US Judge Gives Art Dealer One Month to Surrender Nazi-Looted Modigliani
A Manhattan court has ordered David Nahmad to return a valuable Amedeo Modigliani canvas to the descendants of a Jewish antiques merchant who abandoned it in Paris while escaping Nazi persecution.
US Judge Gives Art Dealer One Month to Surrender Nazi-Looted Modigliani
A Manhattan judge has imposed a one-month deadline on celebrated gallery owner David Nahmad to relinquish a 1918 Amedeo Modigliani canvas to the relatives of Oscar Stettiner, a Jewish antiques merchant who abandoned the piece in his Paris shop while fleeing Nazi persecution during World War II. The artwork vanished afterward, only to emerge decades later in commercial circulation.
This directive, handed down on June 16, represents the most recent chapter in a courtroom saga stretching back eleven years. Earlier this spring, the same tribunal had definitively ruled that the portrait — appraised at roughly 25 million dollars — lawfully belongs to Stettiner's successors. His grandson, Philippe Maestracci, who lives in France, speaks for the claimants.
The Nahmad clan purchased the piece in 1996 via their enterprise International Art Center, paying 3.2 million dollars, and subsequently placed it in a Swiss vault. Maestracci began pursuing its recovery in 2011. Backed by Mondex, an organization dedicated to recovering plundered cultural property, he launched formal action in a Manhattan courtroom four years later to compel its surrender.
The Nahmads had contended that Stettiner never actually owned the disputed portrait and, after the spring restitution verdict, asked for the matter to be re-examined. Maestracci's counsel resisted this petition successfully. Following the mid-June order, clan head David Nahmad announced plans to challenge the decision. A representative for Maestracci warned that such a move risks dragging the litigation out for half a decade more, serving only to postpone restitution to the descendants of the Shoah victim, according to tachles.ch.
In its spring opinion, the bench confirmed that Stettiner's heirs hold valid title to the Modigliani and are justified in possessing it. The tribunal found that Oscar Stettiner held ownership prior to its wrongful confiscation and never willingly parted with it. These conclusions drew support from a 1946 judgment by a French tribunal that Stettiner had petitioned following the conflict. That Parisian court had mandated the portrait's restoration to Stettiner, yet by then it had already changed hands and could not be traced. Stettiner, a British subject, passed away in France in 1948.
The bench noted that Stettiner's relatives remained in the dark about the portrait's fate for five decades. Nahmad cannot be faulted for this period of uncertainty; he entered the picture only after buying the work at a Christie's auction in 1996, as tachles.ch reports.
Source: Google News CH — Crime (de)