The Restoration of Art to Rightful Owners

Chapter Review: Art Theft and the Art Market

Jennette Greenfield’s chapter on “Art Theft and the Art Market” from her 2007 book The Return of Cultural Treasures highlights the complicity of the art market in circulating artistic treasures with a suspect history. Historically, the right to plunder a nation has been one of the spoils of war. This was true of both Napoleon and Hitler. Because both dictators were the losers, historically speaking, however, in the aftermath of their reigns, there was an attempt to restore the taken treasures to their rightful owners. Where the victors did the pillaging, the struggle for proper restoration has often been far more difficult. Even then, many of the treasures looted by the Nazis have been scattered all over the world and not been returned to their rightful owners.

It is bitterly ironic that a regime that claimed its moral and national superiority as a result of racial and ethnic heritage did so much looting of other nation’s art and even private collections. As late as 1984, according to Greenfield (2007), several thousand treasures were found located in a cave. Unfortunately, by that late date, most of the potential claimants lacked appropriate documentation to establish their claims upon the objects, despite the existence of the 1969 Final Settlement of Heirless Property Law. In actual practice, very few objects were given back under the law, and despite the de-Nazification of Germany and the staunch reputation of Germany’s Nazi past, there is ample evidence that there was an attempt to evade the demand to return stolen objects to their rightful owners.

This is not necessarily unique to Germany, however. Another surprising aspect of the ownership of art and stolen art treasures is that even when the ideologies that gave rise to the theft were deemed to be wrong, such as ideologies of racial inferiority, there were still attempts to hold onto the treasures after the fact, given the profound benefits many of these objects can bring in the form of tourism in museums—although in the case of these Nazi-stolen artifacts, some were in private collections, and others were simply hidden away from public view.

Giving back art treasures often symbolizes an admittance of wrongdoing that many nations are unwilling to make. Jonathan Petropoulos in his 2017 article “The Restitution of Looted Art: Art Dealer Networks in the Third Reich and in the Postwar Period” in the Journal of Contemporary History notes how art dealers during the Third Reich made a critical role in profiting from such looting. Although there has been substantial questioning of profiting of the other ways people benefited from the Third Reich spanning from medical science to banking, art theft is yet another still often unexplored area that has gone under-studied, Petropoulos (2017) and Greenfield (2007) both argue in their respective articles.

Such profiting was often less obvious, and collectors are quiet about the actual history of the acquisition of the objects in their possession. Greenfield (2007) notes that the first museums were originally established for religious or academic purposes, not for personal possession or an attempt to keep cultural treasures captive. Although there may be national laws governing the regulation of artifacts, which exist in France and other nations with substantial art and museum collections, in the shadowy world of private dealers, they are often poorly enforced.