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.
