Les Cariatides: a Renoir returned to a dealer's heirs

In March 1941, the Paris art dealer Grégoire Schusterman had to close his business and leave the city. The French Ministry of Culture says he was escaping persecution by the occupying forces and the Vichy regime, the wartime French government. He was Jewish, Russian-born, and ran a gallery on the avenue Kléber. To pay for his flight to the southern zone and to live on, he sold several paintings. One of them was a Renoir.

Les Cariatides dates from 1909. Sotheby’s describes it as one of four works that form two diptychs, or pairs of panels, and says one of the diptychs is in the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. The Art Newspaper France reports that Schusterman had bought this version at auction in 1939, only two years before he had to part with it.

The ministry says the painting changed hands on the Paris market that year and was bought by a German dealer, who sent it to Germany. The ministry gives only the year, 1941, and does not name the buyer or state a price. After the war the Allies recovered the painting at the château of Thalhausen, in Bavaria, according to The Art Newspaper France.

Back in France, it joined the works known as Musées nationaux Récupération, or MNR, which the state holds in trust for their owners. It carries the number MNR 198. The Musée d’Orsay took charge of it, and it hung on loan at the Musée Renoir in Cagnes-sur-Mer.

Schusterman’s heirs asked for its return. France’s commission for the compensation of victims of antisemitic spoliation judged that he had been forced to sell, and recommended restitution. The sources date that step differently: the ministry cites a session on 17 November 2023, and The Art Newspaper France gives 31 January 2024. The Prime Minister decided on 11 April 2024 that the painting should go back. The Art Newspaper France says the heirs number eleven, and that five of them attended the handover at the ministry on 16 May 2024.

Sotheby’s says the heirs chose the house to sell it. It offered Les Cariatides in Paris on 18 October 2024, with an estimate of 1 to 1.5 million euros. The sources consulted give no result for the sale and do not name a buyer.