Stolen Art Objects

¶ … world's most famous museums and private art collectors are now grappling with a difficult problem. Multiple cases of museums and collectors have surfaced where a painting paid for and owned by them was actually stolen from their legitimate Jewish owners by Nazis or Nazi collaborators during World War II. Some current ownership has been contested; some have been challenged in court; and some artwork has been returned to the descendents of the owners who were robbed.

Two questions arise about these contested purchases: did the purchaser know the painting had been stolen, and if the purchaser did not know, should that person or museum be required to return it to people who never actually owned it? One example of this complicated ownership is a painting by Frans Hals titled" Portrait of Pastor Adrianus Tegularius." Painted in the mid-1600's, the Nazis stole it from Frenchman Alolphe Schloss in 1943.

Later, Adam Williams, a New York City art dealer, bought it in London in 1989 for $180,000 at Christie's (Rubenstein, 2001a). He displayed the painting in an art show in Paris in 1990, where an heir of Schloss recognized it. Williams has since been convicted in France of dealing in stolen artwork. Unfortunately the situation with Hals's stolen portrait is not an isolated incident. The Nazis had a strong interest in acquiring art works and routinely stole art work from the homes of Jews they had driven out.

In some cases local collaborators helped the Nazis with this task (Brinks, 1999). On first consideration people might wonder what the right thing to do is. Paintings don't have serial numbers as cars do, and some people believe that if a person did not realize the artwork was stolen, they should not have to give the work up and take the financial loss. However, cars have serial numbers because they are mass-produced and easily confused.

In the world of fine art, a great painting has a recorded history of ownership called its provenance (Rubenstein, 2001a). Serious collectors and buyers for museums know this, and know how to spot suspect provenances. The Hals picture was bought and sold several times before Williams acquired it, but the mere fact that a Jew in Paris during World War II had owned it before the war but not afterwards should have been enough to raise questions.

Instead, the purchasers' love of great art has allowed them to look the other way, in some cases even when the families of the rightful owners have protested (Editors, 2001). In another recent case, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. has stated that it will return a picture to the family of the original owners (Rubenstein, 2001b). In another case, the heirs of a private owner in Holland has returned a painting dating from before the Renaissance to the heir of its former owner (Editors, 2001).

Even if it were argued that individual owners might be new collectors who did not know how to verify a painting's provenance, this does not explain how museums with world standing acquired these paintings without knowing about the dishonest way in which they ended up on the market and available for purchase. The ownership of antiquities, such as bronze busts from 2,000 years ago cannot.