Paris (AFP)
The French court dismissed on Thursday the heirs of a Jewish art collector despoiled during the war who demanded the return of three paintings of the fauvists André Derain exhibited for years in museums.
For the criminal court of Paris, "persistent uncertainties in the identification of tables" remain, according to the decision consulted by AFP.
"Because we are sure of our good right, we will appeal," reacted the granddaughter of collector René Gimpel, Claire Touchard. "We consider in view of the judgment that it is difficult to pick up paintings from the national collections and that the judges may have been a little shy," she told reporters.
More than 75 years after the occupation, the descendants of the great Parisian gallery owner René Gimpel are still waiting to recover all the works stolen or disappeared in the turmoil of the war. After years of investigation, they claimed to have found three Derain, acquired by their grandfather at the sale of the Kahnweiler collection in 1921 in Paris.
They claim to the Ministry of Culture the restitution of these paintings painted between 1907 and 1910, "Landscape in Cassis", "La Chapelle-sous-Crecy" and "Pinède, Cassis", exhibited for the first two at the Museum of Modern Art from Troyes and for the third at the Cantini Museum in Marseille.
They rely on this for an order of April 1945 on the nullity of the acts of spoliation.
These works have traveled, changed their name, sometimes been re-rented: at the hearing, on June 25, the lawyers of the ministry and museums had questioned the concordance between the works claimed and those acquired by René Gimpel.
This was held by the court, considering that these uncertainties "do not allow to apply" the order of 1945.
For the lawyer of the museum of modern art of Troyes, Béatrice Cohen, "the court made a fair decision: he noted all the uncertainties on the identification and the course of the paintings".
"A mill + which becomes a + chapel +, works that change size, a signature that is at the bottom of the" Landscape Cassis "in the museum and was at the back of the work in the catalog of the sale Kahnweiler. .. too many inconsistencies ", summarized the lawyer, also welcoming that the museum of Troyes was put out of cause, being only" allocataire "and not owner of the exposed paintings, registered in the national collections .
The court does not question the fact that René Gimpel, one of the greatest collectors of art of the early twentieth century, resistant and died in deportation in January 1945, was stolen. He fled Paris in October 1940 for the French Riviera, was arrested in 1944 and deported to the Neuengamme camp.
"If it is established that the German authorities confiscated two cases containing, for the four of them, 23 paintings entrusted to Robinot for transport in 1942, there is no reason to assert that the tables at issue found in these cases, in the absence of an inventory of their content ", the judges noted in their decision.
"I understand that the court was cautious, we do not know under what conditions the paintings were sold, it was the war, René Gimpel was forbidden to practice," said the lawyer of the heirs, Corinne Hershkovitch, who began in 2013 to approach museums.
"We have many evidence that Rene Gimpel was dispossessed of these paintings between June 16, 1940 and 1944, which should normally be sufficient to implement the provisions of the 1945 ordinance," she said.
© 2019 AFP