The regional government of Berlin has decided to return two paintings by German Expressionist Karl Schmidt-Rotluff to the heirs of the paintings’ one-time owner (article in German).
As reported by Catherine Hickley of Bloomberg in Berlin, the paintings, a 1920 self-portrait and a 1910 landscape entitled “Farm in Dangast” once belonged to Robert Graetz, a businessman from Berlin who was deported to Poland in 1942. After a claim by Graetz’s grandson Roberto (Graetz), a government panel headed by Jutta Limbach (a former constitutional judge) concluded that the loss was almost certainly the product of persecution and should be returned. Berlin Culture Secretary Andre Schmitz has now said that the government will follow the panel’s recommendation.
The decision is noteworthy in several legal respects. The first is that the legal claim to the paintings appears to have been extremely murky as compared to others in the news, yet the government decided to return the work anyway. Specifically, the provenance of the painting between 1938 and 1953 was unclear; it simply re-appeared on the market eight years after the war. The Neue Nationalgalerie had argued that there was simply no evidence of persecution, rather only the unknown. The presumption implicit in the 1998 Washington Principles that any transaction in that period involving a member of persecuted group should be considered suspect appears to have carried the day, however; the decision itself (also in German) notes that whether it was stolen is immaterial. The downward pressure on the price in that circumstance, it found, is enough to rule out a fair transaction.
The second notable aspect of the aspect is where it happened: Germany. Most of the news-making restitution claims in the last 20 years have come, ironically, outside of Germany. This has probably been for two reasons. One, because by the end of the war the overwhelming majority of Old Master and Renaissance art stolen by Nazi Germany or its officials was either in a central collection point for their planned-but-never-built museum in Linz , from which the U.S. Army, Lane Faison and others worked to return it whence it came. Second, in the case of artists like Schmidt-Rotluff, the Expressionists, and other then-modern artists deemed “degenerate” by the Nazis, much was sold outside the country for hard currency, so it is in those countries that the disputes and claims have arisen.
Finally, the pressure that Germany, uniquely, would have felt to return this work cannot be ignored. Conversely, it is not hard to imagine a collector or museum taking a harder line in the United States or elsewhere, particularly without the existence of a panel like the one in this case (which is hard to conceive of in the U.S as it relates to private museums). As always, the Washington Principles are fodder for sharp disagreement over who is following them in letter or spirit.
