withdrawn and returned to the museum.

Apart from raising the ire of the International Council of Museums (ICOM)—the president of the Swiss branch of the coalition called the prospective sale “outrageous” and a flagrant disregarding of ICOM’s deaccessioning rules—the sale has drawn fire for the Museum Langmatt’s tenuous connection to the Nazi Party via the electrical engineering company Brown, Boveri & Cie (BBC). Founded in 1990, the Museum Langmatt consists the Brown family home, Villa Langmatt, and the art collection Sidney W. and Jenny Brown. Their son, John Alfred Brown, bequeathed the home and art collection to the city of Baden in his will. Sidney, whose brother Charles Eugene Lancelot Brown founded BBC in 1891, worked as a technical for the company in Baden, and retired in 1935. During World War II, a Mannheim, Germany-based BBC subsidiary engaged in forced labor, including slave labor from concentration camps, to expand its operations.

While Sidney W. Brown did own shares in BBC that passed on to his children after his death in 1941, a spokesperson for the museum told ARTNews that the Brown family’s investment in the company during the war was minimal. At the time, the family’s shares were worth about CHF 75,000, while BBC had an overall nominal share value of CHF 30 million, or about one quarter of one percent of the company.

According to the museum’s website “in 1988, BBC merged with the Swedish company ASEA to form ABB Ltd. In 2000, ABB, as well as many other Swiss industrial companies, settled all claims for use of forced labor during World War II.”

“We’re in a situation where we’ve gone from avoidance, avoidance, avoidance, justifications for holding on to Nazi-looted art, the inalienability of works in collections, to unanimous votes,” Elizabeth Campbell, director of the Center for Art Collection Ethics at the University of Denver, told ARTnews. “It’s a sign of tremendous progress.”

The new law is far-reaching. It will allow stolen art, books, and other cultural property in France’s inalienable public domain—even work looted beyond its borders—to be returned to its rightful owners. Like some other European countries, France’s Heritage Code holds that collections in its public museums are shared public property, and therefore “inalienable,” meaning they cannot be sold or removed. The new law provides an exception. In the past, restitution claims had to be addressed by the arduous passage of case-by-case deaccessioning laws, as they were with the February 2022 law that authorized the return of 15 artworks from national museums, including the Musée d’Orsay’s only painting by Gustav Klimt, and one by Maurice Utrillo. That law came years after some claimants received recognition as the works’ rightful owners.

And, yet, the new law was overdue. France and its public museums have long been criticized for decades of inaction at best, and, at worst, and in rare cases, flatly refusing to return artworks to families of Holocaust victims and Jewish refugees who had the misfortune to make claims when these issues were more commonly swept under the rug.

“Basically, what’s happening in France now is that restitution is being made possible at last,” Wesley A. Fisher, research director for the Claims Conference–World Jewish Restitution Organization’s Looted Art and Cultural Property Initiative, told ARTnews. While the legislation comes nearly 80 years after the war’s end, with few directly connected still alive, “most countries have not done what France is doing at the moment,” he said.

Campbell analyzes France’s handling of restitution, along with that of two other formerly occupied European countries, the Netherlands and Belgium, in Museum Worthy: Nazi Art Plunder in Postwar Western Europe. In the book, due out later this year, Campbell describes how all three countries for decades justified holding on to artwork lost by and plundered from Jewish families, when nobody came forward relatively quickly to claim it. The book follows her 2011 work, Defending National Treasures, which questioned the prevailing narrative in France that top curators at French museums, notably the Louvre, had worked heroically to safeguard artwork sequestered from persecuted Jews. Instead, she demonstrated how, despite earlier, successful efforts by some to protect art from Jewish collections, in 1941, museums began opportunistically taking official steps to acquire art from Jewish collections sequestered by the French state under prevailing anti-Semitic law, to fill gaps in their holdings. After the Liberation they returned those works to surviving families, though not always easily.

In an interview with ARTnews, Campbell painted an inconsonant picture of how Western countries have handled WWII restitution, where seemingly proactive efforts are almost as easily countered by examples to the contrary. France is one of only five countries that has a dedicated commission for restitution and research of Nazi-looted art. Others include Austria, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Germany, whose German Lost Art Foundation (DZK) far outdoes its neighbors in terms of funding and manpower. This year, the DZK earmarked €5.3 million for artwork plundered in the context of WWII, versus the €220,000 allotted to France’s commission. However, France lagged behind Austria and the UK—in 1998 and 2009, respectively—in passing deaccession laws that allow the removal of artwork lost or looted during the Nazi period from a collection owned by the federal government without extraordinary legal measures.

“All countries have more work to be done,” Campbell said, pointing to the 44 countries, including France, that signed the groundbreaking—but nonbinding—Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art in 1998. That agreement called for proactive steps toward identifying and restituting Nazi-looted art, but little action followed those promises at the time. The United States’ mostly privately run museum system leaves it up to individual institutions to research provenance, and no strict enforcement mechanism for restitution exists, though in 2016, the country unanimously passed a law preventing US museums from continuing to use expired statutes of limitations as grounds for rejecting restitution claims.

In France, at least 100,000 artworks were plundered from the country’s thriving art scene and Jewish collections. That low estimate includes works sold under duress in France by families hoping to escape, and by government-appointed administrators who oversaw seized Jewish property, auctioning it to willing buyers, including knowing French museums. After the war, about 60,000 artworks were returned from Germany to France by the Allies. Among them, some 45,000 were restituted following requests, but roughly 13,000 unclaimed objects considered less valuable were sold by the state. The remaining approximately 2,200 unclaimed artworks were labeled Musées Nationaux Récupération (MNR) and selected to be housed in public French museums. Overlapping with what academics often called the “silent years” or the “trente silencieuses,” referring to the roughly 30 years following the 1950s, only 4 MNR artworks were restituted between 1955 and 1993, because institutions did not seek out their owners, and restitution was not a top priority. That is, until 1995, when journalist Hector Feliciano published The Lost Museum [Le musée disparu], which blew wide open the story of Nazi looting and MNRs (National Museums Recovery registry).

Many interviewed felt that the “silent years” resulted from a deep denial in France about the culpability of the so-called Vichy government, led by Philippe Pétain, as well as a desire to focus on rebuilding and moving on, shared by many Jewish survivors. The regime, in power from July 1940 to August 1944, deported at least 75,670 Jews to death camps. The French silence was notably broken in 1995 by then president Jacques Chirac in a landmark speech, when he became the first French leader to admit the state had “seconded” the Nazi occupiers in their “criminal folly.” Yet even today, a French Resistance narrative persists, originating with General Charles de Gaulle, minimizing the parliamentary-elected government based in Vichy as a de facto fake French entity. The war years, in this line of thinking, were a mere “parenthesis” in French history.

Before the 1990s, “it’s true that France was a little behind [in terms of restitution] and had a hard time looking at that [wartime] period,” Fabienne Colboc, a member of the National Assembly and the new restitution law’s rapporteur, charged with studying and amending the measure, prior to presenting it to parliament, told ARTnews. “Even if it’s difficult … even if we’re ashamed, we need to recognize what the French state did during that period.”

Pierre Ouzoulias, a left-leaning senator whose grandparents and great-grandparents were communist French Resistance fighters, pushed for the new law to name explicitly the French government’s clear role in said Nazi plundering. That effort led to the only major point of debate in parliament, with far-right legislators unsuccessfully calling for references to the French government under Pétain to be labeled “illegitimate,” while earlier versions of the bill skirted the sensitive issue with a jumbled alternative moniker: “de facto authority claiming to be ‘government of the French state.’” Ultimately, the law places responsibility for the spoliation of Jews on “the French State between 10 July 1940 and 24 August 1944,” when the Vichy government was in power, in addition to “Nazi Germany [and] … the authorities of the territories that it occupied, controlled or influenced.” The law is thus the first to name the “French state” responsible for the government-sponsored spoliation of Jews. An earlier law acknowledges “racist and antisemitic crimes” by the “French State,” and another, following the Liberation, invalidates forced sales and spoliation under governments working with or under the “enemy,” including the “government of Vichy,” without mentioning anti-Semitic persecution.

“We can plainly see that France still has not taken time to mourn for what happened under the occupation, with Vichy,” said Ouzoulias, commenting on the debate, and noting that he hopes that, as word spreads about the new law, more will come forward with claims.

After the parliament’s vote, I walked across the Seine River to deliver the news to Corinne Hershkovitch, known as “Madame Restitution.” The trailblazing art and intellectual property lawyer is recognized for securing the return of artworks to heirs of Holocaust victims and refugees via court order, when their requests were refused. Her life’s work was launched by a 1995 meeting with the grandson of Jewish-Italian collector Federico Gentili di Giuseppe, whose collection was seized and auctioned in 1941 in Paris. After the grandson discovered The Lost Museum, he was reminded of how his mother, Adriana Gentili di Giuseppe, who fled France during the war, often told him about a visit to the Louvre in 1950. There, she saw her father’s paintings, and asked the museum for their return. They refused. She asked again and was refused in 1955 and 1961, because the institution believed the sale was valid.

“Those bastards at the Louvre don’t want to give me back my father’s paintings,” Adriana would tell her son, according to Hershkovitch. The works, made between the 16th and 18th centuries, included a Moretto da Brescia and a Bernardo Strozzi. They were labeled MNR, meaning they were not state property, and their owners were unknown. But the political climate was far different then. The restitution of such works today would likely be a no-brainer, particularly given that, following publication of The Lost Museum, and government-led efforts enforced in 2013, researchers have been painstakingly seeking the owners of the remaining 1,800 MNRs of unclear provenance. In 1999 a French appeals court voided the initial sale to the Louvre, ordered the paintings’ restitution to Giuseppe’s heirs, and forced the Louvre to reimburse the family’s legal fees.

On that fateful day last June, I was ushered into a room hung with stark expressive paintings by Algerian-French artist Adel Abdessemed, many depicting migrants and victims of war. Hershkovitch sat at the short end of a long table, and only a few minutes in, threw out any preconceived notions I may have had about her views on the new law. Years of battling the establishment, when it seemed as though no one—not even some leaders in the French Jewish community—felt she should pursue the issue, had forced Hershkovitch to consider the complexities of what comes next.

“Of course [the new law] leads in the right direction,” Hershkovitch told ARTnews, but “I’ve come to a point where the most important thing is not restitution. It’s what remains. The memorial aspect.” She said compensation and an agreement between parties was often preferred. “It’s only in conserving a trace of [history], that we can hope [the Holocaust] doesn’t happen again,” she said.

While Hershkovitch’s restitution cases, which pitted her against France’s most venerated art institutions, were “essential for breaking through the status-quo, and for recognizing its importance, restitution only really has value if done to those directly connected to the person who was spoliated. Now, we are getting further and further away,” she said. “This law is coming so late in terms of all that has happened these last 30 years.”

For years, it was “not in the interest of curators” to question provenance of potentially Nazi-looted works in their collections, Hershkovitch said, echoing similar views by Campbell. The new law is nevertheless part of a “revolution,” she said, in how museums consider provenance. “Questioning the presence of these artworks in museums, is also the questioning of museums themselves, and it opens the door to a new approach to what a museum can be,” she said.

The Nazi restitution law is only the first step. The French government has plans to pass two more “framework” restitution laws, meaning laws stipulating guidelines that allow the deaccessioning of an object from the public domain under certain conditions. The initiative also sends a much-awaited message that President Emmanuel Macron is addressing the growing scrutiny into museum acquisitions, which in today’s zeitgeist, have become fraught and highly symbolic testaments to the nation’s complicated past. The two other framework laws will address the repatriation of human remains—numbering in the tens of thousands in French institutions—and the repatriation of art taken from Africa and other regions during the colonial era. The latter, for which the government has yet to release a bill, is expected to face heated debate and delays.

In a country that has frequently struggled to reckon with its past, the Nazi restitution law still featured hand-wringing by right-wing lawmakers reticent to acknowledge the extent of French wrongdoing. France’s colonial history is an even more sensitive wound, covering centuries and seeping deep into all layers of society, with debates regularly stoked by conservative leaders known to insist on the “positive” aspects of France’s empire of some 60 million colonial subjects. A controversial 2005 law even required schools to teach about the “positive role” of French colonialism; it was repealed amid public outcry. Speaking to ARTnews, Patrick Lozès, president  of the Representative Council of Black Associations of France (CRAN), directly linked the “same movement from those who have said that colonialism supposedly had positive aspects,” with what he describes as a “fear” of accelerating restitution to former colonies.

Indeed, there is little guarantee that legislators will come together to pass a framework law for restituting art from former French colonies. Considering how long it took for the state to admit culpability for the Vichy regime, several parliament members said that, while they hope the remaining framework laws receive broad support, few expect it to acknowledge wrongdoing in the context of France’s once vast empire. Ouzoulias, the left-leaning senator, said that while it made sense to justify WWII restitution by linking it to the French state’s responsibility “for the colonial years, we won’t be able to manage it … we’ll have to find other criteria,” he said. “[Otherwise] the bill won’t pass.”

The absence of any similar recognition of wrongs done could lead to a perception of a double standard. Already, Lozès, who has long advocated for art restitution to Africa, argued that a recent government report by disgraced former Louvre director Jean-Luc Martinez, which proposed guidelines for the third framework law, was a clear “regression” from Macron’s 2017 promise to return “African heritage to Africa.” Lozès called it a “paternalistic” reversal of the much broader recommendations stipulated in a 2018 report. The new recommendations place greater limitations, like ensuring the claimant properly display and conserve the work. “It’s neocolonialism. It has no other name,” Lozès said. “It is a recuperation of the restitution issue by senior officials … and certain members of national museums.”

The lack of consensus around condemning French colonial actions is why Hershkovitch is concerned the Nazi restitution law will further complicate the passage of the third framework bill. In doing so, it could “divide communities,” she said, referring to minorities of immigrant and former French colony backgrounds, as well as Jews, who she worried might be singled out as benefiting from special treatment. Members of parliament interviewed for this story similarly noted the danger of that dynamic, but agreed the laws needed to be voted separately owing to their distinct categories, rather than lumping them into one, three-pronged measure, as Hershkovitch preferred.

“My fear is that there won’t be a law for cultural goods [referred to as African art],” due to controversy, “and that will be a catastrophe,” Hershkovitch said. “Everyone is so happy about this law for the 1933–1945 period … but what are we going to do now for the law on cultural goods? How will we ever be able to go as far?”

Institutional handling of Nazi-era restitution claims has also been subject to skepticism from an increasingly curious public, according to a 2018 report by David Zivie, who heads France’s Mission for the Search and Restitution of Cultural Property Looted between 1933 and 1945 (M2RS). But, Zivie told ARTnews, institutions are making significant, concrete changes, both in steps toward restitution and their thinking. Zivie led a surge of new restitutions, helping bring the total number of returned artworks from France to about 200 since 1950, following the initial 45,000 works returned in the five years following the Liberation.

“There are still some people who feel that when a painting is removed and restituted, it creates a little gap, too much of a gap in the museum,” Zivie said. “[But] that is no longer a very pervasive point of view. I think things are evolving positively, even if not fast enough. … Our role is to be favorable to restitutions, to push and encourage our colleagues in museums to do more research (into provenance) and explain that … any doubt should nevertheless err on the side of the families making claims.”

France began seriously addressing restitution around the late 1990s, similarly to other Western European countries. The Mattéoli Mission launched in 1997 to research the plundering of Jews in France, and to recommend modes of compensation, leading to the 1999 creation of the Commission for the Compensation of Victims of Spoliation (CIVS), which evaluates claims, and is attached to the prime minister’s office. In 2013 the government established a group of experts to search for heirs of the unclaimed MNR works, and in 2019, Zivie’s M2RS was formed within the Ministry of Culture.

The new environment in France has provided hope to Oliver Kaplan, who is currently searching for artworks, with the support of the M2RS and the CIVS, from the art collection of Jewish businessman Georges Levy. While Levy was interned in France’s Drancy camp, he wrote a letter to Kaplan’s grandfather, the former grand rabbi of France, instructing him to sell his art and give the proceeds to Jewish victims of war. But Levy was deported to Auschwitz, where he died in 1943, and the Nazis seized the collection. The new French law, according to Kaplan, is part of a broadening awareness on restitution that has helped his family reach agreements on returning some works, without needing to assemble all the hard evidence necessary to prove legal title. But, even so, Kaplan’s efforts highlight how difficult it is to recover such artworks: releasing too much information about the collection might scare private individuals from selling the works.

“We hope when another one of the works is discovered,” Kaplan told ARTnews, “it will be a chance to track down the rest of the collection. Maybe it was kept together, and never dispersed. We just don’t know.”

Meanwhile, museums have begun hiring a small number of researchers dedicated to provenance issues, as educational opportunities in the field emerge. The Louvre led the way, in January 2020, when it recruited art historian Emmanuelle Polack to coordinate the museum’s painstaking provenance research for acquisitions between 1933 and 1945, plus unclaimed MNRs. Thanks to that laborious ongoing detective work, Polack told ARTnews that progress has been made in identifying questionable dealers who may have worked with the Louvre, as well as spotting signs of known, plundered Jewish collections. In her published writings about the French art market during the Occupation, Polack describes the Louvre buying what she deemed spoliated artwork from the Armand Isaac Dorville collection, in an ongoing case. She was also a member of the German task force investigating some 1,500 works found in the Munich home of Cornelius Gurlitt, whose father was an art dealer for Hitler’s planned museum in Linz. Her appointment is an oft-cited symbol of evolution within French institutions aiming for greater transparency.

“In the last ten years or so, we’ve welcomed a small change in mentalities, and I see it in younger audiences,” Polack said. “Young people don’t understand the problem. … They want clean museums, transparent, perfectly clear museums, and, if possible, displays of a work’s provenance.” Polack, who lost family in the Holocaust and is determined to “do this work so my children will no longer need to,” has organized “study days” at the Louvre, in which wartime acquisitions are examined, helping the public “understand that for us, it’s not a problem to confront, without hesitation. We look at provenance,” she said. But in something of a contradiction, when asked what she meant by “the problem,” she indicated that younger generations didn’t understand, Polack stonewalled. “I have a position at the Louvre Museum,” she said. “I cannot revisit old stories. I wasn’t here. I have no judgment to make … what matters to me is to go towards the future …”

I’d been warned by the Louvre press department that Polack could not answer questions that might be seen to compromise her relationship with her employer, likely because of her role in helping the Dorville family’s claim. That view puts her in opposition to the Louvre and several other museums, which remain in a legal standoff with the Dorvilles. French museums, including the Louvre, returned 12 paintings to the Dorville heirs last year in exchange for the cost museums paid for the works. Their reasons for doing so were the “troubling” circumstances around the acquisitions, and that the museum knew about the collection’s Jewish origins, but the CIVS could not confirm it had been looted. The case will be heard in a Paris appeals court this fall and the family, co-defended by Hershkovitch, is asking for the restitution of 9 additional works, including a Eugène Delacroix painting in the Louvre, and an Édouard Vuillard work in the Musée d’Orsay, plus recognition that the initial sale involved despoiled works.

The Dorville conundrum illustrates a gray zone in the new law: it doesn’t spell out the definition of spoliation, which is left to the CIVS. “Even if a painting was paid for at a normal, market price, if the motive of the sale is to escape anti-Semitic persecution, we consider it an item which should be restituted, because it’s a forced sale,” Michel Jeannoutot, CIVS president, told ARTnews.

As it became evident that my talk with Polack would leave some questions unanswered, I ventured one last query about the Louvre’s refusal to return paintings to Gentili di Giuseppe’s daughter in the 1950s. “It was not a time I experienced at the Louvre,” she said, emphasizing her job is to focus on working with the museum now to research art plundered during the Nazi era.

How, then, does one talk about the significance of current changes at museums dealing with these issues, itself inextricably linked to understanding provenance, without discussing, and perhaps constructively criticizing prior management of restitution? While Polack may not be free to publicly address the Louvre’s less glorious chapters, here, again, examining past actions of a beloved public institution, itself a symbol of French culture, is curiously fraught.

I took my questions to the Services des musées de France, which has been examining claims since the 1950s, and was criticized for its past inaction on MNRs. “The manner in which restitution requests are handled has greatly evolved over the last decades, notably since the Gentili di Giuseppe affair … [which] enabled situations of forced sales or sales under coercion to be considered spoliations,” a representative of the ministry said in an email. French institutions don’t always have enough evidence, or “come to the same conclusions as legal heirs” about whether sales were forced, they said. But such legal wrangling remains rare, they added, noting that, of the 184 MNR artworks restituted since 1950, only 10 were returned under a judge’s order. Another 50 were restituted on the initiative of the ministry and museums.

Fair enough. Progress is being made even as the country’s restitution efforts remain a sensitive and complex topic. That point was not lost on Polack, who broke slightly with protocol during our talk, and leaned in with a smile. “I often laugh about finding myself here at the Louvre,” she said. “I’d say it’s the marriage—and you’ll understand—of the carpe and the lapin,” a French expression that describes a mismatch. “It’s a strong symbol.” 

A version of this article appears in the 2023 ARTnews Top 200 Collectors issue.

The privately owned tabot was returned at St Mary of Debre Tsion in Battersea. Formerly an Anglican church, it was acquired by the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church in 2010.

Only clergy members are allowed to see the tabots, according to Ethiopian Christian belief. As such, the tabot was wrapped in an ornate cloth and presented to a crowd of roughly 1,500 attendees. It is expected to return to Ethiopia.

Jacopo Gnisci, a University College of London lecturer, had spotted the tabot in an online sale. When he failed to convince the seller to return it to Ethiopia, he purchased the tabot with the goal of safely returning it. The restitution was organized by London’s Scheherazade Foundation.

The successful restitution of this tabot could lead to greater scrutiny directed toward the British Museum, which holds 11 similar objects in its collection, the largest holdings of its kind in the UK.

Per tradition, the British Museum tabots are hidden in a highly secure basement storeroom, where even the curators cannot view them. The church’s priests, however, are allowed to see them, with the future goal of lending them to an Ethiopian Orthodox Church in Great Britain.

The painting at the center of the complaint is Calabrian Coast (1861) by Andreas Achenbach. It was previously owned by Jewish-German art collector Max Stern, who parted with the work, probably under duress in 1937; in 1935, he had been banned from selling work by the Nazis.

Eventually, in 1999, the painting was purchased at a London auction by Wolfgang Peiffer. (Peiffer as the collector is not named in the court’s documents, but previous reporting by Munich daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung has identified Peiffer as the person behind the suit and current owner of the painting.) In 2016, Peiffer lent the painting to an Achenbach exhibition in Baden-Baden. It was after this exhibition that the Max Stern Art Restitution Project listed the painting with lostart.de, triggering an Interpol search for the painting.

Peiffer brought the suit against the Foundation in 2019 in Germany in a lower court, taking the Foundation’s registering of the painting on the Lost Art Database (vis-a-via the Restitution Project) as a sign that the Foundation was claiming ownership of the painting. Peiffer argued that Stern had sold the painting voluntarily, and that by having the work listed on the Database the work had become unsellable. The lower court ruled that the Stern Foundation hadn’t made a claim of ownership just because it had registered the work on the Lost Art Database, reported the Art Newspaper in 2020. Peiffer then took his claim to the federal court, where he again failed to have the painting struck from Lost Art Database.

The federal court ruled that “the announcement of missing cultural property on the Lost Art Database’s web page, if based upon true facts, does not represent an impairment of ownership” and thus Peiffer is not entitled to having the work de-listed, reported the AP.

It is unclear if or how this legal battle will continue. Peiffer can now attempt to bring a suit directly against the Lost Art Database or else try to get a court to ascertain who the true owner of the work is. As of yet, the Stern Foundation has still made no formal claim for restitution.

Thus far, the Max Stern Art Restitution Project has been able to restitute 11 works that once belonged to Stern, including another work by Andreas Achenbach, Scandinavian Landscape (1837), as well as A Portrait of a Musician Playing a Bagpipe (1632) by an unknown Northern Netherlandish artist, as reported by ARTnews in 2009.

The court ruling on July 13 follows a 2022 regional court ruling and a Supreme Court dismissal in 2021 over the contested items dating from the 11th to the 15th centuries, which include ornate silver, relics, altarpieces, and gold and silver crucifixes. The Guelph Treasure, also known in German as the Welfenschatz, is the largest publicly owned collection of its kind in Germany, valued at up to $250 million.

The most valuable item is a domed reliquary from the 12th century. The ornate object is made of gold, copper, and silver. It is shaped like a church; and features figurines of characters from the Bible carved from walrus tusk.

The Guelph Treasure is currently part of the collection of the Berlin Kunstgewerbemuseum (Applied Arts Museum), which is managed by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation.

The heirs of Jewish art dealers claim the items were sold under duress and for a third of their market price to the Nazi government in 1935. However, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation argued that it was immune from US legal decisions under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act due to its status as a German institution. They also argued the sale was not forced and the collection was not in Germany when it was sold.

“This ruling confirms the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation’s view that a claim for the restitution of the Guelph Treasure should not be handled by a US court,” foundation president Hermann Parzinger told the Art Newspaper in a statement.

The legal saga over the Guelph Treasure between the three heirs—two US citizens and one UK citizen—started in 2014. That year, the German Advisory Commission on Nazi-looted art rejected the descendants’ claim the Guelph Treasure had been sold under duress and for less than its market value. The commission upheld the foundation’s view that the sale of the items was not due to persecution and that the financial loss suffered by the consortium of German Jewish Art dealers in 1929 reflected the conditions of the art market during the Great Depression.

The descendants of the Jewish former owners argued that the view of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation does not reflect the experience of what it was like for Jews living in the country after the National Socialist Party seized power in Germany.

The civil litigation attorney for the descendants, Nicholas O’Donnell, expressed disappointment at the ruling.

“We are continuing to review the opinion and consider our next steps,” O’Donnell told the Art Newspaper, which first reported the news. “Germany’s continued refusal to acknowledge the obviously coercive sale involving Hermann Goering’s agents for what it was—theft—stands in stark contrast to Germany’s obligations under the Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art.”

The new heritage code establishes a framework for public collections to restitute objects and artworks to the heirs of the original Jewish owners without the need for individual legislation to be passed for each case, as was previously the procedure. The legislation encompasses cultural property proven to have been stolen or unwillingly surrendered between January 30, 1933 and May 8, 1945.

The French Ministry of Culture estimates some 100,000 artworks were seized “in the context of anti-Semitic persecution” during the Second World War. 

Until now, restitution goals have been impeded by France’s heritage code, which classifies museum collections as “inalienable.” 

French President Emmanuel Macron has made restitution and repatriation—the restoration of cultural property to individuals and nations, respectively—a priority of his administration. In a watershed moment for his presidency, the National Assembly last year overcame opposition from the French Senate to transfer ownership of 26 stolen royal artifacts from the Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac to the Republic of Benin, as well as one object from the Army Museum to Senegal. The works were relinquished on the condition that they “continue to be preserved and presented to the public in places dedicated to this [cultural] function.”

“I hope 2023 will be a year of decisive progress for restitutions,” French culture minister Rima Abdul Malak said in her annual New Year speech on January 16. She added that the country’s approach to its history must be “neither one of denial nor of repentance, but one of recognition.”

According to Mayer, the proposed law intends to establish an “orderly, consistent and comprehensive” protocol for restitution claims. “The rulers of European countries long viewed large parts of the world as places where they could help themselves; they simply took artifacts and saw that as their natural right,” she said. “Calling out this injustice and following it up with serious debate and concrete actions is Austria’s responsibility too.”

Jonathan Fine, the scientific director of the Weltmuseum in Vienna and head of a government-appointed advisory committee, has called for a “intellectually and culturally diverse” evaluation board dedicated to restitution claims. The Austrian government would base its ruling on the findings of the committee, per a report released today by the committee. Each return, the report stressed, would be assessed on a  “state-to-state basis”. 

Over the past decade, Austria has tightened its cultural protection legislation in the aim to thwart the trafficking of looted artifacts and provide a more efficient means of returning objects taken under suspect circumstances to their rightful owners. The effort has been met with a mixed reception: In 2016, a draft supplement to Austrian cultural patrimony legislation was criticized for failing to revise a paragraph which promised buyers “the undisturbed right to possess an object and to offer it on the international art market without later being confronted with claims for restitution.” 

At that time, each member of the European Union was—to varying degrees of public resistance—updating its cultural protections to meet new European Union directives on illegally seized heritage; the 1993 Monument Protection Act was tightened in 2014, followed by the 2015 ratification of the UNESCO convention of 1970.

Austria’s advisory committee broadly defines objects eligible for restitution as those whose owners “did not wish to part with them at the time they were collected”, which covers contexts such as “violence, looting, theft, coercion”. According to Fine, “very many” of the 200,000 objects in the Weltmuseum’s holdings likely meet those conditions. 

In the 1800s, while under the Habsburg Monarchy, Austria attempted to establish colonies in Africa and South East and East Asia. Austria could never rival the imperial might of its neighboring countries, however, its rulers were prodigious collectors of artifacts taken during colonial conflicts, and invested heavily in Christian missionary work.

“Colonial propaganda was reinforced, research into ‘race science’ intensified, and colonialist thinking and attitudes dominated public opinion,” the advisory committee wrote in its report. “As one of the successors to the Habsburg monarchy, the Republic of Austria has paid comparatively little attention to its predecessor’s colonial history.”