The artful return
Updated on 27 March 2007
The last few years have proved an extraordinary time for art restitution. Has the process become over-commercialised?
Goudstikker collection
By the time he fled his native Holland after the Nazi invasion, Jacques Goudstikker was the pre-eminent art dealer in the Netherlands, if not Europe.
His collection, housed in an Amsterdam gallery, was known throughout the world. During the war, senior Nazi Hermann Goering visited the gallery and helped himself.
But Goudstikker had kept a detailed inventory of his paintings and after years of detective work, 200 of them were returned to his American descendants last February.
Now, just a year later, over 100 of the paintings are about to go on sale at Christie's. The rest will remain in the family's private collection and go on touring exhibition.
The sale may have raised a few eyebrows but, taking into consideration the costs of retrieving the work - employing lawyers and art detectives to track down artworks and take the case through the Dutch courts for 10 years - along with the hefty sums required to insure such works of art, the need to sell is apparent.
But restitution has become a lucrative business where lawyers and art 'detectives' and advisers profit immeasurably. Indeed, the likes of Sotheby's and Christie's were not blind to the business potential of such claims, having set up departments specialising in provenance and restitution, around 10 years ago.
Read about Nick Glass's report Returing art from the 9 Aug 2006 here and watch the report here
Cranach's Cupid
Cupid Complaining to Venus by Lucas Cranach the Elder is one of the National Gallery's finest works - and it's worth millions.
When it was bought by the Gallery in 1963 its origin was a little hazy. The Gallery recently learnt that the painting, like those belonging to Jacques Goudstikker, was looted during the war.
The previous owner was an American was reporter called Patricia Lochridge Hartwell. She witnessed the liberation of Dachau concentration camp and, in 1945, was taken to a warehouse where US soldiers had accumulated art looted by the Nazis.
She was offered a choice - she could take any picture she liked. She chose the Cranach, and the rest is history. The National Gallery is now braced for a claim.
Read about Nick Glass's report Looted Nazi art in the National Gallery? from 26 Nov 2006 here and watch the report here.
Klimt's portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer
A small museum in New York is now home to the most expensive painting on earth: Gustave Klimt's portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. It took Klimt a year to paint it in 1907, it took Adele's niece, Maria Altman, seven years fighting the Austrian government to get it back. She succeeded in March 2006.
Now in her 90s, Maria Altman has sold it to billionaire collector and co-founder of the Neue Galerie in New York, Ronald Lauder, for a reported $135m.
Now so valuable few could own or insure, Lauder has described such artworks as the "last prisoners of world war two".
Read about Nick Glass's report Returing art from 9 Aug 2006 here and watch the report here.
£20 million street scene
At around the same time, Lauder also bought a street scene by the expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner for £20 million, also for the Neue Galerie.
Berlin Street Scene, painted in 1913, had recently been restituted to British Communist Party chairman Anita Halpin. It's claimed that her grandmother, Tekla Hess, had been forced to give up their art collection under duress. For nearly 30 years the painting had hung in Berlin's Brücke Museum.
The painting is just one of an extensive collection of expressionist art owned by the Hess family, and in the 1960s, Anita Halpin's father was compensated for a fraction of the collection's worth - at the time all that was on offer.
Compensating the descendents of Nazis
It is not just the descendents of the victims of the Nazi regime who seek the return of what once belonged to their family; compensation claims from Nazi relatives who had goods confiscated by the Red Army at the end of the second world war are now beginning to surface.
The German government, aware of thousands of potential claims, has put money aside in readiness. But, under a 1994 German law, property cannot be restored to Nazis - and by proxy their families - who had "extensively" served the regime or who were suspected of committing serious crimes.
This law means that in every claim the relative's roll in Nazi Germany would have to be carefully investigated.
In one case, the family of Dr Gustav Schuster lost a case for the return of ?500,000 worth of art last year when the court decided he had played a not insignificant role in the spread Nationalist Socialist ideology.
