MFA Houston to keep Bernardo Bellotto painting, U.S. Court of Appeals rules

A U.S. appeals court has upheld an earlier ruling that Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) can keep an 18th-century painting challenged in a lawsuit brought by the heirs of its Jewish owner German of origin.

Bernardo Bellotto Pirna market (c. 1764), which has been in the MFA Houston’s permanent collection since 1961, was once owned by German department store magnate Max J. Emden, who lost much of his wealth to Nazi persecution.

A three-judge panel of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s dismissal of a lawsuit filed by some of Emden’s heirs, the Art Journal reported.

The legal dispute stems from a misidentification by a foundation set up by the Dutch government, which sent the wrong painting – the Bellotto – to a claimant for Nazi spoils after the war ended. In 2021, three of Emden’s heirs filed a misidentification lawsuit.

An earlier ruling in 2022 by a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas in Houston said that, despite the error, the Dutch restitution was “a sovereign act” and that the decision to dismiss the case had merit. on the incapacity of the district court. to determine the “nullity” of “procedures” linked to a “foreign nation”.

The judgment did not, however, determine the rightful owner of the painting.

Emden was allegedly forced to sell three Bellotto paintings under duress below market value to German dealer Karl Haberstock in 1938, during the Nazi regime. At the same time, the German art dealer Hugo Moser, who owned a reproduction of Market in Pirna “after Bellotto” painted by an anonymous artist, fled to the Netherlands and left the painting with an art restorer in Amsterdam. Both versions were seized by the Nazis and were intended for inclusion in Adolf Hitler’s Führermuseum.

At the end of the war, Monuments Men and Women recovered the three Emden paintings from an Austrian salt mine, as well as Moser’s copy from another warehouse. The two versions of Market in Pirna were sent to the central collection point in Munich (MCCP).

Later, the Dutch Art Property Foundation received a complaint for the copy “after Bellotto” of Market in Pirna from the Goudstikker gallery in Amsterdam to the MCCP. Emden’s Bellotto was inadvertently shipped to the Netherlands. However, before Goudstikker took possession of the work, Moser filed a competing claim and the original Bellotto was sent to Moser.

Although the Monuments Men and Women recognized the error in 1949, it was already beyond the control of the Dutch Art Property Foundation. Moser sold the Bellotto to American businessman and collector Samuel Kress three years later. Kress loaned it to the MFA Houston in 1953 and later gave it to the museum.

Since the mistake was made by the Dutch government, the Fifth Circuit judges ultimately ruled that “it is not our role to question the decisions of foreign nations.”