The U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Louisiana has decided against a claim for a work alleged to have been looted by Nazis. The court found that the Oskar Kokoschka painting Portrait of a Youth (Hans Reichel) (1910) rightfully belongs to Sarah Blodgett Dunbar, whose mother, Sarah Blodgett Platt, purchased it from Galerie St. Etienne in New York in 1946.
The claimant, Raimund Reichel, alleged that the work had been confiscated by Nazis in Vienna in 1939, when then-owner Oskar Reichel transferred ownership of it to fellow Jewish dealer Otto Kallir, Galerie St. Etienne's owner. He claimed that Kallir and thus Platt failed to obtain proper title to the work because of the wartime transfer.
Working for Dunbar, the international law firm Nixon Peabody’s Art and Cultural Institutions Practice argued that the Reichel family was paid for the work and that they never made any claims to it, although they did seek the restitution of other property after World War II.
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