A Paris court last week ordered the Musée d’Orsay to return to the heirs of noted French dealer Ambroise Vollard four major works stolen during World War II, The Art Newspaper reports. Slated for restitution are an 1883 Guernsey seascape and a ca. 1908–10 sanguine study (held by the Cleveland Museum of Art) for the Judgement of Paris, both by Renoir; Gauguin’s 1885 Still Life with Mandolin; and Cézanne’s Undergrowth, ca. 1890–92, a watercolor. The paintings belonged to Vollard at the time of his sudden death in a traffic accident in 1939; aided by the dealer’s brother, Lucien Vollard, who had charge of his estate, dealers Étienne Bignou and Martin Fabiani sold the works variously to Nazi officers and to German museums and dealers.
Vollard’s heirs in 2013 launched a campaign for the return of those works and three others. Casting the circumstances surrounding their provenance as insufficiently clear, the state initially denied the descendants’ request. Complicating restitution efforts was the fact that Vollard was not Jewish and his property thus not subject to seizure under laws then in place in Nazi-occupied France. In the ensuing decade, during which two of Vollard’s heirs died, the case wended its way through the French legal system, with a court in 2022 finally ruling that the works had been stolen from Vollard and illegally sold. The judgment was upheld in a high court this past November, with the recent verdict formally endorsing the ruling and thus clearing the path for the works’ return. The French state has said it will not appeal the decision.
The heirs are continuing to seek restitution of the three remaining contested works, two Renoirs and a Cézanne. One of the bathers is confirmed to have been purchased from Bignou in 1941 by the Köln Wallraff-Richartz Museum; the French state continues to argue that no evidence can be found to support this. The state additionally claims that though Fabiani sold the Cézanne to a Nazi official, the dealer obtained it legally from one of Vollard’s sisters.
