On 2 February 2012 the Restitutions Committee announced it has issued recommendations on four claims for a total of 23 works of art from the Dutch National Art Collection, of which five works of art are to be restituted. The other claims were rejected. The four claims are from the Edouard Jonas, Adolf Arnhold, Aron Hiegentlich and Simon De Haan heirs. For full details, click here. 

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.

On 27 January 2012 the Stiftung Preussicher Kulturbesitz (SPK) in Berlin announced the restitution of two watercolours, Susanna (1914) and Mutter und Kind (1914) to Dr Margot Frank, heir of the collector Paul Westheim. The watercolours have been re-acquired by the SPK and will remain in the Kupferstichkabinett. To read the SPK press release, click here. To view the two watercolours, click here.

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.