What are the legal remedies for art and artifacts unlawfully taken in times of war and injustice? A recent Fordham Law symposium brought together scholars, policymakers, advocates, and students to discuss thorny questions at the intersection of art, history, and the law.
The symposium was timely given new legal developments shaping how people, societies, and governments address looted art and cultural artifacts. To date, 31 countries have endorsed updated best practices on the question of Holocaust-era art that among other things urge that countries make it easier for claimants to find justice by easing burden of proof requirements. In addition, new regulations close legal loopholes that had previously stalled the repatriation of Native American cultural property .
“This is a unique moment in time as we reexamine the question of how we, as a society, address looted art and cultural property,” said Gideon Taylor, president of the World Jewish Restitution Organization and an adjunct professor at Fordham Law. “This issue is the meeting point of history, morality, justice, as well as legislation, civil litigation, law enforcement, alternative dispute resolution as well as broader policy issues.”
Guest speakers at the symposium included Michael Mukasey, U.S. attorney general from 2007 to 2009 and a former judge of the Southern District of New York who played a pivotal role in adjudicating the Holocaust-era art case, U.S. v. Portrait of Wally. The case centered on the painting “Portrait of Wally,” stolen from Austrian-Jewish art dealer Lea Bondi by the Nazis and seized in New York in 1997 for violating the National Stolen Property Act, had sparked a years-long legal battle. Its settlement, which included a sizable payment to Bondi’s heirs and public acknowledgment of the painting’s history, set a key legal precedent in addressing Nazi-looted art.
The symposium also examined more recent developments in restitution or art and cultural property. Ambassador Abubakar Jidda, consul-general of Nigeria, described his country’s recent legal actions taken to restore cultural property stolen under colonial rule. According to Jidda, thousands of artifacts were stolen by the British during the Benin Expedition of 1897, including many bronze statues which have since ended up in foreign museums and private collections all over the world. “These looted treasures are not mere objects, they are the very essence of our identity, the silent chronicles of our evolution as a country and the embodiment of the soul of the people,” said Jidda.
Professor Angela R. Riley, chair of Native American law at UCLA and a citizen of the Potawatomi Nation, outlined the history of the collection of Native American human remains and cultural property. Given the “idea that of course native people were going to disappear,” it was claimed that it was appropriate to “capture everything that [they]could in order to study us and our purported racial inferiority.” Benjamin Barnes, chief of the Shawnee Tribe, spoke of the importance of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and how “sacred site protection goes hand in hand with the rights of the dead”.
“This symposium is a testament to Fordham’s leadership, to our centrality and to our role in this incredibly important and rapidly developing field,” said Fordham Law Dean Joseph Landau. “We have great courses on these topics, taught by major players in this arena who understand the issues through and through. [And we are] situated in a city with the concentration of art museums and auction houses and with the legal and financial infrastructure that is the perfect environment for examining the complexities of looted art and cultural property.”
The legal questions surrounding art and cultural property will continue to matter because they “speak to who we are and who we want to be,” said Taylor. “It brings us closer to lives that are no longer with us, and to memories that were lost. It can represent the heart of a family, the heritage of a community, the soul of a people.”
A video of the speakers and panels can be found here.
