Nazi-confiscated Stern art goes on display

MONTREAL — The Nazi-confiscated painting that was the subject of a three-year legal battle between the estate of Jewish art dealer Max Stern and an elderly, German-born baroness was unveiled in a ceremony at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts on May 20.

McGill University principal Heather Munroe-Blum, left; Nathan Lindenberg, president of the Canadian Friends of the Hebrew University, and Concordia University  president Judith Woodsworth unveiled Girl from the Sabine Mountains last week.

This may be the first in more than 70 years that Girl from the Sabine Mountains, painted by Franz Xaver Winterhalter in the 1830s, has been on public view, said Clarence Epstein, who heads the Stern restitution and educational project, based at Concordia University.

The picture was displayed at the museum alongside the six other paintings – dating as far back as the 16th century – recovered through the project since 2005, the first time they have been shown altogether, or perhaps, since they hung in the Stern gallery in prewar Düsseldorf.

The Winterhalter was the only one that the estate had to go to court to get back.

Stern – who owned the Dominion Gallery on Sherbrooke Street for more than 40 years and became one of Canada’s most prominent art dealers – was forced to sell off his holdings in the 1930s by Nazi authorities, who barred Jews from the art trade. He died in 1987.

The Winterhalter was among the 228 paintings, the last of Stern’s prewar inventory, that went on the block at the Lempertz auction house in Cologne in 1937 and sold for a fraction of their worth. It was featured prominently in the catalogue accompanying that sale.

The purchaser was a doctor, Karl Wilhelm, the stepfather of Maria Louise Bissonnette of Providence, R.I., who inherited the painting from her mother many years ago. She refused to hand over the work to the estate after it made a claim.

The estate tried unsuccessfully to reach an out-of-court settlement, but just before it launched legal proceedings, Bissonnette spirited the canvas out of the United States to Germany in an apparent bid to have that country’s justice system rule on who its rightful owner is and where it had remained until now.

Late last year, a U.S. appeals court decided the painting belongs to the Stern estate and ruled that the German government’s forcing of its sale and that of the 227 other paintings auctioned off in 1937 was “de facto confiscation,” making them, in effect, stolen property that should be pursued as such.

That ruling was precedent-setting and marked a “new era” for the Stern project, Epstein said. Two Stern paintings were recovered by U.S. law enforcement officials within the past month. Both had been in the possession of New York art dealers, who had unwittingly bought them, and both had been placed very recently on the market by Lempertz, the same auction house that handled the Nazi-forced sale.

Thomas Kline, the Washington, D.C., lawyer who represented the estate and attended the ceremony, said this was the first U.S. decision equating a Nazi-forced sale with theft, and according to U.S. law and in most English-speaking countries, a person who buys stolen goods does not become the legal owner and the victim, or his heirs, always remains the owner.

He hopes the landmark ruling will persuade others possessing Holocaust-era confiscated art to settle amicably, but, if the legal route is taken, that courts elsewhere will be more open to viewing such art as having been confiscated.

Stern and his wife, Iris, who were childless, left their estate equally to three universities. Concordia president Judith Woodsworth, McGill University principal Heather Munroe-Blum, and Nathan Lindenberg of Toronto, president of the Canadian Friends of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the third beneficiary, had the honour of removing the black cover from the Winterhalter, a bucolic picture of a slumbering young woman.

The paintings are on loan to the museum, and some were immediately afterward put on view with its permanent collection. (One of the seven on display, a 16th-century Dutch portrait, was a reproduction; the original is currently on loan for an exhibition on Nazi-looted art in Mallorca, Spain, mounted by the Jakober Foundation, the former possessor of the work.)

Among those in the audience was Richard Feigen, the prominent New York art dealer and collector who returned the most recently recovered painting, the circa-1595 Italian Baroque rendition of St. Jerome in the Wilderness.

Feigen told reporters he contacted the estate right away after reading in the New York Times about the return last month of another Stern painting, a 17th-century Dutch picture of a bagpiper that was traced by U.S. Homeland Security Department investigators to another New York dealer. What particularly caught his attention was that this dealer had bought the painting from a British dealer, who in turn had purchased it through Lempertz.

Feigen had bought the Italian painting by Ludovico Carracci through Lempertz in 2000, paying a reported 100,000 Deutsche marks – about $685,000 (US) at current rates. He said it had been hanging in his home since then and he had no intention of selling it. But he didn’t hesitate to return it to the Stern estate.

Feigen said he thinks Lempertz should compensate him, but he hasn’t taken any steps to make a claim, on the advice of Homeland Security to hold off for now. “They [Lempertz] may not have to abide by American law, but they may have to abide by American publicity… I guess they do not like the adverse publicity that they have been recycling plundered art.”

As for U.S. collectors and dealers in possession of confiscated art, Feigen said, “I think they will be less tempted to challenge ownership now.”

Lempertz, however, disputes that it bears any responsibility.

In a May 6 letter published in The CJN’s Montreal edition, the auction house’s legal adviser, Karl-Sax Feddersen, wrote that Stern, “after being forced to liquidate his gallery by the Reich Chamber of Culture, decided to auction the contents of his gallery via Kunsthaus Lempertz… This decision was based on many years of business relations between the Stern Gallery and the auction house.

“Max Stern was involved in compiling the relevant catalogue. The earnings that the auction strived towards were commensurate with the pricing of the time. After the auction, the auction proceeds were remitted to him. If the revenue authorities later confiscated the proceeds, this no longer falls under the jurisdiction of our company.”

Feddersen added that, after the war, Stern stayed in touch with Lempertz. “On no occasion did he demand the return of the paintings auctioned off in 1937, nor any compensation. In a lawsuit in the Düsseldorf regional court in 1964, he was compensated for loss of assets suffered.”