Displaying items by tag: fled

France will return seven paintings stolen from their Jewish owners by Nazis during World War II, part of an ongoing effort to give back hundreds of plundered works that still hang in French institutions including the Louvre. The seven paintings were all stolen or sold under duress as their owners fled Europe during the Nazi occupation. The works were to be displayed in Adolf Hitler’s art gallery, which he planned to build in his birthplace in Austria but never came to fruition.

At the end of World War II, with most of Europe in shambles, many artworks were left unclaimed and thousands of French-owned works found homes in the France’s various museums. Government efforts to return these works gained steam last year at the urging of the owners’ families.   The French government believes that there are approximately 2,000 Nazi looted artworks in state institutions; inaccurate archiving and the challenge of properly identifying paintings has made the restitution process a long one.

Six of the seven works to be returned were owned by Richard Neumann, an Austrian Jew who sold his remarkable art collection for a fraction of its value in order to flee Europe. His collection included works by Alessandro Longhi (1733-1831), Sebastiano Ricci (1659-1734), and Gaspare Diziani (1689-1767). The paintings were ultimately placed in the Louvre, the Museum of Modern Art of Saint-Etienne, the Agen Fine Arts Museum, and the Tours Fine Art Museum after the war.

The other painting to be returned is Pieter Jansz Van Asch’s (1603-1678) The Halt, which was stolen by the Gestapo in Prague in 1939 from Josef Wiener, a Jewish banker who was deported and later died in a concentration camp. The Dutch masterpiece hung in the Louvre for years until Van Asch’s family tracked it down online in the mid-2000s. The French Prime Minister, Francois Fillon, approved the return of the painting to the family last year.

The heirs of Alfred Flechtheim, a prominent Jewish art dealer who fled Nazi Germany during World War II, are urging the German state of North-Rhine Westphalia to return artworks belonging to their relative. The paintings in question, which are by Paul Klee (1879-1940) and Juan Gris (1887-1927), are currently part of the Kunstsammlung Nordhein-Westfalen’s collection in Dusseldorf.

Before the perils of World War II took hold, Flechtheim was an established art dealer in Europe, representing a variety of well-known artists including Klee, Max Beckmann (1884-1950), and a number of French Cubists. Flechtheim ran galleries in Dusseldorf and Berlin, organized many exhibitions, and founded an art magazine. However, Flechtheim’s high standing in the art world made him an easy target for the Nazis. He fled Germany in 1933 shortly after a stream of hateful articles ran in the Nazi press. Flechtheim escaped to Zurich, then Paris before settling in London. After his getaway, Flechtheim’s Dusseldorf gallery was seized and turned over to his former employee Alex Voemel, a Nazi. Flechtheim’s gallery in Berlin was liquidated and his collection, which included works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), Fernand Leger (1881-1955), Georges Braque (1882-1963), and Henri Matisse (1869-1954), was sold.    

Mike Hulton, Flechtheim’s great-nephew, claims that Klee’s Feather Plant (1919) and Gris’ Still Life (Violin and Inkwell) (1913) were part of Flechtheim’s private collection and sold under duress for well below their value when he fled Germany. The Kunstsammlung Nordhein-Westfalen does not believe there is enough evidence to support Hulton’s claim. In addition, owners of archives that could help in the case are refusing to let provenance researchers access their information, bringing the dispute to a standstill. Officials from the Kunstsammlung Nordhein-Westfalen assert that if it was proven that Flechtheim was forced to sell the works by Gris and Klee or that he received little to no money for them, that they would part with the paintings, but the current evidence is inconsequential.

Flechtheim’s heirs are currently pursuing restitution for over 100 paintings in museums in the United States, France, Germany, and other European countries.

Juan Carlos Emden, the grandson of a wealthy Jewish businessman, is demanding that the Swiss Buehrle collection return a Claude Monet painting that the family was forced to sell as they fled Europe during World War II. The masterpiece was sold in haste for a little less than $32,000. The painting today is valued at around $27 million.

Emden is the Chilean grandson of Max Emden who bought Monet’s Poppy Field Near Vetheuil in the 1920s. Max was forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1933 for Ticino, Switzerland, where he built the Villa Emden to house his art collection, including Poppy Field Near Vetheuil, one of Monet’s most famous paintings. After his death in 1940, Emden’s son, Hans Eric Emden, was forced to sell his father’s art collection to finance his fleeing to South America from Europe.

Juan Carlos Emden is rumored to have been fighting for years to regain ownership of his grandfather’s painting and is planning to travel to Zurich to discuss how to recover the work with his lawyers. Poppy Field Near Vetheuil was stolen during a heist at the Buehrle museum in 2008, but it was found several days later.