Nazi robberies - Blume calls for a legal basis for the return of looted art
Following the proposal by Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth (Greens) for a reform of the restitution of Nazi-looted property, Bavaria's Minister of Art Markus Blume (CSU) is calling for a legal basis. "A further development of the Advisory Commission must go hand in hand with a binding legal framework," he told the German Press Agency in Munich. "Voluntariness and attitude are good, but law is even better."
Roth had announced that from January, funding for cultural institutions would be linked to the acceptance of new regulations by the Advisory Commission for the Restitution of Nazi-looted property. She wants the Commission to be able to be called upon by an individual party to a dispute in future. At present, the Commission can only become active if both parties want to involve it - i.e. those who lay claim to a work of art that may have been looted by the National Socialists and the institution in which this work is located today.
In the current situation, one side can block the process through inaction or intransigence. This is seen as one of the reasons why the Commission has only mediated in 23 cases in 20 years. It is estimated that up to 600,000 works of art were stolen during the Nazi era.
Bavaria is also repeatedly criticized. For example, the Bavarian State Painting Collections have been resisting an appeal to the Commission for years in the dispute over the restitution of the 1905 painting "Madame Soler" by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) to the heirs of the Jewish art collector Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy.
"The "Madame Soler" restitution request was examined extremely carefully," emphasized a spokesperson for the Bavarian Ministry of Art. "The result of the independent provenance research as well as all legal and parliamentary consultations is clear: the conditions for an appeal to the Advisory Commission are not met because it is precisely not a case of Nazi-related seizure in the sense of the Washington Declaration."
Blume emphasized: "Bavaria stands by restitution without ifs and buts." For the Free State, it is "a matter of course that collection objects in the holdings of state museums and collections are restituted if they were seized from their former owners as part of Nazi persecution".
He referred to the Office for Provenance Research, which was set up by the Bavarian State Painting Collections in 1999. "Since then, 6,000 works have been proactively examined. As a result, 25 works from 17 collections have been restituted," said Blume. Since the Washington Declaration came into force, state institutions in Bavaria have restituted 245 objects. "Instead of pillorying the states, Claudia Roth must do her own homework and finally create legal certainty."
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Source: www.stern.de
