Two French families battle over a missing Monet

PARIS - More than 70 years after it was plundered by the Nazis, a missing painting by Monet that depicts the shimmering blue rapids of the Creuse River has pitted two of the wealthiest and most prominent families in France against each other.

Ginette Heilbronn Moulin, 85, the chairwoman of the Galeries Lafayette department store chain, is pursuing a claim that the Wildenstein family, an international dynasty of French art dealers, is concealing information about the stolen work. The canvas, which belonged to the Heilbronn family, vanished in 1941 after a Gestapo raid on a family bank vault.

Last summer, after Moulin filed a criminal complaint against the Wildensteins, the French authorities ordered a preliminary investigation. An anti-art-trafficking squad is sifting through World War II documents to pick up the trail of the work, "Torrent de la Creuse," Monet's 1889 study of the confluence of the Creuse and the Petite Creuse rivers in central France.

"It's not a question of the price of the painting," Moulin said in an interview here in her art-filled apartment here. "It's a question of a victory against the Germans and ..." Her voice trailed off.

The Wildensteins, who have been selling art for five generations, have steadfastly denied any knowledge of the painting's whereabouts. But Daniel Wildenstein, an Impressionist scholar who died in 2001, had included it in two of his widely embraced inventories of Monet's work. In both he listed it as being in a private collection - an anonymous owner in the first reference and an unidentified American owner in 1996.

Suspicions aroused

The suspicions of Moulin and her family were aroused last year when more than 30 artworks that had been reported missing or stolen were found in a vault at the Wildenstein Institute, a nonprofit research organization the Wildensteins run from a mansion on the Right Bank. The items, most of which had vanished years earlier during the settlement of estates, were recovered in an unrelated investigation. But members of one Jewish family told the police that they believed a sculpture of theirs recovered from the vault could have been looted by the Nazis because it appeared on no postwar estate lists.

Guy Wildenstein, the billionaire who leads the family business from New York, declined through his lawyers to comment on Moulin's accusations. But he has contended that the institute never knowingly hid missing works, saying the institute simply lacked a full inventory of what was in its vault.

Lawyers for Wildenstein, who is Jewish, have strenuously denied that any of the seized items were Nazi loot.

The Monet vanished in a Gestapo raid on a bank vault in the southwest of France, from which 10 paintings belonging to Moulin's father, Max Heilbronn, were taken. Heilbronn was a member of the Resistance whose French Jewish family was forced out of the historic Galeries Lafayette store on Boulevard Haussmann in Paris and replaced by Nazi collaborators. He was imprisoned in Buchenwald with other French resisters, including Etienne Moulin, who later married Heilbronn's daughter, Ginette, and took charge of the Galeries Lafayette.

Some works recovered

Four of the family's works have been recovered, including a Renoir painting of pastel roses that the family spotted when it came up for sale at Christie's in 2004. Two Pissaro landscapes from the bank vault were also recovered after the war from the Berlin home of Hermann Goering, Hitler's second in command.

Even now, though, more than half of the artworks taken from Jewish families in France and Belgium during World War II remain missing.

Alexandre Bronstein, whose family's sculpture was found in the Wildenstein vault, said new clues could come when archives from a 1949 war-crimes trial of a German diplomat who organized the looting are unsealed in 2024.

What drives Moulin to keep searching after so many years?

"This painting represents some of the history of our family," she said. "It was my grandson who pushed me to react. He doesn't understand how this could happen."

Moulin said that in the 1950s, her mother, Paulette Heilbronn, met with an art dealer who had a photograph of the painting, and that he pledged to recover it. But when Heilbronn approached the dealer again, he told her it was in the possession of people who were "untouchable," Moulin said.

Years later the family discovered references to the missing painting in the 1979 and the 1996 editions of Daniel Wildenstein's five-volume inventory, or catalogue raisonne, of Monet's work. Such catalogs list all known authenticated works by an artist and serve as something of an imprimatur. No major auction house, for example, will sell a work as a Monet unless it is listed in the Wildenstein inventory. The catalogs' mention of the missing Monet fueled suspicions in Moulin's family that the Wildensteins either had the painting or knew where it was, she said.

Stymied inquiries

But the Wildensteins repeatedly stymied her family's inquiries, Moulin said. In 2002 records show that her lawyers asked Guy Wildenstein for help in locating the painting and that he referred them to the Wildenstein Institute, which said it had no information about the painting's whereabouts.

In recent months Guy Wildenstein has been interviewed at least seven times by investigators in connection with the institute case, according to confidential French judicial records. That case is an outgrowth of the family's long-running internal clash over the multimillion-dollar estate of Daniel Wildenstein, Guy Wildenstein's father.

The elder Wildenstein's widow, Sylvia Roth, pursued lawsuits against her stepson Guy until her death in 2010 and accused the family of hiding its wealth and artworks through trusts in offshore accounts. The raid on the Wildenstein Institute was part of the fact-finding in that case.

"When we heard about these strange stories, I thought it was the right moment to struggle to get back the painting," said Guillaume Houze, 30, a grandson of Moulin's.

The quest to find the missing Monet has reached the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It owns a Monet that is described as a near twin of the missing painting. Its work, "Torrent of the Petite Creuse at Fresselines," was purchased by the Wildensteins in 1958 from a private collector, then sold to another private collector, Adelaide Milton de Groot. She bequeathed it in 1967 to the Met, which lists it as "Rapids on the Petite Creuse at Fresselines."

It is not on display, though the museum has posted a copy online with a notation that says it "is nearly identical to another painting (private collection.)" The Met says its information about the other painting was taken from the Wildenstein catalog.

Paintings 'clearly different'

Last summer the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, a New York-based organization that tries to arrange for the restitution of property to Holocaust survivors and their heirs, questioned the museum about the provenance of its painting.

The museum said the paintings are clearly different. It also showed the organization a typed, unsigned English translation of a 1961 letter in French from Max Heilbronn to Daniel Wildenstein, in which Heilbronn acknowledges that the Met's work "cannot be the one which was stolen from me during the war." The museum has not been able to find a copy of the original letter.

"There's no question that this is not the canvas," said Harold Holzer, a spokesman for the Met. "The Met has made its collections available to scholars and to students and, when necessary, to people doing research on paintings for legal questions. There is nothing hidden here." He said there had never been a formal challenge to the painting.

The person who could perhaps provide the most information about the mystery, Daniel Wildenstein, is buried below two obelisks in Montparnasse Cemetery here. A few months before Wildenstein died, Moulin's New York lawyer asked him why he reported in his 1996 catalog that her painting was held by a private collector.

A few weeks later a brief letter was sent out by the Wildenstein Institute, dated Sept. 12, 2001, carrying Daniel Wildenstein's typed name and signature.

"I regret," the letter said, "that this error slipped into the new edition of the book."

It contained no other information about the painting.

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