Three Stolen Renoir Paintings May Have Been Nazi Looted

Three of the Pierre-Auguste Renoir paintings stolen yesterday morning from a museum in southern France may have been stolen before.

France’s Ministry of Culture announced in a press release that three of the four paintings initially snatched from the Renoir Museum in Cagnes-sur-Mer had been returned to France from Germany after World War II. They became informally known as “orphans” because their rightful owners were unknown. It’s still unclear which paintings have the official Biens Musées Nationaux Récupération (MNR) [National Museums Recovery Property] classification. The ministry did not respond to ARTnews’s request for comment by the time of publication.

All four stolen paintings were also on long-term loan from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

Before dawn yesterday, two suspects armed with an electric knife and a saw, wearing helmets and gloves, cut through a fence and broke through a window at the Renoir Museum, which was also the artist’s former home before he died in 1919. They made off with four out of 12 displayed Renoir paintings before police arrived in five minutes, but ultimately abandoned two paintings on the museum grounds. The recovered pieces have been identified as Portrait of Madame Pichon (1895) and Coco Lisant (1905). But police are still actively hunting for the remaining two paintings: Portrait of Madame Colonna Romano (1910) and Jeune fille au puits (1886).

Most, but not all, orphaned artworks, or MNR, were looted by the Nazis from the homes of Jewish families, as well as French museums, and taken to Germany. French museum records list these works as being in their temporary custody. For years, however, few knew about their existence, and little was done to seek out legitimate owners, who were in many cases elderly survivors of the Holocaust.

In more recent years, however, and following public pressure after the watershed publication of Hector Feliciano’s book, “The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World’s Greatest Works of Art” (English edition 1997), more French museums have tried raising awareness around the lost artworks they house, while also actively researching their provenance. This has included mounting special exhibitions, like the inauguration last spring of a gallery dedicated to MNR artworks at Paris’s Musée d’Orsay—on the off chance anyone happens to recognize a picture that once hung on their family’s living room walls.

Some 60,000 lost artworks were brought back to France by Allied Forces after the Second World War, which based the returns on records showing that the items had come from there. Some 45,000 of these objects, which included furniture and books, were returned to their owners in the five years after the war, but another 15,000 remained unclaimed. The French state decided to sell 13,000 of them and hold onto about 2,200 of the best ones, which they placed in its national museums. Last year, the government counted 2,027 remaining MNR artworks in its public museums. Following yesterday’s theft, that number just went down a notch or two.

In a statement, Minister of Culture Catherine Pégard once again reiterated the urgent need to reinforce museum security, as part of a plan she announced in July, following a string of high-profile museum heists in France over the last year.