Posting What You Preach: The Long Wait for the Neue Galerie and Lauder

An outspoken advocate of restoring Nazi loot to rightful owners, Ronald Lauder, the president of the Neue Galerie in New York, has called unrestituted artworks "perhaps the last prisoners of World War II." He is chairman of the Commission for Art Recovery, an organization formed in 1997 to encourage Nazi-loot restitution efforts by European governments. On that commission's website, Lauder personally asserts that "all governments, museums and public institutions must review their collections to identify and then publicize any art in their collections that may have been stolen."

Yet as of today, more than three years since Lauder told Celestine Bohlen of the NY Times that the Neue Galerie was working to put the Nazi-era provenance of its artworks online, the website's provenance section (under "General Information") says only that "the museum is currently in the process of compiling all relevant provenance information and posting it on this website."

This omission was noted on Feb. 10, 2006, in a detailed article in the Forward, a Jewish weekly newspaper, which, like the NY Times, also questioned the information-gap about the works in Lauder's extensive private collection.

In its response to a recent survey by Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, designed to assess museums' progress in compiling and posting Nazi-era provenance research, the Neue Galerie reported that, of the 160 pieces in its collection, "approximately 110, or 69%...could have possibly undergone a change of ownership between 1932 and 1946 and were or might reasonably be thought to have been in continental Europe between those dates. This is approximately 66% of the museum's entire collection."

But, as the Neue Galerie's deputy director, Scott Gutterman, recently told me, these 160 works represent only the art that the institution itself owns. The Neue Galerie owns only about 10 percent of its art, with approximately another 10 percent from the Serge Sabarsky Collection and about 80 percent from Lauder's privately owned collection.

Gutterman said that plans now call for the Neue Galerie to put online its research into the provenance of specific works that the institution itself owns by Sept. 1. When asked why it has taken so long, he said, "It's really a question of resources"---a problem that, judging from the institution's recent purchase of Klimt's Adele Bloch-Bauer I (itself recently restituted Nazi loot), does not impede acquisition activities.

The Neue Galerie reported to the recent Claims Conference survey that it "spends approximately $16,850 per year on provenance research."

NEXT: What to expect from the Neue Galerie's nascent provenance website.