In 1949, a man named Ante Topić Mimara successfully deceived agents working at the Munich Central Collecting Point and obtained more than 150 works of art that he had no legitimate claim to. Capitalizing on the authority and privilege that his role as agent of the Yugoslav Military Mission afforded him, Mimara orchestrated a clever ploy to claim 166 works of art and various objects that he asserted were stolen from Yugoslavia during the Second World War. An investigation following his restitution claim revealed that in actuality, only three of those items had been looted from Yugoslavia. By the time authorities of the collecting point realized the error, Mimara had already crossed the German border and disappeared. What followed were a series of operations to expose Mimara, but he was never prosecuted for his ’49 deception.

Decades after his post-war theft, Mimara opened a museum in his own name to showcase his collection, to the dismay of many art historians who deemed many of the paintings as fake or crude copies. There was widespread skepticism about the legitimacy of his collecting methods and purchases, and speculation into the curious wartime histories of the many of his works. To this incredulity, Mimara invited any ownership claims and offered to freely return a piece if the proper owner came forth. But no one ever did. Still, the histories of the paintings in particular that Mimara obtained through the Munich Central Collecting Point were all at one time in the possession of high-profile figures such as Hermann Goering or Adolf Hitler himself, which raises flags about the acquisition methods during the 1930s and 40s, and how the paintings ended up in the hands of these men.

This raises the complex question of provenance and ethical chains of ownership: how do we approach works of art with tricky wartime histories? To what extent are museums and other institutions responsible for investigating the provenance of their collections and what is the procedure for restitution. From the 166 items in Mimara’s original wrongfully restituted shipment, there are 55 paintings and one drawing. This particular sample from the larger collection is of great interest because each has a unique story, but the provenance of these pieces are generally unknown or foggy at best. While the histories of these pieces are a matter of uncertainty, today, over 80% of them can be traced to the permanent collection of the National Museum of Serbia in Belgrade. Follow along as my research dives into each individual painting and explores it’s history, pre- and post theft, and how it relates back to the puzzling and eccentric Ante Topić Mimara.