A legal battle that went on for 11 years over a prized painting by Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani came to a close in April, when billionaire art dealer David Nahmad and his family lost their bid to hold on to Seated Man With a Cane (1918), valued at upward of $25 million. The family had bought the painting at auction in 1996 for $3.2 million.
But the Nahmads have not returned the piece, and now, a new ruling in New York Supreme Court on Tuesday, June 16 gives Nahmad 30 days to return the canvas to its rightful owners.
A court decided in April that the painting rightfully belonged to the estate of Jewish art dealer Oscar Stettiner, who left the painting behind when he fled Paris ahead of the Nazi occupation. The Nahmads, a Lebanese art-dealing dynasty, had argued that the painting’s history of ownership, or provenance, was unclear, making it uncertain whether this is the painting owned by Stettiner. The court rejected that claim, concluding it was illegally seized and transferred. Stettiner’s grandson, Philippe Maestracci, had sought the painting’s return with the help of Mondex, a company specializing in the recovery of looted art.
“We will be appealing the judge’s decisions,” Nahmad’s lawyers told the Art Newspaper. “We are doing so because this ruling has been made without the testimony of the only eyewitnesses who saw the Modigliani that is central to the case, and establishes that the work that was taken from Oscar Stettiner was not Seated Man with a Cane.”
The Nahmads had filed a motion in May for the case to be reviewed because, they held, two eyewitnesses—photographer Frederic Allain and his wife, film producer Odile Cartlotti-Alain—could show that the painting was not the same one. He is the godson of Jean Van der Klip, who bought the Nazi-looted painting and whose heirs sold it at Christie’s in 1996. He says his godparents would sometimes take “the Modigliani (singular)” out and display it, say Nahmad’s lawyers, who claim that one Modigliani showed a different subject, not seated, and without a cane.
The family also referred to research by Modigliani expert Marc Restellini that, they believe, disputes Stettiner’s ownership.
Nahmad had furthermore claimed the painting belonged not to him personally but to an offshore entity, the International Art Center. That claim was rebuffed when the Panama Papers leak revealed links between the family and the company.
A new appeal, Maestracci’s lawyer Phillip C. Landrigan told the Art Newspaper, could push back the return of the artwork by five years. All the Nahmads’ claims, he said, calling him “a liar and a con” in his words, have been denied, he pointed out. “All an appeal may do,” he said, “is further delay restitution to the Holocaust victim’s heir.”
