It is the end of a painful epic: 77 years after the confiscation of the property of a Jewish collector under the Occupation, French justice has definitively returned to his descendants on Wednesday a painting of Pissarro held by Americans who had it legally purchased at auction. The Court of Cassation put an end to three years of proceedings opposing two families around "La Cueillette des pois", a gouache with a course strewn with gray areas painted in 1887 by the impressionist Camille Pissarro.
One painting, two families
On the one hand the descendants of Simon Bauer, an industrialist, an art lover born in 1862, robbed of his works, including "La Cueillette", under the Occupation of France by Nazi Germany. On the other, the Toll spouses, great American collectors, who had acquired this painting for 800,000 dollars at Christie's in New York in 1995 and have always said they ignore its provenance.
The Bauer family had lost track of "La Cueillette" until they found it on display at the Parisian museum Marmottan-Monet in early 2017, loaned by the Toll couple as part of a retrospective dedicated to Pissarro. She then obtained her receivership and summoned the Americans to recover her.
In 2017, then on appeal in 2018, French justice had ordered the Tolls to return the gouache to the Bauers, based on an exceptional text: the order of April 21, 1945 declaring acts of spoliation null.
On Wednesday, the Court of Cassation dismissed the Toll spouses' appeal, making this restitution final. The high magistrates recalled that by virtue of the 1945 ordinance, "the subsequent purchasers" of a property recognized as confiscated, "even in good faith, cannot claim to have become legally owners of it". The heirs of Simon Bauer, about twenty people, will now recover the painting, which they had left in receivership at the Musée d'Orsay pending a final decision.
A "historic" decision
In a press release, the lawyer for the Bauer family, Cédric Fischer, welcomed a "historic" decision, which had restored his clients "to their legitimate rights".
This decision "gives an incontestable legal basis to all the actions currently in progress having for object the restitution to their legitimate owners of works of art looted and illegally detained by amateurs who try to take advantage of their good faith", a- he estimated. Nothing has yet been decided within the family as to the future of the painting, said Fischer.
The Tolls "are not unhappy that the Bauer family can find the painting", "they are unhappy because ultimately they are the ones who have to pay for a crime committed by the Vichy regime," said Soffer. American collectors intend to turn against the French state before the European Court of Human Rights, announced their lawyer, Ron Soffer. "The original crime in this case was committed by Vichy," insisted the lawyer, for whom "putting the weight of the spoliations on intermediaries is a regrettable decision which opens a box of judicial pandora". "This painting arrived in France because Mr. and Mrs. Toll were willing to lend it in good faith for an exhibition at the Marmottan Museum," he added.
A collection confiscated from the French Simon Bauer
"La Cueillette" was one of 93 masterpieces from the collection of Frenchman Simon Bauer, who had made a fortune in shoes. In 1943, this collection had been confiscated from him, and sold, by an art dealer appointed by the Commissariat for Jewish Questions of the Vichy collaborationist regime. Interned in July 1944 in Drancy, Simon Bauer had managed to escape deportation. When he died in 1947, he had managed to recover only a small part of his works. But his descendants continued their action to regain possession of the collection. "La Cueillette" briefly resurfaced in 1965 during a sale, before disappearing again for half a century.