New York museums now required to acknowledge art stolen under Nazi rule
Museums and art galleries in New York are now legally required to acknowledge art stolen under the Nazi regime.
The new state law requires New York museums to display signage alongside works of art from before 1945 that are known to have been stolen or forcibly sold during the Nazi rule.
According to legislation and expert testimony, the Germans looted 600,000 works of art during World War II.
As well as the new public recognition law, works that were created before 1945 that changed ownership in Nazi Europe are now required to be registered in the Art Loss Register, a private database of more than 700,000 works of lost, stolen and looted art.
Over the last few decades, museums in New York have been at the centre of discussions of who has rightful ownership of artworks that changed hands during the Nazi era.
Both the Guggenheim and the Metropolitan Museum of Art have gone a step further, and returned artworks stolen by the Nazis to surviving members of the families who owned them before they were looted during World War II.
Despite this, several New York museums have also successfully fought to keep allegedly looted art from the Nazi era in their halls.
In 2021, a federal appeals court ruled that the Metropolitan Museum of Art can keep a $100 million Picasso painting that the family of the previous owner says was sold to fund the owner's escape from Nazi Germany.
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