Norwegian art museum gives back looted art
Print Edition
A Norwegian art museum yesterday returned a precious Matisse painting looted by the Nazis in the Second World War to the American heirs of the French art dealer Paul Rosenberg.
The 1937 painting by Henri Matisse — “Woman in Blue in Front of a Fireplace” — worth around US$20 million, was claimed by the Rosenberg family after it appeared in a temporary exhibition at the Paris Pompidou Centre in 2012.
The piece, which has been returned by the Henie Onstad art center near Oslo, was seized in France by the Nazis in 1941, and was briefly part of the personal collection of Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering.
It later found its way into the hands of a German art dealer Gustav Rochlitz who owned a gallery in Paris.
In 1950, a wealthy Norwegian shipowner Niels Onstad bought the painting from the Parisian dealer Henri Benezit without knowing how he had acquired it.
The Matisse went on to form one of the center-pieces of the Henie Onstad art center, set up in the 1960s by Onstad and his wife.
Although Norway is a signatory to the Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art it also has a law which grants definitive ownership once a collector has owned an item for over a decade.
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