Exposing dealers in Nazi-looted art: Searchable database of looted art

Saturday 25 July 2020

Searchable database of looted art

The Information Database of the Commission for Looted Art in Europe's contains information and documentation from forty nine countries, including laws and policies, reports and publications, archival records and resources, current cases and relevant websites.

The Object Database contains details of over 25,000 objects of all kinds – paintings, drawings, antiquities, Judaica, etc – looted, missing and/or identified from over fifteen countries.

All images on the site are published under fair use conditions for the purpose of criticism and research.

For a list of Essential Website Links, showing all key research sites and resources,click here. For Bibliographies on all aspects of looted art, the art trade, archives and restitution, click here.

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Nazi plunder

Much looted art was recovered and restituted. However, many thousands of pieces of art were never recovered by their rightful owners. As late as 2010, 16 of the 40 top paintings were still missing. This past March, Philip Saunders, editor of Trace, the stolen art register, stated that "there are at least 100,000 works of art still missing from the Nazi occupation."

As questions abound Nazi looted assets that were never recovered, interest in the looted art has been rekindled. In August 1997, the National Jewish Museum established a Holocaust Art Restitution Project, and in September the World Jewish Congress began exploring the possibilities of establishing a similar project.

Art forgery

There are essentially three varieties of art forger. The person who actually creates the fraudulent piece, the person who discovers a piece and attempts to pass it off as something it is not, in order to increase the piece's value, and the third who discovers that a work is a fake, but sells it as an original anyway.

An art forger must be at least somewhat proficient in the type of art he is trying to imitate. Many forgers were once fledgling artists who tried, unsuccessfully, to break into the market, eventually resorting to forgery. Sometimes, an original item is borrowed or stolen from the owner in order to create a copy. Forgers will then return the copy to the owner, keeping the original for himself.

Exposing dealers in Nazi-looted art

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Saturday 25 July 2020

Searchable database of looted art

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