Manhattan museum plans to issue Holocaust looted-art study

March 2, 2000
Web posted at: 11:11 a.m. EST (1611 GMT)

NEW YORK (Reuters) -- New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art said on Wednesday that in four to five weeks it will publish a study showing how many of its 2 million artworks it has scrutinized to see if the Nazis might have looted them.

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So far, the museum has yet to find any of an estimated 600,000 artworks that were plundered from Holocaust victims.

"Looked at right now, we would say zero problems," Harold Holzer, a museum spokesman told Reuters by telephone. "We think we are obligated to report on how many works of art we've examined," he added, declining to describe the study in any detail.

The international art world is under the gun to do more than just conduct its own research.

The World Jewish Congress (WJC), a New York-based advocacy group, has criticized museums for waiting for artworks to be claimed by Holocaust victims instead of publicly announcing that they have suspect items.

Under guidelines adopted in June 1998 by the Association of Art Museum Directors, museums were obliged to immediately review the provenance or history of their collections to try to find out if they were stolen by the Nazis and never returned to their owners.

Jewish advocacy groups and museums say this can be a tough question to answer.

"The dead don't make claims," Elan Steinberg, executive director of the WJC, said.

Investigating owner lineage

The National Gallery of Art in Washington found that some 400 of the European paintings it owns had gaps in their provenance during the World War II era, according to Deborah Ziska, a spokeswoman.

But these sorts of gaps are not uncommon.

"Such gaps during this period do not imply that works of art were looted; as matter of fact such gaps are not unexpected at any period in art history," she explained, in a statement.

The gallery turned up one work, "Still Life with Fruit and Game" by the noted 16th century Flemish painter Frans Synders, which was handled by Karl Haberstock, whom the WJC termed "one of the most notorious nazi art dealers."

"We've followed every clue we had with this painting," Ziska told Reuters by telephone. "The research never stops. ... If anything comes up, we'll continue researching."

MoMA's inspection

The sensitivity museums can display toward art that might have been stolen from Holocaust victims was seen with New York City's Museum of Modern Art.

A museum spokeswoman provided Reuters with recent Congressional testimony by its director, Glenn Lowry, in which he described in general terms a one-year inquiry into whether one work was stolen during World War II. The research was prompted by a query from what the museum called the representative of a major European collection.

But the museum spokeswoman did not return calls seeking more details about the inquiry. "There is absolutely no 'battle' going on," Mary Strahlendoff said, in a statement.

Lowry also told Congress "We are not aware of a single Nazi-tainted work of art in our collection, of the more than 100,000 we hold," according to a copy of his speech.

Copyright 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Association of Art Museum Directors
The World Jewish Congress
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Museum of Modern Art, New York

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