(8 Feb 2017) FOR CLEAN VERSION SEE STORY NUMBER: apus071657
Some 80 years ago, the Nazis forced prominent German Jewish art gallery owner Max Stern to sell his family's roughly 400-piece collection before he was exiled from his country.
On Wednesday, FBI agents returned one of those works, a 17th century oil painting by a Dutch master, to representatives of the Dr. and Mrs. Max Stern Foundation during a ceremony at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York.
The recovery of Jas Frans Verzijl's "Young Man As Bacchus" marks the 16th piece of Stern's collection that investigators from around the world have been able to return to the foundation since recovery efforts began in the late 1990s.
While the painting had "survived several generations of exile," it was seized by special agents at a New York City art fair last year after Italian gallery owners unaware of its past consigned it for sale, said Michael McGarrity, who heads the FBI's New York field office.
In 1936, the Nazis forced scores of Jewish art gallery owners such as Stern to liquidate their collections at a fraction of their values because of their heritage, an act that U.S. courts have since ruled amounts to theft.
Recovering the art subsequently is a painstaking process, in no small part because the art world is notoriously secretive, many current art owners inherit pieces from older generations, sometimes unaware of the work's provenance, laws recognizing the theft vary among countries and artwork sometimes doesn't emerge into public view for years on end, experts said.
Maria Vullo, the superintendent of the state's Department of Financial Services, whose six-person Holocaust Claims Processing Office tracks down art, insurance claims and bank accounts stolen by the Nazis around the world, said the recovery of the latest Stern painting was a small symbol of justice to those who suffered in the unspeakable horrors of the holocaust.
Stern was exiled in December 1987 and eventually made his way to Montreal, Canada, where he became a prominent art dealer.
Upon his death in 1987 he bequeathed his assets, including his ownership of recovered artwork, to the foundation and its three beneficiaries: Concordia University and McGill University in Canada and Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel.
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