Few Old Master paintings possess as turbulent an object history as the Ghent altarpiece, now restored, since World War II, to the city’s cathedral for which it was made. While most accounts focus on the longue durée perspective, especially the work’s looting by Napoleon and Hitler, this article examines the altarpiece’s history following its return to Belgium in 1945. The altarpiece was subject to increased sensitivity at home after its wartime wanderings, and a major controversy ensued when the government backed a radical conservation project, which took place under the direction of Paul Coremans at the Royal Museum in Brussels between 1950 and 1951. The project served to emphasize the rift between north and south in Belgium in the newspaper press and became a focus for the international community as it battled to establish new standards in art restoration in the aftermath of the war.

The Landesmuseum Mainz holds a bundle of objects (paintings, works on paper, furniture) that entered its collections in September 1943 as a transferral ordered by the Oberfinanzpräsident of the State of Hesse. The objects had been confiscated by the fiscal authorities of Mainz and Darmstadt immediately after their owners had been deported. In terms of artistic quality, these pieces could be described as “living room art,” a term that well reflects the social function of Jewish upper-middle-class material culture. By combining the methodologies of provenance research and material culture studies, this article analyzes how the “living room art” that once belonged to the German Jewish middle-class closely related to social belonging, self-representation, and the identity of their owners and how the anti-Semitic persecution impacted their material life. This approach aims at reframing object-based provenance research – which is traditionally formulated in the context of the “art world,” for example, the study of art dealership, collecting, and museum history – in the context of the study of Jewish middle-class cultural consumption, small-scale private art collecting, and micro-history.

Born in Vienna in 1906 to a wealthy, assimilated Jewish family, the painter Marie-Louise von Motesiczky enjoyed a lively social life among the prominent figures of intellectual and cultural Vienna in the closing years of the Habsburg dynasty. She studied at art schools in Vienna, Paris, and the Netherlands, including with German painter Max Beckmann in Frankfurt. The Nazi rise to power cut short Marie-Louise Motesiczky’s career in Central Europe. She fled Vienna for permanent refuge in England. Like her mentor, Beckmann and her contemporary and fellow émigré artist, Oskar Kokoschka, Motesiczky considered the artistic practice of the self-portrait an occasion for self-questioning, self-affirmation, and self-discovery. Unlike her mentors, from early in her career, Motesiczky’s self-portraits had to negotiate the representation of a female subject. This article will investigate the ways in which Motesiczky’s emigration compelled her to reexamine the gendered parameters of the self-portrait and how that reassessment manifests itself specifically in regard to her engagement with the spectatorial gaze. Her position as an émigré artist will not be analyzed as a burden to be overcome but, rather, as the impetus for reexamining techniques and strategies of female self-portraiture.

In recent years, the work of the American Monuments Men has been celebrated in popular histories and culture, such as bestselling books by Robert Edsel and a feature film directed by George Clooney (The Monuments Men, 2014). While public awareness of Nazi art looting and the courageous work of American cultural officers is long overdue, these popular narratives elide the role played by women and other Western Allies and fail to address the corps’ greatest failure: the incomplete restitution of Jewish assets. This article explores these factors through a case study of British Major Anne Olivier Popham (1916–2018), who served the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFA&A) division in Bünde from November 1945 to October 1947. Drawing on Popham’s diaries held at the Imperial War Museum in London, the author’s interview with her, and British and American archives, the case study yields important insight into personnel recruited by the MFA&A, gender relations among the officers, methodological dilemmas presented by the use of first-hand accounts, and the ongoing need for transnational restitution efforts.

Under the postwar American occupation of Germany, art produced by the Staffel der bildenden Künstler (German Combat Artist Unit) of Nazi Germany was sent to US military sites for storage under the direction of Captain Gordon Gilkey. Gilkey was head of the German War Art Project, the arm of the Historical Division of the US army tasked with confiscating German “propaganda and war art.” This art, considered a dangerous instrument of Nazi revival, was not protected by laws prohibiting art looting. Yet American officers were sympathetic to many of the paintings created by combat artists, and the German combat artists themselves were torn about their roles in Nazism, perceiving themselves as either victims or survivors merely attempting to make a living. This article traces the history of this artwork from its seizure in postwar Germany through its internment in the United States up to later attempts in the 1950s and 1980s to restitute the works to their creators.

The collection of liturgical objects of the Pechory Monastery close to the city of Pskov on Lake Peipus was deployed as a repository in Germany by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg during World War II. After the war, it was not subject to intergovernmental restitution but was stored away in the Wiesbaden Central Collecting Point and subsequently handed over to the newly founded Icon Museum of Recklinghausen before being restituted to the monastery almost two decades later. This article gives a description of the treasure itself and its history. It traces the odyssey of the treasure in Germany until its restitution and examines the different stages of its journey. The handling of this case in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) is symptomatic of the official German attitude toward National Socialist cultural loot and of the changing debates around this subject throughout the decades. These debates form a micro-history that reflects the FRG’s master narratives about World War II and its consequences, the division of Germany, and its changing, but questionable, relationship to the Soviet Union. In addition, it closely follows the political mainstream from the deep anti-Soviet attitudes of the postwar years to Chancellor Willy Brandt’s policy of détente in the 1970s, which made the restitution actually possible. The act in its entity can be seen as a typical example of Nazi Germany’s art looting in the occupied parts of Europe and of the particular conditions in Central and Eastern Europe as well as the after-war restitution policies of the Western allies and the FRG. It is nonetheless typical of the Soviet Union’s policy of denying restitutions later on, including immediate postwar restitutions as well as later acts such as the one involving the Pechory treasure, which has sometimes been repeated up to the present day.

When, the day after the Anschluss, the Viennese aristocrat Henriette von Motesiczky and her daughter, the painter Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, fled Vienna, they left behind an “old German” painting known as Knight and Devil. In 2016, by now identified as part of an early sixteenth-century altarpiece by the Master of St Christopher with the Devil and entitled St Christopher Meeting the Devil, the painting entered the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. It was donated by the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust in memory of its former owner Karl von Motesiczky, Marie-Louise’s brother, who had perished in Auschwitz. This article, based on detailed archival research, traces the history of St Christopher Meeting the Devil after 1938. The painting, forcefully taken from its owner, made its way through the National Socialist art-looting operation, encountering some of its main protagonists in the process. Sold at auction in 1943, it ended up at the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen in Munich from where, in 1950, it was restituted to the surviving members of the Motesiczky family, now living in England. In an exemplary way, the fate of St Christopher Meeting the Devil throws a light on the workings of the National Socialist looting system and the steps that the Allied Forces undertook after the war to rectify the crimes they uncovered. It also highlights the problems that gaps in the knowledge of an artwork’s provenance can cause in the attempt to reconstruct cases of expropriation and emphasizes the role goodwill plays in reaching fair solutions.