The New York Supreme Court has ruled that David Nahmad must return a Nazi-looted painting by Amedeo Modigliani. The ruling follows more than a decade of court battles between the Lebanese billionaire art dealer and an heir of the late Jewish dealer Oscar Stettiner, who once owned the painting.
Stettiner fled Paris before the Nazi occupation in 1939, and the art collection he hurriedly left behind was seized and resold. Nahmad bought Seated Man With a Cane (1918), a portrait of a chocolate merchant, at a Christie’s auction in 1996 for $3.2m. It has been in storage in Switzerland ever since.
“Oscar Stettiner owned or at a minimum had a superior right of possession of the painting prior to its unlawful seizure,” Judge Joel M. Cohen wrote in his decision. “He never voluntarily relinquished it.” Cohen pointed out that this had already been proven in a French court in 1946, when Stettiner himself filed a claim. However, by the time that case had been decided, the painting had allegedly already been resold and could not be found. Stettiner died in 1948.
It was later discovered that Jean Van der Klip, the man who had bought the painting in 1944, lied about its whereabouts. His heirs were the ones who brought Seated Man With a Cane to auction 50 years later. The painting was again offered up for auction in 2008, this time at Sotheby’s, but failed to sell—perhaps because of gaps in provenance.
The New York lawsuit was filed in 2015 by Philippe Maestracci, Stettiner’s grandson, and Mondex, a company devoted to finding and restituting Nazi-looted art. Nahmad has long argued that the painting is not the same one that was taken from Stettiner. But in Cohen’s ruling, he noted that Nahmad “failed to raise any material issues of fact, and offer no evidence that identifies anyone other than Mr. Stettiner as the owner of the painting or that he voluntarily relinquished it”.
Cohen noted that the painting's provenance listed for the 1996 sale had been fallacious “by design or inadvertence”, and that Nahmad was not involved in misleading the Stettiner family before the initial auction.
Seated Man With a Cane is estimated to be worth as much as $30m.
“Mr. Maestracci is overwhelmed with joy and the satisfaction that, after so many years, the quest of his grandfather has finally been fulfilled,” Mondex’s founder, James Palmer, told Graham Bowley of The New York Times. “We now look forward to Mr. Nahmad to abide by his promise to return the painting upon receiving the order of the court.”
In 2016, Nahmad had told the Times: “If it’s proven that this painting is looted by the Nazis, I will give it back.”
