Nazi looting of artworks by Vincent van Gogh

Many priceless artworks by the Dutch Post-Impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh were looted by Nazis during 1933–1945, mostly from Jewish collectors forced into exile or murdered.

Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), the famous Dutch Post-Impressionist painter, was one of many artists whose artworks were looted by Nazis, either by direct seizure or by forced or duress sales.

In the Netherlands, van Gogh's birthplace and home of many of his collectors, 75% of the Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, and special Nazi looting organizations seized all their property, including art.

In 1999, Germany restituted a van Gogh drawing, L’Olivette, to the only surviving heir of Max Silberberg, a Jewish art collector from Breslau who died in a Nazi concentration camp.

[11][12] In 2006, the Detroit Institute of Arts was faced with a claim for a van Gogh landscape called The Diggers filed by Martha Nathan, originally of Frankfurt, Germany.

[19][20][21] Before the Nazis' rise, the Jewish collector Mendelssohn-Bartholdy owned several magnificent van Goghs, including the iconic Sunflowers, a landscape in Provence and Madame Roulin and Her Baby, which is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

[22][23] In December 2022 the heirs of the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy filed a lawsuit against the Japanese Insurance company who owned Sunflowers stating that it had been sold under duress and demanding its restitution.

In 2020 Malcolm Gladwell dedicated an episode of his Revisionist History podcast[30] to the story van Gogh's Vase with Carnations,[31] which had been owned by German Jewish art dealers Albert and Hedwig Ullmann, prior to World War II.

[32] The ownership of one of van Gogh's most famous works, the iconic Portrait of Dr. Gachet, has been disputed for years, by the family of its former owner, the Dutch collector Franz Koenigs.

[35] Dutch Jewish collector Jacques Goudstikker, who died on the boat on which he was fleeing Holland, left behind an inventory of 1,113 paintings, including artwork by van Gogh.

[37][38][39] Paul Cassirer, a German Jewish art dealer, played a key role in bringing van Gogh artworks to Germany before the war.