Martin Keller, a 30-year-old Frenchman who works in a chemical plant, has invited his friends Sine and Paco over for a card game at his home in the industrial town of Mulhouse. They drink beer and smoke cigarettes, barely noticing the painting of dead sunflowers on the wall behind them.

That painting, it turns out, is actually a masterpiece by the Jewish Austrian Expressionist artist Egon Schiele, who died in 1918. It had disappeared in 1939. The art dealer who had tried to save Schiele’s collection — a fellow Austrian Jew named Karl Grunwald — ended up fleeing empty-handed to the United States, while some of Grunwald’s family perished at Auschwitz. Now, decades later, the long-lost painting resurfaces in a stranger’s home. It should be an easy task to reunite it with its rightful heirs, n’est-ce pas? Well, not so fast.

Things get complicated in “Auction,” a new French feature film based on the real-life narrative of Schiele’s improbably rediscovered painting. Directed and written by longtime French Jewish filmmaker Pascal Bonitzer, Auction makes its US theatrical premiere at Film Forum in New York City on October 29, ahead of a nationwide release.

“One is constantly finding art stolen by the Nazis to this day,” Bonitzer told The Times of Israel through a translator over Zoom. “The museums that own it have not been particularly cooperative in returning works to legitimate owners and descendants.”

The events dramatized in the film took place almost 20 years ago, in 2006, when an anonymous stranger in France phoned in a report of a surprise finding at home: Schiele’s looted masterpiece. Of its provenance, the caller was unaware. Two experts from Christie’s arrived to confirm its authenticity. The painting was restored to the........

© The Times of Israel