CODART, Dutch and Flemish art in museums worldwide

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Tracing Contested Histories: The Challenges and Future of Provenance Research

You can hardly open a newspaper or magazine or look at a news feed without coming across an item about looted art. Articles discussing objects looted in colonial times or by the Nazis have attracted great interest in recent years. Countless case studies have been published worldwide. Looted art is the subject of numerous research projects, lectures, debates, expert meetings, and roundtable discussions. Amid all these deliberations, many questions remain, also for curators of Dutch and Flemish art who deal with issues of looted art and provenance research as part of their everyday practice. Many publications and exhibitions dwell on this emotive subject: one recent example being an exhibition at the Mauritshuis in The Hague and the Humboldt Forum in Berlin (2023-24). Looted art has a long history. In Roman times, generals sometimes deliberately urged their soldiers to loot and plunder. In other cases they ordered them not to, if they wanted the population to remain on friendly terms with them. In the run-up to, and during, the Napoleonic wars (1803-15), many “artistic conquests” took place in countries including the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and Egypt, and the finest masterpieces were sent to the Louvre, then known as Musée Napoléon. In the wars being fought in our own times, too, we also see artworks being looted, with Ukraine as a case in point.

The Treaty of The Hague of 1795 declared not only that the Netherlands was French territory, but also that much of William V’s art collection was the property of the French state. Among the works confiscated was Paulus Potter’s Cows Reflected in the Water (1648). It was returned to the Netherlands in 1816.

In the period 1933-45, the Nazis looted or confiscated cultural objects on a large scale, or forced their “voluntary” sale. The main victims of these crimes were Jewish collectors, who had to sell (or leave behind) many works of art that would subsequently end up with other collectors, in sale rooms or the art trade. Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring were the most fanatical of the Nazi art collectors and they even confiscated major works of art that Jewish collectors had given on loan to museums. Hitler planned to transfer these objects to the Führermuseum he wanted to build in Linz, the city of his birth – a museum that never materialized. After the war, the looted cultural objects were returned to their countries of origin. Subsequently, it was the task of the country concerned to develop a restitution policy. To implement the return of looted objects, diverse committees and an international consultative body were set up. The art objects, once tracked down and identified, were collected in art depots in Munich and other cities, after which the process of repatriation began.

In the late 1990s there was renewed interest in the material losses suffered by Jewish owners during the Second World War, and the failure to put remedies in place. At the 1998 Washington Conference, 42 countries signed what became known as the “Washington Principles.” With this non-binding agreement, these countries undertook to work towards producing a just solution. Since then, several countries have set up new initiatives to track down looted cultural objects and to reunite them with their rightful owners. Several European countries launched research projects to fill in lacunae in the provenance of objects in public collections. New government policy has been adopted geared towards restitution, and claims in countries such as the Netherlands are handled by an independent committee that advises the government on restitution of works in state owned collections.

In 1945, Sgt. Harry Ettlinger (right) and Lt. Dale Ford (left) found Rembrandt’s self-portrait, now in the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, in a German salt mine (photo: National Archives and Records Administration).

Looted art is not a phenomenon exclusive to wars in Europe. The Europeans themselves looted numerous objects elsewhere (mostly in former colonies) in their expansionist zest in earlier times. Over the centuries, colonial powers shipped a huge quantity of objects to Europe from all parts of the world. European museums of ethnography manage countless objects that were confiscated by missionaries who saw them as impeding conversion to “the true faith.” Thousands of artworks and products of craftsmanship belonging to diverse population groups around the world ended up in European collections. In addition, vast numbers of objects were removed as part of scientific expeditions to various regions and were eventually transferred to museums.

Much has since been done in terms of restitution, but the process is time-consuming because of the complexity surrounding the submission of claims and the lengthy research that is generally necessary to establish an item’s precise provenance. You can only return something once and the process must be carried out meticulously. Each case comes with its own story, and each must be dealt with on an individual basis. The restitution of looted artworks may sound like a simple matter, but it is often quite the opposite – if only because there are countless objects whose ownership can no longer be established. It is often easier to trace provenance in the case of a painting by a well-known artist than in the case of engravings produced in many editions, but even in the case of unique paintings provenance researchers may work for months without producing a result.

Looted art remains a complex subject with many subtle challenges. Even today, we still do not know the rightful owner of many objects in museums around the world. How does it work, provenance research? And should that research be conducted exclusively by the curator, or by a specialist provenance researcher – or should it be a team effort? When can something be classified as “looted art” – and what are the most recent developments in this area? And what differences can be observed between the countries where we work in the field of research and restitution of looted art? We will be discussing this important subject together at the CODART congress in 2025.