Ten months after its Armand Dorville judgment, which specified the conditions for qualifying a dispossessed sale, the Court of Cassation ruled on another difficulty: the identification of the property for which restitution is requested.
Following the Second World War, collector Simon Bauer obtained a decision based on the order of April 21, 1945 which declared the sale of his collection null and void in the context of anti-Semitic spoliations. Since then, his heirs have been tracking down the stolen works, following the example of the restitution of Pea picking of Camille Pissarro approved by the Court of Cassation on July 1, 2020 or of The knitter by the same artist.
In 2017 the heirs discovered that a painting by Pissarro entitled A spinner, Breton interior will be auctioned. Believing that it was the stolen painting The knitter the heirs obtained the placement of the work under sequestration in 2019 and sued the current holders for claim. The Court of Cassation has just definitively rejected their request.
By a judgment of September 23, 2026, it affirmed that the order of April 21, 1945 “does not have the effect, through a reversal of the burden of proof, of exempting the plaintiff in the action for recovery from establishing by all means, when the concordance is contested, that the property for which he is seeking restitution corresponds to the plundered property whose sale was canceled”. From then on the judges of the Quai de l’Horloge approved the vision of appeal which, after comparing the sources, had estimated that the works had contradictions and gaps.
Despite the tragic context of the spoliations and the research carried out, the elements produced by the heirs did not make it possible to establish with certainty the legal and material identity between The knitter And A spinner, Breton interior. We must therefore distinguish the artistic approach from the legal qualification, because they do not aim for the same goal. If proof can be provided by any means, in particular by a set of clues, the elements must still allow the judges to establish that the claimed work is indeed the one whose sale was canceled.
