The internet has many uses - and even more abuses - but rarely have I come across one more excellent or better suited than this: a publicly available database designed to trace artworks looted by the Nazis and to assist compensation where possible. It's one of those rare items of news to which you can't really respond except with a simple positive word: bravo!
The Swift Find Looted Art Project is a collaboration between Swift-Find, an online registry of valuable goods, and Sotheby's, who will supply data about looted artworks, collected over the last 10 years by their dedicated Restitution Department.
The project is designed to enable Sotheby's to track down claimants, and claimants to track down works of art stolen from them or their ancestors. And even in the many cases where the heirs of the original owners no longer have legal right of ownership, the system is designed to pick up such cases and facilitate agreements between the legal owner and the heirs.
Speaking about the project in Tel-Aviv last weekend, Lucian Simmons, head of Sotheby's Restitution Department, explained that the fact of the knowledge being publicly available would force those trading in a looted object to share their profits with the original owner or their heirs, even where the law does not explicitly demand it.
"If such a looted object were sold, even legally, the press would scream and nobody would buy it," he said, "so it's best for consigners in such cases to bite the bullet and reach a resolution."
The case of Nazi looting is one about which feeling is more or less unanimous. The stolen objects should be restored or their original owner's families compensated wherever possible, and the Swift Find project is a simple, robust and effective way of increasing the degree of possibility. What more can you say?
