The heirs of a prominent Jewish art dealer have sued the Bavarian state over a group of eight valuable paintings that were allegedly looted when the dealer fled Nazi Germany.  See Docket No. 16-09360 (S.D.N.Y.).  The filing likely marks the start of another complex litigation against a sovereign state over artwork clouded by actions taken during the Nazi era.

The art world is watching with concern the unfolding story of a fake Frans Hals painting; facts are still developing as of this writing, but it’s possible that the work may not be an isolated forgery but rather the harbinger of a larger group of well-executed fakes that could shake up the Old Master market.

We have previously covered the litigation arising out of the 2007 sale of a Rothko masterpiece; the work’s seller sued the buyer and an intermediary dealer over alleged violations of a confidentiality provision in the sale contract, after the buyer and dealer resold the piece in a highly publicized 2009 auction.  In late September, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision in favor of the defendants, in an opinion that serves as a reminder about the importance of clear contracting in art transactions.

Litigation involving art displaced during World War II—and with it the continued focus on the need for adequate pre-acquisition due diligence—is in the news again with the recent filing of complaint against the Metropolitan Museum of Art regarding Pablo Picasso’s The Actor.  See Estate of Leffman v. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 16-cv-7665 (S.D.N.Y.)

An art investor has initiated legal proceedings in New York state court against a Manhattan gallery she says she “trusted and relied upon” to select artworks as investments, claiming that she now has reason to question key details (like authenticity and purchase price) of several transactions with the gallery.  As is all too common, the parties apparently engaged in multiple art deals—here, involving over a hundred works, over the course of several years—with minimal documentation.  And now that their relationship has deteriorated, a court may have the difficult task of adjudicating the dispute without a written contract in place to guide its analysis.

The spotlight once again is focused on questions concerning the appropriate level of pre-sale diligence in art transactions, this time with allegations against the National Gallery in London.  On Tuesday, the heirs of Margarete “Greta” Moll brought suit against The National Gallery of Art seeking to recover a painting by Henri Matisse, Portrait of Greta Moll, allegedly lost in the aftermath of World War II.  Williams v. The National Gallery of Art, London, et al., Case No. 16-cv-06978.

We have written before about a long-running legal battle between the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California, and the heir to a Jewish Dutch art dealer who fled the Netherlands in 1940.  The focus of the dispute is a diptych (two painted panels) titled Adam and Eve, painted around 1530 by German Renaissance artist Lucas Cranach the Elder.  A recent district court decision dealt a possibly fatal blow to the claims by plaintiff Marei Von Saher, although she plans to appeal.

This summer has brought several stories about the continuing and complex efforts to address the painful impact of Nazi Germany and World War II on the world’s cultural heritage and the global art market.

After a long legal battle in multiple federal courts, the University of Oklahoma has reached a settlement regarding a claimant’s attempts to recover a Nazi-looted artwork by celebrated Expressionist painter Camille Pissarro.
We have previously written about this case, which involves a claim by 75-year-old Leone Meyer, who says that the painting, La Bergère Rentrent des Moutons (“Shepherdess Bringing in Sheep”), was stolen from her family by the Nazi regime during World War II. 

After much legal wrangling, a jury heard testimony last month in the first civil trial arising out of the art forgery scandal that took down one of New York’s most prominent galleries.  The story began in 2011 when word spread that, over the course of more than a decade, the once-venerable Knoedler Gallery had sold about $60 million worth of artworks—purported to be by Pollock, Motherwell, Rothko, de Kooning, and other giants of the Abstract Expressionist movement—that later turned out to be forgeries.  Since then, more details have emerged.

This blog has written often about the Knoedler scandal, which exploded in 2011 when a once-venerable art gallery closed following revelations that, over the course of more than a decade, it had sold about $60 million worth of artworks—purported to be by Pollock, Motherwell, Rothko, de Kooning, and other giants of the Abstract Expressionist movement—that later turned out to be forgeries.  Our previous posts contain more detail, but in short, the works all came to Knoedler through a Long Island art dealer, Glafira Rosales, who claimed to represent an anonymous collector liquidating a collection of previously-unknown masterworks.  It turned out that the seller was a fiction, and the works were actually created by a little-known artist in Queens at the behest of Rosales (who in 2013 pled guilty to a litany of federal crimes).

Around this time last year, our blog wrote about the history of two works by Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele.  Both were once owned by Fritz Grünbaum, a Jewish Austrian cabaret performer and art collector who was imprisoned by the Nazis in 1938 and died in Dachau in 1941; it’s unclear what happened to his art during and immediately after World War II, but a handful of the works have surfaced over the years since, sometimes leading to competing claims of ownership.

Back in 2013, this blog discussed the ongoing litigation—and resulting international controversy—over a famous collection of religious books and manuscripts related to the heritage of Chabad-Lubovitch, a Hasidic Jewish organization founded in Russia and now based in New York.  The Russian government, who has control of the collection, has refused to participate in the litigation.  This month, the matter took on new weight as a federal court granted the Chabad-Lubovitch claimants’ request for an interim judgment against the Russian government—to the tune of over $40 million.

This blog has covered many recent stories involving Nazi-looted artworks.  In early June, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California ruled on the choice of law to be applied to one such dispute, and in the process dealt a blow to the claimants who were seeking the return of a long-lost artwork.  The case highlights the difficulty of litigating these disputes that not only span decades of time, but also cross borders, jurisdictions, and legal regimes.

Recent months have seen interesting developments in a federal lawsuit against the University of Oklahoma to recover an allegedly Nazi-looted painting by famed Expressionist Camille Pissarro. 75-year-old Leone Meyer claims that Nazis stole the painting, Pissarro’s “La Bergère Rentrent des Moutons” (“Shepherdess Bringing in Sheep”), from her family during World War II.  The Jewish family owned a significant stake in Galeries Lafayette (a high-end Paris department store) and had an extensive art collection.  

For much of the last decade, the art world has been riveted by the story of infamous art dealer Larry Salander.  Around 2007, civil suits and allegations of fraud began to dog the prominent dealer, ultimately leading to Salander’s bankruptcy and the shuttering of the once-great Salander-O’Reilly Galleries.  By 2009, a lengthy criminal investigation revealed that Salander had been bilking customers, artists, and investors for years.  Today, Salander assets are still being sold off to satisfy creditors, and Salander himself is in prison after pleading guilty to charges including grand larceny.  But those who did business with him are still trying to sort out the tangled mess he left behind.   This month, an appeals court has weighed in on one of the cases that arose out of Salander’s complex double-dealing—or in this case, triple-dealing.  This case is yet another example of a recent trend of courts closely scrutinizing buyers’ pre-sale due diligence.

This blog, along with the rest of the art world, has followed the twists and turns in the strange story of the Gurlitt Collection, a staggering trove of well over 1,000 artworks amassed by German art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt during the Nazi era.  Our earlier posts review the matter in more detail, but in short, Gurlitt was one of only a few dealers authorized by Nazi leaders to trade in what the Nazis called “degenerate” works of art confiscated or looted by the Nazis; he likely handled works that were looted from persecuted individuals or purchased via duress sales, as well as “degenerate” works removed from German museums to be sold abroad. 

This blog has covered several stories about authentication disputes, including a post about the case of Bilinski v. Keith Haring Foundation, Inc., a federal lawsuit filed last year.  The plaintiffs there, collectors of works they believe to be by famed artist Keith Haring, sued the artist’s foundation for improperly denying authentication.  A federal judge last week dismissed the plaintiffs’ claims, in a decision that explores some aspects of the complex role played by artist foundations and authentication boards.

Federal courts continue to grapple with claims involving a diptych—two painted panels titled Adam and Eve, painted by the famed German Renaissance painter Lucas Cranach the Elder.  The works are currently in the collection of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California, but plaintiff Marei Von Saher claims she is their rightful owner.  The case’s history is nearly as convoluted as the history of the artworks—the matter has already made two trips to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, plus two unsuccessful appeals to the Supreme Court—and the courts must grapple with complex threshold considerations before they can even reach the merits of Von Saher’s claims.

This blog has previously covered the strange ongoing saga of the “Gurlitt Collection”—a spectacular trove of well over 1,000 artworks amassed by German art dealer, Hildebrand Gurlitt, during the Nazi era.  Gurlitt was one of only a few dealers authorized by Nazi leaders to trade in “degenerate” works of art that had been confiscated or looted by the Nazis.  After World War II, the Gurlitt family claimed that their artworks had been destroyed during the bombing of the German city of Dresden.