Musée d'Orsay will return Klimt painting taken in 1938 by Nazis during anti-Semitic spoliation

French Culture Minister Roselyne Bachelot-Narquin has announced that she will return a Gustav Klimt painting from the Musée d’Orsay collections to the heirs of Nora Stiasny, to whom the painting belonged and which was taken from him by the Nazis in August 1938 in Vienna. It is Rose under the Trees, a work the artist executed in about 1905.

Of Jewish descent, Nora Stiasny, granddaughter of collectors Viktor and Paula Zuckerkandl, was forced to sell, a few months after Austria’s annexation by Nazi Germany, a Klimt painting then titled Pommier for much less than the market price. The woman was later deported and murdered in 1942 with her mother, husband and son.

Stiasny’s heirs had already requested in the late 1990s that the Belvedere Gallery return the painting, and in 2001 Klimt’s Pommier II was returned. In July 2017, however, Austrian authorities researching the provenance of the estate had said there had been an error in the restored work.

Conginta research by the Musée d’Orsay, the Ministry of Culture, the Belvedere Gallery, and Nora Stiasny’s heirs led to the conclusion that the painting taken from the woman was indeed Rose under the trees at the Musée d’Orsay. It had in fact become part of the Paris museum in 1980, with its acquisition on the art market. Like all acquisitions made by the state, the work had been submitted for approval to the Artistic Council of the National Museums, which had deliberated on the basis of the information then available about this work and its history.

The history of Viktor Zuckerkandl’s collection and his family’s fate in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s has been reevaluated in recent years, which has led to a greater understanding of the movements of the various Klimt works acquired by the collector-all of which has made it possible to establish the work’s provenance from the Musée d’Orsay.

In 2019, the Ministry of Culture launched a mission dedicated to the work of researching cultural property looted by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945, and the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée de l’Orangerie, like all other national museums, are engaged in these anti-Semitic spoliation searches.

Although restitution has been announced, it cannot take place immediately by rule of law. Unlike works listed in the “National Museums Recovery” inventories, which do not belong to the national collections and are therefore returnable if looted, works incorporated into the public collections by an act of voluntary acquisition, for a fee or free of charge, fall within the movable public domain protected by the principles of imprescriptiveness and inalienability.

The government will therefore submit a bill authorizing the removal of the work from the national collections on the basis of the spoliation that took place in 1938.

Image: Gustav Klimt, Roses under the Trees (c. 1905; oil on canvas, 110 x 110 cm; Paris, Musée d’Orsay) © RMN - Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Patrice Schmidt

Musée d'Orsay will return Klimt painting taken in 1938 by Nazis during anti-Semitic spoliation

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