May 4, 2000 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Museums across the country — and around the world — are using the Internet to post information about artworks in their collections that have incomplete ownership records for the years 1933 to 1945 and may have been looted by the Nazis.
In June 1998, the Association of Art Museum Directors adopted guidelines that called on American museums to survey their collections for works of art that were unlawfully confiscated before or during World War II and were never returned to their owners. A number of American museums are starting to use the Internet to report on the results of their research and to call attention to pieces for which they do not have complete records.
* The Art Institute of Chicago has posted on its Web site (http://www.artic.edu/aic/provenance/index.html) a list of 439 paintings and 109 pieces of sculpture in its collection, with photographs and descriptions of the items, that have incomplete ownership records.
* In addition to a list of 393 paintings for which it does not have complete histories, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Web site (http://www.metmuseum.org/news/provenance_a-f.htm) includes testimony presented last month by the New York museum’s director to the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States.
* Although there are more than 200 other European paintings in its collection with gaps in their ownership records during the Nazi era, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts selected seven paintings “of particular concern” to feature on its Web site (http://www.mfa.org/research). Each listing includes the title of the piece, the artist who created it, and what the museum knows of the painting’s origins.
* The Museum of Modern Art, in New York, posted photographs and what ownership information it has on 15 paintings in its collection that have incomplete records (http://www.moma.org/menu/provenance.html).
The National Gallery of Art, in Washington, discovered that eight paintings in its collection had been looted by the Nazis — and returned to their rightful owners after World War II. The paintings are featured on the museum’s Web site (http://www.nga.gov/collection/provfeat.htm) along with a ninth painting that passed through a dealer who sold looted art and for which the museum has only a partial record of ownership.
In March, the National Museum Directors Conference posted on its Web site (http://nationalmuseums.org.uk/spoliation/spoliation.html) a list of 350 artworks with incomplete histories held by museums in the United Kingdom. The German government has created a database (http://www.lostart.de), which went online last month, that lists art stolen during the Nazi era.
