Woman loses appeal for Nazi-era painting

The Associated Press
Published: November 19, 2008

PROVIDENCE—A painting forcibly auctioned by Germany’s Nazi government should remain with the estate of a late Jewish art dealer who lost it when his gallery was liquidated, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.

The ruling by the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston blocks an attempt by German baroness Maria-Luise Bissonnette to recoup the painting “Girl from the Sabine Mountains,“ which has been valued by appraisers between $67,000 and $94,000.

The oil painting is believed to be a work of Franz Xaver Winterhalter, a 19th-century artist famous for painting Queen Victoria, the czar of Russia and other European nobles.

Last year, a federal judge in Providence ordered Bissonnette to give the painting to the estate of Max Stern, who lost his family’s Dusselldorf art gallery when the Nazis forced its closure in 1937. Bissonnette then sought to overturn the lower court’s ruling and win the painting back.

In Wednesday’s three-judge ruling, Judge Bruce Selya said the court was righting a wrong committed during one of history’s bleakest periods, the Holocaust.

“The mills of justice grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine,“ Selya said.

Bissonnette, who lives in Providence, would not comment on the ruling. It was unclear if she would appeal.

The painting is in Germany, but estate officials hope to eventually display it inside the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

“I think this is a historic judgment,“ said Clarence Epstein, who works at Concordia University in Montreal and heads the restitution effort for Stern’s estate. The late art dealer lost about 400 paintings to the Nazis. The majority are still missing.

Stern’s troubles began soon after inheriting his family’s art gallery in 1934, a year after Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany.

Hitler’s fascist government established the Reich Chamber of Culture to purge Jews, political dissidents and others from the art world. Its subsidiary, the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, warned Stern in August 1935 that he had four weeks to regroup or dissolve the family business.

Stern resisted until 1937, when he was denied a chance to transfer his business to a professor and closed the gallery.

“This decree is final,“ a Nazi official warned in a letter preserved by Stern’s estate. It includes an ominous note to the Gestapo. “Stern is a Jew and holds German citizenship.“

The art dealer consigned more than 200 paintings to an auction house in Cologne. Bissonnette’s stepfather, Dr. Karl Heinrich Christian Wilharm, bought “Girl from the Sabine Mountains” for about $24,000 and proudly displayed it in his home. Wilharm was a member of the Nazi Party and a medical officer for the Sturmabteilung, or SA, a Nazi paramilitary force.

After the auction, Stern fled to England but lost most his auction proceeds to the Nazis. He resettled in Canada and became a successful art dealer in Montreal. He traveled to Europe after the
war to recover several of his paintings, advertised his losses in art publications to generate tips and won a restitution claim from a German court.

He died in 1987, leaving most of his estate to three universities.

Unbeknownst to Stern, Bissonnette inherited “Girl from the Sabine Mountains” from her parents and shipped it to her new home in the United States. Stern’s estate tracked it down when Bissonnette attempted to sell the painting in 2005. Negotiations broke down, and lawyers for Stern’s estate filed a lawsuit seeking the painting’s return.

They argued that since Nazi authorities illegally auctioned Stern’s artwork, the sale to Bissonnette’s stepfather was invalid even though he paid.

In her appeal, Bissonnette said the Stern estate waited too long to bring its lawsuit and that the lower court judge should have allowed Bissonnette more time for discovery.