PROVIDENCE, R.I. – A lawyer asked a federal appeals court yesterday to overturn a decision forcing a woman to surrender a portrait to the estate of a late Jewish art dealer who fled the Nazis seven decades ago.
A judge in December ordered Maria-Luise Bissonnette, a German baroness now living in Providence, to return the painting “Girl from the Sabine Mountains” to the estate of Max Stern.
But her lawyer argued that Stern and his estate waited too long before seeking the painting.
Nazi officials forced Stern to liquidate his family's Dusseldorf art gallery in 1937 because he was Jewish. Bissonnette's stepfather, a Nazi, bought the painting, by 19th-century artist Franz Xaver Winterhalter, at auction.
Stern fled the country and became a successful art dealer in Montreal. He died in 1987.
The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals did not indicate when it would rule.
Bissonnette's lawyer, David Levy, argued the judge's order should be overturned. He said the estate only recently began actively seeking the painting's return, noting that it was not listed in advertisements Stern placed after the Holocaust to recoup his lost collection.
Thomas Kline, a lawyer for Stern's estate, suggested the estate had no way of knowing the whereabouts of the painting because it was in the Bissonnette family collection rather than displayed in a museum.
Stern's estate located the painting when Bissonnette tried to sell it in 2005 and sued the following year. It argues that since the auction was forced, the sale was invalid.
