France has announced it will return a painting by Austrian artist Gustav Klimt to heirs of the Jewish family forced by the Nazis to sell it.
According to BBC News, French minister of culture Roselyne Bachelot said that returning the painting to the family who owned it was a recognition of the "broken lives" suffered during the Nazi era.
The painting by the early 20th Century symbolist painter was purchased by the French government in 1980 without knowledge of the artwork's provenance.
Before the Holocaust, the painting belonged to Nora Stiasny, who hailed from a prominent family in Austria. Stiasny inherited the painting from her uncle, Austrian industrialist and art collector Viktor Zuckerkandl. Desperate for money after the Nazi occupation of Austria, Stiasny had no choice but to sell the painting in August 1938 for very little money. In 1942, she was sent to a concentration camp in Poland where she perished.
At a Musee d'Orsay press conference in Paris, Bachelot described the decision to return the painting as "necessary, essential."
"The decision we've taken is of course a difficult one. It results in taking a masterpiece out of the national collections which is the only painting by Gustav Klimt which France owned," she said.
"Eighty-three years after the forced sale of this painting by Nora Stiasny, this is the accomplishment of an act of justice," she added.
The painting will be returned to descendants of Stiasny's sister.
Paintings by Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) are among the most valuable in the art world. In 2017, Oprah Winfrey sold a Gustav Klimt portrait for $150 million.