From Looted to Liberated: Léger’s "La Jeune fille au bouquet"

Fernand Léger, La Jeune fille au bouquet, 1921. Image: Sotheby’s

Labeled “degenerate” by Nazi officials, Fernand Léger’s painting La Jeune fille au bouquet was brought to the Jeu de Paume in Paris, where it was staged and photographed in the so-called Room of Martyrs—a space used to process works deemed culturally impure or politically threatening before they were sold, stored, or destroyed. The image taken of the painting in this setting remains one of the few surviving visual records of its wartime displacement. In May 2025, the work was auctioned at Sotheby’s Modern Evening Auction, achieving a final price of $3,710,000. The Monuments Men and Women Foundation notes the sale of this historically significant artwork as a reminder of the legacy of Nazi-era art looting and the continued relevance of restitution efforts.

The painting has a complex provenance that reflects the turbulent history of art during and after World War II. In April 1921, Léonce Rosenberg, who played a leading role in promoting Cubism, acquired the work directly from Fernand Léger for his Paris gallery Galerie L’Effort Moderne. It later belonged to Alphonse Kann, a prominent French Jewish collector. Seized by the Germans in October 1940, the artwork was transferred to the Jeu de Paume museum by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) and cataloged under the inventory number Ka 1182. Thanks to the meticulous records kept by Monuments Woman Rose Valland, a French art historian and member of the French Resistance who covertly documented the Nazi looting operations at the museum, the painting was identified and later returned to Alphonse Kann on July 11, 1947, as part of the broader postwar restitution process. Later, it was acquired by the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York and then purchased by Joseph H. Hazen on December 20, 1955. The painting remained in the Hazen family collection until its recent sale at Sotheby’s.

The Room of Martyrs, which shows the Léger painting on the left. Jeu de Paume. Image: Archives du ministère des Affaires étrangères – La Courneuve, France, 20160007AC/7/15

Beyond its considerable artistic significance, Léger’s La Jeune fille au bouquet is closely tied to an episode of wartime resistance that ultimately preserved the painting from disappearance. As Allied forces approached Paris in August 1944, Nazi officials prepared to send a final convoy of looted art from the French capital to Nikolsburg, which was in territory that has been annexed by Nazi Germany from Czechoslovakia. Among the 148 crates on that train was Léger’s painting. Through her work at the Jeu de Paume, Rose Valland learned of the planned shipment and relayed the intelligence to the Free French forces in time, ensuring the train never left France.

In the English edition of her memoir, The Art Front (published in French, in 1961, as Le front de l’art), Valland recalls: 

“this month-long episode, during which our emotions alternated between anxiety and hope, ended in good fortune. By a stroke of fate, the liberating troops who brought such a happy conclusion to this business were commanded by the very son of Paul Rosenberg, the well-known Parisian art dealer whose collection was in large part aboard the recovered train.”

After Free French forces intercepted the convoy, she:

 “was very proud to take back to the Jeu de Paume, without a single one of them [the paintings] missing, exactly one month after their departure.” 

Valland adds : 

“if these paintings had continued their journey while the Western Allies were intensifying their destruction of the railways, forcing the Germans to retreat, the risk would have been high that these masterpieces could have been lost forever.” (See Valland 2024, 180–83).

Rose Valland’s intelligence work, and the coordinated resistance it rallied, kept the painting safe and exemplifies how determined networks protected Europe’s art during the war.

Learn more about The Art Front, the first-ever English account of Rose Valland’s detailed narrative of her vital work and the wartime history surrounding artworks like Léger’s painting, at this link.