The Belgian government announced that it will return a painting that, according to investigations, had been stolen from a Jewish couple who fled Germany at the start of World War II.
The painting, a nature with flowers, was painted in 1913 by Lovis Corinth and had been stored in the Royal Museum of Art in Brussels, along with 30 other pieces that were suspected of having been stolen during the Second War.
After decades of analysis and investigation, experts concluded that the painting had been stolen by German officials from a warehouse containing objects of German Jews who had left for refuge.
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Gustav and Emma Mayer were forced to abandon all their belongings to escape to England and a box containing the painting and other objects was stolen already at the beginning of the war.
Finally, on May 26 of this year, the Belgian Secretary of State for Economic Recovery, Thomas Dermine, sent a letter to the Mayer family’s lawyers, confirming the intention to return the piece.
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Once the painting is returned, Mayer’s family will have to return to the German state around 4,100 euros, the estimated value of the art piece. This is because at the end of the 1960s the Mayer family had already received compensation in Germany for the stolen property. Therefore, upon receiving the painting, the family must return part of that compensation.
A commission under the authority of the Belgian Prime Minister worked between 1998 and 2001 on looted Jewish properties in Belgium, which resulted in the passage of a law that opens up the right to compensation.
In 2008, another commission in charge of compensation had identified 5,210 cases of improperly appropriated objects, although most of those pieces have already been returned.
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