[CPProt.net] International team: Collection belonged to Montreal art dealer Max Stern

[Museum Security Network / Cultural Property Protection Net (Ton Cremers)]

International team: Collection belonged to Montreal art dealer Max Stern

A sizeable portion of the World War Two-era art collection of one of
Canada's most prominent art dealers, which was confiscated by Nazi thugs,
has been located and identified by an international team of researchers led
by Concordia University in Montreal, The National Post has learned.

The team, comprising archivists, art historians and other researchers, has
identified 250 works of art in galleries, corporate collections and private
dealers around the world from the collection of Max Stern, a Jewish art
dealer who fled Nazi Germany in 1937 and settled in Montreal in 1942.

Dr. Stern, who died of a heart attack in 1987, was one of Canada's most
prominent art dealers, representing the British sculptor Henry Moore and
West Coast artist Emily Carr, among many others. After the Second World War,
he bought the prestigious Dominion Gallery in Montreal where he displayed
works he had acquired since the war, including the largest collection of
Rodin sculpture outside the Rodin Museum in Paris.

For years Dr. Stern, who had a doctorate in art history from the University
of Bonn, tried unsuccessfully to obtain the family collection that had been
seized by the Nazis. Mr. Stern had taken over his father's gallery in 1934,
a year after Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany.

In 1937, he consigned many of the family's paintings with an auction house
in Cologne that sold them at a fraction of their actual value.

He fled to Paris, then London and while interned as an "enemy alien" on the
Isle of Man, was able to obtain permission to settle in Canada. He was
interned as a "civilian alien" in Frederiction and Farnham, Quebec, for two
years before being allowed to settle in Montreal.

Five years ago, Concordia art historian Clarence Epstein teamed up with
archivists from the National Gallery of Canada to search for the looted
works. They were soon joined by experts from the Holocaust Claims Processing
Office of the New York State Banking Commission and the Art Loss Register in
London, which lists looted art works.

"We are confident that through moral suasion we will be able to obtain Max
Stern's looted collection," said Dr. Epstein, adding that the team is very
close to recovering one of the looted Stern art works -- "an important
piece" says Dr. Epstein -- discovered in New York. "It's a sensitive issue
and we don't want to leverage people uneccessarily when they are trying to
do the right thing."

For this reason, Dr. Epstein says he cannot reveal much about the 250 art
works that he is pursuing, nor will he name some of the institutions that
currently feature them in their collections. According to Dr. Epstein, the
looted collection includes everything from Old Masters to German eighteenth
and nineteenth century works.

Concordia's approach of not resorting to litigation in matters of art
restitution is currently being adopted by many heirs of art collections
looted by the Nazis as they try to reclaim their family property.

A half century after the end of the Second World War, many auction houses
and collectors are returning works of questionable World War Two-era
provenance, art experts say.

"We should be setting an example by having the resolution of Nazi looted art
cases without legal action," said Bonnie Czegledi, a Toronto-based art
lawyer and one of Canada's leading experts on restitution.

"We should be setting an example by not forcing long drawn-out litigation."

Earlier this week another art lawyer based in the United States said that
his firm was planning a global sweep of art insitutions, including the
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, which currently has a painting from the
collection of Dutch Jewish dealer Jacques Goudstikker. The collection was
looted when Nazis invaded Holland in 1940.

Concordia University, which has taken the initiative in the worldwide search
for the looted Stern collection, became one of three institutional
beneficiaries of Dr. Stern's estate when he died in 1987. The others are
McGill University in Montreal and Hebrew University in Jerusalem.


http://proquest.umi.com/