Dina Babbitt’s plea

Luc Latulippe | January 2nd, 2009

Who owns the paintings made by a WWII concentration camp prisoner, if those paintings were arguably made as payment for her freedom? The artist? Or the state? Is the art public domain?

This is the decades-old question being asked by artist Dina Gottliebova Babbitt, wife of famed Disney animator Art Babbitt. She saved her own life and her mother’s life essentially by painting portraits of Gypsy prisoners at the behest of Josef Mengele, during their incarceration in Auschwitz. Years later, she moved to Paris and then to California, where she earned a living working for Warner Bros and Jay Ward.

Today, aged 86 and recently suffering from cancer, she is desperate to get these old paintings back.

Below is her impassioned plea on YouTube to the curators of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, who, while they acknowledge that she is the artist who created the paintings, still refuse to relinquish them to her, claiming they are the property of the state.

This story was also covered over at Animation Artist two years ago, and more recently on CBC’s The Current (where I just learned about it this evening). Here are parts one and two of that interview, about 50 minutes long in total, and quite powerful. Below this, some reproductions of these paintings.


Some of Dina Babbitt's paintings

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  • lou77
    She's entitled to feel the way she wants to about her art but it is sad that she has fixated on having these pieces back, when there are probably other things she could be fixating on, such as herself and her husband working for Walt Disney, a celebrated anti-semitic.

    Museums rarely give back anything, even when an entire country requests it. Their perspective is that if you give one thing back it starts an avalanche of nations, peoples churches etc wanting THEIR stuff back too. She hasn't got a hope in hell.
  • artjess
    As someone who has in fact worked in museums for over a decade, I find it completely ridiculous to say that museums never restitute art. In fact there are many organizations that are solely devoted to this cause. This particular case is interesting because of the question of ownership. It is not a simple case where a collector had art stolen while they were prisoners in the holocaust. The provenance of the objects is entangled with the history of the war itself. Of course she has a very compelling story and I imagine, a very strong case.
  • My reason for posting this story wasn't to attempt to actually answer the question of who owns the art; it's a rather rhetorical question. Even she states she's unsure what she'd do if the artwork was ever returned to her.

    More than anything, it was simply her sadness and anguish that touched me, and her feelings of being lost, broken, incomplete, angry, frustrated.

    I don't think for a moment I can do anything but faintly imagine what it might be like to exist in a prison camp. Further, I can only faintly imagine surviving such an experience and then manage to try living a normal life again. I'm certainly in no position to judge such a person; I have seemingly "won the lottery" living as I do, where I do, in a degree of comfort many might actually consider decadent. I've never had to survive anything, nor can I say I've ever truly suffered.

    But I can understand her need to retrieve the only surviving physical objects from such a bizarre and painful past. I can understand the need for closure, no matter how bizarre it might appear to others.

    I wish her the best.
  • israel
    I agree with Luc that we can't understand her feelings when we haven't been through what she has. If having the paintings brings her comfort then she should have them, I don't know how the museum got them but she has a rightful claim to them. The museum could display reproductions with almost the same impact.
  • lou77 - I just have to say that Walt Disney was not anti-Semantic. Just bad rumors based off his handling with Babbitt & others. Do your homework and read up on the situation. I did. By throwing out a statement like that, you're only perpetuating the rumors.
  • JIMWICh
    Heh. I've long heard accusations that Walt Disney was *anti-Semitic*, but I gotta say - Walt Disney certainly wasn't *anti-Semantic* (per Ward's comment above). His work was plumb full of meaning, even if it wasn't always something I'd necessarily be inclined to go along with.

    Come to think of it though, he might rightly be labeled *anti-somatic*, in that the bodies of his characters were famously decreed by him to be free of "potentially offensive appendages and/or orifices."
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