“If only the paintings could talk,”
A Paris exhibit of Nazi-looted art honors a Europe many fear is under threat again
Lire l’article du Washington Post, By James McAuley :
« For Anne Sinclair, the prominent French journalist and granddaughter of the legendary Parisian art dealer Paul Rosenberg, the modernist masterpieces in her family’s collection contain multitudes of often dissonant stories. They represent major developments in 20th-century art: fauvism, expressionism, cubism. But they also testify to the darkness and brutality of the Holocaust.
After Adolf Hitler invaded France in 1940, the Nazis seized hundreds of thousands of works of art from Jewish collectors and dealers: The French government estimates around 100,000, but experts say the real figure is at least three times higher. Rosenberg, an early champion of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Georges Braque, was among the notable targets. Several of his most-prized pieces, including a 1918 Picasso portrait of the dealer’s wife and daughter, made their way into the hands of Hermann Göring, the high-ranking Nazi official and connoisseur of stolen art. »
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« For Emmanuelle Polack, a Paris-based art historian who also researched the two Matisse canvases, the project of restitution is both personal and collective. “When you give back a painting, you give back an identity, a family, a memory — but also a culture,” she said. »
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Anne Sinclair stands among a newly hung art exhibition of her family’s collection at Musée Maillol in Paris on Monday. She is the granddaughter of the art dealer Paul Rosenberg. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)