[CPProt.net] Suit Highlights Failures on Art Restitution

Thu May 12 06:20:15 CEST 2005

Suit Highlights Failures on Art Restitution
By NATHANIEL POPPER 
May 13, 2005

As part of a renewed push to reclaim art seized by the Nazis, an elderly
Holocaust survivor has filed suit against the Spanish government to regain a
Camille Pissarro painting taken from his grandmother. 

Claude Cassirer, 84, filed suit Tuesday in a Los Angeles court, demanding
the return of the painting — "Rue Saint-Honoré, après-midi, effet de pluie"
— which is displayed in Madrid's Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum. Art experts said
that Cassirer has unusually compelling evidence that the painting rightfully
belongs to him, but Cassirer has been rebuffed by the Spaniards for five
years. 

"It's part of my life," Cassirer told the Forward. "It's part of everything
we had in Germany before Hitler."

The case comes amid a flurry of activity in the art restitution field. In
the last few months, after letting the issue fall by the wayside for most of
the last three years, the three primary international institutions dealing
with Holocaust-era restitution have begun consulting in an effort to revamp
international efforts on artwork seized by the Nazis. In January a project
was launched to document national laws governing restitution. 

Despite this recent activity, the Cassirer case underscores the lack of
progress in Holocaust-era art restitution since the issue first gained
attention in the late 1990s, several restitution experts said.

Many countries — including Spain — signed agreements in the late 1990s
stating the importance of returning artwork stolen during the Nazi era, but
the follow-through on those principles has been less than complete.

"There has been no effort to hold countries accountable," said Stuart
Eizenstat, who was President Clinton's special representative on 

Holocaust-era issues. "The momentum we generated has been lost."

In 1998, Eizenstat was present when 44 countries came to a conference in
Washington and signed on to a set of principles that enjoined them to help
find and return paintings. 

The agreement urged countries to settle the claims of Holocaust survivors
out of court. It stated: "If the pre-War owners of art that is found to have
been confiscated by the Nazis... can be identified, steps should be taken
expeditiously to achieve a just and fair solution." 

Experts like Eizenstat say that in the first few years after the Washington
conference, worldwide activity on art restitution was intense. Several
organizations were founded to help survivors find lost art — including the
Commission for Art Recovery, which was formed by the World Jewish Congress
and cosmetics magnate Ronald Lauder. However, in the last three years these
organizations have been largely moribund, with Web sites trimmed back to a
bare skeleton.

Governments have also dropped their early commitment to the issue. Many
European countries still have laws that effectively bar the return of
cultural objects from public collections. The American government, which led
the way during the 1990s, did not implement many of the recommendations that
came out of a 2001 report written by the Presidential Commission for
Holocaust Assets in the United States. The State Department has actually
filed briefs against survivors who sought to obtain art from foreign
countries through lawsuits.

"There's an avoidance of the obligation to right these injustices, and we're
very aware that time is running out," said Anne Webber, executive director
of the Commission for Looted Art in Europe, the only international
organization that has consistently worked full time on the issue of art
restitution. 

Lacking diplomatic alternatives, many Holocaust survivors have turned to the
courts. In June 2004, a decision in a California case — brought by 88-year
old Maria Altmann — opened the way for American citizens claiming
Nazi-looted art to sue foreign governments in American courts. Cassirer is
using that precedent in his own case, which was filed in the same court as
Altmann's.

Such lawsuits are still treading untested legal territory: No plaintiff has
won back a painting from a foreign country in an American court.

In addition to the legal intricacies, there are moral dilemmas in the fight
to reclaim art. When it came to recovering Jewish money from Swiss banks,
most of the banks had held the Jewish property since World War II. But in
the case of most paintings, the current owners purchased the objects more
recently and rarely knew they were buying looted goods. 

"It's a Solomonic situation," said Randol Schoenberg, Altmann's lawyer. "You
have one piece of property and two innocent parties. You have a situation
where the law has to pick which one gets it."

Art institutions in America have not given up. The American Association of
Museums established the Nazi Era Internet Portal in 2003, and today 120
member museums display information they have on the provenance of artworks,
allowing survivors to search for information more easily (similar efforts
have faltered in European countries). Art auction houses have also become
serious about tracking the history of paintings: Last fall, Christie's hired
away the top restitution expert from New York's Holocaust Claims Processing
Office, the main governmental body in America dealing with art claims.

On an international level, though, no one is coordinating such efforts. To
help change this, Eizenstat has recently been in discussion with Weber and
with officials from the World Jewish Restitution Organization and the
Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. 

Officials at all these organizations say that the Cassirer case symbolizes
the need for new activity.

The Cassirer family purchased the painting from Pissaro in 1898. It was
handed down to Claude Cassirer's grandmother, Lilly, who raised Claude after
his own mother's death. 

In 1939, when Lilly applied for a visa to leave Nazi Germany, she was given
one on the condition that she relinquish the Pissaro painting. Lilly
searched for the painting after the war, but it was only in 2000 that Claude
found the work in the Spanish foundation, which had acquired it from a Swiss
baron in 1993.

Much of the legal case revolves around whether the Spanish government owns
the foundation's paintings. The Thyssen-Bornemisza foundation is technically
an independent body, but the government gave the foundation $327 million to
buy the baron's collection. In addition the foundation's board is comprised
primarily of members of the Spanish government. 

Jewish organizations have helped set up meetings between the government and
the Cassirers, and in 2001 the Commission for Art Recovery helped Cassirer
present a petition to the government, but it was denied.

Repeated efforts to reach the Spanish ministry for cultural affairs were
unsuccessful.

Many experts question whether the lawsuit alone will be enough to recover
the painting. Even if the Cassirers win the case, there appears to be no
international law that would compel the Spanish government to return the
work. But the case is already attracting attention — and ramping the
pressure on the Spanish government. Cassirer said that if he has any success
in his lawsuit, he plans to set up a foundation to help others seeking lost
art.

"People are at a loss about how to pursue this," Cassirer said. "We're just
the people to turn around and help others."

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