French Family Seeks Painting in Texas Museum

A Matisse painting acquired a half-century ago by a Texas family may have been among hundreds of works stolen by Nazis from a French art collector.

The 11 heirs of Alphonse Kann are tracing the chain of ownership for the 1907 oil-on-canvas landscape, “La Riviere aux Aloes” (Brook With Aloes), by Henri Matisse. It has been on display in Houston’s Menil Collection since 1993.

Francis Warin of Paris, Kann’s great-nephew, contacted the museum in a letter last July.

“We are doing research on the piece, as is Warin,” Menil director Ned Rifkin told the Houston Chronicle for a story published Friday. “We want to do what is right and best, and we will.”

Warin has spent several years trying to track more than 1,000 artworks seized by German occupying forces from Kann in a 1940 raid on the collector’s home near Paris.

The Matisse work, part of the Houston display of 20th century art, was acquired in 1950 by John and Dominique de Menil. Their private art collection is housed in the museum that bears their name.

Paris’ Le Monde reported in October that the Houston Matisse oil appeared in photographs of Kann’s home taken before World War II.

The Kann estate has already recovered two Pablo Picasso oils from French and Swiss collections. The estate also initiated claims to two other Picassos--one at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and another owned by a French regional museum--and has sued to reacquire other works.

Efforts to return plundered Nazi art to its rightful owners have intensified recently. Heads of some of the nation’s largest museums testified earlier this month before the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets, pledging to identify artworks suspected of having been stolen by the Nazis.

The family says Kann’s collection was stolen from his home outside Paris in October 1940 after Kann, who was Jewish, moved to London ahead of the Nazi occupation of France for what he thought would be a temporary stay. He never returned and died in 1948.