EA painting by artist Marc Chagall stolen by the Nazis was auctioned in New York on Tuesday night for $7.4 million. The 1911 oil painting, entitled The Father, was offered by Phillips auction house, who did not disclose the buyer.
The oil painting had been acquired in 1928 by a Polish-Jewish violin maker who lost his belongings when he was forced into the Lodz ghetto by the Nazis. The violin maker was deported to Auschwitz, where his wife and daughter were killed. He himself survived and went to France in 1958, where he died in 1966 without having received his Chagall painting back.
The work had meanwhile reappeared in exhibitions. Chagall himself bought it, presumably between 1947 and 1953, and without knowing who had owned it in the meantime, according to the auction house and the French Ministry of Culture.
Born in Russia, Chagall died in France in 1985. “The Father” was added to the French National Collections in 1988 and assigned to the Center Pompidou and the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris.
The French parliament decided earlier this year to return 15 works to Jewish families dispossessed by the Nazis. The Minister of Culture at the time, Roselyne Bachelot, spoke of a “first step” and added that looted works of art and books were still in public collections. The descendants of the violin maker decided to sell the painting “The Father”.
Chagall painted his father’s portrait the year he arrived in Paris. Works by Chagall from this period are rare because he destroyed many on his return to Russia in 1914, said Jeremiah Evarts, vice president of the Phillips auction house.
At the autumn auctions, the auction houses make billions by selling hundreds of works of art. Phillips alone took in $139 million on Tuesday from the sale of 46 works. The highest-priced, at $41.6 million, was a 2005 untitled monumental painting by Cy Twombly, once owned by French businessman François Pinault.
