Yehudit Shendar
Retired Deputy Director and Senior Art Curator, Yad Vashem
"The Insatiable Pursuit of Art: Nazi Art Looting - Perpetrators, Victims, Provenance Researchers"
April 14, 2015
7:00 pm
Weisman Art Museum
In describing the plunder of art by the Third Reich in his book Nazi Looting, Gerald Aalders writes: "Never in history has a collection so great been amassed with so little scruple."
The massive looting continues to resound in the frequent headlines of the world press, which report on the efforts of Jewish Holocaust victims' heirs to regain possession of the property stolen from their families. In November 2013 a cache of 1400 works of art was seized by the Bavarian internal revenue authorities from the apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of one of four art dealers allowed under the Nazis to trade modern art. Yehudit Shendar, a world leading expert in Holocaust Art and Nazi art plundering, was selected as an appointee to an international task force assigned to research the provenance of these recently-discovered works.
In her lecture at the Weisman Art Museum, attended by over 180 friends and scholars in the community, Yehudit Shendar shared perspectives, insights and personal accounts of her work in what was coined by Jonathan Petropoulos, a professor of history at Claremont McKenna College, as "The most important discovery of Nazi-looted art since the Allies discovered the hoards in the salt mines and the castles."
Organized by the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies with support from the Weisman Museum of Art and the Department of Art History. Cosponsored by the Center for Austrian Studies, the Center for German and European Studies, Center for Jewish Studies, and Hillel: The Jewish Student Center.
