[CPProt.net] Museum to return stolen art to Poland

[MSN CPPnet (Ton Cremers)]

Museum to return stolen art to Poland

Jan Mostaert's 'Portrait of a Courtier' arrived at Virginia Museum of Fine
Arts in 1952, gift from woman who had purchased it from New York gallery
Associated Press 

RICHMOND, Virginia - The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts will return to Poland
a 16th-century Flemish painting looted by the Nazis during World War II. 

Jan Mostaert's "Portrait of a Courtier" (also known as "Duc le Burgundy" and
"Portrait of Charles VIII") arrived at the museum in 1952, a gift from a
woman who had purchased the art from a New York gallery. 

The oil portrait, owned by the Czartoryski family, was housed in a castle
the family had converted to a museum. Duchess Maria Ludwika Czartoryski had
the painting moved to Warsaw in 1939, shortly before the German invasion of
Poland. 

 
Nazi thefts 
 
Stolen Picasso to bring USD 6.5 million / By Associated Press 
 
It was confiscated by the Nazis in 1941 and taken to a castle in Austria. It
surfaced in 1948 in New York at Newhouse Galleries, which listed it as being
from "an important European collection." 

The Virginia Museum began looking through its holdings for plundered works
in the late 1990s, said Karen Daly, the senior assistant registrar. She
conducts research on art to see whether it could have been looted by the
Nazis. 

Daly said she is studying about 450 paintings in the Virginia Museum
collection that may have been in Europe between 1933 and 1945. 

"That doesn't mean all those works are suspect, just that we want to
establish the chain of ownership during those years," she said. "That can be
very difficult." 

Daly said she found a listing for the Mostaert on a catalog of wartime
losses listed on the Polish embassy's website. 

"We contacted them, and they provided the documentation that showed the
painting's provenance," she said. 

The Mostaert is the second looted work the Virginia Museum has found in its
collection. 

 
Last year it returned "Portrait of Jean d'Albon," attributed to Dutch-born
painter Corneille de Lyon, to the executor of the estate of Julius Priester,
an Austrian Jewish art collector. 

 
"Portrait of a Courtier" will be handed over to the Polish embassy, which
will deliver it to the Princes Czartoryski Museum in Cracow. 

Woman entrusted painting to Paris art dealer for safekeeping when she fled
Berlin in late 1930s. Nazis looted painting and other valuables in 1940.
Grandson to get money from current owner 

More on stolen Picasso:

Stolen Picasso to bring USD 6.5 million

 

Woman entrusted painting to Paris art dealer for safekeeping when she fled
Berlin in late 1930s. Nazis looted painting and other valuables in 1940.
Grandson to get money from current owner 
By Associated Press 

LOS ANGELES - The grandson of a Jewish woman whose Pablo Picasso painting
was stolen by Nazis during World War II will receive USD 6.5 million from an
American who later bought the work from a gallery. 

Marilynn Alsdorf of Chicago decided she would rather pay Thomas Bennigson
and keep the painting than continue a costly and complicated legal dispute,
her attorney Richard Chapman said. 
 
The painting is now valued at more than USD 12 million. Alsdorf will be
allowed to sell it after the settlement is approved by a federal judge. 

Alsdorf and her late husband bought the 1922 painting, known as "Femme en
blanc" (Woman in white), for USD 375,000 in 1975. It was sitting in the
window of a New York gallery, Chapman said. 
 
"This was a reputable dealer, not a back-alley thing," Chapman said. "She
had no knowledge that there had been any impropriety at all." 
 
When Alsdorf tried to sell the painting in 2002, experts notified the Art
Loss Register in London, which investigated its history. 
 
Missing until 1975


Bennigson's grandmother Carlota Landsberg entrusted the painting to a Paris
art dealer for safekeeping when she fled Berlin in the late 

1930s. Nazis looted the painting and other valuables in 1940, according to a
1958 letter from the dealer. 

Its whereabouts were unknown until New York art dealer Stephen Hahn
purchased it in France in 1975 and sold it to the Alsdorfs. Hahn recently
settled a separate lawsuit by agreeing to pay Bennigson, Landsberg's only
living heir, an amount equal to his profit from that sale, Bennigson's
attorney E. Randol Schoenberg said. 
 
Bennigson did not return a message seeking comment, but Schoenberg said
Bennigson was satisfied. 
 
"You like to see in these type of cases things result without litigation and
paintings returned to the prior owners, but when there's a dispute - and
this one was hotly disputed - it's good to get that type of finality of a
settlement," he said. 
 
Chapman claimed French courts should have had jurisdiction in the case, and
that under that legal system Bennigson's claim came too late.

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