Nine years ago, researchers working at the Dutch national archives in The Hague were going through a box of declaration forms filed with the government in the late 1940s, seeking a work of art that had gone missing in the war, but had never been returned.
On one form, the claimant described a “large oil painting” in detail, including its title, “Le Repos,” its exact dimensions and the fact that it had been signed and dated by the artist in 1882. But what really caught the researchers’ attention was the name at the top of the form: Camille Pissarro, the 19th-century Impressionist.
“I was forced to sell the aforementioned piece to procure currency to survive,” wrote the claimant, Jaap van den Bergh. “Been in hiding for four years.”
Annelies Kool, a researcher with the archives, took the page and began a search that would not only locate the painting but would also illuminate the tragic story of two Jewish sisters whose parents could not keep them from perishing in a Nazi death camp.
Within days, Kool had located the work of art at a German museum. Within months, she had found a surviving van den Bergh heir, a daughter born after the war.
Now, after years of discussion, “Le Repos,” or “Girl Lying in the Grass,” is the subject of an unusual agreement in which the German museum, the Kunsthalle Bremen, will keep the painting but will help to publish a book that recounts the van den Bergh family’s history and losses.
The agreement was announced on Wednesday at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, where the Pissarro will also be put on display until March. The Kunsthalle Bremen, which has held the painting since 1967, also reached a financial settlement with the heir.
“It was very important that the story of her family would be told,” said Rudi Ekkart, a retired Dutch government restitution expert who brokered the agreement between the heir and the museum. The heir, referred to under the pseudonym Suzan van den Bergh in the book, declined to be interviewed.
“It turned out that the financial part was not the most important part to her,” Ekkart said. “The publication and the exhibition were more important to her. That’s the reason we came to this very original solution.” She especially wanted to avoid a protracted legal battle that might have ended with the painting getting sold into private hands, he added.
Suzan van den Bergh knew parts of her family’s wartime story, said Kool, who is now an adviser on Cultural Goods and World War II at the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, but the researchers were able to help fill gaps.
When Germany invaded the Netherlands in 1940, van den Bergh’s parents, Jaap and Ellen, lived in Heemstede, a commuter town outside Haarlem, and they had two daughters, Rosemarie, a toddler, and Marianne, a baby. Soon, antisemitic ordinances were put in place by the occupying Nazi regime, and in 1942 Jews began to be deported. The van den Berghs decided at that point to go into hiding.
The parents hid in Haarlem with a Catholic couple. But sensing that the family would be in greater danger if they hid together, the van den Berghs placed Rosemarie and Marianne with a foster family in the coastal village of Katwijk. They sold the Pissarro to pay for the expenses they incurred while hiding.
Jaap and Ellen survived the war in hiding in Haarlem. But their daughters — unbeknown to them — were sent from one hiding place to another, and eventually landed in a group home full of Jewish children. In January 1944, that house, in Driebergen, was raided by the Nazis, and the children were deported, first to Camp Westerbork in Drenthe, and then to Auschwitz, where they died.
Eelke Muller, a researcher with the Expertise Center Restitution at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, helped Suzan van den Bergh reconstruct her family’s story for the book, which is titled “The Girl in the Grass: The Tragic Fate of the Van den Bergh Family and the Search for a Painting.”
The volume is 190 pages and contains multiple pictures of the van den Bergh family before the war, including images of the girls sitting in the grass. Publishing costs were funded in part by the Kunsthalle Bremen.
Muller said Suzan van den Bergh is very happy it is being published. “She never knew her sisters, her parents never spoke about it, and that obviously had a big impact on her life,” he said. “She’s searched throughout her life to find out what happened, and what her own place is in it.”
Suzan is quoted in the book as saying: “It is the tiny bit of life that I can breathe into Rosemarie and Marianne.”
Christoph Grunenberg, the director of the Kunsthalle Bremen, described the restitution agreement as “an ideal solution,” that helps inform the public about “how personal fate was affected by the Second World War and the Nazi dictatorship,” while at the same time “doing justice to the descendants by telling the story.”
Ekkart and Grunenberg both declined to comment on the estimated value of “Girl Lying in the Grass.” Over the last decade, according to public auction records, some 450 Pissarro oil paintings have sold for as much as $32 million, on the high end, and $200,000 on the lower end.
A legal claim on the painting might have been particularly challenging, because the painting was donated to the Kunsthalle Bremen long after the war. Previous cases of this kind have had mixed results. Earlier this year, an appellate court in the United States ruled that a museum in Spain could keep a Pissarro, in a restitution case filed by an American Jewish family that lasted nearly two decades.
Evelien Campfens, editor of the book “Fair and Just Solutions? Alternatives to Litigation in Nazi-Looted Art Disputes,” said that claimants often want their histories to be acknowledged, sometimes even more than they want the specific objects returned.
“In many restitutions, it’s about the reparation of justice and restoration of rights,” she said, and focusing on “the story that needs to be told.”
Emilie Gordenker, director of the Van Gogh Museum, said it will display “Girl Lying in the Grass,” alongside works by Pissarro and other Impressionists who inspired van Gogh.
“We decided to give it its own spotlight,” she said. “It is a wonderful example of Pissarro, and it has the hallmarks of his work, the color and the sunshine.”
After its four-month display, it will return to Bremen, where it has long been a centerpiece of a display of Pissarro landscape paintings, with a new wall label that will include its wartime history, Grunenberg said.
Winnie Urban, head of history books of Waanders Publishing, which is bringing forth the book with Kunsthalle Bremen and the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, said that in addition to the Netherlands, it would be distributed to book stores and museum shops in the United States and Britain.
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