Original subtitles

(Hitler speaking foreign language)

(crowd roaring)

- Property rights are an important portion

of civilized society.

(overlapping voices speaking)

- [Narrator] The Gurlitt Affair

gave worldwide prominence to the still discreet history

of Nazi looted works of art.

1,500 canvases were found buried

in a Munich apartment, among them were works

by Matisse, Chagall, and Renoir.

- [Interpreter] The story made the subject

of the hidden, stolen, and looted works of art

seem like some sort of mini-drama,

like a riveting detective story,

whereas in fact, it was part of a whole process

of dehumanization and deculturalization of Europe.

- [Narrator] The Bern Museum of Fine Arts

was designated custodian of what was called

the Gurlitt Collection.

It is now therefore up to the museum

to reveal what happened to the works

and to restore them to their legitimate owners.

Amidst the history of betrayal, power, money,

and fascination for art,

Hitler had also undertaken a Nazification of Europe

through an art genocide.

(crowd roaring)

(light instrumental music)

The looting of works

is one of the last unresolved outcomes

of the Second World War.

100,000 works of art were stolen,

and one million books were destroyed in France alone.

This is the story of three works of art,

three major paintings stolen

from three leading European collectors.

The Woman in Blue in Front of a Fireplace by Henri Matisse,

belonging to Paul Rosenberg,

Wilted Sunflowers, also known as Autumn Sun II,

by Egon Schiele, owned by Austrian collector Karl Grunwald,

and Man with a Guitar by Georges Braque,

belonging to Alphonse Kann.

Three works symbolizing the genre of modern art

qualified by the Nazis as a degenerate art,

the art that Hitler took upon himself

to totally eradicate in the name

of purification of culture,

whilst at the same time,

using it as a form of currency.

- The way that they would use the looted art was important.

I think you had categories,

like everything in Nazism.

You had the good art, which was classical art.

It would go either to Hitler's collection

to the German museum collections

or to Goring's collection.

Then you had another type of art

like Impressionism that could go

to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,

the embassies, the German embassies,

and then you had degenerate art.

Degenerate art was the pieces that would allow them,

like the Picassos, the Matisse, to barter them

here in the Paris art market

and to sell them away.

- [Interpreter] Even if this type of art

was not appreciated and was publicly denigrated

by the Nazi regime, they were perfectly aware

that it represented a vast financial aspect,

and that these works could not be destroyed,

that it was better to trade them

and contribute to the war effort.

- [Hector] Degenerate art, is to him,

the art that comes out of degenerate minds,

and he talks specifically about Cubism,

Surrealism, and Dadaism.

How can someone like Michelangelo or the Mona Lisa,

and at the same time, can create and invent the Holocaust?

(somber instrumental music)

- [Narrator] Many art collectors in Paris were Jewish,

and were therefore targeted as a priority for looting.

Before and after the war,

the French capital was the hub of the art market.

Alphonse Kann was a prominent English art collector

living in Paris.

His collections featured Georges Braque's

Man with a Guitar, a major painting

and a founding work of Cubism.

By 1940, Kann had fled to England.

(whistle blowing)

- [Interpreter] Alphonse Kann was an elegant dandy,

a banker and an art collector

who had started out collecting old paintings,

pre-Columbian and African objects of art and furniture.

His taste in art was very eclectic and very accurate.

- [Interpreter] He was a rather amazing man.

He was fascinated by modern art

from 1910 to 1915 after the war,

just after the First World War,

and started buying it.

(light music)

- [Interpreter] Alphonse Kann bought unprecedented volumes

of pure Cubist Picassos with great determination.

He knew full well that they were extremely difficult works,

and that the general public did not understand them.

(whistle blowing)

- [Interpreter] At the time of the occupation,

the German Special Services arrived.

If necessary, the French police helped out

because let's face it, it was in the middle

of the collaboration.

Kann had left for England a couple of years before,

and his house in St.-Germain-en-Laye was looted.

It was early October 1940 right at the start.

- In Germany before the war started,

they had already established a list of the objects

that they may want.

From the very first day of the occupation in June 1940,

the occupation of Paris,

they started looting objects from the very first day,

looting galleries especially.

- [Narrator] The lists mentioned Paul Rosenberg,

a key figure in the Parisian art market.

In early 1940, he fled the French capital

for southwest France in a bid to seek shelter for his family

and his most important works,

among them Woman in Blue in Front of a Fireplace by Matisse.

As Rosenberg's collection was so reputed and well-known,

the collector was a priority target for the Nazis.

His family gallery featured works

by major Impressionists alongside masterpieces

of modern art.

- [Interpreter] Paul Rosenberg forged dealer

and friendship bonds with Picasso,

Braque, and Matisse.

- When you have great art dealers,

they will be helping artists develop their careers,

and this is what happened with Paul Rosenberg.

- [Interpreter] It wasn't simply a case of him

just commissioning and selling.

He didn't just trade.

He was perhaps also an impresario.

He promoted them and accompanied them,

and he also commissioned works.

He followed them.

- This is an art dealer who dealt with Picasso,

Mattise, Braque, and Leger.

In the 20s and 30s, this is man

who was controlling part of modern art.

- [Narrator] In 1939 in Lucerne,

the Nazis organized a major sale of degenerate art

that had been looted from German museums.

All profits from the sale were poured into the war effort.

- [Interpreter] Collectors and museum directors

from all over the world flocked to the sale

because magnificent works were put on the market

at unbeatable prices.

It attracted huge crowds,

but my grandfather said he wouldn't buy any of the works.

He wouldn't give a single coin to the Nazis

as he said the money would fall back down upon them

in the form of bombs.

So he was identified as being refractory to the Nazis

and was blacklisted.

This resulted in him closing his gallery,

and they retreated to near Bordeaux.

But interestingly, the illusion

that we could go back to Paris

to open the gallery again was still there.

He wrote to Matisse saying,

you'll see, I'll return to Paris in April or May.

He thought he would open the gallery again

in April or May of 1940 and put on a fantastic exhibition.

(man speaking foreign language)

- In the beginning, almost none of the collectors,

the Rothschilds, the Rosenbergs, the Kanns,

they never thought that there could be looting

during the war, this type of methodical, systematic looting.

This was unthinkable,

so they wanted to protect it, perhaps,

from the havoc of war, from the soldier of war.

- [Interpreter] He had a lot of his paintings

brought to southwest France near Bordeaux.

He hired a vault at the BNCI,

the French national bank for trade and industry

which had a secured vault in Libourne

saying they'll be safe here.

Braque, who visited him, hired the vault next to his.

- [Narrator] At the time, Libourne

was in the occupied zone,

and persecution against Jews were increasingly frequent.

- [Hector] Over there, he will have to leave very quickly,

but he left behind many many things.

- [Interpreter] Then my grandfather, grandmother,

and mother, families were torn apart,

crossed the border at Hendaye

to flee across Spain to Portugal.

Miraculously, they were able to get away,

take the boat in the middle of the mines and submarines

and reach America.

(somber instrumental music)

Paul Rosenberg attracted feelings jealousy,

so certain intermediaries denounced him.

- There were people who wanted to negotiate,

who wanted to have either a percentage of it, a commission.

In kind, they would be receiving paintings

from the Rosenberg collection in exchange

for their information.

- [Interpreter] In 1941, the Nazis, the Gestapo,

helped by the French authorities

forced the bank's vaults and plundered their contents.

They looted my grandfather's vault and Braque's too.

On the 5th of September 1941,

Paul Rosenberg's collection and stock

were transferred to the Jeu de Paume Museum.

- [Narrator] Hermann Goring, number two at the Reich

and head of the Luftwaffe,

used the Jeu de Paume Museum

to store all the stolen works.

Here in late 1941, Alphonse Kann's

Braque Man with a Guitar

and Paul Rosenberg's Matisse Woman in Blue

in Front of a Fireplace

lay within a few meters of each other.

To transfer the thousands of stolen works

to the Jeu de Paume Museum,

Goring used the services of the E.R.R.,

the official looting body.

(Goring speaking foreign language)

- [Interpreter] Goring took the E.R.R. under his wing,

and this made transport and workforce

available to the E.R.R. to regularly send things to Germany.

(train chugging)

- [Interpreter] Goring had his own personal train.

The entire last wagon was used as a warehouse

for looted works of art.

He spent a large part of his time

seeking masterpieces throughout Europe

that could be looted from families

and compiled into a vast personal collection at his home.

- [Narrator] As grandmaster of this villainous chess game,

Hermann Goring claimed all rights

over the destiny of the stolen works.

Man With a Guitar and Woman in Blue in Front of a Fireplace

transited via his personal networks

that also supplied his private collection.

- [Interpreter] I'm just discovering these photographs.

They're incredible.

Goring has just visited the Jeu de Paume Museum,

where the works that were plundered and looted

from the Jewish families were stored.

Goring visited the Jeu de Paume Museum

on over 20 occasions.

- [Interpreter] In November '42,

February '41, March '41, April '41,

May '41, July '41, August '41,

December '41, February '42, March '42,

14th of May '42, and November '42.

It's quite astonishing.

The man spent his life there.

He would visit incognito.

Goring, that horrible character, liked degenerate art.

He had a room reserved for it,

referred to as the Martyr Room

where all the canvases he was interested in were exhibited,

and he helped himself freely from it.

- [Interpreter] This is a photograph

of the Martyr Room, and in this room,

hanging from floor to ceiling,

are all the works considered

as belonging to degenerate art.

We can recognize works by Chagall, Matisse, Picasso,

numerous works by Dali, Fernand Leger, and Torres Garcia.

- [Interpreter] According to us,

that's the Braque there.

You can see the composition and the size

because it's a tall and narrow painting.

(soft instrumental music)

- [Narrator] The Jeu de Paume became the hub

of Nazi looted art and its parallel market.

One young museum employee risked her life

in tracking and registering the traceability

of the paintings.

She was to play a key role

in the post war restitution.

- [Interpreter] Jaujard, the owner of the Louvre,

asked Rose Valland, a young woman

from a very modest background,

to be on site and to witness what the Nazis were doing.

She was to play a key role.

- [Interpreter] She observed and rummaged in the bins

to obtain duplicates of everything that was written down.

She tried to obtain the addresses

of the looted collectors.

At night in the arrangerie, she would jot down

in her little notebooks summaries of all the works

she'd seen, where they came from,

and where they were going as far as she knew.

After the liberation, this proved to be a gold mine

for the French museums and collectors.

Rose Valland flagged that this painting of Braque's

was going to be exchanged.

We have the exchange documents.

The document can be found in the archives of the Louvre,

and the same document exists in the archives

of the Musee D'Orsay.

- [Interpreter] It's very interesting to see

the correlation between the exchanges

that Rose Valland noted down during this period

and Goring's visits.

For example, the exchange that interests us

took place in February 1942,

and Goring was there on the 25th of February 1942.

We found the Braque Man with a Guitar, Item 1062,

with the reference HG, Hermann Goring.

So, Man With a Guitar disappeared in 1942.

(tense instrumental music)

- [Narrator] Like the Braque,

Matisse's Woman in Blue in Front of a Fireplace

was also exchanged.

It was part of a batch of four Matisse paintings

that Goring exchanged with a collaborator art dealer

for a Jan Brueghel painting.

(tense instrumental music)

- [Interpreter] Here we see that a member of the E.R.R.,

the body dedicated to the looting of art,

is getting ready to serve him a glass of champagne,

and the work he is holding

is the Port of Antwerp by Jan Brueghel.

Goring is sealing the agreement

which is to recover the Jan Brueghel

and to exchange with the art dealer

the four Matisse looted from the Jewish families.

- [Hector] The state of the art market

in Paris during the war,

I realize that it was a very lively place.

- [Interpreter] They operated in a network.

It was an illegal market, a parallel market.

They operated a network and subsidiaries emerged.

- There were auctions at war constantly.

Many art dealers were open,

which meant a lot of collaboration,

of course, naturally, it has to mean collaboration.

- [Interpreter] Everybody, everybody,

I say that in all honesty,

including French gallery owners during the occupation,

everybody profited from the looting.

On October the 31st, 1942,

we can read sale of assets of Israeli Khann,

three days of sales.

The Gazette of the Hotel Drouot auctioning house

three days of sales.

Do you know what three days of sales represents?

Hundreds of canvases, and that's just the French part.

- [Narrator] The two Braque and Matisse canvases

that were stolen from Alphonse Kann and Paul Rosenberg

disappeared into the parallel market.

The Nazis carried on plundering European art heritage.

- The same message that they apply,

let's say to bring in people from Paris to Auschwitz,

you know by using trains,

by using cattle trains, cattle wagons,

we have to put it as an analogy

in how they did the looting.

I think it was more or less the same method

that was applied.

(somber instrumental music)

- [Narrator] Throughout Europe,

the Nazis used an industrialized system for looting.

It was designed to let no work escape.

In 1942 in Austria, the enlightened collector

Karl Grunwald fled the country

with a few of his works including Wilted Sunflowers

by Egon Schiele.

- [Interpreter] Karl Grunwald managed to remove from Austria

a large share of the paintings

he was most fond of by declaring them

to be of lower value than they really were,

so that nobody was interested in the works

he had collected.

He had them transported to Strasbourg

where he placed them in a warehouse.

- [Interpreter] He himself had managed to obtain

and to buy a visa to leave Austria.

He hoped to reach the US by crossing France

and leaving from Spain, but the rest of the family

did not manage to buy visas in time

and were deported.

(Melissa speaking foreign language)

- [Interpreter] Unfortunately, when Karl Grunwald

had to leave France, he no longer had access

to the warehouse, and in order to save his own life,

had to leave the paintings behind in France.

He managed to flee the country.

Originally, he thought he could head straight for New York,

but he first had to travel via Morocco,

where he was detained in very bad conditions

and where he suffered terribly.

(Melissa speaking foreign language)

- [Interpreter] What we knew about Schiele's painting

is that it was up for auction,

organized by the Nazis around 1943 in Strasbourg.

- We don't know whether it was bought,

or whether it remained unsold,

and we just don't know what happened

between 1942 and now.

- [Narrator] In 1943, the three canvases vanished

into the lucrative parallel market.

At the end of the war, the figures were added up.

The Third Reich had plundered over 600,000 works of art.

Karl Grunwald took refuge in New York,

where he remained.

Alphonse Kann stayed in London.

Only Paul Rosenberg returned to Paris

as soon as the war ended.

- [Interpreter] When my grandfather arrived in 1945,

he started to search for his paintings,

and people began to talk.

I would've liked my grandfather, perhaps,

to take legal action, but in Monte Cristo style,

he said he would take revenge.

He went from gallery to gallery saying,

that's mine, that's mine, and that's mine.

I even think somebody said to him,

ah no, I haven't seen a single of your paintings.

Of course you know if I had seen one of your paintings,

I would've said so.

I would've made sure it was safe,

and my grandfather said, well that one's mine.

Ah, there must be a mistake then,

came the reply, and he gave it back to him.

- The art world was very small at the time.

You knew that such and such a painting

had been at the Paul Rosenberg Gallery.

You may have seen it, someone told you about it,

it's very simple.

- [Interpreter] There was artistic collaboration.

If you wanted to find something,

and if you wanted to trace things back at the time,

all you had to do was look at Paul Rosenberg's catalogs.

The dealers who collaborated during the war

and who made a fortune at the time

pretended they didn't know.

But a dealer by definition knows.

Otherwise, they're just small time antique dealers.

They were clearly being dishonest.

- [Narrator] In the post war years,

the collectors set out in search of their stolen assets

in an international market that was flooded with works

that had had a troubled past.

An artistic recovery commission was established

on November 24th, 1944.

45,400 paintings were identified and returned

via the commission after the war,

but another 50,000 were still missing without a trace.

- [Interpreter] In the 50s and 60s,

those sorts of questions weren't asked.

There was a none memory surrounding the plundering.

When you realize that it was only the historian Paxton

in 1970s who revealed the collusion

of the Vichy regime in the deportations of the Jews,

so 25 or 30 years after the end of the war,

you can imagine that people didn't know

the whereabouts of the paintings.

- [Narrator] Looting of works of art

were nevertheless considered at the Nuremberg Trials

to be a war crime.

Alphonse Kann died in 1948 in London

with nobody knowing if he had managed to recover

Man With a Guitar.

Paul Rosenberg died in 1959

not knowing what had become

of Woman in Blue in Front of a Fireplace.

And Karl Grunwald died in 1964

having asked his son to carry on

searching for Wilted Sunflowers,

his favorite painting.

(light music)

It wasn't until 36 years after the end of the war

that one of the three works reemerged

at a famous French museum.

In 1981, the Pompidou Center was the object

of much media attention following

the spectacular acquisition of Georges Braque's Cubist gem

Man With a Guitar.

At the time, there was no more mention

of Alphonse Kann.

In the 1980s, nobody was interested

in the stories of looting.

It wasn't until the mid-1990s

that the issue of the restitution was finally raised.

The French minister for foreign affairs

decided to open its archives to the public,

and in particular, the E.R.R. report

which detailed the lists and references

of all the works and families that had been looted.

- [Interpreter] One morning in 1996,

a client came to see me.

He was a distant heir of Kann,

and he brought me this.

This E.R.R. report had been given

to each one of the families.

That's exactly how it happened.

I went to the foreign office

and got the E.R.R. list.

Look what I found.

And it was in Beaubourg, sleeping peacefully

on a wall in Beaubourg.

- [Narrator] In 1996, Kann's heirs

asked for the restitution of Man with a Guitar,

a painting looted from their ancestor Alphonse Kann.

- [Interpreter] We made contact with the head of the museum

at the time, Mr. Aillagon,

and we had a rather hard time

because the Beaubourg museum was having none of it.

- [Interpreter] We took a while to react

because we considered that if the work

had indeed be involved with the Nazi's looting policy

at some point, it had reappeared at the end of the war

in conditions that could've led one

to believe that there was a transaction

between Alphonse Kann and Andre Lefebvre.

- [Narrator] Andre Lefebvre was a figure

of the Parisian art market.

The painting reappeared with him after the war.

In other words, after it had been looted.

- [Interpreter] The Pompidou Center

suggested that Andre Lefebvre could have acquired the work

entirely legitimately.

Had it done so, there would've been a trace of that.

Curiously, the archives of Andre Lefebvre

given to the Pompidou Center were very detailed

up until 1939, but from the looting to 1945,

there was nothing.

As chance would have it, they disappeared.

- [Narrator] Nevertheless, Andre Lefebvre

was associated with Man With a Guitar

as soon as the painting reappeared after the war.

He officially lent the work for an exhibition

in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany in 1948.

- [Interpreter] One might think

that the Frieburg exhibition

was a way to make the painting seem

as though it belonged to Andre Lefebvre,

like a sort of laundering.

The work reappeared belonging to the great collector

and patron Andre Lefebvre.

- [Interpreter] That really implies

the organizers of these exhibitions

had highly perverse intentions.

It really implies they had extremely somber intentions

and supposes that they were engaged

in laundering operations for looted canvases and works.

- [Interpreter] It's unthinkable that Andre Lefebvre

would've acted openly as the owner of the painting

while Alphonse Kann was still alive even

without the existence of an agreement

between Alphonse Kann and Andre Lefebvre.

What was the nature of that agreement?

Was it a sale or an exchange or something else?

There is no trace of it today.

- [Interpreter] There was an article in 1974

in Connaissance des Arts by his godson Jerome Penieux

who often had lunch at Andre Lefebvre's home,

and who himself said that he never knew

where the paintings came from,

and Lefebvre never spoke to him about them.

- [Interpreter] After the war,

Alphonse Kann claimed back a great many works

that belonged to him.

Why did he not claim back that one

when it was one of the most important works he possessed?

You could say, but it's only a theory,

that he considered he'd given the work

to somebody else, Andre Lefebvre.

- [Interpreter] To everything we provided

in the way of documents gave rise

to a we're also going to carry out research,

we'll meet with you later,

and they came back with a standard response,

no it's not possible.

(light instrumental music)

(Gunnar speaking foreign language)

- [Interpreter] It's typical of museums

to draw negotiations out

even when the legal situation relatively clear.

And this lengthy process is partly aimed

at wearing down the claimants.

They try to negotiate a different amount

for the transaction, or else,

an entirely different agreement

that is more advantageous for the museum

or for the owner.

- [Interpreter] For two to three years,

we tried to negotiate with them,

but because they were not receptive,

we had to take the bull by the horns.

We took court action for concealment.

- [Interpreter] The family considered

that the work was being concealed,

as they proved the painting had been looted,

but the museum was keeping it.

- [Interpreter] And so two representatives

of the Kann family attended the following session

along with myself with Aillagon in the judge's office.

It was a moment of great pleasure for us,

less for them.

- [Interpreter] The first looting

was the one carried out by the Nazis in 1940,

and the second was when the Pompidou Center

refused to return the painting.

- [Narrator] The court case for concealment

triggered an inquiry that was led by an investigating judge.

It lasted several years.

It was at that time in 2005

that chance filled another 60 year void.

Karl Grunwald's Egon Schiele painting,

Wilted Sunflowers, mysteriously reappeared

in a sleepy suburb in eastern France.

(light instrumental music)

- It was already exhibited in 1914

at the Munich secession, then in Brussels in 1914,

and in Vienna, and then in Paris.

What you see here, the text written about the picture,

it's all about the Earl of Provenance

because it was very well recorded,

so a lot was known about the 20, 25 years

after it was painted, but after that,

no more records.

(light music)

Painted in 1914, on the eve of the outbreak

of World War I.

You see the sunflowers.

Behind the sunflowers you've got the fading sun.

It's an autumn sun.

The sunbeams are very weak.

It's not warm anymore.

It's cold.

The sunbeams are not even warm enough,

not even strong enough anymore,

that the sunflowers turn around

towards the sun as they usually do.

No with Schiele, they turn away from the sun,

they look at you, almost like human beings.

They're wilting, they're fading.

It's a symbol of decay and aging,

and it proved to be an almost apocalyptic symbol

of World War I.

(gunshots ringing and bombs exploding)

(thunder rumbling)

- [Interpreter] Karl Grunwald was a lieutenant

stationed in Vienna during the First World War.

Egon Schiele, a young soldier working in the administration,

was very unhappy with his post.

He suffered a great deal as a government worker and soldier.

Grunwald made sure Schiele was transferred to Vienna

so he could live in better conditions,

ensuring he was allowed to sleep at home, for example,

instead of in the barracks,

which enabled him to carry on his work.

That was very important for the artist.

- He saved him.

He possibly saved him from death

by looking after him and pulling him

away from the front line.

He commissioned a painting from him,

and he already then started collecting his works.

- [Interpreter] Grunwald was an extraordinary collector.

He recognized Schiele's talent

well before anybody else.

As Schiele died at a very young age,

just 27, his production is relatively limited.

Grunwald bought up a large share of that production,

a lot of paintings, supporting him not only artistically,

but morally too.

- [Narrator] In 2005, there were very few works by Schiele

in circulation.

The artist died aged 27,

and his unknown paintings are very rare.

Wilted Sunflowers reappeared as if by magic

in the suburb of Mulhouse

in a furnished apartment bought

through a life annuity scheme

a few years earlier by a working class family.

- It was autumn.

It was autumn 2005 when we came here.

We received a call from a lawyer here in Mulhouse

who told us he had a client

who had discovered something in his apartment,

and we should try and have a look at it.

We just saw, it can't be, it must be a fake,

it must be a copy, a reproduction,

I mean there are reproductions often,

even early reproductions of these paintings.

It's a masterpiece, and you don't find masterpieces

just like that.

We knew that if it was genuine,

it would be worth several million dollars.

(coffee machine whirring)

And we walked up the stairs,

and there was sort of light coming through the window,

and the picture was leaning on the wall,

on the floor, against the wall,

and we saw it, and literally,

within seconds, we knew this is it.

This is the long lost picture

which hadn't been seen for 60 years,

the original sunflower picture by Schiele

painted in 1914.

(light instrumental music)

- [Narrator] For some players and observers

in the art world, the tale of this magical reappearance

orchestrated by Christie's is almost too good to be true.

- [Interpreter] I spoke with his heirs in New York.

And it's very probably the official version,

but in fact, it's just a case of big business.

- There's this young man, very nice guy,

who owns this, he's in the possession of this picture,

and we know that the large family,

the Grunwald family, scattered all over the world,

who are entitled to get it back.

- [Interpreter] The case of Wilted Sunflowers

was a wonderful opportunity for an auction house

like Christie's to present itself in the public's eyes

as a key intermediary and the savior

of an important work of art,

so a great stroke of luck for Christie's.

The painting had apparently been missing for decades,

and apparently, nobody knew where it was.

Even the occupants of the apartment

were oblivious to the real nature of the work.

Then an expert like Christie's could come along

and solve the case.

The heirs were not even given the opportunity

to choose the solution they preferred.

- It wasn't just about giving it back, hopefully,

finding a solution, but it also meant

this picture was a symbol

of bringing different generations of the Grunwald family

together again.

They all knew this was the painting

that grandfather had always been looking for

for decades.

- [Interpreter] On this point,

Christie's played a key role.

In spite of everything, Christie's did not just carry out

a very positive advertising campaign,

they also earned money.

That might not have been necessary

if they wanted to tell a really moving

fairy tale type story.

- We sold it then, six months later,

for something like 21.7 million dollars,

and yet we found it in an apartment

which was worth a fraction of this, a tiny fraction,

so with the proceeds of the painting,

it probably could've bought the whole street.

(lively instrumental music)

The Grunwald family, they have wanted him

to be at the table, and we brought them together

in London in a hotel nearby Christie's,

and we were sitting around a long oval table,

I never forget that, and there was a speech

by one member of the family,

and they welcomed him as yet another member,

as another part of the Grunwald family.

It was very moving.

It was extremely emotional.

- [Interpreter] We don't know anything,

and I'm sure that the people involved,

because of the duty of confidentiality

that is always written into contracts like this,

and which really must be respected

to avoid facing major inconvenience,

unfortunately will not enable us to know the full truth.

- Well, we don't talk about how the case was settled,

but they found an agreement.

Let's put it this way.

- [Interpreter] You'll notice I'm smiling a little

when you mention the story.

It's not a rare situation.

Auction houses or art dealers contact the heirs

of Jewish collectors and say,

we know where your painting is.

We can't tell you, but we can serve

as an intermediary to reach an agreement,

so that both you and the current owner

benefit from the sale.

It's very pragmatic, but legally,

it's highly questionable

because in my opinion, the Grunwald family

should've recovered their property.

It's quite common.

We mustn't judge.

The results speak for itself.

The painting reappeared, it became famous again

after decades, it was wrenched from oblivion,

but the market spoke,

and the market enabled the painting

to obtain an incredible value.

- We hope that this story

will serve as an example

for many other restitution cases to come

that amicable solutions are possible.

- [Narrator] 21.7 million euros.

Whatever the mysterious arrangement was,

that was the sum the auction raised.

Meanwhile, the inquiry carried out

by the investigating judge into Braque's

Man With a Guitar dragged on.

Discussions between the Pompidou Center

and Alphonse Kann's heirs remained highly charged.

The accusation of concealment

triggered lengthy research that did not succeed

in throwing light on historical haze

surrounding the painting's journey just after it was looted.

- [Interpreter] The accusation did not go through.

The judge closed the case.

At the time, the judge gave me a hearing.

The study took a number of years

and was never able to formally establish

that at a particular moment in time,

a deed of assignment had been organized

between Alphonse Kann and a third party,

so we concluded that Alphonse Kann's beneficiaries

should be given the benefit of the doubt.

- [Interpreter] The Pompidou Center

kept the painting and indemnified the family.

An agreement protocol was drawn up.

- [Interpreter] The Kann family certainly made

the right decision that the painting

should remain in the Pompidou Center.

I think they were extremely generous and fair

in not making the maximum amount of money out of it.

I wouldn't be surprised, if today,

a painting like that reached between

70 and 80 million euros.

You just don't find paintings like that anymore.

It's incredibly rare,

and it's one of the symbols of a movement,

if not the most important movement of the 20th century.

(man speaking foreign language)

- [Interpreter] Today, museums consider themselves

responsible for the preservation of art.

Many museums when confronted

with request for restitution respond,

for centuries we have saved, protected,

and made these works accessible.

That's our mission, and we don't want a painting

which has since become extremely precious

to disappear into the private sphere.

- For museums, it has always been a complicated matter,

very complicated, because they do not deal

with these paintings or with these art objects

as if they had been looted.

They deal with them as if they were in museums

or not in museums, and we know that many curators,

once they have an object inside the museum,

it should never leave the museum

under any circumstance.

- [Interpreter] I do understand the museums.

It's hard for them to part with the works

because they have been hanging on their walls

for 30 or 40 years, and all of a sudden,

they're asked to give them back.

Yet, ultimately, it didn't belong to them.

They were its custodians.

I understand their frustration,

but it's also logical that they return things

that they do not belong to them

if they're not really theirs.

- [Narrator] Today, the case of Braque

still remains a highly sensitive affair

in the memory of the Pompidou Center.

After purchasing the painting in 1981,

the museum had to pay a second very large sum,

confidential this time,

to keep the work in the national collections.

The case of Paul Rosenberg's Matisse

recounts a different story.

The painting reappeared in 2012,

ironically, in the same Pompidou Museum

during a Matisse retrospective

67 years after it first disappeared.

Lent by a Norwegian foundation from Oslo,

Woman in Blue in Front of a Fireplace

was exhibited alongside dozens of other works by Matisse.

- [Interpreter] As it happened,

I didn't know the list of missing paintings

off by heart, so I missed it.

Luckily, certain specialists,

in particular Emmanuel Pollack,

noticed it and pointed it out.

Our family was alerted that there was a painting

that belonged to the family.

- We were contacted in spring of 2012

by the lawyer of the Rosenberg family in New York,

and they presented us with the papers from E.R.R.

that are now in Washington

and claimed that the painting was stolen.

It was the first case in Norway,

so it's of course a heavy burden for a small museum

to start investigating such a huge issue.

- [Interpreter] When you know the conditions

the work was lost in,

and that it was sold during the Nazi era,

things become more complicated

because we needed to trace the work of art

during the ensuing 50 years

even though it was sometimes sold

four or five times, and that's very difficult.

- When we deframed the paintings,

we couldn't find any traces or evidence

of the history of the painting at all.

The only mark on the back of the painting

is a stamp for a Norwegian crown,

so it's been brought into Norway.

That's the only thing we know.

- [Narrator] Like for Braque, the heirs had to prove

the Woman in Blue in Front of a Fireplace

had indeed belonged to Paul Rosenberg.

They had to provide proof

that it had been in the vault in Libourne.

At the archives of the French Ministry

of Foreign Affairs, Paul Rosenberg's actions

can be traced as he set out to find his canvases

as soon as the war ended.

- [Interpreter] There, there is a very important note.

So, vault of Libourne, as indicated in my letter

dated the 15th, the vault was forced open

on the 28th of April, 1941.

In the presence of the occupying authorities.

The contents of the vault were transferred

to another vault, and an inventory was drawn up

by the director of the Bordeaux School of Fine Arts,

Mr. Roganneau.

So here, you can clearly see a painting by Matisse,

Woman in Blue in Front of a Fireplace,

measuring 60 by 81, does indeed feature

in this inventory drawn up by Roganneau

from the Libourne vault.

We know that in September 1941,

these works arrived at the Jeu de Paume Museum.

On the back of an information card of a Matisse drawing,

I see a list, an inventory

with Woman in Blue in Front of a Fireplace

with the inventory number of Paul Rosenberg's collection,

and the fact that it's presented

with this sentence,

taken either in Floirac or in Paris,

leads me to believe that it was not recovered

after the war, but that he was still searching

for his works.

(light piano music)

- [Narrator] The presence of

the Woman in Blue in Front of a Fireplace

in the Libourne vault confirms

it belonged to Paul Rosenberg.

It remains to be determined

whether or not at the time of the acquisition

the Henie Onstad couple knew it was a looted painting.

- [Interpreter] The painting entered

the Norwegian foundation before the 1960s

because between 1960 and 1963,

I tracked it in the exhibition catalogs about 17 times

which makes me think the couple,

the owners of the work, were acting in good faith.

Because when you lend a work,

you're not afraid to exhibit it.

You're not afraid of claims by the family,

so they didn't know.

- The thing about researching the history

is that you can never be sure.

You have to make a decision upon the facts you have,

and depending on them, you decide

whether or not to return an artwork like we did,

and so it will always be a part of the history

that is not really covered.

- [Interpreter] The return of the Rosenberg collection

Matisse painting by a private Norwegian museum

is a highly unusual case of restitution.

Unusual because, and I find it astonishing,

albeit very positive, the private foundation

declared it was prepared to return

a work in its possession to the Rosenberg family

without being obliged to do so by Norwegian law.

- It was a sad moment seeing the painting leave,

but I'm sure that we did the right thing,

and that's the most important for the institution

and for me.

- [Interpreter] It's very moving

to find a canvas like that

because you wonder what it has lived through,

what vicissitudes it went through

since it was painted in Matisse's studio

and was taken directly from Matisse's studio

to my grandfather's gallery.

Then suddenly, the war arrived,

and it got caught up in the turmoil,

passing from a Gestapo lorry

to warehouses guarded by the Nazis,

and from there, to shady dealers

who conjured it away,

so it has an incredible story.

(soft instrumental music)

The looting of works of art

remains a symbol of what the Nazis tried to do,

what they failed to do,

and what the Allies tried to restore,

the plundering of European culture.

(soft instrumental music)

(lively instrumental music)