Héctor Feliciano

Hector Feliciano (born 1952) is a Puerto Rican journalist and author whose book "The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World's Greatest Works of Art" has shed light on an estimated 20,000 works of art plundered by the Nazis; each one is owned by a museum or a collector somewhere.

Early years Feliciano was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania of Puerto Rican parents (Héctor and Nereida), while his father was concluding his MD residency. He was raised in San Juan, the capital city of Puerto Rico where he received his primary and secondary education, graduating from Colegio San Ignacio de Loyola. During the early part of his youth he became interested in studying art and culture, however his family expected him to follow his father's footsteps and study medicine.

Feliciano moved to Waltham, Massachusetts, and attended Brandeis University, earning in 1974 his bachelor's degree in History and Art History. Feliciano earned his master's degree in the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He then went to Paris and earned a doctorate in literature at the University of Paris while working for the city of Paris cultural affairs bureau.

The Lost Museum Informed by the original research of Lynn H. Nicholas, author of the ground-breaking book, The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and World War II, Feliciano did additional research on the issue for his book in 1989, using – in addition to Nicholas' work – material from German looting inventories, documents that had been declassified and more than 200 interviews with art dealers, art historians and the surviving relatives of the families who were victimized. At first, Feliciano believed that the families involved would be hesitant to cooperate in his investigation, however the five families whose stories would be the core of the book, the Rothschilds, the Rosenbergs, the Bernheim-Jeunes, the David-Weills and the Schlosses trusted him with their records and their memories and other families welcomed him. He also revealed that the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris was amongst the institutions in France and Switzerland that held works that had been seized from Jewish victims during the war by the Germans (these works are now referred to as Musées Nationaux Récupération or MNRs).

The book, which was first published in French, has since been translated into several other languages, including in Russian. After the book's successful European publication HarperCollins, a U.S. publishing house that had initially turned it down (amongst 30 others), bought the U.S. publication rights. The book points out also the role of Switzerland, whose legislation is very favourable to dishonest dealers and Russia, which categorically refuses to give back the stolen works of art found in Germany at the end of WW2 to their legitimate owners.

Families whose art collections were plundered by the Nazis are reclaiming prized paintings that have been found hanging in museums around the world. Auction houses have also stopped sales of works because their postwar sellers may have been thieves.

Neither Switzerland or Russia did anything in favour of the legitimate owners or their heirs.

Litigation In 1999, a French court rejected a claim for $1 million in damages brought by the Wildenstein family against Feliciano, who suggested in his book that the French-Jewish family did business with Nazi officials during Germany's wartime occupation of France.

The family of the Parisian art dealer Paul Rosenberg recovered paintings by Matisse, Monet, Léger and Bonnard. In 2001, Feliciano sued the Rosenberg family alleging that Mrs. Rosenberg, the widow of Mr. Rosenberg's son, Alexandre had made an oral contract with him promising that she would compensate him for tracking down paintings that were returned to the family in recent years. Feliciano was asking a 17.5 percent of the estimated $39 million value of the paintings as a finders fee, however Mrs. Rosenberg denied she had an oral contract with Feliciano and said he had not been responsible for recovering the paintings. The case was dismissed by Justice Charles E. Ramos, a State Supreme Court justice in Manhattan in February 2003.

Later years

During the 1998–99 academic year, as part of the National Arts Journalism Program, Feliciano was one of fourteen journalists selected for a Journalism Fellowship by Columbia University, in which he specialized in arts and culture. He continued to live in Paris and was the editor in chief of World Media Network, a newspaper syndicate serving 23 European newspapers. Feliciano worked as the director of the Ministry of Culture and the "Club des Poètes" in Paris before moving to New York City where he writes for El Pais and Clarin.

Feliciano is a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University, and has served on the Panel of Experts of the Presidential Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States. He is the organizer of the First International Symposium on Cultural Property and Patrimony (Columbia University, 1999) and of a panel discussion entitled "The Art of the Enemy" (School of Visual Arts in New York City, 2002). Feliciano is currently teaching an honors seminar on religious art at New York University.