Deal agreed over Matisse painting stolen

Deal agreed over Matisse painting stolen
ASSOCIATED FRANCE PRESSE

OCT 14: A three-year case involving an Henri Matisse painting looted by Nazis during World War II has been settled between the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) and New York's oldest art gallery, the museum said Friday.

Last year the museum returned the 1928 Matisse painting, "Odalisque," valued at two million dollars, to the heirs of French art dealer Paul Rosenberg, after its investigation confirmed their claims that the painting had been stolen during World War II.

The richly red and blue hued post-impressionist painting of a seated woman was bequeathed to the Seattle museum by late timber baron Prentice Bloedel in the early 1990s. He acquired it from a New York gallery for 18,000 dollars in 1954 and kept it at their country estate near Seattle.

In 1997 Elaine Rosenberg, widow of Paul Rosenberg's son, Alexandre, and Rosenberg's daughter Michele Nanette Sinclair hired an attorney and art experts to track the painting's provenance. The museum sued the gallery the same year, alleging it knowingly sold a painting stolen by the Nazis.

Under the agreement, the museum can select "one or more" art works from Knoedler's holdings. If the museum isn't satisfied with any of the works offered, it can insist on a financial reimbursement. "In that case," SAM Director Mimi Gates told AFP, "we will use the money to buy a significant addition to the museum's collection." Gates wouldn't say how much the settlement was worth. "But we're being reimbursed for legal fees, research and travel costs as well as the loss of the painting," she said. In exchange, the museum will withdraw accusations of fraud and negligent misrepresentation.

The case may have far-reaching effects: museums around the world are struggling with the sources of gifted works. It is unknown how many more stolen paintings are hanging on the walls of prestigious institutions.

Proving "Odalisque" was wartime plunder was made easier because the Nazis, with their keen appetite for organisation and record-keeping, carefully inventoried the art they stole.

Research showed "Odalisque" was stolen in 1941 from the vault where Rosenberg had stored 162 paintings, and then moved into storage at the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris. The following July, a German art dealer based in Paris acquired it in exchange for a French renaissance painting. Its whereabouts were unknown until 1954 when it was acquired from Paris' Galerie Drouant-David and sold to the Bloedels.

Journalist Hector Feliciano, author of "The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World's Greatest Works of Art," first recognized the painting as stolen and put a picture of it in his book. At a party in 1997, the grandson of the Bloedel's was flipping through the book when he spotted the picture and recognized it as the one hanging in his grandparents' home.