Nazi art loot Down Under

Australia is checking to make sure their museums hold no objects of questionable provenance, as this rather melodramatic article reports:

Some of the National Gallery's most famous and valuable artworks are on a risk list of art possibly stolen by the Nazis.

Paintings by Picasso, Monet, Matisse and Rubens are on a list of 86 suspect art works released by the gallery.

An internal gallery audit found the works have suspicious gaps in their ownership between 1933 and 1945, the years of Nazi rule.

The full list of works on the National Gallery website is here. It appears that the museum administration is being extremely careful, and has listed everything that did not have rock-solid evidence for its whereabouts during the Nazi era. To state that these items have "suspicious gaps" in their provenance, however, is quite misleading (see this Book of Hours for an example).

Posted by David on December 27, 2002 1:16 PM