The Americas
Experts working in the Americas, meanwhile, face a very different sort of problem: a public insufficiently aware of what consitutes a cultural heritage site. Sherry Hutt, manager of the National Park Service’s Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act Program, gave an impassioned speech about saving Native American burial sites from plundering; her colleague Robert Palmer suggested that up to 12 incidents of looting occur on American soil every day — as people thoughtlessly pick up Native arrowheads to comb Civil War battlefields with metal detectors — with most looters not knowing they’re doing anything wrong. Terence D’Altroy, a professor of archaeology at Columbia University, warned of the dangers urban sprawl poses to the myriad Inca sites in the rapidly expanding, tourist-heavy Cuzco region of Peru and presented a program to capture 3D images of the sites before they vanish altogether.

World War II
While the panels on the Middle East and the Americas demonstrated the urgency of protecting cultural treasures now, the panel on World War II restitution illustrated what can happen if we don’t.

Monica Dugot and Lucian Simmons, senior vice presidents responsible for restitution issues at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, respectively, both said that the auction houses deal with the aftermath of Nazi looting daily. Dugot called it “one of the most important issues we face,” adding “what we sell and how is under constant examination.”

Simmons presented a slide show of works that his department has dealt with this season, including a painting by Giovanni Battista Franco (aka Il Semolei) that listed Hermann Goering, an avid art looter, among its previous owners. Provenance research indicated that the widow of the original owner had willingly sold it to the Nazi leader, an unlikely story but one her heirs confirmed, and the sale was allowed to go forward (the work was offered in a January sale of old masters but did not sell). Another consigned work, Franz Marc’s Weidende Pferde III (Grazing Horses III) (1910), was forcibly deaccessioned by the Dusseldorf Museum in 1937 after the Nazis deemed it degenerate art. It changed hands several times between then and 1990, and a private collector sold it for £12,340,500 ($25 million) in February.

“A sense of justice being done [is] what drives restitution,” says Dugot, but it’s still very hard to identify looted art. Most of it is not documented, and there’s no central depository of information. Given poorly kept records and how often some works have changed hands, “tracing the provenance of a work of art is anything but straightforward.”

Even when you have good documentation, locating artworks can be a problem. New York attorney Howard Spiegler, a partner in the firm Herrick, Feinstein, which specializes in art law, outlined the landmark case of Dutch dealer Jacques Goudstikker, who fled the Netherlands in 1940, leaving behind a collection of 1,200-plus artworks, which were later seized by Goering. Goudstikker died tragically onboard the boat carrying him into exile, but he left behind a little black book listing essential details of almost all of his works. Still, despite this wealth of information; years of efforts by the firm, the heirs, and independent research organizations; and a landmark restitution case in which the Dutch government handed over 200 of the works to Goudstikker’s sole remaining heir, daughter-in-law Marei von Saher, hundreds of the works have yet to be located.

Extensive steps have been taken in terms of the law, provenance research, and restitution agreements in the last ten to 12 years, but the challenge is as great as ever, Dugot says. “We’ve learned a lot, but it just underscores how much is left to do, and the enormous importance of getting it right.”