Max Stern's gallery, sold in 1937 and still being traced

On 13 November 1937 the Cologne auction house Math. Lempertz held sale no. 392. It offered 228 paintings from the Düsseldorf gallery of Max Stern, a Jewish art dealer. Most were Northern European and Old Master pictures. Stern had not chosen to sell. A Nazi professional body had ordered him to clear his stock.

The gallery was founded in 1913 by his parents, Julius and Selma Stern. Max ran it from April 1933 and inherited it when his father died in 1934. In 1933 the state set up the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, which licensed artists and dealers. Jewish dealers lost the right to hold auctions. On 29 August 1935 the Chamber banned Stern from dealing in art. It confirmed the ban on 29 July 1936, after his appeal. On 13 September 1937 it ordered him to dissolve the firm by 30 September and to sell his remaining stock through an approved dealer.

No one knows how many of the 228 paintings sold. Lempertz lost its business records in an air raid. Some unsold works went back to Stern’s gallery and were offered until 15 December 1937. No total for the sale exists. A US federal court found in 2007 that Stern left Germany before he received any proceeds, and that the German state froze his assets. A Lempertz lawyer told The New York Times in 2009 that the Nazi regime seized the proceeds and that they did not go to the auction house.

Stern left for Paris on 23 December 1937 and reached London in January 1938. He lost his German citizenship in July 1939. He was interned as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man, then in Canada from July 1940, and settled in Montreal in 1941. There he ran a gallery. He died in 1987 and left his estate to Concordia University, McGill University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

In 2002 the estate learned that works from the gallery were on the market. It created the Max Stern Art Restitution Project, which Concordia runs. The first recovery came in October 2006: Aimée, A Young Egyptian, by Émile Vernet-Lecomte, returned with the help of Sotheby’s. A Winterhalter from sale 392 was pulled from a Rhode Island auction in 2005. The estate sued. A federal judge ruled for the estate in 2007, calling Stern’s surrender of the painting “anything but voluntary”. The appeals court upheld the ruling in 2008.

A return does not always rest on a full paper trail. On 20 April 2023 Düsseldorf’s city council voted to restitute Friedrich Wilhelm von Schadow’s The Artist’s Children, because a gap in the provenance for 1931 to 1941 could not be closed. The city says it cannot show that Stern held the picture in 1937. The Art Newspaper says it was probably in his gallery in 1931. The city bought it back and handed it over on 15 May 2023. Concordia counts 26 works recovered from 2006 to December 2023. Some were settlements, in which the buyer kept the work and paid compensation. The New York Times wrote in 2009 that hundreds were still missing. No current total is given.

On 14 November 2025 the parties signed an agreement, mediated by Germany’s Advisory Commission on Nazi-looted art, over Pieter van Plas’s Peasant Breakfast, held by the Landschaftsverband Rheinland in Bonn. Hugo Heinemann, a Jewish client who bought it from Stern, was killed in a Nazi camp in 1943. Ownership passes in equal shares to the Stern Foundation and Heinemann’s heirs.