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ART: Kimbell among institutions giving works back

12:50 PM CDT on Monday, June 12, 2006

By BILL MARVEL / The Dallas Morning News

Works of art have double lives. They're cultural objects, collected for their beauty and studied for the vision they offer of the human experience. But they're also things of value, sometimes very great value. As such they can be bought and sold – and stolen. And when they're stolen, they have to be given back.

Associated Press

The Seattle Art Museum returned the Matisse painting Odalisque to the heirs of French art dealer Paul Rosenberg.

That's why art museum visitors these days may occasionally find favorite paintings missing from museum walls.

The greatest concern is artworks looted by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. Experts say there may be hundreds of these stolen works in museum galleries and storerooms or hanging on the walls of private collections, all subject to the claims of the rightful owners.

J.M.W. Turner's glorious, golden Glaucus and Scylla will disappear from the collection of Fort Worth's Kimbell Art Museum later this month, returned to the heirs of the French family that lost it to the Nazis' Vichy collaborators 60 years ago.

The claim on the Turner came in a letter received last September. "In one sense your heart sinks," Kimbell director Timothy Potts says. "In another an issue like this just has to be handled with the appropriate seriousness and promptness. We asked for copies of the relevant documents so we could work through them with our lawyers."

The Kimbell's experience is only the latest:

•In 1999 the Seattle Art Museum returned the Henri Matisse painting Odalisque to the heirs of French art dealer Paul Rosenberg. The painting had been stolen in 1941 from a vault in occupied Paris and later sold.

•In 2000, the Denver Art Museum returned The Letter, a 17th-century Dutch interior attributed to a follower of Gerard Terborch. The painting went to the 79-year-old daughter of a Holocaust victim after a relative produced old photographs showing the painting hanging on the walls of the family apartment in Berlin.

•The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., gave up Still Life With Fruit and Game by the Flemish painter Frans Snyders, which had been looted from a French collection.

•New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art has returned a Monet, Le Repos Dans Le Jardin Argenteuil.

Artworks don't always go back to the estate. In 2000 the Boston Museum of Fine Arts negotiated an agreement with heirs of the Italian collector Gentili de Giuseppe under which the museum partly paid for, and the family partly donated, Adoration of the Magi by the 18th-century Italian master Corrado Giaquinto. And Matisse's Brook With Aloes will remain in Houston's Menil Collection thanks to amicable negotiations four years ago between the Menil Foundation and the French Association in Memory of Alphonse Kann. The association was established in 1997 to reconstruct the art collection that once belonged to an Austrian, which was broken up and sold in 1940.

According to Robert Edsel, Dallas author of Rescuing Da Vinci, a book about the search for art lost to the Nazis, several recent developments have made it easier to find and claim missing objects.

"The first is the development of the Internet. The fall of communism has opened a tremendous store of records. Art has become synonymous with money – it wasn't that way in the '40s and '50s. Law firms have whole sections of their practice now dedicated to restitution claims."

And finally, he says, as collectors who were alive during the war years die off, their estates pass on to their families. The result is that the paintings and sculpture they acquired come on the market, where they increasingly are subject to intense scrutiny. "Secrets will be revealed."

Since 1999, 10 U.S. museums have returned artworks confiscated by the Nazis or have paid settlements to heirs, according to Mimi Gaudieri, executive director of the New York-based American Association of Museum Directors. And there's no end in sight, she adds, as research tools improve and records become available.

Under the association's policy, the 170 member institutions are obligated not just to promptly return such art objects once heirs have established ownership, but to actively search their collections for works that changed hands between the mid-1930s, when the Nazis came to power, and the end of the war in 1945. The association estimates that of the 14 million objects held by American art museums, about a thousand need further research to establish their provenance. (Provenance is the paper trail that follows an art object as it passes from owner to owner.)

Museums will soon be able to post information on works with an uncertain background at a new Web site, co-sponsored by the Swift-Find Looted Art Project and the restitution department of Sotheby's auction house.

"It's exhaustive and very time-consuming to create a seamless provenance for works of art," says Dr. Dorothy Kosinski, senior curator of paintings and sculpture at the Dallas Museum of Art. "Sometimes you send out letters to dealers and you never get a reply."

The museum started researching the relevant works in its collection more than five years ago, she says. The result, contained in notebooks bulging with letters, photographs, invoices and other documents, is a clear history for 141 objects in the collection, she says. "And we're continuing work on 48 others."

Still, says the museum's director Dr. Jack Lane, "in the current climate, I think one would be fantasizing if we thought we would never be approached about a work in our collection."

The Kimbell's Dr. Potts anticipates a continuing "trickle" of objects out of museum collections as a result of claims by descendants of families victimized by the Nazis. "This is not the first time, nor will it be the last time," he says, "but nothing I'm aware of leads me to see a dramatic increase."

And, as far as he knows, no other objects in the Kimbell collection are vulnerable to such claims.

The painting had been acquired in all innocence from a private dealer in 1966, he says. "All the evidence we had was that the painting had been in a French collection." Once the heirs established ownership, the rest was a foregone conclusion. "This is a case where the object clearly, under every national and international law, belongs to the family from whom it was stolen."

Like all museums that have had to return looted works, the Kimbell will have to eat its loss – in the current market, easily millions of dollars. There has been talk of museums buying some kind of title insurance when they acquire a work, says Dr. Edmund Pillsbury, Dr. Potts' predecessor at the Kimbell.

"One thing that was not done back when the Turner was acquired," Dr. Pillsbury says, "has almost become standard procedure. When a private dealer sells a work to a museum, the museum now requests an invoice in which the dealer gives a warranty for clear title and authenticity."

If there had been such a warranty the Kimbell might have recouped its financial investment, though it still would have lost the Turner.

But art objects have a way of moving around, from collection to collection, and from collections to museums. A work like the Turner, Dr. Potts says, "deserves to have public access, and museums provide that.

"There is a preference that we all have that it should be in public ownership. But that can be trumped. In the long run we have the hope that this Turner would end up in a museum."

E-mail bmarvel@dallasnews.com