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The French government has announced that it will return a Gustav Klimt landscape painting to its rightful owners more than 80 years after it was stolen by the Nazis from a Jewish family in Austria in 1938.
The Austrian Symbolist painter’s 1905 colored oil work, titled Roses under the Trees, has hung in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris for decades.
French Culture Minister Roselyne Bachelot said at a press conference in Paris that “the decision to return a major work from public collections illustrates our commitment to the duty of justice and reparation towards looted families ”.
The oil works will be returned to the family of Nora Stiasny, a Holocaust victim who was dispossessed in a forced sale in August 1938.
Bachelot said French authorities did not initially identify the painting as having been stolen by the Nazis and its provenance was only recently revealed after investigating the issue.
“It is in recent years that the true origin of the painting has been established,” she said, adding that it was “the only painting by Gustav Klimt belonging to France”.
“Rosebushes under the Trees is a testament to the lives that a criminal stubbornly sought to eliminate,” she said.
Thousands of works of art looted by the Nazis across Europe found their way into French museums after the Allies defeated Nazi Germany in 1945. Although many have been returned, French authorities have stepped up their efforts. efforts in recent years to find homes for unclaimed sheet music.
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