Last modified on Tue 1 Jun 2021 14.24 EDT
A French heiress has been forced to give up her battle to recover a Pissarro painting the Nazis looted from her adoptive parents.
Léone-Noëlle Meyer, 81, announced on Tuesday she had been left with “no choice” but to drop legal action to retrieve La Bergère Rentrant des Moutons (Shepherdess Bringing in Sheep) after she was threatened with large fines if she continued.
Last month a Paris court ruled that a contested contract Meyer signed five years ago, sharing the Pissarro with a US university to whom it had been donated, overrode a 1945 French law requiring the restitution of Nazi looted artworks to their rightful owners.
Léone Meyer in 2015. Photo by Bertrand Rindoff Petroff/Getty Images.
During the German occupation of France during World War II, Nazis stole the French Impressionist painting from the bank where the Meyer family was storing it when they fled the country.
Meyer’s biological family was killed at Auschwitz, but the now 81-year-old was adopted by Holocaust survivor Raoul Meyer, who attempted to recover his looted collection. Unfortunately, the theft occurred in 1941, and by the time he found the Pissarro painting, in Geneva in 1951, Swiss courts had dismissed his case because the statute of limitations had expired.
Aaron and Clara Weitzenhoffer, who had purchased the painting in good faith, were found to be its lawful owners. In 2012, Léone Meyer tracked down the painting again, this time at the University of Oklahoma, where Clara Weitzenhoffer had donated it in 2000.