Aurelien Breeden

The task force, announced last year and starting work in the coming weeks, will primarily look at artwork in France that is suspected of having been looted during World War II, to try to return it to the original owners or their heirs.

But in a step up from current policy, it will also try to determine whether any other pieces acquired by French institutions have dubious origins, though those are only expected to represent a small fraction of France’s vast national art collections.

“We are not starting from nothing, but we are amplifying the work,” David Zivie, a Culture Ministry official who is expected to lead the new task force, said in an interview.

French authorities had faced criticism that they were not doing enough to identify looted artwork in France’s collections and were instead waiting for the owners or their heirs to file claims on specific pieces.

Many belonged to Jewish families whose homes were raided during the Nazi occupation, or who were forced to sell the art — paintings, drawings, sculptures or antiquities — as they fled the country to avoid arrest by France’s collaborationist Vichy government and deportation to concentration camps.

Officials had pledged a more proactive approach to restitution in recent years, but the efforts were still shared by museums, the Culture and Foreign ministries and the Commission for the Compensation of Victims of Spoliation, or CIVS, established in 1999 to examine reparation claims from victims of France’s wartime anti-Semitic laws.

Édouard Philippe, France’s prime minister, said last year that the government had “to do better,” despite the “difficulties” of identifying pieces and finding the original owners or their heirs.

“It is a question of honor, a question of dignity, of respect for the victims of this looting, for their memory and for their descendants,” Philippe said in July in a speech commemorating an infamous roundup of Jews that the French police carried out in 1942.

The creation of the task force, called the Mission for Research and Restitution of Spoliated Cultural Property, was announced shortly after that speech. It will be part of the Culture Ministry, with six to seven permanent staffers and an annual budget of 200,000 euros ($225,000), dedicated solely to research, according to Zivie, the ministry official.

While the funding is modest compared to the German Lost Art Foundation, a similar organization that received nearly 6 million euros from Germany’s federal government last year, it is the first time that France has specifically earmarked funding for restitution work.

The goal is to remedy problems Zivie had identified in an official report last year: a “dispersed organization” of the government’s restitution efforts, with an “absence of visibility and coordination” that led to claimants’ “mistrust.”

The task force will now centralize those efforts, Zivie said.

“We want to make this policy visible, we want to assert it,” by encouraging academic research and curator training and forging partnerships with similar institutions abroad, he said.

About 100,000 objects in France were looted by the Nazis or sold under duress and transferred to Germany, according to estimates by French authorities. From 1945 to 1949, roughly 60,000 of those objects were returned to France, and about 45,000 were then claimed by their owners.

Most of the unclaimed pieces were sold at auction. But the French state kept about 2,100 and entrusted them to museums. Even today, experts say it is unclear how those pieces were chosen, and they caution that they do not know how many were actually looted or sold under duress, and how many were proper sales that the authorities have been unable to trace.

Since 1951, after the first wave of restitutions, only about 120 among the 2,100 pieces have been returned.

France has streamlined the restitution process with this latest move, and taken some of the decision-making power out of the hands of curators. The ability to file claims has been widened to “any individual concerned,” and only the task force will investigate the claims. Cases will then be referred to the CIVS, which will make a recommendation to the prime minister, who will ultimately decide.

“It’s also a change in response to a criticism that was justified, even though it is now a bit outdated, that the ministry and museums were, by nature, very reluctant about restitution, because a curator’s nature is to curate,” Zivie said.

Over 70 years after the end of World War II, museums and other institutions around Europe are still returning looted artwork, with varying speed and eagerness. Most recently, in March, a cathedral in Germany agreed to return a Nazi-looted painting to the heirs of an Austrian Jewish couple from whom it was stolen in 1941.

Emmanuelle Polack, an art historian who has worked extensively on the French art market under the Nazi occupation, praised the new task force and said that after years of difficult relations between the state and claimants, “tensions have lifted.”

“There is a real turning point on these questions in France,” she said, adding that museums and curators were now much more open to discussing restitution. “Everyone wants to move things forward.”

For proof, Polack pointed to an exhibition that she is curating at the Mémorial de la Shoah, a museum on the Holocaust in Paris.

The exhibition, which runs until November, is about the art market in France between 1940 and 1944, which flourished as it was flooded with paintings, drawings and other pieces that had been taken or bought from fleeing Jewish families.

At one auction, held in 1942 at the Savoy Hotel in Nice, a Louvre curator bought a dozen pieces that were from the collection of Armand Dorville, a Jewish lawyer who had died the previous year.

Because of anti-Semitic legislation applicable in France at the time, the artwork was sold by a temporary administrator named by the Vichy government, in a complex case that will be one of the first to be picked up by the task force. (Some pieces from Dorville’s collection also ended up in the trove of artwork amassed by Cornelius Gurlitt in Germany.)

The Louvre has lent three of the pieces bought in 1942 — drawings by the French artists Jean-Louis Forain, Camille Roqueplan and Henri Monnier — for the exhibition at the Holocaust museum. Polack called that “a real step.”

“We won’t be able to return everything,” Polack said, noting that passing time and fading memories were making it increasingly hard to pinpoint the rightful heirs to a stolen piece of art.

“But at least we should feel, in good conscience, that we did as much as we could,” she said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/15/arts/design/france-art-looted.html" id="b2c0dc2a-957e-35f2-a317-7f6a6119aae4">The New York Times</a>.

PARIS — A new task force in France has been given a broader mandate to search for and return artwork that had been looted or sold under duress during the Nazi occupation, after years of criticism that its restitution efforts were not proactive enough.

'We Are Amplifying the Work': France Starts Task Force on Art Looted Under Nazis

Brown, 29, was in custody over suspicions of aggravated rape and drug-related infractions, according to a spokesman for the French judiciary, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in line with department policy. The official did not provide more details about the accusations.

According to the celebrity news magazine Closer, which first reported Brown’s detention, his arrest Monday morning came after a 24-year-old woman filed a complaint against him. The woman, who was not identified, accused Brown of raping her in a Paris hotel room last week, the magazine said.

The woman told the police that she met the R&amp;B; singer Jan. 15 at a nightclub near the Champs-Élysées, and that later that evening, he invited her and several other women to the upscale Mandarin Oriental hotel, where he was staying, Closer reported.

According to the magazine, the woman told police that she then found herself alone in one of the hotel’s rooms, where she said Brown raped her. She also accused a friend of the singer and his bodyguard of raping her.

The French judicial official confirmed that two other people were also being questioned by police in relation to the case, but he did not identify them or explain their connection to Brown, who has been attending shows in the city for Paris Men’s Fashion Week.

A representative for Brown in the United States said he did not have enough information on the situation to comment.

Brown’s record company, RCA, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Last week RCA dropped another of its R&amp;B; stars, R. Kelly, after protests that followed the airing of the television documentary “Surviving R. Kelly.” In the documentary, women said that Kelly had lured them into sexual relationships when they were underage and had abused them mentally and physically.

Under French law, suspects being questioned by the police can be kept in custody for up to 24 hours, although prosecutors can extend the duration of their detention. Brown could be released without charges, or charged and placed under formal investigation.

Brown has been involved in a string of violent episodes over the past few years. In July, he was arrested in connection with a nightclub dispute from April 2017, when he was accused of punching a photographer in Tampa, Florida. In May, a woman sued him, saying he held her against her will at his Los Angeles house last year while a friend of his raped her. He was arrested in 2016 on a charge of assault with a deadly weapon after a standoff at his home.

In 2009, he pleaded guilty to one count of felony assault on his girlfriend at the time, singer Rihanna.

Despite his legal troubles, Brown has remained popular with an ardent fan base. He has won several industry prizes, including the 2012 Grammy for best R&amp;B; album for “F.A.M.E.,” and he performed at that year’s Grammy ceremony. His most recent album, “Heartbreak on a Full Moon,” opened at No. 3 on the Billboard album chart in late 2017.

In 2010, according to the BBC, Brown was forced to postpone a British tour after he was denied a visa to enter the country because of the assault conviction involving Rihanna. In 2015, he was forced to cancel the Australian and New Zealand leg of his “One Hell of a Nite” tour for the same reason.

Earlier that year, he was barred from leaving the Philippines for three days because of a fraud complaint stemming from a 2014 New Year’s Eve concert in that country.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/arts/music/chris-brown-rape-allegation-paris.html" id="43a81a77-06ad-3236-abda-3016fa9809e1">The New York Times</a>.

PARIS — R&amp;B; singer Chris Brown was being questioned by Paris police Tuesday over accusations of rape, according to the authorities and French news reports.

Chris Brown, Accused of Rape, Is Questioned by Paris Police

The French judicial official confirmed that two other people were also being questioned by police in relation to the case, but he did not identify them or explain their connection to Brown.

Chris Brown Questioned by Paris Police Over Rape Allegation

<h1>PARIS — R&amp;amp;B singer Chris Brown was released without charges on Tuesday after he was questioned by Paris police over a rape accusation, according to authorities and his lawyer.</h1>

Shortly afterward, Brown said in a message on his Instagram account that the accusations were “false” and that his accuser was “lying.”

Brown, 29, had been taken into custody on Monday for questioning about an accusation of aggravated rape and possible drug infractions. Reports in the French news media said that an investigation had been opened after a woman filed a complaint with the Paris police, accusing him of raping her at his hotel last week after they met at a nightclub in the capital.

The Paris prosecutor’s office said Tuesday evening that Brown had been released without charges but that the investigation was continuing. Brown’s lawyer in Paris, Raphael Chiche, confirmed that his client had been released but did not comment further on the allegations against him.

On his official Instagram page, Brown posted a picture on Tuesday evening that said “This b!tch lyin’,” an image he had used before in reference to a previous accusation in the United States. In the caption for the picture, Brown wrote in all-caps that he wanted to “make it perfectly clear” that “this is false.”

“For my daughter and my family this is so disrespectful and is against my character and morals,” he wrote.

According to the celebrity news magazine Closer, which first reported Brown’s detention, his questioning came after a woman in her 20s filed a complaint against him. The woman, who was not identified, accused Brown of raping her in a Paris hotel room last week, the magazine said.

The woman told the police that she met the R&amp;B singer Jan. 15 at a nightclub near the Champs-Élysées, and that later that evening, he invited her and several other women to the upscale Mandarin Oriental hotel, where he was staying, Closer reported.

The Paris prosecutor’s office said Tuesday evening that two other people who had been questioned by police in connection with the case had also been released without charges, but it did not identify them or explain their connection to Brown, who has been attending shows in the city for Paris Men’s Fashion Week.

Brown’s record company, RCA, which said this month that it had signed a new deal with Brown, did not respond to a request for comment. Last week RCA dropped another of its R&amp;B stars, R. Kelly, after protests that followed the airing of the television documentary “Surviving R. Kelly.” In the documentary, women said that Kelly had lured them into sexual relationships when they were underage and had abused them mentally and physically.

Despite his legal troubles, Brown has remained popular with an ardent fan base. He has won several industry prizes, including the 2012 Grammy for best R&amp;B album for “F.A.M.E.,” and he performed at that year’s Grammy ceremony. His most recent album, “Heartbreak on a Full Moon,” opened at No. 3 on the Billboard album chart in late 2017.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/arts/music/chris-brown-rape-allegation-paris.html" id="d94fc0eb-1471-4dc6-b2c4-3185fe1710f7">The New York Times</a>.

Chris Brown released without charges in Paris after rape accusation

Shortly afterward, Brown said in a message on his Instagram account that the accusations were “false” and that his accuser was “lying.”

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Aurelien Breeden

Articles written by the author

'We Are Amplifying the Work': France Starts Task Force on Art Looted Under Nazis

Chris Brown, Accused of Rape, Is Questioned by Paris Police

Chris Brown, Accused of Rape, Is Questioned by Paris Police

Chris Brown Questioned by Paris Police Over Rape Allegation

Chris Brown released without charges in Paris after rape accusation