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One thing that has changed since "The Rape of Europa" was published, Nicholas says, “is that nobody in the art world can claim to be unaware of the issue.”

"The Rape of Europa," released in 1994, has since been developed into a documentary film.

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A decade has passed since that event, but many of those works are still outstanding, and experts are still discussing how best to reunite them with their owners — or, in many cases, their owners’ heirs. This month, researchers, museum personnel, and other interested parties will gather for a two-day conference, “The Plundering of Artworks: Acknowledging and Compensating,” in Paris, just one of several taking place over coming months, where they will undoubtedly question the legacy of the Washington Conference and the effectiveness of the 11 “Washington Principles” its participants drafted. Intended “to assist in resolving issues relating to Nazi-confiscated art,” the document laid out guidelines for the international community to follow while acknowledging that countries would “act within the context of their own laws.”

Speaking during the opening session of the Paris conference is Lynn H. Nicholas, who brought issues of WWII-era restitution back to public attention in 1994 with her book The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War. The painstakingly researched book, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was recently developed into a documentary film, not only told the stories behind the Nazis’ systematic thefts of thousands of artworks, it also illuminated the challenges of facilitating their return, from the complications and shortcomings of international law to dealers’ and collectors’ tendency to fudge records for tax purposes to the difficulty of tracking works with common or translated names.

The topic of Nicholas’s talk is “The Rape of Europa: 15 Years On.” One thing that has certainly changed in that time, she says, “is that nobody in the art world can claim to be unaware of the issue.” Indeed, thanks to high-publicity cases such as the one leading to Austria’s handover last year of five Gustav Klimt paintings to the 89-year-old niece of the works’ original owner — and her subsequent sale of one, Adele Bloch-Bauer I, to cosmetics magnate Ronald Lauder for the shocking sum of $135 million — the art world is more aware than ever before. ARTINFO asked Nicholas about the current state of the restitution debate.

Lynn, your talk at next week’s conference in Paris is titled “The Rape of Europa: 15 Years On.” How have things changed since your book first came out in 1994?

Restitution is a much more known issue, but it’s also a very big subject, so it’s hard to say we’re exactly in one place or another. There’s a nation-to-nation restitution problem, which requires diplomatic activity, and the main issue there is the former Soviet Union: The Russians think the things they took from Germany are fair war loot, and their government has nationalized them, and it’s just an enormous political issue to give anything back. I think it’s quite unlikely that that’s going to change anytime soon.

Then there are the individual cases, which are really a whole different thing. There are still a lot of things that were not claimed or returned, but I think in proportion to the total amount that was taken, most of the things have gone back.

You mention lawsuits. What effect do you think high-profile, high-price-tag restitution cases like the Bloch-Bauer Klimt one have?

That level of value makes things of great interest, but the huge publicity of the big cases has skewed public opinion to a certain degree and may have even made some people who have something and want to give it back put it back in the closet for another 25 years because they don’t think they can deal with it.

After the war, there was a huge amount of restitution, but then it died down because the easy things to find were given back and the things that had gotten into private hands, nobody knew where they were. And the governments didn’t want to spend as much money on the research and maintaining claims offices.