News:

The French billionaire Bernard Arnault is under pressure to compensate a Jewish family for the loss of a Gustav Klimt painting looted by the Nazis which was mistakenly returned to another family who then sold it to him.

Arnault, reportedly the world’s richest man with a fortune of about $220 billion, paid the heirs of Nora Stiasny, a Jewish Holocaust victim, up to $20 million for Apple Tree II, a 1916 oil painting by the Austrian artist.

Austria had handed over the painting to the Stiasny family in 2001 because it had been confused with another Klimt landscape, Roses Under the Trees, which Stiasny owned before the Second World War. She sold it under duress for a fraction of its value in 1938 after Germany annexed Austria. Four years later she was murdered in a Nazi death camp.

Apple Tree II should have been returned to another Austrian Jewish family, the Lederers, whom the Nazis seized it from. However, Arnault bought the painting in good faith and for years he refused to discuss compensating the Lederer heirs, according to the French newspaper Libération.


Bernard Arnault with his wife Helene. He refused for years to discuss compensating the family who originally owned the painting

He eventually opened negotiations last autumn, Libération reported this week. It said talks were still ongoing between Arnault and the Lederer heirs. The luxury goods tycoon appears to have agreed to negotiate after Monika Mayer, an Austrian art historian, discovered that the real Roses Under the Trees, which Klimt painted in 1905, had been hanging for decades in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. France then returned it to the Stiasny family in 2021.

After France restituted Roses Under the Trees, the Austrian government acknowledged that a mistake was made in 2001. But the culture ministry said that at the time “no evidence could be provided [for the mistaken identification of the painting], nor for the assumption that there was a Nazi persecution-related seizure”.

Yet Mayer had warned the government that there was confusion over the painting’s provenance. Nevertheless, Austria went ahead with the handover to the Stiasny heirs. It had been criticised earlier for dragging its feet over the return of art looted by the Nazis. In this case, it acted hastily because it was “under pressure from the Jewish community and The New York Times”, Thomas Trenkler, an Austrian journalist who covered the case over many years, told Libération.