In art museums throughout the world hang hundreds, maybe thousands of important paintings with mysterious gaps in their ownership histories for the years 1933 to 1945. Any number of these paintings might have been stolen from Jewish families by the Nazis during those years -- and subsequently acquired by Western galleries. And an intercontinental effort to identify such paintings and return them to descendants of the owners is under way.
But not everyone is on board, it seems. During an interview published in the Jan. 4 Ottawa Citizen, Ian Lumsden, executive director of the Beaver-brook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, rather bitterly complained about the project, in fact.
For one thing, "I think the greater good of mankind might have been served inadvertently by the Nazis by virtue of the fact that, possibly, if some of these works had been left in homes in Amsterdam and God knows where, they'd have been bombed and the works might have been destroyed."
Furthermore, Lumsden went on, none of the paintings in question really belonged in those Jewish homes to begin with. They aren't "important pieces of Judaica," and "they don't say anything specifically about the Jewish people. . . . A painting by Pablo Picasso, how does that reflect on one's sense of identity?" What it reflects, instead, is that a bunch of "upper-middle class, bourgeoisie, central European families . . . invested rather astutely" in the early-20th-century art market. The Jews have always been good with money that way, you know.
Not so the Indian nations of Canada, according to Lumsden. What we should really be worrying ourselves over is "the spoliation of native works into nonnative collections." The wrongs North American Indians suffered are "much more profound." And the art stolen from them has "sacred values." So: "What are we doing about getting these back to the rightful owners?"
Too bad Hitler didn't live long enough to invade Canada and set things straight.