The FBI said the owners of the pastel - Bridget Vita and her late husband Kevin Schlamp, did not realize the Nazis had stolen the Monet and they voluntarily surrendered it.
Did they… ask? You’d think anyone buying a painting of that significance might want to verify its provenance. Either it’s expensive enough you’d want to make damn sure your investment isn’t stolen or it’s going for cheap and you might want to know why. It’s not like Nazi stolen art is some new discovery in the art world.
A “private” art dealer.
They weren’t asking the dealer for provenance because they knew it was stolen.
100%
Willful blindness is equally culpable.
FBI: gets valuable artwork from the Nazis
“We had no idea it was stolen!”
The Nazis seized an apartment building owned by my great-grandmother. Then it was in East Berlin so we had no hope of getting it back. Then Germany re-unified and we had to fight for it in court for a decade. When we finally got it, we had to sell it for a reduced rate due to price controls or pay to renovate it to bring it up to modern German code. We sold it. We didn’t get a pfennig of the rent money the family the Nazis gave it to made for decades. It feels like we were taken advantage of from the 1930s onward.
Days since FBI has done a good thing
2580I was half expecting to find out they were the ones keeping it somewhere
