Sara Angel: Addressing the Gaps in Germany’s Holocaust-Era Cultural Restitution

Max Stern was a renowned Jewish art dealer who fled Düsseldorf for Montréal after the Gestapo persecuted him. In an article published in Art News on 2 February 2018, Sara Angel digs deeper into the scandal that rocked the art world last November, when Düsseldorf’s mayor cancelled an exhibit about Stern after Stern’s estate laid claim to several pieces hanging in the Stadtmuseum. In this article, Sara Angel shows that the wounds of Holocaust-era cultural theft are far from healed – and that when it comes to restituting priceless pieces at the risk of them leaving the public domain, curators grapple with a difficult dilemma. Though no date for the reinstated show has been determined, the exhibition was planned to travel to Haifa, Israel, before reaching the McCord Museum in Montreal in 2019.

Sara Angel is a 2012 Trudeau scholar and a PhD student at the University of Toronto in the Department of Art. Read her article here.