Less Than a Month After the Louvre Hired a Nazi Loot Expert to Investigate Its Collection, She Found 10 Ill-Gotten Works Hiding in Plain Sight

The Louvre could soon be restituting 10 looted works from its
collection to the rightful heirs of their former Jewish owner.

Earlier this month, the Paris museum hired an art historian and
expert in the French art market during the German Occupation to
research its collections. Emmanuelle Polack is
tasked with looking into suspect acquisitions made by the museum
during the Vichy regime.

Now, Polack has identified 10 works in the Louvre’s collection
that belonged to a Jewish lawyer before their forced sale at
auction, Le Monde
reports. The works are the subject of an official restitution claim
from his heirs, Artnet News understands.

Upping the Ante

Hiring Polack is the latest move by the Louvre to restitute
works in its collection that were looted during the Nazi era. In
late 2017, it opened two galleries to highlight around 30 orphaned
works in its collection as part of an ongoing effort to find their
rightful owners, but the move has yielded few results so far.

Polack, who wrote a book on the French art market during World
War II, Le Marché de l’art sous
l’occupation, has worked with the Louvre before, albeit
not on its staff. Last year she organized an exhibition at the Shoah Memorial
in Paris on the subject, which included loans from the Louvre as
well as the Musée d’Orsay.

The exhibition grabbed headlines when Polack revealed that the
works in that show had belonged to a French-Jewish lawyer, Armand
Dorville. After his death his art collection was confiscated, and
sold at auction.

Polack presented documents identifying Dorville’s collection,
which included work by Bonnard, Renoir, and Manet, as having been
sold at a 1942 auction in Nice as a “Cabinet of a Parisian
Amateur.” She revealed that a curator in the Louvre’s paintings
department, René Huyghe, had acquired 12 works from that auction
for the museum.

Three of those works were loaned to the exhibition. They were
drawings by Henri Monnier and Camille Roqueplan from the Louvre,
and a Jean-Louis Forain work that is now in the collection of the
Musée d’Orsay.

Now, it turns out that a further eight works from that auction
are still in the Louvre’s collection: three more Monniers and five
works by Constantin Guys. The twelfth work, a bronze by
Pierre-Jules Mène, remains at large.

A spokesperson for the Louvre confirmed to Artnet News that an
official restitution request was made by the Dorville family in
October 2019, and that the case is currently under the
investigation of a special task force that reports to the French
culture ministry, and the Commission for the Compensation of
Victims of Spoliation, which reports to the Prime Minister. Artnet
News reached out to Polack for comment but did not immediately hear
back.

France’s Problem Works

It is estimated that some 100,000 works of art were either
looted by the Nazis or sold under duress during the German
occupation of France. During that time, the country’s national
museums made a number of acquisitions.

While many of these works were reclaimed by their rightful
owners after World War II, the French state held onto around 2,000
works of art which remain in museums around the country for
safekeeping while they await ownership claims.

France has faced criticism over dragging its heels on the
restitution of those works. Only around 100 have been returned to
their legitimate owners since the 1950s. The Louvre has around 100
works in its galleries, and there are around 200 in storage. A
further 500 pieces are dispersed across 130 French museums.

In order to speed up the process of restitution, the French
government launched a dedicated task
force last year, which is responsible for conducting extensive
provenance research into those works and overseeing their return to
their rightful heirs. The task force is led by David Zivie,
a civil service program officer for looted art, and it has
been given an annual budget of €200,000. Zivie has said that the
office’s first mission would most likely concern the claim for the
restitution of artworks formerly in the Dorville Collection. Artnet
News reached out to Zivie for comment but did not hear back by
press time.

The Gurlitt Connection

With just 11 works from the Dorville collection located in
French museums so far, a question remains as to the whereabouts of
the remaining 439 lots from the Dorville auction.

But there is some good news for the heirs already. Today,
January 22, Germany is handing over three
works from the collection to Dorville’s heirs after they submitted
a claim for their return. Two paintings by Jean-Louis Forain, a
watercolor titled Lady in an Evening Gown and the oil
painting Portrait of a Lady in Profile, were located
within the hoard of Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of Nazi-era art
dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt. The remaining work, a drawing by
Constantin Guys, Amazon with Rearing Horse, had also
passed through Hildebrand Gurlitt’s collection before it ended up
in a private collection in Southern Germany.

The post Less Than a Month After the Louvre Hired a Nazi
Loot Expert to Investigate Its Collection, She Found 10 Ill-Gotten
Works Hiding in Plain Sight appeared first on artnet
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