Nazi art loot miscellany

Using a musty bank vault as a backdrop, a prominent American lawyer announced Thursday he was filing a US$1 billion lawsuit on behalf of Holocaust victims whose precious artworks were stolen by the Nazis and sold off after World War II.

Edward D. Fagan, a New York-based attorney who has fought for reparations for American blacks who are descendants of slaves and for victims of South Africa's apartheid system, said the suit would be filed later Thursday in U.S. District Court in New York.

From CBS News. No idea how this will pan out; Fagan got a $45m settlement out of Bank Austria several years back, though, over other looted Jewish assets.

Meanwhile, in the NY Times:

More than a half-century after a Paris art gallery was looted by Nazis, one of the paintings that was taken has been returned to the owner's daughter.

A small pastoral painting, "Les Jeunes Amoureux" by François Boucher, was part of a collection of hundreds that disappeared after a Jewish art dealer, Andre Jean Seligmann, fled with his family to the United States. The painting was donated to the Utah Museum of Fine Arts by a collector in 1993.

David Dee, the museum's executive director, returned the painting to Mr. Seligmann's daughter, Claude Delibes, and his daughter-in-law, Suzanne Geiss Robbins, on Thursday.

Ms. Robbins estimated that 400 paintings had been looted from Mr. Seligmann's gallery; 25 percent have been returned. The Louvre recently returned a painting of the Crucifixion to the family after discovering it was owned by Mr. Seligmann, who died in 1945.

Posted by David on April 5, 2004 10:21 AM