The Musee d’Orsay has been ordered to return four artworks by Cezanne, Renoir and Gauguin to the heirs of a Paris collector, many of whose masterpieces were pilfered in World War II and ended up in the hands of Nazis.
The heirs of Ambroise Vollard, who died in a car crash in July 1939, won the court ruling after a decade-long fight over who owned the art.
Vollard was a leading patron, promoter and friend to several future masters. He gave Cezanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso and others their first solo shows and at one point bought all of Cezanne’s work.
The contested pieces – Marine: Guernsey, a Renoir painting, The Judgment of Paris, a Renoir drawing, Still Life with a Mandolin, a Gauguin painting, and Sous-Bois, a red chalk drawing by Cezanne – were recovered by the Allies in Germany and brought back in 1948. They entered the French state collection of 60,000 Nazi-pillaged artworks, but in 2018 the culture ministry refused to return them on the grounds that they had been sold by Vollard’s family and not looted. An appeal court ruled against the ministry last year and the case reached the Paris administrative court, which handles litigation involving the state.
The judges accepted that the four works had been illegally auctioned to Germans in 1940 by Vollard’s brother Lucien, one of his heirs, and two dealers, Martin Fabiani and Etienne Bignou.
Read the article by Charles Bremner in The Australian (from The Times).