Restitution and ‘restitution’: Some thoughts on the MNR problem in France

by Marc Masurovsky
edited and updated on 5 July 2025

Restitution involves the act of returning a stolen object to the owner who was the victim of the theft.

However, if a gallery sells a painting to a citizen of the German Reich who then takes it home across the Rhine, does that constitute theft, especially if the object itself is proven not to have been stolen in the first place?

When the French claims agency, the Office des Biens et Intérêts Privés (OBIP) transferred a painting to the Selection Committee (Commission de choix) of the Louvre in December 1951, it implied that the Selection Committee and/or the Louvre had lost the painting in the first place and justice was being served by incorporating the painting into French State collections. In this particular instance, the painting, Vénus, Bacchus, Cérès, amours et saphirs, by Frans Floris, had been sold in 1941 to a leading German agent—Karl Haberstock--through a gallery owned by Hugo Engel in German-occupied France. Although the item had not been stolen prior to sale, the postwar French government nevertheless treated the work as a stolen object. One year after the liberation of North Africa by Anglo-American troops and contingents of the French Resistance in November 1942, the French National Liberation Committee had declared that all transactions on French territory since June 1940 were deemed null and void, an act which paved the way for a complex and lopsided campaign of restitution and compensation in the years following the Liberation of France in the second half of 1944. For all intents and purposes, the act of declaring a transaction null and void conferred on the transacted object the taint of illegality.

Let’s pretend for a second that France had not been invaded by Nazi Germany. Hugo Engel still would have offered the Fioris painting to Karl Haberstock, a Nazi cultural agent, who then returned to the Reich with it, acting on behalf of his superiors in the Nazi hierarchy. The French government would not have objected to the sale and departure of this object from French territory. But all of that changed with the German invasion of France and the subsequent wholesale requisitions, acts of plunder and spoliation that befell those living within its now truncated borders. The Floris painting was no longer just another painting being offered for sale in a Paris gallery. It was now treated as if it belonged to France, in other words, its acquisition and transfer to Reich territory was tantamount to a forcible removal of the painting from the bosom of that organic national entity known as France. In sum, a war of aggression and conquest against France waged by Nazi Germany had transformed the privately-owned Fioris painting into a State-controlled object that earned it the full protection and consideration of the French State. A curious turn of alchemy which afforded France to lay claims in the postwar to a significant haul of art that had emanated from its private art market and been acquired by individuals who had transported their cultural purchases outside its borders into the Reich.

The Allies countenanced this conversion of private commercial transactions under Nazi rule into illicit acts of property transfers, thus equating them with actual acts of plunder and misappropriation. Regardless of how one judges this policy, it has produced, among other things, an awkward category of objects known as the MNRs—Musées Nationaux Récupération. Many of the MNRs fall into the category of the Fioris painting—acquired in the open private art market during the German occupation and removed from French territory by the purchaser. There is no evidence that the Floris painting was, in fact, incorporated into the MNR category since it is absent from the French government's website devoted to those objects.

The question now becomes: should the MNR’s even exist since they are as close to war booty as one can get, save for those which are, beyond a shadow of a doubt, plundered objects? The maintenance of this ambiguity forces us to consider that all objects acquired in France—fair and square—during the period of Vichy rule and German occupation—from June 1940 to the fall of 1944—should be considered as illicit transfers of property until otherwise stated. One can’t have one’s cake and eat it too, but it appears that, for the past eighty years, that is precisely what has occurred, thus casting an inexorable taint of wartime theft and illegality on an unimaginable number of cultural objects that have since made it into countless collections on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

Update on 5 July 2025

Since this article was written in 2011, the French government has changed its tune regarding the so-called MNR works and objects of which they are the custodians until the rightful owner(s) state their claims for their restitution, historical evidence in hand. Close to 50 objects have been returned since 2011, a small number but a significant leap forward when compared to the prior 60 years since the MNRs became a "thing."

The French government is still unwilling to admit that most of the works that fall under that label are not Jewish losses. They are simply works and objects that changed hands under the pseudo-legality established by the Vichy regime under German military occupation. Neighboring countries under the Nazi yoke also saw their art markets fructify and grow as if nothing untoward had happened. Another way of saying that the art market is impervious to the vagaries of history. As long as someone has something to sell, there will be a buyer willing to plunk down the requisite sum of money to acquire it in good faith.

Looking back, I speculate that the decision by the French Resistance to declare all transactions null and void may have been a principled, although ill-thought out declaration not realizing how potentially sweeping and destructive its literal enforcement would have been in the postwar years. It foreshadows to some extent Law 59 which was passed in the US Zone of Occupation in Germany in order to hold accountable current possessors of objects acquired during the Third Reich. There is nothing wrong with making the last owner/possessor accountable as an enforcement to establish the circumstances of an acquisition during the commission of an act of genocide.

The Night of the Generals, directed by Anatole Litvak

Night of the Generals 1967 Movie Poster
Source: IMPAwards

I just finished watching this oldie but goodie from 1966, starring Peter O'Toole as a psychotic SS General, adapted from a novel by French author, Joseph Kessel.

One particular scene attracted my attention. Peter O'Toole's character, SS General Tanz, visits the Jeu de Paume in the Jardin des Tuileries, courtesy of the German General Staff in occupied Paris. He is offered a private tour of the art looted from Jewish households, which has been stored there before being shipped to Germany.

It would all be fine except that we are now on July 18, 1944. Most of the art looted by the Germans and taken to the Jeu de Paume for processing had already been either sent to the Reich for dispersal or incorporation into either the future Linz Museum collection or other State or private collections, or been disposed of on the Paris art market.

SS General Tanz is taken into a private room protected by a curtain that cloaks a metal gate. Behind the curtain and the gate is a room where 'decadent' works are stored, as they called them in the film.

This is where it gets curious. Lance Corporal Hartmann (played by Tom Courtenay) who accompanies SS General Tanz has a ledger in hand from which he describes each painting that Tanz reviews. How extraordinary! especially since such an 'exhibit' ledger did not exist. Nevertheless, we see reproductions of paintings by Toulouse-Lautrec (Le Divan), a nude by Renoir which he painted in 1910, Paul Gauguin's "On the Beach," and, most amazingly a painting by Chaim Soutine described as 'Le Garcon d'Etage [the Bellboy]', Edgar Degas' 'The Tub" painted in 1886. I would stop here were it not for the self-portrait by Van Gogh, sometimes called "Vincent in Flames" which entrances General Tanz who almost goes into convulsions so hypnotic is the work.

Were these paintings ever at the Jeu de Paume? I checked the ERR database at www.errproject.org/jeudepaume, on the off-chance that they might be listed there.

None of them are and the Degas looked more like a Bonnard.

The Van Gogh does not appear to exist either.

Why take such license when there were so many great works to choose from, reproduce and display?

The only truth to the story is that many such 'decadent' works had been prepared for shipment to a castle in present-day Czech Republic at Nikolsburg/Mikulov on August 1, 1944. The train barely made it out of Paris and was stopped by the French resistance near a small town called Aulnay-sous-Bois. On that train were a trove of Impressionist works which the rightful owners recovered in due course.

The Train, 1964
Source: imdb

The subject of that dramatic story is treated in yet another film aptly called 'The Train' by John Frankenheimer, made in 1964, with Burt Lancaster in the starring role.

Epilogue

SS General Tanz is set to leave the 'decadent' room--in the film, it is labeled 'Salle E', while in the actual history of the Jeu de Paume, it is referred to as the 'Salle des Martyrs." On his way, he picks up what look like flyers from a stack on a table. These are reproductions of some of the paintings that he just looked at, as if the Nazis had organized the room in true exhibit form complete with photo-reproductions that one could take home and admire. Photos of 'decadent' works? How strange! But then, life is stranger than fiction, non?