A painting looted from a Berlin Jewish family by Nazis has been found by US authorities at the Kunsthaus museum in Zurich, museum officials said on Tuesday.

Read the full article: Nazi-looted painting found in Swiss museum

NO WAYYYY!!!

You gotta be kidding me?!

Who'd have thought...

At least the family of the owners have been low-key about it. They could've raised a huge storm around it, had they wanted to.

Well ...... the painting(s) have to end up somewhere eventually, and they ended up being public ... and in a respectable venue .. at least!

Wow, that is beyond naive.

Why? They were looted. History has extended. Histories forgotten. So the new "owners" put their paintings on exhibit, and discover they were looted. What is naive about my observation on that?

Is everyone totally aware of the history of every possession of theirs?

Not possible! The Swiss? With Nazi loot? Can't believe it.

It's called provenance, and, yes, ESPECIALLY if one is a museum, one is aware.

There are people who are rich but far from noble, but this Sommerguth-Family apparently is noble and intelligent. I hope that the museum lives up to their demand in full. It is good when museum visitors also learn a bit about some tragic aspects of internationally shown art.

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Had they really been aware of the facts about this, they would hardly have used it in a special exhibition in 2009. The Kunsthaus just as other museums has hundreds of exhibits in their vaults. But according to the story they got it inside a whole collection in 2006 . To be praised are the heirs of the Sommerguth legacy who turned the picture over into a donation. There of course will be plate below the picture with the statement "1939 Alfred Sommerguth von den Nationalsozialisten entzogen. Geschenk seiner Erben und von Frau Hannelore Müller, 2010" . Also this in a decent language.

Yes, there's provenance, but in this case, consider the situation-

Would the Nazi government want to 'document' where they got the painting from? "Painting X, stolen from so-and-so." Further, is it possible the documentation might've been destroyed in the war.

Would someone fleeing the holocaust, risking their life, worry about carrying a document that says, "I own such-and-such a painting?"

Museums do their best to determine provenance for anything in their inventory, but, as has been pointed out, the painting was one in a collection of many that were donated to the museum by an individual who *was* able to demonstrate proper ownership of the collection.

The NSDAP-government of course used a dry bureaucratic style to describe such things like "rescued by the German Imperial government from ownerless fortune"

I am by no means an art expert, critic or anything of the sort. But I do like to take in the major museums when I can. Half way through the second day at the Louve, it really hit me, that it was essentially full of the plundered culture from around the world. Albeit, many were donations, 'properly aquired' and put on display at a central location for all to enjoy and compare, I actually was a bit disgusted at the end of a few days, it really started to fee like pillage from all around the world, horded into one facility. Again, just my personal opinion.

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True, apparently there is a good type of loot (the type we collected for "scientific" reasons) and a bad type of loot (which is what the Nazis did).

There is actually a lot of artwork that was raided from Nazi Germany by allied troops and ended up in private collections and musea in the US (including stuff that the Nazis had raided from Jews). The Americans are rather less willing than the Swiss to talk about it though.

True, this is what struck me most about the story. They would have been in their rights to ask for the painting back and to hang it in their living room or sell it to the highest bidder. But they chose to leave it where it is in exchange for recognition that it was in fact theirs. What a very noble gesture.