World
Survivor gives up Pissarro legal fight
Léone-Noëlle Meyer abandons rights to the painting currently on display in Paris
June 3, 2021 11:03
Léone-Noëlle Meyer abandons rights to the painting currently on display in Paris
June 3, 2021 11:03A Holocaust survivor who this week gave up her fight to keep a Nazi-looted Pissarro masterpiece in France says she was “heard but not listened to.”
Léone-Noëlle Meyer, who is in her 80s, had sought to overturn a 2016 agreement to have the Camille Pissarro artwork, ‘Shepherdess Bringing In the Sheep’, perpetually rotate between Oklahoma and France.
But the heiress and former pediatrician said Tuesday she was giving up all her rights to the painting, currently on display at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.
“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. I was heard but not listened to,” Mrs Meyer said in a statement on Tuesday.
Her lawyer, Ron Soffer, said that as far as she was concerned, the university is now “free to do with it as they please.”
The oil painting, worth 1.5 million euros (around £1.3m), had belonged to Mrs Meyer’s late adoptive parents Yvonne and Raoul Meyer before it was looted by the Nazis during the war.
She was adopted by the couple after her biological family was murdered at Auschwitz.
The painting was among a trove of artworks stolen in 1941 and later donated to the University of Oklahoma in 2000 by the family of an art collector who had bought it in good faith in New York in 1956.
Mrs Meyer discovered the painting online in 2012 and later reached a rotation agreement with the university in 2016.
But the deal became “unworkable” due to the costs of having the painting go back and forth between Paris and Oklahoma, Mrs Meyer’s lawyer argued earlier this year.
The painting will now return to the US in the summer where it will be exhibited at the university’s Fred Jones Jr Museum of art with a plaque outlining its fraught history. It will return to France after three years as part of the agreement.
“Some will regret this perpetual rotation and others will celebrate it, but the students of the of the University of Oklahoma will remember that this work belonged to Yvonne and Raoul Meyer and that it was pillaged by the Nazis in France in 1941.
“I have now regained my freedom at a price that I fully accept,” Mrs Meyer said.