Works stolen by the Nazis returned to the beneficiaries of a Jewish collector

They had been stolen, along with hundreds of other works, in 1940 from Moses Levi de Benzion, an Egyptian Jewish businessman. Four works stolen in France by the Nazis during World War II have been returned to the beneficiaries of their owner, the Ministry of Culture announced on Wednesday.

It is about a watercolor, “Landscape”, of Georges Michel, of a drawing by Paul Delaroche entitled “Portrait of a woman” and another drawing, of the same title, of Auguste Hesse, which were under the guard of the Louvre. Then from a watercolor by Jules-Jacques Veyrassat, “Low tide at Grandcamp”, it is kept by the Musée d’Orsay.

Moïse Levi de Benzion had gathered this large collection in his home in France, where he died during the war in 1943. These four works, like all the property looted during the Second World War then found and entrusted in France to the custody of museums while awaiting their return, are referred to as “National Recovery Museums” (MNR).

Under the former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, a mission of the Ministry of Culture was created on April 17, 2018 to investigate to find the owners or their beneficiaries, before they request it. Until these four new restitutions, only 169 works had been returned since 1951, out of some 2,200 “MNR” works, deposited in a hundred museums and registered in the inventory of “artistic recovery”.

On November 3, the Ministry of Culture presented to the Council of Ministers a bill on the restitution of certain cultural property acquired in the public domain during the Second World War to the beneficiaries of their owner, victims of anti-Semitic persecution. This law has yet to be debated in parliament.