Bavaria’s State Painting Collections has kept an internal list of 200 artworks in its possession that it “clearly” believed were Nazi-looted works, German media has revealed.
A further 800 “may have been” looted, according to the list.
The news was “bad but unsurprising”, Hilary Freeman, an author whose grandparents fled Nazi Germany to settle in London, told Brussels Signal on February 27.
Nicole Lampert, a board member of The Jewish News and journalist who writes regularly about anti-Semitism, also told Brussels Signal: “It is absolutely astonishing that 80 years since the war ended, the State of Bavaria, the birthplace of the Nazi party, is still holding on to up to 1,000 works of art looted from Jewish people.
“Time to give the artworks back to the descendants of those it once belonged to. Surely they don’t need more time? All they have been doing over the decades is dragging their feet,” claimed Lampert.
Bavaria’s culture minister Markus Blume promised “more transparency” in a February 26 statement, after Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper on February 19 had revealed the existence of the list on February 19.
A “deeper examination of the provenance research practice at the Bavarian State Painting Collections revealed that some questions remained open or left room for misunderstandings and misinterpretations”, Blume said.
The culture minister has personally kept a 1903 Picasso painting a Jewish family has said was looted from them.
Blume, a Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) politician who has been State’s culture minister since 2022, has not permitted the federal government’s Limbach Commission to appraise the painting, Portrait of Madame Soler.
The Limbach Commission was set up in 2003 to investigate claims about Nazi looted art in government hands.
There is no recourse in Germany for looted artwork in private hands.
Raymond Dowd, a specialist in art restoration and partner at New York law firm Dunnington, Bartholow & Miller, said: “Shamefully, Germany’s courts have been closed to claims against private collectors since shortly after World War II, protecting the spoils of former Nazis.”
This was “an important point the news media misses”, he added.
The Limbach Commission, which Germany’s outgoing government has shut down, was “ineffective”, Dowd said, adding: “Let’s see if the new arbitration process works any better”.
Responding to the controversy, Blume promised to devote €1 million to employ researchers for a new “provenance task force”. It has kept one in-house provenance researcher on its staff since 2008.
The Bavarian State Painting Collections said on its website that it had returned 24 looted works to descendants of their rightful owners since 1998.
Most of these works were “of lesser value’’ and “really valuable works have not been returned”, argued Bavarian State MP Sanne Kurz.
Blume was “demanding consequences” after the embarrassing revelations, said German journalist Olaf Przybilla in a February 26 comment piece in Süddeutsche Zeitung
But he added: “The only problem is that, according to the organisational chart, exactly one person is responsible for this: Himself.”
