A little more than a year ago, on an August weekend, Seattle native Prentice Wright went to a dinner party in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York. Among the dozen or so guests was a woman he'd never met before, named Elisabeth Clark, who carried a recently published book with her.
The chance meeting of these two people—whose grandfathers' fates had strangely intersected decades before—set off a painful and complex chain of events that has brought international attention, and some amount of shame, to the Seattle Art Museum, and resulted in a lawsuit that could be costly and embarrassing to everyone involved.
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The book Clark had with her was called
The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World's Greatest Works of Art by Hector Feliciano. It described the Nazis' systematic looting of the art collections of five Jewish families in occupied France—including that of Elisabeth's grandfather,
Paul Rosenberg, one of the most important art dealers in prewar Paris.
Prentice Wright picked up the book, which had been left on the living room table, and began idly flipping pages. A graduate of Lakeside School and a fine-art photographer, Wright, too, has eminent lineage: his grandfather, the late Prentice Bloedel, was one of the Northwest's wealthiest timber barons, and his mother and father, Virginia and Bagley Wright, are prominent art collectors and philanthropists in their own right. "I could have easily not opened the book," Wright recalls. "I just ruffled through it." But as he did, his eyes fastened on one black-and-white photo of a painting by Henri Matisse.
According to the book, the Matisse was one of dozens of pieces belonging to Paul Rosenberg that were seized by the Nazis when they took over Paris in 1940. Its whereabouts today were "unknown." But Prentice knew exactly where it was. He had seen it all his life hanging in the living room of his grandparents' Bainbridge Island mansion. It had since been bequeathed, upon their death, to the Seattle Art Museum.
Wright's claim of recognition was not taken seriously at first. "Everyone was going, 'Yeah, sure,'" he remembers. Matisse, after all, painted a number of works similar to the one in the photo. "Of course, I was skeptical," Elisabeth Clark recalls. "It didn't seem possible." A short time later, however, she wrote to the Seattle Art Museum and requested a color slide of its Matisse. Comparing the slide from SAM with the photo from their archives, the Rosenbergs could see plainly that Prentice was right: The two paintings were the same.
A few weeks later, the Rosenbergs wrote to the museum, asking that their stolen Matisse be returned.
A year later, the painting has not been returned. While publicly expressing "sympathy" for the family, the museum has been stonewalling them. Last fall, the Rosenbergs agreed to give SAM several months to evaluate their claim. But instead of seeking some kind of settlement, the museum turned around this summer and invited the Rosenbergs to file suit against them. Last month, the family did.
Asking to be sued is highly unusual behavior. The risk, expense, and public scrutiny brought on by a lawsuit—let alone a trial—are traumas that most public institutions want to avoid. But SAM's hardball strategy is not as perplexing as it might first appear. By forcing the family into court, the museum has been able to further its real aim, which is not so much to thwart the Rosenbergs as to secure some kind of compensation should the Rosenbergs win.
Last week, SAM made that strategy both public and official. In its first legal "answer" to the Rosenbergs' suit, the museum filed a "third-party" claim against Knoedler & Company, the powerful New York art dealer that sold the Matisse to Mrs. Bloedel back in 1954. Knoedler is a highly respected Upper East Side institution that has been around for 154 years, longer even than the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Today it represents postwar artists such as Frank Stella and Helen Frankenthaler. SAM alleges that Knoedler knew the Matisse had once belonged to Paul Rosenberg and failed to disclose that fact to the Bloedels when they bought the painting 44 years ago. Should the Rosenbergs win their case, the museum argues, Knoedler should pay SAM for the value of the lost painting, which is probably around $3 million.
The three-way lawsuit will now become a very complex and drawn-out affair as the Rosenbergs' claim is held hostage to SAM's brawl with Knoedler. As time passes and expenses mount, the Rosenbergs will be more likely to run out of money, or patience, and settle for something less than outright return of the painting.
From a self-interested point of view, this legal strategy has merit. But it also raises ethical questions. SAM, after all, is a tax-exempt institution that did not pay a dime for this painting and does not appear to have any serious evidence contradicting the Rosenberg claim. Should it force the family to endure an expensive and time-consuming lawsuit, in order to better its own chances of winning cash back from Knoedler?
