In honor of Hanukkah, this week’s provenance blog post focuses on the work of Jewish artist Marc Chagall. Revered as “the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century,” Chagall is known for his emotive and colorful – or wild and whimsical – works depicting domestic scenes and figures from Eastern European Jewish folklore. One of his best-known commissions is a fresco adorning the ceiling of the Paris Opera. In the course of his 75-year career, Chagall produced approximately 10,000 works in a variety of mediums, including paintings, drawings, lithographs, ceramics, mosaics, tapestries, and stained glass. Some of his works feature religious Jewish elements, including menorahs.
Chagall’s works are very popular and can fetch tens of millions of dollars. In 2017, for instance, a painting titled Les Amoreux (The Lovers) sold for $28.45 million at auction. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that Chagall’s works have been targets for theft. In 1988, a temporary employee of collectors Ernest and Rose Heller stole 14 works, including a Chagall painting depicting Shakespeare’s Othello and Desdemona, from the couple’s New York City apartment. The Hellers had spent a veritable lifetime building up their art collection, and the Chagall possessed sentimental value – Mr. Heller’s father purchased it directly from the artist in 1911 while living in Paris.
The painting remained missing until 2018, when an associate of the thief attempted to sell the work to an art gallery owner in Washington D.C. Fortunately, the gallery owner noticed that the painting was still labeled with the names of the owners and was not accompanied by provenance documents, prompting him to refer the seller to the FBI. There was another twist as well; apparently, the thief may have had connections to a Bulgarian organized crime group and stole the painting with the intention to sell it to the group. After a falling out with the group, the thief kept the painting in a custom-made box in his attic. There were three total attempts to sell the painting to the same art gallery: in 1989, 2011, and 2017. The gallery owner wisely engaged in due diligence and refused to sell the painting without the proper paperwork. He was also instrumental in securing the seller’s cooperation with law enforcement. After the FBI’s seizure, the proceeds of the recovered work went to charity, as the Hellers had passed away some years before.
We hope you have enjoyed this glimpse into the world of Jewish art. The team at Amineddoleh & Associates wishes everyone a Happy Hanukkah.
For many, Thanksgiving is the quintessential American holiday. It represents a sense of warmth, home, family, and tradition. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Norman Rockwell’s emblematic artwork. Rockwell was a 20th century author, painter, and illustrator whose cover illustrations graced the Saturday Evening Post magazine for nearly fifty years. Rockwell created several Thanksgiving paintings and illustrations, ranging from the heartwarming to the humorous. The most well-known of these is likely Freedom From Want (also known as The Thanksgiving Picture or I’ll Be Home for Christmas), which depicts a grandmother serving her family with a delicious turkey. The painting was inspired by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union Address and features the artist’s friends and family. An earlier illustration from 1917 titled Cousin Reginald Catches the Thanksgiving Turkey demonstrates Rockwell’s fanciful side, as it shows a turkey chasing a young boy – the hunter becoming the hunted.
Courtesy: FBI
Rockwell’s paintings have stood the test of time. Although in the 1950s there was little demand for these items, their current market value ranges into the millions. The current auction record for a Norman Rockwell is over $46 million; in the past decade alone, four works have fetched more than $10 million each at auction. It should come as no surprise that a recently recovered painting of a slumbering child has a current fair market value of approximately $1 million. The painting – known variously as Taking a Break, Lazybones, and Boy Asleep with Hoe – was stolen in 1976 from the private residence of the Grant family, where it had hung for nearly 20 years. In 2016, the FBI Art Crime Team issued a news release marking the 40th anniversary of the theft in an effort to generate interest and potential leads. The gamble worked; an antiques dealer recognized the painting and handed it over to the FBI. Interestingly, Chubb Insurance had paid $15,000 for the painting when the Grants made a claim after the theft occurred in 1976, making it the owner of the work. The Grants opted to return that amount to the insurance provider in exchange for ownership rights over the work, and Chubb donated the funds to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. All’s well that ends well, although John Grant did mention that he wasn’t going to tempt fate by keeping the painting in his house. The painting was subsequently offered at auction in Dallas and sold for $912,500.
Amineddoleh & Associates wishes you a safe, happy and prosperous Thanksgiving!
Amineddoleh & Associates LLC co-authored the following blog post with our colleagues at Borghese Associés SELARL in Paris. Borghese Associés, founded in 2009, is a leading business law firm with a boutique art law practice. The firm has a broad art law practice and has handled high-profile art law cases, including the representation of one of Pablo Picasso’s heirs in a case against an art thief convicted of receiving 271 works by the Modern Master. (The case will be featured in our next blog post.) As always, it is a pleasure to work with our esteemed Parisian colleagues.
Vincent van Gogh as a Frequent Target
Singer Laren Museum
March 30, 2020 marked the 167th birthday of celebrated Dutch Impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh. For the Singer Laren Museum near Amsterdam, however, that day was not a cause for celebration. Perhaps taking advantage of the museum’s recent closure due to the global health crisis, unidentified criminals infiltrated the premises and stole one of the artist’s paintings, The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring (1884). The thieves entered by simply breaking the glass door of the public entrance. They were in and out of the building within a matter of minutes. While this smash-and-grab triggered the alarm, the police arrived too late to prevent the thieves from absconding with their prize. Since the painting, on loan from the Groninger Museum, was the only van Gogh work stolen in the swift theft, it was likely a specific target, rather than being the victim of a crime of opportunity. The painting is valued at approximately €1.5 million, and after worldwide press coverage about the crime, the painting cannot be sold on the open market.
Van Gogh’s works are hugely popular amongst art lovers. Unfortunately, they are also popular with thieves. The painter’s works are often targeted by the latter, particularly in the Netherlands. Over the past thirty years, a total of twenty-eight paintings were stolen on six separate occasions. Luckily, all of them were recovered. However, that is not the norm for stolen art. Typically, stolen works are never seen again; the recovery rate for stolen art and prosecution of the related criminals is estimated to be between 5 and 10% worldwide. Pilfered works often vanish on the black market and may later re-emerge in private collections. Other times, thieves destroy the works out of fear that the art will serve as evidence for their criminal missteps.
Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen (1884-1885)
Notably, two paintings were stolen from Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum in 2002. During the early morning hours of December 7, 2002, Octave Durham climbed a fifteen-foot ladder and used a sledgehammer to break a window to enter the Van Gogh Museum. He was able to pass by the infrared security system, cameras and roaming guards. Two paintings, View of the Sea at Scheveningen (1882) and Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen (1884-1885), were lifted from the walls, and the thief escaped using a rope with the help of accomplice Henk Bieslijn. The entire process took only three minutes and forty seconds. Unfortunately, neither work was insured at the time, and they were both on loan from the Dutch government. It is significant that in this instance, Durham did not target the paintings specifically, but rather took advantage of an opportunity to gain access to the museum premises and removed the works because they were the smallest and easiest to carry.
However, this specific theft was particularly upsetting because the subjects depicted in the paintings added both sentimental and financial value to the works. The painting of Scheveningen is one of the only two seascapes that van Gogh ever painted. Because it had never entered the art market, it is virtually impossible to properly quantify its worth. The other painting, showing the church in Nuenen, is also remarkable because the church is where van Gogh’s father worked as a pastor. After his father’s death, van Gogh added the mourning figures in black, and gave the painting to his mother as a gift.
Many thought that the stolen paintings were lost forever. Usually, if a work is missing for ten years, there is a very small chance of it ever returning home. However, in September 2016, the works were found in Italy, in the home of a mobster’s mother. The paintings were recovered by the Carabinieri during an investigation of the Amato Pagano clan of the Camorra Mafia family, a group associated with international cocaine trafficking. In January 2016, Italian prosecutors arrested several members of the family and criminals associated with them in connection to a drug ring with contacts in the Netherlands and Spain. Additionally, Italian financial police confiscated about $22.5 million worth of assets belonging to the clan. Both of the paintings were damaged and found without their frames. The paint on the bottom left corner of the seascape had broken away and the edges of the canvas of the church scene had minor damage as well. Luckily, no major damage was reported, and the paintings returned to their rightful home.
Museums as Targets: Poor Security and Opportunities
The Scream by Edvard Munch
Museums are often targeted by thieves due to poor security. Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893) was stolen in only 50 seconds from the National Gallery in Oslo on the opening day of the 1994 Winter Olympics in Norway. Two thieves were aware that a major world event was occurring nearby and that police would not be readily available to nab them. As a result, they broke into the museum through a window, cut a wire holding the painting, and left a note saying, “Thousand thanks for the bad security!” Another example of an opportunistic art theft was the first major art heist of the new millennium, taking place at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford shortly after midnight as the new millennium was rung in. A £3 million work by Paul Cézanne, View of Auvers-sur-Oise (1879-1880), was stolen in a fashion reminiscent of The Thomas Crowne Affair. Known as the “Y2Kaper,” the thief entered the museum shortly after midnight as the British city was celebrating the new year. As everyone was distracted with millennium celebrations, the burglar gained access to the building from the adjoining Oxford University Library (which was undergoing a renovation at the time) before climbing onto the roof, smashing a skylight, setting off a smoke canister, and then lowering himself into the room via rope. Once he obtained the canvas, which took approximately ten minutes, the criminal vanished into a crowd of revelers. Because this was the only painting removed from the museum, it has been speculated that this was a made-to-order art theft; likely, a private collector or interested party commissioned a criminal to steal the coveted painting. However, it is also possible that the crime was tied to organized crime. Ironically, the museum had increased security in 1992 after a spate of recent robberies, including the theft of various items, such as Greek vases, paintings, silverware, and a 16th century painting that were removed by a visitor who smuggled them out of the museum under his coat. Unfortunately though, the museum failed to take precautions against intruders accessing the museum through the construction structure.
Courtyard at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, MA
The highest profile art theft in U.S. history was perpetrated against the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston during the early morning hours of March 18, 1990. Significantly, the timing allowed the thieves latitude because Boston was in disorder due to the city’s famous St. Patrick’s Day celebrations from the evening of March 17 and into the morning of March 18. The criminals, disguised as police officers, subdued two museum security guards and removed thirteen works valued between $600 million and $1 billion. The stolen items include Johannes Vermeer’s The Concert (1664) (valued between $200 million and $300 million), and Rembrandt van Rijn’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee (the Dutch painter’s only known seascape). The thieves were unsophisticated, tearing the paintings from their frames, likely causing substantial damage. Nonetheless, the criminal scheme was clever enough to succeed and the works have never been recovered. The theft is notorious because neither the paintings nor those responsible have been found, despite the offer of a $10 million award for information. The museum continues to work in partnership with the FBI and the U.S. Attorneys’ Offices in the hope that the artworks will be returned to their frames, which continue to hang empty in their original places. Until that time, visitors of the museum will be confronted with the vacant frames serving as a grim reminder of the unfortunate theft.
In France, an astonishing theft took place in May 2010 at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris. Tomic Vjeran, nicknamed “Spiderman,” a well-known art and jewelry thief who was already condemned fourteen times for similar actions, took advantage of a deficient security system to steal five of the most beautiful artworks of the museum. The stolen works, estimated to be worth 50 million euros, were Nature morte au chandelier (1922) by Fernand Léger; La Femme à l’éventail (1919), a portrait of Luna Czechowska, by Amedeo Modigliani; Le pigeon aux petits pois, (1911) by Pablo Picasso; La Pastorale (1906) by Henri Matisse; and, last but not least, L’olivier près de l’Estaque (1906), a work that Georges Braque painted in three other versions.
Before the Tribunal Correctionnel de Paris, Spiderman detailed the robbery; it took six days of scouting and preparing. A bay window was dismantled from the outside and then removed using suction cups. To the astonishment of the police, Vjeran explained that the security system shutdown enabled him to move far beyond his original targets, which were the Fernand Léger and the Modigliani paintings. Investigators discovered that Vjeran had been assisted by two accomplices, a 62-year-old antiques dealer, and a 40-year-old watch expert and repairman. The day after the robbery, the antiques dealer and the Vjeran met in an underground car parking lot in the neighborhood of Bastille to hand over the Léger to a buyer from Saudi Arabia in exchange for 80,000 euros. But two days later, the Saudi buyer’s middleman returned the paintings to the antique shop. The theft was simply too high-profile, making the painting unsellable. Unable to unload the stolen paintings, the antique dealer thought about selling the works in Belgium or Israel, where he believed the laws would be more lenient. He even thought, fleetingly, about giving them back to the city of Paris. In July 2010, he presented the Modigliani painting to a friend, a watch expert, and asked him to store the five stolen paintings at his shop, behind a large cupboard. One year later, the police arrested Vjeran and his accomplices. To this day, no one knows for certain what became of the five missing paintings. Sadly, the works may have all been destroyed. Before the criminal court, the watch expert maintained that he had thrown them away in the garbage in a moment of panic, when he realized that his involvement had been discovered.
There have been other notorious robberies in the history of Paris’ museums. The most famous is the theft of Leonardo da Vinci’s La Giaconda (the Mona Lisa) from the Louvre, on the morning of August 21, 1911. Vincenzo Peruggia, a glazier who had helped fix a protective glass on the masterpiece, found his way inside the Louvre by passing through a hidden door. He managed to steal Mona Lisa, conceal it under his employee’s coat, and bring it back home where it remained hidden under his bed for two years. Peruggia managed to convince the police that he had nothing to do with the theft. During that time, international pressure mounted to find the thief as the scandal spread across the media. As art lovers demanded the return of the masterpiece, Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile flashed across the world, gracing newspapers. In fact, the high-profile theft made the painting the most recognizable artwork in the world. The magistrate in charge of the case sentenced poet Guillaume Apollinaire to prison for a few-day sentence because the poet’s dubious tenant, Guy Piéret, foolishly sold a newspaper the tale of his exploits. These tales included his fictitious theft of the Mona Lisa.
The truth was revealed in 1913 when Peruggia, under the name of Leonardi, tried to sell the Mona Lisa to a Florentine dealer, Alfredo Geri. When Geri, accompanied by M. Poggi, director of the Gallerie degli Uffizi (the Uffizi) in Florence, saw the painting and realized its authenticity, they alerted the police who arrested Peruggia at his hotel. After a triumphant tour in Italy, the Mona Lisa returned to the Louvre on January 4, 1914. As for the thief, he became a national hero for many Italians, claiming that his actions were motivate by patriotism. For his legal defense, he argued that he had “given back” the painting, and thus could not be condemned for theft. The court rejected the argument, but sentenced him to a relatively lenient sentence of only one year in prison.
Our next blog post with examine art thefts as inside jobs and from private collections.
In addition to offering compelling information to historians and art lovers, provenance often plays a central role in ownership disputes. Essentially, you cannot demand the return of an object, if it wasn’t yours to begin with. Without proof of ownership, a party lacks legal standing to successfully make a claim for restitution. (“Standing” is a requirement of Article III of Constitution. It is the term for the ability of a party to demonstrate a sufficient connection to and harm from the law or action challenged to support that party’s participation in the case. In simple terms, courts use “standing” to ask, “Does this party have a ‘dog in this fight?’”) For this reason, determining provenance is vital in lawsuits involving stolen property because only parties with an ownership interest can demand restitution.
Oftentimes provenance is central to matters related to Nazi-looted art. But proving ownership can be extremely difficult for individuals victimized by the Nazis because of the events that occurred during WWII. The displacement of art during the war was vast; it is estimated that 20% of art and valuables in Europe were looted by the Nazis (this includes items such as musical instruments, jewelry, furniture, porcelain, books, and other personal property). Sadly, most owners lack documentation to support their restitution demands. As people fled their homes and countries, they left behind not only their property, but paperwork associated with those items. Without that documentation, it is an incredible burden to make a claim for restitution because it is nearly impossible to prove ownership. But for the small minority of owners able to successfully demand return of their property, crucial evidence is sometime found in the most unexpected of places.
Landscape with Smokestacks
That was exactly what led the Goodman (Gutmann) Family to pursue a restitution case against Daniel Searle, a collector who had purchased a stolen Degas landscape. The Gutmanns (a wealthy banking family) had an enviable art collection that the Nazis coveted. Landscape with Smokestacks was placed in storage by the Gutmann Family in 1939 in order to save it from Nazi seizure. However, it was eventually taken by the Nazis after the work’s custodians perished in concentration camps. The Degas painting then resurfaced in Switzerland after the war, and then was acquired by a New York collector in 1951. It was eventually sold to Daniel Searle in 1987, with the assistance of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Interestingly, the Gutmann heirs began a quest to recover an impressive art collection after one of the heirs discovered his true identity. Simon Goodman, whose father had moved to England and changed his name from Gutmann to Goodman, had grown up unaware that he was Jewish or that his family owned an incredible art collection. He had discovered this information after receiving a collection of boxes after his father’s death that contained information about his family’s looted collection and ownership information about some of the pieces.
The Degas painting was on the inventory of missing family treasures. During their research, the Gutmann heirs came across a photograph of the work. “Monuments Woman” Rose Valland heroically recorded information about plundered art, and after the war, presented one of the surviving Gutmann family members with images of their looted property. Although only a black-and-white photo, it was used to establish the provenance, verify legal ownership claims, and resolve the legal dispute. The lawsuit lasted over two years, and ended with a settlement. Searle donated a fifty percent ownership interest in the work to the Art Institute of Chicago, and ceded a fifty percent interest to the Gutmann heirs. As part of the agreement, the museum purchased the Gutmann’s interest based on the market value. It was the first dispute over Nazi-looted art settled in the U.S.(For more information about the Gutmann Family’s provenance research and legal battles, Simon Goodman’s The Orpheus Clock is a gripping book about his family’s struggles.)
Determining provenance can be very challenging. Over time, information about a works’ ownership is lost. Sales documents and receipts are lost, first-hand knowledge about transactions slowly disappears as individuals involved in a sale pass away and memories fade. It is especially challenging to piece together a provenance when parties conceal this vital information. Thieves (whether they are individuals or groups) attempt to erase the truth about works, or create a false provenance, so that they can lay claim to the property. This is exactly what the Nazi Party did as it stole art and valuables across Europe.
An image of the Monument Men with recovered artwork (AP Photo/National Archives and Records Administration)
In 1943, the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program (MFAA) was established under the Civil Affairs and Military Government sections of the Allied armies. Its members, better known as the Monuments Men, worked to protect artworks, archives, and monuments in Europe. 345 men and women served in this group, including well-known art professionals, including curators and historians from the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harvard and the New York City Ballet. With an overwhelming task to protect sites and return works to rightful owners, the Monuments Men faced an incredible hurdle. Making things even harder were limited resources and a short timeframe in which to conclude their work. Although many works remain missing to this day, the Monuments Men were able to return more than five million looted cultural items.
The first museum in the United States to hire a full-time provenance researcher was the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In 2003, they hired Victoria Reed to serve as Curator for Provenance. She has been instrumental in conducting research that has led to the return of a number of stolen arts or payment of financial settlements to rightful owners, such as with Eglon van der Neer’s Protrait of a Man and Woman in an Interior. (Following the MFA’s lead, a number of other institutions have hired provenance researchers to examine items in their collections.) While the MFA Boston is closed, Dr. Reed is posting daily tweets about artworks from the museum’s collection that feature interesting provenance information.
Our founder has served as counsel on a number of stolen art matters. One of the cases in which she served as lead litigation counsel involved a civil forfeiture. Civil forfeiture occurs when government agents seize property suspected of being involved in criminal activity. The property owner doesn’t have to be charged with a crime, so the case is actually against the property itself which is why some forfeiture cases have unusual names. Case in point: United States of America v. The Painting Known and Described as ‘Madonna and Child’ attributed to the Florentine Painter Active In The Ambit of Cimabue, Circa 1285–1290, held by Sotheby’s in New York.
The three-decade long disappearance of the thirteenth century painting is a tale about the development of provenance in a legal battle. The story begins in 1977 with the purchase of the panel from a religious mission in London. Co-owners of the painting sold partial interests in the work to other art collectors so that each of the parties owned a percentage of the work. After its purchase, the parties placed the work in a jointly-rented safe deposit in Switzerland, and tried to market the work to sell it.
Unbeknownst to the other parties, one of the co-owners moved the painting to his own safe deposit box in the mid-1980s. In early 1990, he was brought to court. There was an order from an English judge restraining him from selling the painting. However, he used aliases to market the painting. Eventually he hid the painting and he fled to France, and a series of legal conflicts and international police investigations began. The situation quieted down and the co-owner died in Florida in 2006. He left his interest in the painting to his wife who eventually consigned the work in Sotheby’s in 2013.
Due diligence at Sotheby’s revealed that the painting was stolen after the Art Recovery Group discovered that the work appeared in its database of stolen art. The January 2014 sale was stopped. In June of that year, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York filed a complaint against the stolen painting, and Sotheby’s voluntarily forfeited the work. At that point, anyone with an ownership interest was invited to file a claim with supporting documentation. Although there was a gap of over twenty years during which time the painting was hidden, there was substantial documentation supporting our clients’ claims. We developed the evidentiary record in the form of an extensive provenance by supplying the original purchase and sales documents (from the 1970s), bank records from the safe deposit, signed and notarized affidavits, police and INTERPOL reports, the power of attorney allowing one of the owners to sell he work on behalf of the consortium of owners, postmarked letters from the time of the painting’s disappearance, one of the owner’s wills that specifically named the piece, a 1990 article in the Antiquities Trade Gazette, and court decisions against the thief.
With such strong proof of ownership, the case was resolved in the spring of 2015; title was returned to the legitimate owners, and the work was auctioned at Christie’s, with proceeds going to the rightful parties. The co-owner’s widow thought she would be able to sell the work painting because the other co-owners had lost track of the piece over the long lapse of time. However, ownership is part of the permanent provenance that accompanies a work.
Our civil forfeiture case cleared any clouds on the title and the current owner (the individual who purchased the painting at auction) has perfect title because a US court made a definitive ownership determination (as Christie’s noted in its catalog.) The only unanswered question now is attribution (we will address attribution in future posts). The lack of provenance prior to the 1977 purchase makes it particularly challenging to identify the attribution. As of now, the author is identified as “a close follower of Duccio.”
In honor of Hanukkah, this week’s provenance blog post focuses on the work of Jewish artist Marc Chagall. Revered as “the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century,” Chagall is known for his emotive and colorful – or wild and whimsical – works depicting domestic scenes and figures from Eastern European Jewish folklore. One of his best-known commissions is a fresco adorning the ceiling of the Paris Opera. In the course of his 75-year career, Chagall produced approximately 10,000 works in a variety of mediums, including paintings, drawings, lithographs, ceramics, mosaics, tapestries, and stained glass. Some of his works feature religious Jewish elements, including menorahs.
We hope you have enjoyed this glimpse into the world of Jewish art. The team at Amineddoleh & Associates wishes everyone a Happy Hanukkah.
There have been other notorious robberies in the history of Paris’ museums. The most famous is the theft of Leonardo da Vinci’s 
