Now, however, after the family dropped a legal case and submitted a formal ‘review request’, the committee has ruled that the heirs did not need to prove that the painting was lost involuntarily – the opposite would need to be proven, since the formal assumption should be that all art lost by Jewish people at that time was looted or stolen, or a forced sale under pressure of the Nazi regime. This man – whose name appears on a list of red flag names for dealing in looted art – sold the piece to the Eindhoven museum in 1951, claiming the former owner was a mysterious ‘A. Sternn-Lippmann was then arrested, deported to Auschwitz and murdered.Īn initial claim was rejected when the Dutch restitutions committee ruled it did not doubt evidence that the family had owned the painting, but said they had not proven how it ended up in the hands of The Hague art dealer Karl Alexander Legat. The 12 descendants of the former owner Johanna Margarete Stern-Lippmann assumed the painting disappeared under dubious circumstances, when their Jewish ancestor fled to the Netherlands and the painting vanished from the family collection. The Kandinsky painting in situ around 1935. ‘I had a very good contact with the museum and actually the museum was willing to give a farewell party and give it back to the family.’ However, it turned out they needed to make an official claim first.
‘That was the signal for the museum to say, this can’t be nothing, in 2015,’ Bergen previously told Dutch News. Then, in the possessions of her 84-year-old aunt, Bergen found a photograph of the work on the walls of her great-grandmother’s house in Germany, dated up to 1935. She found a ‘Landschaft’ by Kandinsky in a 1924 family will – and the museum discovered these words matched a handwritten description on the back of the painting. One of the relatives, Hester Bergen, previously told Dutch News that she first became aware that the Kandinsky could have been lost by her family when the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven identified it as potentially looted art, with a suspect provenance in 2013. Its coming back to us now marks an important moment – it won’t bring back the nine immediate family members who were so tragically murdered – but it’s an acknowledgment of the injustice that we, and so many like us, have endured.’ ‘The painting used to have a prominent position hanging in our (great) grand-parents’ house and represents much of our family’s story. ‘We are thrilled that the Kandinsky has been returned to us,’ they said. The family said in a joint statement that a sense of justice had been restored.
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