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.
German Culture Minister Bernd Neumann doubles funding for provenance research
On 16 May 2012 Culture Minister Bernd Neumann announced that funding for provenance research would rise from €1million to €2million per annum becuse of the high demand from projects. The Arbeitsstelle für Provenienzrecherche/-forschung (AfP) is currently funding twelve projects and Minister Neumann stated: "I am pleased that the first time, institutions of Schleswig-Holstein and Rhineland-Palatinate have filed applications, so that there are now projects funded by the AfP in all provinces of the Federal Republic." For full details, click here.
Statement of the Bundesgerichtshof in the case of the Hans Sachs Poster Collection
The decision of the German Supreme Court, the
Bundesgerichtshof, in respect of the Hans Sachs Poster Collection was published on 24 April 2012 and is available
here.
On 16 March 2012 the Supreme Court had issued a press statement in respect of its judgement that the Hans Sachs Poster Collection be returned to the rightful owner, Peter Sachs. The statement can be read
here. The Court ruled that Hans Sachs never lost legal ownership of the collection and the right to restitution, set out in the post war Federal Restitution Act, remains in force today. Therefore not to restitute would "perpetuate Nazi injustice". The German Historical Museum Berlin, which has been holding the Collection, issued a statement also on 16 March that it would not resist the judgement of the Court and would enter into talks with Peter Sachs to return the Collection. Its press statement can be read
here.
Publication of Provenance Research at the Voralberg Museum and the Resolution of the State Government February 2012
Follwing an agreement of 28 February 2012 with the State Government of Voralberg, the
Voralberg Landesmuseum in Austria has published a list of objects identified through its Provenance Research Project. These can be viewed
here. The items fall into three categories: A - expropriated objects which are recommended for restitution; B - expropriated objects which came to the museum in the Nazi era but whose location is currently unknown; C -objects whose provenance is problematic and further information is needed. The owners of the expropriated objects recommended for restitution are the Fairholme family of the Villa Wellenau (the villa was confiscated and the contents given to the Museum - paintings, watercolours, photographs, books, porcellain), the Pollak collection (decorative objects including porcellain given to the Museum by Hitler as a gift), and the St Peter Dominican Monastery of Bludenz (wooden objects).
UK Spoliation Advisory Panel publishes a report on a claim for fourteen clocks and watches now in the British Museum, London
The Panel’s opinion was that the moral strength of the claim was insufficiently strong to warrant a return of the timepieces or that an ex-gratia payment be made to the claimants. The Panel did find, however, that the sale of the timepieces at auction at Christies in 1939 amounted to a forced sale, albeit at the lower end of any scale of gravity for such sales. Furthermore, expert advice provided to the Panel revealed that the prices obtained at the auction were fair. The Panel recommended that, whenever one or more of the timepieces is on display at the British Museum, it should be accompanied by a description of the history and provenance of the object(s) during and since the Nazi era, with special reference to the claimants’ interest therein.
To read the Report, click
here.
Dutch government to return 16th century painting to the heirs of Saemy Rosenberg

17 February 2012: A painting from the workshop of Palma Il Vecchio, The Holy Family with John the Baptist and St. Catherine, is to be returned to the heirs of art dealer Saemy Rosenberg, following a recommendation of the Dutch Restitutions Committee. A claim for a further twelve objects was rejected. A claim by the heirs of Herbert Gutmann for four bronzes from the collection of Eugen Gutmann was also rejected. For further details, see the press release here, the Rosenberg recommendation here, and the Gutmann recommendation here.
US Federal Judge orders return of Romanino painting 'Cristo Portacroce' to Gentili family

On 6 February 2012 US Federal Judge Robert Hinkle ordered the return of a 16th century Baroque painting depicting Christ carrying the cross to the heirs of Federico Gentili di Giuseppe, a Jewish man who died shortly before the German occupation of France in World War II. Previously, in January 2012, the US District Court for the Northern District of Florida had ordered the forfeiture of the painting, the
Cristo Portacroce Trascinato Da Un Manigoldo after its seizure on 4 November 2011 by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE)
Homeland Security Investigations (
HSI). The Commission for Looted Art in Europe had been seeking the restitution of the painting from the Italian government, which held it in the Brera Museum in Milan, and assisted in obtaining the seizure and return of the painting after it was loaned to the Mary Brogan Museum in Tallahassee, Florida.
Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin - List of rightful owners of books in its collection now being sought

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.
As a result of the list of names being published on lootedart.com on 3 January 2012, the Library received many enquiries from families whose names were listed. In order to help these enquirers, as of 4 May 2012, a new website, http://raubgut.zlb.de/ enables direct access to the individual objects in the Library that belong to the people named.
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.
Two Wilhelm Lehmbruck watercolours restituted to the heirs of Paul Westheim by the Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz
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.