28 Nov 2008

France returns Matisse painting stolen by Nazis

5:49 pm on 28 November 2008

France has returned to its rightful owners a painting by Henri Matisse.

The 1898 painting, The Pink Wall, was seized by the Nazis in 1941 after its Jewish owner fled anti-Semitic persecutions in Germany.

It was one of 2,000 stolen works entrusted to French museums after World War II, and was recently on display in an exhibition of paintings whose owners had never been identified.

Mr Fuld fled to Britain in 1937. Under a 1941 law stripping German Jewish emigrants of their citizenship, the Nazi regime seized his Matisse painting.

The work next surfaced in 1948, when it was found near the German town of Tuebingen in a cache left by Kurt Gerstein, an SS officer who killed himself in prison in 1945.

Based on a French Customs stamp on the back of the painting which dated to when the work was legally exported to Germany in 1914, the German authorities sent it to France in 1949.

It then lay dormant for almost six decades until a German historian made the link between a painting reported missing by Mr Fuld and an image of the Matisse shown on an Internet database set up by France to try to trace rightful owners.