Looted Art: An Introduction to Nazi Spoliation, Provenance Research and Restitution
Summer School – Online
Monday 21 – Friday 25 June 2021
In the context of WWII and the Holocaust, Nazi officials perpetrated a co-ordinated programme of art and cultural property dispossession; one of the greatest thefts in history. Hundreds of thousands of objects remain missing or unrecovered by their rightful owners.
We shall begin with an exploration of Nazi cultural ideology, the purge of modern art as “degenerate”, and the sponsorship of a “pure” and “Aryan” art that was widely used for propaganda purposes. We shall then focus on the systematic looting by the National Socialist regime across Europe, between 1933 and 1945, and the plunder of Jewish collections as a particular mechanism of persecution. We shall discuss military spoliation, the post-war Allied investigation and recovery efforts, including the work of ‘The Monuments Men’ and the wider ethical and legal dimensions of restitution claims faced by the art world today.
The course introduces fundamental principles and methods of researching the history of ownership, transfer and exhibition, or provenance, of an artwork, a practice as essential to Nazi-era art- historical research as it is to wider curatorial practice. Through a discussion of case studies, and object examinations in a museum setting, participants will also approach questions of contemporary display and interpretation related to these complex historic narratives.