Legal title of a work by Claude Monet, seized by the Nazis from a Jewish couple who fled Vienna in 1938 to avoid persecution, has been returned to their heirs after federal authorities obtained it.
The heirs are relatives of Viennese Jewish collectors Adalbert and Hilda Parlagi, who lost ownership of the 1865 work Bord de Mer (Seaside) when they fled Austria after Germany’s annexation of the country in March 1938, leading to persecution and confiscation of Jewish-owned property. After they fleed to London in December 1938, works of theirs by Monet and Pissarro remained in a Vienna storage facility, where they were taken by Third Reich officials in August 1940. The painting was auctioned in 1941.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation got involved in the search for the work in 2021, after the Commission for Looted Art in Europe, a non-profit involved in helping the Parlagi family located the stolen work, tracked it to a dealer in New Orleans in 2017. After it was sold to a private collector in 2019, authorities recovered it in 2023 when it appeared as a consignment at a gallery in Houston.
The work is being returned after its location was unknown to the family for 80 years.
The Parlagis unsuccessfully attempted to recover their possessions and assets before Adalbert’s death in 1981. Parlagi’s granddaughters, Helen Lowe and Françoise Parlagi, who are taking oownership of the work eight years after beginning the search process in 2014 called the restitution “very moving.”
In a statement, the FBI thanked the former owners, members of the Schlamp family in Sulphur, Louisiana, for forfeiting their ownership of the work after a previous judgement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Louisiana. The date of the legal decision was not disclosed.
