A 98-year-old man, living in the United States, has been fighting for nine years to recover a painting he saw as a child in his grandfather’s villa in Berlin. The painting—a Van Gogh from 1889—today hangs in one of the most visited museums in the world.
Klaus Kallmann He was born in Berlin in 1928 and still retains the precise memory of a vibrant painting that adorned his grandfather’s villa in the Westend neighborhood.
The painting is called Saint-Paul Hospital in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence and today it is part of the permanent collection of the Orsay Museum from Paris. Kallmann claims that this painting was taken from his family under Nazi persecution and demands its restitution. France has not yet resolved the case.
Klaus’s grandfather, Felix Kallmann (1853-1938), was a lawyer and renowned art collector, who headed two top companies: Deutsche Gasglühlicht – known for Osram lamps – and the film production company Universum Film AG of Babelsberg.
He lived with his wife Ernestine in a villa built in 1910-1911 on Ahornallee. Upstairs lived his son Hartmut—a doctorate physicist under the direction of Max Planck—with his wife and three children, including little Klaus.
They were exactly the type of economic and intellectual elite that the Nazi regime targeted when it came to power in 1933. Hartmut lost his research position at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute in July of that year. Family stocks plummeted.
Felix Kallmann died of a heart attack in 1938. Hartmut, protected from deportation because he was married to a woman considered Aryan, finally emigrated to the United States after the war. Klaus Kallmann lives there to this day.
The void in the history of the work
The crux of the conflict is a «gap» of between one and two years in the documentary trajectory of the painting. In June 1932, Felix Kallmann tried to sell the painting to the State Gallery of Berlin, which rejected the offer claiming that it already had several Van Goghs. The trail is interrupted there. The work only reappeared in August 1933—or at the latest in February 1934—in the Paris gallery of the renowned dealer. Paul Rosenberg.
«This situation leaves a gap of one or two years and a bigger question: should a sale by a German Jew in early 1933 necessarily be considered forced? It is the first time we face this type of configuration in France,» he said David Ziviehead of the French mission for investigation and restitution of cultural property looted between 1933 and 1945, in statements to the newspaper The World.
The Zivie mission, after a lengthy investigation, declined in late May to issue a final determination. He acknowledged that the Kallmann family had «undoubtedly been victims of anti-Semitic persecution and suffered dispossession in that context,» but noted that it was «difficult to establish with certainty whether Van Gogh’s painting was among the works sold under duress.»
A hypothesis circulates among researchers: both this Van Gogh and another from the same collection – today in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid – were originally acquired in 1914 in the Paul Cassirer gallery in Berlin.
Both reappeared in Rosenberg’s hands in the same period. They may have followed the same path from Berlin in 1933, perhaps through the Cassirer gallery itself, which at that time moved its inventory to its Amsterdam branch to evade Nazi confiscations.
Zivie described this scenario as «realistic», although he clarified that there is no archival evidence to confirm it. From 1936, the painting changed hands several times until dealer Max Kaganovitch donated it to the Louvre. In 1986 it was transferred to the Musée d’Orsay.
«Kaganovitch, who was a Jewish refugee, had himself been persecuted by the Nazis. This case is more complicated than a direct case of looting,» said historian Ines Rotermund-Reynard, a provenance researcher at the Musée d’Orsay.
«We have crossed all the archival records, but we remain uncertain,» he added, without ruling out that «one day new evidence may emerge.»
The Washington Principles and the pressure of time
Klaus Kallmann’s lawyer, Markus Stoetzelmaintains that this is «a clear case of looting» and supports its position in the Washington Principles, a set of guidelines signed in 1998 by 44 countries—including France—that established a framework for identifying works of art looted during Nazism.
Those principles advocate a broad interpretation of dispossession, including sales by the victim himself if motivated by persecution, and underscore the need to consider «unavoidable gaps or ambiguities in provenance, given the magnitude of the elapsed time and circumstances of the Holocaust era.»
A companion document, the “Best Practices for the Washington Principles,” adopted on March 5, 2024 by signatory states, states that “the sale of art and cultural property by a person persecuted during the Holocaust era between 1933 and 1945 may be considered equivalent to an involuntary transfer of ownership depending on the circumstances of the sale.”
This criterion was endorsed by the French Court of Cassation in a ruling of November 26, 2025 on the collection of Armand Isaac Dorville.
The late reconstruction of the history of Felix’s collection has an explanation that Stötzel contextualized: «Until the 1970s, the priority was rebuilding lives: people fought over pensions, property, and destroyed careers. Only in the late 1990s did the international community become aware of how much work was still pending.»
The case is now in the hands of the Commission for the Compensation of Victims of Plunder (CIVS)which is currently processing around 90 restitution files.
Its president, Frédérique Dreifuss-Netter, indicated in a letter sent to the claimant in mid-May that the case is considered «a priority» and that it is expected to reach the panel from September.
For the family’s American lawyer, Mel Urbachthe delay is already unsustainable: «For Klaus Kallmann, every week is like a year. He has shown extraordinary patience. Now we believe it is time for this painting to return to the family.»
