The question of whether there is looted art in the Leopold Museum Vienna has lost none of its topicality. By next year’s 20th anniversary of the museum, not even 90% of the collection, some 3,760 works of art, willl have been researched.
The ongoing need for provenance research is part of the government’s funding programme despite the museum being a special case as it is not state-owned but a private foundation. It is however state-funded and since 2008 the government has financed 1.5 research positions.The dossiers on 312 works of art compiled by the two researchers Sonja Niederacher and Michael Wladika were submitted to an independent commission, but in the majority of cases the commission deemed that the status of the works could “not be assessed according to the current state of knowledge”.