Léone-Noëlle Meyer, the 81-year-old heiress to a Jewish family from France, had been fighting for years with the University of Oklahoma to regain ownership of La Bergere rentrant des moutons (Shepherdess Bringing in Sheep), an 1886 impressionist painting by Camille Pissarro.
After the war, the painting ended up in Switzerland and was later found in a private collection in the US before being given to the university in 2000.
Meyer had first found the painting in Oklahoma back in 2012 and tried to claim it, but the statute of limitations had expired. According to AFP, Meyer was declared the painting's rightful owner in 2016 and a deal was struck that would rotate the ownership of the painting between the US and France.
Meyer had originally dreamed of leaving the painting to the French impressionist art museum the Musee d'Orsay, where it is currently on display. However, the 2016 deal specified that the painting would return to the ownership of the University of Oklahoma should Meyer not find a museum in France that would take full custody of it after her death – and due to the expensive transportation of the painting between the US and France, no French gallery wanted to take it, according to the BBC.
Meyer had fought to keep it from leaving France in July, but lost a court case, with the ruling stating she violated a settlement she herself negotiated. However, Meyer, who is one of the richest women in France, claims that she was forced into signing the 2016 deal in the first place.
“After all these years, I have no other choice but to take heed of the inescapable conclusion that it will be impossible to persuade the different parties to whose attention I have brought this matter,” Meyer said in a prepared statement, according to The Art Newspaper. “I was heard but not listened to.”
The paintings of Pissarro have a sordid history with the Holocaust, as numerous paintings by the French impressionist were looted by the Nazis. One of them, La Cueillette des Pois (Picking Peas), was one of 90 pieces of art stolen in 1943 from the collection of French businessman Simon Bauer. This artwork was also the subject of a long legal battle, with Bauer's descendants fighting to get it back from its owners, who had purchased it at an auction in 1995.
Relying on an April 1945 ordinance on the invalidity of dispossessed property, Bauer's descendants ultimately won the case and regained ownership of the painting in November 2017. The ruling was later upheld in 2020.However, in another incident in 2020 regarding a Pissarro painting, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, Spain, won a court battle to retain ownership of a painting by the French impressionist, titled Rue St.-Honore, Apres-Midi, Effet de Pluie.The original owner, Lilly Cassirer, reportedly did not know the painting was still in existence when she accepted a reparations payment of $13,000 for the painting from the German government in 1958, and her descendants sued for ownership, but multiple court rulings ruled against them.
According to the 2009 Holocaust Era Assets Conference, approximately 100,000 artworks out of 650,000 seized by the Vichy regime are yet to be returned to their original owners or their heirs.
Eytan Halon and Marcy Oster/JTA contributed to this report.