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Newly enacted U.S. Law could reopen Russian art loans

Picture1The Art Newspaper recently reported that the long-held freeze on museum loans between Russian and U.S. museums could finally come to an end.

In December, both the Senate and President Obama approved the Foreign Cultural Exchange Jurisdictional Immunity Clarification Act. The Act is intended to protect artworks and culturally significant objects on temporary loan to the United States from foreign institutions, by granting those artworks immunity from seizure.

Director of the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Mikhail Piotrovsky, openly praised the Act to The Art Newspaper, noting that the law could potentially provide new assurances that Russian-owned artworks would not be subject to seizure while in the United States.  Piotrovsky’s statements came while visiting his long-time friend President-elect Donald J. Trump at his Florida home in December. Trump himself has been very vocal about his intent to warm US-Russian relations, so the possibility of seeing Russian-owned artworks once again in the U.S. could become very real after his January inauguration.

The new law has nevertheless faced heavy criticism from groups including the Holocaust Art Restitution Project. Although objects subject to Nazi-era restitution claims are not afforded protection under the Act, critics point out that the new Act could extinguish valid restitution claims, such as claims against the Russian and Cuban governments.

The Russian government suspended all artwork loans to US museums in 2011, fearing that any loaned artwork could be seized as part of an outstanding court order requiring Russia to turn over a vast library of religious texts to the Chabad-Lubavitch Orthodox Jewish community.  In 2010, a federal judge in Washington had ordered that the Russian government turn over the  “Schneerson Library,” a collection of more than 70,000 religious texts and documents to the Chabad organization. The organization has been trying to regain possession of the library for years, which was seized by the Bolsheviks during World War II, and Russia has yet to return the documents. In response to Russia’s cancellation of museum loans to the United States, US museums have also frozen lending artworks to museums run by the Russian government.