Tag: Camille Pissarro

A Pissarro Settlement Seven Heirs Never Signed

Impressionist painting of Dieppe harbor on a bright afternoon, seen from above. A long sandy quay curves across the foreground, lined with a dense crowd of small figures watching sailboats with white and rust-colored sails in a pale green basin. People stroll and a horse-drawn cart passes in the lower right. Beyond a low jetty, red-roofed houses and factory chimneys rise against green hills under a blue sky full of pinkish clouds. Signed and dated lower left, "C. Pissarro 1902."
Camille Pissarro, Darse de pêche et bassin Duquesne, Dieppe, après-midi ensoleillée (1902), oil on canvas, 65.3 × 81.2 cm. Listed in France’s 1947 Répertoire des biens spoliés, the painting sold at Sotheby’s London in June 2024 for £1.2 million under a settlement signed by two of Salomon Flavian’s heirs. Seven others are now asking a Paris court to undo it. Image: Sotheby’s.

A Pissarro Settlement Seven Heirs Never Signed

In June 2024 Sotheby’s London sold Camille Pissarro’s Darse de pêche et bassin Duquesne, Dieppe, après-midi ensoleillée (1902) for £1.2 million. That was a bit below its £1.5–2.5 million estimate. The catalogue carried the now-familiar line: the work was “offered for sale pursuant to a settlement between the current owner and heirs of Salomon Flavian.” Settlements like this have become the ordinary way Nazi-era spoliation claims to privately held works get resolved at auction. The consignor gets clean title and the claimants get a share of the proceeds. The auction house gets to sell the picture.

Except that not everyone was at the table. As Vincent Noce reports in The Art Newspaper, seven of Flavian’s heirs appeared before a Paris court on September 18 and asked it to retrospectively cancel the sale and annul the contract behind it. Only two heirs, Gilles and Nicolas Flavian, signed the agreement with the seller. They were represented by Mondex, the Toronto restitution firm, and they waived all their rights. The other heirs say they were never consulted. They apparently found out in a Mondex letter dated October 17, 2024, nearly four months after the hammer fell, which offered them an 8% share of the net sale price. The same letter mentioned a 16% commission owed by the two signatories. Mondex’s founder James Palmer says the firm received no payment for the transaction. A decision is expected November 5.

Was it looted at all?

The provenance fight is the more interesting half of the case. Salomon Flavian was a Jewish banker whose Paris collection was seized in 1941. The painting appears in the Répertoire des biens spoliés, France’s 1947 register of property looted during the war. Sotheby’s own catalogue lists the Répertoire under literature, so nobody disputes that the entry exists.

The seller commissioned research from Mary Kate Cleary, who has since become curator of provenance at Princeton University Art Museum. She concluded the painting was not among the 45 works seized from Flavian in 1941. She found it on no Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) confiscation list. She also found that Paul Rosenberg’s archives, together with the 1939 Pissarro catalogue raisonné, point to a sale around 1938 to the British painter and collector Edward Le Bas. Mondex accepted that finding, which is a somewhat unusual position for a firm in the business of making claims. Palmer says it did so “in the interests of rigour and intellectual honesty.”

Corinne Hershkovitch, for the heirs, has several answers. Works were regularly scrubbed from ERR lists with the help of unscrupulous dealers. Rosenberg’s postwar notes are allegedly imprecise. The catalogue entry does not mention that Flavian had owned the painting since 1935. Rosenberg may simply have confused this Dieppe with another picture Le Bas bought. And its seems Cleary may have worked from Rosenberg’s archives without checking them against the Flavian family’s own papers.

They can’t both be right. Sotheby’s published provenance has the painting going from a 1935 Drouot sale to Flavian and then to Rosenberg “by 1937,” with no date for when it left Flavian. That undated step is the whole case. The Répertoire is an important document, but it was compiled largely from owners’ own postwar declarations, made in chaos and grief, and it has errors in it. A 1939 catalogue predates the seizures, and that counts for something. But dealers’ stock books are not neutral records either.

A couple of tangents

The first is that the archive doing the most work for the seller belongs to Paul Rosenberg. He was one of the most celebrated dealers in Paris and was himself among the ERR’s biggest victims after he fled to New York in 1940. The 1939 catalogue raisonné by Ludovic-Rodo Pissarro and Lionello Venturi was published by Rosenberg’s own gallery. So the records of one looting victim dealer are now being used to show that a looted victim banker’s painting was never looted. Nobody has suggested Rosenberg did anything improper here. Still, it shows how much of our knowledge of this period rests on a handful of dealers’ paperwork.

The second is that the provenance runs through David Rockefeller, by way of Sam Salz, before ending up in the Dreitzer estate and a 1985 Sotheby’s New York sale. The painting was exhibited at the Tate in 1952 and the Met in 1966. It is a reminder that “hiding in plain sight” is the normal condition for works like this, and that no one apparently raised the Répertoire entry for decades.

The fee question, again

Readers with long memories may recall the Bermann-Fischer Pissarro I wrote about years ago. Gisela Bermann-Fischer found her family’s painting in a Zurich vault, and the fight over what the experts who helped find it should be paid ended with Jonathan Petropoulos resigning from Claremont McKenna amid extortion allegations. The Art Loss Register had proposed a sliding scale of 20% of the first million and less above that. I said then that money is a key focus of restitution, and the Flavian case is that point in a new form. Here the money question isn’t how much the intermediary takes. It is whether an intermediary acting for two heirs can bind a family it never spoke to, and then offer the others a fixed percentage after the sale. If French law treats the claim as belonging to all the heirs jointly, it is hard to see how two of them could settle it alone. If the painting was never looted, there was no claim to settle, and the settlement was simply insurance the seller bought to make the picture marketable.

Can Paris undo a London sale?

Sotheby’s also argues that a French court has no business ruling on a sale made in London between two clients with “no relationship with France.” Since Brexit, the EU’s Brussels I bis rules no longer sort out jurisdiction between France and the UK, so the Paris court will I think apply its own rules. And even a French annulment would still have to be enforced against a buyer whose identity hasn’t been reported and a painting that may be anywhere. The French courts have not been shy about Nazi-era claims. In the Bauer case, another Pissarro, La Cueillette des pois, was seized while on loan to the Musée Marmottan. Its American owners, who bought in good faith, lost it under the 1945 ordinance voiding acts of spoliation, and the Cour de cassation upheld that in 2020. But Bauer involved a painting physically in Paris. This one sold in London to an unnamed buyer.

That leaves a lot to watch on November 5. Will the court even reache the merits? Are the heirs proceeding under the 1945 ordinance or on ordinary contract and succession principles? How will a judge weigh a 1947 government register against a dealer’s catalogue from 1939?

Pissarro must be among the most litigated artists in restitution law. Cassirer, Bauer, Bermann-Fischer, and the University of Oklahoma’s Shepherdess all turned on a Pissarro. I can only speculate about why, but a few reasons might be: First, he was prolific. There are simply more of them out there to be lost and later found. Second, his collectors; many were the assimilated Jewish families of Paris, Berlin and Vienna whose collections were seized or sold under duress after 1933. Third, the money; a Pissarro is valuable enough to justify years of litigation, but not so famous that it couldn’t pass quietly through the postwar market. And finally, he liked to paint in series. He returned to the same harboror bridge again and again, in different weather and light. A wartime claim form or a dealer’s stock book that says “Pissarro, port of Dieppe, 1902” could describe several canvases, and the heirs here argue that is exactly what happened with Rosenberg’s records.

Why so many fights now? Part of it is that the evidence is easier to get at. The ERR card files, the Répertoire and dealers’ archives like Rosenberg’s are all searchable now in ways they weren’t a generation ago, so a listing that sat unread for decades can surface with a few keystrokes. Part of it is the auction houses themselves, which now want a settlement in hand before a flagged work goes on the block. And part of it is simple arithmetic. Eighty-five years on, a claim belongs to grandchildren and great-grandchildren scattered across several countries, which is exactly the situation that produced two signatories and seven plaintiffs here.

Whatever the court decides, it has a lesson for the settlement model the market depends on: a deal that gives clean title is only as good as the list of heirs who signed it.

Vincent Noce, Was this Pissarro painting—sold at Sotheby’s in 2024—looted by Nazis? A Paris court deliberates, The Art Newspaper (Sept. 24, 2026), https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2026/09/24/was-this-pissarro-paintingsold-at-sothebys-in-2024looted-by-nazis-a-paris-court-deliberates.

Camille Pissarro, Darse de pêche et bassin Duquesne, Dieppe, après-midi ensoleillée, Lot 49, Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction, Sotheby’s London (June 25, 2024), https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2024/modern-contemporary-evening-auction-including-the-ralph-i-goldenberg-collection/darse-de-peche-et-bassin-duquesne-dieppe-apres (last visited Oct. 1, 2026).

Heirs of a Jewish Collector Contest Sotheby’s Sale of a Pissarro Painting Possibly Looted by Nazis, ARTnews, https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/heirs-jewish-collector-sothebys-sale-pissarro-nazi-looted-1234799464/ (last visited Oct. 1, 2026).

Bureau central des restitutions, Répertoire des biens spoliés en France durant la guerre 1939-1945 (1947), digitised by the French Ministry of Culture, Accès au Répertoire, https://www.culture.gouv.fr/rechercher-une-publication-du-ministere-de-la-culture/bases-de-donnees/mnr-historique-de-la-publication/acces-au-repertoire (last visited Oct. 1, 2026);

Répertoire des biens spoliés en France pendant la Guerre 1939-1945, Lootedart.com, https://www.lootedart.com/MFEU4B37276 (last visited Oct. 1, 2026).

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Footnotes

“Le Marché” 

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Profile of Claude Cassirer

In September of last year the 9th Circuit held that Claude Cassirer can pursue a case against the Kingdom of Spain over this work, Rue St.-Honoré, Après-Midi, Effet de Pluie, painted by Camille Pissarro in 1897.  In a profile of Cassirer in the L.A. Times, the 88 year-old argues the Spanish “have been most unfriendly, not cooperative in any way,” with respect to his claims for restitution.  The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals will hear the appeal again en banc, with an 11 judge panel, sometime in the coming months.  The work had been taken from Cassirer’s grandmother in 1939 before she fled Munich.  The Spanish government purchased the painting in 1993 as a part of the Baron Hans-Heinrich Thyssen Bornemisza’s collection.  The work has been valued now at $20 million. 

Spain paid the baron $50 million in 1988 to lease his collection for a decade, and halfway through bought it outright. The baron had designated Spain for his prized collection, valued at more than $2 billion, an apparently sentimental gesture honoring the last of his five wives, a former Spanish beauty queen. Thyssen-Bornemisza died in 2002.
“The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation thoroughly reviewed the complete historical record on Mr. Cassirer’s alleged claim and respectfully denied it,” said Thaddeus J. Stauber of Nixon Peabody LLP’s Los Angeles office, which represents the foundation.
Citing the statute granting foreign states immunity from U.S. lawsuits except under a few defined conditions, Stauber said “we do not think that the case properly belongs in the U.S. courts.”

  1.  Carol J. Williams, Pissarro masterpiece travels a twisted history, L.A. Times, April 7, 2010.
  2. Cassirer v. Kingdom of Spain, 580 F.3d 1048 (9th Cir. 2009).
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A Pisarro Hidden for 70 Years to be Auctioned

Camille Pissarro’s Le Quai Malaquais, Printemps (pictured), previously discussed here, recently recovered from a Zurich bank vault will go on sale later this month according to Catherine Hickley for Bloomberg:

 Gisela Bermann-Fischer waited almost 70 years to get back a painting by Camille Pissarro stolen from her family’s home in Vienna by the Gestapo in 1938. 

She recovered “Le Quai Malaquais, Printemps” after a quest that pitched her into a battle of lawyers’ letters with Bruno Lohse, a Nazi art dealer appointed by Hermann Goering to loot treasures in occupied France, and finally led to a Zurich bank vault, where the picture was stashed in a safe. Prosecutors sealed the safe as part of a continuing three-nation probe into associates of Lohse suspected of extortion and money-laundering. 

Now 80, Bermann-Fischer will auction the 1903 painting at Christie’s International’s sale of impressionist and modern art in London on June 23. Its value is estimated at between 900,000 pounds ($1.45 million) and 1.5 million pounds. Bermann-Fischer says it cost her at least 500,000 Swiss francs ($466,000) to recover the Pissarro, mainly in lawyers’ fees. At no point during her quest could she be sure of getting the artwork back.

One of the intriguing parts of the story was the brief resurfacing of the work in 1984:

“I don’t think we’ll ever find out from where to where the painting was transported over the years,” Bermann-Fischer said. “It truly was hidden. I think the exhibition at l’Hermitage Lausanne in 1984 was a test run, to see whether the original owners or any heirs were still on the lookout for the paintings and would make a claim.”

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The Difficulty of Nazi Spoliation Research

Camille Pissarro’s Le Quai Malaquais, Printemps (pictured), was owned by a Jewish book publisher in 1938 in Austria. When he fled Austria, the work was lost. A history professor, Jonathan Petropoulos has been involved in attempts to return the works to the descendants.

Last week, Elise Viebeck a student reporter at Claremont McKenna College reported that Petropoulos will resign as director of the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights.

Yesterday Mike Boehm a LA Times Staff Writer picked up the story as well.

The descendant, Gisela Bermann Fischer, has accused Petropoulos of trying to extort 18% of the work’s value as payment for “facilitating” its return. It seems Petropoulos hoped to end controversy and spare the Holocaust center and Claremont McKenna College any more distraction. It seems his involvement may be more than a mere “distraction” as Swiss authorities are holding the painting as evidence in an ongoing German investigation into possible extortion by Petropoulos and a German art dealer, Peter Griebert. The LA Times Story has the details according to Petropoulos:

Petropoulos said he got involved at the behest of Fischer and the Art Loss Register, a London-based company that keeps a database of stolen art and in some cases helps to get it back.

In December 2006, he said, he met in Munich with Griebert, whom he knew as an art-business associate of Lohse. Griebert, the professor said, was now apparently angry with the ex-Nazi. Petropoulos said Griebert told him about papers he’d found showing that Lohse had sold the Pissarro in 1957 to a man who bequeathed it to a foundation in Lichtenstein.

Working for what he said was his customary consultant’s fee of $350 an hour plus expenses, Petropoulos said he reported the news to his client, the Art Loss Register, which was then negotiating a contract with Fischer to recover the painting. The professor said he did more sleuthing on his own, with a view to recovering the Pissarro and gathering material for a book.

In late January 2007, he said, he viewed, authenticated and photographed the painting in the conference room of a Zurich bank. He also said he dined with Fischer and Griebert later that day and that they reached a deal: Fischer, who’d had a falling out with the Art Loss Register, would sell the Pissarro at Christie’s in New York and Griebert would get his customary 10% art dealer’s fee.

Both Julian Radcliffe and prominent restitution attorney E. Randol Schoenberg are quoted as saying Petropolous got himself too involved in the negotiations to return the work, rather than simply do the research for the fee which had been agreed upon. The seems to have been a miscommunication at some point, and the “champagne” agreement that Petropolous thought he was entitled to rely upon was it seems not reduced to writing, and in return Petropolous refused perhaps to continue to bring the parties together.

The ultimate issue I suppose is what kind of compensation these kinds of experts can and should claim. The lawyers involved, and the Art Loss Register all take a healthy commission; and Petropolous certainly seems to have been amply compensated for his time at $350/hour. Though there may be powerful historical, legal and ethical arguments compelling the restitution of these Nazi spoliated works, we should perhaps bear in mind that it is the very large sums of money they fetch at acution which is driving these restitution efforts.

Related Posts:

Dividing a Nazi Art Dealer’s Collection

Compensation for Restitution Experts

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Compensation for Restitution Experts

Elise Viebeck, a student writer for the Claremont Independent has an outstanding article about the conflicts of interest which arise when history and art history experts are brought in to assist the heirs of victims who lost valuable art to the Nazis during World War II. She details the actions of a CMC History Professor, Jonathan Petropoulos.

The article asks an important question: How should these experts, whose specialized knowledge can bring about the restitution of ultra-valuable masterworks be compensated? Swiss prosecutor Ivo Hoppler raided a Swiss safe in the Summer of 2007 as part of a “three-nation probe of a German art dealer accused of conspiring with an American at historian to withold a painting by French impressionist”. I talked about the discovery of the work at issue, Camille Pisarro’s Le Quai Malaquais, Printemps last summer, but was unaware of this controversy.

Here’s an excerpt of Viebeck’s interesting story:

The story of the Pissarro begins with Zurich resident Gisela Fischer, 78, who is of Jewish descent. She and her family fled Vienna in 1938 two days after the Nazi Anschluss. The Gestapo looted their home, and among the stolen items was a painting by impressionist Camille Pissarro, Le Quai Malaquais, Printemps.

After the war, Fischer’s father successfully located and reclaimed many of his family’s stolen assets. After her father’s death in 1995, Fischer concentrated her efforts on the Pissarro which had remained elusive. In early 2001, she registered the painting with the Art Loss Register (ALR), a London-based for-profit company involved in stolen art recovery.

The ALR began to research the painting’s provenance, or history of ownership, in the hope of ascertaining its location. There was no initial financial arrangement, as at that time the ALR did not charge for Holocaust and World War II art claims…

On January 8, 2007, at a meeting in Munich, a representative of the ALR gave Fischer a message from Petropoulos. He wrote in a letter dated December 7, 2006 that he had located the painting in Switzerland and was communicating with an unnamed contact of its owner. The owner was a “foundation created by the heirs of the person who purchased [the painting] in 1957.”

The foundation, he wrote, wished to remain anonymous.

Two days after the meeting in Munich, Radcliffe also sent Fischer a letter, this time to request a finder’s fee for the organization’s success in finding the Pissarro in Switzerland. Despite its earlier commitment not to charge Holocaust claimants, the company had changed its charging policy for Holocaust art claims, telling claimants that the company could complete restitution “at far less cost and often more efficiently” than the expensive lawyers who took some cases. The meeting with the ALR in January 2007 was the first Fischer knew of the ALR’s changed policy…

For the Pissarro case, Radcliffe proposed an elaborate compensation scheme, including 20 percent of the first $1 million, 15 percent of the second million and 10 percent of any additional value of the painting. Included in his price was a stipend for Professor Petropoulos, who had requested $100,000 from the ALR for his services.

In a letter dated January 23, Fischer’s lawyer, Dr. Norbert Kückelmann, rejected the ALR’s proposal. Three days later Petropoulos met with Fischer at the Hotel St. Gotthart in Zurich to try a new arrangement…

Radcliffe and Sarah Jackson of the Art Loss Register also went to Zurich, only to find themselves excluded from the dealings. “We went expecting to be included in the meetings with Ms. Fischer only to discover that they had already had meetings without us. We realized we had been cut out,” Radcliffe told the CI.

At the hotel, Petropoulos and Peter Griebert, a Munich art dealer, showed her digital photos of the Pissarro, claiming to have taken them that morning. According to an account published in ARTNews magazine, they did not give further details about its location or the identity of its owners at that time.

It’s a very interesting account, and I don’t think Petropoulos, nor even the Art Loss Register are painted in a favorable light based on this account. Though much nazi restitution litigation rests on the assumption that the law should compensate the victims of the holocaust and other misappropriation, the engine driving these claims are the large sums of money these works can bring at auction. I think an interesting issue which needs to be researched in more detail is how and to what extent these restitution experts owe a duty to claimants.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

The Rape of Europa

This new film, “The Rape of Europa” is just being released in New York this week, and should start to make the art house circuit soon. Metacritic seems to be giving the film good marks so far.

It details the spoliation by the Nazis, and the efforts of allied soldiers known as the monument men to track down the works. The theft was on such a grand scale that the issues are still fresh today. Poland and Germany have engaged in a very bitter dispute in recent weeks. The death of Bruno Lohse revealed he had been storing a looted Pissarro in a Swiss bank vault since the end of the war. The Altmann case and the Klimts are given a prominent role as well.

I am eager to see the film, but just watching this trailer I’m struck by how much more powerful images and music are than the articles I write. I can give an academic view, but seeing the works and the black and white pictures bring the story much more depth and emotion. Whether that produces better cultural policy solutions is questionable I think. Perhaps we are allowing emotion to cloud our judgment in some of these cases?

I haven’t seen the film of course, but we shouldn’t put the blame on Germany alone, though they do rightfully deserve the most criticism. The loss of art and antiquities is an inevitable part of conflict. Russian forces plundered countless works from East Germany, and allied bombs destroyed medieval buildings in Dresden and at Montecassino. An American GI also stole the Quedlinberg treasures, and his family was able to sell them back to the church in the 90’s. In the end, the movie should speak to a fundamental question which still plagues us: what is the value of cultural property? Is it essential to a people’s heritage? Is it worth sacrificing lives or other economic development?

The NY Times has a short overview, as does Lee Rosenbaum.

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Dividing a Nazi Art Dealer’s Collection

Catherine Hickley wrote a very interesting article for Bloomberg on the efforts by France, Germany and Switzerland to divide Bruno Lohse’s art collection. Here is an excerpt:

Bruno Lohse, a German art dealer appointed by Hermann Goering to acquire looted art in occupied France, dispersed his private collection of Dutch 17th-century masterpieces and expressionist paintings among friends and relatives in his will, the lawyer handling his estate said.

Lohse died on March 19, aged 95, and has since become the focus of a three-nation investigation into a looted Camille Pissarro painting discovered in a Swiss bank safe that was seized by Zurich prosecutors on May 15. The painting’s prewar owners said the Gestapo stole it from their Vienna apartment in 1938. Lohse controlled the Liechtenstein trust that rented the safe.

“Paintings have been willed to relatives and friends in individual bequests,” Willy Hermann Burger, the executor of Lohse’s will, said in an interview at his home in Munich. Burger, who declined to name the beneficiaries or disclose details on individual artworks, said he’s sure none of the paintings in Lohse’s private collection are looted.

Lohse became Paris-based deputy director of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, the Nazis’ specialist art-looting unit, in 1942, according to the interrogation report compiled by the U.S. Office of Strategic Services’ Art Looting Investigation Unit, which questioned him in Austria from June 15 to Aug. 15, 1945.

The E.R.R. plundered about 22,000 items in France alone, according to the O.S.S. reports. The Jewish Claims Conference estimates that the Nazis looted about 650,000 artworks in total.

“There is a lot of art still missing and we believe that a significant proportion remains in private collections, especially in Germany and Austria,” said Anne Webber, co-chair of the Commission for Looted Art in Europe, a not-for-profit organization based in London that helps families recover plundered property.

Adding to the difficulty is the fact that Lohse became an art dealer in the 1950’s, and thus most of his private collection is probably legitimate. However, the Pisarro found in the Swiss bank vault, Le Quai Malaquais, Printemps is probably looted, at least according to the Art Loss Register. This all underscores the importance of establishing and checking provenance for works of art when they are sold or donated. If the various European prosecutors are not as aggressive as their American counterparts have been, a lengthy and complex legal dispute between the successor and the descendants of the original1938 owner will likely ensue.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com