A long-running effort to recover a Vincent van Gogh painting believed to have been lost during the Nazi era has entered a decisive new phase, almost ten years after the claim was first raised.
Klaus Kallmann, the 98-year-old grandson of the German Jewish lawyer and collector Felix Kallmann, is seeking the return of Saint-Paul Hospital in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. This 1889 painting has hung in the Musée d’Orsay for more than half a century. France’s Commission for the Compensation of Victims of Spoliation (CIVS), the government body responsible for examining claims involving property seized during the Second World War, is expected to begin reviewing the case in September. Its recommendations can include restitution of the work or financial compensation.
The painting’s provenance, published by the Musée d’Orsay, records Felix Kallmann as a former owner before it passed through several collections and was eventually donated to the museum in 1973. The central question is whether the work was left in the family’s possession voluntarily or as a consequence of Nazi persecution.
For Klaus Kallmann, the case is deeply personal. Born in Berlin in 1928, he still recalls the Van Gogh hanging in his grandfather’s villa before the family was forced from their former life. He remembers a figure standing beneath a twisted tree outside the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Provence, where Van Gogh admitted himself in 1889 and painted the hospital and its grounds during one of the most productive periods of his career. The scene also includes Dr Théophile Peyron, the physician who cared for the artist during his stay.
Kallmann has pursued the return of the painting for almost a decade. As the CIVS prepares to examine the evidence, the dispute joins a growing number of unresolved restitution claims that continue to test museums across Europe over works with histories shaped by persecution, displacement and war.