The Kunsthaus Zurich will offer Claude Monet’s painting L’Homme à l’ombrelle (1865/1867) for sale under an agreement with the heirs of textile entrepreneur Carl Sachs and his wife Margarete, who sold the canvas under duress after fleeing the Nazi regime in Germany. They lent the painting to the Kunsthaus in 1934 and emigrated to Switzerland five years later. When they fled, they had just 10 Reichsmarks each, the only amount they were allowed to keep.
Art patrons in their home city of Breslau, they had to take out a loan against the value of works they had lent to the Kunsthaus in order to finance their entry into Switzerland; they sold some 13 works by the time Carl Sachs died, including the Monet to the Kunsthaus, due to financial hardship. The Monet sale occurred just weeks after they fled the Third Reich and was the first sale Sachs made under duress.
The two parties have reached an “amicable agreement” in which the museum’s share of the proceeds will go into its acquisitions fund in accordance with the code of ethics of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), said the Kunsthaus in an announcement.
The settlement grows out of a research project initiated in 2023 by board chair Philipp Hildebrand and director Ann Demeester, who had taken up their posts in 2022. They formed a team, led by head of research Joachim Sieber, which had the goal of identifying works that could be classified as having been confiscated as a result of Nazi persecution. Its research is ongoing.
“I am grateful that, through constructive dialogue based on the extensive research work, we have been able to reach an agreement with the heirs of Carl Sachs,” said Hildebrand. “Naturally, we regret that this wonderful painting will probably leave the Kunsthaus after its sale, as part of the just and fair solution arrived at. At the same time, this step underlines the seriousness of our provenance strategy and our fundamental approach of acting transparently and seeking solutions for any work in our collection where there are substantiated indications of duress resulting from Nazi persecution.”
Just days ago, the museum pulled five works from display.
The German Lost Art Foundation lists the Monet canvas and identifies the subject as French botanist and geologist Victor Jacquemont. The Sachs’s collection reportedly also included examples by French artists such as Gustave Courbet, Eugène Delacroix, Francisco de Goya, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
Speaking for the Sachs family, their attorney, Imke Gielen of von Trott zu Solz Lammek attorneys in Berlin, said that the heirs “welcome the Kunsthaus Zurich’s readiness to arrive at a just and fair solution for the work.”