Tag Archives: Germany

New issue of Art Antiquity & Law available now

Posted on: January 16, 2020 by Julia Rodrigues Casella Hommes

As we leave behind the festive season, the latest issue of Art Antiquity & Law has just been released in time for you to start the new year with the latest in-depth analyses from the world of art and cultural heritage law. Adam Jomeen writes about street photography and compares the legal treatments afforded to […]

Unprecedented decision of German Nazi-looted art panel

Posted on: October 8, 2019 by Alexander Herman

The recent case before the German Advisory Commission involving the painting Uhlans on the March by Hans von Marées was a first of its kind on a number of counts. The Commission is the body that hears claims for the restitution of Nazi-looted artworks. The claim had been brought in 2017 by the beneficiaries of […]

Reacting to extremist German political propaganda – a moral rights issue?

Posted on: May 10, 2019 by Julia Rodrigues Casella Hommes

A lot of commotion was caused recently by a German right-wing party’s choice of political propaganda: the use of a 19thcentury painting with a very controversial slogan splashed across it. We are talking, of course, of Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) and Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Slave Market, a painting from 1866 currently on loan to the Clark […]

Progress on the Washington Principles: a glass half full after 20 years?

Posted on: December 5, 2018 by Emily Gould

The adoption of the Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art by 44 nations in 1998 marked a deeply significant moment in the development of cultural policy in the 20th and 21st centuries. Whilst the extent of looting perpetrated by the Nazis during the 1933-45 period was fairly well understood at that stage, few would have […]

Access to Art: the good news and the not so good…

Posted on: April 7, 2016 by Emily Gould

Significant developments on three of the stories we’ve been watching closely of late appeared in the news this week: Firstly, that the deferral on an export licence for the Sekhemka Statue has now been lifted, so it will almost certainly be leaving these shores before too long. Secondly, that pieces from the Gurlitt art hoard […]

Fair and Just Solutions book launch

Posted on: December 4, 2015 by Alexander Herman

On Wednesday, the Center for Art Law hosted an event at the Ongpin Fine Art Gallery in London to celebrate the launch of Evelien Campfens’s new book on the subject of Holocaust-era art restitution committees entitled Fair and Just Solutions? Alternatives to litigation in Nazi-looted art disputes: status quo and new developments. Campfens, who is the […]

Restitution as an art in itself

Posted on: October 2, 2015 by Alexander Herman

An art exhibition in Norway is built around a work by Henri Matisse, Blue Dress in a Yellow Armchair, and yet the work isn’t even there. The Henie Onstad Museum returned the work in March 2014 to the heirs of Paul Rosenberg, the famous Parisian art dealer whose collection of masterpieces had been looted by the Nazis […]

Two important recommendations on Nazi-era loot

Posted on: September 24, 2015 by Alexander Herman

The Spoliation Advisory Panel, the UK body that hears disputes relating to Nazi-looted art held in national collections, has delivered two important reports this month. The first is a follow-up on an earlier 2014 recommendation that the Tate return a Constable painting, ‘Beaching a Boat, Brighton’, to the descendants of the painting’s original owner, Baron Hatvany of Hungary. The Baron had […]

Update and thoughts on Gurlitt

Posted on: August 6, 2015 by Alexander Herman

It has been some time since we discussed the Gurlitt affair in these pages. And what has happened since? Well, the challenge to Gurlitt’s will by his cousin Uta Werner has continued on. It is now before the Higher Regional Court in Munich (Oberlandesgericht München) and just last month the Court requested a psychological opinion concerning Gurlitt’s competence […]

Last call for ‘Freedom of Panorama’

Posted on: July 8, 2015 by Alexander Herman

As the European Parliament is set to vote tomorrow on the amended Report dealing with the harmonisation of ‘Freedom of Panorama’ across Europe, the opposition to the Report has taken off. This can be seen in the nearly 500,000 digital signatures acquired in the last week alone protesting the current provisions of the Report: notably the […]