(Hitler speaking foreign language)
(crowd roaring)
Property rights are an important portion
of civilized society.
(overlapping voices speaking)
[Narrator] The Gurlitt Affair
gave worldwide prominence to the still discreet history
of Nazi looted works of art.
1,500 canvases were found buried
in a Munich apartment, among them were works
by Matisse, Chagall, and Renoir.
[Interpreter] The story made the subject
of the hidden, stolen, and looted works of art
seem like some sort of mini-drama,
like a riveting detective story,
whereas in fact, it was part of a whole process
of dehumanization and deculturalization of Europe.
[Narrator] The Bern Museum of Fine Arts
was designated custodian of what was called
the Gurlitt Collection.
It is now therefore up to the museum
to reveal what happened to the works
and to restore them to their legitimate owners.
Amidst the history of betrayal, power, money,
and fascination for art,
Hitler had also undertaken a Nazification of Europe
through an art genocide.
(crowd roaring)
(light instrumental music)
The looting of works
is one of the last unresolved outcomes
of the Second World War.
100,000 works of art were stolen,
and one million books were destroyed in France alone.
This is the story of three works of art,
three major paintings stolen
from three leading European collectors.
The Woman in Blue in Front of a Fireplace by Henri Matisse,
belonging to Paul Rosenberg,
Wilted Sunflowers, also known as Autumn Sun II,
by Egon Schiele, owned by Austrian collector Karl Grunwald,
and Man with a Guitar by Georges Braque,
belonging to Alphonse Kann.
Three works symbolizing the genre of modern art
qualified by the Nazis as a degenerate art,
the art that Hitler took upon himself
to totally eradicate in the name
of purification of culture,
whilst at the same time,
using it as a form of currency.
The way that they would use the looted art was important.
I think you had categories,
like everything in Nazism.
You had the good art, which was classical art.
It would go either to Hitler's collection
to the German museum collections
or to Goring's collection.
Then you had another type of art
like Impressionism that could go
to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
the embassies, the German embassies,
and then you had degenerate art.
Degenerate art was the pieces that would allow them,
like the Picassos, the Matisse, to barter them
here in the Paris art market
and to sell them away.
[Interpreter] Even if this type of art
was not appreciated and was publicly denigrated
by the Nazi regime, they were perfectly aware
that it represented a vast financial aspect,
and that these works could not be destroyed,
that it was better to trade them
and contribute to the war effort.
[Hector] Degenerate art, is to him,
the art that comes out of degenerate minds,
and he talks specifically about Cubism,
Surrealism, and Dadaism.
How can someone like Michelangelo or the Mona Lisa,
and at the same time, can create and invent the Holocaust?
(somber instrumental music)
[Narrator] Many art collectors in Paris were Jewish,
and were therefore targeted as a priority for looting.
Before and after the war,
the French capital was the hub of the art market.
Alphonse Kann was a prominent English art collector
living in Paris.
His collections featured Georges Braque's
Man with a Guitar, a major painting
and a founding work of Cubism.
By 1940, Kann had fled to England.
(whistle blowing)
[Interpreter] Alphonse Kann was an elegant dandy,
a banker and an art collector
who had started out collecting old paintings,
pre-Columbian and African objects of art and furniture.
His taste in art was very eclectic and very accurate.
[Interpreter] He was a rather amazing man.
He was fascinated by modern art
from 1910 to 1915 after the war,
just after the First World War,
and started buying it.
(light music)
[Interpreter] Alphonse Kann bought unprecedented volumes
of pure Cubist Picassos with great determination.
He knew full well that they were extremely difficult works,
and that the general public did not understand them.
(whistle blowing)
[Interpreter] At the time of the occupation,
the German Special Services arrived.
If necessary, the French police helped out
because let's face it, it was in the middle
of the collaboration.
Kann had left for England a couple of years before,
and his house in St.-Germain-en-Laye was looted.
It was early October 1940 right at the start.
In Germany before the war started,
they had already established a list of the objects
that they may want.
From the very first day of the occupation in June 1940,
the occupation of Paris,
they started looting objects from the very first day,
looting galleries especially.
[Narrator] The lists mentioned Paul Rosenberg,
a key figure in the Parisian art market.
In early 1940, he fled the French capital
for southwest France in a bid to seek shelter for his family
and his most important works,
among them Woman in Blue in Front of a Fireplace by Matisse.
As Rosenberg's collection was so reputed and well-known,
the collector was a priority target for the Nazis.
His family gallery featured works
by major Impressionists alongside masterpieces
of modern art.
[Interpreter] Paul Rosenberg forged dealer
and friendship bonds with Picasso,
Braque, and Matisse.
When you have great art dealers,
they will be helping artists develop their careers,
and this is what happened with Paul Rosenberg.
[Interpreter] It wasn't simply a case of him
just commissioning and selling.
He didn't just trade.
He was perhaps also an impresario.
He promoted them and accompanied them,
and he also commissioned works.
He followed them.
This is an art dealer who dealt with Picasso,
Mattise, Braque, and Leger.
In the 20s and 30s, this is man
who was controlling part of modern art.
[Narrator] In 1939 in Lucerne,
the Nazis organized a major sale of degenerate art
that had been looted from German museums.
All profits from the sale were poured into the war effort.
[Interpreter] Collectors and museum directors
from all over the world flocked to the sale
because magnificent works were put on the market
at unbeatable prices.
It attracted huge crowds,
but my grandfather said he wouldn't buy any of the works.
He wouldn't give a single coin to the Nazis
as he said the money would fall back down upon them
in the form of bombs.
So he was identified as being refractory to the Nazis
and was blacklisted.
This resulted in him closing his gallery,
and they retreated to near Bordeaux.
But interestingly, the illusion
that we could go back to Paris
to open the gallery again was still there.
He wrote to Matisse saying,
you'll see, I'll return to Paris in April or May.
He thought he would open the gallery again
in April or May of 1940 and put on a fantastic exhibition.
(man speaking foreign language)
In the beginning, almost none of the collectors,
the Rothschilds, the Rosenbergs, the Kanns,
they never thought that there could be looting
during the war, this type of methodical, systematic looting.
This was unthinkable,
so they wanted to protect it, perhaps,
from the havoc of war, from the soldier of war.
[Interpreter] He had a lot of his paintings
brought to southwest France near Bordeaux.
He hired a vault at the BNCI,
the French national bank for trade and industry
which had a secured vault in Libourne
saying they'll be safe here.
Braque, who visited him, hired the vault next to his.
[Narrator] At the time, Libourne
was in the occupied zone,
and persecution against Jews were increasingly frequent.
[Hector] Over there, he will have to leave very quickly,
but he left behind many many things.
[Interpreter] Then my grandfather, grandmother,
and mother, families were torn apart,
crossed the border at Hendaye
to flee across Spain to Portugal.
Miraculously, they were able to get away,
take the boat in the middle of the mines and submarines
and reach America.
(somber instrumental music)
Paul Rosenberg attracted feelings jealousy,
so certain intermediaries denounced him.
There were people who wanted to negotiate,
who wanted to have either a percentage of it, a commission.
In kind, they would be receiving paintings
from the Rosenberg collection in exchange
for their information.
[Interpreter] In 1941, the Nazis, the Gestapo,
helped by the French authorities
forced the bank's vaults and plundered their contents.
They looted my grandfather's vault and Braque's too.
On the 5th of September 1941,
Paul Rosenberg's collection and stock
were transferred to the Jeu de Paume Museum.
[Narrator] Hermann Goring, number two at the Reich
and head of the Luftwaffe,
used the Jeu de Paume Museum
to store all the stolen works.
Here in late 1941, Alphonse Kann's
Braque Man with a Guitar
and Paul Rosenberg's Matisse Woman in Blue
in Front of a Fireplace
lay within a few meters of each other.
To transfer the thousands of stolen works
to the Jeu de Paume Museum,
Goring used the services of the E.R.R.,
the official looting body.
(Goring speaking foreign language)
[Interpreter] Goring took the E.R.R. under his wing,
and this made transport and workforce
available to the E.R.R. to regularly send things to Germany.
(train chugging)
[Interpreter] Goring had his own personal train.
The entire last wagon was used as a warehouse
for looted works of art.
He spent a large part of his time
seeking masterpieces throughout Europe
that could be looted from families
and compiled into a vast personal collection at his home.
[Narrator] As grandmaster of this villainous chess game,
Hermann Goring claimed all rights
over the destiny of the stolen works.
Man With a Guitar and Woman in Blue in Front of a Fireplace
transited via his personal networks
that also supplied his private collection.
[Interpreter] I'm just discovering these photographs.
They're incredible.
Goring has just visited the Jeu de Paume Museum,
where the works that were plundered and looted
from the Jewish families were stored.
Goring visited the Jeu de Paume Museum
on over 20 occasions.
[Interpreter] In November '42,
February '41, March '41, April '41,
May '41, July '41, August '41,
December '41, February '42, March '42,
14th of May '42, and November '42.
It's quite astonishing.
The man spent his life there.
He would visit incognito.
Goring, that horrible character, liked degenerate art.
He had a room reserved for it,
referred to as the Martyr Room
where all the canvases he was interested in were exhibited,
and he helped himself freely from it.
[Interpreter] This is a photograph
of the Martyr Room, and in this room,
hanging from floor to ceiling,
are all the works considered
as belonging to degenerate art.
We can recognize works by Chagall, Matisse, Picasso,
numerous works by Dali, Fernand Leger, and Torres Garcia.
[Interpreter] According to us,
that's the Braque there.
You can see the composition and the size
because it's a tall and narrow painting.
(soft instrumental music)
[Narrator] The Jeu de Paume became the hub
of Nazi looted art and its parallel market.
One young museum employee risked her life
in tracking and registering the traceability
of the paintings.
She was to play a key role
in the post war restitution.
[Interpreter] Jaujard, the owner of the Louvre,
asked Rose Valland, a young woman
from a very modest background,
to be on site and to witness what the Nazis were doing.
She was to play a key role.
[Interpreter] She observed and rummaged in the bins
to obtain duplicates of everything that was written down.
She tried to obtain the addresses
of the looted collectors.
At night in the arrangerie, she would jot down
in her little notebooks summaries of all the works
she'd seen, where they came from,
and where they were going as far as she knew.
After the liberation, this proved to be a gold mine
for the French museums and collectors.
Rose Valland flagged that this painting of Braque's
was going to be exchanged.
We have the exchange documents.
The document can be found in the archives of the Louvre,
and the same document exists in the archives
of the Musee D'Orsay.
[Interpreter] It's very interesting to see
the correlation between the exchanges
that Rose Valland noted down during this period
and Goring's visits.
For example, the exchange that interests us
took place in February 1942,
and Goring was there on the 25th of February 1942.
We found the Braque Man with a Guitar, Item 1062,
with the reference HG, Hermann Goring.
So, Man With a Guitar disappeared in 1942.
(tense instrumental music)
[Narrator] Like the Braque,
Matisse's Woman in Blue in Front of a Fireplace
was also exchanged.
It was part of a batch of four Matisse paintings
that Goring exchanged with a collaborator art dealer
for a Jan Brueghel painting.
(tense instrumental music)
[Interpreter] Here we see that a member of the E.R.R.,
the body dedicated to the looting of art,
is getting ready to serve him a glass of champagne,
and the work he is holding
is the Port of Antwerp by Jan Brueghel.
Goring is sealing the agreement
which is to recover the Jan Brueghel
and to exchange with the art dealer
the four Matisse looted from the Jewish families.
[Hector] The state of the art market
in Paris during the war,
I realize that it was a very lively place.
[Interpreter] They operated in a network.
It was an illegal market, a parallel market.
They operated a network and subsidiaries emerged.
There were auctions at war constantly.
Many art dealers were open,
which meant a lot of collaboration,
of course, naturally, it has to mean collaboration.
[Interpreter] Everybody, everybody,
I say that in all honesty,
including French gallery owners during the occupation,
everybody profited from the looting.
On October the 31st, 1942,
we can read sale of assets of Israeli Khann,
three days of sales.
The Gazette of the Hotel Drouot auctioning house
three days of sales.
Do you know what three days of sales represents?
Hundreds of canvases, and that's just the French part.
[Narrator] The two Braque and Matisse canvases
that were stolen from Alphonse Kann and Paul Rosenberg
disappeared into the parallel market.
The Nazis carried on plundering European art heritage.
The same message that they apply,
let's say to bring in people from Paris to Auschwitz,
you know by using trains,
by using cattle trains, cattle wagons,
we have to put it as an analogy
in how they did the looting.
I think it was more or less the same method
that was applied.
(somber instrumental music)
[Narrator] Throughout Europe,
the Nazis used an industrialized system for looting.
It was designed to let no work escape.
In 1942 in Austria, the enlightened collector
Karl Grunwald fled the country
with a few of his works including Wilted Sunflowers
by Egon Schiele.
[Interpreter] Karl Grunwald managed to remove from Austria
a large share of the paintings
he was most fond of by declaring them
to be of lower value than they really were,
so that nobody was interested in the works
he had collected.
He had them transported to Strasbourg
where he placed them in a warehouse.
[Interpreter] He himself had managed to obtain
and to buy a visa to leave Austria.
He hoped to reach the US by crossing France
and leaving from Spain, but the rest of the family
did not manage to buy visas in time
and were deported.
(Melissa speaking foreign language)
[Interpreter] Unfortunately, when Karl Grunwald
had to leave France, he no longer had access
to the warehouse, and in order to save his own life,
had to leave the paintings behind in France.
He managed to flee the country.
Originally, he thought he could head straight for New York,
but he first had to travel via Morocco,
where he was detained in very bad conditions
and where he suffered terribly.
(Melissa speaking foreign language)
[Interpreter] What we knew about Schiele's painting
is that it was up for auction,
organized by the Nazis around 1943 in Strasbourg.
We don't know whether it was bought,
or whether it remained unsold,
and we just don't know what happened
between 1942 and now.
[Narrator] In 1943, the three canvases vanished
into the lucrative parallel market.
At the end of the war, the figures were added up.
The Third Reich had plundered over 600,000 works of art.
Karl Grunwald took refuge in New York,
where he remained.
Alphonse Kann stayed in London.
Only Paul Rosenberg returned to Paris
as soon as the war ended.
[Interpreter] When my grandfather arrived in 1945,
he started to search for his paintings,
and people began to talk.
I would've liked my grandfather, perhaps,
to take legal action, but in Monte Cristo style,
he said he would take revenge.
He went from gallery to gallery saying,
that's mine, that's mine, and that's mine.
I even think somebody said to him,
ah no, I haven't seen a single of your paintings.
Of course you know if I had seen one of your paintings,
I would've said so.
I would've made sure it was safe,
and my grandfather said, well that one's mine.
Ah, there must be a mistake then,
came the reply, and he gave it back to him.
The art world was very small at the time.
You knew that such and such a painting
had been at the Paul Rosenberg Gallery.
You may have seen it, someone told you about it,
it's very simple.
[Interpreter] There was artistic collaboration.
If you wanted to find something,
and if you wanted to trace things back at the time,
all you had to do was look at Paul Rosenberg's catalogs.
The dealers who collaborated during the war
and who made a fortune at the time
pretended they didn't know.
But a dealer by definition knows.
Otherwise, they're just small time antique dealers.
They were clearly being dishonest.
[Narrator] In the post war years,
the collectors set out in search of their stolen assets
in an international market that was flooded with works
that had had a troubled past.
An artistic recovery commission was established
on November 24th, 1944.
45,400 paintings were identified and returned
via the commission after the war,
but another 50,000 were still missing without a trace.
[Interpreter] In the 50s and 60s,
those sorts of questions weren't asked.
There was a none memory surrounding the plundering.
When you realize that it was only the historian Paxton
in 1970s who revealed the collusion
of the Vichy regime in the deportations of the Jews,
so 25 or 30 years after the end of the war,
you can imagine that people didn't know
the whereabouts of the paintings.
[Narrator] Looting of works of art
were nevertheless considered at the Nuremberg Trials
to be a war crime.
Alphonse Kann died in 1948 in London
with nobody knowing if he had managed to recover
Man With a Guitar.
Paul Rosenberg died in 1959
not knowing what had become
of Woman in Blue in Front of a Fireplace.
And Karl Grunwald died in 1964
having asked his son to carry on
searching for Wilted Sunflowers,
his favorite painting.
(light music)
It wasn't until 36 years after the end of the war
that one of the three works reemerged
at a famous French museum.
In 1981, the Pompidou Center was the object
of much media attention following
the spectacular acquisition of Georges Braque's Cubist gem
Man With a Guitar.
At the time, there was no more mention
of Alphonse Kann.
In the 1980s, nobody was interested
in the stories of looting.
It wasn't until the mid-1990s
that the issue of the restitution was finally raised.
The French minister for foreign affairs
decided to open its archives to the public,
and in particular, the E.R.R. report
which detailed the lists and references
of all the works and families that had been looted.
[Interpreter] One morning in 1996,
a client came to see me.
He was a distant heir of Kann,
and he brought me this.
This E.R.R. report had been given
to each one of the families.
That's exactly how it happened.
I went to the foreign office
and got the E.R.R. list.
Look what I found.
And it was in Beaubourg, sleeping peacefully
on a wall in Beaubourg.
[Narrator] In 1996, Kann's heirs
asked for the restitution of Man with a Guitar,
a painting looted from their ancestor Alphonse Kann.
[Interpreter] We made contact with the head of the museum
at the time, Mr. Aillagon,
and we had a rather hard time
because the Beaubourg museum was having none of it.
[Interpreter] We took a while to react
because we considered that if the work
had indeed be involved with the Nazi's looting policy
at some point, it had reappeared at the end of the war
in conditions that could've led one
to believe that there was a transaction
between Alphonse Kann and Andre Lefebvre.
[Narrator] Andre Lefebvre was a figure
of the Parisian art market.
The painting reappeared with him after the war.
In other words, after it had been looted.
[Interpreter] The Pompidou Center
suggested that Andre Lefebvre could have acquired the work
entirely legitimately.
Had it done so, there would've been a trace of that.
Curiously, the archives of Andre Lefebvre
given to the Pompidou Center were very detailed
up until 1939, but from the looting to 1945,
there was nothing.
As chance would have it, they disappeared.
[Narrator] Nevertheless, Andre Lefebvre
was associated with Man With a Guitar
as soon as the painting reappeared after the war.
He officially lent the work for an exhibition
in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany in 1948.
[Interpreter] One might think
that the Frieburg exhibition
was a way to make the painting seem
as though it belonged to Andre Lefebvre,
like a sort of laundering.
The work reappeared belonging to the great collector
and patron Andre Lefebvre.
[Interpreter] That really implies
the organizers of these exhibitions
had highly perverse intentions.
It really implies they had extremely somber intentions
and supposes that they were engaged
in laundering operations for looted canvases and works.
[Interpreter] It's unthinkable that Andre Lefebvre
would've acted openly as the owner of the painting
while Alphonse Kann was still alive even
without the existence of an agreement
between Alphonse Kann and Andre Lefebvre.
What was the nature of that agreement?
Was it a sale or an exchange or something else?
There is no trace of it today.
[Interpreter] There was an article in 1974
in Connaissance des Arts by his godson Jerome Penieux
who often had lunch at Andre Lefebvre's home,
and who himself said that he never knew
where the paintings came from,
and Lefebvre never spoke to him about them.
[Interpreter] After the war,
Alphonse Kann claimed back a great many works
that belonged to him.
Why did he not claim back that one
when it was one of the most important works he possessed?
You could say, but it's only a theory,
that he considered he'd given the work
to somebody else, Andre Lefebvre.
[Interpreter] To everything we provided
in the way of documents gave rise
to a we're also going to carry out research,
we'll meet with you later,
and they came back with a standard response,
no it's not possible.
(light instrumental music)
(Gunnar speaking foreign language)
[Interpreter] It's typical of museums
to draw negotiations out
even when the legal situation relatively clear.
And this lengthy process is partly aimed
at wearing down the claimants.
They try to negotiate a different amount
for the transaction, or else,
an entirely different agreement
that is more advantageous for the museum
or for the owner.
[Interpreter] For two to three years,
we tried to negotiate with them,
but because they were not receptive,
we had to take the bull by the horns.
We took court action for concealment.
[Interpreter] The family considered
that the work was being concealed,
as they proved the painting had been looted,
but the museum was keeping it.
[Interpreter] And so two representatives
of the Kann family attended the following session
along with myself with Aillagon in the judge's office.
It was a moment of great pleasure for us,
less for them.
[Interpreter] The first looting
was the one carried out by the Nazis in 1940,
and the second was when the Pompidou Center
refused to return the painting.
[Narrator] The court case for concealment
triggered an inquiry that was led by an investigating judge.
It lasted several years.
It was at that time in 2005
that chance filled another 60 year void.
Karl Grunwald's Egon Schiele painting,
Wilted Sunflowers, mysteriously reappeared
in a sleepy suburb in eastern France.
(light instrumental music)
It was already exhibited in 1914
at the Munich secession, then in Brussels in 1914,
and in Vienna, and then in Paris.
What you see here, the text written about the picture,
it's all about the Earl of Provenance
because it was very well recorded,
so a lot was known about the 20, 25 years
after it was painted, but after that,
no more records.
(light music)
Painted in 1914, on the eve of the outbreak
of World War I.
You see the sunflowers.
Behind the sunflowers you've got the fading sun.
It's an autumn sun.
The sunbeams are very weak.
It's not warm anymore.
It's cold.
The sunbeams are not even warm enough,
not even strong enough anymore,
that the sunflowers turn around
towards the sun as they usually do.
No with Schiele, they turn away from the sun,
they look at you, almost like human beings.
They're wilting, they're fading.
It's a symbol of decay and aging,
and it proved to be an almost apocalyptic symbol
of World War I.
(gunshots ringing and bombs exploding)
(thunder rumbling)
[Interpreter] Karl Grunwald was a lieutenant
stationed in Vienna during the First World War.
Egon Schiele, a young soldier working in the administration,
was very unhappy with his post.
He suffered a great deal as a government worker and soldier.
Grunwald made sure Schiele was transferred to Vienna
so he could live in better conditions,
ensuring he was allowed to sleep at home, for example,
instead of in the barracks,
which enabled him to carry on his work.
That was very important for the artist.
He saved him.
He possibly saved him from death
by looking after him and pulling him
away from the front line.
He commissioned a painting from him,
and he already then started collecting his works.
[Interpreter] Grunwald was an extraordinary collector.
He recognized Schiele's talent
well before anybody else.
As Schiele died at a very young age,
just 27, his production is relatively limited.
Grunwald bought up a large share of that production,
a lot of paintings, supporting him not only artistically,
but morally too.
[Narrator] In 2005, there were very few works by Schiele
in circulation.
The artist died aged 27,
and his unknown paintings are very rare.
Wilted Sunflowers reappeared as if by magic
in the suburb of Mulhouse
in a furnished apartment bought
through a life annuity scheme
a few years earlier by a working class family.
It was autumn.
It was autumn 2005 when we came here.
We received a call from a lawyer here in Mulhouse
who told us he had a client
who had discovered something in his apartment,
and we should try and have a look at it.
We just saw, it can't be, it must be a fake,
it must be a copy, a reproduction,
I mean there are reproductions often,
even early reproductions of these paintings.
It's a masterpiece, and you don't find masterpieces
just like that.
We knew that if it was genuine,
it would be worth several million dollars.
(coffee machine whirring)
And we walked up the stairs,
and there was sort of light coming through the window,
and the picture was leaning on the wall,
on the floor, against the wall,
and we saw it, and literally,
within seconds, we knew this is it.
This is the long lost picture
which hadn't been seen for 60 years,
the original sunflower picture by Schiele
painted in 1914.
(light instrumental music)
[Narrator] For some players and observers
in the art world, the tale of this magical reappearance
orchestrated by Christie's is almost too good to be true.
[Interpreter] I spoke with his heirs in New York.
And it's very probably the official version,
but in fact, it's just a case of big business.
There's this young man, very nice guy,
who owns this, he's in the possession of this picture,
and we know that the large family,
the Grunwald family, scattered all over the world,
who are entitled to get it back.
[Interpreter] The case of Wilted Sunflowers
was a wonderful opportunity for an auction house
like Christie's to present itself in the public's eyes
as a key intermediary and the savior
of an important work of art,
so a great stroke of luck for Christie's.
The painting had apparently been missing for decades,
and apparently, nobody knew where it was.
Even the occupants of the apartment
were oblivious to the real nature of the work.
Then an expert like Christie's could come along
and solve the case.
The heirs were not even given the opportunity
to choose the solution they preferred.
It wasn't just about giving it back, hopefully,
finding a solution, but it also meant
this picture was a symbol
of bringing different generations of the Grunwald family
together again.
They all knew this was the painting
that grandfather had always been looking for
for decades.
[Interpreter] On this point,
Christie's played a key role.
In spite of everything, Christie's did not just carry out
a very positive advertising campaign,
they also earned money.
That might not have been necessary
if they wanted to tell a really moving
fairy tale type story.
We sold it then, six months later,
for something like 21.7 million dollars,
and yet we found it in an apartment
which was worth a fraction of this, a tiny fraction,
so with the proceeds of the painting,
it probably could've bought the whole street.
(lively instrumental music)
The Grunwald family, they have wanted him
to be at the table, and we brought them together
in London in a hotel nearby Christie's,
and we were sitting around a long oval table,
I never forget that, and there was a speech
by one member of the family,
and they welcomed him as yet another member,
as another part of the Grunwald family.
It was very moving.
It was extremely emotional.
[Interpreter] We don't know anything,
and I'm sure that the people involved,
because of the duty of confidentiality
that is always written into contracts like this,
and which really must be respected
to avoid facing major inconvenience,
unfortunately will not enable us to know the full truth.
Well, we don't talk about how the case was settled,
but they found an agreement.
Let's put it this way.
[Interpreter] You'll notice I'm smiling a little
when you mention the story.
It's not a rare situation.
Auction houses or art dealers contact the heirs
of Jewish collectors and say,
we know where your painting is.
We can't tell you, but we can serve
as an intermediary to reach an agreement,
so that both you and the current owner
benefit from the sale.
It's very pragmatic, but legally,
it's highly questionable
because in my opinion, the Grunwald family
should've recovered their property.
It's quite common.
We mustn't judge.
The results speak for itself.
The painting reappeared, it became famous again
after decades, it was wrenched from oblivion,
but the market spoke,
and the market enabled the painting
to obtain an incredible value.
We hope that this story
will serve as an example
for many other restitution cases to come
that amicable solutions are possible.
[Narrator] 21.7 million euros.
Whatever the mysterious arrangement was,
that was the sum the auction raised.
Meanwhile, the inquiry carried out
by the investigating judge into Braque's
Man With a Guitar dragged on.
Discussions between the Pompidou Center
and Alphonse Kann's heirs remained highly charged.
The accusation of concealment
triggered lengthy research that did not succeed
in throwing light on historical haze
surrounding the painting's journey just after it was looted.
[Interpreter] The accusation did not go through.
The judge closed the case.
At the time, the judge gave me a hearing.
The study took a number of years
and was never able to formally establish
that at a particular moment in time,
a deed of assignment had been organized
between Alphonse Kann and a third party,
so we concluded that Alphonse Kann's beneficiaries
should be given the benefit of the doubt.
[Interpreter] The Pompidou Center
kept the painting and indemnified the family.
An agreement protocol was drawn up.
[Interpreter] The Kann family certainly made
the right decision that the painting
should remain in the Pompidou Center.
I think they were extremely generous and fair
in not making the maximum amount of money out of it.
I wouldn't be surprised, if today,
a painting like that reached between
70 and 80 million euros.
You just don't find paintings like that anymore.
It's incredibly rare,
and it's one of the symbols of a movement,
if not the most important movement of the 20th century.
(man speaking foreign language)
[Interpreter] Today, museums consider themselves
responsible for the preservation of art.
Many museums when confronted
with request for restitution respond,
for centuries we have saved, protected,
and made these works accessible.
That's our mission, and we don't want a painting
which has since become extremely precious
to disappear into the private sphere.
For museums, it has always been a complicated matter,
very complicated, because they do not deal
with these paintings or with these art objects
as if they had been looted.
They deal with them as if they were in museums
or not in museums, and we know that many curators,
once they have an object inside the museum,
it should never leave the museum
under any circumstance.
[Interpreter] I do understand the museums.
It's hard for them to part with the works
because they have been hanging on their walls
for 30 or 40 years, and all of a sudden,
they're asked to give them back.
Yet, ultimately, it didn't belong to them.
They were its custodians.
I understand their frustration,
but it's also logical that they return things
that they do not belong to them
if they're not really theirs.
[Narrator] Today, the case of Braque
still remains a highly sensitive affair
in the memory of the Pompidou Center.
After purchasing the painting in 1981,
the museum had to pay a second very large sum,
confidential this time,
to keep the work in the national collections.
The case of Paul Rosenberg's Matisse
recounts a different story.
The painting reappeared in 2012,
ironically, in the same Pompidou Museum
during a Matisse retrospective
67 years after it first disappeared.
Lent by a Norwegian foundation from Oslo,
Woman in Blue in Front of a Fireplace
was exhibited alongside dozens of other works by Matisse.
[Interpreter] As it happened,
I didn't know the list of missing paintings
off by heart, so I missed it.
Luckily, certain specialists,
in particular Emmanuel Pollack,
noticed it and pointed it out.
Our family was alerted that there was a painting
that belonged to the family.
We were contacted in spring of 2012
by the lawyer of the Rosenberg family in New York,
and they presented us with the papers from E.R.R.
that are now in Washington
and claimed that the painting was stolen.
It was the first case in Norway,
so it's of course a heavy burden for a small museum
to start investigating such a huge issue.
[Interpreter] When you know the conditions
the work was lost in,
and that it was sold during the Nazi era,
things become more complicated
because we needed to trace the work of art
during the ensuing 50 years
even though it was sometimes sold
four or five times, and that's very difficult.
When we deframed the paintings,
we couldn't find any traces or evidence
of the history of the painting at all.
The only mark on the back of the painting
is a stamp for a Norwegian crown,
so it's been brought into Norway.
That's the only thing we know.
[Narrator] Like for Braque, the heirs had to prove
the Woman in Blue in Front of a Fireplace
had indeed belonged to Paul Rosenberg.
They had to provide proof
that it had been in the vault in Libourne.
At the archives of the French Ministry
of Foreign Affairs, Paul Rosenberg's actions
can be traced as he set out to find his canvases
as soon as the war ended.
[Interpreter] There, there is a very important note.
So, vault of Libourne, as indicated in my letter
dated the 15th, the vault was forced open
on the 28th of April, 1941.
In the presence of the occupying authorities.
The contents of the vault were transferred
to another vault, and an inventory was drawn up
by the director of the Bordeaux School of Fine Arts,
Mr. Roganneau.
So here, you can clearly see a painting by Matisse,
Woman in Blue in Front of a Fireplace,
measuring 60 by 81, does indeed feature
in this inventory drawn up by Roganneau
from the Libourne vault.
We know that in September 1941,
these works arrived at the Jeu de Paume Museum.
On the back of an information card of a Matisse drawing,
I see a list, an inventory
with Woman in Blue in Front of a Fireplace
with the inventory number of Paul Rosenberg's collection,
and the fact that it's presented
with this sentence,
taken either in Floirac or in Paris,
leads me to believe that it was not recovered
after the war, but that he was still searching
for his works.
(light piano music)
[Narrator] The presence of
the Woman in Blue in Front of a Fireplace
in the Libourne vault confirms
it belonged to Paul Rosenberg.
It remains to be determined
whether or not at the time of the acquisition
the Henie Onstad couple knew it was a looted painting.
[Interpreter] The painting entered
the Norwegian foundation before the 1960s
because between 1960 and 1963,
I tracked it in the exhibition catalogs about 17 times
which makes me think the couple,
the owners of the work, were acting in good faith.
Because when you lend a work,
you're not afraid to exhibit it.
You're not afraid of claims by the family,
so they didn't know.
The thing about researching the history
is that you can never be sure.
You have to make a decision upon the facts you have,
and depending on them, you decide
whether or not to return an artwork like we did,
and so it will always be a part of the history
that is not really covered.
[Interpreter] The return of the Rosenberg collection
Matisse painting by a private Norwegian museum
is a highly unusual case of restitution.
Unusual because, and I find it astonishing,
albeit very positive, the private foundation
declared it was prepared to return
a work in its possession to the Rosenberg family
without being obliged to do so by Norwegian law.
It was a sad moment seeing the painting leave,
but I'm sure that we did the right thing,
and that's the most important for the institution
and for me.
[Interpreter] It's very moving
to find a canvas like that
because you wonder what it has lived through,
what vicissitudes it went through
since it was painted in Matisse's studio
and was taken directly from Matisse's studio
to my grandfather's gallery.
Then suddenly, the war arrived,
and it got caught up in the turmoil,
passing from a Gestapo lorry
to warehouses guarded by the Nazis,
and from there, to shady dealers
who conjured it away,
so it has an incredible story.
(soft instrumental music)
The looting of works of art
remains a symbol of what the Nazis tried to do,
what they failed to do,
and what the Allies tried to restore,
the plundering of European culture.
(soft instrumental music)
(lively instrumental music)