Looted Jewish art to be identified

The IU Art Museum Provenance Project, part of a global effort to find the history of various art pieces, has turned its focus to the “degenerate.” The project is currently identifying the history of more than 600 pieces – paintings, sculptures and more – that were taken from Jewish owners and artists by the Nazis and sold in a “Degenerate Art” show in Munich 1937. \n“The Nazis did one of two things with the Jewish art: defaced them or kept them as artifacts,” said Dena Kranzberg, student president of the Helene G. Simon Hillel Center. \nFrom 1933-1945, many Jewish artifacts were taken by the Nazi regime. In 1998, President Clinton signed a bill that requires art museums nationwide to participate in the provenance project, stipulating that art should have a well-documented history available to the public. \n“All American museums are legally required to participate,” said IU Art Museum Curator Jenny McComas. “But there was also a big focus on museums needing to take responsibility for (their) art.” \nThe bill was signed as part of a movement to compensate Holocaust survivors and their descendants for money and objects lost during that time period.\n“Nazi looting of art was not something very \napparent until later years,” McComas said. “Many things began to be restituted to their former owners. It started with money, but it moved to art.”\nThe program takes only pieces of art from that time period and seeks to identify all of the former owners through files kept at the museum, archives at museums around the nation and world and sometimes by the art itself.\nMcComas said the curators often find important clues on the back of art – from names of former owners to cryptic numbers.\n“Most of the time we can’t figure out the meaning of the numbers, but other times we find that they are auction or exhibition numbers,” she said. “So we do find quite a lot of information on the piece itself.”\nAfter finding these leads, people involved will follow up on them by searching records and archives for information on the owners. While the process is labor-intensive, the time taken for each piece varies.\n“Some museums and archives get back to me really quickly or we’ll have a lot of information on the piece already,” McComas said. “But usually it takes me a long time. It really just depends.”\nNearly every modern piece in the collection will be in the project. And while the focus is on this modern art, many other pieces’ pasts are being discovered.\n“We’re learning more about pieces from earlier times and what happened to those during that time frame,” McComas said. “There was a 17th century painting that we knew very little about until this project. Now we know exactly where it was in that time frame. Even if we’re a little less than successful at completely uncovering the piece, we still have found a lot of information.”\nMany of the campus Jewish leaders are excited, although some are hoping for a little more than just names.\n“I think it’s great as long as they don’t stop at that,” Kranzberg said. “I hope they look at the Jewish artist and see who he or she was and why he or she lived.”\nOthers feel it is a moral obligation.\n“I think its the responsible thing to do,” said Alvin Rosenfeld, IU English professor and director of Borns Jewish Studies Program.