Four works that were once on display at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, including a rare still life by Paul Gauguin, will go under the hammer at Sotheby’s Modern Art auction in New York next month. The works have been came back earlier this year to the descendants of the famous French art dealer Ambroise Vollard after a long legal battle.
Ahead of the May 16 sale, the works were exhibited today at the auction house’s Paris headquarters. Gauguin’s painting, titled Still life with Chinese peonies and mandolin (still life with Chinese peonies and mandolin), is estimated between $10 and $15 million. Sotheby’s states that the work was painted in 1885 “when the artist was beginning to pursue his art full-time, moving away from the naturalism of the Impressionist movement and beginning to experiment with vivid color”.
The other consigned parts are seaside landscapea seascape by Pierre-August Renoir estimated between $1 and 1.5 million, a red chalk drawing by Renoir entitled The Judgment of Paris from 1908, estimated between $300,000 and $500,000, and a watercolor and pencil on paper by Paul Cézanne titled Undergrowth (circa 1882-84), estimated between $250,000 and $350,000.
After a decade of legal proceedings, an administrative court in Paris in February ordered the Musée d’Orsay to return the four works stolen during World War II and sold to German museums, dealers or Nazi officers.
In May 2022, another French court confirmed that these works were the property of Vollard at the time of his sudden death in 1939, before being stolen by those in charge of his estate who then resold them. This judgment was confirmed by the highest French court last November.
Vollard’s descendants are represented by lawyer François Honnorat who has previously stated The arts journal that he “regrets that the [restitution] the process lasted ten years”, during which two of the heirs died.
“Vollard was a great supporter and defender of the artists of his time, including Gauguin, Renoir and Cézanne. Each of these works testifies to his importance as a central figure who helped shape modern art and whose legacy is still felt today,” says Allegra Bettini, head of the Modern Evening Auction at Sotheby’s in New York, in a press release.
Sotheby’s had previously auctioned 140 works from the Vollard collection in 2010 for a total of 23 million euros. The coins had been discovered in 1979 in a Société Générale bank vault in Paris, sparking a decade-long legal dispute over the ownership of the treasure.
Sotheby’s is stepping up efforts to secure returned items for sale. In March, a newly returned painting from Wassily Kandinsky’s early career, Murnau with Kirche II (1910) sold for £37 million (with fees) at Sotheby’s London. Proceeds from the sale were shared between 13 heirs of the painting’s former Jewish owners, Johanna Margarete and Siegbert Stern, a famous German-Jewish couple at the heart of Berlin’s glittering cultural life in the 1920s.
