Russia's wartime art loot

From today's New York Times:

For more than 50 years the Soviet Union hid them in museum basements and secret repositories, one reportedly in a monastery wall. Now, reflecting increased glasnost, Russia's Ministry of Culture is posting images and descriptions of them on a new Web site.

They are thousands of paintings, archives and rare books looted by Soviet forces in Germany and Eastern Europe during and after World War II and taken to Russia as so-called trophy art. (Now the preferred term in Russia is "displaced cultural treasures.") Hitler's forces had previously pillaged many of the works from Jewish owners and other Nazi victims.

The site is also being used to search for what the ministry estimates as two million works of art that disappeared from Russian museums during the Nazi occupation. An unknown number were destroyed in the war, but some have turned up in Russian antiques shops or at auctions abroad; a few have been returned by Germany.

But the site, which has two Web addresses, www.lostart.ru and www.restitution.ru, has problems: it operates only in Russian and has no system for searching for a specific artist or title; someone investigating the site must usually read each museum's entire list.

As of this month, the site has 10,000 items, said Aleksandr V. Kibovsky, the culture ministry official in charge. "The plan is to have 500,000 by 2005," he added. Mr. Kibovsky said claimants would have 18 months from the time an item was posted to file a formal petition for restitution through their governments. Unclaimed items would then be declared Russian property.

Asked about the prospects for an English translation of the material on the site, he said that the culture ministry was always short of funds and that the priority was to make all the information public. He noted that the site provided color photographs and dimensions of paintings and rendered the titles of foreign books (but not artworks) in their original languages, approaches that could alleviate some of the difficulties.

The site includes lists from 19 museums, libraries and archives in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod and several other cities. Most institutional links on the site are still empty. But the lists do include seven 17th-century German book collections now at the State Public Historical Library in Moscow, an extensive archive from the German colony in Bessarabia at the State Historical Museum, and several hundred paintings now in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.

Posted by David on March 12, 2003 1:38 PM