France Returns Painting Stolen from Austrian Jews

France will return Gustav Klimt’s “Rose Bushes Under Trees” to the Austrian family that owned it prior to World War II. (Wikimedia Commons)

The French government announced this week that it will return a painting in its national collection to the family of Nora Stiasny, an Austrian woman who died in the Holocaust. Nazis forced her family to sell the piece in 1938. French officials say that they initially failed to discover the painting’s origin during an earlier investigation into stolen art, but new inquiries have traced it back to its original owners.

The painting, “Rose Bushes Under Trees,” is the only piece by the prominent Austrian artist Gustav Klimt that France possesses. It originally belonged to the art collector Viktor Zuckerkandl, who purchased it directly from the artist in 1911. Zuckerkandl passed it on to his niece, Stiasny, until local Nazis made her sell the artwork to a Nazi sympathizer named Philipp Häusler for less than one-tenth of its value. Stiasny died in a concentration camp in Poland in 1942. Häusler, an art dealer, held onto the painting until his death in 1966. The French government eventually bought it at auction for the Musee D’Orsay in 1980, unaware that it had originally been sold due to coercion.

Roselyne Bachelot-Narquin, the French Minister of Culture, announced plans for the piece’s restitution on Monday, calling the decision to do so “a difficult one,” but ultimately necessary. “Eighty-three years after the forced sale of this painting by Nora Stiasny, this is the accomplishment of an act of justice,” Bachelot-Narquin said. Because of the painting’s legal status as the property of the French government, the country’s parliament will need to pass a special law to return it to the descendants of Nora Stiasny’s sister.

During World War II, the Nazis looted, sold, and often destroyed thousands of pieces of artwork belonging to Jewish owners. A study by the United States government estimates that the Nazis stole more than a fifth of all of the art in Europe, and more than 100,000 pieces were still missing as of 1994. Among those who survived the Holocaust, the appropriation of Jewish property destroyed many families’ wealth. 

Works by Klimt are extremely valuable. His landscape painting “Flower Garden” sold for nearly $60 million in 2017. Similarly, in 2001, the Austrian government misidentified a different Klimt painting as the one taken from Stiasny and gave it to her family. The mistake went unnoticed until 2017, well after the family had sold the mistaken painting for around 20 million Euros. A similar case involving a portrait by Klimt served as the basis for the 2015 film “Woman in Gold.”

Researchers today are constantly discovering stolen artwork in prominent museums and private collections, and several high-profile cases have made their way to courts in Europe and the United States. These restitutions, though few compared to the total amount of looted art, represent one of the last remaining efforts to restore a small part of what Holocaust victims and their descendants lost.