"Looting," indeed!
Nurse KAT
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American museums looking for art looted by Nazis
March 3, 2000
Web posted at: 3:01 AM EST (0801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A federal agency is planning to report by the end of
the year on how many of the 600,000 art works estimated to have been
looted by the Nazis may be in federal museums or other U.S. government
sites.
According to the Smithsonian Institution, only eight of the 750 art
museums in the country are under federal control, led by the National
Gallery of Art. On Wednesday the gallery reported that among its 3,000
paintings is a still life by Dutch artist Frans Snyders from the 1600s
that had once been in the hands of a Nazi art dealer. Gallery officials
did not know how he got it.
Earlier this week Britain's National Museum Directors' Conference listed
more than 300 works in their institutions that the Nazis might have
taken, but American museums do not report to a central body.
Looting art is an old wartime tradition in Europe.
"The Germans have a lot of information about what the Russians took from
them and the Russians know a lot about what the Germans took," said J.
Carter Brown, chairman of the federal Commission of Fine Arts.
Tracing Nazi-tainted art is hard, said Stuart Loeser, spokesman for the
Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United
States, whose agency will make the year-end report to President Clinton.
The estimate of 600,000 stolen works worldwide came from Jonathan
Petropoulos, the commission's top expert on plundered art.
Commission Chairman Edgar M. Bronfman told The Art Newspaper, published
in Britain last month, that the report will deal with wartime American
policies on art, allegations of mishandling by U.S. armed forces and the
"Hungarian gold train," which was loaded with art work and gold from
Nazi stocks.
Mimi Gaudieri, executive director of the Association of Art Museum
Directors, said that doing the research in American museums is a bigger
job than in Britain. American museums get their collections from private
donors and dealers, she noted. In Britain many works in museums come
from collections made by royal and noble patrons hundreds of years ago.
"Museums would not report to us," said Edward H. Able, Jr., president of
the American Association of Museums. "They'd tell the Art Loss Register
or CAR (Commission of Art Recovery). We support both of them. We're not
a policing body. The museums are self-policing."
The register is a private business, and CAR is part of the American
Jewish Congress.
At a hearing last month before the House Banking Committee it was noted
that the North Carolina Museum of Art had just agreed to return a
500-year-old painting by Lucas Cranach to a pair of aging sisters in
Vienna. It had been stolen from their granduncle 60 years ago.
CAR Chairman Ronald S. Lauder, a former U.S. ambassador to Austria, told
the committee that the German government has agreed to take an active
role with his commission in trying to return stolen art.
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Nurse KAT says: "Looting art is an old wartime tradition in Europe."
This was just TOO ironic to bypass! LMAO! PEACE!