Lost Pictures, Lost Lives - Stories of Restitution 

Lucian Simmons, Vice Chairman and Worldwide Head of Sotheby’s Restitution Department and Senior Specialist, Impressionist and Modern Art Department, Sotheby’s New York, joined Sotheby’s in 1995. Lucian works extensively with art collectors and their advisors throughout North America and Europe and has been involved in the sale of some of the most significant artworks to come to auction in recent years including Onement VI by Barnett Newman (sold for $43.8m in May 2013) and Bildnis Gertha Felsöványi by Gustav Klimt (sold for £24.8m in June 2015). He has worked on restitution and provenance issues since 1997 and has been involved in the resolution of claims to art works worth in excess of $850 million.

He was called to the Bar in 1984 and later re-qualified as a Solicitor of the Supreme Court of England and Wales. He was a partner in the London City Law Firm of Barlow, Lyde and Gilbert prior to joining Sotheby's. He is a Solicitor of the Supreme Court of England and Wales.

Mr. Simmons has spoken widely on art market issues and in particular on the displacement of art during WWII. Mr. Simmons has been interviewed on the subject on television and radio and has appeared in a number of film documentaries. He gives regular seminars at universities and law schools across North America and has given evidence to the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport of the House of Commons, London, to the European Parliament, Brussels, and to the Prague Conference on Holocaust Era Assets.

Anne Webber is co-founder and Co-Chair of the Commission for Looted Art in Europe (CLAE), established in London in 1999. CLAE is a non-profit, expert, representative body which negotiates restitution policies with governments and institutions internationally, and acts for families worldwide to identify, locate and recover their Nazi-looted cultural property. It has achieved the restitution of over 3,500 items of cultural property. She is also founder and Director of the Central Registry of Information on Looted Cultural Property 1933-1945 at www.lootedart.com, set up in 2001 to fulfil Washington Principle Vl and which provides an online repository of the latest research, news and information from 49 countries and a database of 25,000 objects. Both organisations promote access to records, the identification of looted cultural property and the tracing of its rightful owners.

She is Deputy Chair of the UK Spoliation Advisory Committee which advises UK museums on their provenance research and claims handling. She was a member of the organising committees of the 2000 Vilnius International Forum, the 2009 Prague Conference, and the 2017 London Conference. She co-drafted Council of Europe Resolution 1205 on the restitution of looted cultural property, the UK Holocaust (Return of Cultural Objects) Act 2009, and the 2017 Spoliation Action Plan, adopted by five European governments and which led in 2018 to the formation of the Network of European Restitution Committees.

Since joining Sotheby’s in 1988, Helena has been at the forefront of the global expansion of the Impressionist and Modern Art market. In addition to her role as Chairman, specialist and business getter, Helena also plays an important role on the rostrum at Sotheby’s. In July 2016, she became the first woman to take an evening sale since 1990, and she remains the only female auctioneer in the business to preside over these prestigious flagship sales. A role model for aspiring female auctioneers, Helena has brought down the hammer on many landmark occasions (in New York in 2018, she brought down the hammer on the highest value work ever sold at Sotheby’s, and she has similarly presided over the highest value sale ever staged in London). As a classically trained violinist, with an innate sense of the performing skills necessary to command a room, Helena is at the vanguard of women in the art world who are blazing the trail in their industry.