Museum Says Painting May Have Been Nazi Loot

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is investigating whether a 15th century painting that apparently was sold by a Nazi art dealer was stolen from Holocaust victims, museum officials said Wednesday.

The work, called “Madonna and Child,” is on display on the second floor of the museum’s Ahmanson Building.

The painting “appears to have passed through the hands” of Hans Wendland, a notorious Nazi art dealer, said museum spokesman Keith McKeown. In 1947, the late Robert Lehman, a financier and renowned art collector, donated the work to the Los Angeles museum.

Wendland, who operated from Zurich during the war, was a German art dealer who sold numerous paintings stolen from Holocaust victims. Museum officials across the country recently began searching their collections for such paintings.

At a U.S. State Department conference in 1998, representatives of 44 governments and 13 nongovernmental organizations agreed on comprehensive guidelines intended to identify artworks looted by Nazis during World War II. The guidelines included locating the original owners and settling claims.

All participating nations were urged to inventory each work in their museums and galleries. One of the goals of the conference was to create a master list of looted art.

The American Assn. of Art Museum Directors also urged members to study the provenance of all works created before 1945 that changed hands between 1933 and 1953, McKeown said.

The Los Angeles museum hired a researcher last year to review the records of its paintings, concentrating on European works.

“We’ve reviewed hundreds of paintings, about two-thirds of our works in this period, but we’re not at the point where we’ve determined anything definitive yet,” McKeown said. “This first stage is to go through our house records to see if there are any questions or any blanks. Then we’ll get to a second level of research and fill in those blanks. . . . This institution recognizes its moral obligation to resolve these issues.”

“Madonna and Child” was painted on a tempura panel around 1425 by an unknown artist known as Master of the Bargello.

The plundered artworks were confiscated as Hitler’s armies swept across Europe. Tens of thousands of the paintings, sculptures and other works of art now hang in museums, galleries and private collections around the world.

Last week, Britain’s National Museum Directors Conference listed more than 300 works that might have been stolen from Jews. American museums have had more difficulty creating a master list because they do not report to a central body.

Still, a few paintings recently have been identified by American museums. Last month, the North Carolina Museum of Art announced that it will return one of its most prized paintings to the relatives of an Austrian Jewish art collector who fled Vienna in 1938.

Last year, the Seattle Art Museum returned a Henri Matisse painting valued at $2 million to the heir of a French art dealer. His relatives also recovered a well-known Monet painting after they saw it on display at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The work was on loan from a French gallery.