Long Search Ends in Fight Over Degas Painting

It measures 28 inches by 40 inches, an unlikely pastel of fields and smokestacks by a French artist best known for painting ballet dancers.

But the battle over the work by Edgar Degas is a roiling one, and a prime example of the ongoing struggles over art seized by the Nazis during World War II.

On one side is a once-prominent Dutch family that suffered greatly at the hands of the Nazis. On the other is a Chicago-area art collector who could lose a valuable work he believes was legitimately purchased.

More than 50 years after Nazis allegedly stole artworks and antiques from a Dutch banker who was killed in a concentration camp, the banker’s Los Angeles grandsons claim they have located the Degas in a private collection.

Nick and Simon Goodman filed suit Wednesday in federal court in New York to retrieve “Landscape With Smokestacks,” a pastel over monotype they say family members last saw around 1939, when their grandfather put it in storage in Paris as war broke out.

The Goodmans say the Degas is now in the collection of Daniel C. Searle of Winnekta, Ill., a member of the family that started the Searle pharmaceutical company and a trustee of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Searle’s lawyers confirmed Thursday that their client owns a Degas landscape pastel which Searle purchased from a New York art dealer in 1987 for $850,000. But they say it’s not the same work that the Goodmans’ family once owned.

“In this case I have sympathy all around,” said Constance Lowenthal, executive director of the International Foundation for Art Research in New York, which keeps track of stolen artworks. “It’s such a difficult situation.”

The Goodmans’ story begins with their grandfather Friedrich Gutmann, an heir of the family that founded the Bank of Dresden in Germany. Gutmann operated the Dutch branch of the bank in the 1930s and had close ties with major officials in both the Netherlands and Germany, according to Nick Goodman.

“He had a lot of powerful friends,” Goodman said. “He thought that would protect him during the war.”

The family had converted from Judaism to Christianity a generation before. “My great-grandfather decided it would be better, for socioeconomic reasons, for them not to be Jews anymore,” Goodman said.

Still, as a precaution, Gutmann sent three of his most valued Impressionist artworks--two by Degas and one Renoir--to a Paris art dealer for safekeeping. By 1943, he felt he and his family were in jeopardy, and using his connections, he secured passage to Italy for himself and his wife, intending to join Gutmann’s sister.

“My aunt went to the train station in Florence on the day they were supposed to arrive, but they didn’t get off the train,” Goodman said. Documents found after the war indicate that the Gutmanns were taken off the train at some point. Records show Friedrich Gutmann died in the Theresienstadt camp; his wife perished at Auschwitz.

The Gutmanns’ son, Bernard Goodman, spent the war years in England, where he anglicized his name. After the war, he began what would be a decades-long treasure hunt. “He went back and forth to Holland, trying to find what was left of the family fortune,” Nick Goodman said.

Bernard Goodman unearthed some paintings and antiques, and sold them over the years to keep the family afloat. After the family moved to the United States in the 1960s, one painting, by French Old Master Jean-Etienne Liotard, was sold to the Getty Museum in Malibu.

Bernard Goodman died in 1994, never giving up hope that more of the Gutmann treasures would be found. He died, said Nick Goodman, “essentially penniless.”

By the mid-1960s, though, he had stopped searching--and stopped talking.

The Goodman brothers say they did not know about the Impressionist works until after their father died and their aunt in Italy told them.

Perhaps even Bernard Goodman figured they were gone for good. “He had been told by German authorities the Soviets had probably seized them from the Nazis,” said Nick Goodman, now 50.

But with the collapse of Communism and the recent celebrated displays in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia, of Nazi trophy art that had been hidden for decades, the aunt thought there was a chance the works could be found.

Family records mentioned the works, and the Goodmans had in hand three black-and-white photographs of the Impressionist works. Working undercover, art chronicler Rose Valland had photographed the art during the Nazi occupation of Paris, and after the war she gave the photos to Goodman.

The trail, cold for years, was heating up.

The Goodmans made inquiries during last year’s exhibition of Impressionist trophy art at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, but found no trace. They contacted Washington, D.C., lawyer Thomas Kline, a veteran of high-profile art theft cases. He referred them to art investigator Willi Korte, who specializes in art lost during the war.

“I told them the art was probably in America,” he said, explaining that Germans regarded Impressionist art as degenerate and frequently traded or sold it.

“I have been saying for years there are dozens if not hundreds of plundered works from that period that are now in U.S. collections.”

The Goodman brothers began trekking to libraries and art bookstores throughout Los Angeles, looking for any reference to the missing works. And one day last year, just before closing time at UCLA’s art library, Simon Goodman, 48, said he struck gold.

“I got out every book on Degas,” he said. The last one was a catalog from a 1994 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition.

“I flipped it open, and there was the picture,” he said.

In the back of the catalog, “Landscape With Smokestacks” was listed as from the Searle collection. (The title was simply descriptive, Simon Goodman said, because the artist did not give it a formal name.)

The Goodmans hired Kline and, through him, wrote to the Chicago collector.

The answer came from Searle’s attorneys: The Goodmans had the wrong painting. The Gutmann family, said attorney Howard Trienans, never owned his client’s Degas.

And Searle’s lawyers showed the Goodmans paperwork they said proved it: the Degas’ provenance, a history of transactions proving an artwork’s rightful ownership. The prior owner had held the artwork for 20 years, they pointed out. They have evidence that Friedrich Gutmann may even have sold his Degas before fleeing Holland.

The Goodmans countered that, although Searle’s provenance does not mention their grandfather, it does show that a Nazi-connected art dealer brokered the sale of the work during the war, indicating that the Nazis had possession of it.

Complicating the matter is the fact that the Degas is a monotype, a work made by a printing process that on rare occasions produces two copies. Still, each would have had to be separately overlaid with pastel.

The Goodmans’ lawyers say the matter will be cleared up when they get to examine the work in Searle’s possession.