Art France restores a Degas drawing looted by the Nazis in 1940
History The brain of the Nazi looting: an unscrupulous dealer who became a millionaire and found refuge in Spain
French deputies unanimously approved a bill on Tuesday to restore 14 works of art from public museum funds that had to be forcibly sold by their Jewish owners because of the persecution they were subjected to by the Nazis.
The 97 deputies present at the session of the National Assembly gave their support to a text presented by the Government of Emmanuel Macron, which will now continue its processing in the Senate, where it is not expected to face any obstacle to be adopted without changes, which would allow its entry into force quickly.
Among the 14 works for which restitution is planned, there are two that were clearly the object of looting by the Nazis, including the best known of all,
Gustav Klimt 's painting
Rosiers sous les arbres
(
Rosebushes under the trees
), which It is kept by the Musée d'Orsay.
Its owner, Eleonore (Nora)
Stiasny, was forced to sell it in Vienna in August 1938 "for a ridiculous price"
, according to the wording of the bill, to pay the taxes that the Nazis had imposed on the Jewish population.
The Austrian authorities recognized in 2001 and in 2017 that Nora Stiasny had been robbed, but for a long time there were doubts about which painting she had to get rid of by force, since the title that appeared was
Pommier
(
apple tree
) and there were several likely to correspond to that designation.
French and Austrian specialists have finally come to the conclusion that it was the canvas of the Musée d'Orsay.
France will also return to the heirs of Maurice Utrillo
's art collector and dealer
Georges Bernheim
Carrefour à Sannois, which has been
owned by the Sannois City Council
since it was purchased in 2004.
Investigations have shown that the German service dedicated to the looting of artistic works owned by Jews stole it in Paris in 1940.
The other twelve pieces that the bill deals with are eleven drawings by
Jean-Louis Forain, Constatin Guys, Henry Monnier
and
Camille Roqueplan
, as well as a waxwork by
Pierre-Jules Mène
from the collection of
Armand Dorville
, which were awarded in a public sale in June 1942 in which the Commissariat for Jewish Questions had intervened.
That is, the body in charge of applying the Nazi anti-Semitic policy by the French collaborationist Vichy regime during World War II.
The French State was made in the auction of 1942 with these twelve works of art,
through the head of the painting department of the Louvre, knowing the "particular nature" of the circumstances in which it had been produced.
That explains why
I'm going to return them now
.
To do so, they had to go through a law given the public nature of their property.
The Ministry of Culture and various French public museums began
more than twenty years ago to respond to the demands of the heirs of despoiled Jews
.
Examinations of different cases have already led to the restitution of 125 works
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