Christie’s press release on Marc Porter’s new position as Chairman explains that Porter has been “one of Christie’s primary business-getters since joining the firm:”

• He has been especially active in the firm’s involvement with matters involving Holocaust-related restitutions including the oversight of the Mauerbach Sale in 1995, which was the beginning of the recognition by the art world of the serious matters to be redressed with respect to pictures stolen by the Nazis. 

• Mr. Porter also played an important role in the record-breaking sales of the five paintings by Gustav Klimt that were restituted to Maria Altman and other heirs of Adele and Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer.

• Mr Porter, whose primary academic interest is American material culture also advised Jefferson Medical College on its private sale of Thomas Eakins’ masterpiece “The Gross Clinic” and created the structure that permitted the Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts to retain the picture in Philadelphia.

You can read Christie’s release in pdf here: Marc Porter Chairman 2010