Title Mandolin and peonies from China, this early work by Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) did not go unnoticed in the abundant exhibition « Things », at the Louvre, which ended in January. If this painting dated 1885 caught the eye, it was less for its composition in abyss or its still wise palette than for a photo of the reverse, which retraced its history. Because this painting, which belonged to the famous dealer Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939), is an “MNR” (for “National Museums Recovery”), the acronym designating the works found in Germany after the Second World War, then reported in France.
Hanging on the walls of the Musée d’Orsay since its opening in December 1986, this work was returned in February to the heirs of the Parisian dealer. Barely recovered, it will be auctioned by Sotheby’s in May, in New York, at the same time as two drawings by Gauguin and Cézanne, as well as a seascape by Renoir, all from the same source. And what provenance!
Vollard is a legend of modern art, of which he promoted all the cadors. In 1900, the talent scout takes Gauguin under contract. The following year, he exhibited Picasso, then unknown, before defending Cézanne without stopping. In his mansion on rue de Martignac, in the 7e arrondissement of Paris, he has accumulated some 6,000 works, a colossal but poorly inventoried fund.
Homeric battle
On his sudden death in 1939, in a car accident, his brother and three sisters, as well as two longtime friends, Madame de Galéa and her son Robert, inherited the complex and entrusted two merchants, Martin Fabiani and Etienne Bignou, to disperse the works. The latter, who prospered under the Occupation, diverted part of the estate with the complicity of Lucien Vollard, the merchant’s brother, and commissioned another, Erich Chlomovitch, to discreetly sell them abroad.
In 1980, one hundred and forty coins were found in a safe at the Société Générale in Paris, opened by Chlomovitch before his death in deportation in 1942. After a Homeric battle between Vollard’s legatees, who believed that Chlomovitch had illegally seized of these works, and the heirs of the latter, the case ended in 2010 with a sale at Sotheby’s, for a total of 23 million euros.
Since 2016, the Vollard estate has also demanded the return by the French state of seven works classified as MNR. But the procedure dragged on. “We were not in the context of spoliation in application of anti-Semitic segregation laws or confiscation measures with classic sequestration”, explains the lawyer François Honnorat, who defends the interests of five of the beneficiaries. The various jurisdictions pass the buck, until, in February, the administrative court of Paris orders the restitution of four works to the heirs. François Honnorat does not intend to stop at this victory. A procedure will be initiated within a month to obtain the return of two other MNRs, kept at the Louvre.