German Museum Will Keep Pissarro in Settlement with Heir of Persecuted Owner

After nearly a decade of negotiations, a Pissarro painting sold under duress by a Jewish family during the Second World War will remain in a German museum as part of a settlement.

The agreement stipulates that the Kunsthalle Bremen, which has owned the painting Le Repos (Girl Lying in the Grass) since 1967, will publish a book that details the persecution of its original owners, the van den Bergh family, including the forced sale of their art collection. The Pissarro was sold to fund the family’s flight from the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands in 1940. The parents, Jaap and Ellen, survived the war, however, their two young daughters, Marianne and Rosemarie, who had been hid in a separate, presumed safer location, died in Auschwitz.

The museum reached a financial settlement that was privately mediated with a surviving van den Bergh heir, the details of which have not been disclosed, according to the Times.

Nine years ago, Dutch restitution researchers found a legal claim from the 1940s filed by Jaap van den Bergh.

“I was forced to sell the aforementioned piece to procure currency to survive,” van den Bergh wrote, as quoted in the Times. “Been in hiding for four years.” Van den Bergh and his wife were then hiding in Heemstede, a town outside of Haarlem.

Dutch researchers tracked the painting to Kunsthalle Bremen in Germany and contacted Suzan van den Bergh, one of the family’s surviving descendants. From there, the group opened restitution negotiations with the museum.

Rudi Ekkart, one of the Dutch restitution experts involved in brokering talks between the Suzan van den Bergh and the museum, told the Times that publication of the family history replaces a more common outcome in cases like these: lengthy and contentious litigation that usually ends in the works being sold off privately.

The agreement was disclosed in a ceremony at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, where the Pissarro will be exhibited until March before returning to Bremen..

During the ceremony, Kunsthalle Bremen’s director Christoph Grunenberg described the agreement reached with van den Bergh, avoiding a legal dispute over the painting’s title that would have likely seen it removed from the collection, as a good outcome for both parties.“ [It’s ]an ideal solution,” he said.