Dutch museums survey works stolen from Jews by Nazis. And they will return them to their owners

Dutch museums have conducted a census of works stolen by the Nazis from Jews during World War II and now held by institutions in the Netherlands. The result of the Museums Association’s Museale Verwervingen (“Museum Acquisitions”) project was a list of 170 works suspected to have been confiscated at the time, between 1933 and 1945: the works include 83 paintings (one of them in the collection of the Dutch royals, who had already returned a work by Joris van der Haagen to its rightful owner in 2015), 26 drawings, and 13 Jewish ceremonial objects. There are valuable pieces: most notable are the famous Lamentation over the Dead Christ by Hans Memling kept at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam and a watercolor by Vasily Kandinsky at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

It took several years to lead to the final list, since the Museale Verwervingen project started in 2009: in all, 163 institutions were investigated, and of these as many as 42 found works stolen from Jewish families in their collections. The search, moreover, is still ongoing at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, given the size of its collection. “This is,” a spokesman for the project, Chris Janssen, explained to the Guardian, “an important search to do justice. A museum can only exhibit a work if the events and history behind the object are clear. In other words: a museum must know what paths an artwork took before it arrived at the museum. And that is the only possible way to inform visitors well.”

The works will now be returned to their rightful owners. Since 2000, Holland has had a special restitution committee, which takes complaints from owners and returns works to them: so far, more than 450 works have been returned. To which will be added those that have emerged from the Museale Verwervingen project.

Pictured is one of the works found in the survey: Hans Memling, Lamentation over the Dead Christ (c. 1470-1475; height, 68.5 x 52.7 cm; Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen)

Dutch museums survey works stolen from Jews by Nazis. And they will return them to their owners

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