Unfairly Faulting the French

When I heard that Hector Feliciano was reading from his book, Le Musee Disparu, at the Village Voice bookstore in Paris this summer, I didn't know who he was. I did know that I had just arrived in the city and didn't know too many people, and that art looted by the Nazis during World War II was an interesting enough topic to get me on the metro.

Feliciano's investigation of the meticulously recorded Nazi art inventories and France's National Museum archives unearthed some seemingly juicy facts, most notably that of the 60,000 art objects looted from the French by the Nazis during the war, 2,000 were still scattered throughout various French museums. To whom did these objects belong? Why hadn't the French government made greater efforts to locate their rightful owners? Was France stymieing efforts to recover lost art?

"The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World's Greatest Works of Art" was recently published by BasicBooks (despite having been rejected by 30 previous publishers prior to the book's success in France), and The New York Times Arts section featured Feliciano last week in an article titled, "A Bulldog on the Heels of Lost Nazi Loot". But how scandalous were Feliciano's findings? Should the art world really be up in arms about Nazi looted art that is still in French museums? As it turns out, the French have behaved quite responsibly under the circumstances. The intrepid Feliciano seems to have raised a lot of smoke around a fire that does not exist.

After hearing Feliciano speak at the Village Voice bookstore this summer, I was intrigued. It seemed likely that the same country which housed the Vichy regime and waited 50 years before apologizing for its dubious wartime behavior could well have been cagey in its dealings with Nazi-looted art.

Feliciano's story raised some eyebrows in France when his book came out nearly two years ago, and the 2,000 remaining objects left over from the war were put on a special retrieval display last April. As luck would have it, the French television news program I worked on this summer had mistakenly accused the French National Museum of deliberately sabotaging the retrieval of looted art, and was doing a follow-up story this summer.

Of the 60,000 objects recovered by the French from the Nazis after the war, about 45,000 were immediately returned to their rightful owners, 13,000 of very little value were auctioned off and the 2,000 remaining pieces were put into French museums, each bearing the label "MNR", which indicates the national retrieval effort. The French were under a moral obligation to find and to return recovered art to victims and their heirs after the war, and they did.

But should the French government have spent money trying to track down the owners of or heirs to these 2,000 unclaimed art objects, who were likely dead or in another country?

I travelled with a journalist and photographer to Normandy to visit one of the museums with five "MNR" artworks and to interview the museum's curator. This museum's pride and joy was an unclaimed Monet that had been stolen from France by the Germans, and it also had a Delacroix that had been recovered from the Nazis. But to the curator's knowledge, there had never been a claim on any of these five works despite their having been displayed since the early 70s.

These paintings, however, had always been marked as part of the French retrieval effort. Why now, should there be a stink about unclaimed objects that belonged to Holocaust victims or even survivors who have not reclaimed their art in the last 50 years? Feliciano betrayed some the faulty logic of this hullaballoo in The New York Times article: "'I asked people why they never investigated,' Mr. Feliciano said, 'and they said they had more important things to deal with... They said they were so happy to live that they didn't ask for material things.'"

If you owned a Monet and you survived World War II, you would probably have tried to recover it. If you survived the war and your father owned a Monet, you may also have tried to recover it. And 45,000 objects were reclaimed after the war. But if 50 years later, you realize as a result of Feliciano's book that your grandfather may have owned a Monet, do you have a right to it? That is far from obvious. But even if the answer to this question is yes, the French government will give and always would have given you back the artwork if you are the rightful heir. At this stage in the game, however, the onus is and should be on the retriever and not the French government to find and return lost art. The French government, while it could perhaps have made greater publicity efforts in the past, is not behaving badly by providing precious art with a home in its national museums.

Only a handful of very precious art was part of the 2,000 unclaimed objects, and the proof of the overreaction surrounding "The Lost Museum" is that only one legitimate claim has resulted from the publication of Feliciano's book. Was the looting of French art from Jews and others a terrible aspect of World War II? Indeed. Looting of art has been part of French-German conflict since Napoleon, and it was not any better in the 1940s than it was in the 1800s. But France did its part immediately following the war, and the 2,000 objects that remain in French museums should not be seen as a stain upon France's history, but as a sad testament to the millions of people who lost their lives--as well as their art--in the Second World War.

Daniel M. Suleiman's column appears alternate Mondays.