Degas's Landscape with Smokestacks and the Gutmann heirs

In late May 1943 Friedrich Gutmann and his wife Louise were taken from their home at Heemstede, near Haarlem in the Netherlands, and deported by way of Amsterdam to the Theresienstadt camp. Friedrich, known as Fritz, was a banker. He was the son of Eugen Gutmann, who founded the Dresdner Bank, and he ran a bank in Amsterdam. Friedrich died at Theresienstadt in 1944. Louise was sent on to Auschwitz and killed there the same year.

The Gutmanns were collectors. One of their works was a small landscape by Edgar Degas, a pastel over a monotype, 31.7 by 41.6 centimetres, which the Art Institute of Chicago dates to about 1890 to 1893. Degas sometimes finished his monotypes with pastel. The museum records that the work was sold at a Paris auction on 9 June 1932, bought for the Gutmanns. The Washington Post reports that it hung in their house at Heemstede.

What happened next is disputed. The museum’s records show Friedrich sent the pastel to a dealer in Paris in 1939. The Gutmann heirs say he did so for safekeeping. The lawyers for the later owner said Friedrich sent it to be sold. No bill of sale was found. The heirs say the Nazi agency that seized art from Jewish owners, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, took the pastel and that it passed to Hans Wendland, a German dealer. The Art Newspaper reports that a French court acquitted Wendland of property charges in 1950. No court ruled on the heirs’ account of the seizure.

The museum’s provenance, citing a 1968 catalogue, has the pastel next with Wendland’s brother-in-law in Basel. The Art Newspaper says Emile Wolf, a New York collector, bought it in 1951. In 1987 Wolf sold it, through a New York dealer, to Daniel C. Searle of Winnetka, Illinois. Searle was a former chairman of the drug company G. D. Searle and a trustee of the Art Institute. This was a private sale, so there was no hammer price. The Los Angeles Times, artnet and CNN report the price as $850,000. The Art Newspaper gives $875,000.

Searle lent the pastel to a Degas exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1994. According to artnet, the Gutmann family saw the catalogue and wrote to him in December 1995. In July 1996 Friedrich’s grandsons Nick and Simon Goodman and his daughter Lili Gutmann sued Searle. It was a civil case. Searle was not accused of a crime. He said he had bought in good faith. By 1997 his lawyer accepted that Friedrich Gutmann had owned the work in the 1930s. Searle’s side argued that the claim came too late. The Art Newspaper reports that a federal judge in Chicago refused to dismiss the case shortly before the settlement, with trial set for September 1998.

The settlement was announced on 13 August 1998. The New York Times called it the first Nazi looting case settled in the United States. Searle gave his half-interest to the Art Institute. The heirs sold their half to the museum for half the value set by an independent appraisal. The court made no finding on who owned the pastel. The museum’s credit line reads “Purchased from the collection of Friedrich and Louise Gutmann, and gift of Daniel C. Searle”. The Art Institute holds the pastel in its Prints and Drawings collection. Its website lists the work as currently off view.