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If shops can reopen in April, why can’t museums?
Museums in England will have to wait until May to reopen but shops, gyms and libraries are set to open in April. What’s the logic in that?
American museums should not be selling their art to keep the lights on
Deaccessioning rules for US museums have been relaxed to raise money for collection care – and even the Met may take advantage. It’s a slippery slope, says Thomas P. Campbell
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Podcast
The Apollo 40 under 40 podcast: Mohamad Hafez
The Syrian-born, US-based artist talks to Gabrielle Schwarz about his sculptural dioramas of cities ravaged by war – and offers a message of hope for the future
Art news daily
The week in art news – museums in Germany to open from Monday
Plus: V&A to merge departments and cut 140 jobs | UK government announces £390m to help arts venues reopen | Alan Bowness (1928–2021) | and missing Jacob Lawrence painting discovered in Manhattan
Missing Jacob Lawrence painting discovered in Manhattan apartment
The panel from one of the American painter’s great narrative series is the second to have shown up by chance in quick succession
The week in art news – Amnesty report points to massacre in Ethiopian town of Axum
Plus: Swiss museums reopen next week, while UK museums must wait until May | Experts confirm message on The Scream is by Munch | and National Gallery in London and Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin update Hugh Lane bequest deal
Reviews
The Met’s Old Masters, seen in a new light
European paintings still occupy prime real estate on Fifth Avenue – but a redisplay offers fresh insight into the Met’s hallowed holdings
Vein glorious: an epic history of marble, reviewed
For millennia, marble was taken to be a gleaming reflection of the heavens – and, in Fabio Barry’s new book, it regains its divine mysteries
Spoiled
A painting by the French Impressionist Edouard Manet, titled 'Wintergarden', discovered in a salt mine National Archives and Records Administration
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The discovery of a huge cache of modernist paintings in a Munich flat has amazed everyone. Exactly what it consists of is still unclear: the poor reproductions released so far give little indication, but it is said to include the work of great 20th-century masters. Are the 1,500 items mostly originals or prints? We still don’t know and the German authorities – so far anyway – are resisting calls to make the works public under the terms of the Washington Principles governing looted art.
Those principles and later declarations agreed to track down and identify art that was misappropriated during the Nazi era. It’s well known that countless art works have been unaccounted for since the end of the Second World War. Historians like Lynn Nicholas and Robert Edsel are still unravelling the cloak-and-dagger stories of Nazi-era looting and its post-war aftermath.
Were the artworks hidden in Cornelius Gurlitt’s flat acquired legitimately? The evidence points to the murky ability of his father Hildebrand to do well out of Nazi looting. But we still don’t know exactly how Hildebrand, originally a legitimate dealer in modern art who then came to work for the Nazis, acquired them and eventually passed them on to his son.
The Süddeutsche Zeitung has revealed that most of the elder Gurlitt’s collection was confiscated by the Allies in 1945 and taken to their Wiesbaden collecting point for looted art. In the end, all but two paintings were restored to him in 1950.
Accusations are flying against the German authorities right up to Angela Merkel. Of course there’s no doubt that initially the Bavarian state and then Berlin itself have been snail-like and secretive. And their refusal to publicly document the actual art works on the internet and elsewhere is indeed disgraceful.
So why not take a leaf out of the book of the original Monuments Men? At the Munich collecting point, Allied and German art historians staged a public viewing of the looted art works, a sign of hope and international collaboration that provided an early chink of cultural light after Nazism. If restitution simply means a transfer of high-value art to the private realm as Norman Rosenthal once argued, then there is a strong argument for such works to become part of publicly-owned collections. That would save them from being turned into pawns in an endless game of multi-million pound restitution claims and possibly disappearing from public view altogether.
Related Articles:
Second Gurlitt hoard comes to light (Maggie Gray)
Germany proposes a new law to enable the return of looted art (Maggie Gray)
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