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Met Museum Acknowledges Former Jewish Owner in Painting’s History

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By: Andrew Allen Lipsky

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is doing its best to set things right.

Officials at the famed museum have decided to acknowledge the fact that the painting titled The Rape Of Tamar, which has always been attributed to French artist Eustache Le Sueur, was indeed owned by a Jewish art dealer named Siegfried Aram, who was forced to escape from Germany is 1933.

A decades-long battle has been fought by Aram, without success, to re-establish ownership of the painting, which he claims had been effectively stolen by a man named Oscar Summer, who had purchased his home in Germany.

The battle over the painting was pushed into the media glare by researcher Joachim Peter. He has reportedly been studying the German city of Heilbronn, in which Aram formerly lived. The story he uncovered was reported on recently by The New York Times.

“The Met bought the painting, which now hangs in Gallery 634, from a consortium of dealers in 1984,” the Times noted. “The dealers had purchased it months earlier at auction in London where Christie’s had identified it as the “Property of a Gentleman” without additional provenance.”

Aram purchased the painting, “which was previously believed to show the Roman legend of the rape of the noblewoman Lucretia by Tarquin, the son of an Etruscan king, in the 1920s. He became a prominent dealer in New York in the late 1930s,” according to artnews.com. “Sommer’s family sold the work at Christie’s in London in 1983, where it was listed as “the property of a gentleman” with no reference to Aram. The Times reports that the work could be worth $1.5 million today.”

But the confusion should not overshadow the obvious truth. As The Jewish Voice noted in an editorial just three weeks ago, “Now deceased, Mr. Aram had argued for many years that the painting had once been his property but the work has, as for many other stolen property from Holocaust victims, changed hands and some even re-titled. Of course, the subsequent and current owners of these works claim ignorance of the provenance of these now invaluable pieces of art. Lynn Nicholas, an art expert and historian of Nazi looted art , states: “Unless somebody made a noise, it would not even have occurred to a dealer to go back and check.” Nonsense. Museums and those experts who trade in the art field have a responsibility to check the history of the pieces with which they wheel, deal and make fortunes.”

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