The pace of provenance research into objects ruthlessly seized by the Nazis is accelerating. Not before time.

Last week, Germany announced the opening of a ‘Help Desk’, established by the state-funded German Lost Art Foundation, to help claimants recover family assets stolen by the Nazis.  This week, a French art historian, Emmanuelle Polack, an expert in the French art market during the period of German occupation, joined the Musée du Louvre to investigate acquisitions they made during that period.

Here in the UK, museums have been slower than other countries to recruit full-time provenance curators. The Museums Association told me there’s a possibility of further money for funding collections research, but up to now it’s been a low priority for both government and museums. Money to address infrastructure issues for most UK museums has been a much higher priority.

Which is why the V&A’s initiative in 2018 to recruit Dr Jacques Schuhmacher, an expert on restitution of Jewish-owned looted works of art, as a full-time Provenance and Spoliation Curator is welcomed. He’s the first dedicated provenance curator to be appointed by a UK museum.

The V&A is ahead of other UK national collections by debating, if not always resolving, the difficult issues of restitution. Throughout last year Schuhmacher led a fascinating programme of talks on different aspects of restitution (called the Gilbert Provenance and Spoliation Research Seminars, which continue into 2020) and last December the Museum launched their Culture in Crisis  portal, an online database of cultural heritage preservation projects. 

The Museum’s latest initiative, Concealed Histories: Uncovering the Story of Nazi Looting, co-curated by Schuhmacker and fellow V&A curator Alice Minter, throws an emotive  spotlight on the systematic theft of Jewish-owned art. 

It’s a small but intriguing display drawing on Schuhmacher’s research into 80 or so objects from the dazzling collection of works of art formed by Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert.  

The Gilbert’s were British citizens of Jewish ancestry who left the UK in 1949 to set up home in Los Angeles. Their vast collection, transferred to the V&A in 2008, features almost 1200 exquisite objects of gold and silver, enamel miniatures, boxes and mosaics.

Alongside the eight objects featured in this display, including the 18th century Dresden jewelled and gold-mounted amethystine quartz snuffbox illustrated below, are narratives recording a painful, tragic history, together with a series of missing years in each object’s chain of ownership.

Before the Gilbert’s acquired these items, each had been owned by a different European Jewish collector. However, all were forcibly wrenched away by the Nazis, the objects ‘disappearing’ for several years, before re-emerging on the art market during the ‘60s and ‘70s.

What happened to these objects during those twenty or so missing years, before purchased by the Gilberts, is a mystery. But it’s a fate shared by tens of thousands of other Nazi-looted objects, which this display has set out to highlight.

Restitution issues were not a priority for museums or collectors during the ‘60s and ‘70s. Very few stopped to ask questions about provenance. The art market was booming; pension fund managers on both sides of the Atlantic were blinded by the financial  'value' inherent in fine art assets; US collections were scrambling to make up for lost time. There were too few reasons and no hard motives to question how an object had arrived on the market. 

The Gilberts were no different from other passionate, generous collectors, later benefactors, by failing to query those missing years. But priorities have changed and time is running out to recover first-hand information on the location and post-war history of thousands of other works of art looted by the Nazis. 

The V&A hopes this display will raise awareness of the human value of investigating the missing years in an object’s chain of ownership, perhaps revealing new information about these objects.  In the meantime, it’s hard not to be affected by the personal tragedies they conceal and hard to forget there are thousands more Nazi-looted objects lying unrecognised in public and private collections.  Unlike these eight objects, many are still considered 'heirless' - recovered from Germany and placed on exhibition, but without hard evidence of ownership.  They sit there waiting for the families of their original owners to re-discover them. 

Concealed Histories: Uncovering the Story of Nazi Looting is at the V&A Museum, London until 10 January 2021. 

Photo: A jewelled, gold-mounted amethystine quartz snuffbox, likely made in Dresden, c.1755

Courtesy of Victoria & Albert Museum, London

After this was written.......

Less than a month into her new role, the Nazi looting expert Emmanuelle Polack has identified 10 paintings in the Louvre they purchased at the auction of works confiscated from the French-Jewish lawyer Armand Dorville.  The works are now the subject of an official restitution claim.  Read more here .