Few who see Picasso’s “actor” in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Arts know his complicated history. Paul Leffmann, a German Jewish businessman, sold it in 1938. “He used to hang in my great -grandmother’s house,” Laura Zuckerman said. “He needed money to escape the Nazis.”
“Did they come out?” I asked.
“They came out. And they survived. But not all family.”
Zuckerman represents Leffmann’s heirs, who fought for a picture – worth $ 100 million – claiming that it was sold under coercion, which means: “If it hadn’t been for a Nazi persecution against them, they would never have sold it,” she said.
Still, the two US courts did not agree.
But in other cases the tide can be rotated. The Amsterdam Museum returned “Delisque” Henri Matisse, the heirs of Albert and Marie Stern, saying that it was sold under Dires. Sterns tried to escape, but most families died in concentration camps.
And in historical politics, the French Parliament recently unanimously approved a law that quickly made the return of art to families claiming to be rightly theirs.
David Zivie, from the French Ministry of Culture, leads the mission to research and return the Nazi era. He says that the motive of such work is to “recognize what happened and help families get their works.
“We need to know history, because they should be in the hands of the legal owner, because they are the last witnesses of what happened during the war,” Zivie said. “These works are like a persecution witness.”
Professor of the History of the University of Denver Elizabeth Campbell said: “I think there is a political will finally to admit that it is part of a delayed justice.”
She wrote about the complicity of French and other European governments in guarding what the Nazis stole in their book, “Museum Valuable: Nazi Art Robbery in Post -Western Europe.” Campbell says there could be even bigger changes with new guidelines that arranged France and other countries, including the United States. “These new guidelines say that any persecuted person who sold a work of art during the Nazi era should assume that she did so under the coercion,” she said. “So now it gives the blanket a recognition of coercion in any sale. It’s a truly dramatic change.”
When the Germans withdrew, allied artistic experts found piles of stolen paintings everywhere, from caves to castles. More than 60,000 works of art was returned to France. But about 2,000 pieces ended up in a recess, and was held by the French government without a clear legal owner.
Ines Rotelrund-Reynard is a newly established researcher of origin at Musee D’Orsay in Paris. Her job is to find the truth about the past of the Nazi era of art. “The French are now a great desire to clarify the situation,” she said. “It’s kind of like taking a detective and saying,” Look at all the cold cases that happened 80 years ago and get rid of it. “Every story is important.
But the case of Armand Dorville has thrown out the French government against its successors, among them Franca’s Kahn, who said, “Detecting these pictures is a way to get to know him.”
Another heir, Raphaël Falk, said, “I feel angry when we have so much difficulty to pull them.”
When Dorville died of natural causes in 1941, his art collection was auctioned. But because of anti-Semitic laws, the French authorities have seized the revenue, and family members are killed in Auschwitz.
Eighty years later, the Museum in North Carolina returned one of Dorville’s paintings of the family, and the German museum was returned by the impressionist of Camille Pisarsarro. But the French government refuses to return more than half a dozen paintings in public museums, saying that the auction was not Made under the coercion.
Falk said, “It must be difficult for them to bring them back. So, I can understand it. But [to give them back]It’s true, you know? That’s fine. “
The family hired Paris lawyer Corinne Herschkovitch, who spent 30 years of recovering art for Jewish families. “All these people in charge of cultural heritage were more concerned, maintaining alive or preserved all these paintings and artwork than to preserve Jews,” she said.
I asked, “Do you think some of these museum directors are still ashamed of how they got these pictures?”
“I think, I think it’s like that. They’re shame, that’s for sure,” Herschkovitch said.
Dorville heirs believe they are fighting for their history.
I asked, “When you bring them back to the family, do you feel that bad history is corrected? Deleted?”
“Not deleted, never deleted,” Falk replied. “The members of our family died because of this. In my mind, this is a way to fix the damage done.”
Kahn said, “It’s a memory of family. Because it’s completely forgotten. And it’s on our shoulders to wake this story … tell the story.”
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The story produced by Mikael Bufano. Editor: Brian Robbins.
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