The Monet pastel the Parlagi family traced to Louisiana

Adalbert and Hilda Parlagi lived in Vienna when Adalbert acquired this small Monet pastel at auction in 1936. The Jewish couple fled Austria with their children in 1938 and stored their belongings with a transport company, expecting them to follow to London. In 1940 the Gestapo ordered the property confiscated. The Monet went through the Dorotheum in Vienna in 1941, where the auctioneer Adolf Weinmüller bought it.

Adalbert began writing to officials and the transport company after the war. His son Franz later took up the search, also without finding the pastel. In 2021 the Commission for Looted Art in Europe traced it to a New Orleans dealer’s online listing. Researchers could compare that pastel with reproductions in the two Viennese auction catalogues, as well as the listed dimensions and medium. The dealer’s record led back to a French exhibition in 2016, the first public appearance the Commission had found since 1941.

The Commission passed the lead to the FBI. The owners in Louisiana relinquished the artwork voluntarily after investigators explained its provenance. A federal consent judgment followed in May 2024. In October the pastel was returned to Adalbert and Hilda’s granddaughters in New Orleans. The handover ended a search their grandfather had begun in 1946.