British Museums and Galleries Identify Potential Holocaust Loot (XIIA)

On February 29, 2000, Britain’s art museums and galleries released a list of more than 350 works of art that have ambiguous provenances for the period around World War II and may have been seized by the Nazis. The list comes from 10 major institutions across Britain, including the Tate Gallery, the National Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum. According to Sir Nicholas Serota, the chairman of the National Museum Directors’ Conference, which prepared the report, no factual evidence exists that any of the works had been stolen by the Nazis before they came to Britain after the war. However, Serota said the institutions were eager to solve the mystery of where the pieces had been and who had owned them from 1933 to 1945, when the Nazis seized the leading art in Europe…[more]