A Tragic Fate: Law and Ethics in the Battle Over Nazi-Looted Art

by Nicholas M. O'Donnell

Overview

The organized theft of fine art by Nazi Germany has captivated worldwide attention in the last twenty years. Newly found works of art pit survivors and their heirs against museums, foreign nations, and even their own family members. These stories endure because they speak to one of the core tragedies of the Nazi era: how a nation at the pinnacle of fine art and culture spawned a legalized culture of theft and plunder. A Tragic Fate is the first book to seriously address the legal and ethical rules that have dictated the results of restitution claims between competing claimants to the same works of art. It provides a history of Art and Culture in German-occupied Europe, an introduction to the most significant collections in Europe to be targeted by the Nazis, and a narrative of the efforts to reclaim looted artwork in the decades following the Holocaust through profiles of some of the art world's most famous and influential restitution cases.

On the surface, this dispute is similar to many others, but digging deeper one finds a multilayered puzzle that embodies the competing narratives often at play in restitution cases: persecution, obfuscation, the murky environment of the art market after the war, and the basic tension between legal systems and who should bear the burden of resolving the competing claims. But digging deeper one finds a multilayered puzzle that embodies the competing narratives often at play in restitution cases: persecution, obfuscation, the murky environment of the art market after the war, and the basic tension between legal systems and who should bear the burden of resolving the competing claims.

There is no simple, unifying principle to these debates of stolen art. When approached by the heirs of victims, many current possessors look for the right answer. Some are indifferent. Some see a more complicated story in which their own interests and public service are more important than what happened eighty years ago. Disputes not yet known or filed will be guided by the stories and cases that have already happened. The tactics of and choices made by the parties to such disputes many times reveal the heartbreaking struggles that began in the past and continue to affect the descendants of the original owners today.

A Tragic Fate: Law and Ethics in the Battle Over Nazi-Looted Art represents those stories.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781634257336
Publisher:	American Bar Association
Publication date:	08/01/2017
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	819,664
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Author Bio: Nicholas M. O’Donnell (Boston, MA) is one of the art world’s foremost litigators in the restitution of Nazi-looted art. He writes the Art Law Report (www.artlawreport.com) and has been cited widely for his expertise in the New York Times, the Detroit Free Press, the Los Angeles Times, and the Baltimore Sun. He speaks regularly about art law issues around the world.

Table of Contents

Introduction ix

Part 1 Art and culture in Occupied Europe 1

1 From There to Here: Legislated Plunder in the Third Reich and the Allied Response 3

Part 2 The New Era 27

2 The Washington Conference and Its Ethical Parallels 29

3 Portrait of Wally and the Politics of Seizure 59

4 A New Door Opens: Maria Altmann and the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer 83

5 Landscape with Smokestacks and Early Trends 90

6 The Max Stern Estate 102

Part 3 Out of Time? 111

7 Bakalar and the Defense of Laches 113

8 California Legislative Amendments and the Legacy of Jacques Goudstikker 122

9 The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Oskar Reichel, and Provenance Research 146

10 Prescriptive Law in Louisiana 163

11 The Nathan Heirs, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Toledo Museum of Art 175

12 The Knives Come Out 187

Part 4 Back and Forth 201

13 Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy 203

14 Leone Meyer and the University of Oklahoma 206

15 Legally Present: A jurisdictional Hook 224

16 The Pissarro of Lily Cassirer 240

17 Hungary and the Herzog Collection 255

18 Commercial Activity or Sovereign Act? 263

Part 5 The Worst System in the North but All the Rest 307

19 Progress or Broken Promises? Restitution Claims Procedures Among the Signatories to the Washington Conference Principles 309

20 A Tragic Fate: Conclusions and Possibilities 345

Acknowledgments 353

Appendix of and Credits for Selected Works at Issue 355

Endnotes 360

Glossary of Names, Terms, and Concepts 374

Bibliography 394

Index 397

Editorial Reviews

★ 2017-06-21
A comprehensive review of United States court cases involving art that was plundered by Nazis. Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime was always keenly attuned to the power of cultural symbolism and eager to find new ways to disenfranchise Jewish people. These two preoccupations converged in their looting of privately owned art between 1933 and 1945. Some treasures were brazenly confiscated, while others were purchased at steep, coerced discounts. In the last few decades, there's been growing interest in this large-scale larceny, and yet much of the stolen art will likely never be returned to its original owners. Debut author O'Donnell, an attorney, calls this the "central paradox posed by disputes in the last twenty years." In this book, he diligently catalogs the many moral and judicial reasons for this absurdity as well as the evolution of laws regarding claims. His study specifically focuses on cases that resulted in litigation in America, providing an exhaustive account of each and arguing that such litigation can be an effective legal strategy despite complaints to the contrary. O'Donnell also includes discussions of landmark moments in art-restitution law, such as the London Declaration in 1943, the Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets in 1998, and the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act of 2016, which was introduced in the U.S. Senate. The United States emerges in O'Donnell's account as an early, forceful leader in international art restitution despite the fact that some of its own laws, and even the Fifth Amendment, can complicate victims' options. His mastery of the relevant law is nothing short of stunning, and his meticulous parsing of legal detail leaves no stones unturned. This is primarily a work of legal scholarship, and the intense attention that it lavishes upon legal minutiae may prove prohibitive to lay readers. However, it also unearths the moral drama beneath the legal niceties and ably discusses the ways that uncooperative museums are complicit in Nazi theft and how nations grapple with the dark legacies of their pasts. A brilliant display of legal erudition combined with historical incisiveness.

Kirkus Reviews