Monuments Men Foundation offers $25K reward for anyone who helps return items lost since World War II

CAIRO – 30 March 2022: The Dallas-based foundation for the protection of American art, Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art, launched a campaign to recover lost artwork, including paintings and sculptures believed to be still in existence.

“What is needed is to raise awareness of what is missing because you may know a friend who has a beautiful painting on the wall and you do not suspect that the painting belongs to someone else,” said Anna Bottinelli, president of the foundation.

The foundation offers rewards of up to $25,000 for information leading to the recovery of every cultural object featured in the collection. 

Anna Bottinelli, according to the Associated Press, said the foundation worked with museums, law enforcement and owners of lost art while narrowing the scope of the works on display, which include works by Vincent van Gogh, Caravaggio and Claude Monet.

These paintings include the Edgar Degas Portrait of Gabriel Duet that was taken by the Nazis from a house in France in 1940, and is known to have been sold in the mid-1970s to an anonymous Swiss collector.

"Many of these paintings that were lost during World War II reappeared in the recent past - as late as 2008 - at auctions," Bottinelli said.

FBI Special Agent Christopher McKew, a member of the agency's New York-based Art Crime Team, said he believes there is a misconception that since nearly 80 years have passed since the end of the war, most of the lost artwork has been found. 

"There is still a lot of art to look for," he added, noting that the Nazis' looting was "on a scale that's really hard to understand."