Wooing the Public to Recover Art

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Alain Monteagle unfolded his blue chair and set up a white table at a vegetable market last weekend, covering it with brochures titled “The Looting of Art in War.” As a baker nearby peddled croissants that morning, Mr. Monteagle tried to sell his version of justice.

“We will tell our story to people in two’s and three’s, if that’s the only way we can get it back,” Mr. Monteagle, 67, a retired history teacher from outside Paris, said.

“It” is a painting by John Constable that was seized from his family, French Jews, during World War II and now hangs a few blocks away at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, a landmark salmon-colored Art Deco building in the center of town.

Swiss museum officials do not dispute that the painting was looted — they acknowledge the fact on a plaque below it. But they say that the museum accepted it in good faith, and that Swiss law does not require restitution in such circumstances.

So Mr. Monteagle and his relatives have taken to the soapbox. They are using the local Swiss system of popular referendums — which require the signatures of at least 10 percent of registered voters, 2,500 in this case — to  bring the issue before elected officials, since the museum is owned by the town. And they are taking the early, tentative steps required to force the local legislature to put an issue to a vote; if the legislature were to approve, more signatures could be gathered for a communitywide vote.

In this border town of more than 38,000 in “Watch Valley,” the hub of the Swiss watch industry, referendums typically decide matters like issuing parking passes, not war reparations.

Indeed, Marc Masurovsky, founder of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project in Washington, described the family’s petitioning as unprecedented in efforts to recover art lost during the war.

“It will shed light,” he said, “on the denial of due process to victims of Nazi plunder by Swiss legal authorities and their unwillingness to call into question the good faith of dealers who acted in collusion with German agents of the Nazi government.”

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