NEW ORLEANS (AP) — On the eve of World War II, Nazis in Austria seized a pastel by renowned impressionist artist Claude Monet, selling it off and sparking a family’s decadeslong search that culminated Wednesday in New Orleans.
At an FBI field office, agents lifted a blue veil covering the Monet pastel and presented Adalbert Parlagi's granddaughters with the artwork over 80 years after it was taken from their family. Helen Lowe said she felt that her grandfather would be watching and that he would be “so, so proud of this moment.”
Monet's 1865 “Bord de Mer” depicts rocks along the shoreline of the Normandy coast, where Allied forces stormed the beaches of Nazi-occupied France during “D-Day” in 1944, marking a turning point in the war. The Monet pastel is one of 20,000 items recovered by the FBI Art Crime Team out of an estimated 600,000 artworks and millions of books and religious objects stolen by the Nazis.
“The theft was not random or incidental, but an integral part of the Nazis’ plan to eliminate all vestiges of Jewish life in Germany and Europe, root and branch," U.S. State Department Holocaust adviser Stuart E. Eizenstat said in a March speech.
After Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Adalbert Parlagi, a successful businessman and art-lover, and his wife, Hilda, left behind almost everything they owned and fled Vienna, using British license plates to drive across the border, their granddaughters said. Though the Parlagis hadn’t identified as Jewish for years and baptized their children as Protestants, they were still considered Jewish under Nazi laws, according to Austrian government records. Other relatives were killed in concentration camps.
The Parlagis attempted to ship their valuable carpets, porcelain and artworks out of Vienna to London, but found out later that their property had been seized and auctioned off by the Gestapo to support the Third Reich.
Multiple international declarations decried trading in Nazi-looted art, beginning with Allied forces in London in 1943. The 1998 Washington principles, signed by more than three dozen countries, reiterated the call and advocated for the return of stolen art.
Yet Adalbert Parlagi's efforts were stonewalled by the Vienna auctioneer who had bought and sold the Monet pastel and another artwork owned by Parlagi. The records were lost after the fighting in Vienna, the auctioneer told Adalbert in a letter shortly after World War II, according to an English translation of a document prepared by an Austrian government body reviewing the Parlagi family’s art restitution claims.
“I also cannot remember two such pictures either,” the auctioneer said.
Many survivors of World War II and their descendants ultimately give up trying to recover their lost artwork because of the difficulties they face, said Anne Webber, co-founder of the London-based nonprofit Commission for Looted Art in Europe, which has recovered more than 3,500 looted artworks.
“You have to just constantly, constantly, constantly look," Webber said.
Adalbert Parlagi and his son Franz kept meticulous ownership and search records. After Franz's death in 2012, Françoise Parlagi stumbled upon her father's cache of documents, including the original receipt from her grandfather’s purchase of the Monet pastel. She reached out to Webber's commission for help in 2014.
The commission’s research team reviewed archives and receipts, contacted museums and art experts and scoured the internet, but initially found “absolutely no trace,” Webber said. Then, in 2021, the team discovered online that a New Orleans dealer acquired the Monet in 2017 and sold it to a Louisiana-based doctor and his wife.
The FBI investigated the commission's research and, earlier this year, a federal court ruled the pastel should be returned to the Parlagis' descendants.
“There was never a question” of returning the art to the rightful owners after learning of its sordid history, said Bridget Vita-Schlamp, whose late husband had purchased the Monet pastel.
“We were shocked, I'm not going to lie," she said.
The family recovered another work in March from the Austrian government but there are still six more artworks missing, including from acclaimed artists Camille Pissarro and Paul Signac. The U.S. is likely the “largest illegal art market in the world,” said Kristin Koch, supervisory special agent with the FBI's Art Crime Program.
The art world has a greater responsibility to investigate the origins of artworks and a moral obligation to return looted works to their rightful owners, Webber said.
“They represent the life and the lives that were taken,” Webber said. “They represent the world that they were exiled from.”
The granddaughters of Adalbert and Hilda Parlagi say they are grateful for what they have already gotten back. Françoise Parlagi, a broad smile on her face, said she hoped to hang a copy of the pastel in her home. She said the moment felt “unreal.”
“So many families are in this situation. Maybe they haven’t even been trying to recover because they don’t believe, they think this might not be possible," she said. “Let us be hope for other families.”
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Jack Brook is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow Brook on the social platform X: @jack_brook96.