In 1928, the painting The father, made by Marc Chagall in 1911, when he had just moved to Paris, was purchased by a Polish Jewish art lover and violin maker, David Cender. But in 1940, the latter saw his property stolen by the Nazi regime and he was forced to settle in the ghetto of Lodz, Poland, with his family. They are then deported to Auschwitz. If his wife and daughter were murdered there, Cender survived, without however being able to find his looted painting. He did not know then that Chagall had recovered it at the end of the Second World War, in 1947 and that it was in his possession until 1953. But the artist himself was unaware that his canvas already belonged to another and that it had been stolen from its owner during the war. In 1972, the German state recognized the spoliation of the painting, but did not know where it was. When Chagall died in 1985 in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, The father entered the French national collections, first at the Center Pompidou in 1988, then at the Museum of Art and History of Judaism in Paris.
On February 15, 2022, Parliament adopted a bill allowing the return of works of art looted by the Nazis to the Jewish families to which they had belonged. This is how Chagall’s oil on canvas was returned to the heirs of David Cender, thanks to research carried out by the company Mondex. The father then found itself at auction on November 15 of that same year, in New York, under two conditions: that its new owner agree to lend it in order to exhibit it in the Jewish Museum of New York and that the canvas not leave never this town. And what was said was done: the painting was acquired for the sum of 7.4 million dollars and it is now visible until 1is January 2024 at the Jewish Museum of New York.
