Alphonse Kann

Alphonse Kann (14 March 1870[1] in Vienna – 1948 in London) was a prominent French art collector of Jewish heritage.

Kann left France for England in 1938 without making an inventory of his eclectic art collection, which was kept in a St.-Germain-en-Laye mansion and subsequently looted in October 1940 by Nazi occupiers.

[3][4] Included in the plunder were 1,400 paintings, sculptures and art objects, which were first taken to the Louvre and then to the Jeu de Paume.

"Smoke Over Rooftops," a 1911 painting by Fernand Léger, was returned in October 2008 to Kann's heirs by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts after an eleven-year investigation.

[8][9] In the 1990s, eight antique manuscripts once owned by Kann turned up in the vaults of Wildenstein & Company, still bearing the distinctive Nazi catalog numbers ("KA 879" to "KA 886", in red pencil) likely made by Bruno Lohse[10] as he processed the Kann collection in the Jeu de Paume.