View taken in Paris of a painting by French artist Henri Matisse
© AFP Pierre Verdy PARIS (AFP) - Culture Minister Christine Albanel presented "Le mur rose de l'hopital d'Ajaccio" (The Pink Wall at Ajaccio Hospital), painted by French master Henri Matisse in 1898, to the Israeli medical aid organisation Magen David Adom.
The organisation has been identified as the heir to the collection of Harry Fuld Jr, whose father Harry Fuld, owner of a telephone manufacturing company, purchased the painting in Frankfurt in 1914.
Fuld inherited the collection after his father died in 1932 but left it behind when he fled Germany in 1937.
The Matisse painting was stolen by the Nazis in 1941 and recovered in 1948 from a cache of looted art belonging to SS officer Kurt Gerstein, who witnessed mass killings in Nazi camps and reportedly sought to inform the allies about the atrocities.
The small tableau was returned after a customs stamp discovered on the work showed it originated from France.
The painting was kept at the Pompidou Centre in Paris and marked as one of the works recovered by France after World War II.
Years of painstaking research by German art historian Marina Blumberg helped trace the owner of the Matisse and establish the legal heirs, who received the painting at a ceremony at the culture ministry's offices in Paris.
The return of the painting "bears testimony to the major work of remembrance and justice" accomplished since 1997 when a government commission recommended that France step up efforts to trace owners of Nazi-looted art, Albanel said.
The president of the London branch of Magen David Adom, Stewart Glyn, thanked France and said the painting would soon be on exhibition at the Jewish museum in Berlin and later in the Frankfurt home of its former owner.
He hopes the Matisse will then be bought by a philanthropist who could donate it to a museum in Israel.
France recovered some 60,000 works immediately after the war and quickly returned 58,000 of them to their rightful owners.
But 2,000 remain in the hands of the French state including 1,000 works by Delacroix, Courbet and lesser known painters.
Since 1997, 41 paintings including priceless works by Picasso, Monet and Cezanne have been returned after years of work to trace them back to their pre World-War-II owners.
"Those that remain are the ones for which we have very little information, and are the most difficult to trace," said Isabelle le Masne de Chermont, a curator who organised a recent exhibition of works stolen from Nazi art.
France has set up a website on the works, published a book and recently held the major exhibition to raise awareness about the stolen art.
©AFP