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, after Parliament unanimously authorized this return on Tuesday, February 15.
After the vote of the National Assembly, unanimously, on January 25the 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.
The latter welcomes 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 Klimt painting returned to its Austrian owner
A bill was needed to derogate from the principle of inalienability of public collections. Senators of all persuasions hailed restitutions ranging “in the sense of appeasement” and the “end of a long process”.
Paris Senator Esther Benbassa (not listed), 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 presidential election. According to the rapporteur Béatrice Gosselin (Les Républicains, Manche), 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 fifteen works is, in particular, 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 had been 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.
100,000 works seized in France during the war
Eleven drawings and wax preserved in the Louvre Museum, the Orsay Museum and the Château de Compiègne Museum (Oise), as well as a painting by Utrillo (Crossroads in Sannois) kept at the Utrillo-Valadon museum of Sannois (Val-d’Oise), are also part of the restitutions planned. 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 thirteen of the fifteen 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.
Some 100,000 works of art were seized in France during the 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.
A framework law could facilitate restitutions in the years to come. According to Mme Bachelot, “we will get there”. Senator Nathalie Goulet (Centrist Union, Orne), “daughter and granddaughter of deportees”brandished in the Hemicycle the “spoliation sheet” dating back to 1942 from his great-aunt who ran a hat store. She called to “not to reduce spoliation to those who had works of art” and asked for a « reconnaissance ».