Auction house Christie's hid Nazi past of painting

From the UK' Guardian Online:

Christie's covered up its discovery that an Old Master painting it had hoped to auction had been looted by the Nazis, failing to alert art market authorities or the heirs of the original owners of the picture, a Guardian investigation has established. Christie's may now face legal action from the family of the original owners, who have been traced by the Guardian and are consulting lawyers to decide whether to claim against one of the world's leading auction houses.
Paintings stolen by the Nazis from Jewish families are one of the most sensitive areas of the art market and Christie's has claimed in the past to be "a force for good by helping to restore items to the rightful owners". However, internal documents and emails between Christie's employees show that it took the opposite approach in the case of Merry Company With A Woman Playing A Lute by the Dutch master Jacob Duck.

Christie's researchers discovered that the painting had been stolen by the Nazis in 1937 from Ulla and Moritz Rosenthal, a Jewish couple who later died in the Auschwitz concentration camp. But the company made no attempt to contact the descendants of the Rosenthals. Instead, it returned the picture to Carl Schünemann, a German private collector and a long-standing Christie's client, who had hoped to sell it in the firm's London auction rooms in July 2000 for £40,000-£60,000. Christie's failure to reveal that it was in temporary possession of Nazi loot runs counter to the spirit of international calls for the art market to aid the return of such goods to the heirs of the original owners.

Internal emails suggest a member of Christie's staff thought the firm's action was highly questionable. An email from a Christie's researcher in Germany, who had identified the Jacob Duck as stolen, to Johanna Hall, one of the firm's in-house legal advisers in London, said: "So, we are withdrawing the picture, it will be broken gently to the consignor on Wednesday. Let's hope no journalist will have the idea to do this research all over again." Christie's researchers were prompted to investigate the provenance of Merry Company because it was known to have been sold at the Gerhard Harms auction house in Berlin in 1937. Sales at Harms in prewar and war years are notorious among Holocaust historians because they were often so-called "Jew auctions" - that is, sales of items seized from the houses of Jews fleeing persecution or sold under duress. German law has acknowledged since 1989 that works in such auctions should be regarded as looted.

Stephanie Tasch, a Christie's researcher in Germany, suspected the Jacob Duck could fall into this category and examined the details of the 1937 auction, which are still held at the Landesarchiv in Berlin. She reported to her colleagues that 800 items were sold from the Rosenthal's house and that "Aufgabe der Villa" -"abandonment of the villa" - was given as cause of the auction. That wording was a strong indication that the property had been looted after the Rosenthals fled Nazi Germany and Ms Tasch's email concluded by saying "This does not look too good". She promised to conduct more research. Two days later, she reported that her suspicions had proven well-founded in an email that started "bad news". She had consulted the regional archives to the Berlin Memorial Book for the Jewish Victims of National Socialism and established that Ulla Rosenthal emigrated to the Netherlands six months earlier, on December 8 1936. "The auction at Gerhard Harms must have taken place therefore in the absence of the (presumably dispossessed) owners," she said, noting that this had also happened in several other cases where owners had fled the Nazis.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/story/0,11711,1070010,00.html