Renoir’s return: How a Canadian non-profit emancipated looted artwork

Elen Steinberg, art collector and EJB Steinberg Arts Foundation director, stands with some of her collection at the Gina Godfrey Galley in Toronto in 2024. Photo by Peter J. Thompson/National Post

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A Toronto foundation has helped return a Renoir artwork allegedly looted by the Nazis to the Musée d’Orsay, after a 90-year journey as dramatic as the painting itself.

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Le Jugement de Pâris, a 1908 sanguine sketch of a classic cultural myth, was loaned to the Parisian museum by Canadian non-profit EJB Steinberg Arts Foundation, which bought the artwork in 2023.

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“From what I understand, this painting has a complicated history, but one that is all too common for many great European works of art,” said foundation director Elen Steinberg in an email.

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The drawing depicts three nude women standing in various positions as a fourth figure kneels to the left of the page. The sketch uses browns, reds and terracotta to form their silhouettes without using harsh lines or intense colours.

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Its onetime owner, Ambroise Vollard, was an ambitious European picture dealer, often investing in young, upcoming artists such as Picasso and Renoir. Vollard began in the arts in 1890, selling pieces out of his seventh-floor apartment.

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Le Jugement de Pâris was owned by Vollard until his sudden death in a “suspicious” 1939 car crash. By that point, it is estimated he owned more than 6,000 invaluable pieces that lined the halls of his Paris townhome and gallery.

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Following his death, Vollard’s brother Lucien became the executor to his will. Lucien incited his brother’s apprentice, Martin Fabiani, as an expert appraiser for the collection.

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Vollard’s collection was to be divided between his family and his partner, Madeleine de Galéa. His brother quickly sold over 600 pieces from the family inheritance to Fabiani. But Lucien Vollard did not have legal authorization to sell this property.

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Two weeks prior to Germany’s arrival in France, Fabiani fled to Spain with the collection in his car. He proceeded to Portugal, where he obtained a British origin certificate for Vollard’s property under the context that the art was collected in France before German occupation.

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Fabiani managed hundreds of art pieces into four crates valued at roughly $10,000. The crates were loaded onto the American Excalibur cargo ship travelling from Lisbon to New York in 1940.