Mondrian is said to have loaned eight paintings dated 1925-1926 to the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in the city of Krefeld, Germany, without them ever being returned.
Two years after a first complaint to the German museum, located 30 km north of Düsseldorf, the beneficiaries filed a complaint, on October 15, 2020, in the court of the District of Columbia.
"
The directors
[of the McManus Holtzman Irrevocable Trust]
first tried to resolve this dispute out of court,
" said their legal representative, US firm Herrick, Feinstein.
They are demanding the return of the four paintings, estimated to be worth $ 200 million, and compensation for the other four, which were allegedly sold or traded by the museum in the 1950s.
Read also: The Netherlands at Mondrian's time
The Kunstmuseen Krefeld could not provide any proof of legal acquisition, but does not intend to restore the representative paintings of "neoplasticism" according to Mondrian.
Its justification?
Max Creutz, the former director of the museum, would have acquired them privately.
But nothing is clear in this matter.
An acquisition with troubled origins
The heirs speak of a loan to the Krefeld museum, as part of a contemporary art exhibition, in 1929, which ultimately never took place.
Max Creutz died in 1932 and the Nazis, having come to power, placed Mondrian in the category of "degenerate" artists.
The painter could not get his hands on his paintings before his death in 1944.
The museum, specializing in post-war art, is said to have found the paintings in 1947 before listing them for the first time in its catalog in 1954. Mondrian's sole heir, the artist Harry Holtzman, who died in 1987, had not been warned.
It was only in 2011 that the beneficiaries - his widow and his three children - learned of the existence of the paintings.
If there is a statute of limitations, under German law, according to the city of Krefeld, Americans invoke the 2016 Holocaust Expropriated Artwork Recovery Act.
And the dates are in their favor, since the paintings were lost between 1933 and 1945.
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