France: restitution of a Pissarro looted under the Occupation

"Pea picking", Camille Pissarro, 1887. wikipedia

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The Court of Cassation in France put an end to three years of proceedings around "The Picking of Peas", a painting by the impressionist painter Camille Pissarro. The court validated this Wednesday, July 1, definitively the restitution of the work to the descendants of a Jewish collector robbed during the Occupation.

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It is the end of three years of legal battle. On the one hand: the descendants of Simon Bauer, an industrialist fond of art of Jewish origin despoiled under the German Occupation. On the other: the Toll spouses, a couple of American collectors who had acquired the painting by Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) for 800,000 dollars at Christie's in New York in 1995. Picking  is a gouache with a sown course shadow zones, painted in 1887 by the impressionist artist. 

More than 20 years later, the painting resumed its public appearance, when the Americans lent it on the occasion of a large retrospective dedicated to Pissarro at the Musée Marmottan Monet, in 2017, in Paris. Since then, the two parties have faced each other in court.

"Even in good faith"

The high magistrates recalled that by virtue of the ordinance of 1945, "  the subsequent purchasers  " of a property recognized as confiscated, "  even in good faith, cannot claim to have become legally owners of it  ". 

La Cueillette  was one of 93 masterpieces from the collection of Simon Bauer, who made his fortune in shoes. In 1943, this collection had been confiscated from him and had been sold by an art dealer appointed by the Commissariat for Jewish Affairs of the Vichy regime, who collaborated with Nazi Germany. Interned in July 1944 in Drancy, near Paris, Simon Bauer managed to escape deportation. When he died in 1947, he had managed to recover only a small part of his works. 

"We do not repair one injustice by creating another"

The heirs of Simon Bauer, about twenty people, will now recover the painting, which they had left in receivership at the Musée d'Orsay, in Paris, pending a final decision. 

The argument of the American buyers "  that one injustice is not repaired by creating another  " therefore ultimately failed. The Court of Cassation, the supreme judicial judge, ruled in favor of the descendants of the Jewish collector, even if the American couple has always claimed to be ignorant of the provenance of the canvas. 

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