A Moral Persuasion: The Nazi-Looted Art Recoveries of the Max Stern Art Restitution Project, 2002-2013

In 1937, under Gestapo orders, the Nazis forced the Düsseldorf-born Jewish art dealer Max Stern to sell over 200 of his family’s paintings at Lempertz, a Cologne-based auction house. Stern kept this fact a secret for the rest of his life despite escaping from Europe to Montreal, Canada, where he settled and became one of the country’s leading art dealers by the mid-twentieth century. A decade after Stern’s death in 1987, his heirs (McGill University, Concordia University, and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) discovered the details of what he had lost, and how in the post-war years Stern travelled to Germany in an attempt to reclaim his art. To honour the memory of Max Stern, they founded the Montreal-based Max Stern Art Restitution Project in 2002, dedicated to regaining ownership of his art and to the study of Holocaust-era plunder and recovery. This dissertation presents the histories and circumstances of the first twelve paintings claimed by the organization in the context of the broader history of Nazi-looted art between 1933-2012. Organized into thematic chapters, the dissertation documents how, by following a carefully devised approach of moral persuasion that combines practices like publicity, provenance studies, law enforcement, and legal precedents, the Max Stern Art Restitution Project set international precedents in the return of cultural property. The dissertation reveals how the Max Stern Restitution Project used a self-generated methodology to recover works of Nazi-looted art from both private and public collections in countries including Spain, the United States, Germany, and the Netherlands. It addresses how in just over a decade, the Max Stern Art Restitution Project became one of the world’s leading advocates in the reclamation of Nazi-era spoliated art and an authority on the subject of a judicious approach toward cultural property.Ph.D