Collector Fails to Get Painting De-Listed from Nazi-Era Lost Art Database

An unnamed collector filed a suit in German federal court to get his painting de-listed from the Lost Art Database, which tracks paintings that were stolen, looted, or otherwise separated from their rightful Jewish owners during the Nazi regime in the hopes of connecting these dispossessed assets to their true heirs. Last week, a judge ruled that the painting would not be de-listed, according to a report by the Associated Press.

The painting at the center of the complaint is Calabrian Coast (1861) by Andreas Achenbach. It was previously owned by Jewish-German art collector Max Stern, who parted with the work, probably under duress in 1937; in 1935, he had been banned from selling work by the Nazis.

Eventually, in 1999, the painting was purchased at a London auction by Wolfgang Peiffer. (Peiffer as the collector is not named in the court’s documents, but previous reporting by Munich daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung has identified Peiffer as the person behind the suit and current owner of the painting.) In 2016, Peiffer lent the painting to an Achenbach exhibition in Baden-Baden. It was after this exhibition that the Max Stern Art Restitution Project listed the painting with lostart.de, triggering an Interpol search for the painting.

Peiffer brought the suit against the Foundation in 2019 in Germany in a lower court, taking the Foundation’s registering of the painting on the Lost Art Database (vis-a-via the Restitution Project) as a sign that the Foundation was claiming ownership of the painting. Peiffer argued that Stern had sold the painting voluntarily, and that by having the work listed on the Database the work had become unsellable. The lower court ruled that the Stern Foundation hadn’t made a claim of ownership just because it had registered the work on the Lost Art Database, reported the Art Newspaper in 2020. Peiffer then took his claim to the federal court, where he again failed to have the painting struck from Lost Art Database.

The federal court ruled that “the announcement of missing cultural property on the Lost Art Database’s web page, if based upon true facts, does not represent an impairment of ownership” and thus Peiffer is not entitled to having the work de-listed, reported the AP.

It is unclear if or how this legal battle will continue. Peiffer can now attempt to bring a suit directly against the Lost Art Database or else try to get a court to ascertain who the true owner of the work is. As of yet, the Stern Foundation has still made no formal claim for restitution.

Thus far, the Max Stern Art Restitution Project has been able to restitute 11 works that once belonged to Stern, including another work by Andreas Achenbach, Scandinavian Landscape (1837), as well as A Portrait of a Musician Playing a Bagpipe (1632) by an unknown Northern Netherlandish artist, as reported by ARTnews in 2009.