All posts tagged: restitution

Painting Repatriated to Heirs of Jewish Art Collector Who Fled Germany

Painting Repatriated to Heirs of Jewish Art Collector Who Fled Germany

Published by Jenni Sidey

Paul Laporte, a great-grandson of the well-to-do Sofie Heilbronner, who fled Munich for the United States in 1938, spent the past eight years working to reclaim a painting that belonged to his great-grandmother and had been lost as a result of Nazi persecution. The artwork, Music (Arcadian Scene), 1892, by German painter Albert Lang was returned to Heilbronner’s heirs in a ceremony on September 22 at the German Embassy in Washington, DC. Before Tuesday, it had been held by the Bavarian State Painting Collections, a museum in Munich. A notice from the New York State Department of Financial Services, which administers the Holocaust Claims Processing Office, explains that Heilbronner packed up her artworks before leaving Germany, intending to sell them in New York. Instead, they were seized by the German government and auctioned off; the Lang painting was later discovered in a former Army barracks-turned-warehouse in Munich and eventually ended up in the Bavarian State Painting Collections, which identified it as having been looted. There was no record of who its rightful owner was. Related …

Family Says Stolen Renoir painting is Nazi Looted

Family Says Stolen Renoir painting is Nazi Looted

Published by Jenni Sidey

The mystery has just deepened around who rightfully owns the two still-missing paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, stolen on Tuesday from a museum in southern France, along with two other artworks by the Impressionist, which were ultimately abandoned in the museum garden. According to Le Monde, the descendants of the Paris-based, Jewish dealer Jadwiga (also called Hedwig) Zak, who died in Auschwitz, had previously made a formal request for the restitution of one of the two missing Renoir paintings, Jeune femme au puits (1886). Related Articles The Canada-based Mondex Corporation, which advocates for people seeking to recover artworks that were often lost in the Holocaust, also confirmed to ARTnews that they have been working with Zak’s heirs to that end. Mondex founder James Palmer said over the phone that about a year ago, his team sent a petition to the French government arguing for the painting’s return to the Zak family, and were waiting to learn whether their request was approved when thieves got to the Renoir painting first. “We are doing our best to cooperate …

AI Expands the Functionality of Nazi-Era Looted Art Search Tool

AI Expands the Functionality of Nazi-Era Looted Art Search Tool

Published by Jenni Sidey

The Jewish Digital Cultural Recovery Project (JDCRP), an organization founded in Berlin in 2016, announced today that it has added AI capabilities to its provenance research tool, Legacy Explorer, which launched last year. Legacy Explorer is currently able to search five archives, including the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg archive at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, as well as several others that organize property cards and photographs. A sixth archive will be added later this month, according to a statement from the JDCRP. Related Articles Prior to this AI sync, users would have to search each archive individually. Now, the AI document-scanning tools, along with partnerships with organizations and archives around the world, will allow researchers to pull information about the same cultural object from different sources at the same time. There are still dozens of other databases and archives for looted artwork and artifacts that contain information about Nazi-looted art and heirlooms. “The platform addresses an urgent gap in provenance research: the lack of a single place where experts and the general public can easily …

Ivorian “Talking Drum” Arrives at Its Home Village After 110 Years

Ivorian “Talking Drum” Arrives at Its Home Village After 110 Years

Published by Jenni Sidey

A sacred “talking drum” known as the Djidji Ayôkwé, looted from Côte d’Ivoire by French colonial troops over a century ago, returned this month to the place where it was made. According to the Namibia Press Agency (NAMPA), the drum arrived on August 7 at its home village of Adjame, where the local community was able to see it for the first time. The ten-foot-long, 940-pound drum has a single-piece cylindrical soundbox slit in half longitudinally. Extending out from the slit are two planks, one of which supports a carving of a jumping leopard. The box itself is decorated with carved and painted faces and geometric patterns. Related Articles The massive instrument was once used by Côte d’Ivoire’s Atchan/Ebrié people to transmit messages between villages many miles apart, including warnings of impending French recruitment operations. It was seized by colonial authorities in 1916 as a way of suppressing local resistance. Between 1916 and 1930, the Djidji Ayôkwé was kept outside the French governor’s Ivorian home. It was transferred to France in 1929 and housed most …

Professors Launch AI Tool to Help Identify Nazi-Looted Artworks

Professors Launch AI Tool to Help Identify Nazi-Looted Artworks

Published by Jenni Sidey

Earlier this month, a team of researchers at Santa Clara University in California launched an AI chatbot called AI Provenance Research. The tool is intended to enable anyone to ask questions about Nazi-looted artworks and receive answers based on information culled from a searchable, illustrated online database with over 40,000 entries. The news was recently reported by the Jewish News of Northern California. The group is made up of three business school colleagues: management professor Michael Santoro and analytics professors Haibing Lu and Michele Samorani. The database use AI to corral the vast array of existing provenance data that are spread across different archives, databases, and catalogues, in many different languages into a more easily accessible tool. Related Articles Santoro was inspired to launch the project after following his friend Timothy Reif’s decade-long effort to locate artworks that had been stolen from his ancestor, a Jewish Austrian cabaret star. (Reif, a judge in the US Court of International Trade, has since recovered 11 artworks by Egon Schiele.) Santoro also thinks the AI bot could be …

Judge Awards Interest in David Nahmad Modigliani Restitution Case

Judge Awards Interest in David Nahmad Modigliani Restitution Case

Published by Jenni Sidey

Just weeks after ordering billionaire art dealer David Nahmad to return a Nazi-looted Amedeo Modigliani painting, a New York judge has ruled that the painting’s rightful heirs are also entitled to prejudgment interest, a decision that could add millions in compensation to the case. In a decision issued Tuesday, Justice Joel M. Cohen said New York law requires prejudgment interest in cases like this, meaning the heirs are entitled to compensation for the years they were deprived of Seated Man with a Cane. Exactly how much they’ll receive is still up in the air. The court has scheduled an evidentiary hearing for September to determine the painting’s value, which will largely dictate the size of the award.  Related Articles The latest ruling comes four months after Cohen found that the Modigliani belonged to the estate of Jewish art dealer Oscar Stettiner, who left it behind while fleeing Paris ahead of the Nazi occupation. In June, the judge ordered Nahmad to return the painting. But earlier this month, the Appellate Division granted an interim stay, allowing the Nahmads …

New York Authorities Return 59 Antiquities to Italy, Iraq, Indonesia

New York Authorities Return 59 Antiquities to Italy, Iraq, Indonesia

Published by Jenni Sidey

Fifty-nine antiquities looted from Italy, Iraq, and Indonesia, including 45 seized from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, have been returned to their countries of origin, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office announced on Wednesday. Among the objects seized from the Met and returned to Italy was a terracotta vase used for chilling and mixing wine and water, attributed to the famed Troilos Painter. One side depicts Dionysos, the Greek god of wine, and the hero Herakles on Mount Olympus; the reverse shows members of the Olympian pantheon, including Zeus, Athena, and Nike. According to New York investigators, the vase was smuggled out of Italy by Fritz Burki and consigned for sale at Christie’s London before entering the museum’s collection. Also seized from the Met was a marble fish plate from Magna Graecia, dating to around 400 B.C.E., which entered the museum through dealer Robert Hecht in 1984. Related Articles Nine antiquities collectively valued at nearly $300,000 were returned to Iraq. Among them were two of the earliest known sculptural depictions of the human figure in the …

Italy Advances Legislation on Restitution of Nazi-Looted Art

Italy Advances Legislation on Restitution of Nazi-Looted Art

Published by Jenni Sidey

The Italian parliament is advancing legislation to create a formal process for restituting art and cultural property looted by the Nazis under Italian Fascist racial laws. The news was reported by the Jewish News Syndicate following a statement by the World Jewish Restitution Organization (WJRO), a Jerusalem-based nonprofit that works toward the return of Jewish-owned property in Europe. “The bill offers a historic opportunity to finally deliver justice to victims of Nazi and fascist persecution and their heirs,” said Gideon Taylor, president of the WJRO. “While operational and legal details remain to be resolved as the bill moves forward, this is a vital step toward creating a framework for restitution,” he said. Related Articles A founding member of the Axis powers during World War II, Italy was allied with Nazi Germany under the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. The Nazis looted about 20 percent of the art in Europe, including from Jews in Italy, and more than 100,000 items have not been returned to their rightful owners. A 2024 study by the WJRO and the Claims Conference on Jewish …

Three Swiss Museums Return Trove of Benin Bronzes to Nigeria

Three Swiss Museums Return Trove of Benin Bronzes to Nigeria

Published by Jenni Sidey

Three Swiss museums have returned 18 royal and religious artifacts from the Kingdom of Benin to Nigeria, marking another significant repatriation of the so-called Benin Bronzes. A handover ceremony took place today at the University of Zurich between Swiss Federal Councillor Elisabeth Baume-Schneider and Nigeria’s Minister of Culture, Hannatu Musa Musawa. The university returned 14 objects from its Ethnographic Museum, while two additional Benin Bronzes came from Museum Rietberg Zurich and another two from the Musée d’Ethnographie de Genève.  Related Articles The Benin Bronzes refer to the approximately 5,000 bronze sculptures, ceremonial objects, and ivory carvings looted by British forces from the Kingdom of Benin, in what is now Nigeria, during the 1897 punitive expedition. Scattered across museums and private collections worldwide via illicit channels, the bronzes have become emblematic of efforts by formerly colonized countries to reclaim cultural heritage, as well as the broader—and often contentious—debate over the ethics of ethnographic collections.  Among the artifacts returned by Switzerland is a Benin Eroro, a four-sided ceremonial bell that played a central role in royal rites, …

Ireland Urged to Adopt New Restitution and Repatriation Laws

Ireland Urged to Adopt New Restitution and Repatriation Laws

Published by Jenni Sidey

Three years ago, in the summer of 2023, the Irish government formed a committee to advise museums and other cultural institutions on matters related to restitution and repatriation. That endeavor, known as the Advisory Committee on the Restitution and Repatriation of Cultural Heritage, presented its final report last month. According to The Art Newspaper, the report aims to address the “practical and legal impediments” that can prevent some institutions from properly responding to claims, whether related to colonial-era artifacts or cultural property looted during the Nazi regime. Therefore, the government should establish a national advisory panel to oversee such claims, along with funding to address impediments like limited provenance research, incomplete cataloguing and digitization of records, and a lack of access to specialists. Related Articles The report conducted a national survey of cultural heritage and presented some sobering key findings. Ninety percent of Irish institutions lack comprehensive online catalogs; many have large documentation backlogs, and only a small fraction of their collections are digitized. Few are accessible online. The committee recommends funding earmarked to improve …