France. In around twenty years, French museums have evolved from culpable ignorance to voluntary proactivity in terms of restitution of property stolen from Jews between 1933 and 1945. In its report devoted to the subject, unveiled on September 24, the Court of accounts is pleased to see France catching up with the delay in this restitution and compensation effort for rights holders, emphasizing in particular the solidity of the legal framework – recently augmented by the law adopted on May 23, 2023, which facilitates the release of national collections for looted works.
This recent awareness does not, however, benefit from sufficient means to carry out the work of researching provenances on all the collections. It was not until 2023 that the French Museums service created an envelope with 200,000 euros for the 2024 financial year, supporting the provenance research process undertaken by territorial museums.
This project is not systematic in French museums, and depends on the resources granted by each establishment. The Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay have thus integrated into their teams researchers dedicated to provenance research, “in small numbers compared to the major museums in foreign countries studied by the Court”. At the National Museum of Modern Art, it was a researcher made available by the Mission for Research and Restitution of Looted Cultural Property (M2RS) who made it possible to initiate the research. The metropolitan museums of Rouen called on a private service provider to carry out this mission.
The comparison with other European countries engaged in this restitution work is unflattering: the German Center for Missing Works (DZK) thus had an annual budget of 12 million euros in 2023. Its scope of action is however much broader than the M2RS, since it also deals with works looted in the Soviet and colonial contexts. In Austria and the Netherlands, this work is mainly carried out by museums which create positions dedicated to provenance research: seven specialist researchers are thus employees of the Rijksmuseum. “France appears very behind”, estimate the rapporteurs, who note a “hiatus between the legal framework (…) and the effective capacity to process requests for compensation, due to lack of adequately sized resources. »
The black point of the report concerns the art market, of which the Court of Auditors denounces in hushed words the lack of involvement in the search for provenance. One of the report’s recommendations calls for “ create in the law an obligation for private players in the art market to respond to requests for information from public agents in charge of provenance research”. Public buyers are not exempt from all blame: the report also points out “a lack of training on the risks inherent in the functioning of the art and provenance market” among the agents sitting on the acquisitions committees.