Louvre hunts Nazi-era looted art with Sotheby’s help

Auction house teams up with museum as French initiative leads to return of works by Klimt and Chagall

SOTHEBY’S is joining forces with the Louvre museum to research the provenance of nearly 10,000 museum artworks acquired before and during the Nazi occupation of France. Scholars from the auctioneer’s restitution department have helped to resolve issues relating to hundreds of artworks with an aggregate value of nearly $1 billion (£700 million) since its creation in 1997.

Among the highest-profile of recent years was the sale of an Egon Schiele painting, City in Twilight (The Small City II), in 2018 for $24.5million in New York as part of a private restitution discovered by Sotheby’s own researchers.

The partnership comes as France passed legislation this week to return masterpieces in French museums, including the Louvre, to their Jewish owners as part of a government pledge to restore art looted by the Nazis.

The works include a landscape by Gustav Klimt, the Austrian art nouveau painter, which has an estimated value of £75 million, and a portrait by Marc Chagall, the Franco-Russian modernist, of his father.

About 100,000 artworks were stolen in France during the war, with many ending up on the market and being purchased in the post-war period for the country’s national collection. In the Louvre’s three-year partnership, Sotheby’s will sponsor research by the museum that will include digitising and photographing artworks obtained between 1933 and 1945.

“Sotheby’s is honoured to give financial support to the Louvre’s research into items acquired by the museum between 1933 and 1945,” said Lucian Simmons, Sotheby’s vice-chairman and head of its Restitution Department.

“The museum’s initiative underlines the importance of Second World Warera provenance research for the art world at large, something Sotheby’s has been committed to for many years.” he said.

The Louvre possesses 9,950 works acquired in that wartime period, according to a presentation in 2020 by the scholar Emmanuelle Polack, who was hired to lead its provenance research.

According to the Louvre, researching potential heirs is like seeking a needle in a haystack. The initial job involves seeking to divide up works into those whose provenance is clear and ones that raise suspicion. France has often been accused of dragging its feet in the restitution of Nazi-era looted art. French MPs this week approved a bill to hand back paintings, drawings and other artworks to their owners.

Five of the pieces to be returned are in the Louvre, seven are in the Musée d’Orsay, and the remainder in the Château de Compiègne, north-east France, the Musée Utrillo-Valadon, north of the Paris, and the Museum of Art and History of Judaism, in the capital.