In February, the painting by Camille Pissarro The Louvre and the Seine from the Pont-Neuf was returned to the heirs of Max Heilbronn, who founded the Monoprix retail chain in 1932, fought for the French Resistance and was deported in 1944 to Buchenwald before serving as Chairman of the upmarket department store Galeries Lafayette between 1945 and 1971. Placed in a bank safe deposit box, the painting had been spoliated by the Germans during World War II.

In September 2003, Max Heilbronn’s heirs opened a case file with the CIVS which stipulates, among other things, ten spoliated paintings, including The Louvre and the Seine from the Pont-Neuf. Research brought to light the fact that three of the paintings had already been returned after the war. In May 2007 the CIVS recommended compensation for the other seven paintings.

A few years later, in the spring of 2012, during searches of the premises of Cornelius Gurlitt, who was suspected of tax fraud, the German authorities seized a collection of some 1,500 works from his apartment in Munich and then his house in Salzburg. The “Gurlitt” affair was thus brought into the public spotlight: some of the works came from spoliations committed by the Nazis. The Special Taskforce Schwabinger Kunstfund (Taskforce), a group of international experts formed in 2012, pressed on with the investigation in order to determine where these works of art had come from. They had one objective: if it transpired that a particular work had come from an anti-Semitic spoliation, then the German federal authorities would return it to the rightful owners or their beneficiaries.

At the end of 2014, the CIVS and the Taskforce began to work together – and this is how the CIVS came to tell the latter of the Pissarro case concerning Max Heilbronn. The CIVS provided the facts that enabled the Taskforce to determine the spoliation of the painting The Louvre and the Seine from the Pont-Neuf, and then to make the link back to its owners and their beneficiaries. The information gathered by the CIVS and its expertise have proven to be invaluable resources for the Taskforce’s work. On July 10, 2015 the CIVS and the Taskforce signed an agreement to step up their partnership.

Since January 2016, the Taskforce’s remit has been merged within the Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste (German Lost Art Foundation/DZK), based in Magdeburg. The partnership is continuing within this new context, and the heads of the CIVS and the DZK are scheduled to meet in Paris this coming May.