A pioneer of abstract art, Mondrian painted “Composition With Blue” — a work comprising two black lines against a white background and a small triangle of blue — while living in Paris in 1926.
“American museums should no longer keep Nazi-looted art in their collections,” said Lawrence M.
Mondrian had consigned “Composition With Blue” to the German art historian and dealer Sophie Küppers soon after completing it.
But after the Nazis came to power, “Composition With Blue” was confiscated as “degenerate” in the merciless purge of modern art from German museums that was orchestrated by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.
Judged by the Nazis to be marketable abroad, the painting was then given to Karl Buchholz, one of a select group of art dealers appointed by Adolf Hitler to sell “degenerate” works to foreign buyers.
But he recognized that “Composition With Blue” had belonged, not to the museum, but to a private person and he declined, according to research conducted for the heirs by Gunnar Schnabel, a German lawyer, and Monika Tatzkow, a provenance researcher.
collectors who purchased art confiscated from German museums, he is quoted in The New York Times on Oct.
Mondrian, who left Paris in 1938, before World War II broke out, ended up in New York, where Gallatin lived.
The heirs, however, argue that as World War II still raged, Mondrian didn’t realize that he retained a valid claim to property seized by the Nazis, perhaps because he assumed incorrectly that expropriations by the German government in power had been legal.
According to a statement from their lawyers, the heirs only learned that they retained legal ownership of the painting through the research by Schnabel and Tatzkow.