The Hunt for Nazi Stolen Art

The NY Times has an interesting article on three generations of Rosenberg family in their search to recover family art stolen by the Nazis.  The family has worked tirelessly to recover 340 pieces of nearly 400 plundered pieces.  The article claims nearly 100,000 pieces of Nazi stolen art are still missing worth an estimated $10 billion.

The NY Times reports

Since that day, three generations of Rosenbergs have been engaged in a painstaking search for hundreds of artworks that were looted from their family by the Nazis. This month their hunt led to Norway, where the family is negotiating for the return of a Matisse that has hung for 45 years in the Henie-Onstad Arts Center, a museum founded by the skater Sonja Henie and her husband.

“We are not willing to forget, or let it go,” said Marianne Rosenberg, Alexandre Rosenberg’s daughter, a New York lawyer. “I think of it as a crusade.”

The Rosenberg cache represents just a tiny part of what some experts say are roughly 100,000 pieces — worth perhaps $10 billion — still missing from Nazi plundering, but few victims have been as unyielding, or as successful, as this family in reconstituting their cultural legacy.

The Rosenbergs have scoured auction catalogs, worked with Interpol, dragged museums to court and even resorted to buying back their own property to retrieve more than 340 of the roughly 400 works they lost.

Few can claim so many victories. “They are part of the 5 percent of those who have been successful,” said Marc Masurovsky, a founder of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project. “They set an example of how restitution should take place.”

The chase has rarely been easy. Despite the victories, the Rosenbergs’ efforts, like those of others who have tried to regain property that disappeared under the Third Reich, have been plagued by frustration and deceit, Ms. Rosenberg said.

Although dozens of countries signed international agreements in 1998 and again in 2009 that pledged to resolve claims of families like the Rosenbergs quickly, there are no mechanisms to enforce them. As a result, many attempts to recover stolen art have required years of bruising, often unsuccessful battles with institutions, bureaucracies and courts.

Source: The NY Times