The Art Institute of Chicago restitution will see the museum return an early 20th-century painting to the heirs of its former owner, following a determination that the work was sold under Nazi coercion during World War II.
Jean Metzinger’s Woman With a Fan, painted in Paris in 1913 at a formative moment for Cubism, had long carried gaps in its wartime provenance. New research, including infrared examination of the painting’s reverse, has now connected it to a Jewish collector whose holdings were caught up in Nazi persecution, according to museum officials.
“This return reflects our commitment to take decisive action when new research clarifies the provenance of a work,” Jacques Schuhmacher, executive director of the museum’s provenance research department, said in a statement.
Art Institute of Chicago restitution and provenance research
In May 1940, German forces invaded the Netherlands, where Woman With a Fan belonged to Emanuel Lewenstein, a Jewish collector and sewing machine company director. Three months later, the work was among more than 150 artworks sold at the Frederik Muller auction house in Amsterdam, a group that included pieces from the renowned Goudstikker collection and works on loan to the Stedelijk Museum.
A Toronto-based firm that specializes in Holocaust-era art restitution notes that it remains unclear who consigned the Lewenstein collection to auction or who received the proceeds.
The Metzinger resurfaced in the mid-1950s. In 1959, the Art Institute acquired the painting from a New York gallery, and it has remained in Chicago since, apart from exhibition loans to Iowa and Texas in 1985 and 1986.
The museum, which operates one of the world’s largest provenance research departments, used infrared imaging to detect a faint pencil inscription on the back bearing the name of Paul Citroen, an early 20th-century art dealer. Researchers concluded that Citroen obtained the painting from Metzinger’s gallery in 1919 and sold it in 1928 to Lewenstein, his cousin. Although Lewenstein died in 1930, his wife and children retained control of the collection until the Nazi occupation.
In the absence of contradictory evidence, Schuhmacher said it is appropriate to regard the 1940 sale as the product of Nazi persecution, either through confiscation or sale under pressure.
The decision arrives as another work in the museum’s holdings, Egon Schiele’s 1916 watercolor and pencil drawing Russian War Prisoner, remains the subject of litigation. Believed by authorities to have been taken by the Nazis, the drawing was seized in 2023 while permitted to stay on view at the museum. The Art Institute has challenged those claims, and an appellate court last week ruled the seizure was ordered on improper grounds.
“We are confident in our extensive research, which indicates very different facts for each of the two works,” the museum said in a statement. It added that evidence shows the Metzinger painting was seized and forcibly sold, while the Schiele drawing, according to the museum, remained with the family and was ultimately sold by them more than a decade after the war.
The museum’s decision comes amid ongoing debates in the art world about restitution and historical accountability, a topic regularly explored in coverage such as The Cathedral of Joy: Scenes, art news, and fall guides. Institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago continue to face scrutiny over the provenance of works acquired during and after World War II.