Washington Principle #2: A Critique
by Marc Masurovsky
[Editor’s note: Due to the momentous nature of the upcoming international conference in Berlin, Germany, entitled “20 years Washington Principles: Roadmap for the Future,” it would be worthwhile to revisit these Principles and to put them through a linguistic, methodological and substantive meat grinder, and see what comes out of this critique. There will be eleven articles, each one devoted to one of the Principles enacted in a non-binding fashion in Washington, DC, on December 3, 1998.]
II. Relevant records and archives should be open and accessible to researchers, in accordance with the guidelines of the International Council on Archives.
“Relevant”:
Archival collections abound worldwide. Most of them consist of documents, reports, correspondence, photographs, transcripts, memoranda, lists, etc., compiled by municipal, regional and national agencies, both civilian and military. “Relevance” addresses the extent to which these archives shed light on the fate of cultural objects owned by Jewish individuals, their families, friends, businesses, and the like. Hence, these documents can be found in financial, cultural, economic, administrative, police, political, and other archival collections. They name objects, names of people, and locations where objects were located, extracted, transferred, bought and sold, traded, exchanged, ferried, crated, and deposited.
Access to archival records produced since the 1930s has grown exponentially from North America to Western and Central Europe. However, there has also been a reaction to such open access under various disguises: privacy concerns, national security concerns, legal concerns.
Where access to “relevant” documents is granted, the right to publish the documents is suppressed, especially in their digital form. The right to publish and reproduce documents extracted from public and private records will remain a source of friction for some time until privacy concerns are eased for documents that are now more than 80 years old.
In June 2011, we noted the following:
“The main hitch that impedes exhaustive research into Nazi/Fascist looting is the difficulty experienced by all researchers in gaining access to private archives and especially those developed by art dealers, art collectors, private and State-owned museums, and other cultural institutions. As noted in recent court cases in the United States, American museums have been loath to release all records that would shed a full historical light on transactions involving works being claimed for restitution. There, Principle II continues to be completely ineffectual.”
Since 1998, there has been very little progress registered in gaining access to private gallery and museum records. Art trade practitioners continue to hide behind shields of trade secrecy, confidentiality, protection of clients’ and consigners’ identities, amid general suspicion that the desire for access to their records rests on dark motives. All that one wants to know is how objects travel from one point to the next. Art market professionals should feel bold enough to share such information without sacrificing confidential and sensitive client information. But to gain this level of trust requires a lot of handholding and one-on-one communication that could take a lifetime to achieve with meager results. Hence, new strategies should be explored in order to gain access to such records. Otherwise the full truth shall never be known as to the fate of thousands of objects from the time of their forced removal from Jewish ownership to their present whereabouts.
Principle #2 could be rewritten and expanded as follows:
All records and archives must be declassified, open and accessible to researchers, in accordance with the guidelines of the International Council on Archives, EU directives and other relevant legal and diplomatic instrumentalities. In consultation with art trade representatives, mechanisms shall be developed and implemented to ensure that proper access to relevant documents is ensured for all those who request it under conditions that are mutually agreed to between the parties.
