Displaying items by tag: Nazis

A marble bust of the Roman goddess Diana that was looted by the Nazis has returned to Poland after 75 years.

The 18th-Century statue was taken in 1940, but its whereabouts remained unknown until it emerged in a Vienna auction house earlier this year.

The heirs of a Jewish Cabaret performer who was murdered by the Nazis in 1941 persuaded a Manhattan judge Tuesday to block the sale and transport of two Egon Schiele paintings that were part of his extensive collection.

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Charles Ramos ordered London-based art dealer Richard Nagy and the Conservancy that runs the Park Avenue Armory's annual art show to freeze the disposal of the watercolors — worth an estimated $5 million — until he can hold a hearing December 1.

It’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to fight the return of artwork stolen from Jews during the Holocaust, even museum academics who have an interest in keeping the works in their collections. Not only does there seem to be a moral imperative to right these nearly century-old wrongs. On the face of it, such battles are simply bad public relations.

Yet the past decade has seen a series of high-profile, protracted restitution battles across the U.S. and Europe. The case of the so-called Gurlitt hoard, wherein more than 1,200 pieces of (mostly) stolen art was discovered in a Munich apartment in 2012, has yet to be fully resolved.

A painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Fight Between Carnival and Lent (1559), is at the center of a dispute between Austria and Poland after claims arose that the artwork might be Nazi loot.

According to the Financial Times, documents that have surfaced in Krakow's National Museum claim that the Renaissance masterpiece, whose value is estimated at $77 million, was seized by Charlotte von Wächter, the wife of Krakow's Nazi governor Otto von Wächter, during the German occupation of Poland.

A Nazi-era restitution claim for a Renoir landscape at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery has been rejected. The Spoliation Advisory Panel recommended in a report that The Coast at Cagnes, Sea, Mountains (around 1910) should not be returned to the heirs of Jakob and Rosa Oppenheimer because there is insufficient evidence that it had been the subject of a Nazi forced sale in Berlin. The Oppenheimers, a German Jewish couple, had fled to France in 1933. Jakob died in an internment camp in 1941 and Rosa was murdered in Auschwitz two years later.

A Nazi-looted painting by Hans Wertinger has been restituted to the heirs of the Jewish art dealers Isaac Rosenbaum and Saemy Rosenberg by the German state of Baden-Würtemberg.

The work Bildnis Pfalzgraf Johann III (ca. 1526) - which belonged to the collection of the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart - has been returned almost 80 years after the dealers, who sold the work in 1936, were forced to pay the proceeds from the sale into a Nazi-government account.

The best-known portrait of German composer Johann Sebastian Bach was welcomed back in his home city in an emotional ceremony Friday after an odyssey sparked when the Nazis came to power.

Back in the city of Leipzig thanks to the largesses of a late US millionaire and classical music lover, the 1748 work was unveiled in a packed church, going on public view for the first time in centuries.

A federal judge in Los Angeles has declined to order the return of an Impressionist painting to the relatives of a Jewish woman who was forced to sell the work for $360 to a Nazi art appraiser in 1939.

The ruling came after a decade-long dispute over ownership of the 1897 canvas, “Rue Saint-Honoré, Après-midi, Effet de Pluie,” a Paris street scene by Pissarro, which is in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. The judge, John F. Walter of United States District Court, rejected a claim by relatives of the woman, Lilly Cassirer, who sued the museum and Spain seeking to have the painting turned over to them or to be awarded damages.

Three years after German authorities uncovered a vast collection of one of Adolf Hitler’s main art dealers, the first artwork restituted from the trove will head to auction next month.

On June 24, Sotheby’s in London will ask between $540,000 and $850,000 for Max Liebermann’s “Two Riders on a Beach,” a 1901 scene of two elegantly dressed men riding chestnut-colored horses beside a surf.

Five paintings missing since World War II are being returned to collections in Germany at the behest of the heirs of their American acquirers.

The paintings, including three won by an American GI in a poker game, were turned over to the German government on Tuesday. Their return was organized by the State Department and the Monuments Men Foundation, which promotes the work of those who protected cultural works during the war and seeks to track down and repatriate objects that went missing.