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.
