Le Palais Ducal (1908), a painting by Claude Monet valued at more than $30m, has been kept off the market according to lawyers for the estate of its last owners Herbert and Adele Klapper, because of doubts cast about its Nazi-era sales history by the grandsons of the German-Jewish department store magnate and art collector Max Emden (1874-1940). The Klapper estate is suing in New York District Court to clear its title to the painting so that it can be sold at auction.
Herbert Klapper, the founder of the Superior Sewing Machine and Supply Corporation, died in 1999, and his wife Adele died in 2018. In November that year, 13 works from their collection (out of 16 consigned) brought $41.1m at Christie’s, falling short of pre-sale estimates. The Klapper estate withheld Monet’s Le Palais Ducal from that sale after a lawyer for the Emdens approached Christie’s, according to the court papers.
Three of Emden’s heirs, brothers who reside in Chile, allege that the picture was sold under duress to Swiss dealers during the Second World War. They also say New York is the wrong jurisdiction to hear the dispute, but they have not made any legal claim on the work.
“The Monet was sold in a negotiated transaction to a prominent Jewish art dealer in Switzerland with whom Max had done business,” says the Klapper estate’s lawyer Thomas Kline, “and with whom [his son] Hans Erich continued to do business after the war.”
Settlement talks between the two parties soured last spring, and the case has been adjourned until September, due to the coronavirus.
The Klapper estate’s lawyers, who filed for a declaratory judgment on title to the Monet, say the Emdens “sought to create leverage over the marketability of art their grandfather once owned, and to be alerted so that they could use the pressure of an impending sale to extract money from bona fide owners”.
Read the entire article in The Art Newspaper.