Recently I dug out an old coffee-table art book my family must have bought in 1958 or 1959 and started looking at it. I’d taken it with me when I moved out of the house, many years ago, but had never looked at it much in the time since.
I notice that a few illustrations of paintings, where the owner or museum is credited, it’s annoted as in the title of this thread, or similarly for a different museum. I assume this means the paintings either
(a) disappeared during the war or shortly after, but what exactly happened? Did the Nazis plunder the museums, with the brass going cherry-picking through their country’s major art collections? Were they plundered afterwards by the Russians or the Americans?
(b) they were confiscated by the Nazis before the war, from their victims, and install them in these museums. In that case, were they returned to private hands after the war and thus became unavailable for photographing?
So what’s the Straight Dope? In the case of scenario (a), have any such paintings ever been recovered,
I expect the answer depends on where this book was published. The phrasology used by art historians in the Federal Republic and the GDR is likely to have been rather different.
But I’m not aware of any systematic looting of the collections in Berlin by any Nazis on a private basis. Hitler, Goering and the ERR after all had the pick of France, Holland and Italy to greedily choose from.
In the case of Berlin it was the Soviets who were likely to be nicking stuff. For instance, it was them who made off with most of the paintings in Sanccouci. However, because Potsdam was part of the GDR, many of these were returned in batches, starting in 1958. Even so, apparently a significant chunk of the pre-1945 collection does still remain missing.
But the most celebrated case - though they’re not paintings - is surely the Schliemann Treasure. The Russians admit they took that from Unverzagt’s custody in the Zoo Flak-Bunker in 1945 and its wherabouts are known, but its ultimate fate remains disputed.
Or, C) were sold by the museum into private collections but the museum retained the reproduction rights (or no one’s claiming the rights so the Museum note just helps to identify the object for scholars).