The Basel Museum of Fine Arts refuses to return a painting by Douanier Rousseau with a troubled past

The Basel Museum of Fine Arts or Kunstmuseum Basel indicated on Tuesday that it refused to return a painting by Henri Rousseau that a German countess sold to it in 1940, arguing that it had not been plundered by the Nazis. . In 1940, the museum acquired the painting The Muse Inspiring the Poet - Apollinaire and His Muse (1909) by the French self-taught figurative painter Henri Rousseau, known as Le Douanier Rousseau, from Countess Charlotte von Wesdehlen, according to a press release. In 2021, continues the cultural institution, “the lawyers of a claimant to the succession of Charlotte von Wesdehlen asked the Kunstmuseum Basel to investigate the circumstances of this acquisition”. And in 2022, they requested its return.

According to studies carried out by the Basel museum, the painting is one of the cases treated in Switzerland as sales of “random goods”. This term refers to cultural property that their owners took into exile while fleeing the Nazis, according to a report published more than twenty years ago by a commission of independent Swiss experts who examined the role of Switzerland during the Second World War.

“Unlike looted art, “art on the run” refers to works of art that their owners took and sold in a safe third country, such as Switzerland, due to Nazi persecution,” according to the Kunsthaus Basel. Also, he argues, “unlike the case of looted art, the owners were partly offered a price in line with that of the market which they could set freely”.

The Kunstmuseum emphasizes that the restitution of “fugitive goods” is an exception and considers that there is no right of restitution for this painting. It indicates that “negotiations for a “just and equitable solution” have been recommended and have already begun”.