Category: Uncategorized

From Viking Silver to Washington: Who Gets to Decide What Survives?

It has been an unusually revealing week for cultural heritage law.

In Iran, conservators are racing to stabilize historic buildings damaged during the war. In Denmark, a homeowner digging a new terrace discovered the largest known Viking Age silver hoard in the country. In Florida, federal investigators are beginning the daunting work of identifying more than 22,000 antiquities seized in an ongoing smuggling investigation. And in Washington, the physical fabric of national cultural institutions continues to be remade, from the demolished East Wing of the White House to the removal this week of Joel Shapiro’s Blue from the Kennedy Center.

These stories arise from very different legal settings. Together they offer a useful reminder of what cultural heritage protection actually requires: good rules, capable institutions, expertise, and enough time to act before something important disappears.

The most sobering story comes from Iran. Sarvy Geranpayeh reports in The Art Newspaper that Iranian heritage officials have recorded damage to 149 historic monuments across 18 provinces and 29 cities following the US-Israeli strikes that began in February. Among the damaged sites are the Golestan Palace in Tehran, the seventeenth-century Chehel Sotoun Palace in Isfahan, and part of the Trans-Iranian Railway, all associated with UNESCO World Heritage inscriptions.

At Golestan Palace, a team of specialists collects, sorts and codes shattered wooden and decorative fragments Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Handicrafts

The details of the conservation work are especially striking. At Golestan Palace, specialists are collecting, sorting, and coding shattered wooden and decorative fragments. Damaged roofs are being repaired before autumn rain causes another round of harm. At Chehel Sotoun, crews have stabilized damaged sections and removed hazards. Specialists repaired the Trans-Iranian Railway quickly enough to restore operations. Iranian officials estimate damage to the heritage sector at about 7.5 trillion tomans, roughly $40 million at current exchange rates. This is the less glamorous side of cultural heritage protection.

Iranian officials have been communicating with UNESCO, the secretariat of the Hague Convention, and other international bodies. They are also compiling technical documentation for possible compensation claims and international legal proceedings. Farhad Azizi Zelani, Iran’s director general of national and world heritage sites, draws a broader lesson from the experience: international instruments need effective implementation and a rapid response when cultural property is threatened.

That is an important point for the broader law of armed-conflict heritage protection. A treaty supplies a framework. The resilience of cultural property also depends on institutions capable of using it.

Photo: North Jutland Museums / Nordjyske Museer

A very different story from Denmark: A homeowner in Rebild set out to build a terrace and instead found enough Viking silver to make archaeologists everywhere reconsider the attractions of yard work. The newly discovered hoard contains about 700 tenth-century objects and fragments weighing nearly 18.5 kilograms, including silver bars, bracelets, 47 whole coins and coin fragments, a small Thor’s hammer, and pieces of cut silver. The Art Newspaper reports on the discovery here, while Nordjyske Museer provides an excellent account of the find and its archaeological significance.

The objects reveal an economy tied to a very large world. The hoard contains both Arabic and Anglo-Saxon coins. Much of the silver was apparently valued by weight rather than by the identity of the object itself. The bars, broken jewelry, coins, and silver fragments offer evidence of trade networks linking Scandinavia with England and the Islamic world during a period when the Danish kingdom and Christianity in Scandinavia were taking shape.

The legal response is almost as interesting as the discovery. Under section 30 of the Danish Museum Act, objects from the past that possess valuable material or special cultural-historical significance can constitute danefæ, or treasure trove. Qualifying finds belong to the state and must be turned over to the National Museum. The finder receives compensation based on the material value and rarity of the objects and, importantly, “the level of care” used in securing the find. The National Museum of Denmark explains the reward system here.

That last factor matters. Denmark has built an incentive into the law for a finder to protect archaeological information rather than simply extract valuable objects from the ground. The Rebild finder realized he had encountered something significant, proceeded carefully, and the find entered an archaeological and museum system. The result preserves the objects and much of the knowledge they carry.Compare that sequence with what happens after antiquities have entered illicit commercial channels.

ICE Seizes 22,000 Antiquities in Florida

Hyperallergic reported this week on the extraordinary seizure of more than 22,000 artifacts by Homeland Security Investigations in Florida. HSI announced the seizure on August 28 and described it as among the largest in the agency’s history. Preliminary assessments suggest some of the objects are between 1,000 and 5,000 years old and originated in Europe, Africa, the Levant, and the eastern Mediterranean. Researchers from the University of South Florida and the University of Pennsylvania are assisting with identification, authentication, and conservation.

At this stage, there is still a great deal we do not know. Authorities have said little publicly about the suspected trafficking network, the provenance of individual objects, possible source countries, or eventual repatriations. With 22,000 objects, sorting those questions will take considerable time.

This is the recurring difficulty with antiquities enforcement. Recovery gets the object back into responsible custody. Archaeological context may already have vanished. Investigators and scholars then have to reconstruct histories of excavation, ownership, export, and import from whatever evidence remains.

The institutional juxtaposition identified by Hyperallergic is also difficult to miss. HSI has developed considerable expertise in cultural-property investigations and repatriations. Elsewhere within the Department of Homeland Security, border construction has recently damaged the Las Playas Intaglio archaeological site in Arizona, while preservation and environmental requirements have been waived for other border projects that may affect archaeological resources. Somehow, one federal department can simultaneously contain sophisticated cultural-property enforcement and activities that put cultural resources at risk.

Which brings us to Washington D.C. The East Wing of the White House was demolished between October and December 2025 as part of the project to construct a new East Wing containing a ballroom and underground military facilities. Adam Gopnik’s essay on the demolition in The New Yorker remains one of the better pieces of writing about why the loss generated such a strong response. His central insight is that architecture carries political meaning. The White House accumulated meaning because presidents inherited it temporarily. Alterations to a building like this therefore implicate process, stewardship, and institutional continuity as well as architectural taste.

There is an especially revealing legal wrinkle now. On August 31, the Supreme Court divided 5–4 in National Park Service v. National Trust for Historic Preservation and stayed a lower-court injunction that had restricted above-ground construction. The Court’s per curiam opinion emphasized standing. It concluded that the government was likely to succeed in showing that the National Trust lacked a sufficiently concrete and particularized injury to challenge the project and that the remaining stay factors favored the government. The Court expressly said that it was not deciding the legality of the East Wing project itself. The Court’s opinion is available here.

Chief Justice Roberts, joined by Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, dissented. His opening conclusion was unusually direct: “That construction is likely unlawful.” Roberts pointed to 40 U.S.C. § 8106, which prohibits construction of a building or structure on federal public grounds in the District of Columbia without express congressional authority. In his view, Congress had supplied no such authority for the ballroom project.

The standing dispute may prove important for preservation law well beyond this particular building. Historic-preservation organizations often rely on members whose use and enjoyment of historic places supply the injury necessary to get into federal court. A rule that treats an architectural or historic injury largely as disagreement with government aesthetics could make some preservation challenges considerably harder to bring. There is also a simpler lesson here. By the time the case reached the Supreme Court, the East Wing was already gone. Preservation law has always struggled with remedies because demolition can happen quickly.

Another removal in Washington this week raises a related set of questions. On Wednesday, September 2, National Park Service crews dismantled Joel Shapiro’s Blue, the 24-foot painted-aluminum sculpture installed at the Kennedy Center’s REACH campus in 2019. Shapiro had described the animated, angular figure as a “celebration of possibility.” He gifted the sculpture to the Kennedy Center as a permanent installation. The Washington Post’s reporting on the removal is particularly useful, as is Hyperallergic’s account of the deinstallation.

Critics Slam “Petty” Removal of Joel Shapiro Sculpture From Kennedy Center

The Kennedy Center offered no advance public explanation for the decision. It said that the Joel Shapiro and Ellen Phelan Foundation would decide where the sculpture is installed next. Former Kennedy Center curator Josef Palermo gave the Post a more pointed account. He said he had previously been instructed to “get rid” of outdoor artwork because President Trump wanted an entirely new collection when the Center reopened after renovations. Palermo did not recall Blue being singled out individually.

The photographs of the sculpture being taken apart invite a moral-rights question, and I may return to that issue in a separate post.

There is an important wrinkle at the outset. Shapiro died on June 14, 2025. For a work of visual art created after the Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA) took effect, 17 U.S.C. § 106A provides that the federal rights of attribution and integrity last for the life of the author, with the statutory term running through the end of the calendar year in which it otherwise expires. Shapiro’s VARA rights therefore expired at the end of 2025, months before Blue was removed.

That makes Blue a potentially useful case study in the limits of American moral rights. Had Shapiro still been alive, the facts would invite questions about destruction or modification, removal from a site for which a work was given as a “permanent installation,” and the uneasy treatment of site-specific art under VARA. The First Circuit’s decision in Phillips v. Pembroke Real Estate—which of course does not bind courts in Washington—famously concluded that VARA does not protect site-specific art as such. Those questions deserve more space than I can give them here.

For now, the larger pattern is enough. Cultural heritage law is sometimes treated as a field concerned with old things: temples, archaeological sites, ancient coins, museum collections, historic buildings. Yet heritage becomes vulnerable in the present. The differences among these stories matter. So does the common question beneath them: who gets to decide what survives, and through what process?

Good heritage law creates time for expertise before an irreversible decision. It records what has been found and what has been lost. It creates incentives for responsible behavior. It gives institutions the authority and resources to conserve. And, at its best, it recognizes that stewardship carries obligations to people who will encounter these places and objects long after the present decision-makers are gone. Once the bulldozers arrive, or an archaeological context has been scattered, the law has considerably less to work with.

Sources and Further Reading

Smash and Smash at the Dallas Museum of Art

Both the Dallas Museum of art and an alleged vandal had a very bad Wednesday evening last night. Dallas police have said that a young man of 21 allegedly went up to the glass doors of the Museum, smashed his way in using a metal chair, and then began breaking display cases and their contents. And the damage was considerable.

A Black-figure panel amphora

One of the smashed objects was this amphora, and according to the DMA website, it dates to the 6th Century and depicts a battle between Achilles and Prince Memnon of Ethiopia.

Batah Kuhuh Alligator Gar Fish Effigy Bottle

Another smashed object was this lovely more recent effigy bottle depicting an Alligator Gar by the artist Chase Kahwinhut Earles.

Details released by police about the incident seem to indicate the perpetrator was just really frustrated after an argument with his girlfriend. Motion sensors inside the Museum alerted security to the intruder, but he apparently also called the police himself.

In a statement the DMA noted “This was an isolated incident perpetrated by one individual acting alone, whose intent was not theft of art or any objects on view . . . However, some works of art were damaged and we are still in the process of assessing the extent of the damages.”

So hopefully then enough fragments were recovered that these pieces may be put back together again. And if so, who knows, maybe the cool Alligator gar effigy bottle will become world famous, like the Mona Lisa, which suffered an attack from an attention-seeker last week. Remember, it was the theft of that painting in 1911 by artist Vincenczo Peruggia which first sent that work into art stardom.

Tommy Cummings, $5 Million of Ancient Art Destroyed at DMA in Overnight Break-In, The Dallas Morning News, https://www.dallasnews.com/arts-entertainment/visual-arts/2022/06/02/5-million-of-ancient-art-destroyed-at-dma-in-overnight-break-in/ [https://perma.cc/H3TD-NEWT] (last visited Jun. 2, 2022).

The Terrific Pandora Papers Looted Art Article

Prang Temple of Jayavarman IV (928-41), Koh Ker Cambodia (via)

I want to praise the terrific reporting done by Peter Whoriskey, Malia Politzer, Delphine Reuter, and Spencer Woodman. Their piece titled “Global Hunt for Looted Treasures Leads to Offshore Trusts” gets so many of the details about the illicit trade in antiquities right, and is thoroughly sourced and researched. The longread details the extent to which the super-rich have turned to offshore trusts and asset havens in order to avoid the increasing object-focused investigation and regulation of the art and antiquities trade. The piece is fantastic, with a beautiful kicker at the end, don’t miss it.

The great detail about the antiquities trade, the wealthy collectors who fuel it with money, and the damage done to sites and heritage are a real highlight of the reporting. Here’s a glimpse:

“Latchford’s infatuation with Khmer artwork coincided with a hot market for antiquities looted from Cambodia and neighboring Thailand and Laos. All three countries were part of the Khmer Empire, which flourished from the 9th to 15th centuries.

Beginning in the 1970s, amid the tumult of civil war and Pol Pot’s genocidal regime in Cambodia, the temple complexes of the Khmer Empire — including three designated by UNESCO as World Heritage sites — fell prey to massive bouts of ransacking. Organized networks, often headed by members of the military or the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot’s radical communist movement, broke statues from their pedestals. Dynamite blasted other relics loose. Entire walls were trucked away. Proceeds from this pillaging, experts say, helped fund the fighting. The looting continued into the 2010s.

One particular target was the ancient city of Koh Ker, with its 76 temples and aqueducts, statuary and a seven-level pyramid. The statues of Koh Ker were distinctive and revolutionary for their time: Artisans carved sandstone masterpieces that were intricately detailed, larger-than-life and often infused with dynamic movement.”

The Pandora papers are the name given a consortium of hundreds of news organizations around the world who have done a terrific job of making the investigation into the 12 million documents that reveals hidden wealth, tax avoidance, and even money laundering. The data was obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). It focuses on the collection of art of the late Douglas Latchford, and the efforts by Federal Prosecutors to seize looted art from him and even indict him personally. The documents reveal that these offshore trusts are the mechanism used when investigators and prosecutors investigate, seize, or forfeit this looted material and the proceeds. As investigation and prosecution has advanced in recent decades, so too have the strategies used to evade the law.

One of the interesting details of the piece is how many museums still have pieces linked to Latchford or his associates:

  • Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
  • Denver Art Museum
  • British Museum
  • Cleveland Museum of Art
  • Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
  • Asian Art Museum, San Fancisco
  • Brooklyn Museum, New York
  • National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
  • Walter Art Museum, Baltimore
  • Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Many of these of course are museums which have often been connected to the illicit trade in art and antiquities. The piece also offers a rundown of responses by these museums which range from LACMA’s ‘no comment’; to the MET’s empty claim that it ‘is committed to the responsible acquisition of archaeological art’.

Peter Whoriskey et al., Global Hunt for Looted Treasures Leads to Offshore Trusts, Washington Post (Oct. 5, 2021), https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2021/met-museum-cambodian-antiquities-latchford/ [https://perma.cc/5ZAG-5E67].

Responses from Museums to Pandora Papers Antiquities Investigation, Washington Post (Oct. 5, 2021), https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/10/05/museums-response-pandora-papers-antiquities/ [https://perma.cc/SCG9-CHK2].

Pandora Papers: A Simple Guide to the Pandora Papers Leak, BBC News (Oct. 5, 2021), https://www.bbc.com/news/world-58780561 [https://perma.cc/574Y-PNNF].

Psychics, Bowie knives, fake Alamo artifacts: New Book out today on how Texas can’t shake the Alamo

I have been enjoying immensely the excerpts from this book, Forget the Alamo, which have been appearing in the Houston Chronicle and Texas Monthly in recent weeks. Today the book is published, and you can order a copy from bookshop here if you are interested. And I think you should be.

It seems that Phil Collins (yes, that Phil Collins) has been an avid collector of Alamo knives, belts, and memorabilia for decades. As you might expect, his appetite for acquiring the artifacts has created a kind of Collins-centered Alamo artifact trade. And as with any collector-driven trade without safeguards, much of the material may be fake.

These writers are focused mainly on how politicians in Texas are trying to tell the story of the Alamo, and how efforts to incorporate a full and rich telling have been met with Republican in-fighting between the newest rising politician with the last name Bush, George P., and the state’s super-conservative Dan Patrick. But the excerpt in Texas Monthly has some really wild details. Like when you are acquiring material you have to just trust your gut:

Nesmith gave McDuffie some out-of-the-box advice: documents proving an artifact’s authenticity are important, but in the end, you have to trust your gut. “Why do you care what other people think?” McDuffie recalls Nesmith saying. “What do you think? What does your gut tell you?” It was advice McDuffie took to heart. “When I started listening to my own gut, that’s when I really started finding pieces that were just really great,” he says.

Another detail that was just astounding is a collector/dealer named Joseph Musso claims to have acquired not one but two artifacts he claims were owned by James Bowie. And how did he know? He just applied some cleaner to them and held them up to the sun to reveal the initials ‘JB’. Not once but twice! And this is apparently not ever how initials on older weapons get revealed!

Also, he felt the need to authenticate that this was the personal knife of Bowie, so what did he do? Took it to a psychic, as you do of course. But not just any psychic, he didn’t believe in the paranormal so he wanted a really really good psychic, the late Peter Hurkos who passed away in 1996. What’s better object history than an anonymous collector? A superstar deceased psychic!

Hurkos, who had worked on the Charles Manson and Boston Strangler cases, agreed to a meeting, Musso says. After Musso handed him a brown paper bag with the knife inside, Hurkos reportedly named the man who had sold the knife to Musso. Musso says he then laid out several photos facedown and Hurkos pointed at one, which Musso then flipped over. It was Bowie’s portrait; Hurkos declared the knife had belonged to him. To Musso, this was just another piece of evidence that would help him build a case for authentication. 

The Alamo is enshrined on the World Heritage list, not by itself, and not because of a warped version of history, but as part of a mission system created by Catholic colonizers from the 17th century. The book has jumped to the top of my reading pile, and I’ll post a full review when I’m finished. It promises to tell a full accounting of how the State of Texas is trying to scrounge up the astounding $300 million needed to revitalize the Alamo and its surrounding area and create a museum full of Phil Collins’ and his dodgy Alamo purchases. While some of that material sounds as if it may actually be authentic. We absolutely can make an educated guess that a lot of the material will be fake, will be found out, and will be a colossal embarrassing waste of tax revenue. What might that funding go for instead? Solving the State’s homelessness crisis? Arts education? Environmental regulations?

Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth (Jun. 2021).

Abigail Rosenthal, Does Phil Collins Have a Huge Collection of Fake Alamo Artifacts?, Chron, https://www.chron.com/politics/article/phil-collins-alamo-dan-patrick-16190841.php (last visited Jun. 8, 2021).

The Next Battle of the Alamo!, Texas Monthly, https://www.texasmonthly.com/being-texan/next-battle-of-alamo/ (last visited Jun. 8, 2021).

Art Museum intruders escaped by boat last night in Houston

Screen shot from Carol Reed's 'The Third Man'

A couple of art museum intruders did their best Third Man impression in Houston last night. Two people allegedly broke into the Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens, a satellite museum run by the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. The individuals set off a security alarm at the Bayou Bend and were chased by a security guard. They then apparently hopped on a boat on Buffalo Bayou and evaded law enforcement long enough to scurry into a large storm drain and were able to escape.

The episode calls to mind the theft in 2000 when gunmen took works of art by Rembrandt and Renoir and then escaped the waterfront National Museum of Sweden by boat. There was also speculation in 2020 that thefts from the University of Oxford’s Christ Church Picture gallery were done by thieves who came and went by boat on either the River Cherwell or the River Thames near Oxford.

These unsuccessful Bayou bandits were not able to take anything of value according to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, but were able to lose a perfectly good boat in their escape attempt.

Here’s the local ABC13 affiliate report this morning:

A Pair of Thieves Broke Into a Houston Art Museum, Then Escaped by Boat, Texas Monthly, https://www.texasmonthly.com/being-texan/a-pair-of-thieves-broke-into-a-houston-art-museum-then-escaped-by-boat/ (last visited Mar. 17, 2021);

A. B. C. News, $30 Million Art Heist at Stockholm Museum, ABC News, https://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=81873&page=1 (last visited Mar. 17, 2021);

Van Dyck Painting Thieves “May Have Escaped in Boat,” BBC News (Mar. 17, 2020), https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-51926353.

Manhattan Antiquities Dealers Arrested in Fraud Scheme

Two antiquities dealers have been arrested today in connection with what prosecutors allege was an antiquities fraud scheme from 2015-2020. The dealers were announced in an unsealed Indictment in Manhattan federal court today: Erdal Dere of Fortuna Fine Arts Ltd., and his alleged “associate and co-conspirator” Faisal Khan. The defendants are alleged to have defrauded buyers and brokers in the antiquities trade through the use of false provenance. The false histories allegedly fraudulently used the identities of deceased individuals. Fortuna is described in the indictment as a Manhattan-based gallery which sells “antiquities and numismatics”. The indictment here seems to be targeting the false information provided by the defendants to buyers and brokers, which included names of deceased collectors and fabricated documents. The indictment alleges the material originated from Asia and was given false history with fabricated documents.

The criminal offences alleged to have been violated include Wire Fraud under 18 U.S.C. §1343, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and identity theft under 18 U.S.C. 1028A.

In a press release today announcing the arrests, statements from the U.S. Attorney and FBI Assistant Director attempt to tie this investigation into broader efforts to regulate the art and antiquities trade. Audrey Strauss, the Acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York said:

The integrity of the legitimate market in antiquities rests on the accuracy of the provenance provided by antiquities dealers, which prevents the sale of stolen and looted antiquities that lack any legitimate provenance.  As alleged, Erdal Dere and Faisal Khan compromised that integrity, and defrauded buyers and brokers of the antiquities they sold, by fabricating the provenance of those antiquities, and concealing their true history.  Now, thanks to the FBI’s Art Crime Team, Dere and Khan are in custody and facing prosecution for their alleged crimes.

Also, FBI Assistant Director William F. Sweeney Jr. tied the investigation into safeguarding the objects themselves: 

Antiquities and art allow us to see a piece of history from a world that existed hundreds and, in some cases, thousands of years ago. As alleged, the men who trafficked in fake documents and used dead people’s names to bolster their lies had no care for the precious items they sold and no regard for the people they defrauded. 

The press release has asked for assistance from the public at  NYArtCrime@fbi.gov .

The alleged actions certainly link up with much of the conduct that researchers and criminologists have shown to run through the trade in art and antiquities. The use of identity theft and wire fraud charges are noteworthy and likely particularly useful. The fraud charge seems to me to be a particularly useful avenue as it gets at the core wrong of so much of what dodgy dealers engage in, as I have argued elsewhere. Remember that these arrests and the information contained in the complaint are only allegations, and it will be up to the prosecutors to meet their burden if they are to convict these men.

The Press Release:

Antiquities Dealers Arrested For Fraud Scheme, Department of Justice, https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/antiquities-dealers-arrested-fraud-scheme?fbclid=IwAR0LW7hWmCMALAqGZmboVCxntLbtJhgYJPWfWK1ERr9WoXPZZVEZsqSr4PY [https://perma.cc/K98C-S3JV] (last visited Sep. 22, 2020).

And some extra-credit reading:

Derek Fincham, Towards a Rigorous Standard for the Good Faith Acquisition of Antiquities, 37 Syracuse J. Int’l L. & Com. 145 (2009).

Konstantinos-Orfeas Sotiriou, The F Words: Frauds, Forgeries, and Fakes in Antiquities Smuggling and the Role of Organized Crime, 25 International Journal of Cultural Property 223 (Cambridge University Press 2018).

Donna Yates, Museums, Collectors, and Value Manipulation: Tax Fraud through Donation of Antiquities, Journal of Financial Crime (Emerald Group Publishing Limited 2015).

Supreme Court to Hear Case involving Nazi-era sale of the Guelph Treasure

The United States Supreme Court has granted certiorari and will weigh in on a Nazi-era dispute over artworks, involving the sale of a collection of medieval artworks known as the Guelph Treasure. The collection is described as something out of a film: gold, silver, and jeweled liturgical objects from the Church of St. Blaine in Brunswick, Germany. Many of the objects were crafted in what is today present-day Germany, but other objects came from the Italian peninsula or the Byzantine empire.

Here’s a quick background on the dispute. The Welfenschatz, or Guelph trove is currently in the possession of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation and has been claimed by successors of art dealers who were fleeing the holocaust. These objects were originally housed in the cathedral in Braunschweig, owned by the House of Guelph. During the First World War, the House of Guelph lost reign over Braunschweig and in the 1920s the pieces were sold to a consortium of Frankfurt art dealers, including 82 items in 1929. Later in 1935 the Prussian state, led by Hermann Goering, bought the remaining pieces of the treasure in what the claimants allege was a “genocidal taking”. In 2014, a German government commission found that the transaction was not a forced sale.

The claimants then brought suit in the United States. The current possessors, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation have defended that action on the grounds that as a Foreign Government, they are immune from suit in the United States under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. Claimants have argued that the actions of the Prussian government fall under one of the exceptions to that law, that the actions of the Prussians was a violation of International law, namely genocide. The Supreme Court has agreed to consider two issues:

  1. Whether suits concerning property taken as part of the Holocaust are within the expropriation exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA). This is the legal treasure which gives the claimants a jurisdictional foothold to sue a foreign government in the United States, something that ordinarily is not allowed under American law.
  2. Whether a foreign state may assert a comity defense that is outside the FSIA’s “comprehensive set of legal standards governing claims of immunity in every civil action against a foreign state.” In essence the appellants are attempting to use the idea that Courts should refrain from entering into the realm of foreign policy in a broader way. At least that is how I understand that issue.

Nicholas O’Donnell, an attorney for the claimants stated:

[W]e are grateful for the opportunity to address the Supreme Court on these important questions about holding Germany accountable for its Nazi-looted art. A 1935 transfer from German Jews to notorious art looter and war criminal Hermann Goering is the quintessential crime against international law, regardless of Germany’s Holocaust distortion in defending this case. Germany seeks to eliminate recourse for Nazi-looted art and the Court will have the chance to answer this question of critical importance for Holocaust victims.

Being on the side of the possessors and having to defend that possession by justifying the acquisition by such an evil historical figure as Hermann Goering cannot be an easy legal argument. The Court will likely hear the case in the Fall, likely via telephone if the never-ending pandemic continues to outwit the hapless policy makers here in the United States. The case could impact the future of Nazi-era claims, and claims for wrongdoing more generally during similar periods of atrocity. The Court will also hear a case involving Hungarian nationals who lost property during World War II.

Stewart Ain, Supreme Court to Hear Guelph Treasure Case, Jewish Week New York (Jul. 2, 2020), https://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/supreme-court-to-hear-guelph-treasure-case/.

Christopher F. Schuetze, U.S. Supreme Court to Rule on Medieval Treasure Bought by Nazis, The New York Times, Jul. 10, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/world/europe/guelph-treasure-germany-us.html.

Supreme Court agrees to hear Nazi art case, AP NEWS (Jul. 2, 2020), https://apnews.com/3fe60cf650bee8997d7f091fe2e8d84e.

Children’s Book Recommendation: ‘Isabella: Artist Extraordinaire’

Isabella: Artist Extraordinaire by Jennifer Fosberry, illustrated by Mike Litwin

Now for something completely different. Maintaining physical distancing and staying home presents particular challenges to those of us with toddlers. And if you are like me you likely are really, really missing the experience of seeing art in museums and galleries. Luckily, I have a remedy. There’s a terrific book that manages to combine art and staying home in a rare children’s book which is fun to read and a hit with our little one. Best of all, I receive profound joy whenever we get to the page with Edvard Munch’s The Scream, and our toddler recreates it himself. The book offers a sweet girl heroine, art that you likely know about, and a nice introduction to some major works. It has been a hit with our little book lover, and his parents.

Below you can find a useful link to the book at Bookshop, an online bookstore which supports local, independent bookstores.

The IFAR Art Law & Cultural Property Database

This is an unsolicited plug—I have no doubt that many folks are very familiar with the good work that the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR) has done for many years. But one of its most remarkable accomplishments is its Art Law and Cultural Property Database. If you are a student, attorney, art professional, or cultural heritage advocate and not availing yourself of this resource, you are likely duplicating work and failing to account for much of the advocacy and scholarship which has come before. I encouraged my own librarians to secure a subscription for my work, and the work of students in my Art Law Seminars. I’ve used this terrific resource many many times in preparing lectures and informing my own scholarship, and I encourage you to consider adding a subscription for your own firm or institution.

Information on the database is available here.

Pilot Project by the German Lost Art Foundation

Catherine Hickley reports for the Art Newspaper that a new study has shown that serious state-sanctioned seizures of privately-held artworks continued long after the conclusion of World War II, particularly in east Germany. The study examined acquisitions between 1945 and 1989 by four museums: the Viadrina Museum, and museums in Strausberg, Eberswalde, and Neuruppin. The study was conducted by the German Lost Art Foundation, and was intended as a pilot project to guide further research.


One of the most common ways that art confiscated from individuals wound up in East German museum collections was through the clearance of the residences of people who had fled the country, especially in the second half of the 1950s, Sachse says.
At the end of 1961, just a few months after the Berlin Wall was erected, East German Minister for State Security Erich Mielke gave orders for a secret operation to force open and empty unused, privately rented bank vaults, safety deposit boxes and safes at around 4,000 locations across the country and empty them of their contents.
The stealth operation, known as Aktion Licht (Operation Light), amounted to an orchestrated, state-sanctioned mass theft from people who had left the country. The treasures belonged to East Germans who had escaped to the West, but also to Jewish people forced to flee or who were taken to concentration camps during the Third Reich. The Stasi valued its findings at 4.1m deutschmarks (around $10m at the time).
After 1970, the preferred method of theft by the East German authorities was to invent astronomical tax bills and then seize art when the victims could not pay.

Catherine Hickley, Mass theft of art from East German citizens revealed in new report, The Art Newspaper (Jun. 12, 2019), http://theartnewspaper.com/news/mass-theft-of-art-from-east-german-citizens-revealed.