A Renoir painting of two women in a garden — plundered from its Jewish owner in 1941, during the Nazi occupation of Paris — was returned Wednesday to the French woman who is the owner’s last living heir.
“I’m very thankful to be able to show my beloved family, wherever they are, that after all they’ve been through, there is justice,” an emotional Sylvie Sulitzer, 60, said as Manhattan US Attorney Geoffrey Berman pulled off a white cloth to reveal the 12-by-15-inch impressionist painting.
“Huge emotions,” she said, her eyes welling with tears, of seeing the painting, looted 17 years before her birth. It was unveiled in a third-floor gallery the Museum of Jewish Heritage on Battery Place in Manhattan.
“Very important for me as a human being, a Jewish person, is that you have people who work for justice,” she added. “It means a lot.”
Pierre-Auguste Renoir was 78 and crippled with arthritis when he painted “Deux Femmes Dans Un Jardin” in 1919, and during his final months in his home on the French Riviera, an assistant would insert a brush into his deformed fists before he could paint.
“Deux Femmes” was in the collection of Sulitzer’s grandfather, Alfred Weinberger, when the Nazis occupied France and looted his bank vault.
In addition to “Deux Femmes,” they took from Weinberger’s collection four other Renoirs and a work by Eugène Delacroix, the locations of which remain unknown.
Weinberger, who became a member of the French Resistance during World War II, died in 1977, after decades of trying to recover the art stolen from him, authorities said.
Since the Nazi’s defeat in 1945, “Deux Femmes” changed hands and locations many times — traveling to Johannesburg, London, Zurich and finally, New York, where Sulitzer’s lawyers found it being offered for sale by Christie’s in 2013.
Sadly, Sulitzer, her grandfather’s sole heir, said she may have to sell the painting in order to pay back restitution she has already collected from the German and French governments.
“Today, as we celebrate the just return of this painting to its rightful owner, we also remember the uniqueness of the Holocaust and reaffirm our commitment to ensure that the words ‘Never forget, never again’ never ring hollow,” Berman said.
“Hopefully, this event brings some measure of justice to Madame Sylvie Sulitzer and her family.”
Robert Morgenthau, 99, the museum’s chairman emeritus and a former Manhattan US attorney and district attorney, in thanking Berman, noted that “stolen art is a difficult and complicated business.”
Additional reporting by Laura Italiano
