When Picasso Saved Matisse’s Paintings From the Nazis – Literary Hub

September 29, 2025

From article.. Citadel Press. Via Citadel Press

When Picasso Saved Matisse’s Paintings From the Nazis

Christopher C. Gorham on Art Theft and Artistic Solidarity in Occupied France

By Christopher C. Gorham, September 29, 2025

After subduing Paris in the summer of 1940, Adolf Hitler launched “a second blitzkrieg,” in the words of scholar Frederic Spotts, “with the intention of making Germany as supreme culturally as it was militarily.” On one front of this offensive was the attempt to erase the rich and complex cultural life found in the French capital city. Two thousand titles deemed offensive to the Nazi regime were removed from its libraries: histories; biographies; classics like All Quiet on the Western Front; works by the Communist poet Louis Aragon; and by Jews, including Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, and Thomas Mann. Writers Albert Camus, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and Georges Simenon were among those who faced censorship. “Politically,” complained the feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir, “we found ourselves reduced to a position of impotence.”

Before a gallery could mount a show, approval was required from the German Propaganda-Abteilung, installed in offices on Avenue des Champs-Elysées. A referat from the bureau would then attend the live show to act as a spy, ensuring compliance. As if to prove the magnificent treasures within Paris now belonged to the German dictator, the statue of Great War French hero General Mangin—which outraged the Führer—was destroyed.

The relationship between Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso had, in part, been shaped by war.

A simultaneous assault was waged on private art collections and public museums. Nazi bureaucrats entered each bank and inventoried the contents of safes, strongrooms, and vaults. Once cataloged, items were confiscated with typical Teutonic efficiency and sent to Germany or liquidated for Hitler’s war effort. Foreign stocks and bonds, precious metals, and fine jewelry were of particular interest to the Germans. Valuable paintings looted mainly from prominent French Jewish families and characterized as “ownerless” were warehoused in the German Embassy, the Musée de Louvre, and the Jeu de Paume. By 1944, the Special Staff for Pictorial Art could gloat over 21,903 stolen artworks, including masterpieces by Gainsborough, Goya, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Velázquez, and Vermeer. “This collection can compare with those of the finest European museums. It includes many works of the foremost French masters, who up to now have been only inadequately represented in the best German museums.”

Some French cultural treasures remained beyond the reach of the Germans. Nearly a year had passed since national Museum Director Jacques Jaujard ordered priceless artworks and objets crated and carried away. At Loc-Dieu Abbey, seventy-five miles north of Toulouse, the local curator uncrated the seventeenth-century paintings of Nicholas Poussins to check on their condition. A group of children and farmers approached the paintings, which were set against haystacks in the late-summer sun. One of the children began to clap; then all of them; the farmers tossed their spades to the ground and joined in. “Follow me,” said the curator, overcome with emotion. He took them inside the abbey, where they stood before a simple wooden crate with three red dots and the words “Musée Nationale.” He lifted the lid to reveal Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.