By: Ilana Siyance
A law recently passed in New York State requires museums to use signage to identify art that was looted in the Nazi era.
As reported by the NY Post, there are hundreds of paintings and sculptures looted by Nazis between 1933 and 1945 that are still hanging in New York museums—including the Met, MoMa and Guggenheim. Last week, a new law was passed which will require the NY museums to add signs in front of art “which changed hands due to theft, seizure, confiscation, forced sale or other involuntary means”.
Some looted art pieces have been returned to the families of the original owners, but most are still held by private collectors across the globe, and many are now in museums. Heirs who have sought to have their loved ones’ art restored by suing museums have mostly been denied due to legal technicalities, such as statutes of limitations, experts told The Post. While it may seem like the new law does little to provide restitution to the original owners, some argue that the legislation provides a measure of justice. “The first step towards justice is knowledge, awareness and education,” Timothy Reif, a federal judge whose great-uncle’s art collection was looted by the Nazis, told The Post.
The law is part of a legislative package which aims to fight anti-Semitism. The package also requires schools to offer classes on the Holocaust. Anna Kaplan (D-Nassau), the state senator who sponsored the legislation, said she hopes that the law will “empower” the art community toward accountability.
“When the Nazis looted over 600,000 works of art from Jewish families during the Holocaust, they did so because they were trying to erase Jewish culture, and for museums to continue trying to erase the history of what happened is unconscionable,” Kaplan said in a statement to The Post. “This new law compels museums to do the right thing and acknowledge the painful history of the Holocaust, and it’s self-policing by empowering the art community to get involved, speak out, and keep museums honest and accountable when they’re failing to do the right thing.”
One such looted work of art, which is currently on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, is the ‘The Actor’ by Pablo Picasso. Made in 1905, the painting which has an estimated value of $100 million, was owned by Paul Leffmann, a German Jewish businessman. In 1938, the owner was forced to flee and sold the painting under duress for just $13,200 to a Paris dealer, as per court papers. In 1952, the painting was gifted to the Met. Another painting hanging in the Met is the Portrait of Tilla Durieux,by Auguste Renoir. Durieux, an actress in Berlin, took the portrait drawn in Renoir’s old age with her as she fled Nazi Germany for Yugoslavia in 1933. She had to sell it under duress two years later. Per the Post, it was donated to the Met in 1960.
On display at NYC’s MoMa museum is ‘Still Life: Job’ by Pablo Picasso. The work had been part of the collection owned by Alphonse Kann– one of France’s largest collectors. It was seized in 1940, along with Kann’s other assets, when the Nazis invaded Paris. It was donated to the MoMA in 1979. Many more works, with similar history, are currently in museums across the city and the world.
