Peter Jonathan Bell and Kristi A. NelsonWith contributions by Tanja Bernsau, Kathryn Griffith, Neville Rowley, and Nancy Yeide As the Allies advanced into Germany in April 1945, General Patton’s Third Army discovered the collections of the Berlin State Museums hidden in a salt mine 2,100 feet underground. Placed in the care of the “Monuments Men,”
Continue reading ...The German Lost Art Foundation, in cooperation with Arbeitskreis Provenienzforschung e. V., Arbeitskreis Provenienzforschung und Restitution – Bibliotheken, Deutscher Bibliotheksverband e. V., Deutscher Museumsbund e. V., and ICOM Deutschland e. V. have published the “Provenance Research Manual to Identify Cultural Property Seized Due to Persecution During the National Socialist Era”. The English translation of the
Continue reading ...6th international conference on the confiscation, thefts and transfers of works of art as a result of Nazi rule over Czechoslovakia and Europe during the Second World War and in the post-war period organized by Documentation Centre for Property Transfers of Cultural Assets of WWII Victims p.b.o.
Continue reading ...During the darkest days of World War II, a ragtag band of British and American art scholars braved the battlefields of Europe to rescue thousands of cultural treasures from Nazi pillage and the collateral damage of armed conflict.
Continue reading ...In Room 38 of the Louvre’s Richelieu Wing hangs “The Astronomer” by the Dutch master Jan Vermeer. It is an exquisite painting. The stargazer sits before a celestial globe, his fingers spanning the constellation Pegasus. He wears a teal Japanese silk robe, a style favored by Dutch burghers in the late 17th century. He is lost in thought and bathed in a golden light.
Continue reading ...When it comes to art, “private” and “public” take on confused, tangled meanings.
Continue reading ...The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) makes the internet’s largest Interactive Holocaust Collection available for the first time ever. Included among the National Archives records available online at are concentration camp registers and documents from Dachau, Mauthausen, Auschwitz, and Flossenburg, the “Ardelia Hall Collection” of records relating to the Nazi looting of Jewish possessions,
Continue reading ...The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), the “Special Task Force” headed by Adolf Hitler’s leading ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, was one of the main Nazi agencies engaged in the plunder of cultural valuables in Nazi-occupied countries during the Second World War. A particularly notorious operation by the ERR was the plunder of art from French Jewish and a number of Belgian Jewish collections from 1940 to 1944 that were brought to the Jeu de Paume building in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris for processing by the ERR Sonderstab Bildende Kunst or “Special Staff for Pictorial Art.”
Continue reading ...Symposium presented by Christie’s and Union Union Internationale des Avocats, Milano, ITALY
23 June 2011
6-7 May 2011
United States National Archives
Washington, DC