The heirs of the banker Lionel Hauser, cousin and friend of Marcel Proust, seek to recover the painting of Adriaen van der Werff who had been stolen from her by the Nazis in 1942. On June 29, a trial will oppose Christie’s before The Paris Judicial Court.
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When, in the spring of 2018, Bernard Hauser received an email from ATP Avignon, the association of the popular theater created by his father in the 1960s, he repeated the message several times: the Christie’s sales house seeks all urgency to come into contact with the heirs of the banker Lionel Hauser, who died in 1958 in Paris, and a painting on the Second World War reappeared.
Bernard is the grandson of Lionel, whom he has little known and whose memory of a rigid man with an always impeccable costume. Today, the memory of this disappeared grandfather returns to his heirs thanks to Sainte Marie-Madeleine Pétitentte, by Adriaen van der Werff, painted in 1707, a painting at the heart of a conflict which today opposes the four heirs hause at the Christie’s sales house.
The confidant of “Grand Marcel”
This is a time leap that Lionel Hauser’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren had to understand to understand why this unknown picture burst into their lives. Lionel Hauser comes from an Austrian Jewish family installed in Spain at the end of the 19th e century. He left his native country for England, then Germany and France, where he settled in Paris. The family quickly finds their place in the Jewish big bourgeoisie, made up of bankers, collectors, but also renowned doctors and intellectuals.
In April 1882 Lionel Hauser (14) met in Auteuil a distant cousin, Marcel Proust (11 years old). Become a banker in the house of Warburg, Lionel is charged by Gustave Neuburger, administrator of the Rothschild and uncle of Marcel, to help him to manage the little fortune that he inherited from his father. The two men became friends and exchanged thousands of letters between 1908 and 1922, the date of the death of the writer. In the Hauser family, it is this memory that Lionel left to his descendants: the friend, the confidant of the “Grand Marcel”, whose documents will be sold to Philip Kolb, specialist in the correspondence of the writer, Death of the Patriarch, in the 1960s.
From the 1940 defeat, Lionel and his wife, Jeanne Schwenk, slam the door of their apartment on the avenue de l’Observatoire, in Paris. Direction Perpignan, then Montpellier, where they learned in 1943 the theft of all their goods, furniture and works of art, which Lionel had collected during his life. Their daughter-in-law tells in his memoirs of Lionel’s reaction.
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