Stolen art, artifacts increasingly being returned by museums

Stolen art is increasingly being returned to victims thanks to new repatriation laws

What you probably already know: A museum in Allentown, Pennsylvania handed over a valuable 16th-century painting this week to descendants of a German Jewish couple who were forced to flee their home to avoid capture by the Nazis in 1938. The move is just the latest in what has become a trend for museums and galleries across the globe: Returning stolen works to the people or countries they were illegally pilfered from in the first place. That’s prompted the New York Times to say the “Indiana Jones” era for museums is over for good.

Why? The pace of reparations has increased in recent years as museums rush to return ill-gotten antiquities. The Smithsonian returned 29 Benin bronzes to Nigeria and the Manhattan district attorney’s office seized 27 stolen pieces from the Met. While imperialists stole art from countries in Africa and South American, Nazis allegedly stole 650,000 artworks largely from Jewish families, museums, galleries and collectors between 1933 and 1945, according to the Center for Art Law. But in 1998, 44 countries came together to put together rules about how to return stolen art and artifacts that was taken by the Nazis.

What it means: Holocaust victims and their heirs have six years to make a restitution claim after the piece is identified and its location is discovered, whether that’s in the U.S. or in Europe, thanks to recent standardizations of the laws across all of these jurisdictions in 2019. That means you’re likely to see more of these kinds of stories hitting the headlines as heirs identify and pursue their claims.

What happens now? The stolen art is valued in the billions of dollars, and new troves are still being discovered, which, once identified, starts the six-year clock. Identifying and recovering these pieces has become a cottage industry, as attorneys, academics, museums, and art experts come together to repatriate works to individuals and nations. The situation has even inspired art of its own: Woman on Fire, a novel by Lisa Barr, follows an investigative reporter working to find a painting stolen by the Nazis – it’s a great read and puts a personal face, albeit a fictional one, on the individual tragedies embedded in each of these stolen works.

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