Senate moves away from the point of no return

The upper house of the French Parliament began considering a law on the restitution of cultural property appropriated by Nazi Germany during the Nazi era. The law is designed to facilitate the return of items from museum collections. Legislators believe that justice is more important than museum preservation, Kommersant’s correspondent in France notes Alexey Tarkhanov.

Stories about the return of paintings, drawings, books and musical instruments – confiscated, bought for next to nothing or simply looted by Nazi emissaries from 1933 to 1945 – are becoming more and more frequent. On the site Ministry of Culture of France it is easy to find a list of works of art that ended up in the collections of French regional and national museums after the war and returned to the former owners and their heirs.

Between 1950 and April 18, 2023, 170 works have left exhibitions and vaults to return to the families, galleries or foundations they once belonged to.

The list has been kept since 1950, because in the period from 1944 to 1950, the Commission for the Return of Artistic Treasures, created by the French government immediately after the liberation of the country, had already returned 45 thousand works.

The following list includes paintings by Rubens, Courbet, Gauguin, Corot, Renoir, Picasso, sculpture by Rodin, but also porcelain, silverware, period furniture, carpets and tapestries. More recently, in 2021, the story was widely discussed when France gave the only painting by Gustav Klimt “Rose Bushes” in the state collections of the country to the heirs. The Austrian owners were forced to sell it for next to nothing in 1938 by the new owners of the country.

The story of the Klimt painting illustrates one of the ways in which works with a dubious past could end up in French museums. After a series of gallery sales, “Rose Bushes” was acquired by the Musee d’Orsay, who did not know about the history of the painting.

In the same way, a lot of things that changed hands repeatedly appeared in state vaults, finding themselves under the protection of the law ever since. For their return, even if the grounds seemed undeniable, each time a special decision of the parliament and government was required.

The new law should simplify the process by freeing provenly stolen works in museums from the grip of rules on the inalienability of public collections and any interpretation of “good faith acquisition.”

It is believed that during the war the Nazis appropriated about 100 thousand works of art in France. Robbery was carried out by specially created German organizations. Just as active in the search for cultural treasures were the “art critics” of the pro-fascist Vichy regime. Only 60% of the loot was discovered and returned to the country after the surrender of Germany. A considerable part of the works, the owners or heirs of whose owners were not found, died in concentration camps or were killed, were transferred to museums.

Realizing the delicacy of the situation, these things were assigned a special status of storage – MNR (Fund for the return of national museums – Musee nationaux recuperation). This meant recognizing that museums are not the ultimate owners and are only required to preserve the works entrusted to them. However, their fate was not obvious: after the change of several generations and the loss of traces of their origin, they could turn out to be a variant of escheat property that could go to the state.

In the years that followed, they added some of the artworks bought by museums from people who received these paintings as a result of legal acquisitions in the art market. Other items were officially donated to museums on purpose or as part of private collections. These things no longer passed as candidates for “return”.

Museums turned out to be here as if they had nothing to do with it and reacted sharply to possible attempts on their new treasures. Museum acquisitions were under the protection of the state, and the heirs had to lead long legal battles, and in any case the last word was with the ministerial officials and the government.

The law will draw a line under the possibility of different interpretations of the situation. If a work has once been stolen or taken from its owners, even under the ostensible rules of long-abolished Nazi legality, its place belongs to the heirs, and it is up to them to decide how to deal with it.

The state reserves only the work of a special commission, which must check the grounds for the return and make sure that it is a disputed work. In some cases, things will again be on the art market, in others they will become the object of a special agreement with museums – from payment of compensation to the obligation to indicate the names of its rightful owners next to the work of art. From now on, only the owners of the paintings themselves will be able to decide this.