Chicago museum to return Nazi-looted Metzinger painting
The Art Institute of Chicago in the United States has agreed to return Jean Metzinger's 1913 painting Woman With a Fan to the heirs of Emanuel Lewenstein.
Lewenstein was a Jewish collector whose family was persecuted by the Nazis in the occupied Netherlands. The museum concluded the work was sold as a result of that persecution, The Art Newspaper reported. Restitution, in this context, means the formal return of a work found to have been lost through persecution.
The painting was auctioned in Amsterdam in October 1940, months after the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands. It was one of several works from the Lewenstein collection sold at that auction. The exact circumstances of the sale and the identity of the person who consigned the painting are not known.
Its earlier history is clearer. The dealer Paul Citroen, a relative of Lewenstein, acquired the painting in 1919. Lewenstein, a director of a sewing-machine company, bought it from Citroen in 1928. After Lewenstein's death, his widow is thought to have left the work with others at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam for safekeeping. By the time of the 1940 sale, she had died and the couple's children had left the country.
The Art Institute of Chicago acquired the painting in 1959 from a gallery in New York. The link back to Lewenstein was confirmed through research into provenance, the documented chain of ownership. Jacques Schuhmacher, the museum's head of provenance research, found that infrared photography of faint pencil marks on the back of the canvas revealed Citroen's name.
Metzinger, a French artist who lived from 1883 to 1956, painted Woman With a Fan in oil on canvas. The museum lists the work in its Modern Art department as currently off view. He later based a drawing, Woman in a Hat, on the same composition.
The Metzinger is not the only work from the 1940 sale to resurface. Wassily Kandinsky's 1907 The Colourful Life, sold in the same auction, has also been restituted to the family after hanging for more than 50 years at the Lenbachhaus in Munich. Christie's, the auction house headquartered in London, expects that painting to raise more than US$30 million at its 20th- and 21st-century evening auction in London on 14 October.
Around 100 works from the collection are still missing, according to James Palmer, founder of Mondex Corporation, a firm that works on restitution claims.
What makes this stand out is the paper trail. A name pencilled on the back of a canvas, unreadable for decades, helped close a gap of almost 85 years.
