MONTREAL – The men depicted in the most recent painting recovered by the estate of the late Max Stern don’t look like they’re having much fun, but anyone involved in the restitution of the rather dour portrait is smiling widely.
The latest Nazi-looted painting to be recovered by the estate’s university beneficiaries, The Masters of the Goldsmith Guild in Amsterdam in 1701, by Dutch portrait painter Juriaen Pool II, is the ninth in the 10 years since the Max Stern Restitution Project was launched – and it is perhaps the most satisfying to date.
For the first time, the estate has succeeded in recovering a painting from German hands.
And everyone involved is hoping that will make the painstaking work of trying to reclaim works of art that disappeared during the Second World War just a little easier.
“Symbolically, this is an important milestone,” said Clarence Epstein, head of the project and director of cultural affairs for Concordia University, one of the beneficiaries along with McGill University and Hebrew University in Israel.
“It takes a lot to convince individuals of the importance of the restitution of works of art that were lost for 70 years,” Epstein said from Amsterdam, where the return ceremony takes place on Tuesday.
“People are starting to react more positively and countries are starting to realize this issue won’t go away.”
With the recovery of the painting, Epstein is hoping other artworks held by Germans will be recovered as well.
“We are in ongoing discussions with a number of German museums regarding works they hold that were taken from the Stern collection, and remain hopeful that more good news will follow,” said Frederick Lowy, president of Concordia.
Stern was forced to dissolve his Dusseldorf art gallery during the Nazi period. After the war, he settled in Montreal where he became one of the country’s leading art dealers and collectors.
Only 40 of about 400 missing artworks he once owned – worth millions of dollars – have been tracked down.
The Pool painting – valued at less than $1 million – had been hanging in a casino in southern Germany since the 1950s. Epstein said it took seven years of talks to achieve restitution.
The painting is on loan to be displayed at the Amsterdam Museum, formerly an orphanage where Pool was raised.
“When you are mainly arguing the moral imperative, it is a difficult thing,” he said. “It is important that a German organization has accepted that.”
Alice Herscovitch, director of the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre, agreed the painting’s recovery is a significant event illustrating “an understanding of the consequences of theft and looting and murder.”
But for many ordinary Jewish families who lost valuables in the war, there is no restitution, she noted.
“Many families of survivors have very little leverage to take back what is theirs” – despite the Terezin Declaration of 2009, signed by 46 countries and intended to help recover Holocaust-era assets.
“There is a bittersweetness that not many families will see this kind of recovery,” Herscovitch said.
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