The Art Newspaper

Further restitutions for Max Stern estate

By Martha Lufkin. Market, Issue 203, June 2009
Published online: 27 May 2009

On 6 May, Concordia University in Montreal, a beneficiary of Max Stern’s estate, announced the return of a painting of St Jerome by the Italian baroque artist Ludovico Carracci. Peter Smith, a special agent at the US Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in New York, said that art dealer Richard Feigen had cooperated in the return of the Carracci, and hoped that Mr Feigen’s “peers in the trade” would also “take a good look at their own works”.

Mr Feigen unwittingly bought the work when it was reoffered at Lempertz in 2000, Concordia said. Clarence Epstein, head of the Max Stern art restitution effort at Concordia, said that “a number of German auction houses have regularly offered tainted property in the postwar period”, but that doing so “is clearly backfiring”.

The other returned work, the Portrait of a Musician Playing a Bagpipe, a 17th-century Dutch painting, had also come back to Lempertz for sale. In 2007, it was bought at Lempertz by London art dealer Philip Mould, who sold it to New York gallery owner Lawrence Steigrad. In April, undercover federal agents from ICE visited Mr Steigrad’s Manhattan gallery, where they informed him that the work was stolen, and seized it. The US Attorneys Office said there was no evidence of any wrongdoing on the dealer’s part, and that Mr Steigrad had fully cooperated in the transfer of the art.

Dr Stern settled in Canada. He died in 1987, leaving his estate to beneficiaries including Concordia and McGill universities in Montreal, and Hebrew University in Jerusalem.