Museum Studies

Art and Cultural Heritage is appropriately, not solely, about the law-national and international-respecting cultural heritage. It is a bubbling cauldron of law mixed with ethics, philosophy, politics and working principles about how cultural heritage law, policy and practice should be sculpted from the past as the present becomes the future. The authors explore these demanding concerns, untangle basic values, and look critically at the conflicts and contradictions in existing art and cultural heritage law and policy in its diverse sectors. The rich and provocative contributions collectively provide a reasoned discussion of the issues from a multiplicity of views to permit the reader to understand the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of the cultural heritage debate.

United Nations Digital Library

Art and Cultural Heritage is appropriately, not solely, about the law-national and international-respecting cultural heritage. It is a bubbling cauldron of law mixed with ethics, philosophy, politics and working principles about how cultural heritage law, policy and practice should be sculpted from the past as the present becomes the future. The authors explore these demanding concerns, untangle basic values, and look critically at the conflicts and contradictions in existing art and cultural heritage law and policy in its diverse sectors. The rich and provocative contributions collectively provide a reasoned discussion of the issues from a multiplicity of views to permit the reader to understand the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of the cultural heritage debate.

This guide is a comprehensive and authoritative resource for tracing the ownership history of works of art. Focused on cultural property looted by the Nazis and others during WWII, it is divided into three parts: Basic Provenance Research and Principles, Holocaust-Era Provenance Research, and Appendixes, which include bibliographies of collections, dealer archives, and "red flag names" compiled by the Office of Strategic Services. Includes an index and reproductions of artworks and relevant documents.

This book goes beyond the narrow definition of the term provenance, which addresses only the bare facts of ownership and transfer, to explore ideas about the origins and itineraries of objects, consider the historical uses of provenance research, and draw attention to the transformative power of ownership. The result is a volume of essays that makes a strong case for recuperating provenance--what contributing author Anne Higonnet calls "so many epic tales compressed into such dry lists"--for the history of art. Provenance attends to the social life of art, a work's biography subsequent to the moment of its origin.  Provenance: An Alternate History of Art offers a broad perspective that ranges from ancient archaeology to conceptual art, that encompasses Europe, Asia, and the Americas, and considers a variety of media. The essays demonstrate in myriad ways how an owner's relationship with a work of art or, in varying degrees, with the object's previous owners, can change irrevocably the way the work will be perceived and understood by future generations.  Limiting the scope of provenance to only the highly charged context of international legal custody battles or the painstakingly researched lists of names and dates in archives and catalogs is entirely insufficient to the richness of the subject. By considering provenance in its critical and theoretical dimensions, this volume endeavors to integrate this alternate narrative into art history.

Provenance research is an international discipline, just as the art and cultural property it traces are international in origin and influence. At AAM's 2004 International Provenance Research Colloquium, specialists from North America met with colleagues from western and central Europe to exchange information on the general topic of provenance research, with an emphasis on World War II provenance issues. Topics include the collections of the Nazi elite, recreation of historic family collections, case studies of specific object provenance, accessing lesser-known archival resources, and the structure of the art trade in the twentieth century. These proceedings highlight significant strides in provenance research resources and methodology, and also illuminate the number of different sources, many of them little known to North American researchers, that may have to be consulted to clarify the provenance of any one object.

Notes (General): "Ouvrage couronné par l'Institut de France." Vol. 4 pub. (1987) under the direction of Frits Lugt and the Fondation Custodia in association with the J. Paul Getty Trust. Includes indexes. Contents: [V. 1] 1600-1825 -- [v. 2] 1826-1860 -- [v. 3] 1861-1900 -- [v. 4] 1901-1925
Additional Physical Form Entry: Online version: Répertoire des catalogues de ventes publiques.(741996256), Lugt, Frits, 1884-1970.

Contents: t. 1. A-Byrne, avec Supplément.--t. 2. C-Dyon.--t. 3. E-Hyre.--t. 4. I-Lyv.--t. 5. M-Pippi.--t. 6. Pir-Schong.--t. 7. Schonl-Zyv.
Additional Physical Form Entry: Online version: Dictionnaire des ventes d'art faites en France et à l'étranger pendant les XVIIIme & XIXme siècles.(657094035),

Written by the two men who revealed the existence of secret depositories of treasures, this book is the dramatic account of the plundering of precious objects during the last terrible days of the Reich, the buffoonish political maneuvering and corruption that kept the art hidden and neglected for years, and the bold detective work that led to its discovery. 16 pages of photos.

Between 1939 and 1944, as the Nazis overran Europe, they were also quietly conducting another type of pillage. The Lost Museum tells the story of the Jewish art collectors and gallery owners in France who were stripped of rare works by artists such as Vermeer, Rembrandt, Degas, Cézanne, and Picasso. Before they were through, the Nazis had taken more than 20,000 paintings, sculptures, and drawings from France. The Lost Museum explores the Nazis’ systematic confiscation of these artworks, focusing on the private collections of five families: Rothschild, Rosenberg, Bernheim-Jeune, David-Weill, and Schloss. The book is filled with private family photos of this art, some of which has never before been seen by the public, and it traces the fate of these works as they passed through the hands of top German officials, unscrupulous art dealers, and unwitting auction houses such as Christie’s and Sotheby’s.

The legendary names include Rothschild, Mendelssohn, Bloch-Bauer--distinguished bankers, industrialists, diplomats, and art collectors. Their diverse taste ranged from manuscripts and musical instru­ments to paintings by Old Masters and the avant-garde. But their stigma as Jews in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe doomed them to exile or death in Hitler's concentration camps. Here, after years of meticulous research, Melissa Müller (Anne Frank: The Biography) and Monika Tatzkow (Nazi Looted Art) present the tragic, compelling stories of 15 Jewish collectors, the dispersal of their extraordinary collections through forced sale and/or confiscation, and the ongoing efforts of their heirs to recover their inheritance. For every victory in the effort to return these works to their rightful heirs, there are daunting defeats and long court battles. This real-life legal thriller follows works by Rembrandt, Klimt, Pissarro, Kandinsky, and others.  Praise for Lost Lives, Lost Art:  "A heartbreaking and enthralling story of the brutal and mindless Nazi destruction of a singularly cultivated caste of rich German and Austrian Jews and the pillage of their great art collections: a world that was lost and could never be recreated." ~ Louis Begley "Each chapter focuses on a single collector. . . the adulatory profiles [are] matched with an attractive layout and an abundance of well-selected images." ~ Wall Street Journal  "The book is meticulously researched, brilliantly and dispassionately written, and is in all likelihood a game changer in the world of art, art provenance, and art restitution that will resound for years to come."~ ForeWord Reviews "Richly illustrated with excellent art reproductions and family photographs, this is a solid addition to works on Nazi art plundering and the world of art restitution, ownership, and property rights. This will be of great interest to readers wanting to know more about upper-class Austrian and German Jews. Recommended." ~ Library Journal

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award The cast of characters includes Hitler and Goering, Gertrude Stein and Marc Chagall--not to mention works by artists from Leonardo da Vinci to Pablo Picasso. And the story told in this superbly researched and suspenseful book is that of the Third Reich's war on European culture and the Allies' desperate effort to preserve it. From the Nazi purges of "Degenerate Art" and Goering's shopping sprees in occupied Paris to the perilous journey of theMona Lisafrom Paris and the painstaking reclamation of the priceless treasures of liberated Italy,The Rape of Europais a sweeping narrative of greed, philistinism, and heroism that combines superlative scholarship with a compelling drama. "Nicholas knows the art world as well as any military historian knows his battlefield.... Her work deserves the widest reading."--New York Times Book Review

The political elite of Nazi Germany perceived itself as a cultural elite as well. In Art as Politics in the Third Reich, Jonathan Petropoulos explores the elite's cultural aspirations by examining both the formulation of a national aesthetic policy and the content of the private art collections held by high-ranking Nazis. He demonstrates that these leaders manipulated public policy and their own collecting patterns to articulate fundamental tenets of Nazi ideology. Petropoulos begins by tracing the evolution of official aesthetic policy, from the purges of museum staff and academics labeled as 'undesirable' in 1933 to the confiscation of Jewish-owned artworks in the late 1930s and the organized plundering of art from occupied areas during the war. He then reconstructs the collections of a dozen prominent Nazi officials--including Hitler, Goring, Goebbels, Himmler, Speer, and Ribbentrop--and argues that their private holdings defined their relationships to one another within the Nazi hierarchy in addition to reflecting their racist and nationalist beliefs. According to Petropoulos, art collecting offered the political elite a way to achieve legitimacy and social standing, thereby providing a common cultural language for the leaders of the Third Reich.

Website allows for Search or Downloading PDF Copies of All Volumes of the "Répertoire des biens spoliés en France durant la guerre, 1939-1945," Including Certain Annotated Volumes

Short Essays on Dealers Active in Berlin During the Nazi Era. Exhibit Catalog - Stifung Neue Synagoge, Centrum Judaicum, Berlin

A volume which documents the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition mounted by the Nazis in 1937 as part of their antimodernist policy. More than 150 of the surviving masterworks from the original show are collected and illustrated in this book.

Provenance research is an international discipline, just as the art and cultural property it traces are international in origin and influence. At AAM's 2004 International Provenance Research Colloquium, specialists from North America met with colleagues from western and central Europe to exchange information on the general topic of provenance research, with an emphasis on World War II provenance issues. Topics include the collections of the Nazi elite, recreation of historic family collections, case studies of specific object provenance, accessing lesser-known archival resources, and the structure of the art trade in the twentieth century. These proceedings highlight significant strides in provenance research resources and methodology, and also illuminate the number of different sources, many of them little known to North American researchers, that may have to be consulted to clarify the provenance of any one object. Includes a section by Birgit Schwarz entitled: "Hitlers Museum" (2004).