A Claude Monet pastel titled Bord de Mer (1865), looted during the Second World War, has been returned to the Parlagi family after 84 years.
According to the report by Sarah N. Lynch in Reuters, the artwork belonged to Adalbert and Hilda Parlagi, who bought the painting at an auction in 1936 in Austria. After the Nazis’ invasion in 1938, the couple fled leaving the painting in storage at a shipping company warehouse with all their belongings. In 1940, the Monet pastel was seized (along with seven other artworks from their collection) and purchased by a Nazi art dealer, before disappearing in 1941.
Since then, Adalbert Parlagi searched for the stolen art. After he died in 1981, his son took over the investigation until he passed away in 2012. The painting was finally returned to Adalbert and Hilda Parlagi’s granddaughters, Helen Lowe and Françoise Parlagi, on Wednesday, October 8th, 2024.
In recent years, the Commission for Looted Art in Europe learned that the Monet pastel had been acquired by a United States art dealer in 2017 and then sold to a private collector in 2019. In 2021, the FBI became involved in the investigation and, in 2023, discovered the artwork in the sale listing at a Houston (Texas) art gallery.
After contacting the owners, who had no knowledge of the provenance issues concerning the painting, FBI agents and New York City police detectives succeeded in returning it to the Parlagi family as the new owners voluntarily surrendered the painting and their ownership rights.
In March 2024, Austria already returned to the Parlagi family a chalk drawing of German composer Richard Wagner by Franz Lenbach, after the Commission located it at the Albertina Museum in Vienna. Investigations are still ongoing for other missing artworks from this collection, including a watercolour by Paul Signac, titled Seine in Paris (Pont de Grenelle) from 1903, which had been acquired by the same Nazi art dealer who had bought the looted Monet pastel. The Signac painting might be difficult to find as, according to the FBI, it may have been featured under a different name over the years.
Art crime/cultural heritage protection specialist and researcher in AI, Machine Learning and Deep Learning. Expert in Impressionist and post-Impressionist art. Provenance researcher and specialist in looted art cases. Master degrees in Art Market and Art History from the Ecole du Louvre and Sorbonne University in Paris and Master degree in Information and Communication Sciences from the CELSA-Sorbonne. Work experiences at the Wildenstein Plattner Institute (2018-2019), Artcurial Paris (2020) and on the EU-funded RITHMS project. Contributor to articles in the Journal of Cultural Heritage Crime, Journal of Art Crime, on the Wildenstein Plattner Institute website and on Hugging Face. Research on AI, more specifically at the moment on LLM/VLM. Studying the impact of AI and new technologies on the art world and provenance research. Author of a Master’s thesis on the state of Impressionism in today’s art market (Ecole du Louvre – 2020) and a Master’s thesis on Claude Monet’s first journey to the Mediterranean (under the supervision of Professor Pierre Wat – Sorbonne Paris I, 2019). Currently working on a book project.