Akçam and Bazyler Call for Focus on Armenian Genocide Restitution Starting with Looted Art

Armenians only have gone through the first stage in part.

The AGLA research project was launched at UCLA with the intention of being part of a broader Armenian Genocide restitution movement. Akçam said that institutions like NAASR, the Ararat Eskijian Museum, the Fresno State Armenian Studies Program and the Armenian Film Foundation, along with scholars in the field like Michael Bazyler, Jonathan Petropoulous, a historian of Holocaust looted art, Lauren Fielder from the University of Texas School of Law, Levon Chookaszian, chair of the History and Theory of Armenian Art at Yerevan State University, and Christina Maranci, Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard University, are working with AGLA.

The group compiled a list of Armenian art objects held in American museums, as this had never been done before, and are now uncovering the provenance of various objects, which, he said, “will attract broader public attention.”

“Our guiding principle,” he said, “is simple: whatever has been done for the Holocaust should also be done for the Armenian Genocide.  And in fact, not only for Armenians – but for all cases of mass violence.” A framework could be established for identifying, cataloguing, and pursuing the restitution of Armenian cultural property and legislation enacted creating a legal foundation for claims.

However, he declared, “Without a strong political movement and the necessary institutional structures, none of these goals can be achieved….Following the Jewish example, we must build the institutional foundations of a restitution movement if we want to move forward.”

Akçam also noted what he called a significant gap: those engaged in lobbying activities in Washington have not pursued binding legal initiatives in states like California similar to the 2016 Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery (HEAR) Act of Congress (Congress recently expanded its scope).

Holocaust Restitution Movement as a Model

Bazyler, as he spoke about how the Holocaust’s restitution movement could be a model for the Armenian Genocide, accompanied his talk with slides.

He declared that every mass atrocity, and in particular every genocide, incorporates not only mass murder but also mass plunder. He recalled that he learned about the Armenian Genocide as an undergraduate student at UCLA seeing commemorations of the event and learning more about it from various professors. Later, he had Armenian students in courses that he himself taught. He expanded the course he created in 2000 at Chapman University called the Holocaust and the Law in its second iteration to also include the Armenian Genocide.

He recalled that in the late 1990s during the Clinton Administration lawsuits began to be filed in American courts concerning the plunder of Jewish property during the Holocaust in Europe, which forced the defendants to pay attention to this issue. President Bill Clinton appointed Stuart Eizenstat as his special representative and Eizenstat began negotiations with various institutions throughout the world, including on Nazi looted art. Later in 2003, Eizenstat published a book about this called Imperfect Justice, while Bazyler as an academic wrote his own aforementioned book about the same topic.

Eizenstat convened a conference in 1998 which led to the Washington Principles, which are an 11-point nonbinding international code or framework on how to identify and return Nazi-looted cultural property. This process would start with the creation of a central registry of looted items. Bazyler said that this is what he and Akçam are trying to initiate with AGLA.

Bazyler said that litigation would be the last resort in this process to achieve restitution. The experience with Holocaust cases have shown that often museums or private owners acknowledge that items they possess were looted from Jewish families but are reluctant to give them up and insist that they now belong to them.

One case that was a major success, Altmann vs. Austria, and there was a Hollywood film about it, “Woman in Gold” (2015). Maria Altmann, Holocaust survivor, and her husband escaped Austria to Los Angeles. Her aunt and uncle, the Bloch-Bauers, were major art collectors, with works of important artists like Gustav Klimt, who did two portraits of Adele Bloch-Bauer. The Nazis took all of his collection, to which Marie Altmann was the designated heir, and eventually the collection ended up in the Austrian National Gallery.

Altmann hired a young attorney, Randy Schoenberg, to sue the gallery through the US Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. They won in court but Austria appealed to the US Supreme Court, which ruled that Austria was not immune from such a lawsuit. After this, Austria agreed to arbitration by a panel of Austrians, who ruled in 2006 that Austria was obligated to return the paintings to the heirs.

However, after that, Bazyler said, everything just went sideways. Another case of heirs who wanted the return of property looted by Hermann Goring went to the US Supreme Court which said the facts were different so the family couldn’t recover their art. A lawsuit against the Metropolitan Museum of Art was lost in 2019 due to the statute of limitations. A loss of a case against Hungary took place in 2024, and a case of Holocaust heirs against actress Elizabeth Taylor for a Van Gogh painting her father purchased in London in the 1950s was also lost at the US Supreme Court earlier in 2007 due to technical reasons. Finally, Bazyler mentioned that the Norton Simon Museum won a case against a Holocaust survivor’s heirs for possession of two 16^th century paintings of Adam and Eve by Lucas Cranach the Elder due to technical reasons (the act of state doctrine) with the Supreme Court declining to review the verdict in 2019.

Bazyler then turned to the first Armenian case handled by AGLA. Lawyer Vartkes Yeghiayan asked Bazyler to come with him to talk with the Getty Museum in California about some pages from an Armenian illuminated medieval manuscript called the Zeytun Gospels which the museum had obtained. A lawsuit was filed in 2010 and Yeghiayan rented a bus with elderly Armenians to fill the courtroom. The judge decided that the pages were the patrimony of the Armenian people, and did not dismiss the lawsuit, which led to the Getty Center to come to what Bazyler called a Solomonic settlement. The Getty agreed that the five pages belonged to the Armenian Church, because under US law, a thief can never transfer a title. It does not matter whether the possessor knew the items were stolen. A settlement ceremony took place where the Gospel’s pages were symbolically handed to the representative of the Western Armenian Prelacy, who in turn declared that for their preservation, they should stay with the Getty.

Bazyler said that they could have gone on to trial, but there is some risk of losing, as the Holocaust art cases he mentioned indicate. Afterwards, he said, “we realized that this is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s much more stuff because we were doing research there.”

He and Akçam then held a conference in March 2023 called “What’s Next?: Armenian Genocide Restitution in the Post-Recognition Era,” where Ambassador Eizenstat was the keynote speaker. Carla Garapedian made a documentary about this conference. A second conference in February 2024 at UCLA called Armenian Genocide Looted Art and Restitution  examined the role of cultural heritage, Bazyler said.

Over the summer between the two conferences, Bazyler said that AGLA brought together law students, art students, Armenians and non-Armenians to divide the US into regions and search for Armenian art in each area. They reported what they found at the February 2024 conference.

The plan when they find looted Armenian pieces, Bazyler said, is not to immediately sue the museum but instead ask for a fair and just resolution. He said, “What that fair and just resolution will be, I don’t know, but it becomes – and I’ll use the same term as for Holocaust restitution – a measure of justice.”

A lively discussion ensued with questions from the audience, which included pointing out earlier efforts aimed at reparations concerning the Armenian Genocide.