[MSN] Court Decision Could Make It More Difficult To Recover Artwork

[Museum Security Network Mailinglist]

September 15, 2006 

Court Decision Could Make It More Difficult To Recover Artwork
BY JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN - Staff Reporter of the Sun
September 15, 2006
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/39773
 
The steel magnate Albert Otten took many paintings with him when he fled the
Nazis. He resided in Manhattan for a time and died a prominent man, near the
end of the 20th century.

For several years, he shared the city with a man named Curt Glaser. It is
unclear whether the two ever met, but Glaser, at one time a prominent art
historian, surely knew well an Edvard Munch painting in Otten's collection.
The artist once gave the painting to Glaser. In 2004, an executor of
Glaser's wife's estate went to court to try to get the painting back.

In a sharply worded decision yesterday, a mid-level appellate court
unanimously decided that enough time had passed that any claim Glaser had to
the art had expired.

The decision sets a high standard in New York for families seeking to
recover artwork that they separated with during the Holocaust and in the
years before. The decision suggests that onetime owners and their heirs have
to prove they strenuously sought to recover the artwork in the intervening
decades.

"This decision makes it clear that when you can prove that the picture has
been publicly exhibited and the alleged rightful owner has been sitting on
his rights all these years without saying anything, that it is too late to
raise the issue," a lawyer opposing the wife's heir, Charles Moerdler, said
yesterday in an interview.

Indeed, the decision, written by Judge Peter Tom, questions whether Glaser
should have taken further steps during the 1930s to reacquire the painting
if it had indeed been stolen. Judge Tom questions why Glaser never reported
to the authorities that the artwork had been stolen in 1936, as is now
suggested. The decision does not suggest to which authorities, German or
otherwise, Glaser, a Jew then living in Switzerland, could have turned.

The painting changed hands several times. In 1933 Glaser gave it for
safekeeping to his brother, an art dealer, who later sold it to the Galerie
Hermann Abels, in Cologne. Otten purchased it there.

The executor of the estate, Ellen Ash Peters, claims that the decision by
Glaser's brother to sell the painting in 1936 was not authorized and
constituted theft, according to the decision.

The author of a book on Munch and a friend of the artist, Glaser certainly
noted the painting's absence. In a letter dated December 25, 1936, to the
artist, Glaser lamented over his loss of the painting and said it had led to
a break with his brother.

"I would have forgiven him everything except for the fact that he sold -
behind my back - the painting, 'Street in Kragero' that you once gave as a
gift to me and my deceased wife,"the letter reads, according to the
decision. "It took me considerable effort to find out where the painting
finally landed, but I tried in vain to buy it back, even when I was willing
to sacrifice quite a bit for it. It is now hanging in a collection in
Cologne."

Judge Tom uses that letter as evidence that the professor sought to purchase
the painting instead of reporting a theft.

"If Professor Glaser did not treat the painting as stolen in 1936, his
wife's estate will not be heard to speculate, some 70 years after the fact,
that it might have been misappropriated."

The painting, which depicts a scene from the Norwegian town, was exhibited
between 1958 and 1960 at Brandeis, Drew, and Wesleyan universities without
attracting any claims of ownership from Glaser's relatives. Glaser died in
1943.

Sotheby's sold the painting at a London auction in 2002 to an unknown
dealer, Mr. Moerdler said.The executor, Ms. Peters, once chief justice of
the Connecticut Supreme Court, filed suit in 2004 to force Sotheby's to
identify the purchaser. Yesterday's decision - signed also by judges John
Buckley, Joseph Sullivan, Eugene Nardelli, and James McGuire - reverses a
decision last year by Judge Charles Tejada. A lawyer for Chief Justice
Peters could not be reached for comment yesterday.