The heirs of the Jewish former owner of an important painting by Vincent van Gogh have asked Sotheby’s to withdraw the work from sale just days before it was to be auctioned in Manhattan, arguing that it was sold under duress in 1936 as a consequence of persecution by the Nazis.
The 1890 painting, “Châtaigniers en Fleurs (Blossoming Chestnut Trees),” carries an estimate of $180 million, the highest for any lot at this season’s art auctions, and higher than any price ever paid at auction for a work by Van Gogh. The artist painted it in Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris, after spending two years in the south of France. The work, which is the centerpiece of the marquee fall auctions coming up next week, is backed by a financial guarantee from Sotheby’s.
The heirs, who live in the United States, say the painting was sold in Amsterdam before the Second World War as a result of financial losses sustained by their family’s publishing company under the Nazis. Gunnar Schnabel, the heirs’ Berlin lawyer, urged Sotheby’s to prove beyond a doubt that the painting was sold at market value in 1936 and that the family “would have wanted to carry out the sale even without Nazi rule.”
“Otherwise,” Schnabel wrote in a Nov. 12 email to Marco Toracca, the head of Sotheby’s restitution department, “no auction may take place.” In the email, made available to The New York Times, he said his client “is prepared to work toward a fair and just solution in the spirit of the 1998 Washington Principles,” international guidelines designed to help institutions and governments handling confiscated or Nazi-looted art.
“Blossoming Chestnut Trees” is part of the Blaquier-Arrieta collection, which Philip Hook, a former Sotheby’s executive and author, described in the auction house’s announcement of the sale as “the stuff of legend: whispered about, kept from public view.” Carlos Pedro Blaquier and Nelly Arrieta de Blaquier of Buenos Aires began collecting Impressionist and modern art in the 1960s.
Twelve Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings from the collection, among them works by Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin and Edgar Degas, are on offer in next week’s auction. Together, they are expected to raise around $450 million. “Blossoming Chestnut Trees” is featured on the cover of the Sotheby’s catalog.
Sotheby’s said in a statement that it had undertaken extensive research into the ownership history of the painting but did not say whether the lot would be auctioned on Wednesday night, as scheduled.
“We are aware of the concerns recently raised by representatives of the Fischer heirs and have been in dialogue with them regarding the painting’s history,” the auction house said. “While our research to date has not established that the painting was sold under duress, we recognize the importance of engaging thoughtfully and constructively with the family and are committed to working toward a mutually satisfactory resolution.”
With the guarantee from Sotheby’s, the van Gogh would easily surpass the Dutch artist’s current auction record of $117.2 million set in 2022 at the Paul Allen sale at Christie’s (or about $133 million today).
Unseen in public for more than 60 years, “Blossoming Chestnut Trees” is dominated by a huge chestnut in bloom. Three brightly dressed women with parasols are walking away from the viewer on the sidewalk beneath it, while a solitary man approaches on the road.
According to the Sotheby’s catalog, the painting was acquired in 1909 by Samuel Fischer, who is the great-grandfather of one of the heirs represented by Schnabel and who purchased it from a Paris gallery. He was the founder of the illustrious German publishing company S. Fischer Verlag, whose roster of authors included Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse and Alfred Döblin.
After Fischer’s death in 1934, his son-in-law, Gottfried Bermann Fischer, took over the company. With the Nazis’ rise to power, many of the company’s authors faced publishing bans. S. Fischer Verlag was split in two, and Bermann Fischer left Berlin for Vienna to try to continue publishing their work.
The family deposited “Blossoming Chestnut Trees” and two works by Cézanne with the dealer Walter Feilchenfeldt at the Amsterdam gallery Paul Cassirer in either 1932 or 1933, according to Sotheby’s. The van Gogh painting was lent to the Museum Boymans (now the Museum Boijmans) in Rotterdam for an exhibition in 1933 and from there, it traveled on to the Kunsthalle in Bern, Switzerland, for another exhibition in 1934.
In 1936, Feilchenfeldt sold the painting to a Parisian collector. After several more changes of ownership, it was purchased by the current Argentine owners in 1975. (Nelly Arrieta de Blaquier, who died in 2020, was the sole heir to the Ledesma sugar fortune.)
The claim centers on that 1936 sale, which Schnabel said took place three months after the family had left Berlin for Vienna. The Nazis restricted what departing Jews could take with them, and according to Schnabel’s research, the family was forced to pay the “Reich flight tax” imposed on those who emigrated.
After World War II, Gottfried Bermann Fischer regained control of his Berlin publishing company and sought compensation for his confiscated assets. He did not, however, try to make a claim for the paintings sold in Amsterdam. At that time, there was no legal basis for compensation for sales of art in territory that was not under Nazi rule — which the Netherlands was not in 1936.
But in recent years, claims for art sold under duress outside Nazi-ruled territories by Jewish collectors who suffered persecution have increasingly resulted in settlements. Last year, for instance, the Bern Museum of Fine Arts decided to return a painting by Alfred Sisley to the heirs of Carl Sachs, who fled to Switzerland in 1939 and sold the work there the following year. The museum said it had found “anomalies with the sale in Switzerland.”
In a news release, the museum explained that it preferred to use the term “Nazi-persecution-related loss” in order “to cover the range of possible loss contexts within and outside the National Socialist sphere of influence, ranging from direct confiscation by the authorities to legal transactions under unfavorable conditions.”
“This also covers transfers of ownership to third countries outside the National Socialist sphere of influence, where a ‘seizure’ in the technical sense often did not take place,” it continued.
Gottfried Bermann Fischer’s daughter, Gisela Bermann Fischer, handled the family’s art claims until her death in 2014. In 2007, Christie’s offered another painting from the Fischer collection, a Cézanne portrait of his wife, for sale at auction. Like the current van Gogh, it too had been deposited with Feilchenfeldt in Amsterdam and sold in 1936. Before the 2007 sale (where the painting did not find a buyer), Christie’s contacted Gisela Bermann Fischer to inform her about the auction. She wrote back saying that she did not oppose it.
“However,” she added, “I reserve all rights to do so in the future in relation to any other painting sold by my father under duress due to the persecution by Nazi Germany,” she wrote in her letter to the auction house, dated Feb. 2, 2007, and made available to The Times. She added that the withdrawal of her claim to the Cézanne “will in no way set a precedent in the future for other paintings once owned by Samuel Fischer.”
With their new claim for the van Gogh, the next generation of heirs have shown they agree with her.
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