A painting looted by the Nazis during the Second World War has been returned to the descendants of its original owners after more than 80 years. The work, Flowers, a 1913 still life by German expressionist Lovis Corinth, was entrusted to the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels in 1951 after postwar investigators failed to trace the owners.
The restitution marks the first time the Royal Museums of Fine Arts have returned an artwork looted from a Jewish family during the war. Thomas Dermine, Belgium’s secretary of state in charge of museums, handed the painting to a lawyer representing the nine great-grandchildren of Gustav and Emma Mayer, a German-Jewish couple who fled Germany in 1938.
“This restitution, the first by the Museums of Fine Arts, is a very strong signal: even decades later, justice can triumph,” Dermine said. He added that the return was “an opportunity to remind people of the horrors” to which nationalism and the far right could lead. “To repair is to remember and to remember is to avoid the return of the worst.”
The Mayers owned 30 paintings, which were left in storage in Brussels after a 14-month stay in the Belgian capital from 1938-39. Flowers is the only one to have been recovered. Lawyers for the family approached the museums in 2016, eight years after the institution launched an online database of works with uncertain provenance.
Imke Gielen, a lawyer acting for the descendants, said: “They are delighted that at least one of the missing paintings has been identified after 80 years and has now been returned.” The nine descendants, who live in the UK, South Africa and the US, have yet to decide what to do with the painting.
Michel Draguet, the museum’s director, said he felt no sadness that the work would leave the museum. “We never bought this painting, we were never the owners, we were the custodians for the Belgian state.” He scored the painting out from the museum’s inventory during the handover ceremony.
