The National Assembly unanimously voted on Tuesday, January 25, a bill for the restitution of 15 works of art, including a painting by Gustav Klimt and another by Marc Chagall, to the heirs of Jewish families despoiled by the Nazis.
Faced with these rights holders, present in the gallery, the Minister of Culture, Roselyne Bachelot, welcomed a text “historical”, validated to applause by 97 votes. It must be definitively adopted by the Senate on February 15.
The plunder was “the denial of humanity [de ces familles juives], of their memory, of their memories”, underlined the Minister, in unison with the speakers of all the political groups.
Among the 15 works is Rosebushes under the trees by Gustav Klimt, kept at the Musée d’Orsay, and the only painting 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 wax preserved in the Louvre Museum, the Orsay Museum and the Château de Compiègne Museum as well as a Utrillo painting preserved in the Utrillo-Valadon Museum (“Carrefour in Sannois”) are also part of the refunds provided.
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 works seized in France during the war
For 13 of the 15 works, the beneficiaries were identified by the Commission for the Compensation of Victims of Spoliation (CIVS), created in 1999.
“It is the first time since the post-war period that the government has committed a text allowing the restitution of works from public collections” who have been “looted during the Second World War or acquired in troubled conditions during the Occupation due to anti-Semitic persecution”, to Roselyne Bachelot.
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 sent back to France. Of these, 45,000 were returned to their owners between 1945 and 1950.
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 (regarding 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.
From left to right, the parliamentarians welcomed a “right action” with these refunds, which should be “accelerate”. The minister said she was in favor of an upcoming “framework law” to allow it, while pointing “the complexity of the files”.
Communist Elsa Faucillon insisted on the importance of “look our history in the face” : it is “retelling the past, at a time when some are revising it and trying to rehabilitate Vichy”, she said in reference to far-right presidential candidate Eric Zemmour.
