Bettina "Nina" Burr (born c. 1946) is vice president of the board of trustees of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to which she and other members of her family made a major donation of Rothschild family heirlooms that is known as The Rothschild Collection.
Burr was born Bettina Looram, around 1946. [2] She is the daughter of Bettina Jemima Looram (née Rothschild) (1924–2012) and Matthew J. Looram, Jr. (died 2004), an American diplomat, who married in 1943. She is the granddaughter of Baron and Baroness Alphonse and Clarice de Rothschild of the Vienna branch of the Rothschild family. [3] [4] Burr is a former teacher. [2]
Burr's association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, began after she became a tour guide there. She later helped to catalog the museum's Japanese woodblock prints. She first became an overseer, then in 2006 a trustee of the museum. [5] She is now vice president of the board of trustees [6] and the Museum Representative to the Foundation for the Arts, Nagoya. [7]
Some time after 2012, Burr and other heirs of Bettina Looram donated a collection of 186 objects, originally in the collection of Alphonse and Clarice de Rothschild, that were looted by the Nazis following the Austrian Anschluss with Germany in 1938. The museum has named the gift The Rothschild Collection. It includes, paintings, jewellery, prints and drawings, furniture, and books. [8] The Nazis seized nearly 3,500 items from the Vienna Rothschilds, many intended for Adolf Hitler's planned Führermuseum that would have been located in the Austrian city of Linz had it been built. The looted items were stored in the Austrian salt mines of Altaussee where they were discovered by the Allies after the war. [9]
In order to export the bulk of the collection to the United States, where Clarice de Rothschild then lived, she was required to donate around 250 items to the Austrian government. These items were not recovered by the family until a change in Austrian law in 1999, long after Alphonse and Clarice de Rothschild had died. Many of the recovered items were then sold at auction in London in a sale that realised a record at that time of over £57m. [3] The items donated to the Boston museum come mainly from the items recovered in 1999 that were not sold because they had particular family meaning. The jewellery included in the donation was never in Nazi hands because Clarice de Rothschild and her husband had been in London at the time of the Anschluss and she had had the jewellery with her. [9]
Among the items given to the Museum was George Romney's Portrait of Emma Hart, later Lady Hamilton, mistress of Lord Nelson and muse to Romney. [10] Investigations have shown this to be the primary version of the work. [5]
The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, is the 17th largest art museum in the world, measured by public gallery area. It contains more than 450,000 works of art, making it one of the most comprehensive collections in the Americas. It is home to 8,161 paintings, surpassed among American museums only by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. With more than 1.2 million visitors a year, it is the 52nd most visited art museum in the world as of 2019.
Leonard Alan Lauder is an American billionaire businessman and art collector.
Palais Rothschild refers to a number of palaces in Vienna, Austria, which were owned by members of the Austrian branch of the Rothschild banking family. Apart from their sheer size and elegance, they were famous for the huge collections of valuable paintings, statues, furniture, books, and armour that they housed, another reflection of the family's vast wealth and prominent position.
Nazi plunder refers to art theft and other items stolen as a result of the organized looting of European countries during the time of the Third Reich by agents acting on behalf of the ruling Nazi Party of Germany. Plundering occurred from 1933 until the end of World War II, particularly by military units known as the Kunstschutz, although most plunder was acquired during the war. In addition to gold, silver and currency, cultural items of great significance were stolen, including paintings, ceramics, books and religious treasures. Although most of these items were recovered by agents of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program, on behalf of the Allies immediately following the war, many are still missing. There is an international effort underway to identify Nazi plunder that still remains unaccounted for, with the aim of ultimately returning the items to the rightful owners, their families or their respective countries.
The Rothschild banking family of Austria was founded by banker Salomon Mayer von Rothschild in 1820 in Vienna in what was then the Austrian Empire.
Albert Salomon Anselm Freiherr von Rothschild was a banker in Austria-Hungary and a member of the Rothschild banking family of Austria. Businesses that he owned included Creditanstalt and the Northern Railway.
The Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program under the Civil Affairs and Military Government Sections of the Allied armies was established in 1943 to help protect cultural property in war areas during and after World War II. The group of approximately 400 service members and civilians worked with military forces to safeguard historic and cultural monuments from war damage, and as the conflict came to a close, to find and return works of art and other items of cultural importance that had been stolen by the Nazis or hidden for safekeeping.
Judith Helen Dobrzynski is an American journalist and instructor in journalism. She is currently a freelance writer who has contributed articles on culture, the arts, business, philanthropy and other topics to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and several magazines.
Hector Feliciano is a Puerto Rican journalist and author whose book "The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World's Greatest Works of Art" has shed light on an estimated 20,000 works of art plundered by the Nazis; each one is owned by a museum or a collector somewhere.
Lime Green Icicle Tower is a 2011 glass and steel sculpture by American artist Dale Chihuly. Housed in the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston, Massachusetts, it has been on display in the Ruth and Carl J. Shapiro Family Courtyard since the 2011 exhibit "Chihuly: Through the Looking Glass". The sculpture proved so popular during the exhibit that the museum launched a fundraising campaign to purchase the piece.
Rudolf Leopold was an Austrian art collector, whose collection of 5,000 works of art was purchased by the Government of Austria and used to create the Leopold Museum, of which he was made director for life. Claims had been made by Jewish survivors of the Holocaust that some of the pieces in the collection were Nazi plunder and should be returned to their rightful owners.
Portrait of Wally is a 1912 oil painting by Austrian painter Egon Schiele of Walburga "Wally" Neuzil, a woman whom he met in 1911 when he was 21 and she was 17. She became his lover and model for several years, depicted in a number of Schiele's most striking paintings. The painting was obtained by Rudolf Leopold in 1954 and became part of the collection of the Leopold Museum when it was established by the Austrian government, purchasing 5,000 pieces that Leopold had owned. Near the end of a 1997–1998 exhibit of Schiele's work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the painting's ownership (provenance) history was revealed in an article published in The New York Times. After the publication, the heirs of Lea Bondi Jaray, to whom the work had belonged before World War II, contacted the New York County District Attorney who issued a subpoena forbidding its return to Austria. The work was tied up in litigation for years by Bondi's heirs, who claimed that the painting was Nazi plunder and should have been returned to them.
The Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce was a Nazi Party organization dedicated to appropriating cultural property during the Second World War. It was led by the chief ideologue of the Nazi Party, Alfred Rosenberg, from within the NSDAP Office of Foreign Affairs. Between 1940 and 1945, the ERR operated in France, the Benelux countries, Poland, the Baltic States, Greece, Italy and on the territory of the Soviet Union in the Reichskommissariat Ostland and Reichskommissariat Ukraine. Much of the looted material was recovered by the Allies after the war, and returned to rightful owners, but there remains a substantial part that has been lost or remains with the Allied powers.
The Offenbach Archival Depot was a central collecting point in the American Sector of Germany for books, manuscripts and archival materials looted, confiscated or taken by the German army or Nazi government from the occupied countries during World War II. From the Offenbach Archival Depot, these materials of looted art and Nazi plunder were sorted and eventually returned to their original country of origin, or otherwise maintained in new collections.
The Gurlitt Collection was a collection of around 1,500 art works assembled by the late German art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt (1895–1956) which was passed first to his wife Helene, and on her death to their son Cornelius Gurlitt, who died in 2014. The collection attracted international interest in 2013 when it was announced as a sensational 2012 "Nazi loot discovery" by the media as a result of actions by officials of Ausgburg in Cornelius Gurlitt's apartment in Schwabing, Munich, investigating Gurlitt on suspicion of possible tax evasion. German authorities seized the entire collection, although Gurlitt was not detained. Gurlitt repeatedly requested the return of the collection on the grounds that he had committed no crime, but eventually agreed that the collection could remain with the Prosecutor's office for evaluation in case any Nazi-era looted works could be identified. In 2014, a new agreement was reached that the collection would be returned to Gurlitt but he died shortly thereafter, leaving all his property – including two Munich apartments plus a house and additional works stored at his residence in Salzburg, Austria – to the Museum of Fine Arts Bern in Switzerland, which agreed to accept the collection in November 2014. Hildebrand Gurlitt, who had assembled the collection, was suspected of incorporating a number of looted items and, potentially, works acquired in dubious circumstances during the second world war and preceding period in Nazi Germany, in addition to works acquired legitimately and/or passed down through his family; the provenance of a significant subset of items is still under investigation.
Rolf Nikolaus Cornelius Gurlitt, grandson and great-grandnephew of his namesakes Cornelius Gurlitt and Cornelius Gurlitt (composer), respectively, was a German art owner, notable for inheriting a significant art collection from his art dealer father Hildebrand Gurlitt, comprising works passed down through the Gurlitt family together with items Hildebrand had purchased and retained through his dealing career, a subset of which was believed to include looted art from the Nazi era. The collection was confiscated by German tax authorities in 2012 on dubious grounds but eventually agreed to be returned to Gurlitt's possession in 2014, although this never happened in his lifetime. After the collection came to public attention in 2013, Gurlitt agreed that any items which could be identified as looted should be returned to surviving relatives of the persons from whom the items were originally stolen. In his will he bequeathed all his property, including the art collection, to the Museum of Fine Arts in Bern, Switzerland, which agreed to accept them minus any items of suspect provenance, which remain in Germany pending further investigation.
Bacchante and Infant Faun is a bronze sculpture modeled by American artist Frederick William MacMonnies in Paris in 1893–1894.
Archduke Leopold Wilhelm and the artist in the archducal picture gallery in Brussels is a 1653 painting of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm's Italian art collection by the Flemish Baroque painter David Teniers the Younger, now held in a private collection, but previously owned by the Rothschild family, which is how it came into the Kunsthistorisches Museum collection for 50 years after World War II in Vienna.
Emma Lazarus Budge was a wealthy German Jewish socialite, philanthropist and art collector.
Portrait of a 62-year-old Woman, possibly Aeltje Pietersdr Uylenburgh is a 1632 portrait painting painted by Rembrandt. It shows an elderly woman with a small and sober millstone collar. It is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.