– Looted works and deep pockets
The restitution of looted property is an essential act of justice. This should not overshadow the less noble interests that this can also arouse.
Published today at 6:40 a.m.
Almost thirty years ago, in 1998, Switzerland adopted the Washington Principles. This international agreement concerns the inventory of works of art confiscated by the Nazis and the identification of their beneficiaries. Precepts which are, however, not binding and which cannot be used in court. From a legal point of view, for works taken violently from their owners, the rules of the Civil Code apply, as for any other property of which a person has been dispossessed.
But spoliation is not a dispossession like any other. It is a prize of war, the weapon of a broader strategy put in place by a regime to establish its domination through violence. By confiscating from the persecuted their memory, their heritage, and a Source of financing for their exile and their reconstruction.
The restitution of looted property is “a work of justice and humanity, whose moral and political significance far exceeds the material values in question”. These words are those of French university professor and resistance fighter Emile Terroine. He was the rapporteur of the decree of the April 1945 order which canceled the sales and liquidations of Jewish property carried out during the Second World War. In France, this ordinance still regulates questions relating to spoliations today.
We must nevertheless distinguish the violence, the deep desire to harm which animated the Nazis, from the motivation of art lovers who acquired, decades later and in good faith, works without knowing much about their past. For a long time, little attention was paid to the incomplete provenance of certain paintings.
This sensitivity to the provenance of works is recent, it is obviously necessary. But we cannot ignore that the art market has a certain number of deep pockets. “Deep pockets” with significant resources who will have no trouble reaching into their wallets to relieve themselves of the guilt of owning a painting with a troubled past. The restitution of looted art should not be an excuse for a form of hidden blackmail.
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