According to director general of the Bavarian State Painting Collections, Bernhard Maaz told DW, “We have been doing provenance research for 20 years helping with restitutions or initiating them”. He added, however, the emotional impact of their efforts has not been made yet.
According to a DW report, 1,500 art works were found at properties belonging to the son of a Nazi art dealer in the 2012 Gurlitt case. Notably, very little information is out there on people who were behind these sketches, paintings and drawings.
In a bid to familiarise people with the intriguing tales related to these art works and their Jewish owners, thirty stories will be told through films in a 3-year project. In the project, the owners of the artwork will be traced back through collaborators and every story will end with the restitution of the artwork.
Very little is known about the Jewish art collectors but the paintings associated with them are still quite famous. “The Eye of the Law (Justitia)” by Carl Spitzweg, “Berlin Street Scene” by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and the golden portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer by Gustav Klimt are among some of the stolen artworks that tell stories of murder, persecution and expropriation.
Efforts have been made to restitute the stolen artworks as the Bavarian Bavarian State Painting Collections has so far restituted 25 works from 17 collections. Whereas, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation has returned more than 350 artworks and 2,000 books to their owners since 1999.
Notably, Germany had pledged to examine and identify the artwork looted by Nazi as part of the Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art. According to Bernhard Maaz, provenance research is being carried out for the art work which involves historical research on how objects were obtained. He stressed on the fact that these research are often time-consuming as every artwork is an individual case.
