Living History: Three Decades of Researching and Restituting Nazi Looted Art
Jonathan Petropoulos is the John V. Croul Professor of European History and the chair of the department of history at Claremont McKenna College. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University (1990), where he also had an appointment as a lecturer in history and history & literature. He began working on the subject of Nazi art looting and restitution in 1983, when he commenced graduate work in history and art history.
He is the author of “Art as Politics in the Third Reich” (University of North Carolina Press, 1996); “The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany” (Oxford University Press, 2000); “Royals and the Reich: The Princes von Hessen in Nazi Germany” (Oxford University Press, 2006); “Artists Under Hitler: Collaboration and Survival in Nazi Germany” (Yale University Press, 2014). He has edited a number of other works and has helped organize art exhibitions, including Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, which opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1991.
From 1998 to 2000, he served as research director for Art and Cultural Property on the Presidential Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States, where he helped draft the report, Restitution and Plunder: The U.S. and Holocaust Victims’ Assets (2001). In this capacity, he supervised a staff of researchers who combed archives in the United States and Europe in order to understand better how representatives of the U.S. government (including the Armed Forces) handled the assets of Holocaust victims both during and after the war. He also provided expert testimony to the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport in the U.K. House of Commons and to the Banking and Finance Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. He has also participated in a number of international conferences on the subject of Nazi art looting and Allied restitution, including the Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets in 1998, and the Vilnius International Forum on Holocaust-Era Looted Cultural Assets in 2000.
Petropoulos has served as an expert witness in a number of cases where Holocaust victims have tried to recover lost and stolen artworks. This includes Altmann v. Austria, which involved six paintings by Gustav Klimt claimed by Maria Altmann and other family members (five were returned).