Returned art, restored humanity

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Thursday the 31st of March, 2022.

You’re listening to The World and Everything in It and we’re so glad you are! Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. First up: stolen art.

Museums in Belgium and France recently returned paintings to the heirs of the artworks’ original owners. They were among an estimated 600,000 works of art looted by the Nazis from mostly Jewish-owned homes and galleries during World War II.

REICHARD: Returning those works of art 80 years later is an idea catching on at museums around the world.

WORLD correspondent Bonnie Pritchett reports.

REPORTER: Flowers by Lovis Corinth is being returned to its rightful owners 80 years after it was stolen from a Jewish family in Brussels by the Nazis…

BONNIE PRITCHETT, REPORTER: This Expressionist painting of a tall blue vase brimming with pink roses hung in Belgium’s Royal Museum of Fine Arts for 71 years. But last month, museum staff took it off the wall and packed it for shipment to England where the great grandchildren of its original owners live.

The Belgian museum still has 23 paintings known to have been stolen by the Nazis but whose owners have not been identified.

NEWS REPORT: The government has promised to make the best effort to return art works that were expropriated by the Nazis but it’s not easy to find the actual owners or their heirs…

Thomas Kline explains why. He’s an attorney for Cultural Heritage Partners and has spent three decades restoring stolen art to its rightful owners.

KLINE: Towards the end of World War Two, and after World War Two, the term ‘country to country returns’ was used because it was too hard for the Monuments Men and the other people tasked with dealing with displaced art to return it to the actual families. You can imagine many languages, many laws, very difficult chasing heirs. Obviously, millions of people had died and millions more were displaced…

Many of the items returned to the countries from which they were stolen were eventually absorbed into national art collections.

Even if owners are identified now, there is no international standard for restoring stolen art. Kline says national and local laws often pit claimants against the possessor.

KLINE: But in France, Monaco, Switzerland, if an object is sold in good faith, then the buyer receives title. And after a period of time that title might become incontestable…

And the debate over stolen art isn’t just about World War II. Klein says it has prompted museums in Europe and the United States to reconsider their holdings of ancient relics.

KLINE: Much of Sub-Saharan Africa was stripped of its cultural treasures and artwork during colonial times. And much of that art is in European museums…

Jeff Kloha is chief curatorial officer at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. He noted the obvious example—the excavation of King Tut’s tomb.

KLOHA: And eventually they did end up in Egypt, which I think is the right, the right decision. But, but yes, exactly right. They’re during the colonial period. you know, they were legal excavations at the time, it was a British protectorate or under British control. Nowadays, there's much more concern about being respectful of those ancient cultures, and having those objects displayed and controlled by by the people who are, you know, the heirs, right, the people who, whose traditions they are…

Before the museum opened in 2017, its board of directors hired Thomas Kline to help review the purchase history of every object scheduled for display.

KLOHA: So, that involved going back into, you know, donation paperwork, research into prior history, you know, auction history, any any kind of documentation that we could find, and then research on our own, including, you know, going back to previous owners…

The process revealed thousands of objects purchased between 2009 and 2012 that lacked sufficient documentation. It took a few years to work out the logistics, but the museum eventually returned the objects to Egypt and Iraq.

Kloha says the review also turned up two New Testament manuscripts that legally belonged to someone else.

KLOHA: And then we also, we restored a gospel manuscript that was stolen from Athens University sometime in the 1980s. And subsequently sold twice publicly with by public auction. And then, even as recent as—we currently have it on display actually—a gospel manuscript that was looted from a monastery in Greece in 1917…

Museum representatives plan to return the manuscript to the monastery in October.

But Kloha says some museums in Europe and the United States are not willing to give up their prized displays.

KLOHA: Like the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum, right. So it's, quite obviously, are part of the Parthenon. But the British Museum chooses to hold on to those. So, despite claims from Greece, or requests from Greece, that they'd be returned. So, who actually owns them? Right? And how far back do you trace that…

Pretty far back, in the case of some artifacts. Thousands of years. So why, after all this time, does it matter where these items are displayed?

Monica Dugot is an attorney who worked for Christie’s Art Restitution division. She talked about the real harm done by looting during World War II in a 2016 TED Talk at Yeshiva University.

MONICA DUGOT: This looting wasn’t sideshow to the main genocide, but very much a main part of it. It sought to wipe out a collective culture. It sought to dehumanize. But to continue to deny an original owner now is to continue to deny their very existence and their family’s existence…

Dugout’s work is personal: she’s the granddaughter of Jews displaced from their homes in Austria and Poland. One of her grandfathers and his daughter did not survive the Holocaust.

She says righting past wrongs has future repercussions.

DUGOT: Recovering the past restores humanity. And it’s a vital victory against a Nazi regime that robbed us of so much. It makes the 6 million lost not just a number but gives names and stories back to people and their descendants.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Bonnie Pritchett.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.