Looted Art

Looted art has been a consequence of looting during war, natural disaster and riot for centuries. Looting of art, archaeology and other cultural property may be an opportunistic criminal act or may be a more organized case of unlawful or unethical pillage by the victor of a conflict.

Looted art is a term often reduced to refer to artwork plundered by the Germans during World War II in Europe. However, the Nazis were neither the first nor the last to loot art on a large scale. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is on record with the following quote:

The Herald-Times even claims: "Napoleon was a model for Hitler in terms of art looting." Bloomberg Radio also makes it clear that many of the world's greatest artworks were taken from their rightful owners.

Plunder, booty, appropriation and spoliation are related terms that have been used for several hundred years to describe the process of looting. Many references still associate the term looted art with the World War II period; recent legal frameworks and treaties use the term spoliation in connection with the "large number of cultural objects and works of art looted by the Nazis and others during the Second World War and the Holocaust Era from 1933–1945". The term trophy art is used for the cultural objects that were taken by the Red Army and the Soviet Trophy Brigades from occupied Germany to the Soviet Union after World War II. It is a translation from the Russian Трофейное искусство.

Related terms include art theft (the stealing of valuable artifacts, mostly because of commercial reasons), illicit antiquities (covertly traded antiquities or artifacts of archaeological interest, found in illegal or unregulated excavations), provenance (the origin or source of a piece of art), and art repatriation (the process of returning artworks and antiques to their rightful owners).