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| Hermann Göring (as seen above) was a ruthless and avid Nazi art collector |
A media storm ensued and unrest temporarily broke out, though today one of those paintings sits firmly upon the wall of an insignificant elderly gentleman in a small bungalow in Cornwall. A fitting if not some what ironic punishment perhaps for the work of a dictator with delusions of grandeur.
However, today a set of paintings once owned by the Commander of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Goring, goes on auction this Spring after being returned just a year ago to its original owners. The paintings include works by Salomon van Ruysdael which is expected to raise an estimated $30m, only about $100m short of the price recently reached by the same art dealers for the sale of Gustav Klimt's potrait of Adele Bloch Bauer, a former lover.
While the modern-day heirs of art collector Jacques Goldstikker intend to keep a portion of the art work a majority of it will end up on display quite possibly in the United States. Although some of the work had been recovered many years ago this raises questions over the cultural implications of handing over these works of art, especially for the Dutch as many of the pieces had been parts of the national collection.
Over the past few years we've seen a rush to return stolen masterpieces, including major works by Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klimt and the expressionist Van Gogh. For some, this is seen as a theft of cultural heritage with major works being taken from the hands of museums and handed back to private collectors, though we must look deeper and ask if it is more than that?
Once, Vienna was a thriving and vibrant city full of energy, life and culture... and home to many an artistic genius such as Klimt, Moser, Hoffmann and Olbrich. But then it was gone and but a spectre of anti-semitism. In this anti-semitic Vienna post anschluss with Germany came a ferocious attack on the rights and privildges of the Jewish artistic community. The art work they collected was taken from them by their Nazi oppresors, totalling over three million works of art. These stolen works of art are symbols of oppression and of loss, and of persecution.
Not only does their return triumph an end to that, but closure for ones anscestors and a self-satisfying knowlege that one may now rest, as the wrongs of the past have now been put right.