A French restitution committee reportedly has recommended returning seven valuable paintings looted by the Nazis during the Holocaust from two Jewish families. The paintings are currently part of various collections in France, including the Louvre in Paris. and the museums of Tours, Saint-Étienne and Agen, but the CIVS Holocaust restitution committee determined in December that…
A panel of experts advised the Dutch government to return only one painting out of 189 claimed by relatives of a Holocaust-era art collector. The Advisory Commission on Restitution Requests, Cultural Goods and World War II asserted that descendants of the art collector Nathan Katz and his brother, Benjamin, failed to prove that the brothers…
Vienna’s Jewish Museum holds hundreds of books and works of art that may have been stolen by Nazis, a newspaper reported on Saturday. A screening programme that started in 2007, years after other Austrian museums began combing their collections for works taken from their rightful owners, has determined that about 500 works of art and…
Artist Shimon Attie is probably best known for “Sites Unseen,” his 1990s series of temporary installations in Europe, in which he projected photographic images of a lost Jewish past onto actual sites. For “Writing on the Wall,” (1991–1993), Attie, living in Berlin at the time, was haunted by the lack of any past signs of…
A collection of pre-World War II posters that were returned to the heir of a Jewish dentist who fled the Nazis is going on sale. The more than 4,300 posters collected by Hans Sachs and looted by the Nazis will be auctioned at Guernsey’s in New York on Jan. 18, though the auction house is…
A metal door set into a mountain in Switzerland offers a way out for fine art investors forced to pay over the odds to insure their collections. The doorway leads into a disused military bunker, one of several being sold off by the Swiss government and whose echoing, climate-controlled chambers, once used to stockpile munitions,…
Museum negotiations to bring artifacts from abroad for exhibits are typically complex. And the detailed discussions that brought a stunning collection opening on Iranian Jewry here in October were no exception. But the institutional arrangements between the Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles and Beit Hatfutsot: The Museum of the Jewish People,…
Although the Middle East seems to be forever in the news, for many of us, its reality remains distant. And the media cycle, with its focus on violence and turmoil, can make the region feel even more foreign. So it’s welcome when anyone finds a way to bring the Middle East closer to home. This…
100% of profits support our journalism
