Fifteen works, including paintings by Gustav Klimt and Marc Chagall, can be returned to the heirs of Jewish families despoiled by the Nazis. The unanimous Parliament authorized it, Tuesday evening, via a bill which wants to be “historic”.
“It’s a first step [car] looted works of art and books are still kept in public collections. Objects which should not, which should never have been there, ”repeated the Minister of Culture Roselyne Bachelot, while research on the provenance of the collections has accelerated.
“Appeasement”
It welcomes a “historic” law by which, for the first time in seventy years, “a government is taking steps to allow the restitution of works from public collections looted during the Second World War or acquired in troubled conditions. during the Occupation, because of the anti-Semitic persecutions”.
A bill was needed to derogate from the principle of inalienability of public collections.
Senators from all sides, after the Assembly on January 25, welcomed restitutions going “in the direction of appeasement” and the “end of a too long process”.
Only Klimt from national collections
Among the 15 works is Rosebushes under the trees by Gustav Klimt, kept at the Musée d’Orsay, the only work by the Austrian painter belonging to the French national collections. It was acquired in 1980 by the State from a merchant.
Extensive research has established that it belonged to the Austrian Eléonore Stiasny who sold it during a forced sale in Vienna in 1938, during the Anschluss, before being deported and murdered.
Eleven drawings and a waxwork kept at the Louvre Museum, the Orsay Museum and the Château de Compiègne Museum, as well as a painting by Utrillo kept at the Utrillo-Valadon Museum (“Carrefour à Sannois”), are also part of the expected refunds.
A painting by Chagall, entitled The father, kept at the Center Pompidou and entered the national collections in 1988, was added. It was recognized as the property of David Cender, a Polish Jewish musician and luthier, who immigrated to France in 1958.
100,000
100,000 works of art were seized in France during the 1939-1945 war, according to the Ministry of Culture. 60,000 goods were found in Germany at the Liberation and returned to France. Among them, 45,000 were quickly returned to their owners. About 2,200 were selected and entrusted to the custody of national museums (works “MNR” that can be returned by simple administrative decision) and the rest (approximately 13,000 objects) was sold by the administration of the Estates in the early 1950s. Many looted works thus returned to the art market.
A “framework law” could facilitate restitutions in the years to come. According to Roselyne Bachelot, “we will get there”.