Fifteen works, including paintings by Gustav Klimt and Marc Chagall, will be able to be returned to the heirs of Jewish families looted by the Nazis, following Parliament voted unanimously Tuesday evening in favor of this return. After the National Assembly on January 25, the Senate dominated by the right validated this text by a show of hands, to the applause of these heirs or their representatives present in the gallery. “It’s a first step” car “looted works of art and books are still kept in public collections. Objects that shouldn’t, never should have been there,” repeated the Minister of Culture, Roselyne Bachelot. She welcomed a law “historical” by which, 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”. A bill was needed to derogate from the principle of inalienability of public collections.
Senator Esther Benbassa (unlisted), a historian specializing in the Jewish people, noted the importance of this vote “at a time when some are trying to rehabilitate the Vichy regime in the public debate”, in allusion to Eric Zemmour, far-right candidate for the Elysée. According to the rapporteur Béatrice Gosselin (LR), the spoliations were “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”.
Among the 15 works is Rosebushes under the trees by Gustav Klimt, preserved in the Musée d’Orsay, the only work by the Austrian painter belonging to the French national collections. It was acquired by the state in 1980 from a merchant. Extensive research has established that it belonged to the Austrian Eleanor Stiasny, who sold it during a forced sale in Vienna in 1938, during the Anschluss, before being deported and murdered. Eleven drawings and wax preserved at the Louvre Museum, the Orsay Museum and the Château de Compiègne Museum, as well as a Utrillo painting preserved at the Utrillo-Valadon Museum (Crossroads in Sannois), are also part of the refunds provided. For 13 of the 15 works, the beneficiaries were identified by the Commission for the Compensation of Victims of Spoliation (CIVS), created in 1999.
