Art looting is commonly recognized as a central feature of Nazi
expropriation, in both the Third Reich and occupied territories. After
the war, the famed Monuments Men (and women) recovered several hundred
thousand pieces from the Germans' makeshift repositories in churches,
castles, and salt mines. Well publicized restitution cases, such as
that of Gustav Klimt's luminous painting featured in the film Woman in
Gold, illustrate the legacy of Nazi looting in the art world today.
But what happened to looted art that was never returned to its
rightful owners?In France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, postwar
governments appropriated the most coveted unclaimed works for display
in museums, embassies, ministries, and other public buildings.
Following cultural property norms of the time, the governments created
custodianships over the unclaimed pieces, without using archives in
their possession to carry out thorough provenance (ownership)
research. This policy extended the dispossession of Jewish owners
wrought by the Nazis and their collaborators well into the
twenty-first century.The custodianships included more than six hundred
works in Belgium, five thousand works in the Netherlands, and some two
thousand in France. They included paintings by traditional and modern
masters, such as Rembrandt, Cranach, Rubens, Van der Weyden, Tiepolo,
Picasso, and Matisse. This appropriation of plundered assets endured
without controversy until the mid-1990s, when activists and
journalists began challenging the governments' right to hold these
items, ushering in a period of cultural property litigation that
endures to this day. Including interviews that have never before been
published, _Museum Worthy _deftly examines the appropriation of Nazi
art plunder by postwar governments and highlights the increasingly
successful postwar art recovery and restitution process.
Les mer
Nazi Art Plunder in Postwar Western Europe
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780190051990
Publisert
2023
Utgiver
Vendor
Oxford University Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter