The new law, if passed, would set a national statue of limitations for claims on art looted by the Nazis
The US Congress is close to passing the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act of 2016, which would make it easier in the US for heirs of Holocaust victims to recover art looted by the Nazis—but the clock is ticking as the legislative season nears its end. On 7 December, the House of Representatives approved the proposed law unanimously. Now the measure awaits a vote by the Senate, where it has received bipartisan support at a time when the country is divided on almost every other issue.
The law would standarise the statute of limitations on claims for the return of art looted by the Nazis during the Second World War, allowing heirs six years to file in the US, once they became aware of the suspected looted object and its location. Statues of limitations on such claims currently vary from state to state.
The collector Ronald Lauder, one of the bill’s most prominent supporters, now displays Adele I at the Neue Galerie in New York. Lauder calls objects looted during the Nazi years “the last prisoners of war”. On 1 December, Lauder wrote a blog post for The Hill, a publication read by Congressional members and staff, in which he asked: “Imagine if you walked into a museum and saw a painting that once hung in your grandparents’ home? How would you feel, especially if your grandparents had been murdered by the same government that took the painting? Is this justice?”
Randol Schoenberg, who represented Maria Altmann’ claim against the Belvedere, said from Los Angeles that “one of the purposes of federal legislation is to make sure that in the US, with its various states, you have the same law applying. In general, it’s a good idea, especially for artworks, which tend to travel.”
Yet Thomas Kline, president of the Lawyers Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation, was wary of what he called “Holocaust-specific legislation”.
“We should have laws of general applicability,” he said. “In Cyprus, the Ottoman Turks killed civilians and they destroyed art. So it’s 1,500 people instead of 15 million, but they’re just as dead, and the deaths were out of disrespect for the culture and the people, as was the looting. And Armenians would tell you the same thing.”
Kline, who is Jewish, still supports the HEAR Act. “It’s a fact that relevant records were sealed, and it’s a fact that post-war restitution was a difficult process. Our laws don’t contemplate the situation where documents are destroyed and where society is torn apart for years, if not decades.”
Read the entire article at The Art Newspaper.