Heir of German Jewish Collector Seeks Return of Van Gogh Painting from Musée d’Orsay

Klaus Kallmann is 98 years old, but he still remembers being a little boy and looking at a painting by Vincent van Gogh that hung in his grandfather’s Berlin villa until the early 1930s. The work depicts the artist’s doctor, Théophile Peyron, standing by a gnarled tree, his hands on his hips, in front of the mental hospital he ran, where Van Gogh was also a patient. 

That painting, titled Hôpital Saint-Paul à Saint-Rémy-de-Provence (1889), is now in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay and is part of France’s national art collection. But Kallmann claims it rightfully belongs to him, according to Le Monde.

For about nine years, Kallmann, who lives in the US, has waged a legal battle to prove the Van Gogh painting was looted from his German, Jewish grandfather, Felix Kallmann (1853–1938) after the Nazis came to power. France recently passed laws facilitating the return of Nazi-looted art, so one might expect that such a request would fall squarely into the new law’s intended use. However, France’s Commission for the Compensation of Victims of Spoliation (CIVS), which decides which works constitute Nazi-looted art, is stumped by the case.

The Kallmann family “was surely a victim of antisemitic persecution, and was subject to plunder in that context,” David Zivie, who runs the CIVS, told Le Monde. Yet “it is difficult to determine with certainty whether the Van Gogh painting was among the looted assets that were sold under duress,” he added. Gaps in the painting’s provenance, between June 1932 and February 1934, don’t help. We do know that the painting somehow popped up in Paris in 1934, at the gallery of the historic dealer Paul Rosenberg, and was eventually donated to the Louvre.

Meanwhile, Kallmann asserts that his father, Hartmut, always maintained that the family art collection had been intact when the Nazi’s rose to power, and all the family’s belongings were stolen soon after. Felix Kallmann, who, in addition to collecting art, ran a lightbulb-making company called Deutsche Gasglühlicht and the film production company Universum Film AG de Babelsberg, died of a heart attack a few days after the Kristallnacht pogrom. His son’s young family was able to flee Germany just in time.

To the family’s lawyer, Markus Stötzel, the case is a typical example of Nazi plunder in need of immediate restoration. He points to the best practices established in 1998 by the Washington Principles for handling Nazi-confiscated art, signed by 44 nations, which states that “consideration should be given to unavoidable gaps or ambiguities in the provenance in light of the passage of time and the circumstances of the Holocaust era.”

The Washington Principles also recognize that many sales of artwork by Jews during the Nazi era occurred while they were being persecuted, or under duress.

Now, the case is in the hands of a judge and a committee of government officials, with the next key meeting due to take place in September.