Should all looted art be returned?
Norman Rosenthal is right to question whether stolen artworks should be restituted at the expense of great public collections

US soldiers carrying looted art discovered in an Austrian castle in 1945. Photograph (Getty)

Some things seem so obviously moral, so unarguable, that years and decades can pass before they are recognised as folly. What could be more self-evident than the rightness of returning works of art stolen by the Nazis in the 1930s and 40s to the heirs of their Jewish owners? Yet nothing in today's art world is more absurd and insidiously destructive. Sir Norman Rosenthal is courageous and correct to speak out against it. The former exhibitions secretary of the Royal Academy, writing in The Art Newspaper, has said that the descendants of Holocaust victims who suddenly discover they are the rightful owners of paintings worth millions of pounds have comparatively remote claims that do not justify weakening public collections.

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