The tricky process of returning Nazi-looted art

A visitor reads informations during a preview of the exhibition "Gurlitt: Status Report, Nazi Art Theft and its Consequences" ("Bestandsaufnahme Gurlitt") on November 1, 2017 at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, western Germany, where the exhibition runs from November 3, 2017 to March 11, 2018. A spectacular art collection hoarded by Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of Nazi-era dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, will be shown for the first time since World War II in parallel exhibitions in Switzerland and Germany. The works in the two exhibitions, in Bern and the German city of Bonn, are just a fraction of the more than 1,500 pieces discovered in 2012 in the possession of Cornelius Gurlitt. PATRIK STOLLARZ / AFP. by Robin Gremmel

PARIS (AFP).- The Nazis stole thousands of artworks from Jewish families during World War II and the restitution of these pieces has been a slow process involving legal battles, complex searches and some stunning finds. Ahead of a court ruling on the return of a painting by impressionist master Camille Pissarro this week, here is some background.

The art plundered by the Nazi regime was intended to be resold, given to senior officials or displayed in the Fuehrermuseum (Leader's Museum) that Adolf Hitler planned for his hometown of Linz but was never built. Just before the end of the war, the United States dispatched to Europe teams of experts -- museum directors, curators and educators -- to find, protect and rescue cultural treasures. Known as the Monuments Men, they were honoured in a 2014 George Clooney film of the same name. These work and restitution programmes enabled the return of most of the looted works to their owners soon after the end of the war. But out of 650,000 stolen pieces, about 100,000 had not been returned by 2009, according to figures released at the Holocaust Era Assets Conference in the Czech Republic that year.

Secret records Works seized by the Nazis in France were stored at the Jeu de Paume site in Paris, originally tennis courts, ahead of their shipment to Germany. Thanks to the secret notes of Rose Valland, an art historian there, about 45,000 were recovered and three-quarters of these returned, according to a report to the French Senate in 2013. Of the remaining "orphaned" pieces, some were sold and more than 2,000 were accorded the special status of "MNR", standing for "Musees Nationaux Recuperation" (Recuperation - National Museums) meaning they are provisionally entrusted to museums. The works were exhibited from 1950 to 1954, but then, "for 40 years, nothing happened", said the 2000 Matteoli report on the looting of French Jews. The report noted "the total abandon of all searches for the owners of these works".

New impetus Inertia settled over the restitution drive in the context of the Cold War and the complexities of various cases. The process was revived in the 1990s after the declassification of thousands of archives and the publication on the internet of databases such as The Art Loss Register. In December 1998, 44 countries signed the Washington Declaration that committed them to stepping up efforts to return stolen pieces to their prewar owners or heirs. This led to the creation of special commissions and new laws, including the US Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act of 2016 that lengthened the time limit for lodging a restitution claim.

The Klimt affair In one of the biggest cases involving art stolen by the Nazis, five masterpieces by Gustav Klimt were caught up in a bitter legal battle between a descendant of the Jewish family from which they were taken and Austria's Belvedere Museum. They included two stunning portraits of Adele Bloch-Bauer, completed with gold leaf. The Vienna museum argued that Bloch-Bauer herself had left it the works. But American heiress Maria Altmann disputed the claim, saying the pieces belonged to her uncle, Adele's husband. Altmann won her battle in 2006 and the pieces were returned. The story was adapted by British filmmaker Simon Curtis into "Woman in Gold" (2015). Austria estimates it has returned about 10,000 works from public collections after passing a restitution law in 1998.

A spectacular find In 2011 a raid on a rubbish-strewn flat in Munich as part of a tax investigation uncovered hundreds of priceless paintings, including works by Picasso and Matisse, that had been stolen by the Nazis. The flat belonged to Cornelius Gurlitt, an octogenarian whose father was one of four art dealers charged by the Nazis with selling the art.

An additional 239 works were found at a house he owned in Salzburg, Austria. Gurlitt passed away in 2014 and left his collection to the Museum of Fine Arts in Bern, Switzerland. But many of the pieces have been subject to legal challenges across Germany.

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Spain court orders pyschic to pay for Dali exhumation

Spanish national Pilar Abel Martinez, 61, who claimed to be Salvador Dali's daughter, speaks during an interview in Barcelona, on June 26, 2017. LLUIS GENE / AFP.

MADRID.- A Spanish court has dismissed a paternity lawsuit brought by a psychic who claimed to be Salvador Dali's illegitimate daughter and ordered her to pay for the exhumation of the surrealist painter's remains. DNA tests prove that Salvador Dali, who died in 1989 aged 84, was not the biological father of Pilar Abel, a 61-year-old who claims her mother had a covert relationship with the artist, according to a Madrid court ruling dated October 13 published on Monday.

The court also ordered Pilar to pay for the exhumation of Dali's remains in July without specifying how much the operation cost. The arduous task involved removing a slab weighing more than a tonne that covered his tomb at the Dali Theatre-museum in Figueras where the eccentric artist was born in 1904. Forensics experts then removed DNA samples from Dali's skin, fingernails and two long bones.

Contacted by AFP, the Dali Foundation, which promotes the artist's legacy, said it still had not evaluated the total cost of the exhumation. The foundation had blasted a court ruling ordering the exhumation as "unusual and unjustified". Abel can appeal the court's dismissal of the paternity lawsuit. If she had been confirmed as Dali's only child, she would have been entitled to 25 percent of the huge fortune and heritage of one of the most celebrated and prolific painters of the 20th century, according to her lawyer Enrique Blanquez.

Dali, known for his elongated figures and wilting clocks, left his estate, which includes properties and hundreds of paintings, to the Spanish state.

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Exiled Russian artist torches central bank branch in Paris

This file photo taken on January 16, 2017 shows Russian artist Piotr Pavlenski (R) and his wife Oksana Chaliguina posing in Paris. Pyotr Pavlensky, who had has fled Russia for France after being questioned by Russian authorities on allegations of committing a sex crime, and his wife were granted political asylum in France on May 4, 2017. MARTIN BUREAU / AFP.

PARIS (AFP).- Controversial Russian performance artist Piotr Pavlensky, who was granted asylum in France in May, was taken into custody early Monday after setting fire to the outside of a Banque de France branch in central Paris, police said. Firefighters arrived the scene at around 4:00 am (0200 GMT) to put out two fires outside of the building in Bastille square, a spokesman said, adding that the incident was of "criminal origin".

Photos on social media show the 33-year-old dressed in black, standing in front of the shuttered front door flanked by fires burning outside two windows. Pavlensky, a recipient of the Vaclav Havel award for creative dissent, was taken into custody along with his partner Oksana Shalygina for causing "damage by fire", police said. Pavlensky once memorably nailed his scrotum to Red Square to denounce state power. In November 2015, he doused the doors of the FSB -- the successor to the Cold War-era KGB, or secret police -- in petrol and set them on fire.

On Monday, a Banque de France spokesman told AFP the bank's entrance was damaged but the security systems were not affected. "The building is still secure," although the Bastille branch will remain closed until further notice, he added.

Pavlensky gained a reputation for challenging Russian restrictions on political freedoms in radical, often painful performances that have won international acclaim. While best known for his 2013 Red Square performance entitled "Fixation", he also sewed his lips together to protest against the jailing of members of the feminist punk group Pussy Riot. He has also wrapped himself in barbed wire and chopped off part of his ear.

After the FSB stunt, Pavlensky was handed a fine of 500,000 rubles ($8,700, 7,400 euros) and released after being found guilty of damaging a cultural site. Pavlensky spent a month last year in a notorious psychiatric hospital undergoing state-ordered tests of his sanity that found him sound of mind.

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Nazi-looted Pissarro painting at centre of legal tussle

Camille La Cueillette des pois, 1887. Gouache, 53,3 x 64,4 cm. Bruce et Robbi Toll – Archives du musée Camille-Pissarro, Pontoise / droits réservés. by Juliette Montesse

PARIS (AFP).- A painting by impressionist master Camille Pissarro that was seized from its French Jewish owner during World War II is at the centre of a court battle beginning Tuesday in Paris after surfacing at an exhibition. "La Cueillette des Pois" (Picking Peas), a gouache from 1887, emerged earlier this year on display at the French capital's Marmottan Museum, more than 70 years after being snatched from art collector Simon Bauer in Nazi-occupied France.

A court will on Tuesday begin examining who are the rightful owners -- Bauer's descendants or an American couple who say they had no idea as to its wartime fate when they bought it at auction in 1995. Bauer, a self-made businessman, was among the thousands of French Jews who were rounded up for deportation in 1944. He narrowly escaped being sent to the Nazi death camps due to a train drivers’ strike. "La Cueillette des Pois" was one of 93 works that were confiscated from him before he was sent to the Drancy internment camp near Paris and sold on by an art dealer.

On his release in 1944, he immediately began looking for his paintings but had only managed to recover a fraction of the works by his death in 1947. His family then took up the hunt, but lost all trace of the Pissarro for half a century before it turned up at the Marmottan, on loan from its current owners for a major retrospective of the artist's work. Bauer's grandson Jean-Jacques Bauer, 87, immediately filed a legal claim to prevent the painting leaving France while beginning a process to try wrest it back from Bruce Toll and his wife Robbi.

In May, a court granted his request to have it impounded in France pending a ruling on its on ownership. 'Free the painting' The Tolls, patrons of Washington and Tel Aviv Holocaust museums who bought the work at Christie's auction house in New York, say they did so in good faith, unaware it was wartime loot. "It is not Mr Toll, who bought this painting at public auction in 1995, who should pay for the crimes of Vichy," the couple's lawyer Ron Soffer told AFP, referring to France's puppet regime under the Nazis. Bauer's descendants will attempt to show that legal precedence is on their side.

They have noted that since 1945 French courts have routinely annulled the sales of other works that were part of Bauer's collection and ordered they be returned to his family. They are pinning their hopes on the application of an April 1945 law which renders void transactions of looted works. The Tolls will attempt to show that the 1945 law does not apply in this case and contest the competence of the court to decide the matter.

If the court does not have jurisdiction in the affair it will have to "free the painting", Soffer said. He added that the outcome would potentially be of "great importance" in the art world as it highlighted "a risk of legal insecurity regarding works which are lent to exhibitions in France.". The Bauers' lawyer Cedric Fischer would not comment on the case ahead of the hearing.

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Renoir stolen in brazen theft ahead of Paris auction

A painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, "Portrait of a Young Girl with Blond Hair", was stolen Saturday from an auction house in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, near Paris. Photo: PAUL J. RICHARDS. AFP.

NANTERRE (AFP).- A small painting by French impressionist Auguste Renoir was stolen from an auctioneer in a Paris suburb on Saturday, the day before it was due to be sold, police said. "Portrait d'une jeune fille blonde" (Portrait of a Young Girl with Blond Hair), estimated at 25,000-30,000 euros ($30,000-$35,000), was taken from an auction house in the western suburb of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where it was on display prior to the sale.

The thief apparently just took the oil painting off the wall and escaped unnoticed, a police official said. The highlight of the sale, the canvas is listed in the auctioneers' catalogue as measuring 14 centimetres by 12.2 centimetres (5.5 inches by 4.5 inches), with the initials "A.R." in its top left-hand corner. Police hope video surveillance footage will provide a lead.

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Artist to face trial for 'flashing' at Louvre

She was arrested in January 2016 for indecent exposure after lying down naked in the Orsay Museum in front of Edouard Manet's similarly nude painting of the prostitute Olympia.

PARIS (AFP).- A woman performance artist who exposes herself in museums is to be prosecuted for exhibitionism after baring her genitals in front of the Mona Lisa in Paris, her lawyer said Thursday. Deborah de Robertis spread her bare legs before Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece on Sunday in the Louvre museum, shouting "Mona Lisa, my pussy, my copyright" as several dozen tourists looked on.

"The goal was not to exhibit my genitals," the 33-year-old told AFP, "but to copy a famous photograph by Valie Export" -- an Austrian performance artist known for her sexually provocative acts during the 1970s. "My message is to question the place of women artists in the history of art. That's why it's necessary to do my performances in museums," said Robertis, who has dual French and Luxembourg nationality.

Robertis was in custody for two days before appearing before a judge, who ordered her to face trial on October 18 on charges of sexual exhibitionism and assault -- for biting a museum guard's jacket during her arrest. "The legal approach to this affair is scandalous," Robertis's lawyer Marie Dose said. "It's not exhibitionism if there is no wish to assault someone sexually, which is completely contrary to the work of this performance artist."

Robertis went on trial in February but was acquitted when a judge determined that similar acts at the Decorative Arts Museum and the Museum of European Photography in Paris were artistic performances. Robertis performed a similar stunt before the Mona Lisa at the Louvre in April.

She was arrested in January 2016 for indecent exposure after lying down naked in the Orsay Museum in front of Edouard Manet's similarly nude painting of the prostitute Olympia. In May 2014 she exposed herself in front of Gustave Courbet's "The Origin of the World" painting, also at the Orsay, to mimic the close-up of a woman's genitals. The painting caused a sensation when it went on view in 1866.

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400 Viking objects stolen in Norway museum heist

Thieves were able to enter the museum on the seventh floor via scaffolding on the building's facade. Photo: Kari K. Årrestad. © University Museum.

OSLO (AFP).- Some 400 Viking objects were stolen from a Norwegian museum at some time over the weekend of August 11-13, the museum's director said Sunday, describing the loss as "immeasurable".

"If the stolen objects are not returned, this is by far the most terrible event in the 200 years of Norwegian museum history," the director of the University Museum of Bergen in southwestern Norway, Henrik von Achen, told AFP. The items, most of them small metal objects like jewelry, "do not have monetary value attached to them" and the value of the metal itself "is also quite small," he said. "Yet the great and immeasurable loss is connected to the cultural history value of the items, which exceeds the monetary value many times over," he added.

Thieves were able to enter the museum on the seventh floor via scaffolding on the building's facade. The stolen objects had been temporarily placed there ahead of a planned transfer to a more secure location on August 14. "The (security) measures were not sufficient, we should have had additional security elements in place," he acknowledged.

Norwegian police are investigating the case together with their international counterparts. Meanwhile, the museum was surveying all of the stolen objects and posting photos of them on social media sites so "that the items become well-known and hence more difficult to sell and easier to spot," von Achen said.

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