NEW ART RESTITUTION OFFICE TO OPEN IN BERLIN IN JANUARY

A new office within Germany’s Institute for Museum Research is opening in January to help identify and research art stolen by the Nazis, the Associated Press reports (via the Boston Globe). The office, which comes under the State Museums of Berlin, will help museums, libraries, and archives identify items that were taken from their rightful owners during the Nazi period, Culture Minister Bernd Neumann said. “I expect from this an important push in Germany in the clarifying of restitution questions,” he said. Neumann founded a working group to look into how to deal with restitution issues, after Berlin sparked controversy with a decision last year to return Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Berlin Street Scene to the heirs of a Jewish collector who said the Nazis forced the family to sell it in the 1930s. Some art experts questioned whether the Expressionist work was sold under duress and whether its return was legal. With the new office, which has a $1.47 million annual budget, Neumann said he hoped the restitution process would be better coordinated and more transparent.