On Monday, France’s Culture minister Roselyne Bachelot declared that the French government will make an effort to send back a painting by Gustav Klimt to the successors of its owner more than 80 years following its sale under pressure during World War II.
The artwork’s initial owner, Nora Stiasny was obliged to sell Gustav Klimt’s Rosiers sous les arbres (Roses Under the Trees), an abstracted landscape showcasing an apple tree, in the wake of the Nazi regime’s occupation of Austria in 1938. Nora had inherited the painting from her aunt and uncle Viktor and Paula Zuckerkandl. Unfortunately, Nora was killed in a concentration camp in 1942.
Under French law, the restitution of the Klimt painting cannot be effective immediately. To execute the return of the artwork to the successors of Nora Stiasny, the French government is obliged to submit a law that would sanction the release of the artwork from the national collection, on the reason that a theft from its original owner occurred in 1938.
The painting has been in the Musée d’Orsay’s collection since 1980, when it was purchased by the state via auction from Zurich’s Nathan Peter Gallery, an auction authorized by the Artistic Council of National Museum upon the museum’s founding. Prior to its acquisition to the Paris museum, Philipp Häusler, the short-term director of the Vienna School of Applied Arts and a Nazi party member, bought it from Stiasny in 1938 for 400 RM, a fraction of its 5,000 RM value. He later trafficked it into Frankfurt and kept it until he died in 1966.
The painting was first displayed in 1908 at the Kunstschau in Vienna and afterward at the International Exhibition in Venice in 2011. Prior to its sale to Häusler, it was exhibited in 1928 at the Neue Galerie in Vienna, in a showcase honoring the 10th death anniversary of Gustav Klimt.
“This decision to return a major artwork from the public collections illustrates our commitment to justice and to reparation for the looted families,” Bachelot said. The steps toward restitution the Klimt are part of a larger scheme in France devoted to exploring cultural property robbed between 1933 and 1945.
The endeavor to give back Rosiers sous les arbres grew out of another restitution effort concerning a Klimt. In 2001, Pommier II was sent to the Stiasny heirs from Austria’s Belvedere Gallery. In 2017, the Austrian government commission in charge of background research, which appointed Belvedere researcher Monika Mayer and Klimt expert Tobias Natter to examine the work’s record, determined that there had been a mistake in the original restitution of the work. It was then revealed that the Rosiers sous les arbres had been sold under duress.
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