Statement by Earl A. Powell III, Director of the National Gallery of Art, to the Committee on Banking and Financial Services, United States House of Representatives,

10 February 2000

Mr. Chairman, members of the Committee, good morning. I appreciate the opportunity to meet with you again to discuss the subject of works of art seized during the Third Reich and to tell you about some of the National Gallery’s initiatives in this area since we last met two years ago. I was also pleased to be a member of the Association of Art Museum Director’s Task Force on the Spoliation of Art during the Nazi/World War II Era. The Task Force’s report, issued in June 1998, established important principles and guidelines to which the member museums subscribe.

At the hearing two years ago, I spoke about the National Gallery’s role on the Roberts Commission, established in 1943 by President Roosevelt to encourage and assist in the preservation of cultural properties in Europe’s war-ravaged areas. Headquartered at the National Gallery, the Roberts Commission proposed the founding of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section of the U. S. Army to assist in protecting and restituting cultural property. Among its many other tasks was the establishment of collecting points in post-war Germany to which works of art and other cultural objects, hidden by the Nazis throughout Germany and Austria and subsequently discovered by the Allies, were transferred. At these facilities, works were identified, photographed, catalogued, and restituted to their countries of origin. One of the largest of these was the Munich Central Collecting Point and works that were processed there had come from European museums and private collections, particularly from France and The Netherlands. On extended loan from the U.S. National Archives, the National Gallery currently houses portions of the Munich Collecting Point material—the existing negatives and microfilm of the original inventory cards. Over the past two years the Gallery has worked diligently to make these records more accessible—and understandable—to the public. To that end, a computerized index is being developed by Gallery staff and is designed to be used as a "finding aid" for those seeking to use the records. This computerized index cross-references artist, media, and presumed owner to the Munich inventory number. The completion of this index will help facilitate locating specific works of art within the collection. This is an extremely valuable tool, as few know the Munich number for the works of art they are researching and studying. And, it is a very time-consuming task. Prints are being made of each of the approximately 43,000 glass and film negatives and computer records created for the more than 150,000 objects. The Munich Collecting Point archive is a valuable resource; it is available to the public and over the years we have welcomed many individuals doing research on this subject, including authors, family members, and other art museum staff.

The National Gallery has always been concerned with and has conducted research on the provenance of works of art in its own collection. For example, the Gallery is publishing a projected thirty-two volume systematic catalogue of the entire collection. Written by Gallery curators and other scholars, each volume is devoted to a particular school of painting, sculpture, or decorative arts and includes comprehensive scholarly essays on each work, including details on the provenance, or history of ownership, of each work of art. Twelve of these volumes have been published since the systematic catalogue project began some sixteen years ago.

The National Gallery’s collection is one of the finest in the world, with major achievements in Western art from the Middle Ages to the present. We are at the forefront of computerized access to information on the collection. The Gallery’s Web site, launched three years ago, features an extensive section on the collection, offering searches by artist or title, numerous tours by school or medium, foreign language tours, and in-depth studies on specific artists and works of art. The collection is the cornerstone of the Web site and known provenance information is available on-line for every painting and most of the sculptures in the collection. In keeping with the AAMD Task Force recommendations, extensive research has been undertaken in the last several years by Gallery staff on the almost 1600 European paintings in the collection that date from before World War II. In addition, it is routine procedure for the Gallery to conduct ongoing consultation with the Art Loss Register which, as many of you may know, maintains an international database of claimed losses. I am pleased to participate on the panel with its chairman Ronald Tauber; the Art Loss Register staff has always been very responsive to the Gallery’s requests. We also work closely and on a continuing basis with The President’s Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the U. S. I am delighted to share the panel today with their research director for art issues, Jonathan Petropoulos; he and his staff have been very helpful in our ongoing research.

Finding a gap in known provenance in any time period is not surprising, or complicating in and of itself. When a work of art has been sold at auction or through a dealer, a previous owner’s name may have been withheld for any number of legitimate reasons. During the World War II period, the picture is further complicated since many works which had been looted were restituted to their legitimate owners in the years following the war and records of these returns, many of which are held by foreign governments, have not always been easily available. Nonetheless, Gallery staff conduct extensive research using materials available at the National Archives and elsewhere to clarify the provenance of the collection. More resources have become available in recent years; these take the form of international web sites of this material and those of individual scholars sharing their expertise electronically as well as more European archives becoming accessible. Working groups such as those at the American Association of Museums annual meeting this coming May are also contributing to available scholarship. To date, the Art Loss Register review of Gallery works with provenance gaps has found no match with their database of claimed losses or with numerous published sources of losses from World War II. This extensive research being conducted by the Gallery is ongoing.

I would like to tell you about the research undertaken on one picture in the Gallery’s collection that illustrates both the often-complicated nature of tracing provenance and the high level of international cooperation the National Gallery has received. The Gallery’s painting The Marriage of the Virgin (c.1491) by the Italian Renaissance master Luca Signorelli was owned in 1931 by the Goudstikker Gallery in Amsterdam. No additional provenance information was known except its purchase in 1955 by New York collector and Gallery benefactor Samuel H. Kress. There was some cause for initial concern as recent scholarship revealed details of the 1940 acquisition of the Goudstikker Gallery and its contents by agents of Hermann Goering. Research by Gallery staff at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, uncovered an inventory list of the Goudstikker Gallery’s contents that had been sold to Goering’s agents; further research showed that the Gallery’s painting had not been chosen by Goering himself but that it had remained in Nazi possession. In attempting to determine its whereabouts between 1940 and 1955, we contacted the Chief Inspector of the Dutch Inspectorate of Cultural Heritage, who I understand will be testifying to the Committee on a subsequent panel; her prompt and extremely helpful response in the end proved that the Signorelli was one of a small number of paintings that had been restituted to the Amsterdam dealer’s widow after the war. Dutch archives provided the Gallery with a copy of the actual receipt signed by Desiree Goudstikker in 1949 for the pictures. The provenance could not have been clarified without such international access and cooperation.

The Gallery has always requested full provenance details for proposed acquisitions to the collection, including export licenses where required and, when purchasing art, a warranty of title from the seller that the work is free from any claims. Further scrutiny includes submitting information on proposed acquisitions to the Art Loss Register. In addition, as is customary with many major art museums, the National Gallery publishes annually a detailed list of all works of art acquired during the year, and in our case, a description of our collection is available through the Gallery’s Web site.

The Archives of the National Gallery preserves and makes available to researchers and scholars historical materials relating to the National Gallery’s past. In response to the great interest generated by this period and subject in recent years, the department produced a Guide to Research Resources Relating to World War II; subsequently, it was expanded and made available on the Gallery Web site last year. The guide directs users to documents and records relating to wartime activities that are available for study and research at the National Gallery; these records include files, photographs, and oral histories of particular interest to those researching the field. For instance, documents reflect the involvement of Gallery employees and others on the Roberts Commission and the officers of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program, including correspondence, fascinating glass slides of the MFAA’s packing activities in Germany, donated personal papers and journals of travels in Europe, as well as newspaper and magazine articles, to name just a few.

In all aspects regarding this subject, the National Gallery adheres strongly to the statement of purpose and guidelines established by the Association of Art Museum Directors. At this time, Mr. Chairman, I can assure you that we have not received a single claim for unrestituted looted art but if we did, we would seek to review such a claim promptly and thoroughly. Similarly, we have not found any concrete evidence through our own research that any painting in the Gallery’s collection was illegally confiscated during the World War II era and not restituted; but if we did, such information would be given the same high priority.

Thank you for the opportunity to discuss further this important topic.