A court unsells a Pissarro

On Thursday, a French court ordered that a Camille Pissarro painting sold at Sotheby’s in London be returned to the heirs of its prewar owner, and that the sale be cancelled. Darse de pêche et bassin Duquesne (1902), a view of the port of Dieppe, belonged from 1935 to Salomon Flavian, a Jewish banker. The court found that the Nazis looted it in Paris in 1941, as recorded in France’s 1947 register of looted property. A study backed by Sotheby’s and Mondex, a Toronto restitution firm, argued that the painting had left Flavian’s hands before the war. The court found no convincing evidence of that. Sotheby’s sold it in June 2024 for £1.2 million under a settlement that, according to the heirs’ lawyer, only two of Flavian’s relatives had signed. Under French law, cancelling the 1941 seizure voids every sale that followed. Sotheby’s now has two months to reveal the buyer’s full identity or pay €1,000 a day. The house says it is “disappointed,” disputes the court’s reach over a sale made in London, and is considering joining Mondex’s appeal. “It is a very important ruling,” said Corinne Hershkovitch, the heirs’ lawyer. Two days earlier, The Art Newspaper reported that Italy is moving toward a restitution panel of its own. A bill before parliament would create a five-member committee to rule, within 180 days, on art confiscated or sold under racial persecution between 1933 and 1945, with no statute of limitations. Italy has “barely scratched the surface” on Holocaust restitution, said Gideon Taylor of the World Jewish Restitution Organization.

Why it lasts: an auction sale used to be the end of a painting’s story. This ruling says a sale can be undone years later, in another country. If it survives appeal, anyone selling a work with a gap in its wartime history will have to weigh that risk.

The dead leave the display case

Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum has taken the mummified remains of an Egyptian priest named Nekht off public view, and Glasgow Life, the charity that runs the city’s museums, has received a request to return them to Egypt. It hasn’t said who made the request. Under a draft policy, Glasgow will show human remains only with documented consent from the dead or, where appropriate, their descendants. Without that consent, a spokesperson said, removing ancient Egyptian remains from display is “more respectful to the deceased individuals.” A mummified head, foot and hand from the Valley of the Kings have also come down, and remains at the St Mungo Museum are next. At the University of Glasgow’s Hunterian, the open sarcophagus of Lady Shep-En-Hor has been covered. Not everyone agrees. Stuart Robertson, former director of the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society, called the consent test “an absurd and impossible standard.” In Germany, on Tuesday, the Museum Wiesbaden will hand ten skulls to representatives of the Indonesian government. They were sent home in the 19th century by Ernst Albert Fritze, a military doctor from Hesse who served the Dutch in their East Indies colony from 1817. Hesse’s culture ministry says it is the first time human remains have been returned from Germany to Indonesia.

Why it lasts: for generations, mummies have been a staple of Western museums. The question now is not only who owns the dead but whether they should be looked at at all. Once one major city answers no, others will be asked the same question.

Rome plans a museum for a fascist modernist

Italy’s culture ministry has unveiled plans for a state museum devoted to Mario Sironi, a leading Italian modernist and a committed fascist. It is due to open next year in Rome, in the 1928 headquarters of the national association of disabled war veterans. That monumental fascist-era building already holds two Sironi frescoes, one of them showing Mussolini on horseback. The museum will show 30 works the ministry recently bought from the Mario Sironi Archive and 90 more on loan from it. Culture minister Alessandro Giuli calls it “the defining achievement of my term in office.” Sironi joined the fascist movement in 1919 and drew more than 1,700 cartoons and illustrations for Mussolini’s newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia. His work runs from Futurism to the regime’s monumental commissions. Tomaso Montanari, an art historian on the museum’s scientific committee, doesn’t oppose the project. He says its materials “must make clear that there is no endorsement of fascism,” and that the ministry has only “partially” accepted his call to show work from other periods. Another committee member, Fabio Benzi, warned of “legitimising a certain authoritarian aesthetic under the guise of cultural rediscovery.” The museum’s press materials, The Art Newspaper notes, don’t mention fascism or Mussolini.

Why it lasts: every country with a dictatorship in its past has to decide how to show the art made for it. A state museum is the strongest statement a government can make about an artist, and the wall texts in Rome will be read closely, in Italy and abroad.