Stolen by the Nazis 80 years ago: Monet painting returned to family

For Helen Lowe and Françoise Parlagi, a decades-long search has taken place. A search that had occupied her family for more than eighty years. In the American city of New Orleans, the two women received a valuable painting back on Wednesday. A painting that the Nazis stole from her grandfather Adalbert “Bela” Parlagi.

Adalbert Parlagi was a successful prize in Vienna in the 1930s. He loved art and owned valuable paintings. One of these was “Bord de Mer” by Claude Monet from 1865. The pastel painting shows the coast of Normandy and was one of the French painter’s first works. Parlagi bought it at an art auction in Austria in 1936 and hung it in his living room. But it didn’t stay there for long.

In 1938 the National Socialists marched into Vienna. Parlagi was born a Jew, but left the Israelite religious community with his wife Hilda in 1923. The Nazis still considered them Jewish. While many of their relatives were murdered in the concentration camps, the Parlagis fled to London. Her possessions and works of art are left in the warehouse of a Viennese shipping company. From there the goods were to be shipped to England. However, they never left the camp: they were confiscated by the Gestapo.

Parlagi searched for the works of art during his lifetime

The Nazis auctioned off the confiscated possessions in 1941 at the Dorotheum auction house in Vienna. A Nazi art dealer bought the “Bord de Mer”.

Adalbert Parlagi looked for his possessions after the end of the war. He spent years, hired a lawyer, did some research.

A lead led Parlagi to a Viennese auction house. This had bought the Monet and another picture from the Parlagis collection at the Nazi auction and resold it. This emerges from documents from the Austrian government. But the auctioneer blocked the search. In a letter he stated that the purchase documents had been lost due to the fighting in Vienna. Furthermore, he couldn’t remember the two pictures.

Parlagi did not receive any of his paintings back until his death in 1981. His son, who continued the search and died in 2012, was also unsuccessful. The Monet painting will not appear again until 2023 in a gallery in the American state of Texas.

The buyer did not want Nazi-looted art

In the USA, the FBI’s Art Crime Team has been investigating works of art stolen in the fall for several years. It is a special department dedicated to combating art crime. The FBI was contacted in 2021 by the non-profit organization Commission for Looted Art in Europe, which searches for looted cultural assets worldwide. Parlagi’s granddaughter commissioned the organization to search for the images in 2014.

The organization discovered in 2017 that the Monet painting was for sale at the said art gallery in Houston, Texas. The FBI agents contacted the couple who purchased the artwork from the gallery. They did not know that the painting they had purchased was Nazi looted art and voluntarily returned the work of art. This meant that the picture could be returned to the Parlagi family.

“The return is an act of justice,” said Anne Webber, co-chair of the Commission for Looted Art in Europe, at a press conference.

James Dennehy, the assistant director of the FBI in New York, emphasized in a statement the significance of the artwork for the Parlagi family. “Although this Monet is undoubtedly valuable, its true value lies in what it represents to the Parlagi family.” The painting is a legacy for the descendants that was quickly erased. “The emotions associated with this return cannot be measured in dollars – they are priceless,” Dennehy said.

Many works are still considered missing

This is the second return from the Parlagis collection for the descendants. In March they received back a chalk drawing by the German painter Franz Seraph von Lenbach from the Austrian government. The picture shows the German composer Richard Wagner. It was the only collector’s item that Adalbert Parlagi was able to find in a private collection in Vienna during his lifetime.

However, the owner at the time, the Austrian film director Ernst Marischka, only wanted to return the picture to Parlagi if he bought it from him at the estimated price. Because the price was too high for Parlagi, the negotiations failed. Marischka’s widow sold the drawing in 1976. It later ended up in the inventory of the Albertina Art Museum in Vienna via a detour. The drawing was located there by the Commission for Looted Art in Europe.

It is estimated that the Nazis stole 600,000 works of art and millions of books and religious objects during World War II. The pastel painting by Monet is one of 20,000 works of art seized by the FBI’s Art Crime Team in recent years.

Several works of art are still missing from Adalbert Parlagi’s collection. These include paintings by famous artists such as Camille Pissaro and Paul Signac. The FBI’s investigation is ongoing. Kristin Koch, the lead special agent for the Art Crime Team, suspects that the images are also in the United States. She says: “Our country is probably the largest illegal art market in the world.”