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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 colourful 1905 oil work by the Austrian symbolist painter, titled Rosebushes Under the Trees, has been hanging in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris for decades.
The French culture minister, Roselyne Bachelot, told a Paris news conference that “the decision to return a major work from the public collections illustrates our commitment to the duty of justice and reparation vis-a-vis plundered families”.
The oil work will be returned to the family of Nora Stiasny, a Holocaust victim who was dispossessed during a forced sale in August 1938.
Bachelot said that French authorities hadn’t initially identified the painting as being stolen by the Nazis, and its provenance only recently came to light after they made investigations into 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 Gustav Klimt painting owned by France”.
“Rosebushes under the Trees is a testament to the lives that a criminal will has stubbornly sought to eliminate,” she said.
Thousands of artworks looted by the Nazis across Europe wound up in French museums after the allies defeated Nazi Germany in 1945. Though many have been returned, French authorities have stepped up efforts in recent years to find homes for the scores that remain unclaimed.
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