Fifteen works, including paintings by Gustav Klimt and Marc Chagall, will be able to be returned to the heirs of despoiled Jewish families.
“It’s a first step” because “looted works of art and books are still kept in public collections – objects that shouldn’t, never should have been there”, underlines the Minister of Culture Roselyne Bachelot, while research on the provenance of the collections has accelerated. She welcomes a law “historical”, whereby for the first time in seventy years, “a government initiates a process allowing the restitution of works from public collections looted during the Second World War or acquired in troubled conditions during the Occupation, due to anti-Semitic persecution”.
Read alsoNazi spoliations: the National Assembly examines the restitution of 15 works of art on Tuesday
Parliament is preparing to authorize Tuesday evening February 15 this return. The National Assembly adopted it unanimously on January 25, under the eyes of the families or their representatives in the gallery. It is therefore the turn of the Senate, dominated by the right, to approve this text which makes it possible to derogate from the principle of the inalienability of public collections. According to the rapporteur at the Luxembourg Palace Béatrice Gosselin (LR), the law will have a “major impact from the point of view of recognition and reparation of the Holocaust”. Because the spoliations “were, whatever form they may have taken – theft, looting, confiscation, sale under duress -, one of the aspects of the policy of annihilation of the Jews of Europe led by the Nazi regime” and “without being the instigator, the Vichy regime also actively collaborated in these crimes”she notes.
100,000 works of art seized in 1939-45
Among the 15 works is Rosebushes under the trees by Gustav Klimt, kept at the Musée d’Orsay, and 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 Éléonore 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 preserved at the Louvre Museum, the Orsay Museum and the Museum of the Château de Compiègne as well as a painting by Utrillo preserved at the Utrillo-Valadon Museum (“Carrefour à Sannois”) are also part of the planned restitutions. . 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.
For 13 of the 15 works, the beneficiaries have been identified by the Commission for the Compensation of Victims of Spoliation (CIVS), created in 1999. France has long been accused of being behind several European neighbors in terms of reparation. A research and restitution mission for cultural property looted between 1933 and 1945 was created within the Ministry of Culture two years ago.
Read alsoA looted Chagall will leave the national collections to be returned
Some 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 the national museums (“MNR” works that can be returned by simple administrative decision) and the rest (about 13,000 objects) were sold by the administration of the Estates in the early 1950s. many looted works have thus returned to the art market.
Until the mid-1990s, the question of restitution was passed over in silence, until the fall of the Soviet bloc and the opening of new archives. In July 1995, President Jacques Chirac opened a new page by acknowledging the responsibility of the French State in the deportation of Jews from France. A “framework law” could facilitate restitutions in the years to come, without the need for case-by-case authorization from the legislator.