Two years after the adoption of a law on the restitution of property seized during the Franco period, the Spanish Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, officially handed over to the Francisco Giner de Los Rios Foundation the first stolen work of his inventory: The portrait of Don Francisco Giner de Los Rios, made in 1852 by the painter Manuel Ojeda y Siles (the father of Francisco Giner de Los Rios). “For a long time remained at the bottom of a cupboard in the National Library of Spain”the painting was returned to the foundation 80 years after its confiscation by the Franco regime. “The canvas now returns to the forefront of our history, it returns home”declared Ernest Urtasun during the restitution ceremony.
The painting was confiscated in 1940. At that time, Francisco Giner de Los Ríos had been working for four decades at the Free Educational Institution of Madrid. The rebel troops who besieged Madrid in 1939 burst into the premises of the establishment. In 1940, it was banned and the property, including the portrait of Francisco Giner, was entrusted to the Ministry of National Education.
In 1978, a decree recognized the Francisco Giner de los Ríos Foundation as heir to the institution and entitled to its property. Restitution takes place in practice thanks to the memorial law of 2022. This law in fact opens the right to restitution of property seized (article 31) under Francoism. It gives rise in June 2024 to an inventory of seized goods carried out by the General Directorate of Cultural Heritage and Fine Arts (DGPC). This inventory, devoted exclusively to the sixteen state museums, today lists 5,000 pieces: paintings, jewelry, ceramics, sculptures, fans, furniture and tableware. These seizures date back to when the Republic government created the Art Treasury Authority (JTA) to protect property from looting and bombing. At the end of the war, the Franco regime, which came to power, created the National Artistic Heritage Defense Service (SPDAN) in order to return the works to their owners, which was only partially done. Most of these works were then given to various institutions and museums.
If the handing over of this painting is symbolic “it is a small painting in its format, but large and decisive in its meaning” authorities explain in El Paíssignificant research work still remains to be done. Indeed, some people are surprised by the low quantity and value of the inventory of stolen goods from national museums. It would be necessary to look at private regional or municipal museums, which also hold looted works. In 2021, during his research, researcher Arturo Colorado Castellary notably identified no less than 17,000 unreturned works, of which 8,710 had been on deposit in museums, public organizations, churches or even with individuals under Franco.
