Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.It isn't clear how many pieces of art now on display will wind up being labeled as Nazi loot, and disagreements have already arisen over certain artworks with a complicated history. Khan is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. The idea that students and general public should go through museums to understand where these items come from, is important.” “Because the survivors of the Holocaust are a generation that is dying out, this becomes much more important,” said Fisher, of the Claims Conference. Kaplan, who sponsored the legislation, said the new law is partly about educating younger people unfamiliar with the Holocaust. In the last two decades, the museum has returned or reached settlements on 10 artworks that changed hands during the Nazi period, including a Claude Monet painting. It was also seized by the Nazis from Rothschild in 1939, later returned to his widow in 1948 and sold to the museum in 1950. It was returned to Rothschild’s widow in 1949 and sold to the museum in 1950.Īnother is a 1695 painting titled “Gamepiece with a Dead Heron” by Dutch painter Jan Weenix. The Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles researched German art trade between 19 and now provides digital access to auction sales catalogs related to Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.Īmong the 53 pieces at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that will get signage identifying them as having once been looted is a Turkish helmet dating to the late 15th and 16th century that had been seized by Nazis from its owner Baron Alphonse Mayer Rothschild in 1938. museums have undertaken efforts to trace the origin of potentially stolen artworks.īoston’s Museum of Fine Arts launched a Nazi-era provenance research of their artwork in 1998, where they identify objects in the collection that were lost or stolen during the Nazi era and never returned to their rightful owners. While signage for Nazi-looted artwork is a policy unique to New York, other U.S. Last year, the Jewish Museum, in New York City, dedicated an entire exhibition to the topic of looted art and ceremonial objects. The museum’s director, Suzan Friedlander, said they “fully support the recent legislation regarding work seized by the Nazis.” In 2019, the Arkell Museum in upstate New York returned a painting after it was made known that it was stolen by Nazis from a Jewish family in 1933. Guggenheim Museum returned an Ernst Ludwig Kirchner painting titled “Artillerymen” to the family of Jewish art dealer Alfred Flechtheim, who was forced to abandon his collection after fleeing Berlin in 1933.Ī Guggenheim spokesperson said the museum is not aware of any other work in its collections that was looted by Nazis, but is continuing its research. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City, said it had identified 53 works in its collection as having been seized or sold under duress during the Nazi era. It isn’t clear how many pieces of art now on display will wind up being labeled as Nazi loot, and disagreements have already arisen over certain artworks with a complicated history. and Europe are also reckoning with collections that contain numerous objects looted from Asia, Africa and other places during centuries of colonialism. The new rule comes as many museums in the U.S. Kathy Hochul signed a law in August requiring museums to put up signs identifying pieces looted by the Nazis from 1933 through 1945. Some of that plunder wound up in the world’s great museums. (AP) - Museums in New York that exhibit artworks looted by Nazis during the Holocaust are now required by law to let the public know about those dark chapters in their provenance through placards displayed with the stolen objects.Īt least 600,000 pieces of art were looted from Jewish people before and during World War II, according to experts.