An end to restitution of Nazi looted art?

Ulrike Knöfel reports for Spiegel Online :

For years, it has been widely accepted that artworks looted by the Nazis should be returned to their rightful owners. But now a prominent British expert has called for a stop to restitution -- and triggered protests in the art world.

The art connoisseur Sir Norman Rosenthal may be a British institution, but the equanimity often attributed to his compatriots is not one of his distinguishing features.

Rosenthal, 64, was the leading curator at London's Royal Academy for more than 30 years. Considered the public face of the institution, he was knighted for his achievements. His vibrant passion for art is legendary. He helped make British artist Damien Hirst and his peers famous when he staged the exhibition "Sensation" at the Royal Academy. Last year, he left the museum where he had caused many a stir -- and shocked the British and others yet again.

Rosenthal, the son of Jewish refugees from Germany and Slovakia, called for an end to the restitution of so-called Nazi looted art in an article in the journal The Art Newspaper.

The fact that someone who lost members of his own family in the Holocaust is now opposing restitution and is calling for an end to the practice has injected a provocatively dissonant note into an already angry debate -- and has triggered fierce protest. At issue is nothing less than the permanent whereabouts of some of the icons of art history.

Restitution is a term that has been constantly bandied about in the art world for at least the last 10 years. It's a question of morality and the righting of indisputable wrongs. But it has also become -- at least in Rosenthal's opinion -- a question of big business.

It is clear that new restitutions will introduce even more turmoil into the museum world and shrink the inventories of notable collections. The controversy involves important artists such as Rembrandt, the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, the Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele and even Pablo Picasso. Two of the Spanish painter's works with somewhat murky histories are in New York, one at the Guggenheim Museum and the other at the Museum of Modern Art. The heirs of the banker Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy recently reached an out-of-court settlement with the two museums.

The E.G. Bührle Collection in Zurich still owns "La Sultane," a painting by Edouard Manet that is controversial because of its history as looted art. Max Silberberg, an industrialist from Breslau (now the Polish city of Wroclaw), was forced to sell the painting in 1937. Silberberg and his wife were deported to Auschwitz five years later.

The principle of restitution seemed undisputed until recently. Who would challenge the legitimacy of the claims of the heirs of Nazi victims to their family property? In those cases in which museums have balked at returning looted art, they have argued that they acquired the works in question legally and in good faith. But does this argument truly release them from the obligation to give back the art?

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