Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert said the German government was in talks with the Jewish Claims Conference to link up their art provenance experts with a task force appointed Monday to comb through the more than 1,400 works discovered in a Munich flat.
He also announced improvements to an official government website www.lostart.de which this week posted details on an initial lot of 25 works in the stash by the likes of Matisse, Delacroix and Rodin after it crashed repeatedly this week.
“We have brought great momentum to this process by forming the task force,”
Seibert insisted when asked by reporters about complaints Germany had been too slow and secretive in its handling of the spectacular case.
“The first works have been presented on the platform www.lostart.de, which will of course be expanded with further works and a commission is working flat out to accommodate what has of course been an enormous rise in user demand for this online platform.”
Seibert added that beyond the “at least six” art historians appointed to the new task force, Germany would turn to experts from abroad to make the hunt for the works’ true owners more efficient and fair.
“We are for example in very close consultations with the Jewish Claims Conference. They also have expertise in this area,” he said, adding that the parameters of the cooperation were still being hammered out.
“We are working, fully aware of the responsibility that Germany has, also in the context of looted art in connection with National Socialist (Nazi) crimes.”
After a week of uproar over the revelation that German customs police had nearly two years ago seized about 1,400 treasured works stashed for decades in the home of elderly recluse Cornelius Gurlitt, the government took a few steps toward transparency.
Jewish groups welcomed the measures but urged more decisive action.
The JCC, a U.S.-based Holocaust restitution organization, called Tuesday for seats on the task force and for all the works found in the Munich flat to be placed on the government website by the year’s end.
Gurlitt is the son of Hildebrand Gurlitt, a powerful art dealer commissioned by the Nazis with selling confiscated, looted and extorted works in exchange for hard currency.
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