The painting, acquired by the French state in 1980, it was being kept at the Musée d’Orsay in France, one of the main museums in Paris.
Previously, it belonged to Nora Stiasny, who lived in Purkersdorf, near Vienna, Austria.
Austria was annexed by the Nazis in 1938 during the Anschluss. Stiasny’s property was gradually confiscated and, in August of that year, she was forced to sell her painting to an acquaintance – now titled “Rosiers sous les Arbres” or “Rosebushes under the trees” – at a reduced price for the order to survive , said the French minister of culture, Roselyne Bachelot.
In April 1942, Stiasny and his mother, Amalie, were deported and killed in Nazi-occupied Poland, the Izbica ghetto or the Belzec death camp, Bachelot said. Stiasny’s husband, Paul, and their son, Otto, were deported to the Terezin camp, near Prague, and then to Auschwitz.
French Culture Minister Roselyne Bachelot said that returning the painting was France’s “deep duty”. Credit: Alain Jocard / Pool / AFP / Getty Images
In 2019, the French Ministry of Culture started trying to identify stolen works in its collections.
Bachelot said that after a long process to identify the original owners of the artwork, the painting would be returned to Stiasny’s descendants.
She added that restitution of confiscated Jewish properties was France’s “deep duty”.
“The decision we made is obviously difficult. It means bringing from the national collections a masterpiece, which is, in fact, the only painting by Gustav Klimt that France possessed,” she said.
“It is not a disgust for me, quite the contrary,” she said.
“We know that the persecution of the Jews took many forms. Often, before the methodical elimination, before the extermination, there were thefts of property of the Jews, ordered to abandon everything.”
Born in Austria in 1862, Klimt was one of the founding members of the painting school known as the Vienna Secession, an avant-garde artistic group at the turn of the century.
The artist is perhaps best known for his painting “O Beijo”, one of the most recognized works in the world.