Lake Forest family's Renoir painting object of court fight about who is rightful owner

Steel magnate Newton Korhumel bought piece in 1956, but heirs of German Jew say he was unjustly forced to sell it to escape Nazi persecution

September 03, 2011|By Dan Hinkel, Tribune reporter

In 1956, steel magnate Newton Korhumel and his wife, Irene, bought a florid country landscape by French impressionist master Pierre-Auguste Renoir at a New York gallery. The painting hung proudly in their Lake Forest home.

Now, there's a question as to whether the couple ever truly owned the painting.

Irene Korhumel died in December, nine years after her husband. The executor of their estate turned to Christie's auction house in Chicago to sell the painting, created by an artist whose work routinely fetches millions of dollars.

But any potential sale is on hold, awaiting a possible claim by the heirs of a German textile mogul who, like many other Jews in mid-20th century Europe, lost his art collection to the Nazi onslaught, said Olaf Ossmann, a Swiss lawyer who represents the mogul's heirs.

Lawyers for the Korhumel estate filed a federal lawsuit in Chicago on Aug. 15 asking for official rights to the painting, which, according to the suit, Christie's has refused to relinquish after calling its ownership into question.

While Ossmann isn't sure whether his clients have any legal basis to force the painting's return, he said his clients are the rightful owners of the Renoir, one of the works textile manufacturer Richard Semmel sacrificed when he fled Germany in 1933.

"Mr. Semmel died with nothing," Ossmann said. "Friends had to pay for his funeral."

Nearly seven decades after the end of World War II, persecution and systematic theft by the Nazis continues to spark court cases and ownership controversies like the one that has thrown the Korhumels' Renoir into limbo.

While experts on Nazi theft say hundreds of thousands of artworks have never been returned to their rightful owners, efforts to retrieve the items continue. A new group based in Milwaukee, for example, is leading an aggressive effort to document the loss of Jews' possessions and seek restitution. Aided by advances in technology, the group is driven by a sense of urgency as Holocaust survivors die and victims' heirs age.

"We're in a race against time," said Bobby Brown, executive director of the Holocaust Era Asset Restitution Taskforce, known as Project HEART.

The controversy over the Renoir painting, titled "Paysage Pres de Cagnes" ("Landscape Near Cagnes") and likely painted in the early 1900s near the artist's home in southern France, reaches back to the political tumult of pre-World War II Berlin.

Semmel was a massively wealthy garment-maker — "the leading man for underwear in Berlin," said Ossmann — and a dedicated art collector.

In January 1933, Semmel was returning from a vacation in Switzerland when he was told at a German train station that his mansion was filled with police who were piqued by his Jewish roots and support for an opposition political party, Ossmann said.

Semmel fled to Switzerland and somehow regained a portion of his collection, while other pieces were stored in the Netherlands, Ossmann said. Cut off from his factory and income, Semmel liquidated his collection, selling paintings, including the Renoir landscape, at an Amsterdam auction house in 1933, Ossmann said.

As hostilities intensified, Semmel, widowed before he fled Germany, moved from Europe to Cuba and then to New York. His brother perished in the Westerbork concentration camp in the Netherlands, and Semmel's only heir upon his death in 1950 was a romantic partner from his final years, Ossmann said.

His current heirs are that woman's granddaughters: two women who live in Johannesburg, Ossmann said. He declined to name the women, and they are not identified in court records.

Though Semmel's painting was not hoisted off a wall by a Nazi soldier, like so many others, his heirs argue that he was unjustly forced to sell his collection to finance his flight from harm, Ossmann said.

That argument compelled the Dutch government in 2009 to return a painting from its national museum to Semmel's heirs. The painting, a portrait by Dutch artist Thomas de Keyser, had been sold in the 1933 auction along with the Renoir, Ossmann said.

The Renoir landscape ended up in New York, where Irene and Newton Korhumel bought it in March 1956 from a gallery that said it was from the estate of an Irving H. Vogel, according to the Korhumel estate's lawsuit.

Over more than five decades, the Korhumels — he was the founder of Korhumel Steel Corp., formerly in the northwest suburbs — had no reason to question their ownership of the painting, according to the family's lawsuit.

Semmel's heirs have not made a legal claim, and it was Christie's that told Ossmann of questions about the painting's provenance in late August, the Swiss lawyer said. Ossmann said he is investigating any potential claim, and he added that he always strives for a "reasonable solution."

A spokeswoman for Christie's declined to comment, as did members of the Korhumel family and lawyers for the estate.