News

Family trying to recover extensive Hahn Judaica collection – looted, destroyed by Nazis – and build
Jewish Tribune 24 January 2012
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Kommission empfiehlt Rückgabe von Raubkunst
Der Standard 24 January 2012
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The Kunstmuseum Basel and the Heirs of Kazimir Malevich reach an amicable settlement regarding Malevich Works in Basel
Kunstmuseum Basel and Herrick Feinstein 20 January 2012
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U.S. claims to Schneerson library provocative - Avdeyev
Interfax 13 January 2012
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Raiders of the Lost Art? George Clooney to Make Movie About Nazi-Loot Hunters
Artinfo 12 January 2012
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George Clooney Highlights Stolen Nazi Art
ArtLyst 8 January 2011
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George Clooney to Direct, Star in 'Monuments Men' About Stolen Nazi Art
TheWrap 8 January 2012
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George Clooney's next movie: World War II art drama
LA Times 8 January 2012
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Court Forfeits Cristo Portacroce After Italy Does Not File A Claim
Cultural Heritage Lawyer 5 January 2012
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Le scandale Wildenstein crève l'écran, Liouba révèle un arrangement secret
Pure People 4 January 2012
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Die Angewandte möchte ein Gemälde von Jehudo Epstein restituieren - und sucht nach Verwandten des Malers
Der Standard 27 December 2011
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Glaser Heirs Sell Van de Velde II Painting Back to the Rijksmuseum
MMD Newswire 21 December 2011
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Websites and Resources

International Research Portal for Records Related to Nazi-Era Cultural Property
The Portal provides for the first time digital access to millions of cultural property records from the National Archives of the US, the UK, Germany, Belgium, Ukraine, France and other archival sources.  
click to visit
Polish Wartime Losses
Launched on 2 February 2011 by the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.  The site includes missing plundered paintings by Raphael, Carracci, Breughel, van Dyck, Rubens, and Guardi and others, reflecting the 70% of Poland's cultural heritage lost to the Nazis. The site provides no provenance information though it includes works both privately and publicly owned and claimed.  
click to visit
ERR Database
The Nazi records and photographs of the looting of more than 20,000 objects from Jews in France and Belgium. Click here for background details.
click to visit

Publications

"Beschlagnahmte Bücher". Reichstauschstelle und Preussische Staatsbibliothek zwischen 1933 und 1945. Aspekte der Literaturversorgung unter der Herrschaft des Nationalsozialismus
February 2012
Cornelia Briel.
read more
NS-Provenienzforschung an österreichischen Bibliotheken. Anspruch und Wirklichkeit
November 2011
Bruno Bauer, Christina Köstner-Pemsel, Markus Stumpf (Hg.),.
read more
Lisbon: War in the Shadows of the City of Light, 1939-45
November 2011
Neill Lochery.
read more
Taking it Personally: The Individual Liability of Museum Personnel
November 2011
Ruth Redmond-Cooper and Norman Palmer, eds.
read more
Lunching under the Goya. Jewish Collectors in Budapest at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century
October 2011
Konstantin Akinsha.
read more
Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Fay, and the Vichy Dilemma
September 2011
Barbara Will.
read more
Neglected Witnesses: The Fate of Jewish Ceremonial Objects during the Second World War and After
September 2011
Julie-Marthe Cohen with Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek eds.
read more
Cultural Heritage Conventions and Other Instruments: A Compendium with Commentaries
September 2011
Patrick J. O'Keefe and Lyndel V. Prott.
read more
United Kingdom: Holocaust-Looted Art: A Changing Legal Landscape
June 2011
Judith Bresler.
read more
Nazi Art Theft: Still Unsolved
June 2011
Max Amichai Heppner. Booklet posted online about the theft of paintings from the dealer, Albert Heppner, in Amsterdam and his son's continuing search for them.  To read the booklet, click here.
read more
Nazi Art Thefts Fiction
January 2011
To see a list of fiction works, click here
read more
Cultural Heritage & Arts Review
January 2011
Second issue of the Journal, with articles on restitution, immunity from seizure, US state laws, protection of cultural property in war, and other issues.
read more
Lost Lives, Lost Art: Jewish Collectors, Nazi Art Theft, and the Quest for Justice
November 2010
Melissa Müller and Monika Tatzkow.
read more
And The Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris
October 2010
Alan Riding.
read more

Welcome to lootedart.com

This site contains two fully searchable databases.

The Information Database contains information and documentation from forty nine countries, including laws and policies, reports and publications, archival records and resources, current cases and relevant websites.

The Object Database contains details of over 25,000 objects of all kinds – paintings, drawings, antiquities, Judaica, etc – looted, missing and/or identified from over fifteen countries.

For a list of Essential Website Links,showing all key research sites and resources,click here.

For details of international resources, see below, Online Resources and Case News.

To subscribe to our looted art newsletter, click here.

NEW

Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin - List of rightful owners of books in its collection now being sought

Ex Libris Szafranski.jpg  Zugangszettel.jpg  Besitzstempel.jpg

On 10 November 2011, the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin (the Central Library of Berlin) published a list of the rightful owners of looted books in its collection identified through signatures, stamps, inscriptions and notes found in the books - all of which have been photographed by the Library. Names in the books include those of the rightful owners, also the names of donors dedications, previous owners from the period before 1933, and, in some cases, the names of the Nazi perpetrators. While many of the books were forcibly stolen by the agencies of the Third Reich or were taken as a result of discriminatory laws, others had to be sold by the persecuted either for their flight or to allow them to survive.A minimum number of 1,920 of the books were acquired by the Library in 1943 from the municipal pawnship and these come exclusively from the private collections of the Jews of Berlin who were deported and murdered. The Library is seeking the rightful owners to that they can return the books to them. The names are searchable on this site. Click here for all details.

Felbermeyer Photographs for the Central Collecting Point, Munich, ca. 1945


Konrad Roethel at the Central Collecting Point Munich 1949

Taken by the Munich-born photographer Johannes Felbermeyer, more than 1,100 prints and negatives record the repatriation of art after World War II, depicting those involved in the process- art-historical and military figures including Edgar Breitenbach, General Lucius D. Clay, Charles Parkhurst, Rodolfo Siviero, and Craig Hugh Smyth and approximately 500 European paintings and sculptures. Available at the Getty Research Institute, these have now been digitised and can be browsed and searched here.

104,000 paintings from the UK nation's art collections now online
On 16 December Andrew Ellis, the Director of the UK's Public Catalogue Foundation, which is collaborating with the BBC on the Your Paintings project to put all the UK's publicly owned paintings online, announced that a further 40,000 paintings have been added to the initial upload. This brings the total number of paintings from UK public collections now online to 104,000, over half the national collection. It is estimated that the entire national collection of 200,000 paintings, which is held in 3,000 galleries, museums, libraries and public institutions, making it one of the largest and most diverse collections in the world, will be online by the end of 2012.  

Launched in June 2011, Your Paintings now contains the works of over 23,000 artists. The site is interactive and fully searchable by artist, collection and location, and  provides links to the collections themselves.To make the site searchable by subject matter, over 5,000 members of the UK public have signed up as taggers, alongside curators and experts, participating in the task of cataloguing the collection online in a way which will allow searches for a wide range of subject matter across the website.
Online Resources and Case News
Country-specific information is available on this site for 48 countries, from Albania to Yugoslavia, in the Information by Country section. Details of important, non country-specific, online resources are available in the International section of the site which contains several categories of information.  For example: 

Case News: provides details of claims and cases ruled on or settled outside the courts with copies of reports and rulings. Full details of a comprehensive range of cases can be found in the News Archive, which is fully searchable by name of family, artwork, museum, city, etc.

Lawsuits
: provides details of claims and cases ruled on or being settled in court with copies of court filings and judgements.

Research Resources: provides details of family records, tracing services, texts of post-war reports, and books and publications.

Web Resources: provides details of various online databases of looted paintings, results of provenance research in countries around the world, archival records available online and other research materials.

Seeking Owners of Identified Looted Property: provides lists of names of individuals whose looted property has been identified in institutions in Germany and whose heirs are being sought. 

Other categories of information include Governmental Conferences and Hearings, Laws, Policies and Guidelines, Art Trade, and Press, Television, Radio and Film.  To explore all these sections, click here.

The site is regularly updated with new resources and developments.  To provide details of resources or cases to add to the site, please email info@lootedart.com.
© website copyright Central Registry 2012