How a French family found their ancestor’s painting at UNC 80 years after Nazis sold it

Scholars and artists have pondered from every angle the dark, moody painting “The Studio of Thomas Couture” during its many times on exhibit at UNC’s Ackland Art Museum.

Which of Couture’s students might have painted it? Could one of the figures in the portrayal of an art class in progress be Couture’s acclaimed student Édouard Manet? Which of Couture’s own pieces are visible in the scene?

The one query no one appears to have made for 50 years after the museum acquired the painting was whether this mid-19th century French work might have been stolen from its Jewish owners by Nazis during World War II.

Katie Ziglar had no reason to ask such a question of “The Studio of Thomas Couture” or any of the other 20,000 pieces in Ackland’s collection when she took over as museum director in 2016.

With a history degree from Chapel Hill, a master’s in Islamic art and architecture from American University in Cairo and nearly three decades of museum experience, Ziglar — like all the art world — knew the story of the “Nazi plunder.”

It began in 1933, when Adolph Hitler rose to power as the German chancellor and ordered his army to begin systemically seizing the belongings of Jewish people. They claimed businesses, financial assets, homes and their furnishings, including — and especially — artwork.

The BBC has reported that before he fought in World War I, Hitler was a casual laborer and artist in Vienna producing postcards and paintings, and that he applied twice to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts but was denied each time.

Hitler designed a museum that was never built

As chancellor, he dreamed of and designed a great museum to be called the Führermuseum that he wanted built in the Austrian city of Linz, near the town where he was born. It would have housed the finest art from throughout Europe and, Hitler believed, outshone the city of Vienna. While he bought some art with his own funds, Hitler planned to fill the museum with thousands of the finest works, mostly confiscated from Jewish families and collectors or from the museums and cathedrals of countries his army invaded: Poland, Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium, the Netherlands.

In 1943, according to the U.S. Army Airborne & Special Operation Museum in Fayetteville, the Allies formed the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) Section, made up of about 345 men and women from 14 countries who had worked as historians, in museums, as artists, archaeologists, architects, librarians and archivists, to identity and protect vulnerable collections ahead of the Germans’ advance.

Still, art historians say Hitler’s forces took trainloads of art and cultural objects — an estimated 5 million pieces, 20% of Europe’s holdings at the time — stashing some for their personal collections, selling some to fund the Nazi war effort, destroying some works in the modernist style Hitler considered an abomination, and hiding what he considered the most important pieces for eventual placement in the future Linz museum.

After Germany’s defeat, the MFAA section, nicknamed the Venus Fixers or the Monuments Men, set about retrieving as many stolen items as possible.

Tens of thousands of pieces seized in the Holocaust were recovered. Using the Nazis’ own records, many were returned to their owners or surviving heirs, or the institutions from which they had been taken. Others were left in limbo, without sufficient information about who had owned them or who might be left to claim them. In France, The New York Times has reported, the post-war government sold thousands of looted pieces and kept the proceeds.

Why the Ackland didn’t know the painting’s history till now

By the time Katie Ziglar joined the Ackland, stories about Nazi plunder being identified and returned to rightful owners were dwindling, despite renewed efforts in the late 1990s and early 2000s, including the 1998 Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets that produced a set of 11 principles on how to deal with modern-day disputes.

In accordance with international agreements and laws, larger museums go through their collections to look for items whose provenance — or lack of it — might suggest Nazi expropriation. Dana Cowen, Ackland’s Sheldon Peck Curator for European and American Art before 1950, said it might be considered a red flag if a pre-World War II piece was bought in France, Germany or Belgium, where a lot of art was changing hands after the war, or if there are gaps in the work’s ownership history.

But Ackland is not a large museum, and no one had ever asked about “The Studio of Thomas Couture.”

Until May 2022, when Ziglar got a letter from a lawyer in France notifying her that the museum had a painting that belonged to someone else.

The letter was from Corinne Hershkovitch, a Paris attorney specializing in the art market, research provenance, circulation of cultural goods and the protection of cultural heritage and intellectual property.

Hershkovitch had approached the Ackland on behalf of the heirs of Armand Isaac Dorville, who was a successful lawyer and an art collector in Paris when Hitler came to power. Fearing persecution because he was Jewish, Dorville fled Paris in 1940 after the Nazis defeated France. He transferred much of his art collection to a home in the South of France, away from occupying forces, and moved there with part of his collection.

He died in 1941 of natural causes, willing numerous artworks to national museums and leaving use of the estate to his brother and sisters and ownership of it to his nieces. All these heirs were Jewish and subject to the increasing threat of persecution.

Nazis seized control of an auction, took the proceeds

A few months after Dorville’s death, a friend of the family organized an auction of the collection of more than 450 paintings, drawings, pastels and sculptures to keep the collection from being confiscated and, with the proceeds, to help Dorville’s heirs escape the Nazis. The sale was scheduled for four consecutive days in June 1942 at the Hotel Savoy in Nice.

The sale went on, but on the first day the Nazis seized control and then confiscated the proceeds.

Shortly after the sale, one of Dorville’s sisters, her two daughters and their two young daughters, aged 2 and 4, were arrested and sent to Auschwitz where they all died.

Little was known about what had happened to the splintered collection until Bavarian authorities raided the Munich apartment of a man named Cornelius Gurlitt in 2012 and found a trove of more than 1,400 works of art that had been confiscated from Jewish owners or purchased at rock-bottom prices as families tried to escape Nazi persecution.

It was the largest group of Nazi-looted works found in decades.

The New York Times reported that Gurlitt, who had been selling pieces over the years, may have inherited them from his mother. His father was part Jewish but had bought art for Hitler.

After the Gurlitt discovery, an international task force was formed to sort through the works and try to determine proper ownership.

Task force member Emmanuelle Polack, an art historian and provenance researcher who also works for the Louvre, came across an Impressionist painting in the Gurlitt stash with a label on the back bearing a catalog number from an auction in Nice. Polack, whom an art writer dubbed “the Indiana Jones of looted paintings,” traveled to the city and found records of the auction, which turned out to be the sale of the Dorville estate, one of the largest such auctions the Nazis conducted.

Ultimately, three pieces from Dorville’s estate were found in Gurlitt’s trove.

Polack tracked down Dorville’s heirs to let them know what she had found.

Ackland Museum put its collection online

In 2020, the family hired a sleuth of its own. Using the catalog from the 1942 auction Polack had found, provenance researcher Eléonore Delabre of Paris began looking for more of the 450 pieces of Dorville’s scattered collection, starting in an art history library that said the piece was housed at Ackland,

“The Studio of Thomas Couture,” believed to have been painted in 1854 or 1855, was one of the pieces whose listing in the auction catalog included a photo of the work, giving Delabre access to a tool the Monuments Men never dreamed of.

As it happens, the Ackland Museum made early use of the research and teaching potential of the internet, putting photos of its collection online by around the year 2000.

When Delabre hit “search,” up popped “The Studio of Thomas Couture,” in the care of the art museum at the flagship public university in North Carolina.

It took Ziglar and Cowen, the curator, some time to vet the claim. Scrutinizing the file, Cowen found that Ackland bought the painting from a dealer in Paris in 1972 during the tenure of the museum’s first director, Joseph Curtis Sloane. The museum paid about $1,100 for the piece, Cowen said, using money from the William A. Whitaker Art Fund, an endowment.

Cowen and Ziglar don’t know if Sloane knew or suspected the piece had been part of a Nazi-run auction, and the seller didn’t provide its provenance. According to a UNC biography, Sloane held undergraduate and graduate degrees from Princeton, served as an officer in the U.S. Navy during World War II and was a distinguished professor at UNC specializing in 19th-century French painting. He ran the Ackland from 1958 to 1978. He died in 1998.

Cowen brought in a conservator to make sure the painting was authentic, not a copy, and to look for a signature the 1942 catalog had described. The conservator confirmed its authenticity and said the signature had been damaged when previous owners scrubbed the painting, twice.

Its size matched the catalog description.

Some other museums, including ones in France, have argued in court that while the Nazis’ seizure of the proceeds is not disputed, the sale of Dorville’s collection wasn’t “forced” and therefore Holocaust restitution rules don’t require the auctioned works to be returned. But once the Ackland knew it had a piece of the collection, it began the process of giving it back: seeking approval from UNC’s chancellor and removing it from the museum’s inventory.

Ackland has its own history

The Ackland itself has a connection to the exploitation of a race of people, but in its own country. William Hayes Ackland, whose bequest founded the museum and whose body is entombed within it, inherited his fortune. His mother’s first husband made the money by founding what became the largest slave-trading company in the United States. The museum acknowledges this bitter truth on its website.

Ziglar and Cowen say the museum’s handling of the Dorville piece shows its commitment to ethical stewardship of the cultural artifacts in its care.

In a private ceremony at the museum on Jan. 16, a Tuesday, when the museum is closed to the public, Ziglar presented the painting to Dorville’s great-nephew, Raphaël Falk, becoming the first U.S. museum to return a piece of the Dorville collection to his heirs. Delabre, the family’s researcher, says at least 10 other pieces are housed in American museums, including three at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, one at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and one at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut.

Delabre also made the trip from France for the ceremony.

Now back in its home country, “The Studio of Thomas Couture” will no longer be available to art students at the Ackland who want to see how painters learned portraiture in the 1850s. But in an email exchange after the ceremony, Delabre said the museum’s restitution of the painting could teach a more important lesson.

“Returning a work allows us to honor the duty of remembrance, towards all those who were persecuted during World War II,” she wrote. “All those who lost their property, their identity, or their life, as the three women and two little girls of the Dorville family, deported and murdered at Auschwitz.

“Returning a painting, almost 80 years later, is an act which shows that there is no impunity for violence and persecution,” Delabre wrote. “It is therefore a gesture related to the past, but also a message for the future.”