Carol Vogel tells the story of a family that has been at the center of the Holocaust restitution movement:
On Friday the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., is handing over an early-16th-century portrait by the German artist Hans Baldung Grien to Simon Goodman, a grandson of two collectors and Holocaust victims, Friedrich and Louise Gutmann. (Mr. Gutmann, known as Fritz, was a distinguished collector and a member of the Dresdner banking family.) […] Twelve days after Mr. Goodman takes possession of the painting he plans to sell it at aChristie’s New York auction on Jan. 26. It is expected to fetch $200,000 to $300,000. […]
The family has been looking for this portrait since 1946, but only last year did Mr. Goodman successfully trace its whereabouts after finding a copy of the 1983 catalogue raisonné of the artist by a German art historian, Gert von der Osten. Rutgers has owned the portrait since 1959, when it was donated by Rudolf Heinemann, an international art dealer and collector who died in 1975.
[…] In 1998 a case involving a Degaslandscape from the Gutmann collection helped prompt a conference involving 44 nations to adopt principles for resolving issues of Nazi-confiscated art.
Inside Art: Return of Looted Portrait (New York Times)
