PRAGUE—The famous face of Holocaust-era art restitution — Klimt’s majestic Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, handed over by the state of Austria after a prolonged legal battle, only to sell for a staggering $135 million — now reigns calmly over Ronald Lauder’s Neue Galerie collection in New York. Yet its tortured path to restitution serves as a cautionary tale to all quarters of the art world, including the legitimate heirs of those who perished in the Holocaust and left behind hundreds of thousands of works of art. To many, the story of Adele Bloch-Bauer I represents the need for a more uniform and efficient means of handing over these works. To others, including such leading voices in the art world as former Royal Academy of Arts Exhibitions Secretary Norman Rosenthal, it exemplifies the need to close the door on this chapter and suspend the process of restitution altogether.

Last month, at the Holocaust Era Assets Conference in Prague, held June 26–30, art-world representatives gathered with 46 state delegations to address these issues, as well as other unresolved Holocaust-era issues such as restitution of Jewish communal property and the current needs of impoverished survivors, and assess the progress of art restitution since the watershed 1998 Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets. The Prague conference concluded with the signing of the Terezin Declaration, which reaffirms the principles of the Washington Conference, and the inauguration of the Terezin Institute, which will serve as a non-binding mechanism for monitoring the effectiveness of restitution efforts.

The 1998 Washington Conference formally recognized, and elevated the importance of, this much-neglected, and perhaps conveniently ignored, casualty of the Holocaust. During Hitler’s reign, more than 650,000 artworks were either looted or confiscated by the Nazis from their Jewish owners. In addition to outright theft, Jews seeking to flee or merely subsist were often forced to sell works at fire-sale prices or to entrust them to friends, dealers, or museums for safekeeping until they returned, which in most instances did not occur. While art looting may seem secondary to the human toll of the Holocaust, a central goal of Hitler’s genocide was to erase the cultural identity of European Jewry. As historian and restitution expert Marc Masurovsky noted at the recent conference, as a result of the war, Jews’ artistic legacy, like their presence in Europe, “was amputated.”

The principles — or goals, really — put forth by the 1998 conference include the identification of art confiscated but not yet restituted, the publicizing of such works, the opening and accessibility of public and private archives, the encouragement of heirs to come forward, and the achievement of “just and fair” solutions.

However, as Lynn Nicholas, the historian and author of The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War, points out, “While the D.C. principles are morally admirable, they are not laws.” Indeed, the Washington Principles are not legally binding, and as a result, despite the publicity surrounding such high-profile treasures as Adele Bloch-Bauer I, only about 3 percent of the 650,000 works have actually been returned. Stephen Knerly, counsel to the Association of Art Museum Directors, said during the conference that the 200 or so member museums of the AAMD have restituted only 16 pieces since 1998, eliciting an audible gasp from the audience.

Especially since the 1998 principles are not legally binding, finding alternative solutions seemed a main aspiration of the Prague conference, and the desire to remove restitution from the legal sphere was clear. Some serious accusations were hurled during panels on restitution and legal issues, and at least one museum director and more than a few lawyers were called outright liars. In interviews and conversations with participants, even the most minimal prodding stoked these simmering tensions.