Battle over museum’s Renoir ‘that Nazis forced Jews to sell’
A PRIVATE detective has accused a British city council of harbouring a Renoir painting that the Nazis forced a Jewish art dealer to sell.
Arthur Brand, 48, wants Bristol City Council to hand over the work, The Coast at Cagnes. It has hung in the city’s museum since 2001, but Mr Brand says it is a spoil of war. The museum disputes this.
Mr Brand claims the original owners, Jakob and Rosa Oppenheimer, were made to sell it after being banned from working as art directors by Hitler’s regime in 1933.
The work passed into the hands of Leopold Moller, an Austrian Jew who fled from Hamburg to the UK. He left it to the Friends of Bristol Art Gallery on his death in 1999.
Mr Brand says he has been hired to ‘set the record straight’ but Bristol Museum is refusing to hand it over, saying Britain’s Spoliation Advisory Panel – set up to decide on works of art that could have been taken from Jews in the 1930s – ruled in 2015 that the painting’s history, including its sale in 1935, did not require the council to hand it back to the Oppenheimers’ descendants.
But Mr Brand said the council was being ‘deeply arrogant’ in not returning it. He said the Nazis put Jewish businesses into debt with fines and other costs, forcing them to sell their valuables. He added: ‘The Oppenheimer family sold this one under duress.’
The UK’s Spoliation Advisory Panel concluded that debt was the reason the Oppenheimers sold, but didn’t conclude that this was effectively a case of the Nazis seizing or stealing the work. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, one of the French Impressionists, is believed to have painted it in around 1910.
A spokesman for Bristol City Council said: ‘We stand by the conclusion of the Spoliation Advisory Panel.’