Building Bridges – Rev. Al Sharpton’s Blueprint for Harlem’s Museum of Civil Rights
Celebrating Women’s History Month with Holly Hotchner, President and CEO of the National Women’s History Museum: On Record PR
Last week it was announced that a Roman mosaic, long thought lost to the ravages of war and the whimsy of wartime looting, finally returned to its rightful home in Pompeii. The racy piece of ancient décor, depicting a pair of...more
In February, the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) announced that it would withdraw its lawsuit against the Manhattan District Attorney (DANY) for declaratory judgment that the museum was the rightful owner of a Greco-Roman...more
I was proud to advise the Allentown Art Museum, which announced today that it has reached an agreement with the heirs of Henry and Hertha Bromberg concerning Portrait of George, Duke of Saxony by Lucas Cranach the Elder and...more
I was honored to be among the speakers this week at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on March 5, 2024. Convened by the World Jewish Restitution Organization and the U.S. State Department, the event announced the...more
(Germany’s highest court issued a much-anticipated ruling on a challenge by a collector to the listing of his painting in the so-called Lost Art database in Magdeburg, Germany. The Bundesgerichtshof (BGH) ruled that the...more
The artworks stolen by the Nazis are the last prisoners of World War II. – Ronald Lauder, Woman in Gold Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer was a wealthy sugar magnate in Vienna, Austria where his six Gustav Klimt paintings were housed....more
New York Governor Kathy Hochul has signed into law a new requirement requiring museums to indicate publicly any object in their collection that was displaced by the Nazis as part of what Congress has rightly called the...more
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit yesterday affirmed the 2019 judgment that allowed the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Museum in Madrid to retain Camille Pissarro’s Rue St. Honoré, après-midi, effet de pluie (Rue...more
There has been some renewed interest in the case a decade or so ago involving a claim by the heir of Oskar Reichel’s family to a painting in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston: Two Nudes (Lovers) by Oskar Kokoschka. In response...more
On March 2, 2020, the Supreme Court denied the petition for writ of certiorari filed in Laurel Zuckerman, as Ancillary Adminstratrix of the Estate of Alice Leffmann v. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. At issue was whether the...more
The Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz (Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, or SPK) in Berlin announced that it had agreed to restitute a 1537 painting of the biblical figure Lot by Hans Baldung Grien to the heirs of Hans...more
One of the longest-running court cases in the United States about art looted by the Nazis has been decided in favor of the current possessor, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, an instrumentality of the Kingdom of...more
Debate has peaked in the last year or so about the treatment and possible restitution of so-called colonial artifacts in Western (i.e., European and North American) museums. The conversation is important for many reasons, but...more
I am pleased to be taking part in a symposium at the Skirball Center in Los Angeles on September 26, 2018, “The Future of Nazi Looted Art Recovery in the US and Abroad.” Presented by Cypress LLP and the Sotheby’s Institute of...more
As Germany puts on the much-anticipated exhibition in Bonn of Cornelius Gurlitt’s disputed collection, a strange story has developed not too far away in Düsseldorf. The Stadtmuseum, which is administered by the city itself,...more
On July 10, 2017, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit became the first circuit court to apply the six-year statute of limitations from the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act of 2016 (HEAR Act). In Cassirer v....more
In recent art world news, last week the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that a holocaust survivor’s heirs can seek the return of a Nazi looted painting from Spain’s Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum. The...more
In recent art world news, artworks that had been seized by the Nazis from German museums and later discovered hidden away by Cornelius Gurlitt, a reclusive Munich art collector who had amassed a collection of 1,500 artworks...more
A federal appeals court has upheld the growing consensus that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) confers jurisdiction over foreign state actors in possession of art allegedly looted by and/or overseen by the Nazis....more
Two pending cases have invoked the new law - A recent article in the New York Times highlights the change that the recent passage of the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery (HEAR) Act of 2016 has had on disputes about...more
Cousin Had Challenged His Capacity to Make a Will Shortly Before 2014 Death - After a two-year legal battle, the Oberlandesgericht in Munich has upheld the dismissal of Uta Werner’s challenge to the will made by...more
Three New Members Are Added but German Museums Can Still Decline to Participate - After nearly a year of hinting at changes the Advisory Commission in Germany that makes recommendations to state museums on claims for...more
Word came this week of two resolutions of claims to Nazi-looted art in museums in New York and Cologne, and a new Nazi-looted claim against Germany filed in Washington. Barely a month after the Neue Galerie (of Austrian and...more
Two restitution related bills have advanced past the Judiciary Committee of the United States Senate: the Holocaust Expropriated Art Act (S.B. 2763, the HEAR Act), and the Foreign Cultural Exchange Jurisdictional...more
Just as it appeared that the first trial in years would begin next month on a claim of Nazi-looted art, the much publicized Von Saher case has come to an end with a judgment that entered yesterday. The U.S. District Court...more