“Jamais trop tard…” Strasbourg expose des oeuvres spoliées par les nazis

Still lifes, portraits, nudes… “wise and pleasant works” to the taste of Nazi Germany: in Strasbourg, an exhibition brings together 27 paintings and works of art repatriated in 1945, with little hope of being returned to their owners themselves or their descendants.

“This set is the most beautiful in France after that of the Louvre”, emphasizes Dominique Jacquot, chief curator of the Museum of Fine Arts in Strasbourg.

These 20 paintings, including a landscape by Alfred Sisley, and seven objects, correspond to the MNR acronym for “National Museums Recovery”. It is about “remnants of works found in the territories of the Reich in 1945 because they came from France”, explains Thibault de Ravel d’Esclapon, lecturer at the Faculty of Law of the University of Strasbourg and co-curator of this exhibition. opened on October 22.

At the end of World War II, 61,000 works from France were found in Germany and Austria. More than 45,000 were quickly returned to their owners, the rest were sold by the state.

Unsolicited, about 2,200 were selected and became “MNR” placed under the responsibility of the state.

If the history of all is unknown, “many of these works belonged to broken Jewish families,” Thibault de Ravel d’Esclapon points out. Some may have been the subject of unrestricted sales to the conqueror or orders.

These MNR do not belong to the museums where they are exhibited, nor to the state that is their depository.

‘moral duty’

Normally, the 27 MNRs of Strasbourg are exhibited in the four museums in the city. For the first time they gather in one place.

“It is an exhibition that responds to a scientific mission, a legal mission but above all a moral duty,” said Paul Lang, director of the Strasbourg museums.

Since 1999, 112 MNR works have been returned to their owners, and so it was again last February in Paris. “It is a story that is still part of the present and the future,” assures Mr. de Ravel d’Esclapon.

But time limits the chances of finding out who they belonged to before the war, hence the interest in getting people talking about them. In the hope that this will revive, in posterity, the memory of a work first seen in an old family photo or in the inventory of an estate.

For Paul Lang, the “ideal objective” of the exhibition would be that at its end, in May, all the MNR works held in Strasbourg “return to the descendants of their legitimate owners”. But he recognizes there “a wishful thinking”, since since their arrival in the early 1950s, this has not happened for any of them.

However, “it is not and it will never be late”, insists the director of the museums.

Rose Valland

The catalog of all MNRs in France can be consulted on terminals or in paper version.

See also

Among the works exhibited in Strasbourg, four were owned by Hermann Göring, including the painting “The Betrothed” by Lucas de Leyde, presented as the most important of the exhibition. Marshall was the second largest buyer of art under Nazi Germany, after those responsible for the foundation of the giant museum that Hitler planned to establish in Linz, Austria.

Passionate about “art and heritage”, Nelly van der Barnvelt, a 74-year-old former accountant, came after being fascinated by a documentary about Rose Valland, who during the war secretly kept notes on the transfers of works by the Nazis, crucial information for finding and restoring works.

“I wanted to see the paintings they had in Strasbourg and I was not disappointed,” she explains.

The exhibition “Past, present, future of recovered works in Germany in 1945” is on view until May 15, 2023 in the Heitz gallery of the Palais Rohan.

may/bar/npk

In Strasbourg on October 22, 2022, in an exhibition bringing together 27 paintings and works of art looted by the Nazis and repatriated in 1945, with little hope of returning them to their owners or descendants.
• FREDERICK FLORIN

At an exhibition of works of art looted by the Nazis, in Strasbourg, October 22, 2022
• Frederic FLORIN