The day after the restitution to the descendants of the Saulmanns and those of Harry Fuld junior of two paintings and a sculpture from the 15th century, the Minister of Culture Rima Abdul Malak presented a framework bill on the burning question of Nazi spoliations . It will concern the specific case of works stolen from collectors or Jewish families, then entered into public collections.
During the Occupation, a hundred thousand works of art were stolen by the Germans, mainly from Jews. After the conflict, nearly 60,000 were brought back by the Allies from Germany and Austria, – including part of the Rothschild’s fabulous art collection. In the 1950s, for lack of finding the owners, the State sold some of the works repatriated from Germany (those said to be of lesser heritage interest) and kept 2,200 others in French museums (MNR). Between 1954 and 2023, 184 were returned to the descendants of their rightful owners.
With this framework law, the government wants to go further by asking public museums to carry out searches from their collections, in order to identify paintings or objects that would have been spoliated from Jews, between 1933 and until today. today, in France or in other European countries.
Having integrated the national collections, and being considered non-transferable (inalienable), their possible restitutions currently require a heavy procedure of “downgrading”, then a passage before the parliament. In April 2022, the French State thus returned a painting by Chagall, The Father, which entered the national collections in 1988 by donation in payment of the rights of Chagall’s estate. After research, it turned out that the painting had been stolen from a luthier, David Cender, in 1940 in Poland, as part of the Nazi anti-Semitic persecutions. before delivering the canvas in person to the descendants, at the Museum of Art and History of Judaism where it was exploded, the State had to pass a law authorizing the transfer.
The bill, which could be presented before the summer, aims to provide a general framework, a method and criteria, in order to avoid doing it on a case-by-case basis.
By definition, we don’t know how many works will be affected. The Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay began heavy research on the provenance, trying to sift through all the purchases made from 1933 onwards. Thefts, trafficking and the art market were flourishing during the dark years Nazism, and it’s a safe bet that some works were originally stolen (or coerced) from Jews.
For museums, the task is daunting, but the game is worth the effort. “Identifying and finding these cultural assets and returning them to the victims’ heirs means doing a work of justice, but also of memory, to allow the descendants of looted Jewish families to find their history,” said the Minister of Culture, which speaks of a historic step.
