The Derain that went back to the Gimpel family

When German forces entered Paris in June 1940, the dealer and collector René Gimpel, who was Jewish, fled to the south of France. Christie’s says that between 1940 and 1942 he was forced to sell a Derain landscape, Paysage à Cassis. The sources do not say to whom, or on what terms.

Gimpel had owned the picture for nearly two decades. Christie’s dates it to 1907, an oil on canvas of 53.9 by 65 centimetres, signed “a Derain” at lower right. The dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler acquired it from the artist, and it came up in the second sale of his sequestered stock at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris on 17 and 18 November 1921. Gimpel bought it there.

The Ministry of Culture describes Gimpel as a member of the Resistance, deported in 1944. Christie’s says he died in the Neuengamme camp in 1945. Meanwhile the painting passed to Pierre and Denise Lévy of Troyes. Christie’s puts that around 1948, while the ministry says the Lévys bought it in the 1950s. They gave it to the French state in 1976, and it hung on loan in the museum at Troyes.

Gimpel’s heirs began legal proceedings in 2013, according to The Art Newspaper France. A Paris court refused the claim in 2019 for lack of evidence about the works’ history. On 30 September 2020 the Paris Court of Appeal reversed that and ordered the ministry and the City of Marseille to return three Derain landscapes to Gimpel’s family. They were this painting, a second work at Troyes and Pinède, Cassis in Marseille. The sources name the Troyes work differently, as La Chapelle-sous-Crécy and as Le Moulin.

The Art Newspaper reports that the court found “serious, precise and concordant” clues that the paintings were looted in 1942, during the German Occupation. It would not require the family to produce proof of sales that Gimpel had been obliged to conceal. The ministry said it would apply the decision as soon as possible, and noted that the case showed why provenance research on public collections matters.

Christie’s records that the painting was restituted to the Gimpel family in November 2020. It later offered the work as lot 63 C in a 20th Century Evening Sale. Its page gives no sale date, price or buyer, and the sources do not say where the painting is now.