KEY POINTS:
He is a child of Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe who has become a leading light of Britain's art establishment. But Sir Norman Rosenthal, the former exhibitions secretary of the Royal Academy, has risked alienating the Jewish community by speaking out against returning Nazi art plunder to the descendants of its owners.
Writing in The Art Newspaper, Sir Norman said it was time to put an end to restitution. He suggested it was better for plundered art to stay in public collections than return to the descendants of owners, many of whom have long since died. Sir Norman said the Washington Declaration of 1998, which committed 44 countries to find and return stolen works, needed to be revisited.
"This process [of research and restitution] has been ongoing for 10 years and the items in question have often been claimed by people distanced by two or more generations from their original owners," he said. "I believe history is history and that you can't turn the clock back or make things good again through art. Ever since the beginning of recorded history, because of its value, art has been looted and, as a result, arbitrarily distributed and disseminated throughout the world.
"Of course, what happened in the Nazi period was unspeakable in its awfulness. I lost many relatives whom I never knew personally and who died in concentration camps in the most horrible of circumstances. But I believe grandchildren or distant relations of people who had works of art or property taken by the Nazis do not now have an inalienable right to ownership, at the beginning of the 21st century."
But Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Galleries and chairman of a working group examining the spoliation of art during World War II, said: "Spoliation has been under intensive discussion only for the past 10 years since the Washington conference on Holocaust-Era Assets in 1998. I think it would be premature to impose a moratorium now but, at some point in the future, this may be appropriate."
A statement by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, which created an independent Spoliation Advisory Panel in 2000, said: "We believe that, where a work of art can be proved to have been looted in the Nazi era, the wishes of the heirs of the original owners should be respected and, where possible, the work returned or appropriate amends made. This is a simple, right and fair way of righting historic wrongs and we have no plans to resile on our commitment."
- INDEPENDENT
