Restitution

Grant recipients 2025

• Caroline David is embarking upon PhD research at Royal Holloway, University of London on the collection of Edith Neumann and Hanna Spitzer, and their father, the lawyer Dr Alfred Spitzer, all from Vienna. Caroline describes her work as a transnational, cultural and political history of art, plunder, archives, family migration, and intergenerational Jewish history; her PhD constitutes an act of reclamation and intellectual restorative work: “For my next steps, I will build on my primary sources by researching information available in UK, Austrian and German archives relating to the migration of my family members and Dr Alfred Spitzer's collection.”
• Eléonore Thole is undertaking PhD research at the Open Universiteit (OU). Centred in the Netherlands, the Dienststelle Mühlmann was one of the most prominent Nazi art looting agencies. Tasked with “securing” art objects for the German Reich, its work benefited the highest-ranking Nazis and supported an ecosystem of dealers and intermediaries: “Building on archival research, I aim to examine the Dienststelle Mühlmann as an art-historical agency by tracing the professional backgrounds, networks, and decision-making processes of its key personnel, situating their activities within both National Socialist ideology and the wartime art market in the Netherlands.”
• Cristina Iancu is a Master’s student in Art History and History at the University of Neuchâtel, focusing on provenance studies and the circulation of artworks, particularly in relation to issues of cultural heritage and museum practices. She is researching two collections donated to the Musée des Beaux-Arts de La Chaux-de-Fonds and the Musée d’art et d’histoire de Neuchâtel: “Such research reshapes our understanding of how collections are built, valued, and transmitted, and it reframes the museum’s role as a guardian of not just objects, but of histories—both visible and concealed.”
• Sara Funk is working towards completing her B.A. in Sociocultural Anthropology with a minor in Art History at the University of San Diego. Her research is looking at Poland’s Art and Object Diaspora, specifically World War II looted art rediscovered in the Americas: “I am drawn to this research because I feel strongly about the ethics of ownership that surround objects that have been missing for some time. I want to continue to look deeper into the provenance of where these pieces have been since being looted and look into the stories and emotional ties that the owners along the way have had with these objects.”
• Yelyzaveta Bezzub’s project ‘Stolen Icons, Stolen Futures: From Nazi Cultural Looting to Russia’s War on Ukrainian Heritage’ is part of her BA in Art History and Communication at the University of Neuchâtel. The grant will help her investigate the wartime displacement of sacred objects from Ukraine, using the case of the Pecherskaya Mother of God icon looted by Nazi forces from the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra in 1941: “I want to understand what happens when sacred art is removed from its community, and how cultural heritage can be used as a weapon. Through the story of one icon, I aim to recover a fragment of our shared European history—and to ask what we owe, today, to the art we have lost.”

Christie’s extends its sincere thanks to the selection panel of restitution experts for their insight and time: Anne Webber, Co-Chair of the Commission for Looted Art, Marc Masurovsky, Holocaust Art Restitution Project, Prof. Dr. Christian Fuhrmeister, Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, MacKenzie Mallon, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and Perry Schrier, Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands (RCE).

Grant selection panel 2025

Christie’s is working with leading experts in the field to serve on the selection panel to identify this year’s Grant recipients. We are delighted to be working with:

Anne Webber, Commission for Looted Art in Europe

Anne Webber CBE is Co-Founder and Co-Chair of the Commission for Looted Art in Europe (CLAE). Established in 1999, CLAE is a non-profit, expert, representative body which negotiates restitution laws and policies with governments and cultural institutions, conducts research and trains provenance researchers, and acts for families worldwide to identify, locate and recover their Nazi-looted cultural property. She is also founder and Director of the Central Registry of Information on Looted Cultural Property 1933-1945 at lootedart.com, set up in 2001 to fulfil Washington Principle VI and which is an international centre of expertise and provides an online repository of the latest research, news and information from 49 countries and a database of 25,000 objects.

Marc Masurovsky, Holocaust Art Restitution Project

Marc Masurovsky co-founded the Holocaust Art Restitution Project (HARP) in September 1997 and served as its Director of Research. Active from 1980 in examining assets looted during the Nazi era, he has been an expert historian in Swiss banks class action lawsuits, a consultant for the US Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigations and former director of the Provenance Research Training Program at the Prague-based European Shoah Legacy Institute (ESLI). From 2005-19, Marc was project director of the Database of Art Objects at the Jeu de Paume. He has been teaching provenance research workshops for the Association for Research into Crimes against Art (ARCA) (Amelia, Italy) since 2017.

Prof. Dr. Christian Fuhrmeister, Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte

Art historian Christian Fuhrmeister received his doctorate in Hamburg in 1998 and became staff member of the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich in 2003. He was habilitated at LMU Munich in 2013 (2020 Adjunct Professor). Within his focus on the 19th-21st centuries, Christian specializes on the production, distribution and reception of art, including translocation and change of ownership during National Socialism and the postwar period, often by initiating and supervising third-party funded projects.

MacKenzie Mallon, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

MacKenzie Mallon is the Head of Provenance Research at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, where she coordinates the museum’s provenance research program. She curated the exhibitions Discriminating Thieves: Nazi-Looted Art and Restitution (2019) and Origins: Collecting to Create the Nelson-Atkins (2021) and is a co-founder of the Provenance Connect professional network. Her most recent publication, “A Seed of Desire: Effie Seachrest and Women Collectors in Kansas City and Beyond,” is in Frances Fowle and MaryKate Cleary, eds., The Art Market and the Museum: Institutional Collecting, Display and Patronage since the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Bloomsbury Publishing, April 2025).

Perry Schrier, Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands (RCE)

Perry Schrier is an art historian specializing in provenance research on Nazi-looted cultural objects. He began his career in 1997 at the Origins Unknown Agency, focusing on artworks lost during the Second World War. As Advisor Cultural Assets WWII at the Cultural Heritage Agency, he is part of an international helpdesk supporting victims of Nazi persecution and their heirs in recovering cultural property lost between 1933 and 1945. The helpdesk also advises museums, researchers, and the art trade. Perry contributes to a national database of missing artworks Cultural goods and the Second World War, co-authored Dutch provenance research guidelines, and regularly teaches workshops at academic institutions.

Sarah Done, Christie’s

Sarah joined Christie’s in 2003, with the sole focus on Nazi-era restitution from 2004. First researching artworks for sale and now as Director of Restitution, she works principally on the research and resolution dialogue for restitution claims. Sarah contributes to shaping Christie’s approach to restitution and establishing its reputation for best practice in this field, working widely with colleagues both in-house and within the restitution community.