The life of an art detective

The life of an art detective

While the Elgin Marbles from Ancient Greece sit comfortably in the British Museum, international public outrage calls for their return home. In May, Italy celebrated having €60 million (£51 million) of historical artefacts returned to from US museums and galleries. As demand for historical reparations grows, we spoke to Richard Aronowitz, the Global Head of Restitution at Christie’s, specialising in Nazi-confiscated art.

Richard Aronowitz never intended to spend his days hunting down the original owners of Nazi-looted art. It’s a métier that chose him — not the other way around.

In 2006, Sotheby’s approached Richard to head up its restitution department in Europe. He was previously a fine art expert with a German-Jewish background, having a Masters in German 20th-century art history, an undergraduate degree in German and a long-held interest in 1933-45 provenance research.

“I realised that running the European restitution team was probably exactly what I should be doing,” says Richard. “Before that, I had always thought of myself more as a curator or fine art expert. “As a fine art expert, you spend all your time looking at the front of artworks. As a restitution specialist, you spend all your time looking at the backs,” he says. Just like Sotheby’s team, Christie’s restitution department, which Richard joined in March 2022, proactively researches the thousands of artworks created before 1945 that the company would like to offer for sale, as part of its due diligence process.

Buyers, sellers and auction houses have given increased attention to the provenance of artworks in recent years. In June, a Swiss museum removed five paintings from public display while it investigates whether they were looted by the Nazis during the war, for example. Growing social movements, highlighting the injustices inflicted by colonialism, have also led the art world to look more closely at the origins of historic works. This is partly due to the rise of the internet, which has enabled the research and information sharing required for restitution work.

A public push for justice

Museums are being particularly cautious, and for good reason. The US Manhattan District Attorney’s office has seized dozens of antiquities from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in recent years so that they can be returned to countries including Cambodia, China, Egypt, Italy and Turkey. In response, the museum has hired a team of 12 people to search its collection of 1.5 million objects for stolen items. This could take a while: in March 2023 the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists released a report claiming more than 1,000 items in the Met were previously owned by people indicted or convicted of crimes. However, the museum has disputed this.

Amongst this push for justice, the restitution of Nazi-looted works has been given a particularly strong focus as it is a context that is relatively easy to define. There is a specific period and geography. It largely focuses on Jewish ownership, although it could be any oppressed group during this era.

History is always personal

“It’s arduous, complex, time-consuming and, of course, emotionally draining work,” says Richard. “Sometimes, when you find a Jewish name in the ownership history, and follow that lead, you find that the owner was deported, had to flee Nazi Europe for America or Venezuela, or you find that the owner was murdered and the work itself was somehow miraculously saved within the family or lost and restituted after World War II. Nevertheless, the biographies you encounter are often troubling at best. It’s not a terrain for everyone.”

On his office wall at Christie’s in King Street, London, Richard has a photo of his grandmother who was murdered by the Nazis and his mother’s Kindertransport card – a rescue mission that took German, Austrian and Czech Jewish children to Britain before the Second World War – as a daily reminder of the context of his work. “We are trying to do something positive that recognises history and tries to resolve unresolved taints. We are all trying to give a very small thing back into the void of history,” he says. Often this research goes far beyond reuniting a family with stolen works of art. It gives the family information about their history that was until now lost in the upheavals of the Nazi regime and war.

An exhibition called “Looking for Owners”. This exhibition displays 53 pieces, most of them being treasured paintings looted from Jewish homes by Nazis in occupied France.

Settling claims

Out of the thousands of lots that Richard’s team researches every year, from Persian carpets to Monets, they may discover about 50 that were looted or subject to forced sale by Jews during the Third Reich. And out of that, about 25-28 were already recovered by the “Monuments Men and Women” – a unit established to protect cultural property in war areas during and after the war – and then restituted after 1945 to relatives of those who lost them. Its work was featured in a 2014 film, The Monuments Men, starring George Clooney, based on an earlier book.

However, if a claim to an unrecovered and unrestituted work is established, Christie’s restitution team looks to initiate a dialogue between its client and the claimant. Often a financial settlement is made through the sale of the work and the splitting of the proceeds in mutually agreed percentages between the current owner and the claimant, lifting the Nazi-era taint. The claimant rarely asks for full physical restitution of the object. Having worked in the field for 18 years, Richard says that he can count on one hand the number of times a family has asked for the physical object back. This is chiefly because by now the claimant group is often relatively large and they cannot all share one work of art.

“When something was lost by a museum in the upheavals of war, however, whether in Germany, Poland or elsewhere, through Nazi or Red Army looting or some other form of nefarious act, then the museum of course always wants the work back because they want to reconstitute their collection. That’s a very challenging scenario,” says Richard. Sometimes, but by no means always, museums are willing to pay a small “finder’s fee” for the object. “The problem is if a current owner doesn’t accept that. They may be stuck with something they can’t sell, as the item will be registered on the Lost Art database,” he explains.

Sgt Harold Maus of Scranton, Pennsylvania, examines an engraving by Albrecht Durer stolen by the Nazis and hidden in Merkers salt mine, Thuringia, 13 May 1945.

What can you learn about your own artworks?

“Ask questions,” says Richard. If you’re curious about the history of the artworks you own, there are plenty of experts that can help you research their past. “We don’t differentiate by price,” he says. “The due diligence work we do for a $4,000 watercolour is not dissimilar to the work we do for a multimillion-dollar Monet.”

Equally, for flat artworks, Richard suggests that owners can take them out of their frames and look at their backs to see if it has any marks, stamps, inscriptions, or labels that might help you build up a better picture of its past. “You would be amazed what you can sometimes find there,” says Richard.