The Gazette (Montreal)
November 4, 2013 Monday
Early Edition
Sharing stories of stolen cultures; Concordia Conference looks beyond
art looted during the Second World War to injustices suffered by First
Nations and Armenians
by KAREN SEIDMAN, The Gazette
With several European museums recently facing scandals involving
looted art, Concordia University’s exploration of plundered cultures
at an international conference this week couldn’t be more timely.
But where the focus on most stolen material concerns Nazi-looted art
from the Second World War era, Concordia’s conference on Wednesday and
Thursday will aim to expand the issue beyond the Holocaust era to talk
about injustices to the First Nations and Armenian communities as
well.
People often think of European masters when the topic of looted art
arises, but what about the suppression of the carving of totem poles
of First Nations people, or the assault on religious art experienced
by the Armenians in Turkey? Frank Chalk, director of the Montreal
Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies at Concordia, is one
of the driving forces behind the conference and he says these
communities have a lot to learn from each other.
“This will help consolidate the lessons learned and share the burden
these communities carry,” he said.
Plundered Cultures, Stolen Heritage will open a chapter in
multidisciplinary human rights studies integrating research on
history, cultural studies and the memory of atrocity.
It will bring together leading experts on the cultural destruction and
mass atrocities suffered by the First Nations, Armenian and Jewish
peoples to discuss the motives of the perpetrators of these assaults –
and the impact.
Rather than a competition of suffering between groups, it will focus
on learning from the shared experiences of these communities with the
aim of helping all groups confront crimes against humanity and
genocides. It will open with a keynote address by Morley Safer (which
is sold out), a correspondent for CBS News’ 60 Minutes, who is
interested in the subject of looted art.
Although it wasn’t timed to coincide, the issue of looted art had a
local angle last week when the beneficiaries of Max Stern, a Jewish
art dealer who fled Nazi Germany for Montreal after he was forced to
close his gallery, recovered a painting looted by Nazi officials 76
years ago.
His estate was left to Concordia, McGill University and the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, and the colleges began a campaign to recover
the lost art. The Max Stern Art Restitution Project, administered by
Concordia, has recovered 11 paintings of about 400 being traced.
And in October, several controversies swirled in European art circles
centred on looted art (see sidebar).
Hollywood will even document its version of the subject with the movie
The Monuments Men, directed by and starring George Clooney, which
centres on a group of art historians and museum curators charged with
rescuing art treasures taken by the Nazis. It is to be released in
February.
The Nazi regime systematically plundered hundreds of thousands of
artworks from museums and individuals.
More recently, Chalk said, the wars in the Middle East and central
Asia illustrate that assaults on culture are still being waged – and
are often a precursor to genocide.
“You just have to look at the attacks on Christians in Egypt and
Syria, where churches are being destroyed,”
he said. “And the Buddhist statues, great treasures, destroyed by the
Taliban in Afghanistan (just over a decade ago).”
Clarence Epstein, director of the Max Stern Art Restitution Project,
said the conference marks a pivotal point for Concordia, which is
chairing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance this year.
“It will be a symbolic and important week for us,” he said. “The
university has been spearheading this issue with regards to one
subject, which is WWII restitution issues, but this is the first
conference that goes beyond WWII issues and talks about injustices as
varied as those of the First Nations and Armenian communities. “It’s
an important conference which will attract a lot of attention – at a
time when there is a groundswell of interest in this issue.”
To see the full program, go to
concordia.ca/events/calendar/2013/11/06/plunderedcultures/program.html.
[email protected] Twitter: KSeidman
Recent developments in looted art
April 2013
The federal government commits funding of almost $200,000 to enable
Canadian museums to contribute to a key international research effort
on the provenance of Holocaust-era works of art.
October 2013
The National Gallery of London is urged to investigate the ownership
of a painting believed to have been stolen from a Jewish family by the
Nazis. The Portrait of Amalie
Zuckerkandl by Gustav Klimt is on loan to the gallery from the
Belvedere Gallery in Vienna, but a lawyer who specializes in the
restitution of significant artworks insists the painting was looted.
The director of Vienna’s Leopold Museum, Tobias Natter, quit after
some of the most senior staff joined a controversial new foundation
associated with Gustav Klimt’s illegitimate son, whose works included
Nazi propaganda.
A probe by Dutch museums showed that 139 of their artworks, including
a Matisse and two Kandinsky paintings, may have been plundered by the
Nazis during the Second World War, many from Jewish owners. It showed
that one-quarter of the 162 Dutch museums that took part in the study
into art acquisitions between 1933 and 1945 have objects with a
questionable history.
Karen Seidman