National Post (National Edition)
It is the right and moral thing to do for (Oklahoma University) to return this painting to the Jewish family from which the Nazis plundered it.
PAUL WESSELHOFT, A REPUBLICAN STATE REPRESENTATIVE FROM OKLAHOMA CITY, ON A THREE-WAY LEGAL BATTLE OVER AN IMPRESSIONIST PAINTING.
Impressionist artist Camille Pissarro's tiny La Bergère Rentrant des Moutons (Shepherdess Bringing in Sheep) has for years been the subject of a three-way tug of war between a museum in France, a university in Oklahoma and the daughter of its original Jewish owners.
When they fled France during the Second World War, wealthy Parisians Raoul and Yvonne Meyer entrusted their art to their bank, but in 1941 Nazi officers managed to loot the lot. Upon returning to Europe in 1945, Raoul was able to recover much of his vast collection, Artnet.com says. However, by the time he tracked down La Bergère in Geneva in 1951, the statute of limitations to claim it had expired and a Swiss court ruled in favour of the work's postwar owners.
The 1886 painting wasn't seen again by the Meyer family for 70 years but, in 2012, the artwork was located in a private U.S. college art museum, where it had been hanging for a decade: The University of Oklahoma's Fred Jones Museum holds 20,000 art objects including the tiny painting by Pissarro, a highly influential artist in the Impressionist movement of the late 19th century.
The painting had been one of the 33 works gifted to the university in 2000 upon the death of Clara Weitzenhoffer, whose husband, oil tycoon Aaron Weitzenhoffer, had bought the piece in good faith from a gallery in New York in 1956.
In 2013, the Meyers' daughter, Léone-Noëlle, sued the university for the return of her parents' Pissarro; the settlement transferred ownership of the work to her and the painting was returned to France from Oklahoma the following year.
In 2014, president David Boren defended the university's earlier ownership, saying the school did not want to keep any items it did not legitimately own but neither did it want to just give away gifts it had received to anyone who claimed them.
However, prior to that statement, he had said that “the highly regarded Jewish family from Oklahoma who gave the painting to us also had friends and family members endangered at the time of the Holocaust. They are deeply opposed, as is the university, to the theft of art by the Nazis.”
The university said the paintings would be returned only on the orders of the court.
At that time, Paul Wesselhoft, a Republican state representative from Oklahoma City, urged university officials to repatriate the painting, saying that keeping it even after the disclosure of its rightful owners causes humiliation for the state and the school.
“It is the right and moral thing to do for OU to return this painting to the Jewish family from which the Nazis plundered it,” he said. “Keeping this painting is an embarrassment. I'm ashamed that it's in the museum.”
Though it was returned to her, Meyer preferred to have La Bergère seen by the public rather than hang it in her home. According to her lawyer, Ron Soffer, the heiress signed a three-way deal in 2016 stipulating that she and the Musée d'Orsay in Paris would share possession of the painting; that it could not be sold, exchanged or donated without approval from both sides; and that the piece would rotate between the Oklahoma museum and a French art gallery every three years.
Having been shown in the d'Orsay since it was essentially repatriated, the painting is now due to be returned to the U.S. in July for its first three-year stint.
Meyer, however, has had a change of heart and has decided she wants it in France permanently.
Her lawyer told the BBC that “because (the Americans) were not willing to restitute it, Meyer found herself with a substantial risk of not seeing the painting ever return to France.” The 2016 agreement, he said, “was a solution imposed by Oklahoma. It goes from Oklahoma to a French museum and then back to Oklahoma. Meyer does not even have the ability to touch it.”
The costly requirement to ship it to the U.S. every three years was not optimal for the d'Orsay, but it will soon begin packing up the artwork for its Oklahoma rotation.
The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany has also criticized the university, saying that rotating the painting “by definition is not restitution.”
She may not be able to keep it solely in France, but the deal does allow the 81-year-old heiress to donate the painting to a French art institution before her death. If she does not, Soffer says, the painting “shall be permanently transferred to the U.S.'s Art in Embassies program.”
Limited by the deal she herself signed, Meyer had few options to prevent La Bergère being removed from France. As a last resort, she asked the French court to stop it. That verdict is expected next month.
Meanwhile, the district court in Oklahoma ruled that with her lawsuit Meyer was in contempt of the 2016 deal, saying she “has largely forfeited whatever sympathy she might otherwise have been entitled to,” adding in its judgment, according to the BBC, that she “entered into a rigorously negotiated settlement agreement … then violated that settlement agreement when it no longer suited her purposes.”
And to add injury to the insult, the court imposed a daily fine on her — Soffer says it's US$2,500 a day, in addition to legal fees — until she drops the French case.
He suggests there's a basic principle of ethics at hand.
“The important question is to ask why Oklahoma has been fighting for the past decade not to restitute a painting that they do not contest is of dubious origin, that they do not contest was taken from Meyer's adopted father by the Nazis?” Soffer told bbc.co.uk.
The arrangement had widely been seen as a fair solution to the question of who gets to keep Nazi-looted art — the buyers who purchased it in good faith from a legitimate source, the work's original owners or heirs, or the institutions that either bought or were gifted the artwork. As the BBC noted, different courts and different countries have applied different rules.
The Oklahoma University Foundation at first saw Meyer's arrangement as “a model for how to fairly and justly settle modern day art restitution cases,” but recently told the BBC that “it is disappointing that she is actively working to renege on the agreement lauded by the international arts world.”
But because the Jones museum has not denied that the painting was looted by the Nazis, Soffer says “we frankly do not understand how Oklahoma could possibly justify to themselves and to their students the notion of getting an 81-year-old Holocaust survivor sanctioned in order not to yield a painting that they know belongs (in France).”