City of Passau returns Nazi-looted art to Jewish owners

The city of Passau is returning two paintings to their rightful owners in France. The paintings were originally in the possession of Jewish citizens in Paris and were looted by the Nazis during the Second World War. The handover will take place at the beginning of November.          

In the 1980s and 1990s, the city of Passau conducted a reappraisal of its history during the National Socialist period – including that of the Oberhausmuseum. In 2001, the city’s cultural committee decided to enter objects suspected of being Nazi-looted cultural property in the Lost Art database maintained by the German Lost Art Foundation. As a result, in 2019 lawyers in France became aware of the oil painting Fishermen By A River In A Landscape With Town Beyond by Camille Bombois (1883-1970), an important representative of French naive art. 

In the course of further research, museum staff identified another painting in the Oberhaus from the same art collection in Paris, in this case by Maurice Denis (1870-1943). It shows the son of Jewish art collector Marcel-Joseph Monteux – the paintings’ original owner. Monteux possessed a renowned collection of modern art. All his property was confiscated by the German occupiers in Paris in 1942. Monteux was first interned in Paris, then transferred to the Nazi collection camp Drancy near Paris in July 1944 before finally being deported to Auschwitz, where he was murdered on 15 August 1944.   

The two paintings form part of the so-called “CCP collection” at the Oberhausmuseum, which originally comprised 88 works, including paintings and graphic works from different epochs. It is not yet known how these works found their way to Passau during the Second World War. In 1946, they were taken by the US Army from the Oberhaus to the Central Collecting Point (CCP) in Munich in order to determine the rightful owners. Since no claims were made, the objects were returned to the Oberhausmuseum in 1958.            

The city of Passau regards the return of the paintings as a milestone and an important stimulus for research into the museum’s history. A two-year project is now underway involving systematic research into the history of the Oberhausmuseum under National Socialism and the provenance of the museum’s holdings.